Sword of the Bright Lady

by M. C. Planck

  “Assuming you could do so without violating any guild secrets, regulations, or laws, what would be the end? No one would buy steel from us. No one would believe that a priest knew how to make steel in the first place.” From the way he said it, Christopher could tell that Dereth numbered himself among that group.

  “I’m a priest of War,” Christopher said. “War requires weapons, and weapons require steel. The army will buy our steel.”

  “Then you have won over Goodman Karl? A second victory, even more impressive than defeating Horrible Hobilar.”

  “Well—not yet. But I’m hoping.”

  “You have high hopes, then,” Dereth said. “I will gladly share them. But I must feed my family, as well as my forge.” The smith poked around in the near-empty buckets of charcoal and raw ore. Christopher knew where charcoal came from; cut down a forest and burn it in a hole in the ground. He had an ax, and he knew where to find trees.

  “Where does the ore come from?”

  “The Old Bog, of course.”

  Christopher had been hoping for a mine, with rich veins of easily refined ore. Boiling a bog until it yielded up its red treasure was inefficient—which meant expensive.

  Apparently Dereth could read the disappointment on his face.

  “It’s not so bad as that. I’ll be the one digging in it.”

  A smith digging his own ore? The concept defined inefficiency.

  “Maybe I should take a look at this bog,” Christopher said. Maybe he could work some industrial magic there.

  “Just head north, to the edge of town. You can’t miss it.”

  He almost did, though, because it was so pathetic. A handful of dispirited apprentices mucked about in shallow pits in the ground, breaking up the frozen earth. At first glance he had thought they were gardeners.

  “Wouldn’t that be easier in summer?” he asked one of them.

  “Journeyman says it builds strength,” the young man replied bitterly.

  “Ha!” laughed one of the other young men. “Journeyman says stop looking at my daughter, more likely.”

  “Bugger off, Trane, you’re out here too.”

  They weren’t working together. Each apprentice was filling his own wheelbarrow. At least the dirt was red, which implied it was higher quality than he had feared.

  “What if I wanted to buy some of that?” he asked.

  “Don’t you have enough dirt?” the one called Trane said with a leer, and the others laughed.

  “Haha. But I want this dirt now.”

  “Go see Tom, then,” another said. “He’ll even dig your night-soil for you, if you pay him.” The apprentice jerked his thumb, pointing farther north, and went back to work.

  The bog followed the river up and to the right, and disappointment followed with it. A solitary young man was waist-deep in a hole in the ground, shoveling black shale. He seemed poorer than others, dressed in clothes almost as shabby as Christopher’s cast-offs. But he was whistling.

  “Greetings, Pater,” he said cheerfully. “Come to dig some more dirt?”

  Christopher smiled lamely. “Has everyone heard about my hobby, then?”

  “As the only professional digger in the county, I must confess I paid unusual attention to the matter,” the man replied. He was young, a little over twenty or so, and didn’t stop shoveling to talk.

  “Now that’s a profession I haven’t encountered yet.”

  “I’m a second son,” the young man said. When that didn’t seem sufficient, he added, “Of a farmer.” Seeing Christopher’s continued blankness, he sighed and explained, “My older brother was graceless enough to survive the draft.”

  It finally clicked for Christopher. “So you have no farm to inherit.”

  “Now I heard you were a sharp one, but I didn’t expect this,” the man said innocently.

  Faced with relentless impertinence, Christopher had to laugh. It was nice that wearing a sword didn’t intimidate everyone. Actually, so far it hadn’t done anything but annoy people. Christopher suspected that was more his fault than the sword’s.

  “I was told you could sell me some ore.”

  Tom glanced at him sharply and chose his next words with care.

  “I doubt that very much, Pater. Digging iron ore is a craft secret.”

  “Then what are you digging for?”

