Forging the Sword (The Farsala Trilogy) (7 page)

Kavi says.
He had charmed most of the tribe, just as he’d charmed so many Farsalan peasants into aiding Sorahb’s cause. And once the slaves he’d freed from the tower told their tale, his reputation—
Sorahb’s
reputation, she corrected herself sourly—would grow even greater.

She closed her eyes, letting the soft, changeable shilshadu of
water into her own shilshadu, soothing away her anger, sinking herself into the water’s mindless pleasure in even the small movements it made inside the bag. She took a moment to remind it of cool streams, of melting snow and the cold of the highest sky where it had formed.

The shilshadu of water was the easiest to affect, for water loved to change. When she handed the skin bag back to Abab it was cold.

He smiled his thanks absently, eyes fixed on her face. “Why don’t you like him?”

“Like who?” said Soraya.

Abab snorted. “I heard that he killed your father, but I’ve also heard that your father died in battle against the Hrum. Besides, your father was a great warrior. Kavi can’t even grip fire tongs in his right hand, much less a weapon. And he’s not left-handed, either. So I have trouble believing that he could have killed your father—in battle or any other way.”

A flash of rage surged through Soraya. “Believe what you like!”

She turned and stalked away. In the old days, she’d have thrown something at him, something hard, and he deserved it too! Who was he—

Water splashed on the back of her neck, startlingly cold against her hot skin.

She spun to glare at Abab, who stood with the water bag still raised, ready to defend himself.

“Just helping you cool that temper of yours,” he said innocently.

Anger fractured her control, but Abab was one of the people she found easy to read. Beneath his laughter, Soraya could feel his concern like an outstretched hand. She closed off her shilshadu sensing as soon as she noticed it. She agreed with Maok that it was rude to spy into people’s hearts without their knowledge. It was only for enemies that she made an exception. And Abab, though he exasperated her mightily sometimes, was far from an enemy. He was worried about her.

Soraya went back and sat down on the rock beside him. For the first time, she realized that he had led her away from the others; if she didn’t lose her temper and yell, they would have privacy.

“He didn’t kill my father with his own hand,” she said. “He did it with lies and treachery.”

“But what did he do?” Abab asked. “Exactly.”

Soraya’s heart flinched from talking about it. But perhaps it would be good for the Suud to know the details. To know who and what that charming traitor really was.

“My father hired him,” said Soraya, taking a deep breath. “Caught him, really. He had committed crimes in the city of Setesafon, selling gold-coated bracelets and other things as if they were solid gold. He tried to sell one to me and my cousin Pari, but my father caught him.”

Pari had been taken by the Hrum to be sold as a slave. Soraya
worried more about her than she did about her mother, for Sudaba was stronger and tougher than sweet-natured Pari could ever be. And she feared for Merdas more than either of them. He’d be three years old now. Just a toddler when she’d seen him last. After so many terrifying changes, would he even remember the big sister who had taken him on horseback rides and blown buzzing kisses into his baby-soft skin?

Abab’s hand settled over hers, his palm as rough and dirty as her own. “Your father caught him,” he prompted firmly. He might sympathize, but he wasn’t going to let her off. He and Elid and the others had probably decided that talking about it would be good for her. Soraya wondered if Abab had drawn the short straw—although the Suud settled that kind of thing by drawing different-colored pebbles. In any case, it was clear he wasn’t going to give up.

“My father could have turned him over to the city guard,” she said, “but he was foolish enough to give him a chance. I was going to stay in the croft, to hide from my father’s political enemies.” Abab nodded, for he knew about that. “Well, my father hired the peddler to visit the croft as a part of his rounds. To bring any supplies we needed and then to take my father news of me. How I was faring.”

She had to stop then, to swallow down the lump in her throat. Her father had loved her. It had been the central fact of her existence—the one thing in the universe nothing could ever change. But death changed everything, and the Hrum had brought plenty of death.

