Jack Whyte - The Sorcer part 1 - The Fort at River's Bend

I stooped and picked up the Varrus sword in my right hand, briefly aware of the painful tingling in my fingers as they closed about the hilt. A great, vee-shaped gouge almost severed the blade, the wounded metal glinting, raw and fresh and new-looking, among the rust that covered the rest of it. Excalibur's keen edge had struck deep, penetrating the metal of the other blade as though it were wood or lead, twisting and wrenching it out of shape with effortless force, then lodging firmly enough for the momentum of Ambrose's swing to rip the weapon from my clutching hands and cast it aside effortlessly, ruined and useless forever thenceforth. I held the broken thing up for Ambrose's inspection. Its long blade was twisted and bent far out of true in two directions: one where it had bent sideways around the impact of Excalibur's smashing bite, and the other in a tortured twisting of the very metal surrounding the point of impact, skewing it like wrought iron twisted in a forge. I dropped the now useless weapon to the floor.

"There is the reason underlying my playing with sticks, Brother. The need for practice swords ... or for one specific practice sword."

"I don't follow you."

"I know you don't, but you will. What you have just done defines and underlines my problem. There's no blade in the world that can withstand Excalibur. It cuts through other metals, without losing its own edge. It is unique, and that, I have decided, is its tragedy."

"Tragedy!" Ambrose's shout was a scoffing laugh. "What's tragic about it? The thing is magical and utterly unbelievable. No tragedy there, Brother."

"No, I agree, just as there was no weakness in Alexander's sarissas."

That wiped the smile from my brother's face. "What? There's no comparison. Where can the weakness lie in Excalibur? Most ordinary men, seeing what it can do—like cutting that blade in half—would swear it to be magic and live in fear of it. The warrior who carries it will be invincible, and the envy of the world."

"The king, you mean ... the king who carries it."

"Aye—" he broke off, eyeing me askance. "It is to be young Arthur's, isn't it? You have not changed your mind on that?"

"No, I have not. He is his father's son and heir to the Pendragon lands and kingdom in his own right. I have had no change of heart in any part of that. But I am concerned about training the boy to face the task he must, here in these hills, so far away from Camulod and from others who would bring out the best in him. And if he is to master this new sword of his, Excalibur, instead of merely swinging it, then he must have someone wielding a weapon fit to withstand his, against whom he can practice."

"Well, you will train him, won't you? He'll fight you, and Dedalus and Rufio and all the others. No shortage of trainers, I think."

"No, but you are still not hearing me. Excalibur's weakness is its strength, Ambrose! I have nothing with which to train the boy—no Excalibur against which he can swing Excalibur." I nodded towards the broken thing in the comer. "That was a superior sword, a Varrus blade. It was cut almost in half with one blow. How am I to train the boy to use the weapon adequately when there is nothing comparable to it? It won't ever be enough simply to train him with another sword, a lesser weapon, because then he'll be master only of a lesser weapon, lacking the refinement, the edge, the balance and the strength of this sword, this blade, this excellence."

As I spoke the words, I saw comprehension breaking in my brother's eyes. Almost immediately, he started to smile, and then his smile grew into a radiant grin as he subsided into one of my chairs, grounding Excalibur's point between his feet.

"What?" I asked him. "You can find humour in that? Why are you smiling? What is it?"

He swung the point of the sword up from the floor, holding it now above his head so that the weight of the hilt and pommel pressed into his lap and patterns of reflected light raced along the mighty blade that reared between us. "This thing, Excalibur. Did anyone work with Publius Varrus in the making of it?"

"Aye, of course, his friend Equus. They made the sword together, working alternately on it until it was finished."

"And does anyone yet live who might know how they made the blade?"

"Aye, Equus's sons, Joseph and Carol. They had no hand in the making of the sword itself, but they are both smiths, and I know their father taught them the art of folding and beating metal the way he and Varrus did in making Excalibur, tempering ordinary iron into superior swords. They do it now, to this day. And more than that, the use of moulds to shape and bind the hilts of our weapons to the tangs of our blades has become commonplace in Camulod."

"So they could make another Excalibur."

"Aye, they could, either one of them, if it were possible," I agreed, before I realized what he had said, and then I checked myself. "What? Another—?"

"From the Lady, Cay! The half of her that still remains in Camulod. Isn't that what you told me, that Varrus melted the statue down to make the sword, then remade the statue, smaller and lighter, with the remaining metal? The remaining metal, Cay, the metal from the sky stone! We can make your training sword—another Excalibur, less ornate, but no less magical in its properties, a plain blade with which to test the other."

"By the Christ!" I was thunderstruck. His solution was so crystalline, so perfect and so obvious that I could not now comprehend my own failure to see it for myself.

"Damnation! Joseph is here with you, isn't he? No matter, we'll have Carol make another sword, in Camulod since that's where the statue is, and we'll pattern it upon this one, but as I said, not so grandly and it will be nowhere near as pretty. Is Carol capable of doing this alone?" I nodded, mute. "Good, then. It should not tax him too greatly. What we need here is not another thing of blinding beauty, but a plain, functional weapon of strength and durability that will stand up to this one here on equal terms. We have all the dimensions—all we need do now is have Carol duplicate them, without regard to decoration. What think you?"

I sat shaking my head, overwhelmed by the beautiful simplicity of his instant solution to a problem that had been plaguing me for months. So close had I been to the source of the solution, I saw now, that my eyes had passed over it mentally a thousand times without seeing it. Ambrose was watching me, his eyes aglow.

"You agree?"

"Agree? Of course I agree. It is a brilliant solution, Ambrose! We'll start working on it immediately by preparing a full set of drawings from Publius Varrus's original notations and sketches—I have all of them here. When you return home, you will be able to take written instructions with you, containing the exact dimensions of Excalibur and whatever else Carol's brother Joseph might wish to add in the way of advice on the treatment and melting of the statue's metal and the forging of it into another blade. Of course, we'll have to show it to Joseph— Excalibur, I mean."

Ambrose frowned at me. "Is that a problem? I hear doubt in your voice."

I shrugged. "Well, not doubt, perhaps, but definite trepidation. I hate to do it. Today, only you, Shelagh, Donuil and I know Excalibur exists. That is already far too many people. Every other person who knows about it increases the odds that the secret will be discovered."

He was silent for a while, digesting that, and then he shrugged. "Well then, why does Joseph have to see the thing? As you said, you have all the dimensions, and Joseph's a smith. He should be able to work from those alone. A sword's a sword, and this will simply be a larger, longer, heavier sword than he and Carol have made before. No need for them to see the real thing, is there?"

I smiled at him. "How is Joseph to visualize the sword's reality and depict it accurately and minutely if he has never seen it?" I shook my head. "No, I don't like it, but I think we must show it to him. He is one of us, true to the bone, and his father helped to make the thing, and we are asking him to help us duplicate it. We'll show it to him tonight and swear him to secrecy. Once he has seen the sword, he'll also see the importance of the task. I wonder how long it will take Carol to make the new one."