The Singing Sword cc-2

by Jack Whyte

  She stared at him for long moments and then reached out and took his hand. "Thank you, Father Cay," she said. "I like that. I will think carefully about it and try to find something that will please all of us."

  She named the baby Merlyn, after the blackbird whose magical songs filled the long spring and summer days throughout the length and breadth of Britain. Caius Merlyn Britannicus.

  XXX

  The news of my own grandson's birth arrived from Ullic's people a short time later. No Roman nonsense there; the child, a boy, had been named Uther, Uther Pendragon. Mother and child were both well and would come to visit us in the spring, as soon as the snow, heavy in the hills this year, had melted.

  I was content with the news of the children, but I was far from happy with the results of my attempts to pour a hilt for the new sword. Nine times I had tried it by the beginning of spring thaw, and nine times the result had been failure. Andros and I were convinced the technique must work eventually, once we had mastered the knack of pouring the metal in the correct volume, at the right speed and at the proper temperature, but our early efforts had been ludicrous, and I had often thanked God and my stars that the metal of the sword was as hard as it was, because I had been constrained to melt nine messes of bronze and gold from the adamantine tangs, cleaning them completely after each failed attempt. It was starting to prove expensive, too, for we were never able to reclaim all of the gold from the abortive attempts, and each time we tried again I had to melt a few more coins of Grandfather's hoard.

  Perhaps it was because I had so much on my mind at that time that the significance of what Luceiia was saying escaped me when she told me that the two children, Uther and Merlyn, had been born at the same time, the fourth hour of the morning of the second day of January. Later, when I thought about it, I laughed to myself at the old wives' mutterings that would give the baby boys power over each other's lives in the years to come because of the coincidence of their birth. As I have said before, I never was a superstitious man, and although I was prepared to grant the strangeness of the timing, I well knew the cause of it. Had they been born together, under the same roof, I might have given the matter some more thought, but that is useless conjecture; they were born sixty miles apart, and they were as different as day and night from the time of their birth. Caius Merlyn Britannicus and Uther Pendragon would live their separate destinies. The cousins would grow up knowing each other well, but as individuals, with but little influence each on the other. I put the matter out of my mind and concentrated upon my own immediate problems.

  And so it was that dawn of the Ides of March that year found me sitting alone in the smithy, waiting for my tenth mould to be cool enough to crack open, and looking admiringly at the silver blade of the sword that projected from the great cubic mass of the mould like a tongue of liquid light. I remember wondering then if I would ever be able to hold it properly in my hand as a finished sword. I touched the mould tentatively. It was still too hot. I hissed with frustration and impatience and made my way across to the villa in search of something to break my night's fast. I had not slept at all that night, but I had little awareness of that at the time. I was too tightly wound, like an overstressed spring, to think about sleep.

  I heard my great-nephew Merlyn howling as I entered the villa. His mother had made her permanent home there since his birth, living in one small section of the house and refusing to have servants wait upon her. She was a Celt, never comfortable with having other people do the work she considered to be hers by right. As she put it, she could not enjoy having other people live for her. Because she was so obviously sincere in this, we humoured her, leaving her alone to look after her section of the big house, and the servants came down from the hill on two days each week to maintain the rest of the building. We made sure, however, that someone from the household stayed with her each night. Caius and I had both been there the previous night, so I had felt no guilt about spending the entire night in the smithy.

  I followed the sound of infant wails to the kitchen, where I found Enid heating food in a pan over the fire. I greeted her and picked up the boy, soothing him into silence.

  "Is he hungry, Enid? Is that why he's crying?" "No, he is a pig," she smiled. "That's why he's crying." The baby was quiet now, staring up at me with great, brown eyes. She came and pinched his fat cheek gently. "A greedy little pig, aren't you? He's sucked me dry this morning, so he'll have to wait. Even a cow runs dry, you know!" This last was to her son, who ignored her. "What are you heating there? Is there enough for me?" She nodded, stirring the contents of the pan. "There's enough for all of us, but Father Cay hasn't stirred yet." She paused for a heartbeat and then asked, "How old is Caius, Publius?"

