by Bell, Hilari
“That’s not entirely true,” said the master miller. “If you go down to the warehouse, you can also see a large enough shipment of food to keep this city fed—and fighting—for two months. And if you’ll open your stubborn ears and listen, which you seem not to have done so far, you’ll hear the farmers who helped him bring it in tell you that this young man organized the whole thing. That he was likely the only one who could have done so, because he’s the only one the people in all the scattered villages around Mazad know well enough to trust. If a stranger rides into one of those villages and says, ‘I need you to contribute food to help Mazad resist the Hrum,’ what do you think they’re going to say?”
The weaver attempted to answer, but the miller rolled over his voice. “They’ll say they’d never dream of resisting the Hrum. Loyal citizens of the empire, that’s what they are. They’ll say it because they won’t trust a stranger not to get them all hauled off as slaves. But they do trust their peddler, and I think they’re right to do so. Because something else I saw is that none of the growers’ marks on those grain sacks is familiar to me—not one. And I’ve been grinding grain from all the farms in this area, man and boy, for most of my life. I don’t think the farmers would have thought to use false marks themselves. Not all of them.”
Inquiring gazes turned to Kavi, who shrugged. He hardly dared to hope. “It’s a simple precaution. If they’re stopped on the road, there’s got to be a mark on the sack, or the Hrum patrollers will get suspicious. But unlike the craft-master, they don’t know the local marks. And if the Wheel should dump us down, then nothing can be traced back.”
“Hmm,” said Golbas. “To my mind, the evidence speaks in your favor. On the other hand, that mark tells against you. And for your intentions at that time, and for the future, we have only your word. So what it comes to is: Do we believe you? Do we decide to trust you?”
“I will offer bond for him.” It was the first time Tebin had spoken since he’d identified Kavi. His voice, rueful and resigned, was just as Kavi remembered it in times past when his master had retrieved him from the authorities. But this . . .
“Master, you can’t. If you offer bond and I let you down, you could be asked to pay any penalty short of hanging. If I’m lying, you could be ruined!”
Tebin shook his head. “You never did know when to stop talking. But if you’re lying, we’ll probably all end up Hrum slaves—can’t get much more ruined than that.”
Several of the men had been grinning, but that sobered them.
Golbas sighed. “True enough. Masters, if there are no objections, I’m inclined to take Tebin’s word for this man.” He looked around the table. The weaver glared, but even he nodded consent. “Very well then, he’s yours, Tebin. Try to keep him out of trouble.”
This time several laughed, but not Kavi. Hope thundered through him, but still . . . “You can’t just write this off like . . . like an apprentice prank!” His gaze went from the craftmasters, who were rising from their chairs, stretching, beginning to chat, to Commander Siddas.
The commander jumped down from the dais and came toward him. “Hold out your hands,” he said. “And stop talking for a moment.”
Kavi complied, and the commander began pulling at the knot that tied his wrists. “It’s not so much that they treat it lightly,” Siddas said. “It’s that they want those food shipments to continue. We’ve had several people offer us aid, but when it came down to actually helping, only one of them came through—and he’s having enough trouble feeding his own people. You’re the first to deliver food in any quantity, you did it before we were starving, and you say you can do it again.” The commander’s voice dropped lower still. “If there’s a crime you could commit that they wouldn’t ignore right now, I can’t think what it is. So consider your confession well timed, and come see me before you leave. I’ll tell you our exact supply situation, and you can tell me what you can bring in and when. I’ve hesitated to impose rationing if I don’t have to, for hungry people lose heart. But if it proves necessary, I can do it. And there may be other things you can supply. I could use a man who can move freely in the Hrum’s camp.”
“But how can you trust me?” Although Siddas’ cynical explanation for the council’s leniency was reassuring, Kavi still found it hard to believe that they would let him off so easily. “How can you just let it go?” He nodded to Siddas’ uniform tabard. Not that of a man in the deghans’ army, but still . . .
