The Anvil of Ice

by Michael Scott Rohan

  "Do you wonder at them, then?" said the Mastersmith. "Yet once again they are simple things, true smithcraft's servants, rather than its creation." He strode to the wall and turned a wide wheel set there a little way, and the cavern filled with the thunder of falling water. Below the wheel were rows of levers in the floor, and he pulled first one, then another. There was a long, loud creak, a slow ticking sound, and in the shadows behind the great anvil something stirred; the firepit casting a moving, plunging shadow on the wall. Alv had barely time to see it was a bladed wheel before the Mastersmith slipped yet another lever by the high anvil. The suspended hammers jerked, rose and came crashing down in turn on the great block of metal with a mighty clanging that shook the sandy paving of the floor, echoed in the vaults of the ceiling and went reverberating through the boy, so that his body felt insubstantial and frail. The Mastersmith shut the levers off one by one. "Thus are the sternest ores crushed and the hardest metals tempered. But before you use it, guard your ears!"

  He stood a moment, with the faint half-smile on his face. "You see there, a vent channels in a part of the waterfall to turn the wheel. That works the hammers, and other such devices—bellows, grindstones, heavy hammers, lifting tackle, metal-benders and wire-drawers, all with greater power than ever came from a man's arms. And that is not all… Ingar!"

  The older apprentice, over by the firepit, took hold of another wheel, set this time on a thick shaft in the floor, and with immense care moved it a little way. There was a sudden deep coughing rumble, the flames of the pit leaped and blazed to twice their height and spat a column of dark smoke toward the ceiling, where a wide gap swallowed it.

  "You see? The rock itself bleeds to aid our forging." The Mastersmith nodded, and Ingar hastily spun the wheel back, grinning at Alv.

  "A forge fit for the gods!" he called. "All four ele-ments ours to command! The stone around us, the wind in our airshafts, the water in the wheels and this—" He locked the shaft with a bolt. "Better than having a dragon on a leash! Here we can work wonders!"

  Roc, pouring fine sand around some impossibly delicate wax thing in a mold, laughed scornfully. "We?"

  A single glance from the Mastersmith silenced him, and Ingar's angry retort died in his throat. The man smiled. "Ingar is a competent craftsman, but more interested in the theory of our art. He prefers—" he gestured at a low arched doorway to the right "—to bury himself in here."

  The door was of bronze, and heavy, and when it opened there was a sucking of air. Alv stepped through, and stood blinking in the change of light, clear, cool and coming from nowhere he could see. And when the shapes and flecks of color around the walls resolved into solidity, he was still blinded.

  "You know what these are, then?"

  "Yes, Mastersmith, of course! The town had some, three or four, very old—they were proud… But—am I stupid? I never knew there could be so many!" From floor to ceiling, and across the center, the room was filled with books. Books of every kind, from the usual scrolls and fanfolded links to leaves of paper, parchment or even bark tied up in clumsy sheaves or, oddly, fastened together along one edge.

  "No," said the dry voice, "you are not stupid. It is an immense expanse of knowledge, more than you will find in any other library save that of Kerbryhaine, which is now little regarded, or those of lost Morvan itself. And yet no more than a fraction, a grain of what there is to know. Ingar prefers to be a scholar, and makes himself useful as such. But a true master of the art, as I am, as I judge you might one day be, must balance both, the learning and the craft. I assume you cannot read?"

  "A few signs I picked up… My name, a word or two…"

  "Well enough for you, then. Because you are late to start book learning, and this is one door you must enter soon. But be warned now! Learning is not to be gulped down as you do your food. It must come in courses, by degrees, as you are ready to receive and understand it. Otherwise it may choke you, or worse! The high mysteries of our craft are not to be taken lightly, and need to be guarded. So—you may take and read any book from this South wall, or the center cases, as you will. But on the others a guard is set, surer than any lock or key, and I advise you not to cross it. For the East and West walls, you must first ask leave of me, and it will seldom be refused. But leave the North wall alone!" The soft voice glittered like the Iceglow; Alv shivered, and nodded. "Then go now to Ingar, he will begin teaching you your letters. He has some romances and epics which should be easy enough to begin on. Find me by my anvil in three hours if you weary. But you must be reading, and well, by next spring—no longer!"

