4 The chain link

Lifdor, Nanda, Shiltapi, and Todakwa just unsheathed their sabers and were looking around nervously in the barren steppe. Their eyes glowed with fear. His two sabers in hand, Dashvara was moving furtively under the Moon rays. He could see all the chieftains with a diurnal clarity. His face was not smiling, but within him, his heart was laughing just at seeing them exchanging suspicious glances, not even imagining that a shadow was going to kill them all. He raised a saber, and he hit the first throat. He jumped away even before he heard the gurgling sound of a man choking on his own blood, and he killed the next. Lifdor, Nanda, Shiltapi… All of them died. Dashvara turned as fast as a bolt, dodged Todakwa’s mortal blade strike, and leaped at the Essimean. A black moon appeared on the last throat. Todakwa collapsed to the ground, soundlessly. The Prince of the Sand drew himself up before the four murderers. A cold wind blew in the Rocdinfer steppe. All of them had died.

“Wake up, you sleepyhead brat!”

Dashvara woke up in a start and raised his hands to ward off any possible attack. Right after, he realized that he had no saber, and he gazed at Zaadma with an annoyed face.

“What did I do to you to suffer such a pursuit?”

“A pursuit?” she replied briskly. “For your information, this olive tree is my olive. It has never happened to me before that someone has fallen asleep in my yard. Get up,” she commanded.

Dashvara complied, glancing around with a surprised look. It was already daylight for maybe two hours. He was on a small elevation, not far from the river. About forty paces away, he saw a nice, white stone house surrounded by multicolored flowers. The jasmine fragrance was so strong he didn’t quite understand how he hadn’t suspected anything when he had fallen asleep under that olive tree.

“You have nowhere to go, do you?” Zaadma inquired, folding her arms across her chest.

Dashvara moistened his dry lips. He was thirsty.

“I’m going to drink water,” he declared.

“Don’t bother going to the river. I have a good wine from the Dazbon Republic. Don’t you want to try it?”

Dashvara turned to look at her with surprise. Why did she continue charming him and being so nice to him when it was clear as water he didn’t have even a damned gold coin?

“As long as you don’t ask me anything in return—”

Zaadma burst out laughing.

“You amuse me, young Shalussi. In return, I only ask you to like the wine and to be less rough. Come with me.”

She turned away, and the Xalya followed her into the house. As soon as he went in, the inside captivated him. It was simple but beautiful. There was a kind of rhombus-shaped canvas with lilies on the wall. The floor next to the window was crowded with pots and flowers. In the middle, there was a golden carpet, and on the left, a large bed. Dashvara averted his eyes and met Zaadma’s teasing gaze.

“Sit down, young Shalussi.”

Dashvara sat as she got a bottle out of a basket.

“It was a friend of mine, a wine merchant of Dazbon, who gave it to me. I once used to like wine, but not anymore, so—” She handed him the bottle. “I have five bottles, and none of them has been opened yet. Of course, I never dared say to my friend that I actually no longer drink them. Giving me presents makes him so happy…” She smiled, and after putting down a glass in front of the Xalya, she sat down on the carpet too, very formally.

Dashvara looked at her with a raised eyebrow, glanced down at the wine, and finally opened the bottle. It smelled intensely. He filled the glass silently and took a sip.

“Well?” Zaadma inquired.

“It’s not like I have tasted a lot of wine in my life,” he admitted, “but it seems quite good to me.”

Zaadma nodded wordlessly. They both kept a silence, which was neither embarrassing nor altogether peaceful.

“You call me young Shalussi,” Dashvara said suddenly. “Does it mean that you are not a Shalussi?”

Zaadma let out a crystalline laugh.

“Me? A Shalussi? No! Otherwise they wouldn’t let me do what I am doing in this village.”

Dashvara frowned, failing to understand, and Zaadma explained:

“The Shalussi women get married, have children, take care of the house, and work in honest jobs.”

Dashvara breathed out in disbelief.

“That is if men don’t sell them.”

Zaadma looked confused.

