Shadows on the Stars (38 page)

Ethaun leaned back on the seed bags that formed his chair, gazing across the wooden table at Tamwyn. “Ye see, I always wanted to be an explorer. To go places, aye! Places so amazin’ that I couldn’t even imagine them. Even though I’d seen naught but the inside o’ me old master’s smithy in Stoneroot, that was me dream.”

He sucked on his smoke-blackened pipe. “An’ so I ran away, I did, after hearin’ that the greatest explorer o’ them all, Krystallus hisself, was roundin’ up brave folks to join him on his biggest journey ever. A journey people said might go all the way to the stars.”

Tamwyn’s gaze bored into him. “Yes?”

“Well, I was so very young, Krystallus didn’t want me along. Said it was jest too damn dangerous. But I tried me best to convince him he’d need a good smith, as I’d worked the hammer an’ tongs since boyhood. Still he said no. But I pestered him an’ pestered him, bein’ the sort o’ lad who jest wouldn’t give up.”

He chewed on his pipe for a moment, eyeing Tamwyn. “A lot like ye, methinks.”

Grinning, Tamwyn nodded. “And what happened?”

“Well, finally, he changed his mind. Said I could come an’ be a second smith, as well as pot washer, seam stitcher, an’ all-round helper. Told me that, with the twelve folks he already had in his group, I’d make it a lucky thirteen.”

Ethaun turned toward his wall cluttered with tools, his face wistful. “Well, I was happier than a pig in paradise! An’ fer the first few weeks, it was a great adventure, fer certain. I saw jest about everthin’ I’d ever hoped fer—portals, painted tunnels, upside down waterfalls, ye name it.”

Suddenly he scowled. “Then one day, jest when we was settin’ up camp in a cavern, them termites came out o’ nowhere! Hulkin’, fearsome beasts, with slashers like giant broadswords, an’ hungry fer blood. I seen them first, but I . . .”

After his voice faded, the hut was silent, as if the earthen walls themselves were waiting for him to continue. The cloud of smoke, hovering above the hearth, seemed to darken. And it was Tamwyn who spoke next, for his intuition told him what had happened. Quietly, he asked, “You didn’t stay to fight, like the others, did you?”

“Jest ran off an’ hid! Tremblin’ like a worthless leaf in the wind.” Ethaun bit so hard on his pipe the stem snapped, spilling pipeweed onto the floor. He spat out the end that had been in his mouth. “Not exactly like an explorer, eh?”

Tamwyn pinched his lips together. “That’s nothing compared to some of the fool things I’ve done.”

The man just grunted and stroked his curly beard. “I’ve wished a hundred times, if I’ve wished once, to live them moments again. To do right fer me mates. An’ ‘specially fer Krystallus, a better man than any who ever walked the paths o’ Avalon.”

Tamwyn’s eyes shone, though he said nothing.

Ethaun heaved a sigh. “None o’ them survived, not a single bloody one.”

“All of them died?”

“That be right, lad. All o’ them.” Bitterly, he added, “Except fer lucky number thirteen.”

“But,” protested Tamwyn. “I heard Krystallus
did
survive. And that he came up here to the Knothole, just as I did.”

Ethaun shook his hairy head. “Not that I know about, lad. An’ that means, I’m afeared, it never happened.”

“How can you be certain?” Tamwyn banged his fist on the table. “You can’t be!”

The big man got up and fetched another pipe and a different sack of pipeweed, which smelled like crushed needles of cedar. Biting the pipe stem, he filled the bowl, lit the weed, and took a first puff. Then, moving slowly, he returned to the table and sat down on the seed bags.

“It be like this, ye see. When I comes out o’ hidin’, I went back to the battle scene. An’ counted the bodies, mangled though they was. Twelve, all together. Nobody survived, I tell ye. Nobody.”

Seeing the disbelief in Tamwyn’s expression, he went on. “Anyways, I came up here straightaway after that. Rode the bloomin’ waterfall, I did, far as I could. Used me tarp to ride higher—like a big sail that was lifted by the water. Then I jest followed tunnels fer days an’ days, growin’ weak from hunger. I was sure that I was goin’ to die—an’ that I deserved to die. Somehow, though, I jest happened to find a tunnel that took me here, to this very valley.”

He chewed vigorously on the pipe for a moment, then puffed a few times. “If any other man was ever here, don’t ye think I’d know about it? An’ in all these years, I’ve seen nobody else wearin’ two legs. Until ye came along.”

“Are you sure?”

“Aye.”

