The Forge in the Forest

by Michael Scott Rohan

  "What is it?" Kermorvan hissed. "Are you all right? Can you not…"

  "I am a fool!" snapped Elof between clenched teeth. "Who would place so strong a virtue upon so simple a thing? But there it is, a force of stern authority such as I have seldom encountered…"

  "To what effect?" Ils whispered.

  "I don't know," muttered Elof. "It was too quick, I wasn't ready. I must…" Gritting his teeth, he twisted the wire once more, hard. Again that pain surged into him, but this time he met it, endured it, opened himself to it and sought to read the resonances it awoke within him. A feeling grew in him, which became a note, a phrase, a line, a complex net of surging music. And in that music he heard words of stern command.

  Look to the lock! The wards are of fire!

  Of ice the bolt!

  It stings,

  It burns

  The hand that turns

  That lacks the right,

  That serves the ill!

  It scorches,

  It freezes,

  Its strength shall consume you!

  Fall back then, false that you are!

  "Ah!" he murmured. Never before had he been so clearly aware of the virtue within a work; it was as if words were reinterpreted, remade within his mind, as if the voice of that unknown smith of elder days spoke to him, self to self, through the power of their common craft. Eerie he found that, and daunting, and yet at the same time its sheer clarity aided him. "It says only one with authority may open this door! Ancient and arrogant and strong it feels, older than the metal of the lock itself…"

  "Is that possible?" demanded Roc.

  "If the lock were repaired piecemeal, over many, many years, yes… and if the virtue were made strong enough in the beginning. Which it surely was."

  Kermorvan growled with impatience. "Then you cannot open it?"

  "Not directly! But let me think…"

  "It would be a strong force indeed," he heard Ils murmur, "that could resist what is in him… if only he can bring it to bear…"

  Elof searched his mind with growing impatience. In what would the lock recognize authority? A key, set with a matching virtue? But keys may easily be lost in the course of time, and that spell was meant to last. Was that why the lock was made deliberately simple? So new keys could easily be cut… and used with some greater authority, less likely to be lost. Any number of locks could be secured thus. Most men would need some outward emblem of authority, imbued by smithcraft with virtues of command, but a smith might manage with a simple form of words, if only they were the right words…

  Or strong ones. The arrogant sting of the spell, the shock of pain and the contemptuous dismissal in the words, these had roused a great impatience in him, and it swelled now to danger. Kermorvan had bidden him open this door, and who now was lord of these ruins, if not he? Elof bitterly resented being so daunted by this ancient force; he would meet its demand for authority with his own. He would create a counterpoint to that wild music, an answer to those challenging words, as surely as he had shaped wire to ward. And with that thought his impatience turned to a harsh insistent rhythm, a chant of authority no less imperious than that upon the lock. He leaned his head against the cold stone and though he muttered the words he seemed to feel them batter against that guardian thought like a forging hammer, like that of Ilmarinen in his image.

  By the self that hears your singing,

  And the craft that burns within me,

  By the strength I turned to evil

  And the evil that I withered,

  By the skill that I have nurtured

  And the knowledge I have gathered,

  By the courage of the seeker

  And the quest that now I further

  These the rights you shall acknowledge

  These the strengths you shall bow down to,

  You, a singing of the Old World,

  You shall hearken to a Master

  As the Shaping to the Shaper

  In the image you are set in! As a rightful lord has willed it, By that will I bid you—open!

  On the last word he gripped the wire and twisted, this time with all his strength, ignoring the pain that lifted before him like a forbidding barrier. Then suddenly, astonishingly, it was no longer there; the lock was turning softly, silently, the bolt sliding smoothly back from the socket it had lain in a thousand years or more. Elof let out a great sigh, and sagged down on his knees, still clasping the grippers. Under his weight the slab creaked out a little way from the wall, and stopped.

