The buildings were larger and taller inside the walls, though most were made no differently from those outside. The roofs looked a bit odd to Perrin, especially those that came to points, but he had seen so many different kinds of roof since leaving home that he only wondered what kind of nails they used with their tiles. In some places, the people did not use nails on their roof tiles at all.
Palaces and great buildings stood among the smaller and more ordinary, seemingly placed haphazardly; a structure of towers and squarish, white domes, surrounded on all sides by wide streets, might have shops and inns and houses on the other sides of those streets. A huge hall fronted by squared columns of marble four paces on a side, with fifty steps to climb to reach bronze doors five spans high, had a bakery one side and a tailor on the other.
More men wore coats and breeches like the soldiers’ here, though in brighter colors and without armor, and some even wore swords. None of them went barefoot, not even those in baggy breeches. The women’s dresses were often longer, their necklines lower to bare shoulders and even bosom, the cloth as likely to be silk as wool. The Sea Folk traded a good deal of silk through Tear. As many sedan chairs and carriages drawn by teams of horses moved through the streets as ox-carts and wagons. Yet too many of the faces had that same look of having given up.
The inn Lan chose, the Star, had a weaver’s shop on one side and a smithy on the other, with narrow alleyways between. The smithy was of undressed gray stone, the weaver’s and the inn of wood, though the Star stood four stories tall and had small windows in its roof as well. The rattle of looms was hard-pressed to compete with the clang of the smith’s hammer. They handed their horses over to stablemen, to be taken around back, and went inside the inn. There were fish smells from the kitchen, baking and perhaps stewing, and the scent of roast mutton. The men in the common room all wore the tight coats and loose breeches; Perrin did not think richer men—somehow he was sure the men in colorful coats with puffy sleeves and the bare-shouldered women in bright silk were all rich, or nobles—those folk would not put up with the noise. Perhaps that was why Lan had chosen it.
“How are we supposed to sleep with this racketing?” Zarine muttered.
“No questions?” he said with a smile. For a moment he thought she was going to stick out her tongue at him.
The innkeeper was a round-faced, balding man in a long, deep blue coat and those loose breeches, who bowed over hands clasped across his stout belly. His face had that look, a weary resignation. “The Light shine on you, mistresses, and welcome,” he sighed. “The Light shine on you, masters, and welcome.” He gave a small start at Perrin’s yellow eyes, then passed wearily on to Loial. “The Light shine on you, friend Ogier, and welcome. It is a year or more since I have seen one of your kind in Tear. Some work or other at the Stone. They stayed in the Stone, of course, but I saw them in the street one day.” He finished with another sigh, seemingly unable to summon any curiosity as to why another Ogier had come to Tear, or why any of them had come, for that matter.
The balding man, whose name was Jurah Haret, showed them to their rooms himself. Apparently Moiraine’s silk dress and the way she kept her face hidden, taken with Lan’s hard face and sword, made them a lady and her guard in his eyes, and so worthy of his personal attention. Perrin he obviously took as some kind of retainer, and Zarine he was plainly unsure of—to her visible disgust—and Loial was, after all, an Ogier. He called men to push beds together for Loial, and offered Moiraine a private room for her meals if she wished. She accepted graciously.
They kept together through it all, making a small procession through the upper halls until Haret bowed and sighed his way out of their presence, leaving them all where they had begun, outside Moiraine’s room. The walls were white plaster, and Loial’s head brushed the hall ceiling.
“Odious fellow,” Zarine muttered, brushing furiously at the dust on her narrow skirts with both hands. “I believe he took me for your handmaid, Aes Sedai. I will not stand for that!”
“Watch your tongue,” Lan said softly. “If you use that name where folk can hear, you will regret it, girl.” She looked as if she were going to argue, but his icy blue eyes stilled her tongue this time, if it did not cool her glare.
Moiraine ignored them. Staring off at nothing, she worked her cloak in her hands almost as if wiping them. Unaware what she was doing, in Perrin’s opinion.
“How do we go about finding Rand?” he asked, but she did not appear to hear him. “Moiraine?”
