Bannon held out all of his remaining coins. Mandon let out a long, discouraged sigh. “Quite a challenge.” His lips quirked in a smile. “It wouldn’t be right to let a man go without a blade, however. Tanimura has some dangerous streets.”
Bannon swallowed. “I discovered that already.”
Mandon led him inside the shop. “Let’s see what we can find.” The smith began sorting flat blank strips of metal that had not yet been fashioned and forged. He rummaged through half-finished long swords, broken blades, ornate daggers, serrated hunting knives, even a short flat knife that looked incapable of anything more dangerous than cutting cheese or spreading butter.
The smith stopped to ponder one clunky-looking blade as long as Bannon’s arm. It had a straight, unornamented cross guard, a small round pommel. The grip was wrapped in leather strips, with no fancy carving, wire workings, or inlaid jewels. The blade looked discolored, as if it hadn’t been forged as perfectly as the other blades. It had no fuller groove, no engraving. It was just a simple, sturdy sword.
Mandon hefted it, held the grip in his right hand, tossed it to the left. He moved his wrist, felt the weight of it, watched it flow through the air. “Try this one.”
Bannon caught the sword, fearing he would drop it with an embarrassing clatter to the floor of the shop, but his hand seemed to go right to the hilt. His fingers wrapped around the grip, and the leather helped him hold on. “It feels solid at least. Sturdy.”
“Aye, that it is. And the blade is sharp. It’ll hold an edge.”
“I had imagined something a little more—” Bannon frowned, searching for words that would not insult the swordsmith. “A little more elegant.”
“Have you counted the number of coins you’ve got to spend?”
“I have,” Bannon said, letting his shoulders fall. “And I understand.”
Mandon clapped him on the back, a blow that was much harder than he expected. “Get your priorities straight, young man. When a victim is staring at a blade that has just plunged through his chest, the last thing on his mind is criticism about the lack of ornamentation on your hilt.”
“I suppose not.”
Mandon looked down at the plain blade and mused, “This sword was made by one of my most talented apprentices, a young man named Harold. I tasked him with making a good and serviceable sword. It took him four tries, but I knew his potential, and I was willing to invest four sword blanks on him.”
The smith tapped his fingernail on the solid blade, eliciting a clear metallic clink. “Harold made this sword to prove to me it was time he became a journeyman.” He smiled wistfully, brushing his spiky black beard with one hand. “And he did. Three years after that, Harold was such a good craftsman that he created a fantastically elaborate, perfect sword—his masterpiece. So I named him a master.” He squared his shoulders and leaned back with a wry sigh. “Now, he’s one of my biggest competitors in Tanimura.”
Bannon looked at the sword with greater appreciation now.
Mandon continued, “That just makes my point—it may not look like much, but this is a very well crafted sword, and it will serve the needs of the right person—unless your needs are to impress some pretty girl?”
Bannon felt a flush come to his cheeks. “I’ll have to do that some other way, sir. This sword will be for my own protection.” He lifted the blade, tried it in both hands, swung it in a slow, graceful arc. Oddly, it felt good—perhaps because otherwise he had had no sword at all.
“It’ll do that,” said the swordsmith.
Bannon squared his shoulders, nodding absently. “A man never knows when he might need to protect himself or his companions.”
The dark edges of the world infringed upon his vision. Marvelous Tanimura seemed to have more shadows than before, more slinking, dark things in corners, rather than bright sunlit colors. Hesitating, he held out the coins, everything that the thieves hadn’t taken from him. “You’re sure this is enough money?”
The swordsmith removed the coins, one at a time, the two silvers then four of the coppers, closing Bannon’s fingers on the last one. “I would never take a man’s last coin.” He gestured with his bald head. “Let’s go outside. I have a practice block in back.”
Mandon took him behind the smithy to a small yard with barrels of scum-covered water for cooling his blades, a grinding wheel and whetstones for sharpening the edges. An upright, battered pine log as tall as a man had been mounted and braced in the center of a dirt clearing strewn with straw. Fragrant piles of fresh pale wood chips lay around it on the ground.
Mandon pointed to the scarred upright log. “That is your opponent—defend yourself. Imagine it is one of the soldiers of the Imperial Order. Hah, why not imagine it’s Emperor Jagang himself?”
“I already have enough enemies in my imagination,” Bannon muttered. “We don’t need to add to them.”
He stepped up to the practice block and swung the sword, bracing for the smack of impact when the blade hit the pine wood. The vibrations reverberated up to his elbow.
The swordsmith was not impressed. “Are you trying to cut down a sunflower, my boy? Swing!”
Bannon swung again, harder this time, resulting in a louder thunk. A dry chunk of bark fell off the practice block.
“Defend yourself!” yelled Mandon.
He swung harder with a grunt from the effort, and this time the impact thrummed through his wrist, jarred his forearm, his elbow, all the way to his shoulder. “I’ll defend myself,” he whispered. “I won’t be helpless.”
But he hadn’t always been able to defend himself, or his mother.
Bannon struck again, imagining that the blade was cutting not into wood, but through flesh and hard bone. He hacked again.
He remembered coming home barely an hour after sunset one night on the island. He had been working as a hand in the Chiriya cabbage fields, like all the other young men his age. He had to work for wages rather than working his family’s own land, because his father had lost their holdings long before. It wasn’t even dinnertime yet, but his father was already out of the house, surely halfway drunk by now in the tavern. Getting drunk was about the only thing at which his father showed any efficiency.
At least that meant their cottage would be quiet, granting Bannon and his mother an uneasy peace. From his fieldwork in the past week, Bannon had earned a few more coins, paid that day—it was the height of the cabbage harvest, and the wages were better than usual.
He had already saved enough money to buy his own passage off of Chiriya Island. He could have left a month ago, and he remembered how he had longed to be gone from this place, staring at the infrequent trading ships as they sailed away from port. Such vessels stopped in the islands only once every month or two, since the islanders had little to trade and not much money to buy imported goods. Even though it would be some time before he had another chance, Bannon had made up his mind that he wouldn’t go—couldn’t go—until he could take his mother with him. They would both sail away and find a perfect world, a peaceful new home like all those lands he had heard of—Tanimura, the People’s Palace, the Midlands. Even the wild uncivilized places of the New World had to be better than his misery on Chiriya.
Bannon had walked into the house clenching the silver coin he had earned that day, sure that it would finally be enough to buy passage for himself and his mother. They could run away together the next time a ship docked in port. In order to be sure, he intended to count the carefully saved coins he had hidden in the bottom of the dirt-filled flowerpot on his windowsill. The pot held only the shriveled remnants of a cliff anemone that he had planted and nurtured, and then watched die.