  "Bravely done, my smith!" said Kermorvan admiringly, as Roc helped Elof to his feet. "Do you rest now! For since your skill has freed the lock, let mere thews do what remains!" And he leaned forward, clenched his long fingers round the lip of stone, braced a foot against the wall and hauled. Slowly, ever so slowly, the great door yielded to his careful strength, a finger's width, a handspan; the faint protest of hinges could be heard, but no more. Ils ducked under his arms to add her own unhuman strength; her shoulders tensed, the muscles stood out on her shapely limbs, tracing the shape of the heavy bones beneath. The slab advanced a handspan more, and in its exposed edge metal glinted, a diamond-shaped plate of tarnished bronze that could only be the lock. Upon it were incised many characters, but it was the cartouche upon the square face of the bolt that caught Elof s eye, that sowed within him a sudden unease. So fierce a challenge, on a lock so simple… Those characters, that pattern, he had seen them on other bronze; his hand flew to his pack, to the wrapped shape of the scepter, and he saw at last what crooked shape it must be that Ilmarinen forged. That carven door must symbolize royal command, the power those characters embodied; and so he had misread that challenge. Not arrogance, but a stern decree of state… "Kermorvan, hold! This may be no common hiding place…"

  But he was already too late. Under the unison of strong arms the stone was swinging outward with a momentum of its own, sending Ils hopping out of its path, Kermorvan striving to halt it lest it be torn from its protesting hinges. The torches fluttered, and from the open doorway the darkness billowed out like curtains in the wind. A slight rush of air swirled out after it, a waft of odors strange to the cold corridors, a heavy, stifling weight of dust and must, a strange scent tinged with a thin spiciness, with aromatic resins and pungent balsam. It was such a smell as antiquity might have, the dust of withered summers, of faded years.

  Kermorvan, releasing the door, swept up the guttering torches and stepped over the low sill into the chamber beyond, holding them high. They flamed up and flared, the blackness cowered away at their fire and fled down the long chamber before them. For a moment Kermorvan's tall shape hid it from the others; but then he seemed to crumple as if struck. His cloak billowed about him and he sank down to his knees, the torches sagging in his hands; red light and long shadows surged up the walls. Strange shadows they were, from the high slabs and pedestals of stone ranged along those walls, from the still shapes upon them. Kermorvan bowed his head low in the somber glow.

  "What ails you, man?" Elof whispered, hardly able to speak aloud. Kermorvan made no reply, nor showed that he had heard. "What is it?" persisted Elof, ever more unnerved. "What place is this?"

  To those who knew him less well, Kermorvan might have lacked expression, have looked like the graven image of a man painted into life yet tinged with the stone that lay beneath. And they might have asked, those who did not know him, into what unimaginable depth or distance his gray eyes stared. His companions, each in their way, knew better, saw the play of feelings inside him like cloud shadows going across a hill, like breath upon glass, heat through iron. His stony lips stirred, but it was not to them he spoke.

  "All that we were …" he murmured, and shook his head, almost in disbelief. Roc, hearing the words, looked around him quickly.

  "It can't be!" he burst out. "We've not…" He bit his lip, and to Elof's astonishment he looked ready to turn and run. Kermorvan repeated the words softly.

  All that we were, passes; A sheaf of dry grasses That late in
green meads blew, To this end are we come. Passed on, scepter and crown, Justice and rule, laid down, As least man must, we rest Silent, in our long home.

  "Ils and Elof, you would not know that," he said gravely. "It is the opening of the rhymes of lore that are called Arel Arhlayn. Few in Bryhaine now learn them, but that first line has become proverbial."

  A dreadful understanding cut through Elof's confusion. "But Arel Arhlayn, in the old words that would mean…"

  "The Tale of Lords, the tally of kings. Exactly so. And you could say you stand among it here, its living self, or that once lived. For as you feared, this is no common hiding place. We have strayed into the crypts of the ancient King's House, and by your craft laid open the place called Dorghael Arhlannen, vault and tomb of the Kings of the realm of Morvan, the deepest hallow of all that land. And all around us they lie."