“Remain close to the inn,” she said after a moment. “Tear can be a dangerous city for those who do not know its ways. The Pattern can be torn, here.” That last was soft, as if to herself. In a stronger voice she said, “Lan, let us see what we can discover without attracting attention. The rest of you, stay close to the inn!”
“ ‘Stay close to the inn,’ ” Zarine mimicked as the Aes Sedai and the Warder disappeared down the stairs. But she said it quietly enough that they would not hear. “This Rand. He is the one you called the. . . .” If she looked like a falcon right then, it was a very uneasy falcon. “And we are in Tear, where the Heart of the Stone holds. . . . And the Prophecies say. . . . The Light burn me, ta’veren, is this a story I want to be in?”
“It is not a story, Zarine.” For a moment Perrin felt almost as hopeless as the innkeeper had sounded. “The Wheel weaves us into the Pattern. You chose to tangle your thread with ours; it’s too late to untangle it, now.”
“Light!” she growled. “Now you sound like her!”
He left her there with Loial and went to put his things in his room—it had a low bed, comfortable but small, as city people seemed to think befitted a servant, a washstand, a stool, and a few pegs on the cracked plaster wall—and when he came out, they were both gone. The ring of hammer on anvil called to him.
So much in Tear looked odd that it was a relief to walk into the smithy. The ground floor was all one large room with no back wall except for two long doors that stood open on a yard for shoeing horses and oxen, complete with an ox sling. Hammers stood in their stands, tongs of various kinds and sizes hung on the exposed joists of the walls, buttresses and hoof knives and other farrier’s tools lay neatly arranged on wooden benches with chisels and beak irons and swages and all the implements of the blacksmith’s craft. Bins held lengths of iron and steel in various thicknesses. Five grinding wheels of different roughness stood about the hard dirt floor, six anvils, and three stone-sided forges with their bellows, though only one held glowing coals. Quenching barrels stood ready to hand.
The smith was plying his hammer on yellow-hot iron gripped in heavy tongs. He wore baggy breeches and had pale blue eyes, but the long leather vest over his bare chest and apron were not much different from those Perrin and Master Luhhan had worn back in Emond’s Field, and his thick arms and shoulders spoke of years working metal. His dark hair had almost the same amount of gray that Perrin remembered in Master Luhhan’s. More vests and aprons hung on the wall, as if the man had apprentices, but they were not in evidence now. The forge-fire smelled like home. The hot iron smelled like home.
The smith turned to thrust the piece he was working back into the coals, and Perrin stepped over to work the bellows for him. The man glanced at him, but said nothing. Perrin pulled the bellows handle up and down with slow, steady, even strokes, keeping the coals at the right heat. The smith went back to working the hot iron, on the rounded horn of the anvil, this time. Perrin thought he might be making a barrel scrape. The hammer rang with sharp, quick blows.
The man spoke without looking up from his work. “Apprentice?” was all he said.
“Yes,” Perrin replied just as simply.
The smith worked on for a time. It was a barrel scrape, for cleaning the insides of wooden barrels. Now and again he eyed Perrin consideringly. Setting his hammer down, just for a moment, the smith picked up a short length of thick, square stock and pushed it into Perrin’s hand, then picked up his hammer again and resumed work. “See what you
can do with that,” he said.
Without even thinking about it, Perrin stepped over to an anvil on the other side of the forge and tapped the stock against its edge. It made a nice ring. The steel had not been left long enough in the slowfurnace to pick up a great deal of carbon from the coal. He pushed it into the hot coals for almost its entire length, tasted the two water barrels to see which had been salted—the third was olive oil—then took off his coat and shirt and chose a leather vest that would fit his chest. Most of these Tairen fellows were not as large as he, but he found one that would do. Finding an apron was easier.
When he turned around, he saw the smith, still with his head down over his work, nodding and smiling to himself. But just because he knew his way around a smithy did not mean he had any skill at smithing. That was yet to be shown.
When he came back to the anvil with two hammers, a set of long-handled flat-tongs, and a sharp-topped hardy, the steel bar had heated to a dark red except for a small bit of what he had left out of the coals. He worked the bellows, watching the color of the metal lighten, until it reached a yellow just short of white. Then he pulled it out with the tongs, laid it on the anvil, and picked up the heavier of the two hammers. About ten pounds, he estimated, and with a longer handle than most people, who did not know metal working, thought was necessary. He held it near the end; hot metal gave off sparks, sometimes, and he had seen the scars on the hands of the smith from up at Roundhill, a careless fellow.
He did not want to make anything elaborate or fancy. Simple things seemed best at the moment. He began by rounding the edges of the bar, then hammered the middle out into a broad blade, almost as thick as the original at the butt, but a good hand and a half long. From time to time he returned the metal to the coals, to keep it at the pale yellow, and after a time he shifted to the lighter hammer, half the weight of the first. The piece beyond the blade, he thinned down, then bent it over the anvil horn in a curve down beside the blade. A wooden handle could be fixed onto that, eventually. Setting the sharp-chisel hardy in the anvil’s hardy-hole, he laid the glowing metal atop it. One sharp blow of the hammer cut off the tool he had made. Or almost made. It would be a chamfer knife, for smoothing and leveling the tops of barrel staves after they were hopped together, among other things. When he was done. The other man’s barrel scrape had made him think of it.
As soon as he had made the hot-cut, he tossed the glowing metal into the salted quenching barrel. Unsalted gave a harder quench, for the hardest metal, while the oil gave the softest, for good knives. And swords, he had heard, but he had never had any part in making anything like that.
When the metal had cooled enough, to a dull gray, he removed it from the water and took it to the grinding wheels. A little slow work with the footpedals ground a polish onto the blade. Carefully, he heated the blade portion again. This time the colors deepened, to straw, to bronze. When the bronze color began to run up the blade in waves, he set it aside to cool. The final edge could be sharpened then. Quenching again would destroy the tempering he had just done.
“A very neat bit of work,” the smith said. “No wasted motion. You looking for work? My apprentices just walked away, all three of them, the worthless fools, and I’ve plenty you could do.”
Perrin shook his head. “I do not know how long I will be in Tear. I’d like to work a little longer, if you do not mind. It has been a long time, and I miss it. Maybe I could do some of the work your apprentices would have done.”
The smith snorted loudly. “You’re a deal better than any of those louts, moping around and staring, muttering about their nightmares. As if everyone doesn’t have nightmares, sometimes. Yes, you can work here, as long as you want. Light, I’ve orders for a dozen drawknives and three cooper’s adzes, and a carpenter down the street needs a mortise hammer, and. . . . Too much to list it. Start with the drawknives, and we will see how far we get before night.”
Perrin lost himself in the work, for a time forgetting everything but the heat of the metal, the ring of his hammer, and the smell of the forge, but there came a time when he looked up and found the smith—Dermid Ajala, he had said his name was—taking off his vest, and the shoeing yard dark. All the light came from the forge and a pair of lamps. And Zarine was sitting on an anvil by one of the cold forges, watching him.
“So you really are a blacksmith, blacksmith,” she said.
“He is that, mistress,” Ajala said. “Apprentice, he says, but the work he did today amounts to his master’s piece as far as I am concerned. Fine stroking, and better than steady.” Perrin shifted his feet at the compliments, and the smith grinned at him. Zarine stared at both of them with a lack of comprehension.
Perrin went to replace the vest and apron on their peg, but once he had them off, he was suddenly conscious of Zarine’s eyes on his back. It was if she were touching him; for a moment, the herbal scent of her seemed overwhelming. He quickly pulled his shirt over his head, stuffed it raggedly into his breeches, and jerked on his coat. When he turned around, Zarine wore one of those small, secretive smiles that had always made him nervous.
“Is this what you mean to do, then?” she asked. “Did you come all this way to be a blacksmith again?” Ajala paused in the act of pulling the yard doors closed and listened.
Perrin picked up the heavy hammer he had used, a ten-pound head with a handle as long as his forearm. It felt good in his hands. It felt right. The smith had glanced at his eyes once and never even blinked; it was the work that was important, the skill with metal, not the color of a man’s eyes. “No,” he said sadly. “One day, I hope. But not yet.” He started to hang the hammer back on the wall.