  “Ah, now that’s the very question I have often asked myself. Why dig and delve for ungrateful townies? Why muck out their garderobes and stables? They say there’s plenty of good land out in the Marches. Farms for the taking, if you don’t mind the occasional band of slavering ulvenmen. So what keeps young Tom here, in muck up to his knees, doing dirty jobs for lazy townsmen?”

  Christopher wasn’t completely clueless. He knew the answer to this one without being told.

  “A woman, no doubt.”

  Tom stopped shoveling and looked at Christopher with appreciation. “Sharp indeed, Pater. Young Tom Fool, I am. Fool for falling in love with a town girl with a harpy for a mother and an ogre for a father. Pleased to meet you.” He tipped his hat, which was a sorry-looking affair that appeared to be two mangy squirrels locked in a deadly grapple.

  “Who owns this—” Christopher couldn’t call it a mine, as it was just a bunch of holes in the ground, “—this field?”

  “The Saint does, Pater, and the coal’s free to all who dig it. It’s not valuable, like, say, wood or grass. So I dig when others won’t and sell it to smiths who don’t feel like punishing their apprentices.”

  “Coal?” Of course. Tom’s wheelbarrow was loaded with black, not red. “You’re digging coal?” Christopher could hardly believe his good luck.

  “That I am. Sometimes the smiths will burn it, as it’s cheaper than charcoal, though it’s a foul choking to do so.”

  Christopher scooped up a handful of the soft rock. Poor bituminous, rather than good hard clean Pennsylvania anthracite. It was carbon that made it burn, and sulfur that made it dirty.

  Coincidentally, Christopher had need of both.

  On impulse he took a gold coin out of his purse and tossed it to the young man.

  Tom snatched it out of the air and whistled. “That’s a lot of coal. I deliver a wheelbarrow to town for three coppers.”

  “I need a barrow delivered to Burseberry village. Will that cover it?”

  “A long walk, but Tom Fool isn’t a fool for nothing.” He winked and tapped his head with the coin.

  Christopher laughed. “You can take your time to deliver it.”

  Tom looked a little relieved and then asked carefully, “Only one, Pater?”

  “For now. I’ll want more coal later, and no, I won’t be paying a gold a wheelbarrow then. But I need this one for, um, research.”

  “So you’re a wizard, then.”

  “No,” Christopher corrected him, slightly alarmed. “I’m a priest.”

  “You’re a man with hard gold and loose pockets,” Tom replied with a good-natured shrug. “You can call yourself the Queen of Niflehiem for all I care.”

  Tom dug into his hole with renewed zeal, and Christopher turned back towards town with a more hopeful step. His myriad problems had been reduced to a single vector. Now all he needed was an unlimited supply of gold.

  The ride back to Burseberry was discomfiting in its mundanity. The horse snorted and steamed in the cold air; the empty road and snow-covered fields simply plain, a picture postcard of a country lane. Absent people, the world seemed too ordinary. It was momentarily impossible for him to believe that he was on an alien world, surrounded by magic, and fighting for his life.

  Only when he saw the smoke from the village, and his stomach rumbled at even the thought of porridge, did the sense of unreality return, gradually fading from conscious awareness as he turned his horse over to one of Fenwick’s boys and quick-marched back to the chapel before the stable-master could put in an appearance and ask for the money he was due.

  Helga sent him off to the tavern to join Svengusta until dinner with s
erene confidence, the girlish flirtations entirely vanished. Although her transformation had been coterminous with his increase in status from poor, mute beggar to ranked priest, he didn’t think that was the cause. Safely ensconced in the tavern, drink in hand, he brought it up.

  “Explain Helga to me.” He interrupted the old man’s laughter: “I know, she’s a woman, a creature of ineffable mystery and all that, but I don’t understand what happened between her and Karl.”

  “Good gods, boy, if you don’t understand that, I don’t know where to begin!” Svengusta laughed so hard beer came out his nose.

  Christopher had to wait while the old man sneezed between gales of laughter. “Ha ha. Seriously, I don’t understand. Is she in love with him?”

