"Well, you may, but I bloody well don't have to!" Elof shook his head at Roc's sharp outburst. "I spoke only of myself, Roc; this is no affairs of yours, any more than it was in the marshes. You are not crippled; you have nothing to hinder you escaping."
Roc snorted like an ox. "Oh yes I do! That get of a mongrel bitch Nithaid landed his darts right in the gold, neat as pie. For one, I haven't got you this far to leave you now; or why the hell'd I spill all that sweat in the first place? For another, where can I escape to? The duergar? The Ekwesh? Or the depths of the bonny blue sea? I can't sail a ship worth a damn, still less can I plot a course! No, my lad, I'm taken in the same snare; here I am, and here I stay, till we've some way of prying you loose."
"But do you not see?" Elof groaned. "You're his chiefest hold over me! If you weren't in his hands too, I could refuse to labour for him, even if he had me tortured half to death -"
"Which he would! And then the whole way, if you still resisted! He'll baulk at nothing, that one - as we've cause to know. Think I could suffer escaping, knowing it meant that? Could you, in my place?"
Elof grimaced. "I like to think not. Very well, Roc, you have the advantage of me there."
"Not I. Circumstances. And it's surely not worth having your gullet slit just to keep your smithcraft from his paws; it's a king of our kinsfolk, he is, after all, and foe of our foe."
Elof laughed bitterly. "So I told myself, and so sought his aid; should I have not been warned by the manner of land he ruled? A chieftain of brigands I named him, and brigand he is, ruling by main strength and by fear, by no law save the absolute whim of his will. He hates the Ice, I guess, as he would hate anything which threatened aught that was his. For the evil behind it, for its threat to all men, he cares nothing; let it do its worst, so long as it leaves him alone! And it might, Roc, one day it might! If he gives Louhi a hard enough fight - as he is strong enough to do, can he but hold his realm together - she may decide our land is the easier target, after all."
Roc's alarm was evident in his voice. "You'll never get him to go after her then! And a sudden assault, after years of peace… Powers, Elof, what do we do?"
"What we can!" Elof felt a change within himself, deeper than any mere mood: his voice grew suddenly harsh in Roc's ears, as grim and dark as time-eaten iron. "He is a fool, who incurs without need the wrath of a mastersmith! For had Nithaid used us with any honour, we would have worked strong smithcraft enough for him; it fitted our purpose. Even so fell a hand as his I might have strengthened, seeing no other way to unite the land. But now we will bide our time, you and I; and use that time to seek the means of freedom for us both. And shall we not find it, who in our youth defied the will of Powers? On that day all pacts shall fail, all reckoning fall due; then let him beware! His reckoning is heavy enough now; if he lets fall the struggle against the Ice, the weight may crush him!"
"Great words!" said Roc, the more acidly because he himself was daunted by the voice in the darkness, so unlike the friend he knew. "But breath alone won't bring 'em to pass!"
The voice grew softer, slower and yet more sure. "Yet for all that, we shall make them be, you and I.
We shall quarry our misfortune, we shall smelt it, you and I;
Out of suffering render vengeance, molten in the forge of pain;
We shall strike it on our anvils, ere the fires within shall die.
And from vengeance temper freedom that shall shatter every chain!
The more firmly I am fettered, all the freer I shall stride!
The more cruelly I am pinioned, all the further I shall fly!
The more harshly I am crippled, all the more I shall be free…"
It was sinking now, like the last embers of a dying fire, almost to a whisper on the edge of sleep, mingling with the circling wind in the trees.
"And he shall see it!