“He used his position to go into the Farsalan army camp,” she said. “He learned about my father’s battle plans, and gave them to the Hrum. So they were ready for the deghans’ charge. Just as the Farsalan horses reached their line, the Hrum brought up lances, hundreds of lances, long enough and well enough braced to kill a horse. I was told they killed half our men, and almost all the horses, in the first few minutes of the battle. After that they were on foot, and the Hrum are the finest infantry fighters alive. The deghans’ swords broke on the Hrum’s watersteel, and anyway, they were horsemen. Without their horses …”

She turned her face away. She could see it clearly in her imagination. She’d had nightmares about it.

“Was your father killed by the Hrum lances?” Abab asked. “I can see why you’d hate Kavi for that.”

“No,” Soraya admitted. “My father survived the charge, survived almost all the battle that followed. In the end—a soldier who saw it told me this—when it was clear the Farsalans had lost, my father drew a circle in the earth at his feet, challenging the Hrum commander to single combat. But Garren didn’t fight. He … he had his archers kill my father instead. The soldier said my father saw them coming, but he never flinched. He said it was quick.”

Tears fell now. Odd, for she hadn’t cried for her father in months. She pulled her hand from Abab’s to wipe her face. She would have revenge, as she had sworn to. Revenge against the
Hrum, and the traitor. That was better than weeping.

“So it was the Hrum who killed your father,” said Abab slowly, working it out. “But Kavi made it possible, showing them how to use these lances?”

“Not exactly,” Soraya admitted. “They already had the lances. The traitor just told them when and where to use them. And he told them where the Farsalan archers would be, and some other things.”

“So what Kavi did … he didn’t actually kill your father, but he made it easier for the Hrum to win the battle where they killed your father. He helped them.”

“Exactly,” said Soraya. “He gave aid to the enemy while he was pretending to work for us. That’s what treason is.”

Abab eyed her soberly. “I can see why you’re angry. But have you asked him why he did this?”

“I don’t care why,” said Soraya, meaning every word of it.

“But he’s helping you now, and betraying the Hrum. Doesn’t that …” He paused to search for words, but Soraya didn’t care how he phrased it.

“No,” she said, “it doesn’t. It only makes him a traitor twice over.”

She went back to work then, gathering up rocks from the canyon floor, and soon the others rejoined her. She could feel Abab’s gaze on her as she filled the baskets, but he said nothing more, working beside her in silence until they returned to camp for the final meal of the night.

•   •   •

S
ORAYA WATCHED THE
peddler as he wandered from one family’s cooking fire to another in the Suud way of eating a meal. He talked more than he ate, she noticed. The camp’s food had tasted strange to her once, but now it tasted right—even when the cook put too much belish in the stew, it was something she was … accustomed to. The lamplight glowing through the patterned silk that made up the sides of the hutches looked right, and the bouncing babble of the language sounded right to her ears. Watching the peddler’s struggles, she realized how much Proud Walking clan had come to feel like home. But she was a deghass. Her home was elsewhere. She remembered the burned-out shell of the manor where she’d grown up, and shivered.

When Merdas returned, when she had her brother back, she could make a home anywhere. That was worth anything, even tolerating the traitor, as long as he helped keep the Farsalan rebellion alive.

For according to the Hrum’s own law, if Garren didn’t complete his conquest of Farsala within a year, the Hrum army would leave, and all the people who had been captured and made slaves would be returned. It had seemed absurd to Soraya, when she first learned of this strange custom. Then she spent the summer working as a servant in the Hrum’s main army camp near Setesafon, trying to learn where in their vast empire her mother and brother had
been sent. She had come to know the Hrum, and above all else they were a people of law. If their law gave Garren a limit of one year to complete his conquest, then one year was all he had. Only four months left now that Mazad had to hold out.

A shadow fell across her, and she looked up into the peddler’s—the traitor’s face.

“We done one other sword,” he said in his clumsy Suud—no doubt to further charm the Suud apprentices who gathered behind him. “We will test sword, dinner is done. I want you to talk for me, if you want.”

“I’d be happy to translate for you,” said Soraya in her smoothest Suud, though when she’d only been here a month, she’d sounded much like he did now. “Though why you think another broken blade requires translation I don’t know. How many swords have failed so far?”

The peddler frowned, trying to work out what she’d said.

“Uvadu,” said one of the apprentices, grinning. “But we’re just beginners, you know. We’re getting better.”