Siddas snorted. “What, you think I’m more eager to become a Hrum slave than they are? I’m no more a deghan than you, boy. I don’t hate them as you did, but I don’t have your reasons, either. So I’m inclined to let it go. Especially since the alternative is starving myself into slavery.” His expression was full of rueful self-knowledge, and that kind of honesty was something Kavi seldom encountered in any man.
“Most would be lying to themselves about something like that,” he said. “Making up excuses for me—for themselves, for letting me off.”
“I’m defending a city, under siege by the mightiest empire in the world,” said Siddas. “I can’t afford to lie to myself. Well, just one lie.”
Kavi’s wrists came free. He stuffed his hands into his pockets to conceal their trembling.
One lie. Kavi thought he knew what it was, but there was little use and less kindness in speaking it aloud.
He turned to Tebin, who had descended from the dais and was waiting for him, the familiar resignation in his eyes. “Honestly, lad, you sound like you’re trying to get yourself hanged.”
“If I was, then you’ve no business throwing yourself in the way. I’m not your journeyman anymore.” The words were harsh—Kavi meant them to sound harsh, but his voice softened on him. When Tebin held out his arms, Kavi walked into his embrace as if this man was the father who had died of fever when Kavi was a boy.
“I didn’t mean to cause trouble,” he muttered into Tebin’s muscular shoulder.
“You never did,” said his master. “But that never stopped you from doing it.” He pulled back and gave Kavi’s shoulder a bracing slap. “Come on home, and we’ll get some food. They got me out before breakfast for this!”
FOR YEARS KAVI HAD THOUGHT he had no home, except perhaps for Nadi’s house. He had returned before, of course. Most of the goods he sold came from this very shop. But since he first left to take up his new trade, he never felt—had never let himself feel—the old sense of belonging here. Now, settling onto a bench in the yard in back of the smithy, with a tankard of ale and a thick, salt-beef sandwich, he realized that this place, with the clamor of men and boys working iron, and the acrid scent of hot metal coating the back of his throat, this was home too, and always would be. At least, as long as Tebin was here.
“You’re making nails?” It had been too hot to linger in the forge, but taking note of the apprentices’ work as he passed by came as effortlessly as breathing.
“The boys are making nails,” said Tebin, sitting down beside Kavi with his own sandwich. “I’m working on hinges today, and some of the journeymen are making cart braces.”
Unlike his master, Kavi had been given breakfast, but he suddenly found he was hungry. “Not swords?” He took a bite of his sandwich. “I’d ’a thought—”
“Just because we’re under siege, it doesn’t mean life stops,” said Tebin. “I’m actually preferring hinges these days. Though we’ve made swords enough. Especially after a fight, for ours break like sticks on that cursed watersteel. Fortunately, there aren’t many sword fights in a siege.” Tebin’s voice held all the bitterness Kavi had felt when he realized how inferior Farsalan swords were, and the same combination of hatred and longing when he talked about their watersteel. A bitterness that was personal.
“You sound like you’ve seen our swords break yourself,” said Kavi curiously.
“Near enough,” said Tebin. “I saw the wounded when they brought them in. You’ve heard about the guardsmen’s raid on the Hrum camp?”
“A bit,” sa
id Kavi. “I didn’t know how much to believe. Especially since rumor had Sorahb himself leading an army to support them.”
Tebin laughed, and Kavi’s brows rose.
“Oh, I’m not laughing at the men who came to our support,” said Tebin. “They fought with courage and paid a high price, from what I hear. It’s this Sorahb foolishness. The lad who leads them is called Jiaan. He’s the son of—what?”
Kavi tried to get control of his expression. “It’s just that I’ve met this Jiaan. At least, if he’s the son of Commander Merahb.”
Commander Merahb’s bastard son. Kavi wondered again what had happened to the daughter, but the thought was fleeting. “Yes, I met him. He’d make a fine Sorahb, reckless, honorable fool that he is.”
“Maybe it’s fools we need,” said Tebin gently, “to be taking on the Hrum with swords that break.”
“Umm!” Kavi chewed and swallowed, suppressing a surge of guilt. “I’ve got something to show you!”
