The First Book of Swords

by Фред Сейберхэген

  The First Book of Swords

  Фред Сейберхэген

  Мечи эти были выкованы на безжизненной, исхлестанной ветрами горной вершине, в огне, добытом из чрева земли, из металла, упавшего с неба. Их закалила в человеческом поту и человеческой крови рука Вулкана, Бога-Кузнеца. Было Двенадцать Мечей, созданных, как орудия затеянной богами прихотливой игры. Каждый Меч был наделен удивительной силой — побеждать в битве, или умерщвлять еще более страшными средствами… отводить врагу глаза или убивать его душу… даровать неизменную удачу или исцелять…

  Fred Saberhagen

  The First Book of Swords

  Prologue

  In what felt to him like the first cold morning of the world, he groped for fire.

  It was a high place where he searched, a lifeless, wind-scoured place, a rough, forbidding shelf of black and splintered rock. Snow, driven by squalls of frigid air, streamed across the black rock in white powder, making shifting veils of white over layers of gray ancient ice that was almost as hard as the rock itself. Dawn was in the sky, but still hundreds of kilometers away, as distant as the tiny sawteeth of the horizon to the northwest. The snowfields and icefields along that far edge of the world were beginning to glow with a reflected pink.

  Ignoring cold and wind, and mumbling to himself, the searcher paced in widening circles on his high rugged shelf of land. One of his powerful legs was deformed, enough to make him limp. He was searching for warmth, and for the smell of sulphur in the air, for anything that might lead him to the fire he needed. But his sandalled feet were too leathery and unfeeling to feel warmth directly through the rocks, and the wind whipped away the occasional traces of volcanic fumes.

  Presently the searcher concentrated his attention on the places where rock protruded through the rough skin of ice. When he found a notable bare spot, he kicked; stamped with his hard heels, at the ice around its rim, watching critically as the ice shattered. Yes, here was a place where the frost was a trifle less hard, the grip of cold just a little weaker. Somewhere down below was warmth. And warmth meant, ultimately, fire.

  Looking for a way down to the mountains heart, the searcher moved in a swift limp around one of its shoulders. He had guessed right; before him now loomed a great crevice, exhaling a faintly sulphurous atmosphere, descending between guardian rocks. He went straight to that hard-lipped mouth, but just as he entered it he paused, looking up at the sky and once more muttering something to himself. The sky, brightening with the impending dawn, was almost entirely clear, flecked in the distance with scattered clouds. At the moment it conveyed no messages.

  The searcher plunged down into the crevice, which quickly narrowed to a few meters wide. Grunting, making up new words to groan with as he squeezed through, he steadily descended. He was sure now that the fire he needed was down here, not very far away. When he had gone down only a little way he could already begin to hear the dragon-roar of its voice, as it came scorching up through some natural chimney nearby to ultimately emerge he knew not where. So he continued to work his way toward the sound, moving among a tumble of house-sized boulders that had been thrown here like children's blocks an age ago when some upper cornice of the mountain had collapsed.

  At last the searcher found the roaring chimney, and squeezed himself close enough to reach in a hand and sample the feeling of the fire when it came up in its next surge. It was good stuff this flame, with its origin even deeper in the earth than he had hoped. A better fire than he could reasonably have expected to find, even for such fine work as he had now to do.

  Having found his fire, he climbed back to the windblasted surface and the dawn. At the rear of the high shelf of rock, right against the face of the next ascending cliff, was a place somewhat sheltered from the wind. Here he now decided to put the forge. The chosen site was a recess, almost a cave, a natural grotto set into the cliff that towered tremendously higher yet: Out of this cave and around it, more fissure chimneys were splintered into the black basalt of the face, chimneys through which nothing now rose but the cold howling wind, drifting a little snow. The searcher's next task was to bring the earthfire here somehow, in a form both physically and magically workable; the work he had to do with the fire meant going deeply into both those aspects of the world. He could see now that he would have to transport and rebuild the fire in earthgrown wood-that would mean another delay, here on the treeless roof of the world. But minor delays were unimportant, compared with the requirement of doing the job right.

