Cold Iron

by Miles Cameron

  ‘The man lived in Volta, which is in the middle of a civil war,’ Aranthur said carefully. Or rather, he thought he said it carefully, but when he heard himself, he was disappointed to hear an adolescent whine. ‘I wanted to be home for the Rising of the Sun, and to be honest, Patur, I was afraid to be on the roads.’

  ‘I’m afraid that all they teach you at your school is that you are smarter than your parents,’ Mira said, coming in softly. ‘That is not the tone to take with your father.’ And then, as she always did, she turned and took his side. ‘But it’s true, my love. Volta is another four days’ travel – and even here we’ve seen refugees. Would you have him go there?’

  Marta looked as if she’d like to chime in, just to be heard, but Hagor cut her off with a raised hand.

  ‘Tell me why you even have a sword,’ he said.

  ‘Patur, you make it sound as if you’d have been happier if the soldiers had killed me,’ Aranthur said.

  His father looked him over carefully.

  ‘No,’ he said, after a moment. ‘I’m damn glad you came out on top. But that doesn’t change what I’m asking. Why do you even have a sword?’

  Aranthur suppressed his anger. ‘I bought it,’ he said plainly.

  ‘With what money?’ Hagor asked.

  ‘Money I make doing leather-work. I do some basic sewing for a leather-maker, and I do apprentice work for a purse-maker’s shop, and sometimes for a bookbinder. He says …’

  Aranthur slowed and came to a stop, because his father’s face was, if not wreathed in smiles, at least less tense.

  ‘You didn’t say anything in your letters about work,’ he said reprovingly.

  Aranthur thought it through. Good oratory was all about understanding the points of view of other people. He took a deep breath.

  ‘You were afraid I was stealing?’ he asked.

  Mira shook her head vehemently.

  ‘Maybe not stealing – oh, Arry, dear. You know what happened to the Korontes boy. And your uncle Theo.’

  ‘I know he’s chaplain to one of the Vanaxsi – the army. Isn’t he?’ Aranthur looked at his mother. ‘Uncle Theo?’

  Hagor looked uncomfortable. ‘Theo was a kind of soldier,’ he said.

  ‘He was a bravo. A villain!’

  ‘Mira, you know that’s not true.’

  Hagor looked out of the small window and shook his head.

  ‘Anyway, the Korontes boy was better in the end,’ Mira said.

  ‘He is now,’ Hagor replied. ‘But he came there by a hard road, and he gambled away all his parents’ school money first.’

  ‘The City is far, and very dangerous for folk like us,’ Mira said. ‘Please don’t blame us if we worry.’

  ‘So you bought a sword,’ Hagor said. ‘You know how to use it?’

  Aranthur shrugged. ‘I take lessons.’

  He did not say I killed someone with it.

  ‘Like a Byzas. A gentleman,’ his father said. ‘Well, I shouldn’t be surprised – you always dreamt about it. With help from my damned brother. But, lad – doesn’t your work cut into your studies?’

  The truth was that it did. But Aranthur, who for the most part told the truth, had learnt in the city that there were ways of telling the truth.

  ‘I have permission,’ he said, which was true. ‘Students are encouraged to get exercise. The richer students play games.’

  There was, in fact, a City-wide craze for shuttlecock, a new game from somewhere far to the east, and everyone was playing it, including Aranthur himself. But he didn’t mention that, either. Or that he could swim from the pier at the end of his street – a walk downhill for a stade – and do it for free.

  ‘Wearing a sword is a statement that you are willing to fight,’ Hagor said.

  Aranthur took a breath for a poorly considered reply, but his father quickly raised his hand.

  ‘I’m not saying you shouldn’t,’ he said carefully. ‘Looks like it saved your life. Just wondering what it says about you, and where it’ll lead.’

  Aranthur tried not to sound surly. ‘I think – I think I could be a good swordsman.’

  Hagor smiled. ‘That’s what I’m afraid of, son. I can’t think of anything more useless on a farm than a good swordsman.’

  ‘A priest?’ Aranthur asked. ‘You want me to be a priest?’

  ‘Never said so.’ Hagor nodded. ‘Stop pouring milk over that calf.’

