Then began the clanging and the roaring. Looking down, Yocote saw that Illbane had brought bellows and had thrust their long iron snout into the fire. When he pumped, flames roared out of it to bathe in brightness the glowing metal bar he held within. He sang a verse while he pumped, then laid the bar on the anvil and struck it with the hammer, chanting a different song, one of driving urgency. As he did, the green glow spread from the metal again, still with one or two strands of scarlet.
One verse, and he laid the bar in flame again, singing the forge song as he pumped the bellows, then brought it back to the anvil.
Culaehra, too, saw this, and reported, “He takes it back and forth between anvil and flame, singing first the one song, then the other.”
“What words does he chant?” Lua asked, but Culaehra could only shake his head. “It is a language I do not know. The shaman's tongue, belike—though I confess it does sound like the canticle Agrapax sang to his forge. And the metal—again and again he beats it. It shall be flat ere long, I doubt not.”
That evening Kitishane reported, “He hammered the bar flat indeed, twice its length and breadth, then hammered another bar into it and folded them both with many blows. Now he beats them flat again.”
In the morning Lua told them, “He has flattened four of the bars now, and beats them together, folding and flattening, then folding and flattening again.”
“What of the other two bars?” Culaehra asked.
“He has set them aside—why, I cannot guess. The others, though, he has beaten into a single bar, though it seems little bigger than any one alone.”
On the morning of the fourth day Yocote whistled shrilly, and the others came running up to his pine. “What moves?” Culaehra panted as he came up.
“Look!” Yocote pointed, his whole face taut, and somehow Culaehra knew his eyes were wide behind the mask. Turning, he saw Illbane beating out a long, straight length of green-glowing steel—surely it must be steel, to glitter so in the dim light of the overcast North! And what could it be but a sword? A long sword, a broadsword, a double-edged sword. As they watched, he laid it in the flames again, pressed the bellows and sang to the roaring, then laid the sword on the anvil once more and beat it with his hammer, bouncing on the steel in a rhythm like that of horses galloping. At last he heated it one more time, then thrust it deep into a bank of freshly fallen snow. It hissed; steam rose; the green glow sank into the white mound and was gone. Illbane drew forth the sword and laid it in the flame again, crying, “Culaehra, come forth!”
Culaehra stared, taken aback, then rose and ran down to the smith, hearing Kitishane's cry of alarm behind him. But his trust in Illbane was absolute now; he came panting up to the singing smith, crying, “What would you have of me, Illbane?”
“When I lay the sword on the anvil, grasp the tang!” Illbane snapped, then swung the sword over to the rock. He himself held it by the crosspiece, no longer with tongs. Culaehra laid hold of the tang where the handle would be bound and nearly cried out in pain. The tang was hot, very hot! How could the smith hold the sword even nearer to the glowing blade? But if Illbane could stand the pain, so could he! Culaehra grasped it hard while Illbane sang to it, not beating now, then shouted “Come!” and ran with it to the finger of glacial ice that strayed near. Culaehra ran with him, matching steps, and Illbane cried, “Thrust it in!” He let go of the sword. Culaehra thrust as he had been told, and the sword pierced the ice with a vast hissing. Boiling drops struck Culaehra; he gritted his teeth against the pain and kept up the pressure as the sword slid into its icy sheath and the smith stood by, singing. At last he stopped, sighed, and said, “Draw it out now, Culaehra. Your sword is forged.”
Culaehra drew the sword forth, staring at the blade in wonder. It seemed to shimmer as the light glanced off it, a grain almost like that of wood running down its length. The edges glittered with the sharpness of obsidian flakes, though it was fresh from the forge and not yet whetted. The wind blew past, making it vibrate. It almost seemed to sing with a deep note that Culaehra could feel through his very bones, and it scarcely felt as if he held any weight in his hand at all. “It is beautiful,” he whispered. “It is a marvel!”
“It will cleave any armor, be it iron or bronze,” Illbane told him, exaltation in his voice. “It will cut through any other sword save those few that were forged by Agrapax himself, no matter the steel of which they are made—and because you held it while it was tempered, it will accept only your grasp or that of one of your blood; it will twist from any other's hands, so that no enemy can wield it against you.”
