He said: “Even though you do not lead a troop at the Contest, next year you will be squired. In time you will be a Captain like your father.”
“Rudi,” I said, “would you have wished to be a warrior?”
I still could not believe it. I had heard dwarfs talk, and never known such a thing even hinted. They saw their kind as the builders and producers of the city’s wealth, war as a sickness that afflicted proper men, laying waste to the land’s prosperity. I had heard one say once that if there were only dwarfs all cities would be at peace and grow rich.
Rudi finished his second pot and laughed.
“A warrior, Master Luke? When I am Master Armorer? And will die at last in my bed, with no scars on my body except the small scars of my trade. But you would find it hard, I think, to make swords for other men to use. There are disappointments in all men’s lives, even those who have achieved their ambition, and there are compensations. You are young and strong, and gaining skill in arms. You will go far in the Prince’s service, and prosper. Not to be chosen for the Contest is a small thing to bear.”
It was true, I supposed, but it did not help. I looked past him at the four swords on the wall, only dimly visible among the shadows that moved as the fire rose and fell with the blowing of the bellows. I had worn one of them in imagination all winter, sometimes the one with the red stone winking in its crosspiece. I had rejected that particular part of the daydream as futile, but the other had seemed possible. Having to abandon it was bitter.
Rudi threw his pot to the assistant dwarf and stood up.
“There is work still to do,” he said. “Come, and I will show you how to put an edge on steel, in case a fairy touches you in the night and your legs shorten.”
• • •
When I left the forge I crossed the river. There was confusion on the bridge, with carts jammed together and men shouting angrily, smoking the chill air with their curses. An overloaded cart had overturned and the way was blocked. The river, pouring violently from the millstream, ran free and turbulent at its center but the verges were rimmed with ice and downstream, between the grazing meadows, the ice spread right across from side to side. Farther down still it was thick enough for skating; or had been yesterday, and there could be no thaw with this sharp wind. I meant to go there in the afternoon but the morning had worn away and my chief thought was of dinner.
My home lay higher up in the city, among the houses that surrounded the Prince’s palace. I did not go that way, though, but turned right along the street that ran parallel with the river for a while, and was called the River Road. The house into which I went was small but well kept, shutters and door painted bright blue, window sills and flagstones underneath them scoured and whitened. Bedding hung from the open windows at the top and would do so until mid-afternoon, when mattresses, sheets, blankets and eiderdowns were taken in for the beds to be made up and heated with the wrapped bricks that now lay at the back of the hearth. Everything was spick and span and in good order. This was my Aunt Mary’s house.
She was not truly my aunt, but my father’s first wife. They had known each other as children and he had married her when he was a young warrior. They had a son, my half brother Peter, whom I called cousin. Riding to war with the Prince (the old Prince, our present Prince’s father) my father had seen a farmer’s daughter, my mother, whose beauty had amazed and confounded him. It was in that campaign that he was made Captain and so could divorce his wife, on petition to the Prince, and take another. He divorced my Aunt Mary and brought his young bride back to the city, and the next year I was born.
He had made provision for his first wife and child. He would have done so even if the law had not required it because he was a just man. Moreover, although he no longer loved her, he respected my Aunt Mary and came to her house often, not just to see his son but to talk to her and listen to her advice. And I, from my earliest days of roaming abroad, treated her house as my second home.
In some ways, even, I preferred it to my own. It was smaller, pokier, but clean and sweet smelling. My aunt had only two polymuf servants, my mother eight or nine, but the two were closely watched and supervised, the eight or nine for the most part slack and grumbling. From time to time my mother, in despair, would have my father dismiss one or more and get others, hiding in her room while this was done, and would make resolutions that in the future everything would be different. It never was. I heard my father say one day in exasperation that no one could have imagined such a thing—a farmer’s daughter who knew less of running a house than a lady of five generations’ idleness. She wept, and he forgot his annoyance in comforting her.
She was beautiful. At thirty she had the skin, the face and figure of a girl. Her likeness hung on the walls of half a dozen great houses, including the palace itself: Margry, the Prince’s painter, had had her sit for him a score of times. And yet she aroused no spite or jealousy among the ladies of the court. Everyone recognized she was without malice and therefore she provoked none. I had seen her petulant sometimes but never angry. For the most part she was happy, talkative, eager to please and to be pleased. She liked sunshine and pet animals and glancing at her own beauty in the glass.
My Aunt Mary was very different. She was gray-haired and had a long harsh face scored with years of work and brooding. She was deep-natured. She did not make a show of her feelings—she spoke little and smiled less—but their strength was shown in small things: a brief condemnation of that person, a rare word of praise for this. Of all men she most respected my father and continued to treat him as master of the house which he had left when he divorced her. Toward others, with a single exception, she was reserved. That one was her son, my cousin Peter. Him she loved with the depth and fierceness of a river forced to run between narrow banks. Even this she strove to hide, but it could not be hidden.
She would have accepted me because of my father—it was his house and his son, though by another wife, must be made welcome in it—but I fancied she liked me a little apart from that. She was strict, as she was in everything, and I would never have dared to go to her table with unwashed hands as I had sometimes done at home. But she showed me some kindness, and somehow my black moods sat on me less heavily in her house. It was not that she indulged me in them, if anything the reverse, but that my misery seemed less important in the presence of her watchful austerity.
This morning she greeted me with a nod and told me that dinner was almost ready. I had scented it, a stew whose rich smell made my appetite clamorous. At home the polymuf cook used the best of meats and vegetables but the stews were thin and tasteless. I went to the kitchen to wash and saw one of the polymufs scouring a pan. (My aunt did her own cooking but kept her servants busy with cleaning and polishing.) This was Gerda; she had short arms and the mark of an extra eye on her forehead, though it had never opened. She bobbed her head to me without ceasing her work. My aunt allowed her servants fair periods of rest but required good labor the rest of the time.
I was at the table and eating when Peter came in. I heard him tethering his horse outside and he pulled off his big leather coat as he entered. Gerda brought a bowl of hot water, soap and a towel, and he washed in the hall as befitted a grown man. He was eighteen, a Sergeant under my father’s command, soon to be made Mister as the junior Captains were called. When he had finished he took the seat at the head of the table, which was his except when my father dined here. He said to me cheerfully:
“Have you heard the news, Luke?”
“What news?”