  "Cay? Let's see..." I had to think about it for a few moments. "Well, he's about five years older than me, I think, so that would make him sixty-two or sixty-three, something like that. Might even be a little older. Why do you ask?"

  She frowned slightly. "I don't know. He seems to me to be ageing quickly, that's all."

  "Ageing quickly? You think so?" I was surprised. "I haven't noticed anything. Not recently, I mean. There was a time, back a few years ago, when I really worried about him, but he came through that, and he's been in excellent fettle ever since ... At least, I haven't noticed anything to indicate otherwise. You evidently have. What is it?"

  She shook her head. "I don't know, Publius. It's nothing obvious, but it is there. He seems to tire quickly nowadays and he sleeps more than he used to."

  I laughed at that, tossing the baby gently into the air and catching him before he really lifted out of my hands. "That's because this fellow here has made him a grandfather. I mean, Cay is over sixty, Enid. Most men never see that age. The few who do tend to slow down afterward, particularly if they are spending most of their time playing with babies."

  "Hmmm, I suppose they do." She tilted her head to one side in a gesture I had become familiar with and accepted my opinion. "I am probably imagining things. Put tomorrow's emperor down and come and eat. I'm famished even if you are not."

  Caius joined us as we were finishing our meal, and he and I chatted together for a few minutes as Enid moved around preparing food for him, and then I left again to resume my vigil at the smithy. As I was leaving the house, I met Plautus coming in to visit and so I stopped to talk with him, too. It was one of those brilliant early mornings that presage a glorious spring day. He asked me where I was going and I told him that I was about to crack the mould for the tenth time. As soon as he heard that, he wanted to come with me and watch the operation.

  "Are you quite sure about that, Plautus?" My question was only half in jest. "I am not the most pleasant or courteous person when my moulds do not turn out correctly."

  "What's new? You've been an unpleasant whoreson ever since I first met you."

  I grinned. "Well, don't say I didn't warn you. Andros should be here any time now, so we may have to wait a few minutes for him. He has worked as hard as I have on this thing."

  Half an hour later Andros had still not appeared and I decided not to wait for him. Plautus had been rooting among the shelves at the back of the smithy and I called him over. He came towards me clutching something in his hand.

  "What's this?" he asked me.

  I looked at the hardened roll of material he was holding and smiled. "You'll never guess what it is, Plautus, but it's the same as this." I picked up a square piece of supple, silvery material with the softness of fine leather and the paradoxical texture of fine sand and held it out to him. He took it from me, rubbed it between finger and thumb and then looked disbelievingly from it to the hard roll of stuff in his other hand.

  "What is it?"

  "It's shark skin. Belly skin."

  He blinked at me, confusion in his eyes. "From a shark's belly, you mean? The big fish? What's it for?"

  I grinned at him. "It holds the shark together, idiot!" I pointed at the sword sticking from the mould. "And it's for that. It will wrap the hilt of my new sword,
so it will never slip in anyone's grasp."

  "Hmmm!" That was his only comment. "I wonder what happened to Andros?"

  I stood up. "I don't know, but I'm not waiting any longer. Come on, you'll have to help me. I'll tell you what to do."

  It took another half hour before all the tight-twisted binding wires around the mould had been loosened, and I stood shaking with anticipation, my hands on opposed top corners of the mould, ready to crack it open. Plautus held two bottom corners.

  "Well," I sighed, tensely, "we'll never know if we don't look, Plautus, so here we go!" I twisted and jerked upwards, and the mould came apart with a soft crack. Slowly, hardly daring to hope any more, I looked down in silence.

  "Well?" Plautus's voice was filled with anxiety. I relaxed slightly.

  "It seems to be fine on this side. I hope the other one is as good." I levered upwards on the blade and peeled the hilt audibly from its bed, turning it over as I did so. It was flawless. I slumped back onto my stool, overwhelmed with relief, my long-held breath whistling out forcibly.

