by Guy Antibes
Bellia stripped behind a blanket hung in a corner and put on her uniform. She had to laugh when she discovered that everything fit better than her old clothes, even the boots.
“You do a good job Urt,” Bellia said as she reluctantly put her old clothes on the counter.
“You want to keep those?” Urt eyed her dirty clothes.
“Why? What would you do with the old clothes?”
“Dunno. Any cast offs go to the King. Rumor has it he has ‘em cleaned and given away to those that need more than what they’ve got,” Urt said.
“The King seems to know what he’s doing,” Bellia said.
“That he does,” Urt said as she opened the flap.
“Wait,” Astun said with a large bundle under his arm. “I think you deserve a tent on your own, since you’re the only female among the blacksmiths, there’ll be less complications if you sleep alone. I’ll help you set it up and then be on my way. We have a couple more stops, though.”
Now that she had a uniform on, Bellia felt more like one of the soldiers. She hadn’t noticed all of the different uniforms before. Everyone in camp were dressed in uniforms except for the odd lost ones who looked for their new squads, just as Bellia had just moments before.
The light was dwindling, yet oil lamps threw light on all the lane corners and the courtyard fires lit the rest of the camp.
The next dwelling wasn’t a tent but an actual building made out of wooden planks covered with tarps. Astun opened the door. Two small windows with counters on the sills were the only openings on another wall.
Astun rapped on the window.
“New recruit here to deposit her goods.”
“I’ve got more than a change of clothes in there,” Bellia whispered to Astun.
“No matter. You can’t get anything back until you leave the King’s service. Whatever money you want to keep, get it out now.”
Bellia dug deep into her satchel to remove her purse. She pulled out forty guilders and a few of silver pieces of her father’s coins and thrust them into her pocket.
“All right to have a purse?”
“As long as you realize whatever you’ve got outside of this building is as good as gone.” Astun said. “Actually it’s not that bad, but theft happens often enough. No one prosecutes theft in the army, except for personal weapons.”
Bellia went back up to the counter and handed her bag over.
“Sign here and have your friend verify your signature.”
Bellia signed her name. “What squad?”
“I’ll take care of that.” Astun put in the squad/division/regiment and then signed his name.
Bellia looked at Astun’s signature. She could read it, but the style of writing looked familiar. When they stepped outside, Bellia pulled out one of her silver pieces.
“Do you recognize this writing?”
“Ah! A Griannan shilling. I haven’t seen one of those for a long time. Where did you get this? It’s worth about twenty-five guilders.”
“It was my father’s. What do the words say?”
“King Nellian’s Reign – May he live long and may Grianna prosper. Typical for these kinds of coins.”
“How old is it?”
Astun pursed his lips in thought. “Twenty five years, maybe. King Nellian died four or five years ago. The youngest son, Cressian is King now. I think he killed his way to the throne. There were four brothers. Two were killed in Grianna and the other, a wizard, was killed in a far off land. Something like that. He’s the only one left. I heard he’s taken care of the rest of the royal family, as well.” Astun shrugged his shoulders.
Bellia struggled to maintain her composure. “How do you know this?” Bellia looked at Astun in disbelief.
“My mother lives in Togolath. It’s the biggest city in Eustia, but there’s lots of shipping. I hear from her every six months or so. Big thick boring letters.” Astun laughed.
“But you ended up here?” Bellia had to change the subject.
“Oh that. I stowed away on a ship after my father, who was a rug merchant, died in a duel about the time King Nellian was killed. I hate Togolath. A guy like me isn’t treated very nicely. I wandered around Testia for a few years and ended up in King Rollack’s army. The quartermasters like people who can read and write, so here I am. What about you?”
Bellia didn’t quite know what to say. “My parents died. I became an apprentice to a blacksmith. His daughter wanted a much deeper friendship than I was willing to give and I had to leave, so here I am.”
Giving Astun a short description of her life in the past three years didn’t hurt as much as it once would. He guided her into the last tent.