“How much ‘uvadu’ mean?” the peddler asked.

Soraya had finally mastered the Suud’s expressions for various amounts—but it hadn’t been easy. “Between thirty-two and fifty,” she said. “It’s only used when you don’t have a precise count.”

“Uvadu mean between thirty-two and fifty?” the peddler asked incredulously.

“No, U
vay
du is between sixty and a hundred and fifty. U
vah
du is between thirty-two and fifty.”

“You’re kidding me,” said the peddler, dropping into Faran. And he must have said it before, for even the apprentices who didn’t speak Faran laughed.

“Just say ‘much’ and ‘big much,’” Soraya told him. “Why do you need a translator?”

She might be prepared to tolerate his presence to defeat the Hrum and get Merdas back, but she didn’t want to be around him tonight.

“This one sword …” The peddler groped for words again, then shrugged. “This one right.”

“Right?” Soraya raised her brows.

“It feels right,” he said, lapsing into Faran again. “The shilshadu of it. The trick of watersteel is something to do with the quenching, I think. When metal cools, I can feel …” His hands moved again, and Soraya nodded understanding. It was hard to find any words, Suud or Faran, to describe what you found inside the shilshadu of a thing. But she had seen him, standing behind his apprentices as they worked the steel with their hammer and tongs, his hands on their shoulders. Much as she despised him, it was impossible to ignore his skill at his craft. If he said he felt something, she had to believe that he felt it.

“It’s like something is moving, swimming in the metal as it
cools,” he went on. “In watersteel, I finally figured out, it’s swimming in lines, in formation along the edges of the blade, but in the middle it’s just … just milling around. I don’t know how to put it more clearly than that,” he added. “But I’m certain of it now. And Lupsh here can feel it too.” He clapped one of the grinning apprentices on the shoulder. “The sword he just made feels like everything is swimming in the right way, in the right places. Some of the other lads are honing an edge on it now. By the time dinner’s over, it will be ready to test.”

“I’ll be there,” Soraya told him coolly. “Though I still think that one more broken blade won’t need a translator.”

T
HE
S
UUD WERE BEGINNING
to yawn, and Soraya felt sleep creeping up on her, too. The graying sky in the east showed that soon the sun would rise, but after the meal was over she went with the rest of the tribe to the edge of the camp, where the peddler had sunk a post into the sandy soil. He had bought it from the miners, along with the rest of his equipment, and it stood almost as high as a Suud man—which left it a hand span shorter than his own curly head, and he wasn’t particularly tall. About seven inches thick at the base, the wood was rough and unpolished—rougher now, with the sword cuts in it. That ordinary post had broken every sword the Suud had made so far.

The peddler held up the new sword, and the dim light of the
soon-to-rise sun flowed over the blade. It didn’t look very promising. The hilt was a couple of pieces of carved wood bound with leather strips, and even Soraya could see that some parts of the blade were thicker than others. The apprentice smiths had only sharpened about a third of one side of the blade, leaving the rest dull.

It did display the rippling pattern that marked the Hrum’s watersteel, but Soraya had been watching swords that looked very like this one break again and again, so that no longer impressed her.

“
You
have made this sword,” said the peddler in Faran. Soraya translated swiftly. “Not just Lupsh who forged it, but all of you—from the men who dug the ore, to the women and children who gathered wood for the fires, and even those who were taking an extra share of work, hunting and cooking, so that the rest of us could work at the forge, the smelter, or the mine.”

He looked at their somber, sleepy faces and smiled. “You did this because you wanted to learn the secrets of making metal, which I have taught you as well as I could. And I taught you because I needed to learn the secrets of your shilshadu magic, and how to apply them to my craft. I think this is the sword that will prove how well we’ve learned.”

His smile widened and he held out the sword to Dai. Dai wasn’t a smith or a swordsman, for there were no swordsmen among the Suud. He wasn’t the strongest man in the tribe either, though he was no weakling. What he was was the only Suud who had proved
willing to strike the post with all his strength. For all the peddler’s coaching, the others swung the swords hesitantly, reluctant to break something it had taken so much labor to create. Dai tried to break it, striking as if he understood the price that would be paid by a soldier whose sword broke in the midst of combat.