“Take it.” Ajala cleared his throat. “I do not usually give away good hammers, but. . . . The work you’ve done today is worth more than the price of that hammer by far, and maybe it will help you to that ‘one day.’ Man, if I have ever seen anyone made to hold a smith’s hammer, it is you. So take it. Keep it.”
Perrin closed his hand around the haft. It did feel right. “Thank you,” he said. “I cannot say what this means to me.”
“Just remember the ‘one day,’ man. Just you remember it.”
As they left, Zarine looked up at him and said, “Do you have any idea how strange men are, blacksmith? No. I did not think you did.” She darted ahead, leaving him holding the hammer in one hand and scratching his head with the other.
No one in the common room looked at him twice, a golden-eyed man carrying a smith’s hammer. He went up to his room, remembering for once to light a tallow candle. His quiver and the axe hung from the same peg on the plaster wall. He hefted the axe in one hand, the hammer in the other. By weight of metal, the axe, with its half-moon blade and thick spike, was a good five or six pounds lighter than the hammer, but it felt ten times heavier. Replacing the axe in the loop on its belt, he set the hammer on the floor beneath the peg, handle against the wall. Axe haft and hammer haft almost touched, two pieces of wood equally thick. Two pieces of metal, near enough the same weight. For a long time he sat on the stool staring at them. He was still staring when Lan put his head into the room.
“Come, blacksmith. We have things to talk over.”
“I am a blacksmith,” Perrin said, and the Warder frowned at him.
“Don’t go winter-crazy on me now, blacksmith. If you cannot carry your weight any longer, you may drag us all down the mountain.”
“I’ll carry my weight,” Perrin growled. “I will do what has to be done. What do you want?”
“You, blacksmith. Don’t you listen? Come on, farmboy.”
That name that Zarine so often called him pulled him to his feet angrily, now, but Lan was already turning away. Perrin hurried into the hall and followed him toward the front of the inn, meaning to tell the Warder he had had enough of this “blacksmith” and “farmboy,” his name was Perrin Aybara. The Warder ducked into the inn’s only private dining room, overlooking the street.
Perrin followed him. “Now listen, Warder, I—”
<
br /> “You listen, Perrin,” Moiraine said. “Be quiet and listen.” Her face was smooth, but her eyes looked as grim as her voice sounded.
Perrin had not realized anyone was in the room except for himself and the Warder, standing with one arm up on the mantel of the unlit fireplace. Moiraine sat at the table in the middle of the floor, a simple piece, of black oak. None of the other chairs with their high, carved backs were occupied. Zarine was leaning against the wall at the other end of the room from Lan, scowling, and Loial had chosen to sit on the floor since none of the chairs really fit him.
“I’m glad you decided to join us, farmboy,” Zarine said sarcastically. “Moiraine would not say anything till you came. She just looks at us as if she is deciding which of us is going to die. I—”
“Be quiet,” Moiraine told her sharply. “One of the Forsaken is in Tear. The High Lord Samon is Be’lal.” Perrin shivered.
Loial squeezed his eyes shut and groaned. “I could have remained in the stedding. I would probably have been very happy, married, whoever my mother chose. She is a fine woman, my mother, and she would not give me to a bad wife.” His ears seemed to have hidden themselves completely in his shaggy hair.
“You can go back to Stedding Shangtai,” Moiraine said. “Leave now, if you wish. I will not stop you.”
Loial opened one eye. “I can go?”
“If you wish,” she said.
“Oh.” He opened the other eye, and scratched his cheek with blunt fingers the size of sausages. “I suppose. . . . I suppose . . . if I have a choice . . . that I will stay with all of you. I have taken a great many notes, but not nearly enough to complete my book, and I would not like to leave Perrin, and Rand—”
Moiraine cut him off in a cold voice. “Good, Loial. I am glad that you are staying. I will be glad to use any knowledge you have. But until this is done, I have no time to listen to your complaints!”
“I suppose,” Zarine said in an unsteady voice, “that there is no chance of me leaving?” She looked at Moiraine, and shivered. “I thought not. Blacksmith, if I live through this, I will make you pay.”
The Dragon Reborn Page 63