Tamwyn squinted at him. “I
still
think he came here, just as Gwirion said. And even if he was badly injured, the élano in the water should have healed him, as it did me.” Turning away, he added under his breath, “I just can’t believe he’s dead.”

For some time, neither spoke. Finally, Ethaun blew a ring of smoke toward his hearth, and said, “I’m sorry, lad. Ye must o’ been pretty young when Krystallus left the root-realms. But . . . did ye know him?”

Hoarsely, Tamwyn whispered, “I would have liked to.”

“Well, well. Now I understand” boomed Ethaun. He leaned back on the seed bags, his strong hands clasping one of his knees. “Makes perfect sense, it does.”

Tamwyn looked over at him. Could he have guessed the truth?

Ethaun gave a knowing nod. “Yer a young explorer, too, aren’t ye? Jest like I was.”

Tamwyn just stared at him blankly. All the hopes, all the longings, he’d allowed himself to feel—now crushed. He still wasn’t willing to let them go completely . . . but he didn’t really believe them anymore. He felt strangely empty inside. He still had the friends he’d left behind on Hallia’s Peak, of course, as well as his quest. But if he’d lost any hope of ever finding his father, then he’d also lost part of himself.

“Well now, lad,” said the smith. “Seein’ as yer an explorer, an’ likely have a long ways more to go, do ye have anythin’ that be needin’ fixin’? I’m still fairly good with the hammer an’ tongs.”

Absently, Tamwyn shook his head. “All I have is an old dagger that I broke on a living stone. But it’s so old and rusted you probably can’t fix it.”

Ethaun leaned forward, crashing his burly forearms down on the table. “I’ll be the judge o’ that, lad. Where be it? In yer pack? I’ll jest fetch it fer a look.”

Suddenly afraid that Ethaun would open the pack and find the scroll from Krystallus—which he didn’t want to talk about right now—Tamwyn got up himself. He walked across the earthen floor to his pack, reached inside, and pulled out the dagger’s broken handle and blade. Glumly, he dropped them on the blacksmith’s lap.

Even as Tamwyn shuffled over to the window, to see the swelling light of dawn slowly brighten the ravine, Ethaun took an oily rag from the table and started to polish the rusty blade. A few seconds later, the burly fellow whistled. Tamwyn spun back around to see him gazing at the blade with something close to awe.

“What?” asked the young man skeptically. “It’s just an old thing I plowed up in a farmer’s field. He called it
a gift from the land
, but that’s just a fancy way of saying it’s an old, beat-up dagger nobody wanted.”

Ethaun didn’t respond. All his concentration was on the broken blade. He polished it some more, shifted his bulk so that more starlight from the window struck the metal, then mumbled some archaic-sounding words.

Finally, he lowered the blade and peered at Tamwyn. “No, lad. Yer wrong. This here be somethin’ special.”

“How?” Tamwyn walked back to have a look, almost tripping over a half-made garden rake that lay on the floor. “I tell you, it’s just—”

As if for the first time, he saw the subtle marks engraved on the side of the blade. What he’d thought were merely random scratches were really some kind of script! Like an ancient stream, the script meandered down the length of the blade. How in Avalon’s name could he have carried this with him for so long without ever realizing what those marks were?

He scoffed at himself.
Because you never looked closely enough, you dolt!

Ethaun’s big finger jabbed at the script. “This be Old Fincayran, bet me top teeth. See here? How them letters curl back on theirselves? I seen some writin’ jest like this, ages ago, on me old master’s most prized possession, a real ancient shield. He’d never let me touch it, aye, but I sure looked at it plenty. An’ a bard who came through our village showed me how to read its meanin’.”

Tamwyn bent down on one knee to look more closely. “Can you read this?”

“Some parts, leastways.” Brow furrowed, he puffed some on his pipe. “It says somethin’ like,
Hallow be this blade when held by Merlin’s heir
.”

Tamwyn’s heart leaped over its next beat. Merlin’s heir? Could that really be the dagger’s destiny? And could he really be its rightful owner?

He glanced over his shoulder at his staff by the door. It could have been just a trick of the dawn light coming through the window, but for an instant, the seven symbols carved in the wooden shaft seemed to glow eerily. Then the staff returned to normal.

“Can’t figure what that could mean,” grumbled Ethaun. He set the blade back down on his lap and picked up the rusted handle. Examining it, he scratched the side of his beard. “One thin’ be sure, though. This dagger was made long ago, an’ by elvish folk.”

“Elves? How can you tell?”

He pointed to the sweeping designs, barely visible, that ran along the handle’s edges. “Only elvish metalworkers from Old Fincayra did that.” He turned it over, then ran his cracked and blackened fingernail along the underside, revealing some more script. “Whoa! Will ye look at that?”

