The Anvil of Ice

by Michael Scott Rohan

"It is that I grew up with," Alv replied, "and my companion here from his youth, though he is one of your folk, by name Roc."

  "And you are not?"

  Alv shrugged. "I have not that honor, that I know of. A foundling I, raised a northerner and named Alv, that is all. Roc has forgotten most of your noble tongue in his long exile, and I know it only from books."

  The bearded man smiled a smile as impenetrable as a stone battlement. "Well then, my fair-tongued foundling, my name is Kathel Kataihan, called the Honest, a dealer in things of small account and the elected leader of this paltry troop of peddlers you see before you. Are you come to sell, or buy, or how else may we oblige you?"

  "A seat by your fire on this dank night, honest sir," chimed in Roc, "and perhaps a trifle of supper, as it's some hours since we dined. Nothing elaborate, you understand, for it would not agree with the digestion this late of an evening."

  "Oh alas," intoned Kathel, "we are only poor traders with the least of victuals, sufficient only to get us across this godforsaken land without actually starving. If you were calling on us at our simple homes, why then we'd share our last crusts with you gladly, but as it is we dare spare no morsel or crumb for the sake of the loved ones we have with us."

  "Ah, but how remiss of us not to explain!" said Roc smoothly. "We are not the common beggars or riff-raff as you would find in such places, but honest men of craft and lore traveling to the Southlands in search of other honest men who will appreciate our hard-earned skills, namely the working of metals…"

  Kathel's eyes widened, and one of the other men, short and baldheaded, lowered his sword. "You're smiths? Northern smiths? Out of the far north?"

  Roc repeated his tale about the unfortunate death of their master, and the short man rounded on Kathel and spoke a few crisp words.

  "Yes, I have the skill of repairing wheel and axle," said Alv, in halting Sothran phrases.

  "And of understanding our tongue, indeed," said Kathel. "Can you make our carts whole?"

  "I will not say till I see them," said Alv drily. "I have my tools, but not the whole equipment of a forge. With no smithy to hand—"

  Kathel inclined his head at the ruin beyond. "This is a smithy," he said, with an air of having arranged it on the spot. "Or it was. That's why we stopped here. We've been trying to get it back into order, but we know no more of the craft than any traveler picks up over the years. We have four carts crippled by this worthless road, barely dragged here in one piece, and another ten that might fail us before we even reach Dunmarhas—not that the best of their blasted smiths will avail us much."

  Alv smiled. "You may find them a touch more adept since we passed. Let us see the damage, then, and the forge, and I will do what I can."

  "Wait a minute!" protested Kathel. "We've not fixed a price yet!"

  "Fire, food, bed," said Alv. "The rest we'll settle later, depending on how much is to be done. We won't haggle."

  "You trust us?" cried Kathel, as if the idea offended him.

  "Of course," chuckled Roc, "since you're called the Honest."

  "Oh dear, oh dear," breathed the trader, "what is the world coming to, to be sure? Well, come and have a squint at what's to do, and then you may share what poor scraps we have."

  The poor scraps turned out to be as sumptuous as anything they had tasted, and in quantities enough even for Roc. Alv ate little, but the prospect of work seemed to hearten him.

  "So," said Kathel when they had finished, "you reckon you can do it, then?"

  "The most of it," said Alv, "if your men can get the smithy clear and working. Those ten damaged wheels only need a fastening and a new iron tire; Roc can do them for you on his own, he's a fine craftsman." Roc sat up and stared at him, startled. "And those with the bent axles and spokes I can straighten and weld so they'll bear you all the leagues you'll travel this season—if you keep to the roads. But the two with broken hubs—well, I can patch them up to last thirty leagues, maybe, but no more."