  They all laughed.

  Later that night, his sister rolled over and kissed his cheek.

  ‘I think it’s wonderful,’ she said.

  He grinned, waiting for the tickle or the tease, but Marta shook her head in the darkness.

  ‘No, I’m serious. You look grown up and civilised and you act it and you wear a sword. I wish I could go to the City. The boys here are all idiots.’

  ‘The thing is …’ Aranthur said. ‘The thing is, Patur is right. Wearing a sword is … is a statement.’ He shrugged. ‘I like it, though.’

  ‘Patur doesn’t want us to grow up,’ Marta said. ‘But even I know he and Matur are occasionally right.’

  The next day, Aranthur left the house on horseback, with his boyhood friend Stepan riding double behind. They had the ostensible mission of going to the upper pastures to make sure all the sheep were down. There had been snow, and the wolves had come in on Darknight.

  Really, it was a chance to shoot his cannone. Stepan was entranced by it, and they rode out into the woods to the north. Aranthur knew where his uncle had his little hut – a hovel, really – and they went to it.

  Aranthur found his uncle, sober, splitting wood. And the hovel was gone, replaced with a large cabin of new-cut pine.

  ‘Uncle Theo,’ he called. ‘You remember Stepan?’

  Theo was taller than his brother, with heavier muscles, and whorls of dark tattoos on his arms and hands, around his neck like a torq, and up one cheek. He wore his hair in the old way, half shaved, half very long.

  He nodded carefully. ‘Not very well,’ he admitted. ‘Stepan what?’

  ‘Stepan Topazo, syr,’ Stepan said.

  Theo nodded. He picked up his axe.

  ‘Matur know you are here, Arry?’ he asked.

  ‘No, syr,’ Aranthur said.

  Theo nodded. A woman’s voice called from inside the cabin.

  The cabin was much better than the hovel that had been before. There was a window of six carefully pressed panes of cow horn. The door had glass in it. Neat shutters covered the windows and there were curtains.

  A child came to the door. He had dark brown skin and big, dark eyes.

  ‘There’s an Easterner kid in your house,’ Stepan said.

  ‘That’s my son,’ Theo said in a flat voice.

  Aranthur, used to the City, was smiling.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked the boy.

  The child ran inside. A woman spoke sharply in Armean. Aranthur was still struggling with Armean, so he knew it instantly.

  ‘Why’d you come?’ Uncle Theo asked. He was sober, and surly.

  Aranthur shrugged. ‘I have a cannone. I thought you’d like to shoot it.’

  For the first time, Uncle Theo smiled his warm smile.

  ‘Damn,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t mind. But there’s chores and chores …’

  A little girl emerged from the house. She was more daring than her brother, and crossed the clearing.

  Aranthur knelt down and offered her a hand, and very cautiously she accepted.

  ‘I am Aranthur,’ he said.

  She made a little curtsey, the Eastern way.

  ‘I am Aranthur,’ he said in Armean.

  Her face lit up.

  Uncle Theo’s face transformed.

  ‘You speak Eastern?’ he asked.

  ‘Only a few words,’ Aranthur admitted.

  ‘Why do you speak it at all?’ Stepan asked.

  ‘I’m studying it at the Academy,’ Aranthur said.

  Stepan nodded. ‘Makes sense, I reckon. Good way to talk to
your hired men. Know what they say behind your back.’

  Aranthur gave Stepan a glare, and he subsided.

  But Uncle Theo gave Stepan a disgusted look and shrugged at Aranthur.

  ‘Sorry, lad,’ he said, the way he had as a younger man. ‘But there’s too much work. I have a family now.’

  Aranthur hugged him anyway, and Uncle Theo surprised him by wrapping him in a strong embrace.

  ‘But how do you speak Armean?’ Aranthur asked.

  Theo raised an eyebrow. ‘I spent ten years killing ’em. I learned the language, eh? Where’d you get the horse?’

  Aranthur glanced at Stepan, aware that, as soon as he told the story, everyone for three mountains would know it. Then he shrugged.

  ‘I was coming home for First Sun …’ he began.

