The Sword and The Quest: Lady Merlin's Saga (Epic Fantasy) Read online

  Galabes rattled the stones in my sack as though trying to see the weakness in them that Llew saw. The hound watched me as though measuring for a weakness in me.

  “Your pardon, I suppose, Lord Prince,” I said, with knightly arrogance, shoving the gnome behind me for its protection, “but all ore is the same. I know because I dug it.”

  “Do you speak for my eyes, you insolent young creature?” cried Llew.

  “I saw in the pits that whether the stone was cut from the east wall or the west, whether ablutions were offered or not, whether the god praised was Jesu, Pluto or the Weeping Cat, it was all the same rock – hard, veined, dark, and heavy.”

  “Learn more magic!” Llew cried. “Look at this haggard piece. It may have merit, yes, but was it mined beneath a Christian prayer?”

  “The gnome sang prayers over each piece,” I said, exasperated. “Isn’t that enough?”

  “What effective prayers could she know?” cried the prince, flinging another rock at her as she leered from around my knee.

  “Do I go back to the pits for another year to pray over each of my hammer blows, Prince? Don’t be absurd. These are rocks as good as any and better than most because they were mined by a pendragon. Use them.”

  “More insolence?” sang the gnome, smiling up at the prince from behind my leg.

  “There’s no spirit in stone but what gods or men put there,” the prince said. “This isn’t the finest Armenia I’ve seen and you gave it no spirit.”

  “So improve it yourself – throw a spell or two at it.”

  “Perhaps I can improve it with blood.”

  “It won’t be my blood. I’ve put enough blood and sweat into your damn rocks. Make my sword!”

  Galabes thumped the sack of rock onto the citadel’s stone floor and said, “You’ve been paid a Jerusalem coin, Prince, and here’s a bag of ore. Make her sword. If you want blood, take mine and let me be done with everything. I’d be happy for it.”

  Quick calculation came into the prince’s blue-ing eyes. “I’ll have your blood for the blade,” he said, “but not now, not yet. When the proofing time comes, I’ll you’re your blood.”

  The prince turned me and said, “You, blood-hungry cutter of arms, digger of iron, eater of flowers. Now you learn to make the puddles of boiling metal that become swords.”

  “Puddles?” I said.

  “Make my puddles well and I’ll teach you to pour out iron. Pour well and I’ll teach you to roll iron and make rods of steel. Roll and make well and I’ll teach you to weld with hammer and heat. Do all that well and I’ll teach you to shape a blade, to cut and sharpen it. Then you’ll temper it in his blood.”

  “Galabes’ blood?” I said, stunned.

  The prince took up my sack of ore, the old man lifting the massive sack as easily as a young hero might, and said, “Now we puddle your rocks into iron and make them pure enough for a great sword.”

  Llew swept away the rags and furs that had been his wintering bed on the glowing coals. He shouted to his apprentices to power the bellows to drive up the fire to its hottest heat. The thin smoke from the coals shot out of the citadel on the howling wind and rose with the air sweeping up the mountainside like a flag announcing the presence of a king or queen.

  Cheers rose from the retainers huddled in their slip-sliding tents on the mountainside below the citadel.

  “Bring leather aprons!” the prince shouted to his slaves. “Leather gloves. The clay crucibles for catching the melt. Ring the gong for the season’s beginning!”

  The gong rang. The apprentices leaped to the bellows, to piling on more charcoal. The slaves brought out the tools and aprons.

  “You,” the prince said to me, “haul out my hammers.”

  I brought his great hammers from their closet.

  “Smash this one,” he said, examining a rock from my ore sack and dropping it to the stone floor.

  I smashed it with the hammer.

  “Smaller!” he cried.

  I smashed the bits into smaller bits.

  “This one is no good,” said Prince Llew, tossing aside a rock.

  The gnome watched it rattle away into a corner of the citadel, her smile constant.

  “Save it,” said the prince to his apprentices, “for some inferior knight’s blade.”

  He plucked out another stone and another and tossed them aside. Then he pulled out a massive, deeply black rock and said, “Here, this one has the charm,” and dropped it beneath my shattering hammer.

