Evening the Second — The Smith Who Forgot His Own Name

Another night, the fire lower, the ale gone sour at the bottom of the cask — and still you crowd back to my corner of the Broken Tusk like crows to a gut-wagon. Good. Crom keeps no hall for songs, so a man's deeds rot where he drops them unless some one-eyed wretch carries them out for the price of a cup. You heard the Cimmerian's first hold told, the cross at his back, the grey in him that bends to no god. That was last night's bread. Pour, and I'll cut tonight's.

Hear now — there is a kind of cold worse than the wind off Cimmeria, and it is the cold a man wears who has forgotten he was ever free. You have seen it. The eyes gone flat. The mouth that says master before it knows it has spoken. Strabo Nagi knew that cold from the inside — he wore the rope before he ever cut one — and that, I think, is why his hands did not shake when he came down into the camps of the Dogs of the Desert.

Picture it. Heat coming off the stones like breath off a hound. And in a pit of his own soot squatted a Shemite, a blacksmith, broad as a door and hammered low, a chain through the meat of his ankle gone green where the iron sweated into him. The smell of him reached the Cimmerian first — old fear, char, and a sweetness underneath that is what a wound smells like when no one cleans it. The smith did not look up. Why would he? Men came to that pit only to take.

Strabo took the iron instead. Set the smith's chain across a stone, fitted the cold edge to the rivet, and struck once — a flat hard crack that ran up both their arms. The blacksmith felt his own leg go light. You there, with the empty cup — you do not know that feeling and pray you never need it: the weight of a thing you carried so long you called it your bone, gone in a heartbeat, so that you near fall over from the lack. Loark was his name. He stood. He swayed. He looked at his unbound foot like it belonged to a stranger, and then he looked at the grey-eyed man who had done it, and something behind his face that had been dead a long while turned over in its grave.

The Cimmerian did not say come. He does not beg, and he does not own. He turned and walked, and left the road open. The smith chose it. That is the whole of the matter, and the only part that counts.

Now — the small gods of that country sent their wardens, and I'll tell them as the hero first beheld them, for a man should know the shape of what comes at him. There went a rabbit through the scrub, only a rabbit, brown and quick, the kind of meat that keeps a hard man alive between greater killings — I name it only so you know the place was not all monsters. Then the green ones. Komodos, the desert-folk call the great lizards: a tongue like a black ribbon tasting the air for your blood, a hide of beaded stone, and a bite that does not kill you at the table but three days later in your sleep, rotting you from the wound out. The Cimmerian met one in the open. It did not run as the rabbit ran. It came low and sideways, all that cold meat moving at once, and he met it with iron and a Cimmerian's contempt for anything that thinks it has already won.

And the kappas — ah. There's a thing the southern wet breeds that I'd not believed till the smith swore to it over his cup. Squat man-shaped horrors the colour of a drowned bruise, one blue as deep water, one violet as a strangled throat, each with a hollow crown atop its skull that cradles a swallow of foul water — and the old word is that the water is its life, that spill the bowl and you spill the beast. Strabo learned that the way he learns everything: by doing it, and not flinching when the doing was ugly.

The moon was thinner the next night of his road, the eleventh, and the wheel turned strange — for who should he find next in irons but another Loark. A different man, mind, a Wanderer of the Exiles, a fighter, lean where the smith was broad. Crom has a grim humour, to hang the same name twice on a man's path. The Cimmerian struck this one's irons free as he had the first, and this Loark did not sway nor weep — he picked up a fallen blade before his wrists had stopped aching, tested its weight, and fell in at the hero's shoulder like he'd been waiting his whole captive life to be asked. Two beasts dogged that day, a komodo and a violet kappa, and they fed two graves and no more.

By the twelfth day the road had taught the Cimmerian a thing, and it is a thing worth your while to swallow with your drink: a freed man is good, but a freed man who can make is worth a war-band. So he went back into the camps of the Dogs and the lines of the Exiles, and he struck the rivets off a Shemite smelter — a man who knew the secret of coaxing bright metal out of dead red stone — and off another Wanderer fighter besides. No beasts that day. Only the work of it: the cold stone, the chain, the single hard blow, and the slow turning-over of dead faces back toward the light.

And while the irons fell, the smith Loark earned his road. Day on day his hammer rang — a making, then another, then more, until the camp had edges to its blades again and points to its spears, until a band of the unbound had the iron teeth to keep their freedom past the next dawn. There is no holy fire in that work. It is soot and sweat and a burned forearm. But hear me, you who think a saga is all severed heads: the man who arms the free does as much as the man who frees them, and Strabo Nagi had the wit to know it.

So that is where he stands tonight, in the telling — no longer the lone grey wolf of the first hold, but a man with a smith at his fire, two warriors named and unnamed at his back, and a smelter to turn the desert's bones to blades. He owns none of them. That is the part the slaver-kings will never understand, and the part that will, in the end, undo them.

The cask is dry and so is my throat. Come back when the fire is lower still, and I'll tell you of the first of the dread ones that came looking for him — for a band that grows is a band that gets noticed, and the desert had begun to notice. Pour, and good night.