  From the corner of his eye, as he stood contemplating his selected forge-site, he caught sight of powers that raced airborne across a far corner of the dawn. He turned his head, to see in the distant sky a flickering of colors, lights that were by turns foul and gentle. Probably, he thought to himself, they are only at some sport that has nothing at all to do with me or my work. Yet he remained standing motionless, watching those skycolors and muttering to himself, until the flying powers were gone, and he was once again utterly and absolutely alone.

  Then he clambered down the surface of the barren mountainside, moving methodically, moving swiftly and nimbly despite one twisted leg. He continued going down for almost a thousand meters, to the level where the highest real trees began to grow. Having reached that level he paused briefly, regarding the sky once more, scanning it in search of messages that did not come. Wind, trapped and funneled here between the peaks, blasted his hair and beard that were as thick and wild as fur, whipped at his scorched garments of fur and leather, rattled the dragonscales he wore as ornaments.

  And now, suddenly, names began to come and go in his awareness. It was as if he saw them flickering like those magical powers that flew across the sky. He thought: I am called Vulcan. I am the Smith. And he realized that descending even this moderate distance from the upper heights had caused him to start thinking in human language.

  To get the size and quantity of logs he wanted for his fire, he had to go a little farther down the slope. Still the highest human settlements were considerably below him. The maplike spread of farms and villages, the sight of a distant castle on a hill, all registered in his perception, but only as background scenery with no immediate significance. His mind was on the task of gathering logs. Here, where the true forest started, finding logs was not difficult, but they tended to be from twisted trees, awkwardly shaped. It occurred to the Smith that an ax, some kind of chopping tool, would be a handy thing to have for this part of the job: but the only physical tools he had, besides his hands, were those of his true art, and they were all back at the site he'd chosen for his forge. His hands were all he really needed, though, clumsy though they could sometimes be with wood. If a log was too awkward, he simply broke it until it wasn't. At last, with a huge bundle that even his arms could scarcely clasp, he started back up the mountainside. His limp was a little more noticeable now.

  During his absence the anvil and all his other ancient metalworking tools had arrived at the forge-site, and were dumped there in glorious disorder. Vulcan put down his firewood, and arranged everything in an orderly array around the exact place where he had decided that the fire should be. When he had finished, the sun was disappearing behind the east face of the mountain that towered above his head.

  Pausing briefly to survey what he had done so far, he puffed his breath a little, as if he might be in need of rest. Now, to go down into the eart
h and bring up fire. He was beginning to wish he had some slaves on hand, helpers to handle some of these time-consuming details. The hour was approaching when he himself would have to concentrate almost entirely upon his real work. He longed to see the metal glowing in the forge, and feel a hammer in his hand.

  Instead, gripping one five-meter log under his arm like a long spear, he descended for the second time into the maze of crevices that ran beneath the upper mountain. Through this maze he worked his way back toward the place where fire and thunder rose sporadically through convoluted chimneys. This time he approached the place by a slightly different route, and could see the reflected red glow of earthfire shining from ahead to meet him. That glow when it encountered daylight seemed to wink, as if in astonishment at having found this place of air so different from the lower hell in which it had been born.

  At one neck in this crevice the rocks on either side pinched in too much to let pass the Smith and his log together. He set down the log, and laid hands on the rocks and raged at them. This was another kind of work in which his hands were clumsy. Their enormous hairless fingers, like his sandalled feet, were splayed and leathery. His skin was everywhere gray, the color of old smoke from a million forge-fires. Now, with his effort against the rocks, the sandals on his huge feet pressed down on other rocks, dug into pockets of old drifted snow, crunched and shattered ancient ice. Presently the rocks that had narrowed the crevice gave way to the pressure of his hands, splitting and booming and showering fragments.

