This had been no problem with the little boat; its gunwales had been just the right height above the waterline.
He frowned, dismaying Frae. Why, whenever he tripped over this junkheap, did he think upon the ocean—and of rippling yellow prairies westward, where his father’s name had become known to all Helvetii? It was a region of forbidding, blood-soaked reputation.
Sedrich covered his consternation with a gruffness learned from Owaldsohn, his adolescent maladroitness adding insult to an injury he’d no idea he inflicted.
Over his shoulder he observed, “Mother says in Eldworld the Cult of Jesus, or something like unto it, was that powerful—all must belong, or else—and the Sisterhood small and powerless and hidden.”
“In olden days,” Frae agreed (she, too, echoing what Ilse had taught her), “there were a lot more people. The world was crowded.”
In absent concentration, she picked at a splinter in one of the weathered shed uprights, watching with big eyes as the boy went about his mysterious boylike business.
From the corner of his own eye Sedrich watched the only friend he owned of his approximate age. Had he thought to, he’d have admitted—with reluctance—in the end he’d likeliest find himself wedded to her. That she pleased his eyes—though such be true—no one might have extracted from him with red-hot pliers. He was curious—shy to the point of paralysis—about the way of men with women.
Frae might satisfy his curiosity, and more.
Yet he resisted such thoughts, not for his age alone, but because it was natural to resent being forced, by circumstance or other people.
In particular, by other people.
In general, he’d learned—was learning, there was still this silliness with the rowboat—to keep wary silence regarding his ambitions. That he shared a bit of them with Frae betrayed beginnings of a certain feeling toward her which, in truth, confused him. It, too, might prove a mistake—or lead to one.
Ah, well, even great grim Owaldsohn had embarrassing failures, did he not, as was the fate of all who aspired to new things? The gravest of the ropy scars which marked his massive torso came not from mortal encounters with the Red Men westward but from an ill-fated attempt to accustom an unwilling whitetail to dogcart harness.
Not looking up again, Sedrich said, “And there were all kinds of strange animals: horses—sort of like a big deer without horns, so big you could climb on—unicorns, cats...”
Frae wrinkled her brow. “Cats?”
“Sure. They killed rats we have ourselves to kill now. Something bad happened to them—I don’t know as I believe what books say of them, anyway. But oxen there were, and gryphons...”
All of these existed now, both children knew, only in Ilse’s many illustrated volumes and in talismanic carvings venerated by the superstitious. Sedrich wasn’t certain he believed any such had ever in truth existed.
On a block of granite which served as one of his father’s anvils he began making circular motions with the pumice he’d been using to sand the resin smooth. Before long, the softer stone was flat again. Not quite aware how closely his companion watched him, Sedrich went back to the jar, hoping this time he’d finish, the curved walls of the lightweight container would be uniform and smooth, before the pumice block, growing hollow in his hand, needed truing up again.
There wasn’t much left.
It was expensive.
Sedrich knew his curious aptitudes were frowned upon, not by the Cult alone, but by most Helvetii. His parents—each for a particular reason—had encouraged him since first he’d shown interest in tinkering. Owaldsohn himself was bothered in the middle of the night by more ideas than ever he would, in his lifetime, have opportunity to explore. Ilse felt, among a people dominated by legends of the long ago, it was time something new got written into her books and those of her Sisters—and, of course, there was the visible joy with which the doing of these things filled her son.
“But how,” asked Frae, thinking Sedrich something of a sorcerer himself, “can you catch lightning in that thing?”
Motherless, with her father being the sort he was, the little girl had been neglected in the matter of her education. Unconsciously she twisted her fingers in the front of her simple shift. It was an honest question, without a trace of whine, disbelief, or disapproval. If Sedrich said he could do a thing, he could do it. Frae simply wanted to know how such a thing was possible.
Meanwhile, if he, at age eleven, sometimes demonstrated an outward, boyish indifference, even unwitting cruelty, toward her, neither realized it consciously.
