"But not today," said Roc quickly, his eyes darting to the approaching boats.
Elof smiled thinly. "No my friend, not today. My wits may be crazed across, but they are not wholly shat-tered. Today he comes to see what is costing him so dear. See he shall! And may his cleverness teach him due respect for true smithcraft!"
"It might, at that," said Roc, relieved. "It's impressive enough, that forge; almost as fine as old Mylio's lair, or your own in the Guildhall - and may I live to set foot in there again one day! Who'd have thought this old ruin would shape up so neat?"
"Well, I did!" smiled Elof. "Right from the first moment I set eyes on it, there it seemed to be, just as you see it now, exactly the way it was - "
"Oh aye?" cut in Roc sharply, but Elof had already stopped short. "How're you so sure of that, then?"
They looked at each other a moment, questioningly. "I don't really know." Elof admitted. "I just… saw it, that's all. That's all!" he insisted, as Roc opened his mouth to ask something more. "Come, the boats are beaching. Come!" He snatched up his crutches and with ungainly energy slammed the shutters closed and swung himself out of the door. Roc lifted his eyes to the naked rafters in mute appeal for patience, and stumped out after him.
With no less vigour Nithaid swung his heavy frame over the gunwales, thumped down onto the chalky sand and squinted up at them. Behind him, splashing into the shallows, sprang his guards. The king waved an imperious hand upslope, and set off at a great pace, the guards doubling to keep up with him, their plumes tossing in the breeze. He reached the forge red-faced and asweat, and stood with hands on hips, glaring at them and saying nothing; the guard, a dozen or so, closed in around him, their scarlet spears held trailing but ready for immediate use. Elof gave no sign of noticing them, and inclined his head politely to Nithaid. "Your thrall regrets his inability to come down to meet you," he said with elaborate politeness. "Or make the usual obeisances. The crutches, you see…" For a moment their glances clashed; but Nithaid's smile was all bluff and genial condescension.
"Well, I'd hardly insist, would I now? Take it that you're relieved of all such obligations to me. Valant'. As to the least of free men, eh?" He gestured impatiently at the smithy. "What do we tarry for, then?"
But he glanced uneasily at the freshly painted door as he entered, and many of the guard baulked visibly. For Elof had set patterns and symbols upon it in strangely worked brass, and they guessed unhappily at their potency. At its heart was the mighty character of the sun, worked in the Nordeney style, and the look in its central eye was bleak and baleful indeed. What they saw, as their sight grew used to the shadows beneath the temporary roof of sailcloth and boards, was no more reassuring. Two huge waterwheels dominated the forge, and as the king entered Roc spun open the sluices; water diverted from the falls leaped and thundered under the roof and crashed down upon their blades of iron unrusting, and with many a protesting creak strange devices came to life. Sighing like a giant, bellows taller than a man drew breath and blew in the same pass, and all around the room the hearthfires roared into sudden dazzling flame. The red-white light danced about the strange-shaped ironwork that supported the roof, browning the beams and bringing eerie life to the grimacing masks of the crouching beasts that formed the brackets. Grinding wheels and shaping lathes, crushers and sifters, driven by pulleys of many sizes, hissed swiftly to life, and with ponderous smoothness a tall column of blackened steel surged straight up towards the rafters, slipped free suddenly and dropped down upon a high anvil with a crash that seemed to shiver the air. Lesser hammers beat a rippling rhythm on blocks of chiming iron, sharp sounds that lanced through the ears and severed thought from thought. Against this torrent of sound Nithaid stood stolid and unmoving on his squat legs, his guards clustering close about him as if he might protect them. Elof waved to Roc, and the sluices were shut again; the abrupt silence seemed as terrible as the noise. But Nithaid was yet undaunted.
"That's a pretty show!" he remarked sceptically. "But I've seen better in the arena, Valant'. Fine to look upon - but what may you do with it all, there's the rub! Crows you may scare off with such a din, but never the Icewitch! So much expense upon the thrall, and now he's demanding still more! Time we saw some results from you, my lad!"