“What kind of weapon?” Astun said.
“I’ve practiced swordplay with my brothers. I like the feel of a saber, but I don’t think I’ll be fighting from horseback.”
“Sword or pike or short spear?”
“Sword. I’ve made enough of them.”
“Pick one of those on the rack over there.”
Bellia went to the rack. Close to one end was a sword she made with Pock. The round brass guard was bent. The scabbard was in tatters and the belt was missing a buckle. The wrappings on the hilt needed replacing. Bellia found the edge wasn’t in very good shape, but she could fix that. She looked for Pock’s mark, and there it was. It carried her mark, as well. She selected the sword she had made.
“I’ll take this.”
“Hmmm.” The man at the counter looked at the sword and its mark. “A circle square. You’ve a good eye. This one shouldn’t have been over there, but since you’ve got it…” He threw a small wooden shield on the counter and a round helmet.
“Mess pot with a small knife and a spoon,” reminded Astun.
A small dented metal bucket with clanging inside was added to Bellia’s collection. She dropped the mess pot. Astun leaned over to pick it up. Bellia noticed a red tattoo in the shape of four tiny interlocking circles on the inside Astun’s wrist.
“What kind of tattoo is that?”
Astun colored, an easy thing for the redhead to do. “When I was a kid I joined a gang. All the kids do in Togolath. It’s a matter of self-preservation. All that’s behind me now.”
On the way back to the courtyard, Bellia drew laughs. She clanked as she walked. The sword was tied at her side with a cord. Astun carried her new tent, but the mess kit clanked as much as everything else. The helmet was a few sizes too large.
“Don’t worry. They don’t recognize you. It’s me who’ll get all the ribbing. No one fails to recognize Astun.”
Bellia was glad she quickly found a friend in the army. That night after an awful meal, she thought about King Nellian, King Cressian, her father, the wizard Norlian. The family names all ended in –ian. Her father must have been the wizard brother. She never knew. King Cressian had ordered her father killed. Her long term goal had just crystallized. She would confront King Cressian in Grianna.
A wizard led a group of killers to assassinate her family just as King Cressian came to power. The coins. The wealth her father had to have to built the House and transport it to the desert. Now that she was older, she realized how privileged she lived. The furnishings in the House were spare, but every piece was crafted by masters. Her grandfather had been the king and her father a prince. That made more sense than any guessing she had done in the last three years. She laughed at the thought of being a princess and then turned over and dreamed of pounding steel into Griannan crowns.
~
“You worked with the man who made the circle square swords, eh?” Laxall didn’t believe the Sergeant Major. “Tell me how you did it.”
Bellia didn’t like the tone of Laxall’s voice. Was Pock’s sword making technique a secret? She didn’t remember Pock committing her to secrecy. “Folds. You fold the steel lots of times. The layers gives the blade strength and makes it supple.”
“Show me.”
“I’m not going to make swords unless Sergeant Noller tells
me to. My old master relied on making swords for his livelihood.” Bellia put her hand to her chin and thought. She didn’t want to make an enemy of Laxall. “Then I’ll show you.”
Laxall gave Bellia a crooked smile and collared Sergeant Noller.
“Go ahead. I think we can keep up on the repairs enough and give you time to show Laxall,” Noller said. Bellia didn’t like the look in the sergeant’s eyes.
Bellia went to a barrel of spent coal waiting to be hauled away and began grinding it down.
“What’s that?”
“Something we put between the layers. The coal powder helps bind the layers, I guess. It’s what we did on the swords.” He went back to work. Bellia looked at Laxall’s back. The man gave off a slimy feeling of laziness.
Bellia had to commandeer a ceramic bowl and a pestle from the healer’s tent to pound the dust into a fine powder. She found a crucible and melted down a broken sword. It wasn’t a Pock sword, but the steel was very good. Perhaps it had been an officer’s blade.
Laxall laid out a billet mold for Bellia. The molten metal filled the mold.
“I’ll work this a bit first.” Bellia removed the cooled billet from the mold and thrust it in the coals. She started to flatten the billet and began the same process of coating the steel, throwing a fine layer of coal dust on the blade and folding the metal over. “Laxall, come see this technique, it’s the same way we did the swords.”
Laxall walked over from his work and observed Bellia’s work.
“Is that all, you just keep folding it?”
Bellia nodded. “We’d make enough layers to end up with about a thousand folds.”
“Lot of work for a sword. It looks like to me you’re not using enough coal dust.” Laxall grunted and then went back to his bench. That was the last time the man took time to inspect Bellia’s work.
The knife reached over a thousand folds itself when Bellia started shaping the blade. She thought about the saber and made it a single sided blade with a slight curve in the blade’s shape. She thought about the saber and how the thickness made the blade too heavy.
“Why are your making it skinny like that? It looks like a really long meal knife.”
“I’ve shown you the process, so I’m going to experiment.” Bellia worked into the night, skipping her dinner to finish the sword. She had steel left over and decided to make a long, thin knife to match. When she was done, the long knife had a slight curve along its length. The blade thickness was mostly uniform as it stretched out about a foot and a half long. Bellia ran her finger along the length. The blade would end up about an inch and a half at the widest point and only had one sharp side, like the cavalry saber. She took a square metal tube and a wavy metal fastener. She punched a square, similar to Pock’s and punched a wavy line underneath. The House, she thought, over the sea of sand.
The flex was less than she it would have thought, but there was still a supple feeling. The tang was extra long, so she folded it to keep the weighting. The knife would be balanced right where the tang started and that made for a longer than normal hilt.
The next day, she showed her knife to the Sergeant Major. “This could be used with a sword or on its own,” Bellia said.
Sergeant Noller frowned. “A good sword will ding this pretty bad. Too light for military work. But you did show Laxall how the swords are made?”
Bellia nodded. “I did.” She could see the sergeant thinking about something in his mind as he looked at the blade. The long knife would hold up better than Noller thought.
“Can I finish it?”
“If you don’t take too long. Get some other work done while you do it.” The sergeant made to leave. Bellia didn’t like his lingering look at the blade.
It took Bellia longer to make the scabbard than it did the knife. She used thick tent thread to wrap the handle made from a broken tent pole. An oval of brass made up the guard and a brass plug sat at the end. Both were taken from another old broken sword.
The steel took on a shine of its own. Shimmering patterns reflected off the shiny surface of the blade when she pulled it out of the leather-covered wood of the scabbard. Bellia even made a blade guide out of brass at the top of the scabbard. A ring for her belt completed her knife.
Bellia thought it odd that Laxall never tried to make a sword on this own. She looked at the shiny blade. It took a lot of fine sand, sand cloth and finally rouge to make the blade shine like a mirror. The blade showed off the layers. She had carefully hammered the edge to make a more hollow blade and ground it down with a round stone. A thin runnel that ran the length of the blade at the top made it look more like a cavalry sword. Bellia kept the blade wrapped up with her sword in rags underneath her cot. Even Pock would be impressed with her work.
~
Days stretched to weeks as Bellia’s workload increased. More soldiers meant more practice and more weapons to repair, so Bellia began to work on more than swords.
Menna, the woman soldier who brought the saber to Pock’s smithy, showed up one day.
“They’re splitting the army. This is the First Army; the new camp will be the Second. The rumors are once they’re both filled, we begin King Rollack’s war.”
“I’ve heard of this.” Indeed Bellia wondered which army she’d be joining. She thought the Second would be the weakest fighting force.
“Yeah, well if you don’t want to be sitting behind a forge while the rest of us are fighting, I can talk the sergeant to keep a spot open in our squad. They’ll be splitting up the teams so the trained soldiers are evenly spread around.”
Bellia nodded. “I think I like my smithing duties. But if things change, I’ll let you know.”
