"It was perfect this time!"
Andros shook his head gently, a sad little smile of human understanding on his lips. "No it wasn't, Publius. That is why you now have to do it again."
I gritted my teeth in the face of his naive honesty. "Thank you, Andros. You can go now."
As soon as he had gone, I crossed to my work-bench and unwrapped the long bundle that lay there. It gleamed at me, liquid silver in the gloom of the smithy. It had a shine, to be sure. Shine and to spare. It was the finest blade I had ever made. But it was wrong, flawed, and the fault was mine; it had nothing to do with the skystone metal. I took it in my hands, looked one last, long look into its mirrored surface, and then I thrust it into the fire, deep into the glowing coals, and reached for the bellows. Now I had to untemper it, melt it again to a shapeless mass of metal and recreate it with a triple tang.
The smithy was deserted, save for myself. Equus and the other smiths worked up in the new smithy in the fort most of the time now, and the villa proper was strangely silent nowadays. The staff of servants was being removed little by little to tend to the new quarters up above as they were built. The villa would remain in use, but only as spare quarters. The new living accommodations for the family up in the fort were less spacious, and less gracious, but they were luxurious enough and would grow more comfortable with use. They were far safer, too, now that the fort itself was impregnable, with walls that were twenty-five feet high in places, rising vertically from the steep hillside.
I moved back to the work-bench again and found a scrap of papyrus and a stick of charcoal. I knew I would have few distractions in my second struggle with the sky-stone metal, so I set myself to thinking of the difference the triple tang would make to the weight, proportions and temper of the blade. I would not again deprive Caius of a portion of his goddess; I would make do with the piece of her I had already, and that thought led me to a consideration of my own women at home in the fort on the hill.
Veronica's departure with her new husband had not been as cruel a deprivation as I had expected, mainly due to the fact that her place in the household had been taken immediately by Enid, who would live with us while Picus was away campaigning. Luceiia had defined the situation succinctly, as usual, telling me that I had lost a daughter but gained a niece. I smiled as I thought of the two of them together. Luceiia had gained more of a friend than a niece. I supposed that the main reason for Enid's closeness to Luceiia was that they were two of a kind, both cut from the same cloth. Each of them was stubborn, wilful, intelligent, implacable and yet almost paradoxically serene, self-sufficient and dignified. And each was a beauty in her own right. I was surprised to find myself whistling tunelessly as I waited for the sword blade to grow red-hot.
In the weeks and months that followed, I worked diligently, almost religiously, at my forge, discovering to my pleasure and surprise that Andros was right, the task was much easier the second time, and I had come to know better the properties of the metal I was working with. The second blade emerged from its shapeless mass as a longer, more slender and altogether finer entity than its predecessor, so that by the time I set out to refine it and temper it and create its cutting edges, I found myself in the grip of an intense, almost mystical excitement, a sense of awe that inspired me to conceal my work from everyone, including even Equus, until I had completed it. Only then, when I was convinced I could not improve upon what my hands and mind had wrought, did I call him into the forge and show him the long, cloth-wrapped shape lying on the bench. He looked from me to it and then back to me again, and his big face broke into a slow, ungrudging smile that held no trace of rancour over the long time I had kept this piece of work from his sight.
"So, you finally finished it. Am I allowed to look now?"
I nodded and he unwrapped the blade. For a long time he simply stood there, staring down at it with his back to me, saying nothing. I waited. Eventually he brought his hands abstractedly to his buttocks, wiping his fingertips clean on the material of his breeches before fumbling a cloth out of his apron pocket and using it to pick up the blade, protecting it from finger-marks. When he turned to me at last, holding the blade reverently in his hands, there were tears in his eyes. He shook his head savagely, trying to clear his vision, and uttered half a laugh.
"Varrus!" he said. "It's a Varrus blade." He shook his head again. "I'm weeping, thinking of your grandfather. He would have wept to see this, too. I think there has..." His voice choked up and he had to clear his throat. When he spoke again, he was making a determined effort to sound strong. "There has never, ever, been anything like this made in iron by a man before, Publius. This is perfection."
I had to swallow hard to overcome the emotions that his tone brought out in me. I fought to sound casual. "No, Equus. Not perfection. Not yet. I still have to hilt it."
He shook his head, dismissing any possible difficulty. "Oh, you'll hilt it. That's what the triple tang's for, isn't it? You're going to pour it like the dagger's hilt?"
I nodded. "Aye, in a cruciform. That way, no blade will skip across the boss. The outside tangs will be twisted at right angles, and I'll pour the mould around them."
He shook his head again, his eyes still fixed on the blade. "God, Publius, this is superb." There was real awe in his voice, matching the awe I had felt in helping the blade emerge from the raw metal. "It's longer than the first one, and narrower, by a good inch." He turned it sideways. "Thicker in section, too. And look at this." He was fingering the reinforcing spine that ran centrally the length of the blade between two thumb-wide channels. "God! Look at this thing!" He raised his eyes eventually and looked at me. "Have you designed the hilt yet?"
"Aye, I have the drawings here, and the finished mould. I couldn't have done it without Andros. He's a true artist. Come and see."
I led him to the back of the smithy and lit two lamps by the light of which I showed him the open halves of the finished mould and how the triple tang would fit inside it. He asked me how long it would take me to finish the hilt and complete the sword, and I looked at him and shook my head and told him that it would take as long as it had to take. We had just blown out the lamps and were on our way out of the smithy when Ullic's big shape blocked the light from the doorway.
"Roman," he yelled. "Are you in there?" We were within two paces of him almost, but he was sun-blinded.
"I'm here, Ullic," I answered him. "What brings you back so soon?"
"News, my old friend!" He stepped inside the door and grasped me by the shoulders. "We are to be grandfathers, you and I! Veronica is with child! Didn't I tell you we Pendragons are potent sires?"
"Hah!" I flung my arms around him. "Fertile mares, too, you Celtic lout! We are to be uncles, too! Your sister Enid has the same affliction."
I felt him rear back from me and saw his eyes light up. "Enid? Already? By the great sun god! When is she due?"
I laughed. "By the new year. Picus wasted no seed."
"Nor did Uric, by God! The two of them will whelp together. This demands celebration, Varrus!"
We celebrated, and within the week Picus came home on a flying visit and we celebrated again. The women watched our drunken antics and smiled knowingly among themselves.
Picus remained with us for only one day. He had no real right to be here at all, he told us, but had seized an opportunity to come one last time before all Hades was loosed on the land. Things were going rapidly downhill in every direction. His spies reported major trouble brewing in the north again, behind the Wall, and he doubted that the northern garrisons could any longer withstand an all-out attack from the strength that threatened them. The Picts, he believed, had amassed an enormous army reinforced with Scots from Hibernia and the wild men from the Germanic lands across the water to the east. These were not Saxons, he told us, but a different race altogether, bigger and more savage than the Saxons. I had heard of these Northmen, as they called themselves. I said nothing, and his father asked him about his cavalry. How was Seneca doing?