At last Culaehra turned to stare at the smith. “How can I ever thank you for this, Illbane?”
“By bearing it in the mission I have given you,” the sage answered. “Kneel, Culaehra!”
The warrior did not ask why; he only knelt before his teacher, bowing his head.
Illbane took the sword from him and laid the blade on his shoulder, chanting a deep and weighty song, then laid it on his other shoulder, and finally across his breast, leaning down to fold the warrior's arms about it. “I name thee Corotrovir the Starsword,” he intoned, “to be wielded only when the cause is just. Do thou, O Prince of Swords, summon up in this man all virtues that lie within him, magnifying and expanding all until he is a Prince of Men!”
A glow sprang from the sword then, and Culaehra nearly cried out in alarm—but he held the blade tightly to his chest as that green glow shimmered all about him, then shrank in on itself and buried itself in his breast. He knelt staring down at the sword, feeling numb—then began to tremble as forces he had never guessed pounded through him, making his whole body vibrate with their shaking. Power itself seemed to rise into his head, making him dizzy; it seemed to rise like a heat haze between himself and the world. Then it subsided, sinking deep within him; he saw the world clearly again and saw himself more clearly still, saw his every fault and every virtue, knew himself as he truly was without boast or regret, and felt the iron resolve growing within him never to yield to his weaknesses or let his faults grow. He saw how to balance vice with virtue, to heal every breach, to become all that he could be ...
But he saw, too, that he would have to temper those qualities in battle, even as the sword had been tempered in centuries-old ice.
Then he felt hands upon his arms and looked up to see Illbane raising him to his feet, taking the sword from him, and setting its tang in his hands. “You are a prince among men now, Culaehra,” he said, “but you must still earn your crown and grow into kingship.” Then his eyes glittered and his voice sank low, almost feverish with exultation as he said, “Now go, and slay Bolenkar!”
Illbane bound wood to the tang, of course—not firewood sticks, but seasoned dark ebony that he brought from his smith's pack. He fastened it with rivets, fashioned a scabbard of the same dark wood, then whetted the blade and polished both wood and steel until they reflected the sky. He strapped it on Culaehra's back, bound up the anvil and his tools in his pack, and bound the two bars of Star Stone metal in a leather bag that he tied to a rope, to drag behind. Then he led the companions away from the ground where the Star Stone had stood. They looked back once from the crest of the ridge to see that the slag pile had already crumbled away into the ground, and that snow was already rising upon it, as the glacier began to reclaim its own.
Then off they went, through gently falling snow.
“I must carry your pack, Illbane!” Culaehra protested. “It is my place!”
“Not yet,” the sage told him, “not yet. You bear a heavier load now, Culaehra.”
“I scarcely feel the weight of the sword at all,” Culaehra protested, though he knew quite well what Illbane meant—but the sage did not even deign to reply, only strode through the snow with a glow in his eyes. Culaehra would have thought him a man who had finished his work and rushed to his reward, if he had not known that the greatest task of all still lay before them. Nonetheless, the thought gave him a shiver.
The next day, however,
Illbane seemed to lean more heavily on his staff, and after the first hour his pace slowed. Culaehra slowed with him, reining in his impatience and silencing questions from Yocote and Lua with a warning glance. Kitishane did not ask; she, too, had seen.
On the third day, though, Illbane's back began to bend under the weight of his pack of smith's tools. When they paused at midday, he set it down, and Culaehra snatched it up. Illbane glared at him, but Culaehra glared right back and said, “It is my place, Illbane, and my burden. It is time for me to bear it again.”
Illbane tried to stare him down, but his glance wavered; he knew the younger man spoke truth.
They ate and rested, then forged into the wilderness again. A light snow fell about them as they strode across that featureless plain that was the top of the glacier, toward the mountains that rose still higher in the distance. Illbane walked with his back straight now, but his steps were still slower than they had been. Culaehra ventured a word. “We do not retrace our steps, Illbane.”