  With a satisfied grunt, Vulcan the Smith took up his log again. One final time he paused, looking up at what could be seen from here of the day's clear skyonly a narrow tracery of blue. Then he went quickly on his way.

  When he pushed one end of his log into the roaring chimney, the earthfire caught promptly and deeply in the wood. The log became a blazing torch when the Smith pulled it back from the inferno-fissure and tossed it spinning in the shadowed air. Its rosin popped and snapped with hot, perfumed combustion. Vulcan laughed, pleased with the forge-fire he had caught; then he tucked the log under his arm and quickly climbed again.

  He built up his forge-fire quickly on the spot he had prepared for it. Now his anvil, a tabletop of ancient and enchanted iron, had to be positioned levelly and solidly in just the right spot relative to the fire. This took time. As he worked with the anvil, adjusting its position in small increments, the Smith decided that he'd have to make at least one more trip downslope for fuel before he'd be able to start his real work. After he'd begun that in earnest, he'd want no interruptions.

  His eye fell on the waiting bellows. The sight made him frown. Yes, it would be very good, perhaps essential, to have some helpers.

  The more he thought about it the more obvious it seemed. Yes, human help would be necessary at some stage, given the peculiar nature of this job. He now had earthfire burning in earth-grown wood, with the clean upper air of earth to lend its spirit to the flame. Opposed to this, in a sense, was the unearthly metal that he was going to work. At one side of the grotto, sky-iron waited, a lump of it the size of a barrow. It was so heavy that the Smith grunted when he took it up into his arms to look it over carefully. He could feel the interior energies of it waiting, poised in their crystalline layers, eager to be shaped by his art. He could feel the ethereal, unearthly magic of the stuff-yes, even crude-looking as it was, slagged and pitted on all sides by the soft fist of air that had caught and eased the madness of its fall, slowing the fall until mere crashing instead of vaporization had resulted when the mass struck earthly rock at last. Yes, the metal itself would bring enough, maybe more than enough, of the unearthly to the project.

  Human sweat and human pain were going to be indispensible. The catalyst of human fear would help to refine the magic too. And even human joy might be put to use-if the Smith could devise any means by which that rare essence might be extracted.

  And when the twelve blades had been forged at last, when he could raise them straight and glowing from the anvil-why, for their quenching, human blood would doubtless be best…

  The keening pipe-music and the slow drum were borne to Mala's ears by the cool night breeze, well before the few dim lights of Treefall village came into her view between the trees ahead. The sounds of mourning warned her that at least some part of the horrible tale that had reached her at home was probably true. She murmured one more distracted prayer to Ardneh, and once again impatiently lashed with the ends of the reins at the flanks of the old riding-beast she straddled. Her mount was an elderly creature, unused to such harsh treatment, and to long night journeys in general. When it felt the sting of the reins it skipped a step, then slowed down in irritation. Mala in her impatience thought of leaping from its back and running on ahead, groping her own way along the lightless and unpaved road. But already she had almost reached her destination; now she could hear the cackling of the village fowl ahead as they sensed her approach. And now the first lighted windows were coming into view amid the trees.

  Presently, on a main street every bit as small and narrow as the only street of her own town, Mala was dismounting under a million stars, whose light made gray and ghostly giants of the Ludus Mountains looming just a few kilometers to the east. Autumn nights in this high country grew cold, and she was wearing a shawl over her regular garb, a workingwoman's homespun trousers and loose blouse.

  The music of mourning was coming from a building that had to be the village hall, for it was the largest structure in sight, and one of the few lighted. Mala tied up her animal at a public hitching rack that was already crowded. Moving lightly, though her joints felt stiff from the long ride, she trotted the few steps to the hall. Her hair was long, dark, and curly, the loveliest thing about her physical appearance. Her face was somewhat too broad to be judged beautiful by most peoples standards; her body also was broad and strong, vibrant with youth and exercise.