The more clearly he shall see it! And in seeing… shall
he…"
King Nithaid had been generous, after his lights, to his valuable thrall. Also, perhaps, he had not been unmindful of his own safety. When Elof collapsed he had had him taken and cared for in rooms of the palace, rather than any of his dungeons; but every door and window had been well guarded. In a day or so, when Elof was recovering his strength, their old acquaintance Aurghes the sergeant had come with a detachment of the royal guards, to which he had been promoted, and conveyed them unobtrusively down to a light longboat and out to one of the islands that lay in the Yskienas around a half-league offshore from the city. Its southern face was unwelcoming, yellow cliffs rising to a roughly fertile country of scrubland and small woodlands, with many oaks, chestnuts and pines on the upper slopes. Its northern side, though, rose more gently, and over a wide part of it a single sweeping slope, smooth and grassy, led to a hill-top crowned with a great stand of oaks, ancient and gnarled, contorted like grotesque dancers as they swayed in the river breezes.
There he had settled them in the shell of an old building, built half of wood, half stone, in a pleasant nook high on the island's upper slopes, by the side of a swift stair of waterfalls and well sheltered by the oaks. Once, he told them, it had been a comfortable hunting lodge, used by those who came to hunt the island's game, which was rich and diverse; it included small herds of rare creatures, perfect cousins of the enormous mammuts found in both Elof's land and this, yet no larger than a dog. In later times the lodge had sometimes housed noblemen sentenced to mild terms of exile. That, he said, might account for the slightly unhappy reputation the island had among the more ignorant peasants; and certainly nobody cared to come there now. So, since neither Nithaid nor his father and grandfather before him indulged in such lenient punishments, it had fallen into neglect and near decay, leaving barely one room sound, abutting the rockface behind. But that very decay had stripped away enough of the wood to reveal, unmistakable to Elof and Roc, the unshaken foundations of a magnificent smithy in the stone. Here beneath the lodge's fireplace was a hearth, wide but well shaped, with the remnants of what must have been a tall chimney, cunningly flued; other lesser hearths were ranged around. Here were solid bases for huge anvils, such as they had not seen outside the tower of the Mastersmith Mylio; and, as in that eerie place, there were recognisable mounts for tall waterwheels, and channels from the many falls above. "He was a master indeed who built this!" said Elof admiringly. "
How came it
into
disuse
?"
"Can't say anythin' of that," said the sergeant, rather uneasily. His manner, though not unkindly, had become noticeably more curt and domineering, as if to underline that he had to do with thralls now and not emissaries. "Must've been three hundred years past, or more even. The Lord Nithaid commands you build it anew for yourself."
"All by myself?" inquired Elof sardonically, tapping the stones with the crutches of green birch the guards had cut for him. With his legs splinted straight he could already move surprisingly well for short distances, aided by the great strength in his arms.
The sergeant sniffed humourlessly, and handed him a sheaf of waxen tablets. "Tomorrow we return with a first load of stone and all else necessary. If there's anythin' special you'll need in the buildin', do you write it here. Lord Nithaid grants you such tools as you bore, and all else in Amylhes' smithy; it will be packed and sent when the smithy is ready."
"Before!" snapped Elof, scribbling furiously. "I'll need to forge ironwork for the building. And it must be packed by a smith. If he had a library, I'll want that also, and safe housing for it here. And any other books Nithaid can spare, of smithcraft or otherwise."
The sergeant sniffed again. "I doubt there'll be many; What'd a king be wanting with books, now?" He glanced down the long list Elof had scrawled, and his wispy eyebrows shot up. "By the Gate, I'd as soon not be the one gives him this! Him in a rage, he'd do nigh anythin' to anybody!"
"So I have observed," said Elof flatly. "But this is the smithy I must have, to work of my best. If he wishes less, he has only to choose. Tell Nithaid!"
Shaking his head, the sergeant shambled away down the slope to the boat, and left Roc and Elof to spread their bedding in the last remaining room. It was there, alone and free at last to speak openly as the long summer twilight faded into night, that they held that desperate conclave. It proved the first of many they were
to
have during the weeks, the months that followed after, which at last grew into long years.