  We worked that way through the day, choosing and hammering, me the only one to swing the massive hammers, grateful to my year in the mines for the toughening of my muscle and bone.

  At last, the day done, I realized I had watched the sun’s shine and the night’s shadows streak across the floor of the citadel a hundred times, me all that while crushing rock and nothing more.

  Galabes was gone, his hound with him. The gnome smiled and sang at me from the vaulted ceiling of the citadel. I smelled the smoke of cooking fires coming up the mountainside from the tents clinging to the slope.

  I saw Prince Llew in leather apron, gloves, and mask sweating over the forge, scattering my shattered iron ore bits among the charcoals to melt down and purify the metal. The molten iron, red and yellow, hissing, steaming, drained away down out of the coals through a stone trough at the base of the forge. It poured hot and liquid into clay crucibles.

  The prince saw me staring at him across the dust and shatter of black stone. He pulled off his leather mask. He had fresh blue eyes uncovered by cataracts. The clean cheeks of a youth. The heavy muscles of a hero. He was beautiful. He was astonishing!

  But he had in his face the twisted frenzy of a man at the work that was his destiny.

  “Hammer!” he shouted at me. “Hammer the iron for all my blades!”

  “I want my sword!” I bawled at the beautiful boy.

  I threw down the hammers.

  “How long have I been working here? How many swords have you made with my ore? What’s the day, the hour, the year?”

  “Who knows, who cares?” said the prince. “All, all those other swords made from bits you shattered have gone away to season in the Earth or to be welded and cut and filed and sold out into the world into the hands of knights and princesses.”

  “I did all that hammering for them?” I said.

  “For yourself. For your sword.”

  I kicked away the iron pebbles I had pounded into a heap and said, “No more for any other swordswoman, Prince.”

  I scooped up a heap of ore fragments and said, “Here, make these into my sword. I work for nothing more now than my own blade.”

  “There it is,” said the prince.

  “What is?”

  “In your hands. Your sword.”

  “This is a rubble of rock!”

  “It’s an iron made perfect by your sweat and fury and now your spirit of anger. An iron of which you just now chose every pebble. Stone invested with your strength and destiny. But what’s its name?”

  “What name? It’s rock,” I said. “Rock has no name.”

  “Too soon,” the gnome sang down from the vaulted ceiling.

  “Yes,” said the boy prince, “too soon.”

  He flung wide his apron and I dumped the iron gravel into it.

  “More!” he cried. “I need more iron!”

  I swept up more black pebbles and filled his apron overflowing. He flung the bits into the searing hot charcoal.

  “Bang the gong!” he shouted to an apprentice.

  The gong tolled out a single note that echoed over the valley. The wind howling through the citadel went silent. The retainers and knights camped down the mountain slope ceased their usual riot.

  The colossal moment had come. The greatest sword of the age was about to be born.

  “There’s your iron,” Prince Llew said, pointing at the yellow, steaming glow of liquid metal pouring into the last clay crucible.

  I squatted by the clay pot and
watched the gathering together of the iron into a giant puddle of heat and stink and sizzle. I watched the clay pot run up to white hot and then cool through reds and oranges, through days and nights, to a dull-glowing brown. It was so great a marvel to see I could not blink my eyes for fear of missing any of it.

  “Are you my sword?” I whispered to the cooling metal.

  Prince Llew had in his boy’s hands the Jerusalem gold coin given to my stepfather by my blood-father Arthur.

  “Here,” Llew said, “is the only blessing on the sword that any child of Britain could crave.”

  He dropped Arthur’s gold coin into the molten iron. Smoke, steam, hiss, a banging flash of light, and the coin was absorbed into my metal. Arthur was in my sword.

  I squatted there on the citadel’s stone floor for more hours or days watching the metal blob congeal and harden as the heat went out of it.

  At last, young Prince Llew, with old Galabes behind him and the silent hound, as though the prince needed their protection against me, reached into the crucible and took out the lump of iron.