  Her quick step carried her onto the shadowed porch of the hall before she realized that a man was standing there already. He was in shadows, not far from the curtained doorway through which candlelight and music came out, along with the murmur of many voices and the soft thump of dancing feet. His bearded face was unfamiliar to Mala, but he had a certain look of importance; he must, she thought, be one of the elders here.

  To simply rush past an elder without acknowledging his presence would have been impolite, and Mala halted, one foot in the shadow cast by the rising moon. "Sir, please, can you tell me where Jord the blacksmith is?" Since courtesy required speech of her, she would not waste the words. but instead try to use them to accomplish her urgent search.

  The man did not answer her immediately. Instead, he only looked in her direction as if he had not clearly heard, or understood. As he turned his face more fully toward Mala, she saw that he was stunned by some great pain or grief.

  She spoke to him again. "I'm looking for Jord, the smith. We were-we are to be married:"

  Understanding grew in the tormented face. "lord? He still breathes, child. Not like my son-but both of them are in there."

  Mala put aside the curtain of hides that half-closed the doorway, and went through, to enter the most crowded room that she had ever seen in her seventeen years of life. She guessed wildly that forty people, perhaps even more, were gathered here in one place tonight. Yet the hall was big enough for the crowd, even big enough to have at its center a sizable area free of crowding. In that central area stood five rude biers, each covered with black fabric, expensive candles burning at the head and foot of each. On each bier a dead man lay draped with ritual cloths; on several of the bodies the cloths were not enough to hide the marks of violence.

  Near the foot of the central bier was a single chair. Jord was sitting in it. Mala's first glance at him made her gasp, confirming as it did another aspect of the story that had reached her in her own village: the right arm of her betrothed now ended a few centimeters below the shoulder. The stump was tightly wrapped, in fresh, well-tended bandages, lightly spotted with the bleeding from be
neath. Jord's beardstubbled face was aged and shrunken, making him look in Mala's eyes like his own father. In his light hair there was a gray streak that she had never noticed before. His blue eyes were downcast, staring almost witlessly at the plank floor, and the dancers' feet that trod it slowly a pace or two away from him. The ring of village women who danced so slowly to the dirge went round the biers and chair, their feet hitting the floor softly in time to the drum, slow-beaten back in the rear of the large hall.

  And outside the dancing ring, the other mournersyes, there might really be forty of them-mingled and socialized, wept, joked, chatted, prayed, ate and drank, meditated or wailed in loss just as their spirits moved them, each in his or her own cycle of behavior. There was a priest of Ardneh, recognizable by his white suit, comforting an old woman who shrieked above all other sounds her agony of grief. Most of the crowd looked like folk of this village, as was only natural the story had said that all the dead men were from here, as was Jord. Mala could recognize some of the faces in the crowd, from her earlier visits here to meet Jord and his kinfolk. But most of the people were unknown to her, and a few of them were dressed outlandishly, as if they might have come from far away.

  Still standing near the doorway, looking over shoulders and between shifting bodies, Mala breathed a prayer of thanksgiving to Ardneh for Jord's survival; and yet, even as she prayed, she felt a new pang of inner anguish. The man she was going to marry had been changed, drastically and terribly, before she had ever had the chance to know him in his full health and strength and youth. Then as if trying to reject that thought she tried to step forward, meaning to hurry to Jord at once. But the thick press of bodies held her back.

  At this moment she had the impression of an odd, momentary pause in the room-but it must have been only a seeming in her mind, she was not used to crowds, and when she looked at the faces in the crowd around her they were all doing just what they had been doing a moment earlier. But in that moment of pause, the hide curtain draping the doorway behind Mala had been put aside by someone else's hand. Amid the din of music and grief and conversation there was no way she could have heard that soft movement, but she did feel the suddenly augmented breath of the cold wind that at night here slid down from the mountains.