The First Book of Swords

by Фред Сейберхэген

  And then in the next moment a man's hand came to rest on Mala's arm — not insinuatingly, not harshly either, but just as if it had a right to be there, like the hand of a father or an uncle. But he was none of those. His face was entirely concealed by a mask, made of what looked like dark, tooled leather. The mask surprised Mala, but only for a moment. A few times in her life before, at wakes and funerals, she had seen men wearing masks. The explanation was that feuds could be exacerbated, friendships and alliances sometimes strained, if a man whose opinion mattered were seen to be mourning openly for the enemy of a friend or ally; while at the same time, some conflicting rule of conduct might require him to do so. A mask allowed its wearer's identity to be ignored by those who did not wish to know it, even if it were not really kept a secret.

  The masked man was somewhat on the short side, and well enough dressed in simple clothing. And Mala thought that he was young. "What has happened, Mala?" His voice, close to her ear, was almost a whisper.

  He knew her; so he was most likely some distant relative of Jord's. Or, thought Mala, noting the short sword at his belt, he might even be some minor lord or knight, one who had perhaps at some time been served by Jord as smith or armorer.

  And the masked man must have come here from some distance, and must have just arrived, not to know already what had happened. In the face of such ignorance Mala stumbled over words, not so much trying to repeat the story as she had heard it as trying to find some reasonable explanation of the horror. But an explanation was hard to find.

  She tried: "They… all six of them… they were called by a god to go up on the mountain. Then… "

  "Which god's call did they follow?" The quiet voice was not surprised by talk of gods; it wanted to nail down the facts.

  One of the men who had been standing in front of Mala, unintentionally blocking her path to Jord, turned round at that. "They answered Vulcan's call. No doubt about it, the god chose them himself. I heard him — so did half the village — more than half. Vulcan himself came down here from the mountain in the night and called the six men out by name. The rest of us just lay low in our beds, I can tell you. Next day, when none of the six had come back yet, we gathered here in the hall and wondered. The women kept egging us on to find out what had happened, and eventually some of us started climbing… it wasn't pretty, what we found there, I can tell you."

  "And what," the masked man asked, "if they had chosen not to follow Vulcans call?" The light in the hall was too uncertain, the shadows too heavy, for Mala to be able to tell if his hands looked like those of a worker or of a man highborn. The hair emerging from his jacket's cowl was dark, with a hint of curl, giving no clue about his station. Perhaps it was this very indeterminateness in his appearance that first raised in Mala's mind a suspicion that seemed to come out of nowhere: I wonder if this could be the Duke himself. Mala had never actually seen the Duke, but like thousands of his other subjects who had not seen him either she knew, or thought she knew, certain things about him. One of the most intriguing of these things was that he was supposed to go out in disguise from time to time, adventuring and spying among his people. According to other information, he was still a relatively young man; and it was also said that he was physically rather small.

  Jord, Mala thought, might have worked for the Duke at one time. Or some of the dead men on the biers might have. That could explain why the Duke had shown up here tonight… she told herself that she was making things up, but still… there were some stories told about the Duke's cruelty, on occasion, but then, Mala supposed, such stories were told about almost all powerful folk. Even if they were true, she thought, they didn't preclude the possibility that Duke Fraktin might sometimes take a benevolent interest in these poor outlying villages of his domain.

  The solid citizen who had turned round to speak was plainly not entertaining any such exalted idea of the masked man's identity. Instead, he was looking him over as if not much impressed with what he saw, small sword or not. The citizen snorted lightly at the masked man's question, and shook his head. "When a god calls, who's going to stop and argue? If you want to know more about it, better ask Jord."

  Jord had not noticed Mala yet. The brawny, youngold man with one arm and one bandaged stump still sat on his chair where ritual had placed him, almost as if he were one of the dead himself.

  Mala heard the solid citizen saying: "His arm's still up there on the mountain, but he brought his pay for it back with him." Without trying to understand what this might mean, she pushed her way between the intervening bodies and ran to Jord. Inside the slow ring of dancers, Mala went down on one knee before the man she had pledged to marry, clutching at his one hand and at his knees, trying to explain how sorry she was for what had happened to him, and how she had come to him as quickly as she could when the news of the horror reached her.

  At first Jord said nothing in return, but only looked at Mala as if from a great distance. Gradually more life returned to his face and in a little while he spoke. Later Mala was never able to remember exactly what either of them said in this first exchange, but afterwards Jord could weep for his friends' lives and his own loss, and Mala was able to comfort him. Meanwhile the dancing and feverish festivity went on, punctuated only by outbursts of grief. Looking back toward the entrance from her place near the center of the hall, Mala caught one more glimpse, between bodies, of the man in the tooled leather mask.

  "All will be well yet, lass," Jord was able to say at last. "Gods, but it's good to have you here to hug!" And as Mala stood beside him he gripped her fiercely around the hips with a huge, one-armed blacksmith's hug. "I'm not yet destroyed. I've been thinking it out. I'll sell the smithy here and buy a mill elsewhere. There's one in Arin I can get… if I hire a helper or two, I can run a mill with one hand."

