The Forge in the Forest

by Michael Scott Rohan

  "Black wings," he muttered. "In the path of the sunrise, as I was bidden. Let us go down now."

  Their descent led them by the lower slopes of the falls, where already grasses and flowers were burgeoning among the stones, and out at last onto steep slopes where the land's bared bones still thrust up through the thin skin of soil. Yet even here the grass grew ever thicker and lusher, most of all along the leaping streams; they came to a mountain meadow whose grass itself, breast-high to Ils, seemed like some deep pool of greenness where fish might swim among the waving stalks. They looked down its slopes to stands of tall trees, and although those around them were almost all evergreens still, they could see the crowns of seasonal trees spreading below, bright with new leaf. Before day's end they were among those trees, a woodland with light and air and running waters, all full of life. Among white pines and balsam firs, gray birch and tall beeches they walked, and found track and trail, heard scurrying and dashing among the mold; birds fluttered among the trees, fish rose in the deep pools of the streams. There was no need to fear hunger, at least; in so rich a country they could expect to hunt and fish and snare enough for their needs with little effort and delay.

  So indeed it proved, over the days that followed, while they made their way down through the woods to the lower lands beyond. They passed among paper birches, hickories and elms; they camped one night under massive oaks with green leaves, the next under chestnuts that loomed like stepped towers in the morning mists. Elof could not help missing the great redwoods of his northern woods, Kermorvan the tall alders he knew, for those grew here only as large streamside shrubs under the willows and the poplars and quaking aspens which seemed more common than in the west. It was a long avenue of these poplars that caught Elof's eye some mornings later, silhouetted by sunrise upon the crest of the next hill. He called to the others, and they saw, as he had, that the trees grew strangely regular and separate. After a bolted breakfast they hurried to investigate, but long before the hill's crest they could see that something lay there. When at last they struggled through the tangled bushes at its edge, the road came as no surprise, save perhaps for its width and its state of preservation. The stone slabs that surfaced it were cracked in many places, with grass and other plants thrusting up through the crevices, but so large were they to begin with, and so smooth, that save at the edges, where the poplar roots had been at work, little of the paving was wholly overgrown. "I've seen parts of our High Roads in less good repair!" exclaimed Elof. "Have men kept it this clear? Or has it lasted…"

  "No man has passed this way for many long years," said Kermorvan, gesturing downhill to where thornbush and bramble overhung the path. "This must have been maintained since the fall of Morvan, yes. But I would guess it is a beast's track now. Still, it seems to lead eastward, and we have no better guide. Let us follow it!"

  The road proved a good guide indeed. Often they had to hack aside overgrowth with sword and axe, but hardened as they were to rougher country this bothered them little. They made swift progress along its kindly path, and strayed from it only to gather food, or bathe in the rivers. Out of the woods it led them at last, winding like a gray stream among grassy hills that might once have been rich pastureland, and out onto a raised bank across a wide plain. It seemed as if only spring grasses grew and tossed here now, but Kermorvan, plucking the heads from many, found that they were grains grown once by men. "And now sunk back among grasses and tares!" he muttered, kicking at a weathered hummock by the roadside. "See, here sat the boundary stone of a field. And somewhere nearby there would have been a farmhouse, a village even. Over there, perhaps, that low mound where the road turns for no reason."

  They gazed at it in silence as they passed. "How long'd such a place lie forgotten, to come to that?" Roc wondered.

  "Five hundred years, maybe," said Ils, "or twice that. It must have been left long before the fields ceased to be cultivated."

  "It was indeed," said Kermorvan darkly. "For this must have been land farmed by the sothrans who fled west to found Kerbryhaine. Those who stayed must have kept up the land…" His words tailed off, but Elof had read his thought, and could not help but voice it.

  "Kept it up, until there were so few that they could not, or they no longer needed its produce. And they maintained the road, which must have led over the mountains to Morvan, till it was clear that none would return that way…"

  "Till now!" Kermorvan barked, his face gone all to edged flint. "We have come back! And few or many, they will know that we are the heralds of a new time!"