Elof smiled calmly. "Do you look over upon that anvil, then!" Nithaid stared, blinked, then with a muffled curse he stalked forward and lifted from the anvil some pieces of plate armour with patches of mail about their edge. They had something of the same bronze hue as Amylhes' but no other resemblance. Each link of the mesh was most cunningly and intricately worked against its neighbour, so that when Nithaid laid a piece across his hand the mail became almost a solid surface, merging imperceptibly with the plate. "You commanded an armour of me," said Elof quietly. "These are its trial pieces, made of such materials as Amylhes kept to hand; I will need more, and better. It will be a suit of plate and mail combined, in the style of Morvanhal; and the mail will also close thus under the weight of a blow. The harder that falls, the more firmly it will be driven together. The mesh as a whole has virtues of strength and unity within it, but upon each ring is set a virtue of moving freely and unhindered; I have learned to value that of late. Well, as I have begun, shall I go on? When you send me the makings - "
"You'll have'em, you'll have'em!" crooned Nithaid absently, greedily caressing the mail as if it were costly silk, "Aye, finish it, soon as you may!" Then, recollecting himself, he added gruffly "I've need of haste. Summer ends, and with the mists of autumn the reivers grow bolder; the king must start a new campaign, or lose even more support from the outlying lords who bear the brunt. I hate to fight in armour that was dead men's, and what's borrowed never fits my belly. So! List all you need - but no waste, mind you!" He peered around suspiciously. "Like these heavy roof-timbers you've the nerve to demand! Each one the month's keep of a cavalry squadron! If any can be found of that size, that is! We're forever short of large timber in this land. Why not just cut down that oakwood stand atop the hill and use them, as my lads'd have you do?"
Elof snorted impatiently. "Aye, and lose the roof itself to the next winter gale, without their shelter! Anyway, you feel the heat of the fires, even under this high roof; it takes well seasoned timber to bear the heat of a forge for long!" He forbore to add that he was simply too fond of the trees, anyway; fortunately it was highly unlikely that any such idea would occur to the king, though Nithaid had a mind both acute and acutely suspicious. It cost Elof most of the day's work, not to mention all the shreds of patience he could summon up, to convince him that the timbers and materials he had demanded were necessary. "Well, then," grumbled Nithaid at last, as he cast a last severe look around the forge, "at least you'll not be able to claim I denied you aught, Mastersmith. If I'd a court as perfect as this forge I'd hammer out a sound enough realm, let me tell you!"
"Would you?" inquired Elof coldly. "A master does not despise his metals, king. And though the forge is well enough as it once was, it is hardly perfect; I need more heat! Fierce heat, fiercer than a common fire can yield! Heat to soften stubborn medals, to consume others and bear new substance from their blending. At the very least I need a furnace of some kind, for my studies and trials! Amylhes cannot have understood a tenth part of that library of his, there's much new to me within those books that I must wrestle with."
"Is there now? And to what end?"
"To what end is a babe new-born? I have known the strangest oddments prove vital. But where knowledge is dangled before me I must have it, king, as you must your dominion. No other passion rules me save one, and that is deep in eclipse."
"Well, do you burn your heart to feed your forge, then! No, you'll have no costly construction of me; if fiercer fires you want, you yourself must find them. And meanwhile, have a care of that armour!"
As Nithaid's boat pulled away and his guards scrambled hastily back into the other, Elof flung the shutters wide and drank deep of the cool air. Roc grinned as the sunlight flooded the smithy, and made it an airier, fairer place altogether. "You were right; far better show it made, all in shadow like that! Fairly shook the brute, for all his calm! And look at those guards hop! They'll not be too eager to come back to Elan Ghorenhyan again!"