“Sell them? Men are lucky that women don’t sell them,” she joked.

Dashvara clenched his teeth. The more he spoke, the more he betrayed his own ignorance, he realized.

“Of course.”

Zaadma smiled.

“It seems that you don’t come from a typical Shalussi village. Which doesn’t surprise me, actually. There aren’t Shalussis only in the Shalussi territories. Proof of that is that Dazbon has a street called the Shalussi Road. Do you come from a hamlet? No, now that I think about it, you seem to be a nomad man. Do you come from the steppe or from the desert?”

“From a… zone rather in the middle,” Dashvara replied. “I don’t want to talk about myself.”

Zaadma made a bored face and let the silence drag before adding in a brighter voice:

“Okay, so let us speak about flowers. Do you know I managed to plant a moon narcissus? In Dazbon, it grows like weeds, but here, everything is deader than an aknosaur fossil. These plants are marvelous. I took with me some seeds when I departed with Aldek, to sow them, but sadly, I couldn’t see them grow up. And when this merchant friend of mine arrived, I begged him, I implored him whether he could bring me a special moon narcissus with a black stalk. This variety is very expensive because the black narcissus takes a lot of time to flower. Mine will flower soon, I hope. What do you think about it?”

Dashvara gazed at her, puzzled. For days, he had been only thinking about killing murderers after losing all his family and all his clan, and now that Dazbonish woman was talking to him about flowers? Oddly enough, a smile began to creep up his lips.

“Are you smiling?” Zaadma exclaimed as though she had just seen a miracle. “I can’t believe it!” Suddenly, her lips twisted, and her eyes narrowed into slits. “Do you think my flowers are a stupidity?”

Dashvara looked at the flowerpots that were inside. There were white and red petals, as delicate as a water drop. It reminded him of the botanic garden some Xalyas used to maintain on a terrace of the dungeon.

“No,” he said finally.

Zaadma cleared her throat.

“Your eloquence is amazing. By that ‘no’, do you mean you like flowers?”

Dashvara held back an exasperated sigh.

“I suppose.”

He drank the wine in one gulp and pointed at the bottle.

“May I?”

“Of course you may, young Shalussi,” Zaadma whispered seductively.

The Xalya rolled his eyes and filled his goblet.

“It is really good,” he pointed out after swallowing the second drink.

Zaadma looked as if she was trying to conceal a smile, without success.

“If you are not accustomed to drinking, a third drink may be excessive,” she ventured.

In fact, Dashvara was starting to feel the wine effects. He shrugged.

“A Xa… Shalussi man suffers neither hunger, nor sun fire, nor the bloody water,” he pronounced solemnly.

“Wine isn’t exactly bloody water, but it doesn’t matter. Drink as much as you want. You still have four bottles,” she bantered.

She watched him pouring himself another drink, and she added:

“It’s a pity because you seemed to be able to have an interesting conversation. But talking with a drunk man is likely to be less exciting.”

Dashvara was about to lift his third goblet, but then he stopped.

“Wine helps not to think.”

“True,” Zaadma approved. “And perhaps this way you will be somewhat less rough. I don’t deny it. I suppose you’re just attempting to forget what those Xalyas did to you in your cell.”

Dashvara cast a fuming glare at her.

“What do you know about my pain?”

The woman didn’t answer, and after a discomforting silence, Dashvara almost regretted having been so harsh. And the thing was that, looking at these delicate flowers and that golden carpet, smelling those perfumes of jasmines and emzarreds, he had the impression he was in a goddess’s house. He could not feel aversion for this young woman. She, after all, had killed no Xalya.

“Why do you no longer drink wine?” Dashvara suddenly asked.

Zaadma lifted her eyes with a pensive face.

“I don’t want to talk about me either.”

Dashvara nodded gloomily.

“I understand.”

“Oh, really?” A dangerous glint appeared in her eyes. “I doubt that you could understand.” After a silence, her face softened, and she smiled when she added: “I suppose our little traumas will eventually heal in time, don’t you think?”