“We do not,” the sage agreed. “We must march eastward as well as southward, Culaehra, for if we seek to find Bolenkar, we must go to his city in the Land Between the Rivers.”
On they went into land none of them knew, but Illbane's steps slowed even more, and by evening his back had begun to bend again. When they sat around the fire, Culaehra saw with a shock that the sage's face had lost its color, taking on a shade of gray.
Yocote saw, too. “By your leave, Illbane,” he said, taking the sage's wrist in his fingers.
Illbane frowned. “Do you think to heal me, Yocote?”
“You taught me that no shaman should seek to tend himself,” the gnome said evenly. He frowned, pressed a hand against the sage's chest, then shook his head. “You are not well, Illbane. We must rest until you are healed.”
“We must not lose a day!” Illbane snapped. “I will be restored tomorrow, Yocote! Leave me now!”
The gnome retreated with misgivings, and Lua murmured to him, “He did not tell you what to do if a patient would not accept healing.”
“Oh, yes he did,” Yocote replied, “but he is still too strong for me to knock him down and tie him up, and I would not put such a doom upon Culaehra.”
True to his word, Illbane looked almost healthy the next morning as he strode briskly off into the snow. The clouds dispersed and sunlight waked all the snowfields to blinding intensity. Illbane bade them bind cloth over their eyes; so they did and, squinting behind their masks, strode ahead. By noon, though, the sage was wilting again, and by evening he was moving so slowly that his companions had to drag their feet as they followed.
Over dinner Culaehra decided to take the bull by the horns.
“You must rest until you are well, Illbane. We will stay in this camp!”
“You will go on!” the sage snapped. “Even now Bolenkar brews war among the younger races! Leave me if you must, but march!”
Then the vomiting began.
Illbane turned pale and pulled himself up by his staff, hobbling quickly away behind a boulder. They heard him retch, then retch again. Yocote was on his feet, starting toward the sound, but Lua held him back. She detained him until the noise stopped, then let go, and the gnome bolted forward, but he met his teacher as Illbane came limping back. Yocote took his arm as he sat, concern wrinkling his face. “You cannot march farther, Illbane!”
“Even so,” the sage admitted. “Go south without me, Yocote. I shall endure.”
“You shall not stay by yourself!” Kitishane snapped, and Culaehra nodded. “We shall fare more strongly against Bolenkar with you than without you, Illbane. It is worth the wait while you mend.”
The sage was silent a moment, then said, “I shall not heal.”
They all stared, not daring to speak, frozen by his words.
Yocote finally asked, “What has brought this illness, Teacher?”
“The Star Stone itself,” Illbane answered.
They stared. Illbane breathed heavily a few times, then explained. “The Star Stone is a force for good, yes, for it is imbued with the power of Lomallin—but it was struck from his spear by Ulahane, whose power poisoned the metal within it. Only traces of poison, it is true, but they would have been enough to sicken anyone who stood near it for any length of time.”
“As you did.” Lua's breath caught in her throat.
Illbane nodded. “I did not stand near it so long as that—but as I forged the metal, I beat the poisons out...”
“And they took root in you,” Yocote whispered.
Heavily, Illbane nodded.
“You forged me a wondrous blade by taking its poisons into yourself,” Culaehra cried, tears in his eyes. “You cleansed the steel at the cost of your own life!”
“And you knew you were doing it,” Yocote accused.
Illbane's nod was slow and ponderous. “There is no curing this sickness. Go, go on without me, for there is no time to wait!”
“We cannot,” Lua cried, and Kitishane agreed, thin-lipped. “We cannot leave you to die alone, Illbane.”
They did not. They dug their camp in; Kitishane went out to hunt while the gnomes did what they could to ease Illbane's pain—but they could not stop the vomiting, nor patch old skin as it sloughed off, leaving new and tender skin behind. They could not make his scalp cease shedding, nor his cheeks. Perhaps it was a mercy that the end came while his beard and hair were only sparse, not gone completely.