  “What woman isn’t? He’s the bravest of the brave, the best of the best. Doubly tested, you know.”

  “Is he going to break her heart?” Christopher pressed.

  “How do you mean?” Svengusta asked, genuinely confused.

  “Is he going to come back?”

  “Probably.” Svengusta laughed. “You seem to have taken his fancy.”

  “I mean, is he going to come back to Helga?”

  “No, he’s not going to marry her. Why would he?”

  “But what if she gets pregnant?”

  Svengusta put down his beer. “I can see you’re truly troubled. Relax, Brother. Haven’t you seen Helga lately? She glows. Did you miss that?”

  No, Christopher had to admit, she’d been the paragon of happiness.

  “Karl made her. She went from being the village orphan to a woman of society in a week. She used to pine to me that the local boys paid her no attention. Now she won’t give them the time of day unless they’ve got a beard. She’s had a real man, you see. And a child? A child proves she’s fertile. No good man would balk to raise a daughter or two. And if she were to have a son off of Karl, she could have her pick of husbands. Who wouldn’t want a whelp of his to call your own?”

  “Helga’s an orphan? How could she lose her parents if you can bring people from the dead?”

  Svengusta shook his head. “Reviving the dead is not done lightly. It consumes a hundred tael with no guarantee of success. Peasants do not expect to be revived. Even knights must be rich or favored by their lord to be brought back. In Helga’s case, none of these mattered.”

  The old man took a drink of his beer, held up his hand to forestall questions. “Patience, Brother. I need strength for this next part. A decade ago the ulvenmen overran the March of Carrhill. The town stood against their assault until reinforcements drove the monsters off, but the countryside was devastated. Most folk didn’t have enough warning to flee. The ulvenmen slaughtered, burned, and took heads. And they took whole bodies, like Helga’s parents, for their victuals. Helga was among a train of children captured for provender, being carted back to wherever the fiends come from. She was rescued by our King, the Lady bless him.”

  Svengusta stopped to take another drink and steer himself back to the unpleasant topic. “The children were dispersed throughout the realm, to families that could take them. Helga was sent to my village, but she never got along that well with her adopted mother, and so when she turned twelve and my last house-girl got married, she moved in and took over the job.

  “But enough of the past,” the old man said. “She’s riding high now. She’s a good woman, and sooner or later some clever fellow will notice, and then I’ll have to find a new girl to cook for me. Just as soon you will leave, and I’ll have to find a new novice to trouble me. In the end, they all leave.”

  Before Christopher could respond, Svengusta called for another round and soon had the tavern patrons singing a rough, rude song.

  9.

  A FLOCK OF GULLS

  In the morning he threw himself into his new career, attacking the manure pile with shovel and pickax, and staggered home with a barrel of filth and a head full of plans. Not knowing how to best refine his ingredients or even precisely what proportions to combine them in, he would reduce the problem through brute force: by trying everything he could think of and keeping what worked. Thus was science born.

  Science first had to contend with the housemaid, however. Helga took one whiff and drew a bath. The process was unbelievably difficult, requiring repeated trips to the frozen well with bucket and ax, and the amount of firewood involved was horrifying to the man who had to split it.

  Helga poured a final kettle of steaming water into the half-barrel laid out in the kitchen and looked at him expectantly. He waited for her to leave, before realizing there was nowhere for her to go. There were, after all, only three rooms in the entire building.

  Svengusta intervened. “Why don’t you run up to the Widow Fenly’s and buy some apples? You can make us a pie for tonight.”

  Excited at the chance to bake, Helga bundled herself in several layers and bustled off.

  “City-bred, I suppose,” Svengusta said, handing him a bar of soft soap and a dishrag.

  “Yes,” Christopher agreed, happy to have an excuse supplied.

  “A strange city, by my lights.”

  “You have no idea,” Christopher said, sinking gratefully into the hot water. It was the first time he’d been truly warm since he had arrived.

