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

"Oh? What work is that?"

All at once his expression sobered. "The duplicate sword. I want to sit down one last time with you and Joseph, to make sure that we have missed nothing and everything is as it should be. I spoke with him here, less than an hour ago. He has been working on the drawings we discussed and they are ready, and he tells me he has spent four days, and two entire nights out of the past three, in the forge. Now he is most insistent that we three meet one more time, to finalize the details of this project, and I agree with him. All very well for you and I to feel the matter's in good hands, but the final responsibility will lie in Carol's jurisdiction, and he will have to deal with it alone. It would be unwise, even unjust of us, not to make sure that we have left nothing to chance that might be remedied and dealt with in detail. This may be the most important undertaking any of us ever assumes. That's why I came back in here, originally, to fetch you. But when I saw you lying there, lolling all naked, with your mouth hanging open, some mischievous urgency took hold of me and I went looking for cold water. And now I come seeking a truce. We really must meet with Joseph."

I stood up and moved towards the door, passing him on my way.

"Truce, then, until our business with Joseph is con- eluded. After that, beware thy mortified and vengeful brother. Is it still storming outside?"

"Disgustingly."

We sent one of the boys to ask Joseph to meet with us in my quarters, where the light was better than anywhere else that late afternoon, thanks to the wealth of fine wax candles I possessed. A dozen of them were burning in two candelabra on my big table when he came in from the rain, clutching an armload of impedimenta and cursing the weather from beneath the voluminous cloak in which he was swathed.

"Damnation," he spat as soon as the door was closed. "I thought winter was gone."

"So did we all," I answered. "Come over to the fire and warm yourself."

As he stood stamping his booted feet and unwrapping the folds of his cloak, Ambrose relieved him of the heavy burden he clutched awkwardly beneath one arm, protected by his cloak, while I poured him a beaker of the hot, honeyed wine we called "sweet flames," some of which I had prepared as soon as I reached home.

Joseph had brought two things with him, clutching them protectively beneath his cloak to keep them dry: a long, cloth-wrapped bundle containing lengths of iron, judging by the heavy, clanking noises it gave out, and a thick roll of heavy parchments. He thanked me as he took the steaming cup from me and then crossed to stand before the blazing fire in the brazier, cupping the drink in his chilled hands, leaving me and Ambrose to examine the drawings he had brought. As Ambrose set about stretching them out on the table top and weighting the ends to prevent them rolling up on themselves again, I took the opportunity to look long and hard at this Joseph who had decided to accompany us from Camulod, leaving behind a lifetime of belonging in one place to seek a new life in the unknown north. I was surprised to realize that I had no idea how old he was, although I knew he was at least a decade older than me. Joseph had been fully grown and already working in his father's smithy when I first began to take notice of the people around me who were not part of my immediate family.

Joseph's father had been known as Equus, the Roman name for a horse, because of his great size and strength; his three were all big men, but they lacked the sheer massiveness that had earned Equus his name. Lars, the eldest, having no wish to spend his life as a smith, had run away from his home in Colchester as a boy to enlist in the legions, and had not been heard of again for more than a score of years until I found him, by sheer accident, running a road house for travellers on the way to Isca, while I was pursuing my cousin Uther, several years earlier. He had journeyed to Camulod at my urging, and there had been reunited with his surviving brothers, Joseph and Carol, who had become the Colony's senior smiths.

Joseph, I remembered from my boyhood, had once had black, thick-curling hair. Although he was now completely white-headed, his hair remained a thick, healthy-looking mane, and it occurred to me now, for the first time, that he was vain about it, keeping it clean and quite long, in a fashion I had seen in no other smith. Publius Varrus, my beloved uncle, had always worn both hair and beard close- cropped, and I remembered him telling me that long hair is a hazard in a spark-filled smithy. By some miracle, Joseph had managed to retain most of his teeth, at an age when his contemporaries were all toothless, and his skin was dark, almost swarthy, so that in the summer sun he quickly turned a deep, dark brown against which his pale blue Celtic eyes stood out startlingly bright. He was, I realized for the first time, a fine-looking man, with a narrow, intelligent face and a finely chiselled nose with a distinct Romanness to it, despite his Celtic blood. As he stood there, gazing into the fire and oblivious to my inspection, I ran my eyes down from his head to his feet, noting the square, solid strength of him and seeing how the hardship of his craft had kept the signs of his advancing age to a minimum. His forearms were corded with muscle, the lines of them thrown into tension by the way he was holding his cup, and I knew that his upper arms and shoulders held the same, clean-cut definition.

Joseph wore only a plain, dark-grey, knee-length tunic of heavy, coarse wool devoid of decorations, a functional garment, tightly belted at the waist, designed and intended to disguise the ravages of working among smoke and charcoal all day, every day. On his feet and legs he wore heavy leather boots of the kind that our foot soldiers wore, thickly soled with several layers of cured and toughened bullhide then studded with heavy metal hobnails made in his own forge; the upper portions were bound and sandalled up to just below his knees, and beneath them he wore heavy stockings of the same thick, dark-grey wool, their tops turned down to cover the boot tops.

At that point, he became aware that I was watching him and turned to look at me, one eyebrow raised in curiosity, but at precisely the same moment Ambrose straightened up from his first scrutiny of the drawings and called to me to come and look at them.

They were very fine, although some of them were scarcely comprehensible to me, and I found myself surprised at the precision of Joseph's penmanship.

"These are excellent, Joseph, but why are there two sets?"

He grunted and sniffed, then put down his cup before answering. "For comparison. We'll use but one of them, the plain set. The other, showing Excalibur as it is, we'll burn as soon as we are all satisfied the main one is correct." He left the fire and crossed to where we stood, holding his cup in one hand while he pointed out details of the drawings with the other. As he stood close by my side I detected the odour of the smithy on his clothes, a nostalgic mixture of forge smoke and something I could only think of as "the iron smell" that transported me immediately to my boyhood. Joseph spoke with the authority of the craftsman as his hand moved swiftly across the drawings. "Here you have Excalibur as it is, and I swear, by all the gods, I've never seen a thing so wondrous fine. I knew it had been made, by Publius Varrus and my father, but the making of it was all I had heard of. My father spoke of it with pride, but now I know he also spoke with great reserve, because he never mentioned the beauty of the thing, or its · greatness, or the size or colour of it. I knew it was longer than a short-sword, but I thought of it in those days as something resembling a spatha, but finer, with a blade an arm's length long. Nothing, no imaginings of mine, could have prepared me for the actual sight of it—the sheer size and splendour of the thing. I mean, from what my father did say from time to time, I knew this wondrous sword had no blemishes, but I could never have imagined what he truly meant by calling it flawless. Its beauty is unnatural ... " He paused, shaking his head again in amazement.