Dashvara gazed at her, and he suddenly arrived at a deep certainty: sometimes it was cheering to know that not all the beings of the world shared your pains. Some were even able to call them “little traumas”. He swayed his head, feeling strangely relieved. After another silence, he looked at the flowers, thought about those soft, tanned hands that had given life to them, and he could not say anything else than:

“That place is… very beautiful.”

Zaadma’s smile had been slowly disappearing, but it came back when she heard his words.

“Thank you. It’s an awful lot of work, trust me. I have to go to the river every day to fill the buckets and water the flowers because, in these lands, you never know when it rains. Well, aren’t you going to drink this wine glass?”

Dashvara shook his head. Zaadma raised an eyebrow, and after a short hesitation, she leaned toward him, showing her generous cleavage, took the goblet, and poured its contents into a pot of white flowers. Seeing the Xalya’s surprised face, she pointed out:

“These flowers were a little lazy. This way, perhaps they will brighten up.”

Dashvara responded with a mere smile, and then he wondered what the hell he was doing here. He stood up and bowed politely.

“Thanks for the wine.”

“You leaving so soon?” Zaadma complained. “Are you going to go back to your home?”

Dashvara darkened.

“No.”

“So why wouldn’t you stay here? You have nowhere to sleep, right? Look, I propose you a deal. I let you stay in the other room, which I never use. And in return, you get a job, and you give me half of your profits. What do you think about that?”

That you have mistaken me for an idiot, Dashvara thought. He shook his head negatively.

“I’ve got to find a weapon, and I will never get it if I give you half of my profits.”

Zaadma sighed.

“Of course. You’re an irredeemable weapon lover. Good. I promise you that I myself will put up money to buy you a weapon if the deal turns out well for, say, an indefinite time.”

“An indefinite time!” Dashvara laughed sarcastically. “Do you also come to that kind of agreements with the Shalussis of the village? Perhaps you promise them some powerful miracle, and in return, they worship these so pure graces of yours from afar?”

Zaadma’s eyes widened, and she got up with an irate face.

“Get out,” she snapped.

The Xalya nodded calmly.

“I didn’t mean to wound you. You have already wounded yourself enough on your own. Anyway, thank you for the wine.”

He turned his back on Zaadma, crossed the threshold, and moved away from the house. After a while, he began to regret his words. At the end of the day, if Zaadma wasn’t a Shalussi and had ended up in this village against her will, what sort of rogue could reproach her for her behavior?

Bah, stop thinking over and over again about trifles, Dash.

He went uphill. While walking up, he saw two little girls running after a young boy while screaming a song in laughs. He also saw an old woman and a mother cradling her infant in her arms; they were animatedly chattering, sitting on the grass. More and more confused, Dashvara went past two old men that were walking slowly, and he heard them talking about the past in calm and good-humored voices. The Xalya breathed quietly while advancing. This village wasn’t as he would have imagined it a couple of weeks ago. People didn’t look at each other suspiciously. None of the Shalussis he saw bore weapons. They were cheerfully living their own lives. Seemingly, old men weren’t eliminated because of their incapability of working or wielding a blade. According to Zaadma, the Shalussi women weren’t sold, and men regarded them. The Shalussis had definitely a less advanced technology, they probably were all illiterate, and they did not really know what honor was, unlike the Xalyas, and yet, they weren’t as awful as he had always thought.

Wine is affecting me more than I expected, he guessed, worried.

He sat down in the shade of an acacia and observed the village intently. For some reason, he wanted to know what the Shalussis’ everyday life was like. A woman got out of her house, holding some carpets to shake them. A man sat down not far from Dashvara and kept carving a wooden bowl. A boy that must be not more than fifteen was fixing the hinges of a door while seeing that his younger brother didn’t go too far.

After a while, the village livened up even more. Dashvara began to hear a drumlike noise, and he stood up to see what was going on. A group of women and men were rhythmically beating seeds in large mortars with a pestle. They were speaking in a chaotic and joyful babel, and a gray-haired woman just struck up a song to keep the pace. No doubt: the Shalussis behaved like humans.

Nooo, what makes you think so? he thought ironically. They are humans, after all, Dash, or do you have yet to realize the village you are in is not inhabited by trolls?

At that point, a metallic tapping caught his attention. He went around the hill and found the smithy. It was large and had no wall all along the way; thus, the inside was in full view, with its machines, its forge, and its blacksmithing tools. There, a strong and sweaty man was just withdrawing a piece of hot iron with a pair of tongs to put it onto the anvil. Dashvara’s eyes twinkled. As befitted a good Xalya, he had learned blacksmith arts, and he had forged his own sabers. He knew all the steps for crafting a bladed weapon.

If this man could only give me a steel bar and the tools for working it…

When the man started tapping his work with a hammer, Dashvara stayed there, his hands at his back, wondering how he could convince that Shalussi to grant him the permission to forge the sabers before returning the favor. One saber, he corrected. He could not forge two, otherwise he would arouse suspicion: Xalyas were known for being two-handed fighters. Very few Shalussis abandoned their shield to pick a second saber.

He spent a long moment staring at the working blacksmith. After shaping the cleaver, the man plunged it in a cold water bucket, and a steaming sizzle followed the red sparks. Dashvara noticed that the Shalussi was looking sideways at him while approaching the sharpening wheel. He saw him run the pedal, and he began to hear a metal-stone grating noise.

He was so focused on the blacksmith and on his own thoughts that he didn’t notice the thud of hooves until it drew near. As soon as he turned, his face hardened.

“Why, if it isn’t the boy we left in the White Hand!” Walek cried, on his horse’s back.

Two horsemen followed him.

“No way! Are you really expecting Orolf to gift you a saber just to please you?” Walek mocked. “But he may get infected by the silkian madness, who knows. I have talked with Silkia; she asks you to meet her tonight,” he explained. “If she’s really willing to give you a night for free, you shouldn’t think twice. Gee up!” he yelled to his horse. “Have a good day, Orolf!”

Dashvara saw the three horsemen riding downhill to the river, stirring up a dust cloud in their path. They crossed the river and galloped toward the southwest.

“Are you really looking for a saber, boy?”

Dashvara jerked up slightly; then he noticed that the wheel had stopped making noise. Orolf stared at him, playing with his long beard. The Xalya nodded.

“I need a saber since the Xalyas stole the one I owned.”

“Fair enough. But depending on what metal you want to use, it can be a bit expensive. It costs five gold coins to forge a good dagger. And for a simple saber, about twenty.”

Dashvara didn’t despair.

“That is… more than I have.”

“And how many do you have?”

Dashvara looked him straight in the eye; he hesitated and then confessed:

“Nothing more than I have with me, that is, nothing. But you wouldn’t need to forge the saber. I can forge it on my own.”

Unexpectedly, Orolf grinned, and his thick lips revealed his white teeth. The blacksmith approached and went under the sunlight. An intense smell of metal slapped Dashvara.

“You’re the prisoner who’s been saved in the Dungeon of Xalya, aren’t you?” Dashvara nodded. “Well, I guess you must hate them with all your heart. Am I right?”

Dashvara clenched his jaw.

“With all my heart,” he confirmed.

Orolf shook his head as though he felt sad.

“Now you can leave that hatred behind. Why do you want a saber?”

Dashvara snorted.

“Do you always ask your customers about what they intend to do with the weapons you craft?”

Orolf gave a shrug.

“Not always. But when I see a broke boy who ends up in a village he doesn’t even know, of course I do ask him. I think you have higher priorities than trying to get a weapon. For example, working and earning the esteem of the villagers. If they all see you lazing around, no one will want to feed you. Maybe, just maybe, they will give you the leftovers.”

Hearing him talking about food was a hard blow. Dashvara hadn’t eaten anything since the noon of the day before, and now that he was starting to forget effectively his hunger, that blacksmith turned up and reminded him of it.