  Elof could have wished the cold stone to open then and swallow him. For in his haste, his old ruthless haste, had he not seen that stern barrier only as a thing to be broken down, without thought or respect? Even thus an Ekwesh pirate might shatter a casket of fine crystal to get at the gold within. The Kings of Morvan! Kermorvan's own line, his forefathers whom he most revered… Like Korentyn. Elof thought then of the brand that ancient lord had set upon him, of open honor and hidden shame. Had he not now earned it doubly?

  "Elof Valantor…" said Kermorvan, and Elof sickened at the name. The warrior's voice was hushed, but the same cold strength was in it that the smith had heard first among the duergar, and never forgotten. "Well may you bear that title! For by the cunning of your hand you have brought an era to an end, a long era of division, of separation, that should never have taken place. To this place of old it was the custom that every prince must come ere he took the kingship, to revere his ancestors, to take counsel among them, to reflect upon the end to which even such power as his must come, and so use it more worthily. And because the son King Keryn sent east was too young to have done this, it was the pretext his enemies chose to deny him the throne, and all of us of his line following. Now let them regret it! For they have laid so much weight on that one custom, that it shall turn as heavily against them. You have done me greater honor than I deserve, my friend." He looked round, met the astonishment on Elof's face and smiled gravely. "Did you fear otherwise? Why? It was at my behest you broke the enchantment on the lock; what followed was mine to bear, for weal or ill. And bear it I shall! Share this with me, my friends; look around you, imagine, wonder! Here lie in state the remains of the Kings of Morvan since the first founding of that kingdom upon the then unknown shores of Brasayhal, a good four thousand years ago."

  The shadows shivered suddenly; the torches were smoking, dying in Kermorvan's hand, yet he paid them no heed. A deep awe had settled upon them all as he spoke, upon Roc, upon Elof and even upon Ils to whom the realms of men were slight and transient; and that same sense of presence which had troubled Elof in the outside blackness now returned. He looked from bier to bier, at the shapes that lay beneath dulled armor and the ragged remains of rich robes, mere webs now held together only by dust and the rich metal threads of their ornament; fit warning indeed for any aspiring prince, but a source of deep pride also. Elof thought he might find it in himself to envy such a lineage, yet in truth he did not; he cared little for his ancestry, there being so many other things he yearned to know. He could guess, though, what they must mean to Kermorvan, these rows of shapes stretching out into the shadowy depths of the tomb, and to Roc also. Their silent majesty told strongly upon Elof, and all that they stood for; the weight of years, the building of a mighty realm of men, the long sustaining and last defense of it against the relentless, ageless enemy, and within all those the high events, war and peace, battle and building, the myriad lives of men they had once both ruled and served. And they served them yet, bearing mute witness to the life of their kingdom when all other traces had been erased. Then the torches guttered again, and the thrall was broken; Ils snorted impatiently, plucked the linklights from Kermorvan's fingers and waved them about to rekindle them.

  "Aren't all here, are they?" she demanded. "Didn't some die away from home, or at sea?"

  "Few," answered Kermorvan, rising stiffly, "and we always strove to bring their bodies back. Those few are here in effigy, with arms or armor that were theirs. You see those arches, spanning the vault? They were once its rear walls, and mark the many times Dorghael Arhlannen was extended. At the last the number of biers was increased to two hundred, and one hundred and sixty-four kings lie here in state."

  Ils chuckled sardonically. "A grave matter as you might say, then, that with all the spare accommodation some should lie on the cold floor!"

  "What?" cried Kermorvan, seizing back a torch. "If some enemy has defiled this place…"

  As he sprang forward Elof saw what Ils' sight had picked out of the shadows. Far down the tomb, to either side of (he last arch, two shapes lay like a child's stick drawing marked in the dust of the floor. But the lines stood proud of it, and most so at the heads, for they were skulls. It was by the bones of two men that Kermorvan knelt. "These were not thrown down!" he murmured. "Surely they lie as they died, helms on their heads, harness about them…" Gently he lifted the remains of a mailshirt,

  and a long halberd, still intact. "By the look of it, harness of the old Royal Guard…" Then he gasped, and stood up suddenly. "The two guardsmen! Korentyn said it! He took with him only two old men of his guard!" Slowly, almost unwillingly, he stepped through the last arch, and stopped there. The others crowded behind him, and saw as he did.

