“I care not,” Sander answered, “where the metals are found. It is the working of them that means much to me.”
“So,” commented the Trader, “any man might say, were he found where he has no right to be.”
“Do you then,” Fanyi asked, “claim all this?” She indicated the land about them.
“What it contains is ours by right of discovery. You,” he snapped at Sander, as if by any prolonged conversation he weakened his case, “loose your gear”—he pointed to the bundles on Rhin—”and let me see what you have stolen—”
Though he had no idea of the strength of the force that might stand behind him, Sander refused to play meek any longer. He knew enough of Trader ways to realize that if one did not stand up to them and bargain, one was completely lost. He folded his arms across his chest.
“Are you then chief here?” he asked. “You are not head of my Mob, nor even a Man of First Council, unless you so declare yourself. I do not take orders—I am a smith, one with the magic of metals. Such are not to be ordered about by any man without reason. Nor,” he continued, “does one so address a Shaman.”
The man made a sound that might have signified scornful amusement.
“If she was Shaman of Padford, and Padford is no more because of the Sharks, then is her claim of Power false. As for you, smith,” he made a taunt of that title, “more than words have to prove your worth.”
The fishers growled, Rhin echoed them, while the hound bristled and showed his fangs in turn.
“Control those beasts of yours,” ordered the Trader, “or else look to see them dead. Move on, carefully. We shall see what the Planners make of you.”
Fanyi glared at Sander. He read warning in her look. The fishers were still growling, but they had gone to four feet again and she walked between them, her hands resting on their backs as they moved, flanking her, down toward the town.
Sander followed. There was little else he could do. He heard a scrabbling behind him and realized that his caution had been right as three riders on hounds moved forward to box him in as he went.
Some of the loose hounds came bounding closer as the party followed the rutted road toward the ditch bridge. They bayed and growled. Rhin and the fishers, their fangs showing, made ready answer to the challenges the other beasts offered. But there was no attack, for the riders sent the hounds off with a series of cries not unlike barks.
Men issued from the village to await them. It was one of these who called to their captor:
“Ha, Jon, what have you gathered in? These are no Horde stragglers.”
“They are invaders no matter what they look like,” the rider returned. “But if you want to trade blows with the Horde, those also come. The signals have been seen.”
Fanyi stopped short of the bridge. “Trader, my companions will not enter here. Bring out your Planners.”
“Dead animals can be easily transported—”
The girl raised her hands and brought them together in a loud clap. Her eyes caught and held the eyes of the threatener. He looked as if he were struggling vainly to make some further statement or give an order, but something had locked his lips.
“I have spoken, and the Power is mine, Jon of the Red Cloak—know I not your true name? Thus, I can command you to do this thing. Get hither one of authority that we may speak together.”
Sander believed the rider struggled between his own will and that of the girl. He looked furious, yet he slid down from the back of the hound and tramped heavily over the bridge, those gathered there making way for him.
Fanyi’s face bore that look of concentration that Sander had seen her wear when she had sat with the pendant in her hand. Though he found it hard to believe in her reputed “power,” it was plain at this moment a man, who was not even conditioned to accept her decisions as her own people had doubtless always been, was obeying her orders against his own will.
There was a closed look about the men who surrounded them. Though this was obviously a well-established town, no women or children showed in that silent crowd. