The Book of Swords. Gardner Dozois

besants; ninety-two parts fine, guaranteed by the Emperor. I picked one up. The artwork on a besant is horrible, crude and ugly. That’s because the design’s stayed the same for six hundred years, copied over and over again by ignorant and illiterate die-cutters; it stays the same because it’s trusted. They copy the lettering, but they don’t know their letters, so you just get shapes. It’s a good general rule, in fact; the prettier the coin, the less gold it contains; the uglier, conversely, the better. I knew a forger once. They caught him and hanged him because his work was too fine.

      I put my cup on top of one coin, then pushed the other four back at him. “All right?”

      He shrugged. “I want the very best.”

      “It’d be wasted on you.”

      “Even so.”

      “Fine. The very best is what you’ll get. After all, once you’re dead, it’ll move on, sooner or later it’ll end up with someone who’ll be able to use it.” I grinned at him. “Most likely your enemy.”

      He smiled. “You mean I’ll reward him for killing me.”

      “The labourer is worthy of his hire,” I replied. “Right, since you haven’t got a clue what you want, I’ll have to decide for you. For your gold besant you’ll get a long sword. Do you know what that—?”

      “No. Sorry.”

      I scratched my ear. “Blade three feet long,” I said, “two and a half inches wide at the hilt, tapering straight to a needle point. The handle as long as your forearm, from the inside of your elbow to the tip of your middle finger. Weight absolutely no more than three pounds, and it’ll feel a good deal lighter than that because I’ll balance it perfectly. It’ll be a stabber more than a cutter because it’s the point that wins fights, not the edge. I strongly recommend a fuller—you don’t know what a fuller is, do you?”

      “No.”

      “Well, you’re getting one anyway. Will that do you?”

      He sort of gazed at me as if I were the Moon. “I want the best sword ever made,” he said. “I can pay more if necessary.”

      The best sword ever made. The silly thing was, I could do it. If I could be bothered. Or I could make him the usual and tell him it was the best sword ever made, and how could he possibly ever know? There are maybe ten men in the world qualified to judge. Me and nine others.

      On the other hand; I love my craft. Here was a young fool saying; indulge yourself, at my expense. And the work, of course, the sword itself, would still be alive in a thousand years’ time, venerated and revered, with my name on the hilt. The best ever made; and if I didn’t do it, someone else would, and it wouldn’t be my name on it.

      I thought for a moment, then leant forward, put my fingertips on two more of his coins, and dragged them towards me, like a ploughshare through clay. “All right?”

      He shrugged. “You know about these things.”

      I nodded. “In fact,” I said, and took a fourth coin. He didn’t move. It was as though he wasn’t interested. “That’s just for the plain sword,” I said. “I don’t do polishing, engraving, carving, chiselling, or inlay. I don’t set jewels in hilts because they chafe your hands raw and fall out. I don’t even make scabbards. You can have it tarted up later if you want, but that’s up to you.”

      “The plain sword will do me just fine,” he said.

      Which puzzled me.

      I have a lot of experience of the nobility. This one—his voice was exactly right, so I could vouch for him, as though I’d known him all my life. The clothes were plain, good quality, old but well looked after; a nice pair of boots, though I’d have said they were a size too big, so maybe inherited. Five besants is a vast, stunning amount of money, but I got the impression it was all he had.

      “Let me guess,” I said. “Your father died, and your elder brother got the house and the land. Your portion was five gold bits. You accept that that’s how it’s got to be, but you’re bitter. You think; I’ll blow the lot on the best sword ever made and go off and carve myself out a fortune, like Robert the Fox or Boamund. Something like that?”

      A very slight nod. “Something like that.”

      “Fine,” I said. “A certain category of people and their money are easily parted. If you live long enough to get some sense beaten into you, you’ll get rather more than four gold bits for the sword, and then you can buy a nice farm.”

      He smiled. “That’s all right, then.”

      I like people who take no notice when I’m rude to them.

      “Can I watch?” he asked.

      That’s a question that could get you in real trouble, depending on context. Like the man and woman you’ve just thought of, my answer is usually No. “If you like,” I said. “Yes, why not? You can be a witness.”

      He frowned. “That’s an odd choice of word.”

      “Like a prophet in scripture,” I said. “When He turns water into wine or raises the dead or recites the Law out of a burning tree. There has to be someone on hand to see, or what’s the good in it?”

      (I remembered saying that, later.)

      Now he nodded. “A miracle.”

      “Along those lines. But a miracle is something you didn’t expect to happen.”

      Off to the wars. We talk about “the wars” as though it’s a place; leave Perimadeia on the north road till you reach a crossroads, bear left, take the next right, just past the old ruined mill, you can’t miss it. At the very least, a country, with its own language, customs, distinctive national dress and regional delicacies. But in theory, every war is different, as individual and unique as a human being; each war has parents that influence it, but grows up to follow its own nature and beget its own offspring. But we talk about people en masse—the Aelians, the Mezentines, the Rosinholet—as though a million disparate entities can be combined into one, the way I twist and hammer a faggot of iron rods into a single ribbon. And when you look at them, the wars are like that; like a crowd of people. When you’re standing among them, they’re all different. Step back three hundred yards, and all you see is one shape: an army, say, advancing toward you. We call that shape “the enemy,” it’s the dragon we have to kill in order to prevail and be heroes. By the time it reaches us, it’s delaminated into individuals, into one man at a time, rushing at us waving a spear, out to do us harm, absolutely terrified, just as we are.

      We say “the wars,” but here’s a secret. There is only one war. It’s never over. It flows, like the metal at white heat under the hammer, and joins up with the last war and the next war, to form one continuous ribbon. My father went to the wars, I went to the wars, my son will go to the wars, and his son after him, and it’ll be the same place. Like going to Boc Bohec. My father went there, before they pulled down the White Temple and when Foregate was still open fields. I went there, and Foregate was a marketplace. When my son goes there, they’ll have built houses on Foregate; but the place will still be Boc Bohec, and the war will still be the war. Same place, same language and local customs, slightly altered by the prevailing fashions in valour and misery, which come around and go around. In my time at the wars, hilts were curved and pommels were round or teardrop. These days, I do mostly straight cross hilts and scent-bottle pommels, which were all the rage a hundred years ago. There are fashions in everything. The tides go in and out, but the sea is always the sea.

      My wars were in Ultramar; which isn’t a place-name, it’s just Aelian for “across the sea.” Ultramar, which was what we were fighting for, wasn’t a piece of land, a geographical entity. It was an idea; the kingdom of God on Earth. You won’t find it on a map—not now, that’s for sure; we lost, and all the places we used to know are called something else now, in another language, which we could never be bothered to learn. We weren’t there for the idea, of course, although it was probably a good one at the time. We were there to rob ourselves