The Book of Swords. Gardner Dozois

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СКАЧАТЬ “That’s an odd choice of word.”

      “Like a prophet in scripture,” I said. “When He turns water into wine or raises the dead or recites the Law out of a burning tree. There has to be someone on hand to see, or what’s the good in it?”

      (I remembered saying that, later.)

      Now he nodded. “A miracle.”

      “Along those lines. But a miracle is something you didn’t expect to happen.”

      Off to the wars. We talk about “the wars” as though it’s a place; leave Perimadeia on the north road till you reach a crossroads, bear left, take the next right, just past the old ruined mill, you can’t miss it. At the very least, a country, with its own language, customs, distinctive national dress and regional delicacies. But in theory, every war is different, as individual and unique as a human being; each war has parents that influence it, but grows up to follow its own nature and beget its own offspring. But we talk about people en masse—the Aelians, the Mezentines, the Rosinholet—as though a million disparate entities can be combined into one, the way I twist and hammer a faggot of iron rods into a single ribbon. And when you look at them, the wars are like that; like a crowd of people. When you’re standing among them, they’re all different. Step back three hundred yards, and all you see is one shape: an army, say, advancing toward you. We call that shape “the enemy,” it’s the dragon we have to kill in order to prevail and be heroes. By the time it reaches us, it’s delaminated into individuals, into one man at a time, rushing at us waving a spear, out to do us harm, absolutely terrified, just as we are.

      We say “the wars,” but here’s a secret. There is only one war. It’s never over. It flows, like the metal at white heat under the hammer, and joins up with the last war and the next war, to form one continuous ribbon. My father went to the wars, I went to the wars, my son will go to the wars, and his son after him, and it’ll be the same place. Like going to Boc Bohec. My father went there, before they pulled down the White Temple and when Foregate was still open fields. I went there, and Foregate was a marketplace. When my son goes there, they’ll have built houses on Foregate; but the place will still be Boc Bohec, and the war will still be the war. Same place, same language and local customs, slightly altered by the prevailing fashions in valour and misery, which come around and go around. In my time at the wars, hilts were curved and pommels were round or teardrop. These days, I do mostly straight cross hilts and scent-bottle pommels, which were all the rage a hundred years ago. There are fashions in everything. The tides go in and out, but the sea is always the sea.

      My wars were in Ultramar; which isn’t a place-name, it’s just Aelian for “across the sea.” Ultramar, which was what we were fighting for, wasn’t a piece of land, a geographical entity. It was an idea; the kingdom of God on Earth. You won’t find it on a map—not now, that’s for sure; we lost, and all the places we used to know are called something else now, in another language, which we could never be bothered to learn. We weren’t there for the idea, of course, although it was probably a good one at the time. We were there to rob ourselves a fortune and go home princes.

      Some places aren’t marked on maps, and everybody knows how to find them. Just follow the others and you’re there.

      “There’s not a lot to see at this stage,” I told him. “You might want to go away for a while.”

      “That’s all right.” He sat down on the spare anvil and bit into one of my apples, which I hadn’t given him. “What are you doing with all that junk? I thought you were going to start on the sword.”

      I told myself; he’s paying a lot of money, probably everything he’s got in the world; he’s entitled to be stupid, if he wants to. “This,” I told him, “isn’t junk. It’s your sword.”

      He peered over my shoulder. “No it’s not. It’s a load of old horseshoes and some clapped-out files.”

      “It is now, yes. You just watch.”

      I don’t know what it is about old horseshoes; nobody does. Most people reckon it’s the constant bashing down on the stony ground though that’s just not true. But horseshoes make the best swords. I heated them to just over cherry red, flipped them onto the anvil, and belted them with the big hammer, flattening and drawing down; bits of rust and scale shot across the shop, it’s a messy job and it’s got to be done quickly, before the iron cools to grey. By the time I’d finished with them, they were long, squarish rods, about a quarter-inch thick. I put them on one side, then did the same for the files. They’re steel, the stuff that you can harden; the horseshoes are iron, which stays soft. It’s the mix, the weave of hard and soft that makes a good blade.

      “What are they supposed to be, then? Skewers?”

      I’d forgotten he was there. Patient, I’ll say that for him. “I’ll be at this for hours yet,” I told him. “Why don’t you go away and come back in the morning? Nothing interesting to see till then.”

      He yawned. “I’ve got nowhere in particular to go,” he said. “I’m not bothering you, am I?”

      “No,” I lied.

      “I still don’t see what those bits of stick have got to do with my sword.”

      What the hell. I could use a rest. It’s a bad idea to work when you’re tired, you make mistakes. I tipped a scuttle of charcoal onto the fire, damped it down, and sat on the swedge block. “Where do you think steel comes from?”

      He scratched his head. “Permia?”

      Not such an ignorant answer. In Permia there are deposits of natural steel. You crush the iron ore and smelt it, and genuine hardening steel oozes out, all ready to use. But it’s literally worth its weight in gold, and since we’re at war with Permia, it’s hard to get hold of. Besides, I find it’s too brittle, unless you temper it exactly right. “Steel,” I told him, “is iron that’s been forged out over and over again in a charcoal fire. Nobody has the faintest idea how it works, but it does. It takes two strong men a whole day to make enough steel for one small file.”

      He shrugged. “It’s expensive. So what?”

      “And it’s too hard,” I told him. “Drop it on the floor, it’ll shatter like glass. So you temper it, so it’ll bend then spring back straight. But it’s sulky stuff; good for chisels and files, not so good for swords and scythe-blades, which want a bit of bounce in them. So we weave it together with iron, which is soft and forgiving. Iron and steel cancel out each other’s faults, and you get what you want.”

      He looked at me. “Weave together.”

      I nodded. “Watch.”

      You take your five rods and lay them side by side, touching; steel, iron, steel, iron, steel. You wire them tightly together, like building a raft. You lay them in the fire, edge downwards, not flat; when they’re white-hot and starting to hiss like a snake, you pull them out and hammer them. If you’ve got it right, you get showers of white sparks, and you can actually see the metal weld together—it’s a sort of black shadow under the glowing white surface, flowing like a liquid. What it is, I don’t know, and not being inclined to mysticism I prefer not to speculate.

      Then you heat the flat plate you’ve just made to yellow, grip one end in the vise and twist your plate into a rope, which you then forge flat; heat and twist and flatten, five times isn’t too many. If you’ve done it right, you have a straight, flat bar, inch wide, quarter-inch thick, with no trace of a seam or laminations; one solid thing from five. Then you heat it up and СКАЧАТЬ