  “This,” he said, “is only the seed of your sword. It needs the purification of the earth to become the blade you want.”

  I followed the prince out of the citadel and across the mountain to a meadow of sheep and goats. Galabes and the hound followed me.

  “Dig a hole,” the prince said to me.

  I dug a pit.

  “Plant it,” he said, handing me the iron seed.

  “In the ground? Bury my sword? It will rust and rot!”

  “Plant your nameless sword.”

  “I’ll name it now,” I said. “Work the iron into steel and weld up my blade, Prince. Don’t waste it in the ground.”

  “Plant it. Purify it. Wait for the moment to dig it up. If it comes out of the ground clean and pure, it’s the true foundation of your sword.”

  “If not?”

  “You go to Armenia again and do your digging as you should have done it.”

  I had the seed iron in my hands, four or five Roman libras in weight. It was my sword, my iron, my ore, my labor in the pits, my misery of all these last two years. I could not let it go into the ground.

  “Bury it,” said Galabes. He swatted me across the head.

  I dropped the iron seed in my sudden fury of reaching for my scramasax to cut the old fool. But the hound was there between us, watching me in its silence. The dog that was the last of the thin line of Arthur’s great battle hound as I was the last of the thin line of Arthur’s human leavings. I put away my sword and my fury.

  The iron lay at the bottom of the pit. The prince shoveled dirt on it.

  Galabes and the hound trudged away across the mountain.

  The boy prince said, “Leave it there a month, a year, ten years…”

  “Ten years?”

  “Until the weak and evil in the iron is eaten out. Then we make your sword.”

  I sat by the covered pit.

  “What are you doing?” said the prince.

  “Waiting.”

  “We have swords to make.”

  “This ‘seed’ is my sword. I’ll wait here for it to be ready for me.”

  “You’ll come with me as my bound slave to make my swords for sale!”

  “I paid for this blade. I don’t need to slave for you.”

  “You’ll slave to learn to make your own sword.”

  “Teach me when this seed sprouts out of the ground.”

  “Why would I bother to teach you then?”

  “Because you know what this sword is to be. I don’t know what it will be. But you do, Prince.”

  Llew sat beside me by the covered pit.

  I said to him, “Do you know my sword’s name?”

  “No, and now I’m frightened to hear it when you first speak it out into the world.”

  We sat by the buried seed all the day that was months of days and nights.

  At last the smiling gnome came across the mountain peaks to squat beside us. She began to sing another song without words. We knew the ripening had come.

  Prince Llew dug out the earth and I reached into the pit to haul out my iron.

  It was rotted, rusted, pitted, eaten away. Demons and acids in the soil had attacked it. It was no longer the gleaming smooth metal I’d dropped in the pit but a ruin of my iron.

  I keened in agony. I howled at the gods and cursed them all. The fury that was in me could have killed them with my scramasax if I had the gods near enough.

  But the prince took the ruined seed from my hands and said, “Half the weight or two-thirds of the libras put into the ground has been eaten away. Good, good! It’s pure enough. We’ll finish the purification in fire and hammer.”

  “But it’s ruined!” I cried. “Weak and shot through with disease!”

  “Disease has been eaten out of it,” said Llew. “It’s pure iron now. I can make it into good steel.”

  The gnome sang a new song that sounded like autumn harvest and the snugging down of houses for coming winter.

  I was startled to see that spring had passed and summer with it. Ice was growing on the distant mountain peaks. Had we sat by the pit all those many months?

  I looked at Prince Llew. He was still a young man, clean-limbed, sleek, and nimble. But a sprout of gray was cutting through his hair and cataracts had begun to close his eyes.

  “What’s happened to you?” I said to him.

  “My dreaming time is coming too quick this year,” he said. “I smell an early winter. Hurry! We have to forge the iron again, four or five times more, to slake out of it the last corruption. Then we pour the rods and bars of iron and steel and soak them in spirit water and wait...”

  “More waiting? Make the sword now!”

  “Wait for my dreaming time to pass,” said the prince, “when I have the power to teach you to make the perfect blade.”