  For many more peaceful days the road led them on. Into woodland it wound again, sparser now and with few evergreens, and the air grew warmer, milder, with every day that passed. The woods straggled out through low hilly country where among good but empty pastureland the ru-

  ined stone circles of cot and fold gaped like empty eyes, and still no man stirred. As the days went by Elof began to believe that he could smell the sea upon the breezes, and soon Kermorvan was agreeing with him. They found that the road seemed in better repair, and beside it they came upon ruins that still stood, a lone wall, three walls and a gable, four walls and half a roof sunken askew between them. On a night of rain they sought shelter in one such ruin, displacing only owl and bat from its hollow rooms. "Here, remember the places we camped in, by the High Roads?" chuckled Roc. "Seems a lifetime past, yet it could just about be the same…"

  "Not quite," said Kermorvan seriously. "Whatever reduced this and the others, it was not war as such; they have not been sacked or burned, simply… left. Neglected. And not for very long, to be still standing thus; fifty, sixty years, perhaps, certainly less than a hundred."

  "So recent?" asked Ils. "And… all of them? All abandoned at once?"

  Kermorvan's mouth twisted. "They look about the same age. Not a comforting thought, is it? That there were folk here until so few years ago, and then… none. There could be many reasons for it, few good, most ill. But the sea cannot be so very distant. And there we will find at least part of our answer." He turned over then on his bed of cut brushwood, and went peacefully to sleep.

  "Aye," muttered Roc. "Always providing it doesn't find us first!"

  It was no more than a day or two later, as the tales are told, that the road led the travelers up a steep slope of the land and into a patch of thick woodland that Kermorvan guessed had been cultivated as a windbreak for fields beyond. They found the truth of his words in the lively breeze that set the boughs to dancing and whipped at their cloaks. And as toward noon they emerged into the open once more it stung their wide eyes, and yet hardly did they know or care, for the gleam of wide waters under the sun was in them, and more than that. They looked with awe upon the end of their perilous journey which had lasted from one spring's beginning to another's end, and from one shore to another of all the vast land. Boundless before them, unbroken to the horizon, stretched out now the waters of the Eastern Ocean.

  These were the Seas of the Sunrise, over which the fathers of men, founders of the realm of Morvan, had first sailed to this land. Far below the horizon, beyond the very curve of the world, these same waters lapped upon the fabled strand from which they had sailed, the shores of Kerys. The sight of them in itself was a mighty wonder. Elof's heart leaped to behold again great waters, and to hear, borne faintly over the long miles, the play of their waves like a vast breath upon the shore. Yet it gripped the travelers for a few moments only, as long as it took their sight to resolve out of the dazzling light the lands below and the great hilly promontory, stark against the glittering sea, that so dominated them. Such a sight Elof had beheld from afar once before, and it stirred in him now an even greater awe. That ordered landscape, fair and fertile, the checkered pattern of field and orchard and well-tended woodland, these were the mark of the children of Kerys upon their new homelands, nature mastered but not plundered, tamed but not ravaged. But whereas around Kerbryhaine the fields had been scarred with fire, enshrouded with the smoke of siege and sack, they stretched out
here unmarred from hill to sea, from north to south as far as his eyes would pierce the hazy air, at least twice as great in their extent. And as greatly as they overmatched the lands around Kerbryhaine, so also in the same proportion did the city at their heart. Kerbryhaine had seemed to Elof a jewel, a brooch or boss upon that blazon of fields, but this, laid out along that wideness like some ark of the Powers come to shore, this distant city was a towering coronet. And it held the eyes of Kermorvan as no lesser jewel could have done.

  It was Ils who spoke first. "Kermorvan! You did not say that your people had another great city to the east! Or is this the work of some other folk?"