He fished the chip of Hrum steel out of his pocket. He’d showed it to a number of village smiths over the last months—usually he had to start by explaining what it was. Tebin knew instantly. He dropped his sandwich to the table and wiped his hands on his britches before reaching out to take the gleaming metal crescent.
“Time’s Wheel, lad, where did you come by this?”
“Off the battlefield,” said Kavi shortly. “But I can’t figure out how they get the layers so thin. I asked a miner about it, and he said the dark—”
“Dark steel’s hard, takes a great edge, but it’s brittle,” said Tebin absently, turning the fragment in his fingers. “Brittle steel’s even worse for hinges and plowshares than it is for swords, which is why miners smelt it into a mix, but I’ve seen it. Worked with it a bit. But when you blend it with softer steel, you just get—”
“A blend,” said Kavi. “But the Hrum swords aren’t a blend—they’re as sharp as the hard steel, and as flexible as the soft at the same time. And this isn’t blended; it’s in layers as thin as frost on stone. So how do they do it?”
“You say you worked with the Hrum for a time,” said Tebin. His voice held nothing but professional curiosity now. “Couldn’t you get in to watch their smiths work?”
“No,” said Kavi. “They kicked me out, even when they were only making horseshoes. And threatened me with worse if I came back. When they’re making swords, they actually put guards around the smithy.”
It had frustrated him so much at the time, but somehow sharing his frustration with Tebin eased it. “Can’t really blame them, I suppose.”
“I can’t say for certain,” said Tebin slowly. “But there’s only one way I can think of to do this. They’re folding it.”
“What?”
“They’re folding the metal. You start with two or three bars—three, say, since the pale layers look bigger. Light, dark, light. Like a sandwich. Heat them till they’re pliable and beat them together. I’m not sure if they’re going wider or longer, but I’d go longer. Beat your bar out till it’s twice a sword’s length, and fold it over on top of itself—now you’ve got six layers.”
Kavi shook his head. “I see what you’re saying, but you’d have to work forever—there are hundreds of layers in this blade, maybe thousands.”
Tebin laughed. “And you a peddler! Do the math, lad. One fold gets you six, two, twelve . . .”
Kavi counted folds on his fingers as he added them up, eyes beginning to widen at the fifth fold. “By the Tree! Just eight folds gets you seven hundred and sixty-eight layers. And nine gets you . . . a thousand five hundred and thirty-six.”
“Exactly,” said Tebin. “Looking at this, I think they’re stopping at eight. Eight’s work enough! But if it got you watersteel . . . You say you talked to the miners. Could you bring in some bars of dark steel? I’ve got to try this!”
“I can,” said Kavi. “Some. The miners don’t find much of the ore that makes it. I’ve heard rumors that the ore from the Suud’s desert is better, though there’s no way to be knowing the truth of that. But, Master . . . even if we learn to make watersteel, we still won’t be able to beat the Hrum. Not forever. Not even for eight more months. They’ve got ten thousand more men, just over the border in Sendar. All Garren has to do is send for some of them, and they’ll overwhelm Mazad.”
That was the one lie Siddas was allowing himself: that it was possible for them to win.
“I know they’ve got the men,” said Tebin. “But one thing you’ll realize when you’ve lived a bit longer is that you can’t ever tell what direction Time’s Wheel will turn. Why, look at this morning.”
Kavi snorted. “You mean when I got off for a crime they should have hanged me for?”
Tebin set the chip of watersteel on the table. “Do you think you should have been hanged? Really?”
“No,” Kavi admitted. “But then I wouldn’t, would I? There are a lot of people who wouldn’t agree with me.”
“Maybe, but the council did. For all of Siddas’ talk of how much we need that food—and we do!—they wouldn’t have let you off that lightly if they didn’t accept . . . extenuating circumstances. But that wasn’t what I meant, anyway.”