  "What's the matter?" Plautus was almost sick with worry. "What's wrong with it?"

  I raised my hand to soothe him and spoke quietly. "Nothing is wrong with it. It looks exactly right."

  Plautus let go his breath in a long rush and slumped down, too, onto a bench. "Thank God! I thought for a moment there you'd fouled it up again!"

  We sat in silence for a time, staring at the hilt. It was dusty, covered with a waxy film, and tiny knobs of metal projected from it in a number of places where the molten metal had filled the air holes in the mould. These I would file off in a few minutes, once I had recaptured my breath completely. I was beginning to feel a mighty exaltation. The gold cockle-shell of the pommel was perfect, as was the junction where the second pour, the gold, had knitted to the bronze of the first pour.

  "Now what, Publius?"

  I smiled at him again, feeling weary and yet triumphant. "Now I clean it, polish it and add the shark-skin grip."

  "How long will that take?"

  I shrugged. "An hour, perhaps less, to clean it and polish it. A day to add the grip, I would guess."

  "May I hold it?"

  I shook my head. "No, not yet. It's not ready yet. Give me an hour to clean it, then you can hold it."

  "May I watch while you clean it?"

  I laughed at his little-boy eagerness, but I was pleased. "You can watch." I reached for a small file on the bench.

  Less than an hour later the job was done and the effect was breath-taking. The golden cockle-shell pommel was superb, every line cleanly etched, and the Celtic scrollwork on the thick cross-guard was crystalline in its purity. I had avoided grasping the hilt in all this time, and I had not used the file on the gritty texture of the hand-grip itself. As I applied one final flourish with the polishing cloth, Plautus was fiddling with the shark-skin square.

  "You know," he said, "I don't want to sound critical, but this stuff is almost as silver as the blade, and the pommel's gold. Your cross-guard is going to look dull by comparison. It's just plain bronze. Had you thought about that?"

  "I've thought about it." I stood up and eased a kink out of my back. "I'm going to coat the cross-guard with silver leaf."

  "With what?"

  I pointed to a box close by his hand. "Sheet silver, beaten so fine that it's almost weightless and transparent. There's some in that box there."

  While he was looking at the silver leaf, I released the sword from the clamps that held it and closed my fist firmly around the hilt for the first time. "Now!" I swung it into the air and my heart almost broke with joy to feel the beauty of it in my hand. All the worry, all the fears, had been for nothing. Our agonizing calculations of the weight and balance had been accurate. Now I was holding perfection!

  "Excalibur," I said.

  "What?"

  "Excalibur. That's its name. That's what I've called the sword. That's what it is."

  Plautus blinked at me. "Excalibur? I must be stupid. I've never heard it before."

  "No, Plautus," I said, "you're not stupid. It's never been said before. Calibur — qalibr — is the north African desert people's word for a mould. This came out of a mould... Excalibur." I handed it to him. "Don't touch the edges, if you want to keep your fingers." Minutely graduated lines rippled like water-marks along each side of the long blade, flowing outward from the thick central spine to edges sharper than any I had ever known, reflecting the light in their patterns and showing where the metal had been folded upon itself and beaten times without number during the tempering process.

  He grasped the hilt and swung the sword and his eyes grew wide. "My God! What a weapon! Excalibur." He swung again and ended up with the point towards the open door just as Andros appeared in the opening.

  Andros crouched in the doorway, squinting with sun-dazzled eyes into the blackness of the smithy. "Publius? Are you in there? Picus is home."

  "Picus?" I swung to Plautus in pleased surprise. "He's here? That's wonderful! Have you seen him?"

  Andros had come into the forge now and he was gazing at the sword in Plautus's hand as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. "You opened it! Did it work? Is it right?"

  Plautus held the sword out to him. "It's perfect," I said. "We have made a masterwork, you and Equus and I. Where is Equus, by the way? And when did Picus arrive?"