  The tall warrior shook his head. "From the site of it there is only one place this could be. Does it not sit like a crown upon the cliffs of a long ness? Does it not thrust like a spearhead out into the sea, a mighty seawall to shield its own fair harbor? On that same shore that lord of Kerys set foot who was the first king of all my line, and there he made his first town, from whence his sons were to found Morvan the Great. Did we dream ourselves mighty, we of the west? Did we dream we had revived and kept alive the glories of old?" His voice shook, but it was a wonder that he could form his words at all. "Behold then, a dreamer has journeyed long to awakening and found how tawdry was his vision beside the glory that is true, and lives! For do you look now upon Morvannec, Morvan the Lesser! In your minds mirror from it the much greater splendor that has passed—and mock our child's pretense."

  "I would not make compare," said Elof softly. "Kerbryhaine is the greatest city of the west, but the west is a realm divided, two lands that should be one. I would rather see in this what Kerbryhaine might have been, had your wise line been its lords. A city of one kin, one blood."

  The others looked at him and smiled, and only then did he realize how apt was that title. For a city of one blood it might well have been. In the noontide sun the sand-red stone of its far-off walls gleamed warm and ruddy as if living blood did indeed course through them. "That's the right of it," said Roc. "And the sooner it turns that way again, the happier we'll be. A right marvel is this place!"

  "It is!" breathed Ils. "Mighty are men, if Morvan was greater!"

  Kermorvan nodded gravely, and placed an arm about her shoulder. "But mightier still they will be, if their Elders will but stand by their side! Come, it is still a good four leagues away, at the least. If we hope to reach its gates before nightfall, we must not delay!"

  It was as well they had a smooth road before them, for none of them could long bear to take their eyes from the miraculous city, lest like some deceiving vision in the Wastes of the south it rippled and vanished into the haze.

  But as they drew nearer it grew only clearer and sharper in their eyes, yet still more marvelous.

  Elof saw now that like Kerbryhaine it had grown and spread gradually outward from the crests of its hills. Many walls that had once been outer walls wove between them, overwhelmed and overtaken by waves of new building in their shadow, until these were walled around in their turn. But this Morvannec had not the look of Kerbryhaine, with that city's chill walls of ivory stone and circles of rooftops in cold grays and greens, its looming citadel, a diadem of gold-crowned towers, as a cold heart. Here all the defenses were toward the outside, walls wider and thicker, smooth and seamless, with a very roadway for their parapet and at every turn and corner a vast round tower, massive and broad-based, smooth-flanked and windowless save for a gallery with firing slots just beneath the high conical roof; turrets and gatehouses of the same pattern lined the walls between. "They are strongly shaped, those towers," said Ils. "Built less for vainglory, and more for use."

  "Looks friendlier, all the same," was Roc's view.

  Ils arched her brows. "But of course! Squat and solid like duergar, not tall and weedy like men. They are bound to look kinder than those haughty towers of Kerbryhaine."

  "The whole city has a warmth to it," said Elof.

  "A lack of order, you mean," grinned Kermorvan. "But I can forgive it that, for what it holds at its heart." He gestured at the crest of its highest hill. There the stone of the cliffs surged up through the circles of the city like the back of some vast seabeast breaking surface, and out of it a vast plinth had been hewn. Great stairs flanked it, and raised above them was a high straight-walled tower of immediate strength and majesty, that bespoke immense age. Yet this was no grim fortress, blind and commanding, but rather a great hall of many galleries and wide windows, which bore its light fortifications as might a king a crowned helm, chiefly for ceremony, but serviceable at need. "It was said of the City by the Waters that you could not walk its width between two sunsets," mused Kermor-van. "You could cross Kerbryhaine in half a day. And this place?"

  Elof squinted to judge the distance. "Midway between, I guess. We see it so clearly only because we are nearer the end of the ness here than its beginning. Happily there are gates on this side, or we should have a long walk!"