  “And by others’. You mystify everyone you meet. People react with caution or fear to the unknown. You cannot blame them.”

  “I don’t.” That the villagers kept their distance did not bother him. He did not want to get close to anything here. His goal was to find a way out, not fit in.

  “I have put my finger on your oddness. You carry yourself as one born to privilege. You did so, even before you were ranked.”

  Christopher came from solidly Middle America, not the one the politicians talked about but the real one, of factories and six packs, small towns and city apartments. Mechanical engineering paid well enough, but he’d never thought of himself as a privileged class. Even being aware of how lucky he was to be born into a rich country, instead of some Third World hellhole, even understanding how lucky he was to be born in the twentieth century instead of the second—although currently he seemed to have backslid on that one—none of this added up to putting on airs. Svengusta wasn’t accusing him of being a snob.

  The privilege he took for granted was that he thought he was just as good as anyone else.

  “I think everybody deserves to be treated the same. Is that really so bad?”

  Svengusta grinned at him. “No, but only because of the color of the robe you wear. Were you anything but a priest of the White, you would be dead within hours.”

  Christopher, luxuriating in the heat, nodded in agreement. That did, in fact, describe his experience so far.

  “Yet when you came to us, you were not a priest. How did you survive the first decades of your life with such an attitude?”

  Before Christopher could frame an answer, Svengusta shook his head.

  “Never mind. It is sufficient for me that Krellyan has accepted your past. I do not need to know, and perhaps I do not wish to know. Knowledge brings danger. Let you and the Saint bear it without me, if possible. Now get out; it’s my turn.”

  When Helga returned, she trimmed his beard while Svengusta dressed for their usual pilgrimage to the tavern. Tonight three strange men sat at the bar, nursing mugs. An old codger was trying to spark a conversation but failing.

  “Greetings, Paters,” Big Bob said. “Perhaps you can talk these mummers into a performance.”

  The men looked Christopher and Svengusta up and down. It did not appear to improve their mood. Christopher couldn’t blame them. He looked like a beggar, despite the sword, and Svengusta, in his old, stained coat, was no better.

  The men lifted their mugs and drained them. One spoke to the tavern keeper.

  “The weather is too cold for a show. We’ll settle our account in the morning and be on our way.”

  “As you will,” Big Bob replied. The men stood, and with a polite “Paters,” left the roo
m.

  “A sorry lot,” Big Bob said when they were gone. “Even their womenfolk were nothing to look at.”

  “Helga will be disappointed,” Christopher said. To be fair, so was he.

  Svengusta waved away his concern. “We’ll have pie tonight all the same. Better than the bawdy, raucous prattle of layabouts.”

  “For that we have Uncle Abjorn,” Big Bob said. “And no need to tip him for it.”

  The old codger sputtered. “Insolent wretch! And to think I held my tongue and spoke no ill against the swill you’ve poured today. Enough is enough.” He slammed down his mug. “I’ll not drink another drop in this hovel!”

  Christopher tuned out the argument. They did it every night.

  “What would they have done?” he asked Svengusta.

  “They had the look of jugglers or acrobats more than players. Perhaps their women would have danced. I fear you would have found it tame, compared to an evening in a townie’s tavern.”

  Christopher wondered what Svengusta and Helga would make of a movie. But that made him think of popcorn, which made him think of all the things he had lost. Every day he spent here would be another defeat for Maggie. It was the cruelest fate he could imagine: her hope would die the death of a thousand cuts.

  Through dinner and pie he struggled to smile, for Helga’s sake. With kindness she and Svengusta pretended not to notice, leaving his pain to fade on its own.

  Some latent martial-arts skill woke him in the night. A shadowy figure loomed over him, arm raised to strike. The menace was palpable, the wrongness terrifying. He reacted instinctively, putting up an arm to block the downward blow. Letting slip the syllables of the spell imprinted on his brain—he’d been memorizing a different one every day to see what they did—he took his fear in his hand and threw it back, forcefully, into the face of nightmare.