  He was gazing at the hilt from a distance of about a handsbreadth, peering closely at the details of the scrollwork and the cockle-shell as he answered me. "Equus is up on the hill at the other forge. I was there with him for a while, working on some drawings he has need of." His voice was barely audible, so intent was he on examining the hilt.

  "And Picus? When did he come?"

  "Hmmm? Oh, Picus. Just now," he muttered. "I saw his big standard above the hedge along the lane, headed to the villa."

  "You mean just now? This very minute?"

  He threw me an uncharacteristically impatient glance, irritated at being distracted from his examination. "Yes, that's what I said — just now, two minutes ago. I saw him just as I turned in through the gate to come here."

  "How does he look?"

  He frowned slightly, still peering at the gold cockleshell. "I don't know. I didn't really see Picus, just his standard, above the hedge. I told you that."

  "So you did. I'm sorry. I'm distracting you from your triumph. What do you think of it?"

  "It looks good. Very good. I'm pleased. Does it work?" He reversed his grip and held the sword properly, looking around him as though searching for something to test it on. The look on his face made me apprehensive.

  "Andros, have you ever swung a sword before?"

  He threw me a preoccupied look. "No, I haven't. What difference does that make? I've never made a successful mould before, either." He walked quickly across to an anvil and slapped the flat of the sword against the tongue of it. The sound of the impact rang as clearly as the note of a bird. I looked at Plautus and shrugged my shoulders in bewilderment as Andros looked around again and fastened his eyes on my work-bench. He stepped determinedly to the side of the bench, whacked the sword blade against one of the legs, whipped the blade upright and pressed the end of the pommel to the table-top. The effect was magical. The whole room suddenly reverberated with a deep, musical hum that emanated from the sword itself. Plautus actually blessed himself with the sign of the cross and I raised my own hands to my ears, so intense was the sound. Gradually, over a lengthy period of time, it lessened and faded away entirely. The silence stretched and stretched.

  "What was that?" I asked Andros.

  He smiled his familiar, modest smile. "I don't know what it was, Publius, but I remember hearing somewhere, a long time ago, that the old smiths used to test their iron blades that way. The better the quality of the metal, the purer the sound it would produce when you did that."

  "I've never heard of that," I said. "Let me try it." I did what he had done and again the vibrant, clean note filled the smithy. "That is astonishin
g. What do you think, Plautus?"

  Plautus merely shook his head, his eyes on the sword. "Excalibur," he said. "The singing sword. I've never seen or heard of anything to match it."

  I swung it, hissing, around my head. "There never has been anything to match it, that's why! Come on, let's go and show it to Caius and Picus, and to Equus. He is going to be angry to have missed its emergence from the womb."

  We walked out into the sunlight, squinting against its brightness, and as I went I swung Excalibur from side to side, revelling in the apparent weightlessness of it. As we entered the lane leading to the main courtyard of the villa, I swung at a young sapling growing in the hedgerow and sheared through it completely without effort. I was wiping the sap from the blade with the hem of my tunic when I heard Plautus say, "That's peculiar!" Something in his tone alerted me even before he gripped me by the elbow, pulling me to a halt.

  I looked up in some confusion. "What is? What's peculiar?"

  He was standing motionless, staring towards the villa in an attitude that immediately set my nerves on edge. I hadn't seen that look in years, but I responded to it immediately.

  "What's wrong?"

  He nodded towards the portico. "You tell me!"

  I could sense him withdrawing into his inimical, soldierly persona and I followed the direction of his look. Eight horses stood outside the main doors of the villa. Eight horses, all riderless. No guards. No one left outside. No one left waiting. All eight men had gone into the house. I felt goose-flesh stirring the small hairs on the nape of my neck at the wrongness of the sight before my eyes picked up another signal that was wholly out of place: a patch of black and white on the ground. It was Picus's great black and white standard! The one he had said was meant to be recognized from a great distance. It had been discarded casually, thrown aside on the ground as though its bearer had no further use for it. All my defensive instincts were now aroused, alarm-signals jangling. I heard Plautus say, "Shit and corruption! I haven't got a sword!"