  So much the travelers must then have seen: but there is much more here recorded of that city's aspect that could not have been visible from so far off. Some, no doubt, they saw as they made their way down out of the hills and in among the inland farms, and some, perhaps, was added later, as is the way of chronicles. But of the immediate impression it made upon them there is no doubt, and the palace most of all. It looked to be of the same red-gold stone as the outer walls, but darkened almost to blackness by weather and the smokes of the town beneath. So also were the walls of the inner circle and its lesser buildings; they were of a type, tall and stately with high-peaked gables under gray slate and columned frontage, built in long rows and facing outward around the hill, outward to sea and sky and land. Many in the circle below were of the same lordly fashion, but some among them glowed in stone of a lighter gold, some in a dark stone with a greenish gloss to it that winked and glittered in the sunlight. And these, where the hill permitted, were laid out in squares or circles with small splashes of greenery at their hearts, and like slender ladies or impudent children, other smaller buildings danced around them; these were not uniform and austere as in the west, but of a merry variety. Gray slates clad the taller rooftops, but the lesser were a cheerful riot of tiles in all colors, red and yellow and blue the commonest, and all manners of glaze and pattern. Their walls were of colored stones, or bricks in many earthen hues. Some were faced with glazed brick, or rendered in dazzling white, or simply painted in many colors.

  But it was the gaggle of houses in the notch where cliff and wall dipped down together toward the wide harbor that caught Elof s eye. Many of them seemed to be built boatlike in wood after the fashion of his own home village,

  their roofs of scaly wooden tiles tar-blackened over high crested gables. Their walls were painted in many colors faded to lightness, and it seemed to him, straining his eyes over the distance, that some bore bright designs, leaping and curling shapes that could be very like the waterbeast patterns he remembered.

  "It seems there are seamen here," said Kermorvan. "Probably of northern stock… But where are their boats?"

  Roe shaded his eyes. "There's some masts in the harbor…"

  Kermorvan frowned at the small dark streaks within the great breakwater. "Indeed, but only a few, and small; light fishing boats, they could be. A city this size should have greater ships than that, if only to bring in produce from fields that stretch as far as these. It would be far cheaper and faster than drawing it by road…"

  "But are all these fields in use?" Ils gestured to the ones nearest her, and Elof saw that though they were still clearly hedged off, they had not been cultivated at all for some time; the hedges contained a tangled riot of growth, chiefly weeds.

  "Strange," muttered Kermorvan. "And no beasts in any field I can see, no sound or movement from the farms, no smoke from their chimneys…"

  "This is all too like what we found before Kerbryhaine," said Elof uneasily.

  "Yet there was a siege, and here, as we can see, is none. Nor any other cause. Could it be that their stock
has failed, their people dwindled? If so… But the sooner we come there, the sooner we will learn. Make haste!"

  Ancient and noble as Kerbryhaine was, to Elof now it seemed young against the venerable crag that rose before them, frail and slight against those strong walls scarred by an age of wind and weather. And though the city below might seem more jumbled and less august, it spoke more truly to him of long ages of life and growth than did the unchanging face of the west.

  "Perhaps that is so," Kermorvan admitted. "In the thousand years since its foundation we have striven to keep Kerbryhaine fair, and so built more or less strictly in the fashion of what has gone before. But this city was where man first dwelt in all these lands. Few buildings, even the palace, could have stood so long. You look upon a city that grew like a living body, that was built and rebuilt over and over again down all the long years. Why do you shiver?"

  Elof smiled, somewhat shamefacedly. "You spoke of years, of the first coming of men to this land. I cannot take them so lightly, seeing them embodied before me. I am a smith, well used to looking deep into the past, delving for ancient learning. Yet even I am awed by the passage of five thousand years."

  Kermorvan's eyes gleamed. "And the last thousand wholly apart, alone, as we were. I believe these last strong walls could be no older than that, and many of these buildings also; as if the city was swelled then by refugees… Will they have changed, I wonder? Do men of southern and northern kindred dwell together still as they did in Morvan? Who rules here, since Korentyn was lost to them and had no heir? A thousand questions await answer!"

  Roc shook his head. "But the first one's got to be whether or not they shoot at strangers! Even ones that might be kin. Or king."