The Book of Swords. Gardner Dozois

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СКАЧАТЬ a crime on your conscience; you’re not always looking at it, but you’re always watching it. Given half a chance, it’ll betray you. Sometimes I think I’m married to the damn thing.

      Indeed. I never had time for a wife. I’ve had offers; not from women, but from their fathers and brothers—he must be worth a bob or two, they say to themselves, and our Doria’s not getting any younger. But a man with a forge fire can’t fit a wife into his daily routine. I bake my bread in its embers, toast my cheese over it, warm a kettle of water twice a day to wash in, dry my shirts next to it. Some nights, when I’m too worn-out to struggle the ten yards to my bed, I sit on the floor with my back to it and go to sleep, and wake up in the morning with a cricked neck and a headache. The reason we don’t quarrel all the time is that it can’t speak. It doesn’t need to.

      The fire and I have lived sociably together for twenty years, ever since I came back from the wars. Twenty years. In some jurisdictions, you get less for murder.

      “The term sword,” I said, wiping dust and embers off the table with my sleeve, “can mean a lot of different things. I need you to be more specific. Sit down.”

      He perched gingerly on the bench. I poured cider into two wooden bowls and put one down in front of him. There was dust floating on the top; there always is. Everything in my life comes with a frosting of dark grey gritty dust, courtesy of the fire. Bless him, he did his best to pretend it wasn’t there and took a little sip, like a girl.

      “There’s your short riding sword,” I said, “and your thirty-inch arming sword, your sword-and-shield sword, which is either a constant flattened diamond section, what the army calls a Type Fifteen, or else with a half length fuller, your Type Fourteen; there’s your tuck, your falchion, your messer, side-sword or hanger; there’s your long sword, great sword, hand-and-a-half, Type Eighteen, true bastard, your great sword of war and your proper two-hander, though that’s a highly specialised tool, so you won’t be wanting one of them. And those are just the main headings. Which is why I asked you; what do you want it for?”

      He looked at me, then deliberately drank a swallow of my horrible dusty cider. “For fighting with,” he said. “Sorry, I don’t know very much about it.”

      “Have you got any money?”

      He nodded, put his hand up inside his shirt and pulled out a little linen bag. It was dirty with sweat. He opened it, and five gold coins spilled onto my table.

      There are almost as many types of coin as there are types of sword. These were besants; ninety-two parts fine, guaranteed by the Emperor. I picked one up. The artwork on a besant is horrible, crude and ugly. That’s because the design’s stayed the same for six hundred years, copied over and over again by ignorant and illiterate die-cutters; it stays the same because it’s trusted. They copy the lettering, but they don’t know their letters, so you just get shapes. It’s a good general rule, in fact; the prettier the coin, the less gold it contains; the uglier, conversely, the better. I knew a forger once. They caught him and hanged him because his work was too fine.

      I put my cup on top of one coin, then pushed the other four back at him. “All right?”

      He shrugged. “I want the very best.”

      “It’d be wasted on you.”

      “Even so.”

      “Fine. The very best is what you’ll get. After all, once you’re dead, it’ll move on, sooner or later it’ll end up with someone who’ll be able to use it.” I grinned at him. “Most likely your enemy.”

      He smiled. “You mean I’ll reward him for killing me.”

      “The labourer is worthy of his hire,” I replied. “Right, since you haven’t got a clue what you want, I’ll have to decide for you. For your gold besant you’ll get a long sword. Do you know what that—?”

      “No. Sorry.”

      I scratched my ear. “Blade three feet long,” I said, “two and a half inches wide at the hilt, tapering straight to a needle point. The handle as long as your forearm, from the inside of your elbow to the tip of your middle finger. Weight absolutely no more than three pounds, and it’ll feel a good deal lighter than that because I’ll balance it perfectly. It’ll be a stabber more than a cutter because it’s the point that wins fights, not the edge. I strongly recommend a fuller—you don’t know what a fuller is, do you?”

      “No.”

      “Well, you’re getting one anyway. Will that do you?”

      He sort of gazed at me as if I were the Moon. “I want the best sword ever made,” he said. “I can pay more if necessary.”

      The best sword ever made. The silly thing was, I could do it. If I could be bothered. Or I could make him the usual and tell him it was the best sword ever made, and how could he possibly ever know? There are maybe ten men in the world qualified to judge. Me and nine others.

      On the other hand; I love my craft. Here was a young fool saying; indulge yourself, at my expense. And the work, of course, the sword itself, would still be alive in a thousand years’ time, venerated and revered, with my name on the hilt. The best ever made; and if I didn’t do it, someone else would, and it wouldn’t be my name on it.

      I thought for a moment, then leant forward, put my fingertips on two more of his coins, and dragged them towards me, like a ploughshare through clay. “All right?”

      He shrugged. “You know about these things.”

      I nodded. “In fact,” I said, and took a fourth coin. He didn’t move. It was as though he wasn’t interested. “That’s just for the plain sword,” I said. “I don’t do polishing, engraving, carving, chiselling, or inlay. I don’t set jewels in hilts because they chafe your hands raw and fall out. I don’t even make scabbards. You can have it tarted up later if you want, but that’s up to you.”

      “The plain sword will do me just fine,” he said.

      Which puzzled me.

      I have a lot of experience of the nobility. This one—his voice was exactly right, so I could vouch for him, as though I’d known him all my life. The clothes were plain, good quality, old but well looked after; a nice pair of boots, though I’d have said they were a size too big, so maybe inherited. Five besants is a vast, stunning amount of money, but I got the impression it was all he had.

      “Let me guess,” I said. “Your father died, and your elder brother got the house and the land. Your portion was five gold bits. You accept that that’s how it’s got to be, but you’re bitter. You think; I’ll blow the lot on the best sword ever made and go off and carve myself out a fortune, like Robert the Fox or Boamund. Something like that?”

      A very slight nod. “Something like that.”

      “Fine,” I said. “A certain category of people and their money are easily parted. If you live long enough to get some sense beaten into you, you’ll get rather more than four gold bits for the sword, and then you can buy a nice farm.”

      He smiled. “That’s all right, then.”

      I like people who take no notice when I’m rude to them.

      “Can I watch?” he asked.

      That’s a question СКАЧАТЬ