  The trader sighed gustily. "Two? Ah well, that's nothing, nothing at all. We always start with a few extra wagons for just this kind of chance, they carry the victuals we eat on the way, see? So we can just shift the loads and send the patched ones home. But we couldn't afford to lose fourteen, no! Take the cream of the profit off the trip. So it seems to me you lads're a godsend, that's it, a godsend. Finding you just where one always needs a smith, after the worst of the road. But devil a man can you bring with you, these days!" He swigged at his ale, and gazed up at the shell of the building above. "Used to be a smith there always, a century or two back. A good place, y'see, for all it was a bit lonely, because there was so much traffic up and down the roads at all seasons, and things always coming adrift in the wilds as is their cursed way. So there was a whole huge hostelry here on the end of the Great Causeway, with a forge to serve it. Times changed, fewer came, the hostelry fell out of use, but the smithy remained. It lay unused from time to time, but smiths d come and keep it up for a few years. The last one, he was still alive when my father passed this way on his first trip, so he told me. Would've been, let me see, fifty, sixty years back. But he died, and nobody came to take his place." He looked keenly at his guests. "Now there might be an opening for two young lads not afraid of a bit of hard work. Very glad to have a smith here again, all us honest trading men'd be! Plenty of work for you there, caravans passing back and forth all the summer—"

  "And the rest of the year nothing and nobody but the marshspooks!" grunted Roc. "No thanks, worthy sir! Too empty and too lonely for us, eh, Alv?"

  But Alv was looking up at the bare old walls and roof-trees, still thick, still strong. A flicker of flame kindled within, where the old hearth must be, and one of the workers began to sing. Others took it up, a soft, melancholy air, and even Kathel hummed along.

  They're worn, my sturdy feet From the wandering day, From the wandering day! They 're sore, my willing hands, From the hours of toil, From the hours of toil! Yet I cannot rest Now the day is done!

  "I don't know," Alv said quietly. "I don't know…"

  It aches, does my ardent heart,

  Till I know no more.

  Till I know no more

  What I must do, how far to go

  To forget my love.

  To forget my love!

  But he said no more about it. Kathel grew sentimental with the song, snuffled into his ale, and then abruptly turned businesslike and led them all off to supervise the fitting-up of the forge. Roc bustled about, showing the workers how to fit a new leather to the corroded old bellows, but Kathel and Alv stood and looked around the ancient building. "Good strong walls!" said the trader, slapping the stonework. "Could make this a place to live in in a day, my boys could! Take some timber off the spare wagons, that and a few good solid strips of turf'd make you a grand roof. You want food, you Ve got rivers full of fish, birds all over the place, and all the dainties you like from your customers. And you needn't stint yourself. With never a rival within thirty leagues, south or north, you could charge what you liked—'cept to your worthy old friend Kathel, to be sure. You could make your fortune!"

  Alv smiled, but said nothing, and that night once more he lay awake. But next day he betrayed no fatigue, nor gave away anything of what was in his heart, but labored with a will. From dawn till dusk of a dank, drizzly day he sweated over the rebuilt forge, straightening wheels and axles, banishing the deadly hair-thin cracks and distortions that could overturn a whole valuable load in the middle of a ford or a steep ascent. It was crude cartwright's work, but all marveled at his strength and perseverance, Kathel most loudly of all. Only Roc, engaged in welding minutely measured hoops of iron and setting them over the wooden wheels, would occasionally stop and look at him with a blend of anger, confusion and concern. But it was only late that night, when the labor was done at last, and they all retreated silently to their pallets and rugs, that Alv at last spoke.

  "Roc, my friend," he said, staring into his mug of mulled wine, "I believe Kathel has the right of
it." Roc spluttered, but Alv held up a commanding hand. "There is a place for a smith here, a useful, a—a vital place, and here I mean to remain, for a few years at least."

  "You've not been taken in listening to that silver-tongued bastard, have you?" burst out Roc. "You're sick in your head, d'you know that?"

  "In truth, I am sick in my head," agreed Alv bleakly. "And in my heart, my hand and all of me that can feel. I have grown crooked, and I must be set straight. And if I mistake it not, this is the place set aside for my cure, and no other."

  "Ach, Amicac have your sickly fancies! This place'll only feed them—or cure you of them and all else beside! You should hear some of the tales I Ve been hearing from the lads about these thrice-damned boglands—a brimful breeding ground for sicknesses, and worse! Every marsh-fever and bog-ague known to man, here for the finding, to rot your innards and pain your bones and set your blood to boiling. And if that's not enough, they're awash with spooks and specters and nightwalkers and fearful things wandered downriver off the Ice, they are!"

  "Men have lived here before, nonetheless," said Alv calmly. "It is driest by the road, and we have seen no terrors as yet."

  "Time enough!" growled Roc. "Ah, see sense, Alv! Or if not, leave the maggots in your mind and try thinking of me—for a change! That you said about me last night, me being a fine craftsman, you've never thought to say a single word of that before now—"

  "Because I never realized it mattered to you; your feelings are not so easy to read. Don't ever think I don't know how much I owe you, Roc—and I am thinking of you now. If it's true what Hjoran said, and from these folk it seems to be, that in the south the power of true smithcraft is unknown, then to them you will be as good a smith as I-"

  "You know that's not true," Roc growled, lowering his round head, "power or no power, you've ten times my craft—"

  "You had to learn it to serve us, though we gave you little chance to use it. But in the south you can, on your own account, and need be forgehand and servant no longer—"

  "Ach, the bog's rotting your brain already! If that's so, it's true ten times over for you. Do you come too, and be a master, an apprentice no longer! Sink these shadows of yours in the mud like the dung they are. What's done's done. If I blamed you I'd never have helped you out then-left you to our dear master's mercy, I would, and cheerfully! He was striving all he could to turn you down his path, because he needed your power-even I could see that, and who were you to resist, the age you were? It's him I blame—what you did, you did in his shadow, that's all."

  Alv nodded grimly. "Yes. And his shadow is with me yet. Roc, my friend, when Kathel sends his carts back south tomorrow you should go with them. But I will not be coming with you. Not yet."

  "Then to the River with you!" spat Roc, and turned his back, and spoke no word more that night.

  He said nothing, too, when the next day dawned, bright and blustery, and made his preparations in silence. Kathel was volubly surprised at the two friends' parting, and all the more that Roc should blame him for it; as a kind of expiation he presented him with a fair sum of money and a wealth of good advice and useful names, to get himself started in his trade. Roc, no fool, took both, but reluctantly. At last he swung himself up on one of the carts, whose driver he had already made a friend, and did not look back as the carts clopped and creaked away. A few hundred paces beyond the ruined smithy the High road left the dry land and set out across the marsh on the low wide arches of the Great Causeway. In this fashion, only occasionally lighting on small islets of solid ground, the road stretched far into the misty distance. Two broad pillars, weathered into shapelessness, marked the place, and beside one of those pillars Alv was waiting.

  "Well?" said Roc coldly.

  "No," Alv answered. "But fare you well, my friend. I can never repay you for all the trouble I have given you, all the good you've done me—but I hope I may at least try, some day."

  He held out his hand, and Roc reached down and shook it, once. But all he said was, "We won't be traveling fast. If you change your mind today, you'll catch us up easily enough. Run'll do you good."

  Alv chuckled, and raised his hand. He made no move to follow as the cart creaked and ground out onto the road, but he stood and watched until it vanished into the sunlit haze.

  Behind him came the sound of laboring, as the traders' men toiled to make the shell of the old smithy habitable. The other merchants had joined with Kathel in making him all kinds of extravagant promises, not realizing that it was not profit that tempted him to remain here. Far from it. Before—if ever—his life became his own again, he had a heavy debt to repay.

  That day he labored on the smithy with Kathel's men, and sat late into the night under its new-made roof, talking with the merchants about the state of the world and drinking their mulled wine. It seemed that the world grew ever darker, roads longer and weather worse, customers stingier and tolls more rapacious. But under the light habitual complaints Alv found a note of real disquiet. The Northlands were sorely changed from Kathel's youth, and he was only middle-aged now. Then the Ekwesh were only a minor menace, harrying the far north from time to time; native corsairs and outlaws were far more to be feared, and the independent towns stood in powerful federation to protect their citizens and the trade on which they depended. Now the outer fringes of the federation were in frightened disarray, the towns retreating behind their own walls and failing to answer the general call, and in this disarray the Ekwesh grew bolder than ever, and fared further south.