“A wise word of advice,” he said, however. “I am a nomad Shalussi. I don’t know much about the customs of the sedentary Shalussis. For me, a saber is a synonym of food.”

Orolf raised his eyebrows.

“Did you hunt animals with the saber?” He squinted his eyes. “Or did you hunt humans? Were you a bandit?”

Dashvara made a face.

Don’t play the poet, Dashvara. The less you invent, the better.

“No,” he answered. “I was not a bandit. But my family and I used to protect our goods from the Steppe Thieves and from bandits. With the saber.”

The blacksmith was still holding the cleaver he had just forged. Barely had he made a slight movement toward Dashvara when this one jumped backwards through pure reflex. Orolf looked thoughtful while bearing the knife horizontally with his two hands.

“How well do you know smith art?” he asked. “Have you ever forged a saber?”

Dashvara nodded.

“Do you know how to forge daggers?” The young man nodded again. “Cleavers? Horseshoes? Rakes, cooking pots, spoons, nails?”

A Xalyas’ firstborn doesn’t forge nails, Shalussi. He swallowed his proud words, just thinking that a nomad Shalussi who had somehow managed to forge his weapons must have also forged his cooking pots.

“Why are you asking me all that?” he replied without answering, implying that he was obviously able to forge anything so long as they gave him a bit of metal.

Orolf rocked his head side to side thoughtfully before saying:

“I don’t know you, and I don’t know whether I can trust you. But I want to verify whether what you say is true or, as I think, your pride gives you invisible wings. Come. You will forge some links.”

Dashvara could not repress a snort of disbelief. Still, he followed the blacksmith to the furnace. Orolf relighted the fire, and he showed him where to find the iron. Dashvara took a bar and put it into the fire with the tongs. He broke out in a sweat.

Links, he repeated mentally. That was going to be a fiasco, for sure. He met Orolf’s encouraging look, he gulped, and he got down to work. When the iron melted, he started shaping it. He was the Prince of the Sand, certainly, and he was a good saber forger… but he was no blacksmith.

At some point, Orolf left, declaring he was going to eat lunch and cautioning him not to take a break. As soon as Dashvara saw him moving away, he had the temptation to take another iron bar, abandon this damned chain, and forge a saber, but he noted very soon that the blacksmith lived just in front of the forge and that the man was glancing repeatedly through a window.

“Bloody Shalussis,” Dashvara muttered.

He had pulled off his shirt, and he was sweating profusely. He continued tirelessly. Forging chainrings was a subtle work that required all his concentration. He took advantage of the situation and sneakingly stole a metal bar from a crate full of debris. Rough but useful in case of emergency, he considered, after hiding the object in one of his boots. It was quite improbable that Orolf would notice the theft.

When he finally had no more iron to shape, he was exhausted, and he sat down awkwardly on the workshop floor, panting and opening and clenching his fists with the impression that his hands had become as numb as iron.

Soon after, Orolf came back, and he smiled when he saw him fallen and exhausted.

“Let’s see the work.”

He examined the chain, stroking his beard. After keeping an exasperating silence for a long time, he concluded:

“That’s a criminal job. It hardly looks like worked iron. Look at that, that link is stuck, and it needs to be molten again. Besides, one never ends a chain tip like this.”

The murderous look Dashvara cast him made him smile jokingly.

“You’re not skilled enough, I’m sorry. But today you have shown me that you are a tenacious boy. I like that. I will help you find a job in which you don’t waste my iron. You’ll repay me, and when I think the time has come, I myself will forge for you the best saber you’ve ever seen.” He held out a friendly hand. “My name is Orolf.”

Dashvara sighed, and he swallowed his dignity by force before standing up and shaking his hand.

“I am Odek.”

Orolf looked amused by his so tensed attitude.

“Follow me, Odek. I will introduce you to the old Bashak. He’s an expert at guessing vocations. I warn you: if he decides that you have no vocation, none of the villagers will respect you, and they will chase you out of here, so… Try to make a good impression.”

As long as he only guesses the vocations, Dashvara sighed.