  “I’m sixteen,” I said. “Nearly at middle-life. I haven’t time for dreams. I must have my sword to make something of myself in this desperate world.”

  “Can you cut steel? Weld iron bars? Wrap a pommel that will not slip in your hand in the dripping blood of battle? Inlay a pommel that whispers a sword’s soul-name to save your life?”

  “You know I can’t do any of that.”

  “You will learn to do it in the time between today and tomorrow.”

  But tomorrow wasn’t tomorrow.

  We flung the three libras of iron seed onto the charcoal of the citadel forge and melted it down, searing out its imperfections. We let the forge cool, the charcoal and iron seed together, and gathered out of the chill coals the littered remains of my iron. It was hardened drips and dribbles and blobs of iron and not one big, glorious seed with its weighty promise of power.

  The bits of clean iron I recovered from the dead coals seemed to me wasted and awful. It was bitter to me to hold in my hands so little after so much work and hope. I could not see how a great sword could be made of so little.

  Prince Llew and the gnome sang together in a wordless song as we heaped the bits together in a final forge-fire. Boiling golden liquid dripped out of the forge into stone and clay molds shaped like rods and bars.

  “The bars are steely iron for weight and power,” said Llew. “They make the spine of the sword. The rods are iron, too, but we hammer them into steel for the biting edges of the sword.”

  “Let’s do it all now!” I cried, grabbing up the cold bars and rods.

  A bitter wind howled through the citadel. I heard the retainers in their tents down the mountainside packing their animals to escape back to their masters and castles before the early snow fall.

  The swordmaking season was done.

  “Ring the gong,” said the prince.

  The gnome clambered up into the vaulted ceiling and banged the gong.

  The white streak in the prince’s hair had spread to a uniform gray. His cheek was no longer flush and smooth but crabbed and pocked. His teeth were greening. His back stiffening and bending. The ye
llow hairs in his nose protruding. Cataracts growing thick over his blue eyes.

  The coals in the forge were still hot. Llew flung his leather and fur blankets onto the coals to warm them for his winter’s sleeping dreams.

  “Put the rods and bars into the wine bath,” he said to me as he curled up in his hides to sleep.

  “But we can make the sword, season or not,” I said.

  “The Mosella now. The blood later.”

  The prince closed his eyes and slept.

  In his dreaming sleep, he withered into a man so ancient he looked to me something almost beyond this life.

  I dropped the rods and bars in their appropriate order into the stone trough filled with wine. As the metal went in, the wine iced over. I could see the makings of my sword in there, frozen away from me. Pitiful. Frustrating.

  The gnome sang her last incantation over my metal pieces and vanished.

  All of Prince Llew’s apprentices and slaves filled their traveling packs and trudged away to their home villages.

  I was alone in the now-dreary citadel, winter’s wind howling around me. What was I to do?

  I shook the old prince in his smoky fur wrappings and shouted to wake him for my answer but his blanketing furs were empty. Dust and ash rose from my shaking of them. He had dreamed himself into a world even farther than old age. Great gods, could he come back from that place to make my sword?

  I had to be sure he had this place for his return. Nor could I leave his ashes in the forge to be blown away on the howling wind and scattered across the world. Or I’d never have my sword from him.

  I covered his dust and the hot coals with his leather blankets. I piled on them his furs. I crawled into the furs myself to hold down the blankets against the wind and there keep his atomos together for the next swordmaking season when he would cut my blade.

  I slept.

  * * *

  “Hey, hey, are you Prince Llew the Swordmaker?” shouted the boy squire stabbing at me in my bundled furs with his scabbarded knife. “What are you doing sleeping on the forge? Are all you swordmakers that mad?”

  I uncurled from my sleeping blankets and looked out of the citadel at the first bit of spring sunshine. “I’ve been asleep the winter!” I said.

  “Yeah, sure you have,” said the boy. He was well-dressed and well-jeweled. From a rich family and squired to a richer knight. He was beautiful and blue-eyed. “Look, if you’re this Prince Llew, I’ve brought you a lamb…”