Forging the Sword (The Farsala Trilogy) (6 page)

“I think you’ve relying too much on the desert,’ Fasal grumbled.

“Remember when I told you that you should spend more time talking to the Suud?” Jiaan asked.

“Yes, though why you wasted so much time on those barbarians, I’ll never understand. What of it?”

“You should have spent more time talking to the Suud.”

S
HELTERED IN THE DOORWAY
of Maok’s hutch, Soraya listened to the soft thud of a hammer on hot metal as she watched the peddler and his Suud apprentice. It had surprised her, that quiet thumping, for she’d thought metal being shaped would clang. She’d since learned that that was only true when a piece was “cold-worked.” Hot metal could be as soft as wood—as soft as dough, depending on how hot it was. She had learned a great deal about metal over the last six weeks. About other things too.

“We have long needed this,” said Maok, peering over her shoulder. “It costs us, to trade with others for our knives and spear points. Now we can make our own. It is a good joining gift.”

Soraya, who had brought only grain and dried beans for her
gift, gritted her teeth and added jealousy to hatred as she stared at the peddler’s back. He had taken off his shirt, even though the night was cool, just as his apprentices had shed the striped robes that covered their white skin. His britches left him with more covering than the Suud, who wore nothing but a strip of cloth wrapped around their hips. Once the Suud had looked almost naked to Soraya, but that had long since passed. Now she thought the peddler looked overdressed.

He wasn’t working the metal himself—he could grip neither hammer nor tongs with his weakened right hand. She could see that he longed to take over, but he simply watched, and he didn’t nag his apprentices either, commenting only when they needed his advice.

Soraya knew that in his place she’d have been muttering things like “keep the strokes firm and steady,” even though the middle-aged Suud man was doing exactly that as he pounded three red-hot iron bars into one. No, she had to admit it—the peddler was a good teacher. She sighed.

“You’re a fool, girl,” said Maok calmly.

“For hating him? He killed my father. I have a right to hate!”

“Maybe. Maybe not,” said Maok, annoyingly cryptic, as she so often was. “He learned to Speak to the shilshadu of metal fast. Faster than anyone I ever seen. But he cannot work it with his own hands. And I think he is a One Speaker, as many with strong …”
She waved her hands, as if to pluck the elusive word from the air. “What is ‘feeling for a thing,’ in your Faran?”

“Affinity,” said Soraya, noticing for the first time that Maok was speaking in Faran. It kept their conversation relatively private, for although many Suud spoke a rough Faran, none of them were as fluent as Maok.

“Affinity, yes,” The old woman nodded, her silky hair floating around her white face. “He has strong affinity for metals, but no gift for other things. He will not be an All Speaker, as you will. Besides, Duckie is a nice mule.”

Even Soraya liked the peddler’s mule, but as for the rest of it …

“I think I’m only going to be a Three Speaker,” she said, though as far as she knew, ‘Three Speaker’ wasn’t a real term. “I’ll never reach the shilshadu of that cursed rock.”

“Stone’s spirit is slow and still,” said Maok. “While your own shilshadu is filled with anger you will not find it.”

Ah, here was the scolding. Soraya found that she was in no mood to be lectured about forgiveness.

“I’m going to the mine,” she said. “Maybe I can reach the stone’s shilshadu better if I handle it more.”

She crawled out of the low, round-topped tent and stood stiffly. She’d been sitting cross-legged trying to reach the spirit of that stupid rock for so long that her legs were half asleep. The frustrating
part was that it did have a spirit: old, deep, and oddly gentle. Soraya was sufficiently adept with the Suud’s peculiar magic by now that she could sense it. She just couldn’t yield herself to it as she could with fire or water, or, as she had recently learned to do, with air.

Air was easy, once you realized how vast and loose was the spirit that filled it—so easy that just thinking about it made a sudden breeze swirl around Soraya, reflecting the turbulence in her soul.

She damped the connection swiftly, noting Maok’s scowl, for control was something else Maok was trying to teach her. But Soraya couldn’t suppress her smile. Air’s spirit was so merry and open that even an instant’s joining lightened her heart.

“Don’t go near the smelting oven,” Maok told her. “The way you are now, the fire might flare up.”

Soraya nodded, turning away. She had no desire to visit the smoldering pit where the ore was cooked—“smelted,” the peddler called it.

“It is not that you hate,” Maok called after her. “It is that hate blinds you.”

At least she’d spoken in Faran, so the rest of the camp wasn’t made privy to Soraya’s private life.

Soraya was sufficiently grateful to Maok for guarding her emotional privacy that she took care to close off her own ability to read
people’s emotions as she passed through the camp, walking away from the peddler and the apprentices who clustered around the central fire. A fire that had required only bellows and an anvil to turn into a forge.

Another of the things that had surprised Soraya was how little equipment was needed to turn rock into sword blades. The peddler admitted that the sophisticated blast furnaces in the mines, and the elaborate forges in Mazad, with their array of bellows, tongs, awls, and other tools, were more efficient. But he said that these primitive expedients would still do the job. Perhaps even better when it came to smelting the Suud’s iron, for rumor had long claimed there was something special about the ore found in the badlands. Kavi said he didn’t want it heated too thoroughly lest whatever made the ore so special “burn off.”

The path to the open trench where the Suud mined iron ore led past the crude pit where lumpy packets of ore were baked into an astonishingly soft, spongy matter the peddler called “bloom.” The bloom held soft iron, but it was still caught in its matrix of rock. The men who ran the smelter had to beat the bloom until the other elements scattered out and only a lump of iron remained—a very hard iron, which the peddler said would be too brittle to be useful on its own.