  He was reading, avidly, before winter. The spring season was in himself, all his pent-up energy and intelligence breaking the crust of his beginnings with the ruthless impatience of a seedling eager for light and air. And over the years that followed it seemed to him that no winter ever came, for he felt himself grow and blossom into new strength and confidence, both of body and mind.

  Little can be said of his eight apprentice years, for little is recorded till the events which led to their uncanny ending; in manhood he was never proud of them. Only the lesser part of his early schooling, his learning of simple smithcraft, is mentioned, and that for the changes it wrought in him. Long hours of toil at anvil, vise and mandrel, wielding heavy hammers, swages, tongs and hardies, hardened his body; it was labor that might have killed a thrall, but with good food in plenty and all the force of his will, his driving need, behind it, the work redoubled the strength he was born with. He grew only to middle height, but solid and well made, especially of face. It was the fine work that bowed his shoulders and narrowed his eyes, long hours of carving out inlays in steel and tapping soft gold or silver wire into the channels, endless vigils over tiny molds in which a minute bead of electrum shivered and slid down little by little at the vibration of a stroking finger. One minute he would be hauling bar iron, heated to the point of burning, out of the firepit and under the mighty hammers, the next he would be anxiously coaxing a fire enameled sword pommel out of a miniature kiln. Then, as the snows of the outside winter melted unregarded, he would be off across the mountain land with the Mastersmith and Roc, searching for new seams and sources of metal. In all ways they went, save only to the north flanks of the mountains, against which ground the first outthrust glaciers of the Ice; Roc seemed deeply glad not to venture that way, but Alv was only the more intrigued. Sometimes, many miles to the south, the master would lead them deep into working and mineshafts evidently made by others, and equally evidently still in use. But who the makers and users were, the Mastersmith did not say, and his manner discouraged questions. There they would find many rich and precious ores for the taking, at the faces or from heaps left lying around uncollected. But though Roc was always looking nervously about, they never so much as saw the mineworkers, and only once, as from an infinite distance, did Alv hear the rattle and ring of work in the stone.

  Often when they returned from these expeditions there would be horses at the gate, even a line of wagons, for the Mastersmith was no hermit; many visitors seemed to think it worth the long trek out to the house, and they were of many kinds. There were messengers, whom the Mastersmith greeted with cool courtesy but dismissed to the kitchen to await reply. There were men who came by night, hooded or masked, and stayed for no more than a word at the gate. There were pale travelers from strange lands in the south, their errands as enigmatic as their speech. Many visitors were simply merchants, come to sell supplies and perhaps treat with the Mastersmith for special work, though this he seemed to endure patiently rather than do gladly; he had no great need of more wealth. Occasionally men in splendid clothes, with haughty airs and well-armed followers, would ride up to commission weapons and armor, or fine jewelry. But often a chieftain or merchant who took away such work would return, wealthy and beholden to the Mastersmith Mylio, and then Alv saw their relations with him change; they would become confidants, partners, consulting a trusted adviser. When they next re-turned it would be as clients to a patron—or v
assals to a lord. The Mastersmith would receive them with his usual mien—suave, reasonable, generous. But nonetheless many left him pale and shaking, or bowed as under a heavy burden.

  Alv studied his master as assiduously as his craft or his books, and through such dealings came to see the iron in him beneath the gilt. Then, for the first time, the memory and the puzzlement of the Thunderbird awoke, of the close ties with the Ekwesh and the bargaining and bartering over the ashes of Asenby. But the years of training were also working changes in Alv's mind; his thoughts were no longer so simple, or his hatred so direct.

  How this was is not known—whether it was a deliberate act of his master, or whether it was a thing brought about by the boy himself. There may have been many subtle enchantments interwoven among the long chants he was set to learn, and that later he was taught to amend, add to and eventually compose for himself. In these, sung into and onto their forging, lay the true magic of the smiths of old—to set a virtue in the things of their creation, to work into them powers that at their height were able to reshape the very forces of nature, or—hardest of all—to sway the minds of men. So it is possible that the will and the blame were not his own. So strong an enthrallment, though, would tend to break the spirit it was turned on, and hamper the growth of its powers. But as the years of his learning passed, Alv's skill and craft waxed ever greater, and with it his arrogant, untamed, questing spirit.

  Need drove him, a desperate need to learn, to know all that there was to be known. Whenever he had a spare moment he would be delving through some volume or other, storing up masses of questions for Ingar or the master. To break the boundaries of his reading he mastered not only his native Northland speech, but also the tongue of Suderney, and many no longer spoken in south or north. Even some words of Ekwesh he acquired. But much as he learned, it never satisfied him. In his dreams he searched out all the secrets of the world, from its heart to its heights, and shouted out his questions to the silent stars. Awake, he longed to end his apprenticeship, to become his own man, free if he chose to go out and explore the world. Much as he admired the Mastersmith, Alv had had his fill of these barren mountains, the house from which he could not stir for six months of every year, the few faces he was forced to see every day. Most of all he yearned to see women again, for none had ever come there save Ernan's old wife, and she died during his third winter in the house. Knowledge was his road to escape, his path to his own fortune, and he longed for it with the fervor of love. That forbidden North wall of the library drew him like a magnet, and he deeply resented the prohibition. He would run his hands lovingly over the scrolls there, fingering the smooth dark fabric of the cylinders and their cold carved finials, as if he could somehow divine their cloth-shrouded secrets through his fingertips. It seemed to him almost that he could, that half of the hidden knowledge came through to him and that he lacked only a single clear glimpse to set it free in his mind—and that that glimpse, that essential key, should be his by right. Always he was tempted— but he never dared risk it. Even more clearly he felt the force of the Mastersmith's word. And perhaps it was this hunger, and the only source of feeding it he knew, that drew his mind toward what, in his innermost heart, he knew to be evil. He felt himself apart even from the others of the household, and quietly looked down on them all. Ingar he despised, even after the older apprentice had completed his prentice pieces and been made journeyman; his amiable lack of ambition and his decision to stay with the Mastersmith and study, rather than make a life of his own, struck Alv as cowardly and contemptible. But outwardly he showed little of this, following the Master-smith's example as in all else.

  Sure it is that he needed no urging to despise his origins and admire the man who had raised him out of them and might raise him higher yet. So perhaps it is not strange that he came to feel it right and admirable to be as hard, as detached, as his master, to feel joy in the domination of others and cloak it under studied civility and friendship. Would that not seem the very stamp of a great man, a master? But he was to learn that not all of the Master-smith's visitors were his servants.

  It fell in the last winter of Alv's apprenticeship, when he might have been some twenty or twenty-one years of age, that the Mastersmith sent for him. Alv found him by the firepit, gazing at its low flames as if reading something from them; when Alv stood respectfully by him he did not raise his head, but spoke briskly.

  "Well, boy! The world moves apace, and you with it; you are molding yourself well. I will need other helpers besides Ingar in the days soon to come. Therefore, though you are young for it as yet, I judge you ripe now to try your prentice pieces."

  Alv lost all his studied calm. "My… You're making me a journeyman?"

  "If I accept your work. If. Strictly by rule of guild, for it would be very useful to me one day if you were to hold a mastership in it. Very useful…So, you must prove to me that you have some command of the higher arts of the smith—scholarship, jewelry, armory, weaponry, suchlike. You will begin three test pieces, two under my direction, but the first you must manage for yourself. We will make that jewelry, I think. A simple gold armring, the kind wealthy young pups covet to give their girls—when they can be sure there's a good virtue of binding and fidelity laid on it. They'll sell their souls for a really fine one—or better, their influence. Can you manage that on your own?"

  Alv swallowed. "Y-yes, Mastersmith. With Mochain's treatise on the patterning of gold…"

  "From the East wall. Very well, you may safely take it. Mind that the ring looks good, now! Graceful, nothing clumsy, but the pattern clear upon it. Now off about your work!" Alv fled willingly, half afraid he would blurt out the thoughts whirling around in his head. So he would become a journeyman—that he had never doubted for a moment. But the Mastersmith was assuming he'd be willing to stay on here, free or not; well, safer not even to think otherwise—for now.

  "Why set you to make a daft thing like that?" asked Roc, when he found Alv shaping the fine beeswax for a casting. "He's got no use for it, that's for sure! And no more have we, worse luck!"

  Alv sighed. He found Roc easier to tolerate than the others, but at times he could be tiresome. Still, it was true enough, what he said. The Mastersmith had no use for women, or any other desire of the body; he was cold, ascetic, saving his passions only for his work and his intrigues. His household had perforce to live as he did, which suited the younger men not a bit. Even Ingar had been heard to complain—but not when the master was around. "How would I know? Maybe he has a customer in mind—"

  "Up here? Even the randiest ones won't come galloping over fifty leagues of frozen Northlands just for one of those!"