  The long rows of biers here were empty, save for a few near the arch. The dark shapes upon them were covered, as all the rest had been, by robe and mail and helm, all save the last. Like the guardsmen, he lay uncovered, save by a great black shield, a sunken shape within his mail. But above it was no common helm, for even through the layers of dust the torchlight drew an answer from it, a glancing sparkle of brighter fires, glittering there in many colors about the head of death.

  "So this is where he came." Kermorvan's voice was somber, deepened by sorrow, and yet within it the triumphant ring still sounded. "He and his comrades, to the heart of the city they would not surrender. Here they stood, as the Ice ground and thundered overhead and laid Waste all that they had known and loved, all that those around them here had built up. This place at least they could die defending. And when the ruin was complete, and this vault still stood, they chose to perish here, of thirst or hunger or by their own hands, rather than risk opening that door to despoilment and desecration. And they are proven right!" He darted forward suddenly, and knelt by the side of that last bier a moment, while the others watched in silence. Then, slowly, he rose, and reached out with hands that shook to the figure that lay before him. Gently, reverently, he detached the helm, and set it down on the bier's end. Then from his own pack he drew the helm he had carried through so many adventures, and, lifting from it its linings of soft leather, he set it upon the fleshless head. Only then did he lift the other from the bier, and drew his long cloak across it in a flourish. Dust flew from it like banished time, and in the torchlight it flared and dazzled as he raised it high. In fashion it was like his own, or the other that Elof had crafted, jet black, high-crowned, with a facemask whose aspect was all hawkish ferocity and dire rage. But the slanted eyes of that mask were picked out in bright gems, the sculpted brows were shapes of silver and gold, and above them rode a circlet of gold in which a great white stone blazed among a setting of green gems, white as clear water, green as spring grasslands, golden as the kindly sun.

  "Behold the Great Crown of Morvan!" said Kermorvan softly. His gray eyes shone with the light of the sun over the infinite oceans. "Against all chance I have spoken with my kin, the last alive who walked here. Here I have come to what remains, to Kermorvan itself, Morvan the City, to him who sleeps here, its last king. From him I receive what was to him entrusted, and that he faithfully preserved to the end. And that trust I take upon myself! The
chain that was sundered is made whole, the line that was severed is restored in me. No longer is he the last King of Morvan! For another shall follow him." And he raised the helm above his head.

  Then, to the surprise of his friends, he lowered it, and cradled it in his arm, and smiled. "But not yet. I must give meaning to that name, before I claim it." And he picked up the linings, and began to fasten them within it. "Strange, are they not, the workings of destiny? And foolish our wish to guide them. For Keryn my ancestor sent the Great Scepter of Morvan westward, that his son might have regalia of royalty in his new kingdom, but kept the crown for himself, that it might remain in Morvan as a symbol, I guess, of continuing resistance to the Ice. Yet in the chances of time it was the scepter that was lost, and it is the crown that now passes into the hands of his kin."

  Then a great lightness came within Elof's heart, warm as a wind from the living south. And beyond all doubt, all danger, his laughter rang in that solemn place like the laughter of the Powers in the morning of the world. "Strange are those ways indeed, lord! Stranger even than you can imagine! Yet do not call them chance! For is it chance that you met and befriended a boy from Asenby, and helped him, among many greater causes and concerns, to recover a thing that had been his to use since childhood, in a humble labor? A thing so worn, so aged that even you could not guess what it was. That I could not, till Korentyn himself gave me the key!" And he drew from his pack the rod that had been a cattle goad, and held it out before Kermorvan's astonished eyes. "By the craft within me, which brooks no gainsaying, I tell you now that this is the scepter of Morvan. From Asenby it came, the home that Ase who took the scepter made for herself; it bears that pattern which only the scepter ever bore, and within it are set craft and virtues which even I cannot yet fathom. Receive it now, and read it as I do—a sign. For chance it cannot be."