The Smith
“No.”
The Smith raised his heavy shoulders and fixed the two youths with piercing grey eyes, and this when their mouth was only half open, before they had even spoke a word.
“I can smell it on you from half a country mile away. You want something from me — Well, ye can have a wee bit of sympathy, and nothing else. I can hear what you’re thinkin’ right now.”
But the noble houses, and the endless wars, and the crops burned, and the royal taxes . . .
“Yes, but no. I hear everything you’re saying, what you haven’t even thought yet. And I knew it all before you were born. Prince Humbert is a vain, strutting, incompetent fool. He can tell the price of one any of these fine helms here.”
He waved his soot-blackened heavy hand at the rack of finished breastplates and helms gleaming with a dull, metallic sheen in the shadows, and sighed deeply.
“Fine work those, and each one worth 20 silver crowns if they’re worth a penny. Although the Prince will force me to sell them to him for less. He knows the price of many things, whatever it is he wants, and the value of nothing.”
“It’s a grim, sorry land you’ve been born into, and that’s no lie. You have every right to be outraged, as you are, filled up to the frothy top with indignation and sweet, blazing righteousness. Many’s a moment over my 52 years, most of em’ spent beating order and fine weapons out of pig iron, as my hammer fell and fell and fell again, that I’ve maundered over just such troubles in my head as I hid far from the clanging.”
“But if you repeat any of what I’m tellin’ you, even a single word, I’ll deny all of it.”
“So still you’re thinking,” But, surely Smith, for the love of the good God above, you have a heart as well as a mind. Can’t you give us just a few castoff blades and shields that have come to you in trade? Just something to fill our hands with so we have a chance . . .”
“No. Again.”
“It would be a quick end for the lot of you. You imagine the universe far out there sees your pure outrage, and hears your brave words about justice and truth and freedom. And if it finds your white, hot rage for a better land holy enough, it’ll bend the whole world around and give you a fewkin’ miracle.”
The grizzled old smith’s mouth twisted in the most wintry smile either had ever seen. And he looked long at the both of them restlessly shifting back and forth from one muddy boot to another. The he stared out the cavernous entrance of the smithy at the snowy peaks in the distance.
So long he stared, and with such a melancholy cast to his blunt bearded profile, they thought he might have forgotten them altogether. Silence fell strangely over the usual clamorous, bustling shop with its dense tang of iron and oil and charcoal. And they fell to wondering where the Smith was wandering and what he thought.
“Ye may not know it, but I have a daughter,” and at that a tenderness slipped across his stony mask of a face. “She’s a wonder, 17 and so fresh and lovely that it’s nigh impossible that she could be any kin to such as me. She’s to marry in the Spring, and to a fine young lad from a respectable family.”
“I love that bright, slip of a girl more than I love anything, and have done since her dear mother Eliza died from a wasting sickness five year ago. She’s been the only bright light in this gloomy place, and if she can find a measure of joy as she deserves, nothing, and I mean nothing is going to get in the way of that.”
He stared heavily at the both of them while they struggled not to break the dense silence.
“You’re going to tell me that my grandchildren will grow up in an ugly, twisted, upside down land just like this one, where the worst of the lot hold everything in their pink, little fingers. Where the best of us are silenced and bled dry year after year, and for what?”
He peered out once again at the snowy, misty peaks, and then sighed until it felt like the flagstones themselves would break.
“Someday, and I can see the shadow of it sometimes at the end of the day when I look out there hard enough. Someday, somehow the fat priests with gold rings on their fat fingers will lie down and die, and men will stop believing in kings and their like whose servants tell us they are God’s gift to us. Someday a new world will find its way into this one through men’s minds first and then their hearts.”
“But that day is not this day.”
He rose stiffly, stretched his heavy shoulders, rubbed his soot-stained hands roughly over his face, and stepped back to his bench. He picked up his massive hammer, and paused.
“I’ll go to my grave — and maybe beyond — wondering whether I might have hastened that bright day if I had given you what you wanted today. My head tells me — If it’s not me then who will it ever be.”
“And maybe you’re right, and maybe that better world was waiting just over the hill from this dark and wretched place. But I don’t feel it. And I can’t find the words anywhere on men’s lips or in their eyes in any tavern I go into or any who wander into this shop.”
“So I’ll just go back to making good weapons out of hard iron for men I despise as I have always done. And I don’t expect I’ll be seeing you again.”
The massive hammer rose high above his head and his whole body tensed for the clangorous strike, one of thousands to fall before the sun set. But he paused one more time and lowered his hammer.
“Good day to you, lads. And don’t hurry to your deaths. They’ll come soon enough in any case.”
They hurried out, confused and wondering what had just happened.
By Paul T. Self