  A very handsome dark-haired woman came out, cautiously, and put a tin cup of water in Theo’s hand. He shared it with Aranthur and Stepan. Aranthur finished his tale as the sun climbed higher and his friend fidgeted.

  ‘You killed a soldier,’ Theo said, and his lips twitched. Smile? Frown? The man had always been difficult to read.

  ‘Yes,’ Aranthur said.

  Theo nodded. His eyes were very far away. He sipped more water.

  ‘Best be running on, now, son.’ He gave Aranthur another squeeze.

  Aranthur remounted, trying to think why he was disappointed. As they rode away, Stepan spat.

  ‘An Eastern family?’ Stepan asked when they were mounted again. ‘The Eagle priests won’t like that.’

  Aranthur didn’t answer immediately. He’d learned silence at the Academy, too. Instead, he found them a place to shoot, although he was surprised to find that the woods in which he’d played with his sister now housed a whole row of huts with a little village of Armeans – refugees from the fighting in the East.

  They played with the canonne all day, shooting rocks and trees until most of the balls were gone. It was in the process of searching the case for more balls that Stepan drew Aranthur’s attention to the damage.

  Someone had cut the bottom out of the holster case, neatly slicing the stitches with a very sharp knife. Almost no damage had been done, except that the bottom was gone.

  ‘Bastards,’ Stepan said. ‘The world is full of bastards. Probably an Easterner.’

  Aranthur looked at his friend. ‘You know who Arnauts are, right?’

  Stepan shrugged. ‘We’re the People of the Eagle,’ he said proudly.

  ‘We’re a tribe of refugees. Of mongrels. All the remnants of a defeated Imperial Army – camp followers and soldiers and officers. They found these hills to hide in, and they allowed in anyone who would take the oath.’ Aranthur smiled.

  ‘That’s not true,’ Stepan said. ‘Or, I mean … You make us sound like we were nobody. We were loyal to the old Emperors. We were rewarded for it!’

  Aranthur shrugged. ‘I think we just walked off and let the war fizzle out. And I think we occupied land no one wanted because it was all rocks.’ He shrugged again. ‘But I’ve touched some of the documents. We weren’t noble soldiers. We were a hunted remnant, and to some people, we still are. In the City, people think Arnauts are barbarians.’

  Stepan shook his head. ‘That’s just stupid.’

  And he could not be swayed.

  It was the only cloud in an otherwise beautiful day. The two young men rode over the fells, shot the weapon, and justified their outing by climbing the ridge towards Korfa, the next major Arnaut village, nestled in the next valley to the east. There they found the Kelloi’s strayed milk cow well up a hillside, miles from home and uneaten by the many wolves. They drove her, mooing piteously, back into the valley and to her owners’ door.

  That night, Aranthur cut a new leather circle from his father’s small store of repair leather, trimmed it neatly, and punched the holes carefully; matching stitching on a circle was quite difficult.

  When he was done, cutting the heavy linen cord with his neck knife, his father ruffled his hair.

  ‘You’ve become quite a leather-worker,’ he said.

  Aranthur flushed. He’d double stitched everything to match the work on the scabbard, and because that’s how leather-workers in the City did their work. It irked him that of all his accomplishments, the one that his patur praised was his leather-work.

  But that night in the loft, listening to his sister snore, he realised that it was the accomplishment Hagor understood. And it occurred to him that his father’s attitude towards the sword and the killing was all related to Theo, who had gone east as a sell-sword and come back a drunk. Except that lying there, thinking about it, Aranthur wondered what his uncle had actually done in the East. No one ever talked about it.

  The last day passed too quickly, and Aranthur had to think about leaving – about another half-year in a tenement in the City, with the winter’s deadly Black Wind blowing through the narrow glass-and-horn paned window, and the smell of three young men in his nostrils all the time, eating bad food cooked by uncaring merchants and writing until his cold fingers ached all the time. Walking through slums full of sullen refugees from the troubles out east.

  All autumn he had missed his village, and when he was in it, he found it difficult to leave. His childhood Liote was much easier to speak than High Liote that the Byzas spoke, with its artificiality, or Ellene, the language of the ancients used for almost everything at the Academy. He hadn’t realised how much he’d missed his mother’s cooking. Or a clean bed. Even if it was a foot too short.