Kavi struggled to track the conversation back, and Tebin grinned. “Don’t bother. What I meant was that this morning, Time’s Wheel turned to bring my best—and worst—journeyman back to me. And if that can happen, lad, then anything is possible. Anything.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
JIAAN
PEOPLE SCAMPERED OUT of the streets of the Kadeshi village as Rakesh carried Jiaan closer, and he sighed. It was more than a month after the battle before Jiaan felt he could leave his troops and go in search of allies. But now, as summer dragged itself to a close in a spate of afternoon rains, the wounded were all well on their way to healing—except for one man the healer-priest couldn’t save, and he had finally died.
It happened after a battle, Jiaan told himself firmly. He had visited the man when he could, and tried to forget him as he went about his business the rest of the time. It was Fasal who had made a habit of speaking to the man daily, who had sat out the death watch in the healer’s cabin until, in the dark time before sunrise, the man had died.
Fasal had asked for permission to take the man’s body home to his village, but Jiaan had refused—he needed Fasal for training.
Jiaan wasn’t certain if Fasal had changed, or if he was seeing something he had missed before. But the army had definitely changed. They were angry now. Angry at the Hrum for killing their comrades, but even more angry at themselves for the lack of skill that had made it possible for the Hrum to slaughter them so easily. Jiaan was surprised they weren’t angry with him for leading them into battle so ill trained, but they didn’t seem to be. Instead they tackled their training with a fierce determination, driving themselves harder than Jiaan and Fasal had ever thought to drive them. And they were learning fast. The beginning swordsmen had almost outstripped Jiaan’s tutoring—he could leave them to Fasal’s training now, and turn his attention elsewhere.
It had taken almost a month for him to get a Kadeshi warlord’s permission to enter his land for a parlay, anyway.
That was the second reason he was leaving Fasal behind. Someone had to supervise the training, and he now felt it was safe to leave the army in Fasal’s charge. But the real reason he was leaving him behind was that Fasal had been so outraged at the very thought of asking the Kadeshi for aid. They’re our enemies! We’ve been fighting them for thousands of years. And they may not be as strong, but they’re worse than the Hrum!
At this point, two days’ ride past the ambiguous, shifting border between Farsala and Kadesh, Jiaan was beginning to think Fasal might be right.
At the time Jiaan had pointed out that better or worse, they were the only ones who could bring an army to Farsala’s assistance. Since they were the next conquest in the Hrum’s path, they might be motivated to fight that battle in someone else’s country instead of their own.
&n
bsp; It wasn’t the patrols that troubled Jiaan—though when the first ragged band galloped up and surrounded him, Jiaan had taken them for bandits instead of warriors, and he still wasn’t certain he’d been wrong. But whatever they were, the intricately embroidered strip of silk that Warlord Siatt had sent to Jiaan as a pledge of safe conduct had stopped them, snapping and snarling like dogs restrained by a master’s hand on the leash. It had also protected Jiaan from the next two groups he’d encountered, so they probably weren’t bandits—though Jiaan hated to think what might have happened if he hadn’t had that strip of silk. No, it was the villages that bothered him.
He told himself that he was accustomed to seeing doors and shutters bright with peasant paint—that it was the absence of color that made Kadeshi villages look so bleak and dark. And that might have been true. But he’d never seen any Farsalan village where the women and children ran and hid when a man wearing a sword rode in. At first Jiaan hadn’t noticed that all those he spoke to were men. He’d ascribed their wary, guarded gazes to the fact that mounted on Rakesh rather than one of the Kadeshi’s tough, shaggy horses, with his ring-studded, silk armor, he was clearly Farsalan—an enemy solider to them.
It wasn’t until a young girl who’d been uprooting weeds in a field hiked up her muddy skirts and darted into a grove of trees at the sight of him, that he realized the truth. And she, and the others who hid from him, might have been doing so just because Jiaan was Farsalan . . . but somehow, he doubted it.
Rakesh was currently plodding between the first decrepit houses on the muddy street of a village that looked even more ramshackle than the others Jiaan had passed through—he was glad he would be spending the night at the warlord’s manor. He tried to convince himself that it was just the effect of the gathering clouds, but the growing overcast hadn’t caused the sagging thatch, or the door that listed off its hinges. And while the Kadeshi were a slender people, these men’s bones were far too prominent.