  Mala said things expressing agreement, trying to sound encouraging. Closing her eyes, she hoped devoutly that it would be so. She told herself that when Jord healed he'd be a young man again, and he'd regain some part of his old strength. Being wed to a onearmed man would not be so bad if he were still a man of property… and now two small children, widower Jord's by his previous marriage, came out of the crowd to lean possessively against their father's legs, and distract Mala from her other cares by staring at her.

  The hands of the small boy, Kenn, began to play absently with the rough cloth wrapping a long, thin object that stood leaning against his father's chair. Mala, without really giving it thought, had assumed this object was some kind of aid provided for the crippled man, a crutch or possibly a stretcher. Now that she really looked at the bundle she could see that it was certainly not long enough for either. Nor was there any obvious reason for a crutch or a stretcher to be wrapped up; nor, for that matter, did it appear that Jord would be likely to benefit from either one.

  Jord saw what she was looking at. "My pay," he said. Gently he eased his son's small hands from the wrapped thing. "Not yours yet, Kenn. In time, in time. Not yours to have to worry about, Marian." And with a huge finger he brushed his tiny daughter's cheek. Then he grabbed the upper end of the bundle firmly in his large fist, and raised it in the air and shook it, so that the rough wrappings fell free except where his grip had caught them. People on all sides were turning to look. The blade was a full meter long, and straight as an arrow, with lightly fluted sides. Both edges keened down to perfect lines, invisibly sharp.

  "What? Who?… " Mala could only stumble helplessly.

  "Vulcan's own handiwork." Jord's voice was rough and bitter. "This is for me, and for my son after me. This is my pay."

  Mala marveled silently. In the version of the story that she had heard in her own village, an obviously incomplete version, there had been nothing about a sword… Jord's pay? Even in the comparatively dim candlelight the steel had a polished look. Mala's keen eyes could pick out a fine, faint mottled patterning along the flat of the blade, a pattern that seemed to lead deep into the metal though the surface was flawlessly smooth.

  The chain of d
ancers had slowed almost to a stop. Their faces wore a variety of expressions, but all were turned, like many in the crowd beyond, to look at the blade.

  "My pay," said Jord again, in the same harsh voice, that carried through the sudden relative quiet. "So Vulcan told me, when he had taken off my arm." He shook the sword in his inexpert hand. "My arm, for this. So the god said. He called this 'Townsaver."' The bitterness in Jord's voice was great, but still impersonal, the kind of anger a man might express against a thunderstorm that had destroyed his crops. His hand was beginning to quiver with his weakness now, and he lowered the sword and started trying to wrap it up again, a job in which he needed Mala's help.

  "I must get something finer than this cloth to keep it in," he muttered.

  Mala still didn't know what to say or think. The sword bewildered her, she couldn't guess what it might mean. Jord's pay, from Vulcan? Pay for what? Why should the god have wanted a man's right arm? And why a sword? What would a blacksmith, or any commoner, have to do with such a weapon?

  She would have to discuss it all with Jord later, in detail. Now was not the time or place. Now the dance and the noise around them had picked up again, though at a lesser level of energy.

  "Mala?" Jord's voice held a new and different note.

  "Yes?"

  "The dance will be ending soon. I must stay here, they're going to do some more healing spells and ritual. But maybe you'd better be going along now." Jord was lying back weakly in his chair, letting his eyes close.

  Mala understood. When a wake-dance like this one ended, there usually followed a final phase of the evening's community action: those mourners who were free to do so would pair off, man with woman, youth with girl, and go out into the fertile fields around the house or village, there to lie coupled in the soil from which the harvests came. Death would be, if not mocked, in some sense negated by that other power, just as old, of life-creation. Mala was still an unmarried woman, still free, in a strict interpretation of the rules, to join in the night's last ritual. But as her wedding was only two days off, it would be unseemly for her to do so with anyone but her betrothed. And Jord was still oozing blood, barely able to sit up in his chair.

  She said: "Yes, I'll be going. Tomorrow, Jord, I'll see you then." Now she would have a long ride back to her own village, or else she would have to try to find some place in this village to stay the night. She didn't feel confident about Jord's kinfolk here, how well they liked her, how welcome she'd be made to feel in their houses. Perhaps, except for the two small children, they didn't even know yet that she'd arrived. In accordance with custom, the marriage had been arranged by family elders on both sides, and there had been no long acquaintance between families.

  Mala had liked Jord himself well enough from their first meeting. She had raised no objection when the match was made, and had no real objection to going on with it now; in fact his maiming had roused in her a fiercely increased attachment. But at the same time…

  The center of the hall, with its burden of dead and wounded, seemed to her to stink of death and suffering and defeat. Mala gripped Jord once more, by his hand and his good shoulder, and turned away from him. Other people who like Mala were unable or unwilling to stay were also leaving now. She went out through the hide-hung doorway with a small group of these. The group thinned rapidly, and somehow by the time she reached the hitching rack she was alone in the dark street. She took hold of her beast's reins to untie them.

  "It is not over," said the calm, soft voice of the masked man, quite near at hand.