"Sorcerers' Isle, is that what they're calling it? Well and good! Let them keep a clear berth, there'll be fewer prying eyes and ears for Nithaid then. And with those timbers we'll have the forge complete within a week." He pondered. "Save for the furnace. But any ordinary furnace would barely meet our need, anyway. He was right, Roc; we must find some means for ourselves…"
The makings of the armour arrived the next day, heaped on the shore by a nervous boatman, who all but fled when the smiths approached him. Elof set to work then in earnest, forming stiff wires of bronze and many other metals, shaping and
entwining
them with soft sung words into intricate forms; most he left free and flexible, but some, for the vulnerable surfaces of the joints, he shaped into the close-knit chains that flowed like thick cloth through the fingers, yet braced and locked against one another when struck. Forming the plates was an easier matter, but he did not skimp it, and set their surfaces with ornament carefully shaped to deflect any impact; then little by little he linked them with the mail, fitting them carefully around the same form Amylhes had used. It was a hard task and tedious, hardly taxing to a mastersmith like Elof, but he threw himself into it with such fierce energy that by the time the thralls returned with the new roof-timbers, some three weeks later, the armour was nearing completion. It stood on the form in a corner of the forge, squatly grotesque, to his tormented mind a disturbing likeness of Nithaid; all the worse, in that he had not yet shaped the helm, and it was headless. It haunted him, and he longed to be rid of it; yet for his pride's sake he would not hurry the work. But a strange quirk grew in him, and when Roc, who had been supervising the work on the roof, saw the completed helm he was appalled. "You're never sending him
that
!"
Elof shrugged. "Why should I not? He will know it for better work than any he can have seen!"
"Aye, but…" Words failed Roc. And indeed, the effect of the helm was not easily described. It was of the same dark bronze hue as the armour, beautifully ornamented in gold; but there was little fair in its aspect. It sat upon the armour's broad shoulders in the shape of a huge bull's head, shaped as from the life, as closely as one could who had herded such beasts in his childhood; its horns were short and turned down against the brow to ward off blows, lowered as if for the charge. But there was also a strongly human cast to that countenance, though it was hard to find it in any single feature; and the look upon it was appalling, lowering, threatening, basely brutal yet fiercely aware, most bestial in its likeness to men. Or rather, to a man; for the whole cast of those features, and most of all the look in those pouched golden eyes, cold and menacing, was beyond mistake. That helm, work of craft and strength though it was, was a mockery closer and more deadly than any dart it might deflect, a distorted likeness of Nithaid.
All Roc's objections Elof brushed aside; the armour was packed up and dispatched to Nithaid that evening with the returning work party. Roc groaned as he watched their boat pull away from the shore, but Elof only chuckled. "Even he would not slay us for that, not when it is such a proof in itself of our worth to him! But I would I were there to see the conflict in him, between his greed and. his pride! You saw how he drooled over it; but what will he do now, I wonder?"
"Ah well!" sighed Roc. "He might well burst a vein in his rage, that's always something. We can only hope. But it wasn't so much that that was worrying me; it's
you
. Dependable soul you've been all the years I've known you, from the moment you got out of the Mastersmith's clutches onward; serious like, never your braying merry-andrew, but a good lad nonetheless. And now? All of a sudden you show up this quirky jesting side; and a jest with savage teeth, at that! What's got into you? You're changing!"
Elof's brows knitted, and for a moment his own face wore the look of the bull-mask. "Say rather, I am changed. In lasting pain, my sword and my freedom torn from me, even the power to walk, what may I do but put a keen edge on my wits? But I am still myself, Roc; have no fear."
"You're still the man I know, aye," grunted Roc. "But there's a hint of one I'm not so familiar with, also, and I do fear; for you most of all."
But when the guard returned, early next morning, they bore with them tidings from the king that neither man expected, and more besides. Nithaid, it appeared from the sergeant's account, had gazed upon the armour a long while in silence, as if astonished, while the court held its breath. Then he had crowed like an enraptured child, insisted upon being fastened into the armour at once, and had jingled around the palace in it for the rest of the evening. "And for all I know 'e slept in it!" grunted the sergeant. "For sure I saw 'im set off for a ride in it at first light!" He scowled at them. "As sharp a piece of kiss-my-arse as ever I saw, that likeness! A fly pair you are, for all your fine words! Brown-noses with the best of the courtiers!"
"You mean," asked Elof faintly, "you think that image is a flattery?"
"Well, surely!" trumpeted the sergeant. "Fairly brings out the king in 'im, that does! And doesn't 'e know it! Wait till the lords clap eyes on 'im in it, he keeps saying, that'll scare 'em into line! And the army! And the savages, by Verya's curlies, they'll brown their britches and run a league! Don't believe me? Well, believe this; 'e's sent you by me a mort of delicate meats, enough for a two days' feast, and a hogshead of strong wine all to yourselves! Though by my lights the bearer of such glad tidings might rate a swig, it being such thirsty work telling 'em…"