~
The next day, Bellia came in for the midday meal. Astun threw a letter at her.
She had to ask herself who would write her a letter? She opened the sealed paper to view very rough handwriting. Her heart sunk as she read:
Dear Bellia,
The army has cancelled the saber contract and won’t be replacing it with swords. It seems they have other vendors who can make blades as well as we did.
I can’t understand it. That folding technique has been a secret my great-grandfather brought with him from Dorlere nearly a hundred years ago. I don’t know how others found out or how they figured a way to make swords any better.
I thought I’d write and tell you; I’ll be dipping into the investment fund for a bit until my business picks up again.
Your friend, Pock
Bellia knew how they found out. She put her hand to her eyes as she could feel them well up. It was a secret and she violated Pock’s trust. Her face became hot. She had betrayed a wonderful man, who didn’t deserve it. Pock always had trouble with women and Bellia had never thought she would be one of them. She felt utterly ashamed.
“Got a problem?” Astun said.
“Yeah.” Bellia cleared her throat and wiped a tear from her face. “Swallowed down the wrong way. I’ve got to find Laxall.” Bellia started combing the camp for her forge partner.
She found the man tying up his pants coming from the jakes.
“Who did you tell about the sword-making? I gave away Pock’s secret without knowing it.”
“Too bad, kid. If you must know the Sergeant Major put me up to it. He wrote down everything I told him you did.”
Bellia’s face burned. Her fist crushed Pock’s letter. “You helped me ruin my old master.”
“Tough life, eh?” Laxall spat at Bellia’s feet. “Women,” he said with disgust as he just walked away. “I don’t like you messing about in my business. Blacksmithing is men’s work.”
~~~
Chapter Four
Foot Soldier
~
“I see you haven’t left yet for the Second,” Bellia said as she spied Menna sitting on a campstool in a courtyard.
Menna brightened up. “Bellia, my friend. As a matter of fact I’m sticking in the First. My offer’s still good.”
“How
do I go about transferring?”
“See your Sergeant and ask. King’s orders state that fighting soldiers take precedence over support troops, however your pay’ll be cut. Can you handle that?”
Bellia laughed. “I haven’t spent any of my pay yet. I have no desire to walk a league to Northwood, to turn around and walk back, drunk with my fellow blacksmiths.”
“Well, truth be told, I’ve been few enough times myself. Anyway, this is our unit.” Menna pulled a flat board from the firewood pile and grabbed a piece of charcoal and scrawled her unit’s name and number. Menna might not be very literate. “Blue Scorpions for now. Don’t know what we’ll be when we get our squad filled up. I’ll save a spot, but be quick about it.”
~
“I’m going to transfer to the infantry.” Bellia looked at Astun.
“Too bad. I can’t talk you out of it?”
“No. I can’t work with the Sergeant after he tricked me out of Pock’s secret, not to mention Laxall. Now, he won’t even talk to me, which suits me just fine.” Bellia pounded a fist into her open hand. “Infantry. I’m tired of putting new points on pikes. I’ll take my long knife and sword though.”
“What did the Sergeant Major say about your leaving?”
Bellia smiled and then looked up into the sky and blinked her eyes a few times to keep her eyes from welling up. “He said he had gotten enough out of me. Brushed me off. I thought he was an honest man.”
“Seems the only honest men are those you know really well for a long time, and even then you’re not so sure. My dad was an honest man, until a little greed bit him. He wasn’t the injured party in his duel. But that won’t bring him back.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“So was I. In Togolath, it doesn’t make a lot of difference. Father didn’t do anything illegal. Not much is in that city. But he damaged a man’s reputation and ended up dead. It about destroyed me.” Astun took a deep breath and shook his head as if to shake out the memories. “And here I am.”
“I guess we all have our personal stories.” Bellia didn’t know what else to say. But knew her story was at least the equivalent of his, but now was not the time to tell it. “You staying here or going over to the Second Army?”