  Mala turned slowly. There were only the massed stars to see him by, with the moon behind a cloud. He was alone, too, holding one hand outstretched to Mala if she wished to take it. Around them other couples passed in the dark street, moving anonymously out toward the fields.

  Almost nine months had passed before Mala saw the dark leather mask and its wearer again, and then only among the other images of a drugged dream. She was traveling with her husband Jord to another funeral (this for a man who'd undoubtedly been her most eminent kinsman, a minor priest in the Blue Temple), and she'd got as far as a large Temple of Ardneh, almost two hundred kilometers from the mill and home, before the first unmistakable labor pains had started.

  This being her firstborn, Mala hadn't been able to interpret the advance signs properly. Still, she could hardly have arranged to be in a better location no matter how carefully she'd planned. The Temples of Ardneh were in general the best hospitals available on the entire continent — for most folk they were actually the only ones. Many of Ardneh's priests and priestesses were concerned with healing, accustomed to dealing with childbirth and its complications. They knew drugs, and some healing magic, and in some cases they even had access to certain surviving technology of the Old World, enough of it to make possible the arcane art of effective surgery.

  It was near sunset when Mala's labor began in earnest. And at sunset music began to be heard in that Temple, music that as it happened was not greatly different from what had been played at that village funeral eight and a half months earlier. It may have been the similar drumbeat that helped to bring that masked face back in dreams. The drumbeat, and of course Mala's fervent but so far utterly secret suspicion that the father of her firstborn was not Jord but rather that man whose face she'd never seen without its mask. Over the past few months she'd tried to find out what she could about Duke Fraktin, but apart from confirming his reputation for occasional cruelty, for occasional excursions among the common people in disguise, for wealth, and for magical power, she knew very little more now than she had before.

  Tonight, lying in an accouchement chamber halfway up the high pyramidal Temple, Mala was questioned, in her lucid intervals between pain and druggings, about her dreams. Jord had been sent dashing out on some make-work errand by the midwife-priestess, who now asked Mala with brisk professional interest — and some evident kindness, too — exactly what she had dreamed about when the last contractions came. The drugs and spells reacted with pain directly, turning it into dreams, some happy and some not.

  Mala described the masked man to the priestess as well as she could, his stature, hair, dress, short sword, and mask, all without saying when or where or how she had encountered him in real life. She added: "I think… I'm not sure why, but I think it may be Duke Fraktin. He rules all the region where we live: " And there was a secret pride in Mala's heart, a pride that perhaps became no longer secret in her voice.

  "Ah, I suppose the dream is a good omen, then." But the priestess sounded faintly amused.

  "You don't think it was the Duke?" Mala was suddenly anxious.

  "You know more about it than I do, dear. It was your dream. It might have been the Emperor, for all I know."

  "Oh, no, he didn't look like that. Don't joke." Mala paused there, her drugged mind working slowly. Everyone had heard of the Emperor, in jokes and anecdotes and sayings; Mala had never seen him, to her knowledge, but she knew that he was supposed to wear a clowns mask and not a gentleman's. When the priestess had mentioned that relic-title there had sprung into Mala's mind all of the town-louts, all the loafing practical jokers, that she had ever seen or known in any village. And next she thought of a certain real clown who for years had been appearing at fairs and festivals with a sad, grotesque face painted over his own features. Not that it had ever occurred to her that any of those men might really be the Emperor. In the anecdotes and jokes the Emperor was a very old man who was forever arguing an absurd claim to rule a vast domain, claiming tribute from barons and dukes, grand dukes and tyrants, even kings and queens. In some of the stories the Emperor was fond of pointless riddles. (And what if they had chosen not to follow Vulcan's call? echoed here, unpleasantly, in Mala's spinning head.) And in some of the stories he played practical jokes, some of which were appreciated as clever, by those who liked such things. There was also a proverbial sense, in which an illegitimate child of an unknown father, or anyone whose luck had run out, was spoken of as a child of the Emperor.
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  Mala had never had reason to consider the possibility of a real man still going about in the real world bearing that title, let alone that he might conceivably have… no, she was drugged, not thinking clearly. The ave * Duke — or whoever it had been — had been young, and he had certainly not worn the Emperor's clown mask.

  The hallucinatory haze that washed over her with the beginning of her next contractions, Mala could hear Jord coming back. Maybe, she thought, hopefully now, Jord was after all the baby's father. She couldn't see Jord very clearly, but she could hear him, panting from his quick climb up the many Temple steps, and sounding almost childishly proud of having successfully located whatever it was that the priestess had sent him after. And now Mala could feel his huge hand, holding both of hers, while he started talking worriedly to the priestess about how his first wife had died trying to give birth to their third child. What would Jord think now if he knew that it might have been the Duke…

  And then the dream, into which this latest set of labor pangs had been transformed, took over firmly. There was a shrill magical chanting in new voices, the voices of invisible beings who were marching round Mala's bed. Jord and the priestess and all other human beings were gone, but Mala had no time to be concerned about that, because there were too many purely delightful things to claim all of her attention, here in the flower garden where she was lying now…

  The chanting rose, but other voices, in unmusical dispute, were intruding upon it, too loudly for any music to have covered them up: They sounded angry, as if the dispute was starting to get serious…