Chapter Twenty

It was nearly midnight when Sparrow entered his home. He started to unsling his pack, then paused.

The betrothal gift he had given Krita was missing. His bride must have returned while he was hunting.

"Krita?" he called softly.

"K—" and his voice caught. "Krita?"

His pack slipped the rest of the way and thumped. Sparrow didn't notice it as he ran to where the mirror had been, like a bear making its short, unstoppable rush onto prey.

The crossbow was still in Sparrow's left hand. He flipped the uncocked weapon away with a motion that skidded it across the puncheons.

The crossbow could as easily have smashed to fragments on a wall. Sparrow didn't care.

The smith knelt on the bare floor and ran his fingers over the wood as if he could touch past events. For minutes he remained in that attitude of subjection.

Sparrow's body blocked light from the illuminating spiral which rotated in the center of the hall. There was nothing to see in light or shadow, only in the big man's memory.

A breeze made the door of the lodge creak on its leather hinges. The night air felt cold on the skin of a man who had hiked twenty kilometers with a heavy load.

Sparrow stood up. "Krita!" he called. "I've waited for you!"

A crow, wakened by the shouting, squawked from a pine tree.

"I'll still wait!"

Sparrow made a fireset of punk and kindling in the corner of the hearth beneath the smoker cage. He lighted the set with an object which looked like a silver salamander and spat a blue spark from its jaws when Sparrow moved its tail.

Sparrow went outside again. He looked tired but steadfast, an ox near the end of the day's plowing. When he returned, he carried the stag's carcase and a large square of mammoth hide, stiff and reeking with old blood.

The smith tossed the hide on the floor with a clop like a wooden pallet falling; fed up the fire; and finished butchering the deer beneath the slowly turning lights. He used his belt knife for the job, a sturdy tool with deep fullers to keep the suction of raw flesh from gripping the blade on long cuts.

Occasionally a sound made Sparrow look up, but it was never more than wind or an animal scrabbling.

As he separated each strip of venison, the smith hung the piece on a hook in the smoker. The slatted cage was indoors to protect it from scavengers—which could include a bear. The low heat began to drive out meat juices in a tangy perfume that replaced the scent of death.

Sparrow wrapped the stripped bones in the deerhide and carried them outside with the butchering mat. He kept his offal in a safe of fieldstone and lime cement until he could dispose of it in a gorge two kilometers away.

A scavenger is almost any predator who's between meals. Sparrow was confident in his strength and agility; but he was a methodical man, and there was no reason to increase the risks he took. Logic, not immediate ease, governed his choices.

When he had finished the clean-up and washed his hands with a gourd of water from his cistern, Sparrow closed the lodge door. He called a harsh command. The beads of light darkened, though they continued to move in blackness relieved only by the coals beneath the smoker.

Though the night was cool rather than cold, the smith took a huge white bearskin from a chest and wrapped himself in it. For a time, he sat beside the fire, staring toward the shadowed emptiness between the feet of his battlesuit.

Then, eventually, Sparrow fell asleep.

The doorlatch clicked as it opened. Sparrow jumped like a bear awakened by hounds.

They were in battlesuits, fumbling through the front door. At the back, wood splintered as gauntleted hands failed to work the latch mechanism in their haste. The image-amplifying screens of the powered armor would turn scraps of moonlight to day, but Sparrow knew his home.

"He's—" bawled a warrior's amplified voice.

The intruder would have continued 'awake' or 'moving' or simply 'there,' but Sparrow was moving, toward his own battlesuit, and light glinted from steel as he flung his knife like a bolt from a catapult.

The darkness ignited in harsh, ripping light. The knifeblade struck the leading warrior and burned because it could not penetrate the battlesuit's forcefield.

Breaking through the back door were two warriors and a third. There were three more at the front, much closer to Sparrow, but the leader of that trio staggered backward from the white dazzle of the knife and blocked his fellows.

A man with a face like a jackal and no armor shouted as he ducked away from the afterimage and fading red sparks.

Sparrow was at his battlesuit and in it, launching himself and turning in the air with the grace of a dancer or a lunging wolverine.

Static discharges popped around the intruders' feet as they clomped forward in their armor. The gauntlets of several warriors glared with dense arcs to cut and kill.

"Don't hurt him!" squealed the little man without armor as Sparrow slammed the thorax of his battlesuit closed and—

The vision screens did not brighten into life. The suit's forcefield did not glow with a lambent aura that could block the weapon of any of the warriors, maybe of all six together.

And the arc which should have sprouted from Sparrow's right hand to shear forcefields, metal-ceramic substrate, and the blazing flesh of the intruders—

The arc did not light, because Sparrow's armor had not latched closed.

The leading intruder gripped the edge of the thorax plate and pulled. The smith resisted with all his strength; but Sparrow's strength was human, while his opponent's steel gauntlet was driven by the energy of the Matrix itself.

The smith let the frontal plate go. He tried to leap clear of his battlesuit. Armored hands gripped him before he could get his legs free. He was dragged into the center of the hall.

Freemen carrying torches and supple withies entered through both doors. While warriors held the smith firmly, the freemen wove the captive's limbs with bindings that could have hobbled a mammoth.

Only when that task was completed did the leading warrior open his armor and get out. He was a big man, almost as big as Sparrow, though his face held a hint of softness despite the cruelty of the lips.

Krita's mirror hung from its loop around his neck.

"Well," the intruder said. "I'm King Hermann, lord of this domain. Who are you who've been robbing me all these years?"

"My name's Sparrow," the smith said. "There's no king over this valley. Or over me."

His gaze touched but did not linger on the mirror. His face looked like a fragment of nature, a boulder or a wrack of clouds rising into a thunderhead.

The jackal-faced man spit on him. "Treat your master with respect, scum!" he shouted in a shrill voice.

"Move back, Platt," King Hermann warned without emotion. The little man scuttled away.

Hermann knelt beside his captive. "Of course I'm king here," he said. "And you're a thief, because it's only from me your king that you could have gotten treasures like these."

He gestured calmly, palm upward, at the wonders winking in the torchlight.

"I made everything here!" Sparrow shouted. "I've stolen nothing!"

A warrior who'd taken off his armor stepped forward. He raised his foot.

The captive twisted to glare at him. The man blinked and eased back without kicking.

Sparrow turned his face to the king again. "Why would I need to rob a poor princeling like you?" he demanded. His voice sounded like rocks sliding. "I'm a king's son myself!"

King Hermann straightened. "No," he said in a tone of finality, "you're a slave. And if it turns out that you really are a smith . . . then you'll use your craftsmanship for me, Sparrow."