The Book of Swords. Gardner Dozois

       THE BEST MAN WINS

      He was in my light. I didn’t look up. “What do you want?” I said.

      “Excuse me, but are you the sword-smith?”

      There are certain times when you have to concentrate. This was one of them. “Yes. Go away and come back later.”

      “I haven’t told you what I—”

      “Go away and come back later.”

      He went away. I finished what I was doing. He came back later. In the interim, I did the third fold.

      Forge-welding is a horrible procedure and I hate doing it. In fact, I hate doing all the many stages that go to creating the finished object; some of them are agonisingly difficult, some are exhausting, some of them are very, very boring; a lot of them are all three, it’s your perfect microcosm of human endeavour. What I love is the feeling you get when you’ve done them, and they’ve come out right. Nothing in the whole wide world beats that.

      The third fold is—well, it’s the stage in making a sword-blade when you fold the material for the third time. The first fold is just a lot of thin rods, some iron, some steel, twisted together then heated white and forged into a single strip of thick ribbon. Then you twist, fold, and do it again. Then you twist, fold, and do it again. The third time is usually the easiest; the material’s had most of the rubbish beaten out of it, the flux usually stays put, and the work seems to flow that bit more readily under the hammer. It’s still a horrible job. It seems to take forever, and you can wreck everything you’ve done so far with one split second of carelessness; if you burn it or let it get too cold, or if a bit of scale or slag gets hammered in. You need to listen as well as look—for that unique hissing noise that tells you that the material is just starting to spoil but isn’t actually ruined yet; that’s the only moment at which one strip of steel will flow into another and form a single piece—so you can’t chat while you’re doing it. Since I spend most of my working day forge-welding, I have this reputation for unsociability. Not that I mind. I’d be unsociable if I were a ploughman.

      He came back when I was shovelling charcoal. I can talk and shovel at the same time, so that was all right.

      He was young, I’d say about twenty-three or -four; a tall bastard (all tall people are bastards; I’m five feet two) with curly blond hair like a wet fleece, a flat face, washed-out blue eyes, and a rather girly mouth. I took against him at first sight because I don’t like tall, pretty men. I put a lot of stock in first impressions. My first impressions are nearly always wrong. “What do you want?” I said.

      “I’d like to buy a sword, please.”

      I didn’t like his voice much, either. In that crucial first five seconds or so, voices are even more important to me than looks. Perfectly reasonable, if you ask me. Some princes look like rat-catchers, some rat-catchers look like princes, though the teeth usually give people away. But you can tell precisely where a man comes from and how well-off his parents were after a couple of words; hard data, genuine facts. The boy was quality—minor nobility—which covers everything from overambitious farmers to the younger brothers of dukes. You can tell immediately by the vowel sounds. They set my teeth on edge like bits of grit in bread. I don’t like the nobility much. Most of my customers are nobility, and most of the people I meet are customers.

      “Of course you do,” I said, straightening my back and laying the shovel down on the edge of the forge. “What do you want it for?”

      He looked at me as though I’d just leered at his sister. “Well, for fighting with.”

      I nodded. “Off to the wars, are you?”

      “At some stage, probably, yes.”

      “I wouldn’t if I were you,” I said, and I made a point of looking him up and down, thoroughly and deliberately. “It’s a horrible life, and it’s dangerous. I’d stay home if I were you. Make yourself useful.”

      I like to see how they take it. Call it my craftsman’s instinct. To give you an example; one of the things you do to test a really good sword is make it come compass—you fix the tang in a vise, then you bend it right round in a circle, until the point touches the shoulders; let it go, and it should spring back absolutely straight. Most perfectly good swords won’t take that sort of abuse; it’s an ordeal you reserve for the very best. It’s a horrible, cruel thing to do to a lovely artefact, and it’s the only sure way to prove its temper.

      Talking of temper; he stared at me, then shrugged. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re busy. I’ll try somewhere else.”

      I laughed. “Let me see to this fire and I’ll be right with you.”

      The fire rules my life, like a mother and her baby. It has to be fed, or it goes out. It has to be watered—splashed round the edge of the bed with a ladle—or it’ll burn the bed of the forge. It has to be pumped after every heat, so I do all its breathing for it, and you can’t turn your back on it for two minutes. From the moment when I light it in the morning, an hour before sunrise, until the point where I leave it to starve itself to death overnight, it’s constantly in my mind, like something at the edge of your vision, or a crime on your conscience; you’re not always looking at it, but you’re always watching it. Given half a chance, it’ll betray you. Sometimes I think I’m married to the damn thing.

      Indeed. I never had time for a wife. I’ve had offers; not from women, but from their fathers and brothers—he must be worth a bob or two, they say to themselves, and our Doria’s not getting any younger. But a man with a forge fire can’t fit a wife into his daily routine. I bake my bread in its embers, toast my cheese over it, warm a kettle of water twice a day to wash in, dry my shirts next to it. Some nights, when I’m too worn-out to struggle the ten yards to my bed, I sit on the floor with my back to it and go to sleep, and wake up in the morning with a cricked neck and a headache. The reason we don’t quarrel all the time is that it can’t speak. It doesn’t need to.

      The fire and I have lived sociably together for twenty years, ever since I came back from the wars. Twenty years. In some jurisdictions, you get less for murder.

      “The term sword,” I said, wiping dust and embers off the table with my sleeve, “can mean a lot of different things. I need you to be more specific. Sit down.”

      He perched gingerly on the bench. I poured cider into two wooden bowls and put one down in front of him. There was dust floating on the top; there always is. Everything in my life comes with a frosting of dark grey gritty dust, courtesy of the fire. Bless him, he did his best to pretend it wasn’t there and took a little sip, like a girl.

      “There’s your short riding sword,” I said, “and your thirty-inch arming sword, your sword-and-shield sword, which is either a constant flattened diamond section, what the army calls a Type Fifteen, or else with a half length fuller, your Type Fourteen; there’s your tuck, your falchion, your messer, side-sword or hanger; there’s your long sword, great sword, hand-and-a-half, Type Eighteen, true bastard, your great sword of war and your proper two-hander, though that’s a highly specialised tool, so you won’t be wanting one of them. And those are just the main headings. Which is why I asked you; what do you want it for?”

      He looked at me, then deliberately drank a swallow of my horrible dusty cider. “For fighting with,” he said. “Sorry, I don’t know very much about it.”

      “Have you got any money?”

      He