He inspected his handiwork. “I don’t know. Last winter did my blankets crackle with a faint blue light when shaken in a dark room. Yestermorning I awoke with an idea that I might make miniature lightning thuswise.”
He looked up, his dark eyes intent upon a sky he couldn’t see within the shed. “Perhaps the clouds are like blankets. They look woolly enough. And the greater lightning they make as they tumble can be trapped.”
He shook his head, returned attention to his work. “Anyway, I mean to try.”
Frae nodded meekly, golden curls bobbing. She remembered that people struck by lightning perish, at the least fall deaf or blind. Should aught ill befall her Sedrich—she pushed the thought away, and with it the incriminating possessive.
At the quenching bath the boy washed the last of the sanding dust off the big jar which Old Roger had given him. It had come off the mandrel a bit lopsided, with odd bumps and sticky patches where the trade-secret hardener hadn’t been mixed into the resin evenly. Sedrich would have been well pleased to have it, experiment or none.
There were always uses for such.
While the jar dried by the forge, he turned to a pile of soft-tanned doe leather upon another bench. Unfolding it, he peeled up a corner of the lead-tin alloy he’d beaten to paper thinness inside its folds—this trade secret being one of his father’s—with a rawhide hammer whose rounded face was near the size of his own.
“Anyhaps, when all those olden people died, the few left—those the Invader didn’t slaughter, I guess—discovered the New World. Don’t ask me how. In the year 1078, it was, o’er three hundred years ago.”
“And what,” asked Frae, “happened thirteen hundred ninety-five years ago? Why count we the years thus?”
“’Twas not the Goddess’ birthday, for She is timeless and forever young, the Sisters say. Nor e’en of the Brotherhood’s Lord Jesus, whom they reckon came into the world more than two millennia ago. Father avows ’tis the way that the Invader calculates the years, from some event significant to them and no one else—that having lost everything first to the Death and then to them, our people took their calendar and brought it with them here. Nobody knows for certain,” the boy concluded. “Not e’en my mother. Perhaps ’twas then the world began.”
Planting a loose confederation of settlements upon the eastern shoreline of the new continent, the survivors, Sedrich knew, of the Mortality, of the Invasion, and of the desperate journey across the great ocean, had come to owe much, for their initial survival and eventual prosperity, to the teachings of another people they’d found here, Iroquois and other nations of Red Men.
“Not those we Helvetii fight with now upon occasion,” he told the. little girl, “but others, with whom we trade, from whom we first obtained our plainest, most wholesome foods.”
When the pliant hide was spread upon the bench, he began with care to separate it from the foil he’d made. Enough was there to cover his jar twice over, just as he’d planned.
He began applying it to the inside of the container, molding and smoothing as he went.
There were, indeed, other Red Men. As the Helvetii trickled westward toward a legendary range of Great Blue Mountains no white man had seen and lived to tell of, they’d discovered—the discovery resulting in a series of violent small-scale wars—the presence of another culture.
“Native tribes,” Sedrich explained, mimicking Owaldsohn now. “Their mechanic arts are super
ior to our own—though none could stand long before my father’s war-dogs or his greatsword Murderer.”
Having covered the inside of the jar, Sedrich applied foil to the outside. He’d turned a wooden stopple for it on his father’s lathe. Into this he now inserted a short, thick bit of wire to which he’d fastened a length of copper chain.
“Father’s told me there are rough, peculiar tracks across those plains, well worn. Frae, I am most curious about those, for, by description, they were beaten out neither by human feet nor by dogcarts.”
He assumed a crafty expression. “And I think I know what made them.”
He set the foil-covered container on the bench nearest the same lathe upon which he’d fashioned its cover. In its jaws he’d clamped a stranger contraption, a pair wooden dowels glued into a cross. At the ends of its arms were rods of the same resinous material the jar was fashioned from. These were hidden by a yard of wool he’d stitched into a broad, circular band, now hanging from the rafters.
Copper wire ran from the rods, down the wooden arms to the center, along the central shaft toward the chuck. A stiff length of copper lay on the shaft where it came into occasional contact with the revolving wire.