  Alv snorted impatiently. "Well, maybe it's to teach me a money making skill, then. Get me a stand to mount this on, will you? And a set of carving tools—fine ones, and sharp!"

  He hummed to himself as he scraped at the wax, a smooth sweeping tune that seemed to fit the gentle curves; it had no words as yet. He would find those in the symbols he would engrave around the serpentine shape, symbols taken from that ancient book and elsewhere in his ardent studies. It was up to him to weld those words together in song, as it was to blend the symbols into a harmonious pattern. The right song, the right pattern, the right fine alloy of metals sunk cleanly into the mold, without crack or bubble—they would take the impress of their creator's power, and enhance it in the form he chose. When the blank wax model was complete, he laid it down gently and turned to his books, selecting and composing, scribbling on his slates, always with that smooth shape before him. A full week that labor alone took him, in which he slept little and only remembered to eat when Roc thrust food under his nose.

  "Here! Stick your snout in a stewpot for a change!" Alv threw down the heavy scroll with a growl of disgust and grabbed the bowl and the slice of black bread. Roc watched him with amusement. "Don't bother to thank me, will you? The stew's not that bad, the beast's only been dead a week."

  Alv remembered to stay polite and mumbled an apology. "Thinking too
hard…"

  "Not such a dawdle as you expected, eh?"

  Alv gave him a withering stare. "You wouldn't understand. It'll do as it is—but I've got to be sure it's perfect, you hear, perfect!"

  "I hear. I won't wait up, then. Don't fall asleep in your stew!"

  Alv hardly heard him. That was the real problem—that half-felt memory that seemed so vital, that nagged him every time he stared down at the symbols scored on the slates before him. He had a pattern, a good pattern, and parts of it had cost him much labor. But some small characters had seemed to fall into place almost naturally, as if by instinct; the result looked good, but he couldn't work out why, or find any other remotely satisfying version. He distrusted that. He had followed a shadow, something cast in his mind, a shadow of the days when he was a child, before he'd come to this place. And that was ridiculous, because then he'd known no smithcraft. He swore, and sent the bowl spinning across the room to crack against the high anvil. Whatever the reason, this way it would have to be.

  At dawn Roc found him asleep over his slates. On them the symbols were merged into a single fluid tangle of lines, and his song had found words. He sat by himself all that day, singing softly and carving the stylized pattern deep into the wax, burnishing away trimmings and rough edges, highlighting the design here and there with stippling. Late that evening he grafted on two short wax rods to act as sprue, and rousted out a yawning Roc to fetch a bronze molding flask and a pail of fine white clay; sand would be too coarse for this. By dawn the clay was dry and the flask set to heat at the firepit. Roc handed him tongs wrapped in wet rags; carefully he lifted the heavy flask, tilted it gently over an empty bowl and spilled out the steaming wax that had once shaped those delicate curves. Only their ghosts were left now, invisible in the shell of clay. He set the flask back to heat for a moment, reached deeper into the fire and seized a black crucible. The air shimmered violently about it as it rose, and he held it unmoving at arm's length above the flask, which Roc was steadying with tongs. Slowly, carefully, Alv tilted the crucible, and liquid spilled over and out, glowing like the sun. Alv had drawn the gold from the Mastersmith's deep vaults, along with tiny portions of rare metals and other substances to make it subtly stronger and easier to cast. Little by little, humming his tune, he poured the fine stream into one of the sprue holes, while Roc gently rasped a fine file over the lip of the flask, to vibrate the molten metal into all the fine detail and free any air bubbles. Steam whistled out of the other sprue hole, and every second Alv's throat tightened as he feared the mold would crack. Then a little dome of gold stood out above both sprue holes, and would sink no farther, and they could breathe freely once more. Now there was only the gradual cooling, moving the flask closer and closer to the lip of the fire till it rested on the rim, and at last he could seize it and plunge it into the quenching bath. The icy water boiled up and splashed his hands, but after the stinging and scarring of forgework he hardly noticed. A tap on the loose bottom of the flask freed the mold, another cracked it. As he pulled it out it fell apart in two halves like an eggshell, and the pattern gleamed warmly up at him from the clay.