They built a hut of ice blocks to shelter Illbane, then settled in for the death watch, their campsite sunk in gloom, partaking only sparsely of the game that Kitishane brought in and Lua cooked so well. Culaehra had to hold himself from speaking, for fear that he would snap or snarl at the others from the weight of grief within him that demanded release. He contented himself with holding Kitishane's hand and with trying to feel Yocote's grief as well as his own, for the little man's face was bleak and drawn whenever he came back from tending his teacher—which was not often.
On the fifth day he emerged from the brush hut to say, “He wishes to speak to us all. Come in.”
Silently, they filed in and knelt beside the old man's pallet. His eyes were closed and dark, his breath rasped in his throat, and his skin was so pale that it seemed to have been claimed already by the snow. After a few minutes he opened his eyes, looked from one to another, tightened his jaw against a spasm of pain, then spoke with great effort. “Go south and east. Go through the mountains, go down to the plain. When you come to a great river, build or buy a boat and sail with the current until it joins another river, equally great. Sail with the current of that river, too, until it comes to an inland sea. There, take ship; cross that sea to its eastern shore, then march eastward still past seven great cities. The eighth will be Bolenkar's citadel.”
“He will not let us merely march toward him,” Kitishane stated.
“He will not,” Illbane agreed. “He will send monsters against you, packs against you, armies against you. You must gather forces of your own as you march, and you will fight several battles before you see his city. There you will fight the greatest battle of all, and Culaehra shall at last hew through the ranks to Bolenkar himself.” His hand caught Yocote's with strength that was surprising in a body so wasted. “Do not let him go alone, O Shaman! Stick as closely to him as his breastplate then!” Turning, he caught Kitishane's hand likewise. “Do you stay as closely to him as the shield upon his arm, O Maiden!”
Culaehra cried out in protest, but the sage's glance stilled him. “There will be no peace for either of you, Culaehra, nor any chance of marriage and children, if you do not win that battle—and believe me deeply, it will be far better for her to die beside you than to be captured if you are dead.”
Culaehra felt something turn very cold within him.
“When I am dead—”
Lua cried out.
Illbane smiled fondly, a ghost of his former beam, and transferred his hand from Kitishane to her. “Do not think to deceive me, little maid, for I know I die
, and I welcome it. But when life has left this corpse, find some seam, some wrinkle, in the great ice field, and lay me in it with my tools at one side and my staff at the other. Then heap snow in atop me and pack it firm, and leave the glacier to carry me where it will.”
Lua sobbed, but Yocote said gravely, “Illbane, we will.”
“The two remaining bars of Star Stone metal, drag behind as I have shown you, then bury them when you come to the mountains and leave them to lie for long centuries. Most of the poison I drained when I smelted them, but there is enough left that no man should touch them until another smith comes who can draw their poison as he forges.”
At last the sage laid his hand on Culaehra's and said, “Of all that I have ever forged, my proudest work is you.”
Culaehra stared, amazed, and the old man beamed back at him, as strongly, as truly, as ever. His hand tightened on Culaehra's, and the warrior had to blink hard against a stinging in his eyes.
Then the old hand loosened and went slack. The old eyes glazed, then dulled, and the sage's body loosened in a way that told them all his spirit had departed. Still they knelt in frozen silence, hoping against hope for some sign of returning life, but the body lay most obstinately still. At last Yocote leaned forward to test his pulse, first in his wrist, then in his throat, then held his hand over nose and mouth to feel for breath. He waited long, but grudgingly and finally reached up to close the sightless eyes.
They buried the sage as he had asked, in ice and snow with his staff and smith's tools beside him. They packed the snow atop the little crevasse where they had lain him, stood to pause awhile in prayer, then reluctantly turned away and set their faces toward the south.
“You must lead us now, warrior,” Yocote said, but Culaehra shook his head, his face dark, eyes downcast, “I am still too full of grief, O Shaman.”
So it was Kitishane who took his hand and Kitishane who led them out of that lifeless land, south and east into the mountains, where evergreens grew and where, after days of travel, they found a land swept bare of snow, where grass sprang new.
The Sage Page 29