Its other end he fastened to the jar-chain.
“This won’t work quite as well as in the wintertime,” he observed, putting his foot on the treadle. “The air seems to need to be dry. Perhaps it won’t work at all in the daytime.”
The lathe began to spin, rubbing the resin rods round in their belt of homespun wool. To Sedrich’s satisfaction, he heard the fabric crackle. At least he was making miniature lightning—and in a more efficient manner than by shaking blankets. He hoped he was capturing it in his jar. It ought to work, he thought, with two layers of foil to ensure it couldn’t leak out.
Resting his hand upon the great iron anvil of the smithy, Sedrich reached across the complicated apparatus, making sure of its connection to the jar. A fat blue spark flashed from the container to his outstretched fingers. With a scream of convulsed muscles, he was tossed across the shed like a toy, slamming against the splintered wall where he slid to the dirt floor.
“Sedrich!” Frae shouted, running to him. She seized his hand, laying her cheek upon it. “Are you still alive?” she asked in a small voice, tears streaming down her face.
Sedrich grunted.
He fluttered his eyelids.
He looked up at her.
He shook his head.
“Methinks”—he grinned—”I’ve discovered a new means of transportation.”
As a timid smile began to creep into her expression of concern, a shadow fell across the front of the shed.
“’Twould be thought you were more capable of learning, young Sedrich.” Hethri Parcifal’s voice was deep and apologetic. “Not a week has passed since Oln Woeck led his followers through our village on your account. Your family’s troubles with the Cult continue e’en now!”
Confusion wrote itself upon young Sedrich’s countenance. He knew his mother was away this afternoon—as was usual. Had there been another incident of some kind with Oln Woeck?
Parcifal passed a weary hand over his eyes. “I see you don’t know what I speak of. Ilse takes the Sisterhood’s part in conflict ’tween her maternal, nurturative vocation and the paternalistic Cult, concerning a colony of rats discovered upon the latter’s unsanitary compound.”
He shook his head. “’Twould be no dispute, were her authority not compromised by the mischief you think of to be doing.”
Sedrich levered himself to his feet. Involuntarily his eyes went to the deep-shadowed back of the shed where, beneath a tarp, he’d hidden the mortar and pestle in which he’d ground a mixture of charcoal, sulfur, and nitre. There’d been no time, yet, to carry that experimentation further.
“But I was only—”
Parcifal sighed. “It has come to me—believe me, son, I didn’t look for it—to be a go-between in life, disputes to resolve among my fellows and to keep the peace. ’Tis a path of moderation.”
Bending, he took Frae’s elbows, gently lifting the child to her feet.
“I’ve imperiled my reputation—not to mention my neck, boy—interfering with the Brotherhood on your account and on your father’s. Ne’er mind. Like him, ’tis a mad bare-chester you are, boy, a seer of the blood-haze. In the Brotherhood you’ve earned an enmity which must culminate in disaster, for yourself, your family, for anyone else unfortunate enough to be present when it arrives.
“Come, daughter, we’ll leave this young demon—and his corrupting influence—to himself for the time being.”
He turned, almost tripping over the pile of dogcart parts. Regaining his balance, to Sedrich he said, “And your dreams, boy—yes, I heard you speaking of them ere now—your dreams would accomplish naught save disturb an unspoken truce ’tween our people and the Red tribesmen west. A truce won in your father’s time, at a price beyond your powers of imagining.”
They left the shed.
As the boy watched their backs diminishing in the twilight, one young and upright, the other bent beyond its years, his eye lighted upon his mother. Ilse Sedrichsfrau stood apart, thin hands folded across the top of her staff, an expression of pain upon her face as she contemplated what had transpired between the man Hethri and her son.
For the first time in Sedrich’s memory, she, too, looked old.