“What does it say?”

“Not real sure,” he muttered, scraping away some more layers of dirt and rust. “I can’t see none o’ the first part, but it ends with some sort o’ name. Startin’ with an
R,
then an
h
,
i, t
—”

“Rhita Gawr!”

“Yer right, lad.” Ethaun’s pipe wriggled in his mouth as he chewed thoughtfully. “But Rhita Gawr be a wicked spirit! Why should the elvish folk be makin’ mortal weapons with a spirit’s name?”

“Because long ago,” declared Tamwyn in a flash of insight, “before Rhita Gawr became a spirit, he was a mortal man. A warlord.”

He ran his finger along the handle’s edge. “I’ve heard songs about those days, Ethaun. Terrible things happened. Rhita Gawr rose to power by massacring families, burning villages, and poisoning crops—to stamp out anyone who opposed him. And he came down harder on the elves than anyone, because only they had the skill to make magical weapons.”

The blacksmith looked at him doubtfully. “Magic blades? Never seen one o’ them in all me years! Ye’ve been hearin’ too many fanciful tales from bards, lad.”

“Maybe so. But this one could really have some sort of magic.”

“Even if it does,” said Ethaun, shaking his head, “that still don’t explain why the blade’s got Gawr’s name writ on it.”

“Because the elves could have made this weapon to fight him, don’t you see? Maybe in their own time—or maybe, if they could read the future, in some future time.”

“Which could be why it says that bit about the heir o’ Merlin?”

Tamwyn said nothing.

Ethaun tapped on the metal, which rang clear and cold, like a faraway bell. “Leastways, it still be a treasure. Even without any magic, a real beauty.” He turned to Tamwyn. “I’ll fix it fer ye, right now.”

While Tamwyn watched, the man strapped on his apron and built up the fire, squeezing his bellows to make it burn hot. He set out a tall bucket of cold water, as well as several rags made from leathereed. Wielding his tools with the same ease and confidence as an expert swordsman wielding his blade, Ethaun alternately heated, hammered, twisted, and tempered the dagger. Clangs, squeals, and hisses reverberated around the hut.

At last, the smith wiped his brow with the sleeve of his tunic, and pulled the reforged dagger out of the fire for the last time. Holding it with the tongs, he turned it around, inspecting it from every angle. With a grunt of approval, he set it down on the anvil to cool.

He stretched his huge arms wide. “Well, tickle me toes, that be a good day’s work!” With a glance at Tamwyn, he said, “Might jest take a wee nap, do ye mind? As it happened, I was out an’ about fairly early this mornin’.”

The young man grinned. “I know.”

As he watched Ethaun drop his bulk onto the straw pallet, an idea rose in Tamwyn’s mind. Walking over to his pack, he pulled out the slab of harmóna wood. For a long while he sat beside the hearth, feeling the wood and studying its orange-streaked grain, while Ethaun snored contentedly.

At last, when the dagger had cooled enough to hold, Tamwyn took it and began to carve Elli’s harp. Gradually, the slab’s triangular shape began to change. Almost, the outlines of a soundbox could be seen; almost, the space for strings, imagined. Curling chips of wood sprinkled the stone hearth, humming ever so delicately as they grew warm from the nearby coals.

Ethaun, in time, woke up. Sitting up on the pallet, he stretched his arms, scratched his beard, and then noticed Tamwyn. Rising, he strode over.

“Well, now,” he exclaimed, “toast me turnips! If ye should ever stop explorin’, lad, ye could pass fer a woodcarver.”

“No,” said Tamwyn with a shake of his black locks. “But on this carving, the wood is helping. And maybe the blade, as well.”

The big fellow raised an eyebrow. “Ye know,” he said in a rough whisper, “the legends from Old Fincayra are mighty strange at times. But one o’ the strangest says that a young wizard only came into power when he carved his first musical instrument.”

Tamwyn stopped carving and gave him a wink. Imitating the smith’s tone of voice from before, he said, “Magic instruments? Never seen one o’ them in all me years! Ye’ve been hearin’ too many fanciful tales, lad.”

Ethaun burst out laughing, his lungs heaving with all the force of his bellows. Finally, he stopped, though his eyes kept smiling. Quite gently for such a powerful man, he placed his hand on Tamwyn’s shoulder.

“Ye know, lad, I’m glad ye came here to me part o’ the world. Real glad.” He peered at the young man thoughtfully, and then a strange expression came over his face. “So . . . I’m goin’ to tell ye somethin’ I swore never to reveal.”