  At the same time, he’d noticed things he hadn’t wanted to notice. He heard his mother’s broad upland accent – an accent for which he’d been ridiculed on arrival in the City, and which he’d worked hard to lose. He heard it in his sister and father, too, but Mira’s was so obvious that she sounded like a comedian in the hippodrome imitating an upland Arnaut ‘barbarian’. Two of his father’s friends came and sat and discussed crop prices and the crisis in Volta, and the unsettled state of the kingdom of Atti across the straits. In the process all three of them betrayed a deep disgust for men who loved other men in their jokes and their gossip. In the City, it was not only acceptable but fashionable. The coupling of men with men and women with women – which on arrival had shocked Aranthur – now seemed so unimportant as to make their comments seem comic. Or boorish.

  Fear that he was contracting such liaisons perhaps fuelled his mother’s frenetic rush to pair him with a local girl. The process had been woven like a thread through every social occasion, whether Eagle Temple, dinners, or the Sun dance. His sister’s best friend, Alfia Topaza, the eldest of the Topazoi children from the river’s edge, whose parents jointly owned the most prosperous farm in the town – her property was presented as her foremost qualification – was the most prominent of Mira’s choices.

  Alfia was pretty – in a severe way – and Aranthur, who was at an age when most women seemed beautiful at least some of the time, wondered whether she might not make the most severe old woman in the village. He found her manners pleasant and her person very attractive – she had large, dark eyes and beautiful long black hair, and she could dance almost as well as his sister, so that to do the haliardo with her was to float in the air – but when she spoke, it was inevitably to belittle. If she ever had a nice thing to say about anyone, it was inevitably mixed with a favourable comment about her own family – or her own sweet self. She invariably used herself as an example of the best way of doing anything.

  And yet she was very attractive.

  So the last day was a day of mixed emotion. He found himself wishing to go and wishing to stay. He wanted to tell his mother that women loving women was really a thing of no matter. He wanted to tell Alfia that her critique of everyone else was merely a sign of her own fears. But he had learnt these truths from books and from observation, in just one year at the Academy, and life in the village, with all its complexity and traditions, made him question the learning of his books and masters. Or rather, it made him see that there were perhaps man
y truths.

  He was currying his horse when his father came out to their small shed. It was dark inside, despite the bright sun that had already melted the snow, so that the olive trees stood proud and the fields looked ready for spring. He had lit the lanterns so that he had some light to work.

  His father came in and touched the Lady shrine over the door. Uplanders had many old beliefs – the Lady and the Twelve were two that uplanders claimed they had received from the Fae People, the Zanash Ancient Folk who had lived in the hills at the dawn of time.

  ‘How’s your hayburner today?’ Hagor called out.

  ‘Still eating,’ Aranthur confessed.

  Rasce had done little but eat for nine days, and his sides had filled out and his coat gleamed.

  ‘I’m guessing that animal hasn’t had two days out of harness his whole life,’ his father said. ‘And still a pretty good horse. I wish he was going to be here when it’s ploughing time.’ He winked. ‘And you too, of course.’

  Aranthur considered. ‘With a horse, I could be home for ploughing. Other boys go home.’ He thought about it – and about all of his hesitations about the village.

  ‘Would you, though?’ his father asked. ‘I get the sense you love it – there in the City. The sword. The clothes.’

  Aranthur kept the curry comb going, realising this was likely to be a difficult conversation, and that he’d been currying while he spoke to Iralia – a woman who had been very much on his mind.

  ‘I do and I don’t, Patur.’ He shrugged.

  ‘Aye.’ Hagor began to work on the mule. ‘You’ll be stopping at the Inn of Fosse on your way down to the City, eh?’

  Aranthur looked up. ‘I said I would. I owe for my other horse.’

  ‘Other horse?’

  Aranthur sighed inwardly. ‘I received two horses as my share.’

  ‘And a fancy fire weapon, and a dead man’s clothes,’ Hagor said. ‘That carbine’s worth as much as my mule – maybe as much as this farm. Men will kill you just to have it.’ He coughed. ‘Do men carry weapons in the city?’