V: Murderer
“Marry the spouseless among you, and your slaves and handmaidens that are righteous....”—The Koran, Sura XXIV
In time, as Sedrich somehow knew it would, Hethri Parcifal’s frightened anger passed away. He wasn’t the sort long to keep a grudge—nor, the boy conceded to himself, much of any other feeling. Such wasn’t the manner of “moderation.” This quality in him made a decent neighbor.
Perhaps it would make an amiable father-in-law.
Following that one terrible night, there was, for a time, peace. The Brotherhood soon discovered others to call upon. In one respect, at least, Oln Woeck was wrong: fisherfolk, not from their village alone, but from many neighboring settlements along the coast, found use for Sedrich’s “dangerous” innovation.
Seldom needing to be shown something twice, the boy forged another boat-crank, without Owaldsohn’s help. Then another. And another. Small thanks to Parcifal, in whose friendship Sedrich in any case came to feel his father’s confidence misplaced, an exception was made where interests of the belly outweighed Helvetian conservatism.
In time, great Owaldsohn’s help became necessary. Soon after, it was indispensable. By the following season, the smithy was producing more of Sedrich’s simple marine equipment than the remainder of their custom accounted together. Before another twelvemonth was out, father and son were required to find a carpenter to fashion wooden paddle wheels. They’d no time for it themselves.
Three more summers passed in this prosperous, happy wise.
2
“Now the left hand!”
One ankle crossing the other, Owaldsohn lounged against the shed, bearlike arms folded, a malicious grin buried in his white-shot beard. The sun glowed orange atop the razor-edge of the horizon. Klem, beginning to grow old himself, dozed in the afternoon warmth. Willi watched Sedrich’s labors with interest.
Sedrich groaned, sweat-drenched, trembling, but obedient to his father’s command. His weak wrist ached, bruised in the marrow with what already he’d demanded of it this morning. By turns, he wiped wet palms upon the clout which was all he wore. Shifting the great weapon for another two-handed assault upon a creosoted post planted in the smithy yard, the youth, grown man-tall with time’s passage, changed his stance.
Whirling Murderer high above his head, he suddenly lengthened his reach with a roar which was half agony, half fury, letting the gleaming steel lash out.
No wood-chips flew. Though the edge bit deep, the heavy tarring upon the post preserved its life somewhat. Whittled remains of a dozen predecessors did dot the yard, making hazardous navigation of a moonless nigh
ttime. They’d have to be dug out ere long.
Levering the great blade free, Sedrich watched the blackened timber “heal” itself for another attack. Cleaning creosote off his father’s sword had become almost as arduous as the effort which put it there. In sun, snow, and rain, summer heat and winter cold, he’d repeated these painful motions a hundred times each dawning the last two years. Given another five, his wrists would come to resemble bundled iron staves, his forearms outsizing the calves of many another man.
Another whirl, another scream of unleashed power, another bite into the unyielding butt Sedrich had come to view as a personal enemy. Shock sang up the blade into his tortured wrists.
Yet, with each swing of the legendary Murderer, he’d come to appreciate his father’s genius more. Seven winters in the forging, beginning when the apprentice smith had been little older than his fifteen-year-old son, the sword was enormous, for grim Owaldsohn was a big man, bigger than Sedrich would ever be. The naked blade spanned a handwidth, its guard three times as wide. When Murderer was rested upon its point (which neither Sedrich would think to do in practice), the fist-sized pommel stood even with the younger blacksmith’s chin. When the sword was slung across his back, handle high above his head, with the broad guard at his right shoulder, the scabbard-tip slapped the back of his knee.
The grip—fashioned not from leather windings, as was customary with the Helvetii, but of iron disks separated by mandrel-wound glass washers—constituted a third of the entire greatsword, allowing leverage necessary to swing the thing. The broad iron cross-guard tips pointed straight forward, splayed to trap an opponent’s weapon. And trap it was, a broad path leading along the flat, polished edges of the unground “forte” onto a wedge of case-hardened steel inset upon the guard-face. This would notch another blade. With a hearty twist of the wielder’s wrist, the dinted blade would snap like dried sea-oat.
The Crystal Empire Page 5