  "A dark time for honest traders, indeed," sighed Kathel. "True that we prosper, and yet that is in part because so many rivals have failed or no longer care to risk the long journey north. So though business is much lessened, it does not have to stretch so far, and often buyers must take what we have at our prices, or go without. But that is an advantage I would gladly forgo, seeing the cause; it will work ill in time. Still, there will be many caravans yet this summer, lad, and work aplenty to feed your forge—even if it must burn peats and not fine coal. You will do well enough here. And now to bed, for we must set off early to catch the best of the light."

  That dawn Alv stood at his door, watching the long line of carts and wagons go trundling off up the road, the oxen stolid as ever but the horses whinnying and frisky, as if glad to be escaping the marsh. It was a long time before they faded into the distance, and longer yet before the noise of wheels and creaking wood and the voices of men and beasts was wholly lost to the ear. But when it was, a great silence seemed to descend, as cool and gray as the sky. Alv closed his eyes, and leaned against the huge heap of peat they had cut him, smelling its rich earthy scent. Around him the voices of the fens seemed to grow louder, the chatter of running water, the bubbling and gurgling from the stagnant pools and the hoarse croaking of the things that lived in them, the thin whine of insects and distant, mournful bird cries. There was little of warmth or comfort for human ears in those cold voices, but for the first time since he had fled the Mastersmith, Alv found in them a promise, at least, of peace. He felt utterly alone.

  After a while he turned and went into the house—if house it was, for there was only one room roofed, the forge itself. It was little better than a shack, but the roof was solid and the old front door of ironbound oak still strong; he would set more iron around its rotten edges, and remake the rusted hinges, till it could have defended a fort. Walls, roof, door and a warm bed on the brick ledge by the forge—he needed no better. He busied himself arranging the great heap of provisions they had left him, enough by themselves for a month or more. He had hooks and line here, too; later he would go fishing, and find dead wood to dry as kindling for the peat. He need look no further ahead than that; let the future dispose itself as it would. But even as he thought that, the face of Kara arose before him, and for a time he felt utterly and completely bereft.

  So began his life in the tumbledown smithy on the salt-marshes, and a lonely life it was to be. Over the remaining months of that first summer he lived by tending to
the travelers who passed that way, usually in caravans—shoeing their horses, making new knives and weapons to replace those lost or broken, repairing their harness and their trade goods, their wagons and carts and occasionally the carriage of a more important traveler. He did his work well, for it had no call for any power in it, and he could have been very well paid. But most often he took his fee in metal, the stuff of his trade, or food, of which all who journeyed through the Marshlands carried a good surplus against emergencies; he supplemented what he had with catching fish and trapping birds—or shooting them, when he found enough sound wood to make himself a bow and arrows. For the most part it was a meager living, for travelers were rarer even than usual on the road that first year, and he feared the coming of winter, when none at all would pass; he knew he had to hoard his small store against it, and smoked his catches over the forge, or preserved them in salt he made from the pools. He might have fared better by taking advantage of those who needed his help most, as Kathel had suggested, but that went against his nature. So his existence was harsh, harsher even than his childhood, and he had had many years of good living since then. And the marshes themselves made it harsher still, for they were a dank and sinister place indeed. In the heat of high summer they seemed hotter than his forgefire, hazy, fly-ridden and fetid; strange fish stirred sluggishly in the lukewarm pools, and foul gases rose from the quaking mud. The tall grasses yellowed and wilted, and dangerous bogs took on a thin deceptive crust to tempt the unwary foot too far. The road shone mirrorlike under a rippling curtain of air, and in it travelers approaching or departing seemed to appear and dissolve like visions, from and into nothing. But for all this, as summer drew into autumn and travelers became rarer still, Alv began to range further and further afield among the marshes. He seldom worried about missing a traveler, for in that flat country his sharp sight could make out anyone approaching along the hum-mocked crest of the road a long way off. At first he went in search of better places to fish and hunt, and these he found. But also he had not forgotten the lore of metals he had learned, and knew that strange stones of good iron could be found in such huge marshes, though none knew why or how they came there. It was in searching for these, with a crude rake he had made, that he found the place he named the Battle Lands.