The Book of Swords. Gardner Dozois

and you lay it on the perfectly straight, flat bed of the anvil. You get down on your knees, looking for a tiny hair of light between the edge of the blade and the anvil. If you see it, the blade goes in the scrap.

      “Here,” I said, “come and look for yourself.”

      He got down beside me. “What am I looking for, exactly?”

      “Nothing. It isn’t there. That’s the point.”

      “Can I get up now, please?”

      Perfectly straight; so straight that not even light can squeeze through the gap. I hate all the steps on the way to perfection, the effort and the noise and the heat and the dust, but when you get there, you’re glad to be alive.

      I slid the hilt, grip, and pommel down over the tang, fixed the blade in the vise, and peened the end of the tang into a neat little button. Then I took the sword out of the vise and offered it to him, hilt first. “All done,” I said.

      “Finished?”

      “Finished. All yours.”

      I remember one kid I made a sword for, an earl’s son, seven feet tall and strong as a bull. I handed him his finished sword; he took a good grip on the hilt, then swung it round his head and brought it down full power on the horn of the anvil. It bit a chunk out, then bounced back a foot in the air, the edge undamaged. So I punched him halfway across the room. You clown, I said, look what you’ve done to my anvil. When he got up, he was in tears. But I forgave him, years later. There’s a thrill when you hold a good sword for the first time. It sort of tugs at your hands, like a dog wanting to be taken for a walk. You want to swish it about and hit things with it. At the very least, you do a few cuts and wards, on the pretext of checking the balance and the handling.

      He just took it from me, as though I’d given him a shopping list. “Thanks,” he said.

      “My pleasure,” I replied. “Well, good-bye. You can go now,” I added, when he didn’t move. “I’m busy.”

      “There was something else,” he said.

      I’d already turned my back on him. “What?”

      “I don’t know how to fence.”

      He was born, he told me, in a haybarn on the moor overlooking his father’s house, at noon on midsummer’s day. His mother, who should have known better, had insisted on riding out in the dog-cart with her maid to take lunch to the hawking party. Her pains came on, and there wasn’t time to get back to the house, but the barn was there and full of clean hay, with a stream nearby. His father, riding home with his hawk on his wrist, saw her from the track, lying in the hay with the baby on her lap. He’d had a good day, he told her. They’d got four pigeons and a heron.

      His father hadn’t wanted to go to Ultramar; but he held of the duke and the duke was going, so he didn’t really have any choice. In the event, the duke died of camp-fever a week after they landed. The boy’s father lasted nine months; then he got himself killed, by his best friend, in a pointless brawl in a tavern. He was twenty-two when he died. “The same age,” said the boy, “as I am now.”

      “That’s a sad story,” I told him. “And a very stupid one. Mind you, all stories from Ultramar are stupid if you ask me.”

      He scowled at me. “Maybe there’s too much stupidity in the world,” he said. “Maybe I want to do something about it.”

      I nodded. “You could diminish the quantity considerably by dying, I grant you. But maybe it’s too high a price to pay.”

      His eyes were cold and bright. “The man who killed my father is still alive,” he said. “He’s settled and prosperous, happy, he’s got everything he could possibly want. He came through the nightmare of Ultramar, and now the world makes sense to him again, and he’s a useful and productive member of society, admired and respected by his peers and his betters.”

      “So you’re going to cut his throat.”

      He shook his head. “Not likely,” he said. “That would be murder. No, I’m going to fight him sword to sword. I’m going to beat him and prove myself the better man. Then I’ll kill him.”

      I was tactfully silent for a moment. Then I said; “And you know absolutely nothing about sword-fighting.”

      “No. My father should’ve taught me, it’s what fathers do. But he died when I was two years old. I don’t know the first thing about it.”

      “And you’re going to challenge an old soldier, and you’re going to prove yourself the better man. I see.”

      He was looking me straight in the eye. I always feel uncomfortable when people do that even though I spend my life gazing at white-hot metal. “I asked about you,” he said. “They reckon you were a great fencer.”

      I sighed. “Who told you that?”

      “Were you?”

      “Were implies a state of affairs that no longer prevails,” I said. “Who told you about me?”

      He shrugged. “Friends of my father. You were a legend in Ultramar, apparently. Everybody’d heard of you.”

      “The defining characteristic of a legend is that it isn’t true,” I said. “I can fight, a bit. What’s that got to do with anything?”

      “You’re going to teach me.”

      I remember one time in Ultramar, we were smashing up this village. We did a lot of that. They called it chevauchee, but that’s just chivalry talk for burning barns and stamping on chickens. It’s supposed to break the enemy’s will to fight. Curiously enough, it has exactly the opposite effect. Anyway, I was in this farmyard. I had a torch in my hand, and I was going to set fire to a hayrick, like you do. And there was this dog. It was a stupid little thing, the sort you keep to catch rats, little more than a rat itself; and it jumped out at me, barking its head off, and it sank its teeth into my leg, and it simply would not let go, and I couldn’t get at it to stab it with my knife, not without stabbing myself in the process. I dropped the torch and danced round the farmyard, trying to squash it against walls, but it didn’t seem to make any odds. It was the most ridiculous little thing, and in the end it beat me. I staggered out into the lane, and it let go, dropped off, and sprinted back into the yard. My sergeant had to light the rick with a fire-arrow, and I never lived it down.

      I looked at him. I recognised the look in his silly pink face. “Is that right,” I said.

      “Yes. I need the best sword and the best teacher. I’ll pay you. You can have the fifth coin.”

      A gold besant. Actually, the proper name is hyperpyron, meaning “extra fine.” The enemy took so many of them off us in Ultramar that they adopted them in place of their own currency. That’s war for you; the enemy turn into you, and you turn into them, like the iron and steel rods under the hammer. The only besants you see over here are ones that got brought back, but they’re current everywhere. “I’m not interested in money,” I said.

      “I know. Neither am I. But if you pay a man to do a job and he takes your money, he’s obliged.”

      “I’m a lousy teacher,” I told him.

      “That’s all right, I’m a hopeless student. We’ll get on like a barn on fire.”

      If ever I get a dog, it’ll be one of those rat-like terriers. Maybe I just warm to aggressive creatures, I don’t know. “You can take your coin and stick it where the sun doesn’t shine,” I told him. “You overpaid me for the sword. We’ll call it change.”

      The sword isn’t a very good weapon. Most forms of armour are proof against it, including a properly padded jerkin; it’s too long to be handy in a scrum and too light and flimsy for serious bashing. In a pitched battle, give me a spear or an axe any time; in fact, nine times out of ten you’d be better off with everyday farm tools—staff-hooks, beanhooks, muck-forks, provided they’re made of good material