David Drake - Balefires

"Little slut," the soldier said affectionately. Then, to Dama, "How do you want your wine?"

"One to three, as always," the blond merchant replied.

"I thought maybe your balls had come down since I saw you last," Vettius said, shaking his head. "Well, here's your wine; water it yourself."

He filled his own cup with the resin-thickened wine and slurped half of it. "You know," he said reflectively, "when I was on Naxos three years ago I made a special trip to a vineyard to get a drink of this before they added the pitch to preserve it in transport."

Vettius paused. "Well," Dama pressed him, "how was it?"

"Thin," the soldier admitted. "I'd rather drink Egyptian beer."

He began to laugh and Dama joined him halfheartedly. At last Vettius wiped the tears from his eyes and gulped the rest of his wine. When he had refilled his cup he rocked back on his stool and gazed shrewdly at his friend. "You brought a bolt of cloth with you tonight," he said.

"That's right," Dama agreed with a thin smile. "It's a piece of silk brocade, much heavier than what we usually see here."

Vettius smiled back at him, showing his teeth like a bear snarling."So I'm a silk fancier now?" he asked."Come on, nobody will come until I call them. What do you have under the silk that you didn't want my servants to see?"

Dama unrolled the silk without answering. The lustrous cloth had been wound around a sword whose hilt gleamed richly above a pair of laths bound over the blade. He tugged at the hilt and the laths fell away to reveal a slim blade, longer than that of a military sword. The gray steel was marked like wind-rippled water.

"Do you believe that metal can be enchanted?" Dama asked.

"Stick to your silk, merchant," the soldier replied with a chuckle, and took the sword from Dama. He whipped the blade twice through the air.

"Oh, yes," he went on, "it's been a long time since I saw one of these."

Setting the point against the wall, the big soldier leaned his weight against it. The blade bowed almost double. The point shifted very slightly and the steel sprang straight, skidding along the stone. The sword blurred, humming a low note that made both men's bowels quiver.

"Thought the way it bends was magical, hey?"

Dama nodded. "I thought it might be."

"Well, that's reasonable," Vettius said."It doesn't act much like a piece of steel, does it? Just the way it's tempered, though. You know about that?"

"I think I know how this blade was tempered," the merchant answered.

"Yeah, run it through a plump slave's butt a few times to quench it," Vettius said off-handedly. His fierce smile returned. "Not very… civilized, shall we say? But not magic."

"Not magic?" Dama repeated with an odd inflexion."Then let me tell you the rest of the story."

Vettius raised his cup in silent consent.

"I was in Amida…" the merchant began, and his mind drifted back to the fear and mud-brick houses overlooking the Tigris.

"We knew that Shapur was coming, of course; that spring, next spring-soon at least. He'd made peace with the Chionitae and they'd joined him as allies against Rome. Still, I had a caravan due any day and I didn't trust anyone else to bring it home to Antioch. It was a gamble and at the time it seemed worth it."

Dama snorted to himself, "Well, I guess it could have been worse.

"Aside from waiting to see whether my people would arrive before the Persians did, there was nothing to do in Amida but bake in the dust. It had never been a big place and now, with the shanties outside the wall abandoned and the whole countryside squeezed in on top of the garrison, there wasn't room to spit."

The merchant took a deep draught of his wine as he remembered. Vettius poured him more straight from the jar. "Mithra! There were two regiments of Gaulish foot there, half-dead with the heat and crazy from being cooped up. That was later, though, after the gates were shut.

"Wealth has its advantages and I'd gotten a whole house for my crew. I put animals on the ground floor and the men on the second; that left me the roof to myself. There was a breeze up there sometimes.

"The place next door was owned by a smith named Khusraw and I could see over his wall into the courtyard where his forge was set up. He claimed to be Armenian but there was talk of him really being a Persian himself. It didn't matter, not while he was turning weapons out and we needed them so bad."

"He made this?"Vettius asked, tapping the sword with his fingernail. The steel moaned softly.

Dama nodded absently, his eyes fixed on a scene in the past. "I watched him while he worked at night; the hammer ringing would have kept me awake anyway. At night he sang. He'd stand there singing with the hearth glaring off him, tall and stringy and as old as the world. He had a little slave to help him, pumping on the bellows. You've seen a charcoal hearth glow under a bellows?"

Vettius nodded. "Like a drop of sun."

Dama raised his eyebrows."Perhaps," he said, sipping at his thick wine, "but I don't find it a clean light. It made everything look so strange, so flat, that it was hours before I realized that the plate Khusraw was forging must have weighed as much as I did."

"Siege armor?" the soldier suggested.

"Not siege armor," Dama replied."There were other plates too, some of them that he welded into tubes, singing all the time."

The blond Cappadocian paused to finish his wine. He held out the cup to his host with a wan smile. "You may as well fill it again. I'm sweating it out faster than I drink it."

He wiped his brow with a napkin and continued. "It was a funny household in other ways. Khusraw, his wife, and his son-a boy about eight or ten. You can't really say with Persians. Those three and one slave boy I never heard to speak. No other servants in the house even though the woman looked like she was about to drop quints.

"I saw her close one day, trying to buy a sword for my foreman, seeing the way things were tending. Her belly looked wrong. It didn't shift like it ought to when she moved and she didn't seem to be carrying as much weight as if she were really pregnant. Padded or not, there was something strange about her.

"As for my own problem, that was decided the morning the Persians appeared. Oh, I know, you've fought them; but Lucius, you can't imagine what they looked like stretched all across the horizon with the sun dazzling on their spearpoints and armor. Mithra! Even so, it didn't seem too bad at first. The walls were strong and we were sure we could hold out until Ursicinius relieved us."

Vettius made a guttural sound and stared at the table. Dama laid his hand on the big soldier's forearm and said, "Lucius, you know I meant nothing against you or the army."

Vettius looked up with a ghost of his old smile, "Yeah, I know you didn't. No reason for me to be sensitive, anyhow. I didn't give the orders.

"Or refuse to give them," he added bitterly after a moment's reflection. "Have some more wine and go on with your story."

Dama drank and set his cup down empty. "Until things got really serious I spent most nights on my roof. Khusraw was working on a sword, now, and I forgot about the other stuff he had been forging. But everytime he had the metal beaten out into a flat blade he folded it back in on itself and started over."

The soldier nodded in understanding, running his finger along the watermarked blade. The merchant shrugged.

"Very late one night I awakened. Khusraw stood beside the forge and that evil white light flared over the courtyard every time the bellows pulsed. Tied to the anvil was a half-filled grain sack. The only noise, though, was the thump of the bellows and perhaps a whisper of the words Khusraw was chanting, and I couldn't figure out what had awakened me. Then another moan came from the house. That sound I knew-Khusraw's wife was in labor and I thought I'd been wrong about her belly being padded.