Soraya didn’t hear any thumping sounds from the furnace, so she guessed they must be heating the ore. But she still obeyed
Maok’s instructions and walked wide around the smelter pit. It was a new and unsettling development in her magic, that she had become so aware of the shilshadu of things that sometimes they reacted to her presence even when she didn’t intend it. Remembering how hard she had struggled to reach the shilshadu of inanimate things—even of live things at first—Soraya could only smile.

Maok said this was a stage most Speakers went through, and that it would pass as she gained more control. The Suud who manned the bellows were protected by the smelter pit’s chimney, but Soraya knew that too hot a fire could ruin the ore they worked on, causing the iron to melt out of the rock and form nuggets at the bottom of the fire pit that were so hard and brittle as to be completely unworkable. And while most of the heat from a sudden burst of fire would go up the chimney, some of it might wash back out of the clay pipes where the men who worked the bellows piped in air. The last thing Soraya wanted was to burn someone, so she left the path, picking her way through the bushes that grew near the stream that provided the camp with water.

Everywhere around her the bushes, the grass, and even the spiny plants were shedding old leaves and putting on new growth. Some sprouted buds that would soon be in bloom. She had learned when she lived with the Suud last year that winter, the time of the rains, was the desert’s time of growth. It was in the summer, when
the sun struck down, that plants went dormant. Now everything hummed with returning life. Soraya couldn’t help but sense it, and she too rejoiced.

By the time she reached the mine, she had calmed down enough to greet the workers with genuine good cheer.

When Soraya finally convinced Maok that the peddler might be able to use his gift to create swords as good as those the Hrum used, and that he would teach the Suud smithcraft into the bargain, men who wanted to learn the secrets of making stone into iron had come from all the tribes in the desert. Soraya knew how valuable the ability to work metal would be to the Suud; that was one of the reasons she’d been willing to reveal the secret of their magic to the treacherous peddler. That and the knowledge that if he showed any sign of betraying their secret she could kill him.

But having watched him teaching his apprentices the craft he loved, she didn’t believe he would give them away. The peddler was the one person whose emotions she always allowed herself to sense—Ahriman, djinn of lies, could take “magical ethics” where he was concerned! Yet sensing his emotions was allowing her to know him. To know for a fact that he had been as surprised, and even more appalled than she was by the sight of the slaves chained to the siege towers. That was why she hadn’t killed him.

She still hated him—she could never give that up, nor did she want to—but she could endure him long enough to make full use of
him before she allowed Jiaan to avenge their father’s death.

It was because she refused to take orders from the traitor that she had gotten involved in mining the ore. The peddler was in charge at the forge whenever metal was being worked, and he kept a close eye on the smelter as well. But he paid no heed to how the ore was gathered, once he had taught the Suud to identify the iron-bearing rocks.

The men who had come to be trained as smiths all took their turns at digging, and other members of the tribe helped out too. Soraya recognized Abab and several of the others. It was hard, unpleasant work, swinging a pick in the confines of the narrow canyon where they had found the best vein of ore—though Soraya thought “vein” was a ridiculous word for the huge band of rock streaking across the canyon wall. Rock dust covered the Suud’s white skin, and small rocks bounced off the thick cloths they had wrapped around their heads to provide a bit of protection. But no one shirked the work. Even the tribe’s children were there, carrying baskets of ore off to the smelter, and the children’s presence made any task light.

In the beginning, Soraya had thought to supervise the digging, but there was little to supervise, and she found that there was nothing quite as boring as sitting and watching others work. She had tried swinging one of the miner’s picks, which the peddler had ordered shipped down to the desert along with the bellows, the anvil, and the load of “soft” iron bars he hoped would mix with the
Suud’s ore to produce something like the Hrum’s famous watersteel. She was strong enough to swing the pick—after a summer spent working as a servant in the Hrum’s camp, she should be—but she couldn’t swing it as long or as strongly as the men did.

Now she no longer bothered with a pick but went straight to the baskets, filling them with bits of shattered ore and passing them to the children, making sure none of them took too heavy a load. Proud Walking clan was excited to be the tribe that had brought the secrets of metal to their people, and the children were eager to be a part of it.

Dust sifted into her hair. The rock roughened her fingers and tired her arms and shoulders, but Soraya kept working until Abab put down his pick and approached her.

“We’ve going to rest awhile,” he said. “You can’t fight the rock all night—it might start winning!”

Soraya laughed, and he pulled her to her feet and led her out of the canyon with the others.

The night air was fresh and cool on her sweaty skin, and the moon glowed like a lamp. Clouds obscured the stars in a few places, but they were small. The winter rains mostly took place during the day, leaving the night skies clear, for which Soraya was grateful. The nocturnal Suud, with their wide-dilating pupils, could see perfectly well by starlight alone. But on moonless or cloudy nights, Soraya was restricted to the firelit camp—one
aspect of living with the Suud that she found most annoying.

On the other hand, she liked the fact that only a few men of the tribe were taller than she was, and then only by inches. Abab was tall for a Suud, and he stood eye to eye with her. Growing up Farsalan, she’d become accustomed to being a small woman. When she came to live with the Suud, it had taken some time for her to feel that their lack of height was normal. When she went back to Farsala, she accepted being short again. It was only when she returned to the Suud once more that she realized how nice it was not to have men looming over her.

Abab sat down on a rock, becoming even shorter, and offered her a skin bag filled with water.

“Kavi says they’re getting close with the swords. That the metal is good, and the metal-Speakers are making them feel more and more like watersteel. Our smiths have already made some good knives. They don’t look like much”—Abab grinned—“and the blades are a bit lumpy. But they hold an edge, and Kavi says the metal is sound.”