At the next day's dawning the guards returned. To the sergeant's astonishment, when shown the list the king had simply grunted and told him to see to it all, adding that there was no measure more wasteful than a half-measure. All that Elof had asked for had been sent; including, to his delight, his precious pack of tools. He tore it open, and sighed with relief at finding it untouched; the gauntlet was there also, his explanation evidently believed. But to the dismay of the smiths 'ail else necessary' turned out to include not only building stuffs but also a pack of thralls to do the actual labour, peasants passive and stolid, stooped by continual labour and poor feeding, burned to a brick red by the strong sun of these southern lands. Though the guards were not especially brutal, they drove and harried these hapless ragged creatures to their labours like mere livestock, till Roc felt his blood boil, and Elof no less. But at the same time he would seize upon some detail and goad all within reach to amend it, guards and thralls alike, till it was to his satisfaction; impatient at his own weakness, he drove them so furiously that even the cowed thralls called down curses upon his head. At last, maddened with frustration, he plunged in among them and, crutches and all, began trying to heave about blocks of stone with his own strong arms. Roc had practically to haul him away lest he injured himself any further, and he sat aside with his hood drawn over his face.
They might have thought him angry; but in truth he wept, and despised himself for weeping. What had been done to his body any man might have found hard to accept; but for Elof, who from his youth had always been impatient of the weaknesses of flesh, it was a terrible torment, and it almost broke him. It was a torment that he could not forget, even for a second, even in sleep. Each night he dreamed of running, free and strong and tireless; then his maimed legs would jerk and thrash, and the pain of his scars would awaken him. Already despising himself for the follies that had led to all this, he could hardly have felt less of a man now had they truly unmanned him. He had learned to walk on crutches quickly, not because he had adjusted to his present fortunes, but because he could not. It was this same impatience that made him drive himself, and led him to bully the thralls. But when it came time to eat he fed them well from the store of decent provisions Nithaid had sent him, though the guards protested it was better than their own. "Why not?" he inquired coldly. "If I am to share their fetters, they are my brethren, and shall share what I have. You who deem yourselves free servants, be content with what your master provides - or try a thrall's life for yourself! I am sure he will oblige you."
The soldiers grumbled still, but made few attempts to hinder him thereafter. They feared him for his influence with Nithaid, but still more as a mastersmith of proven power, which to them was a unique and fearsome thing; had he not been a thrall, they would still have had to salute him as they had Amylhes, falling to their knees before him. From talking to them he had come to expect this, and from his reading in Amylhes' library, when it arrived, he understood why.
Smithcraft in this land had long been caught up in the struggle for power, the secrets of its mastership ever more jealously guarded; they had become something to be handed on only to a chosen few, and in great secret. The fewer mastersmiths there were, and the less widespread their knowledge, the greater became the power of the remaining few. Over many generations that process had taken its logical course, their number being constantly whittled down until in the end there was only one true mastersmith in the land at a time, a powerful servant of the king. But with the dwindling of the mastersmiths the breadth of their experience also fell away, and hence their knowledge; much was lost and little added. Thus the craft of journeyman and apprentice was impoverished, as was that of the masters who rose from among them. It was a slow process; but it had been going on, he guessed, since before his own land of Nordeney was founded, a thousand years past. He found now he could understand Amylhes better, pity him almost; any man who had risen to where he had would inevitably have had to be more the scheming courtier than the smith. And for such a man to be confronted with another he could see at a glance was infinitely more powerful, more capable, and half his age - how could he help viewing him as a rival?
"But Nithaid saw through him!" objected Roc. "Seems he always did; and yet he didn't stop the old bastard crippling you…"
"Why should he?" inquired Elof bitterly. "Did it not suit him well to lose a bad smith for a better, a free man for a thrall, a whole man for a dependent cripple? All without having to lift a finger?"
Roc grimaced. "So that was what you meant! He expected it. He was letting you do his dirty work for him all the time."
"He was," Elof replied coolly, running his fingertips over the wallstones of the forge with an absent-minded caress. "He is clever, Nithaid; too clever for Amylhes, too clever for me, who saw through him only when the deed was done. In every way he has ruined me, that wise brigand; he has stolen from me all the things I still treasured most, he has made me both his victim and his tame murderer. For that I told him I would crush him; and so I shall, Roc. So I shall."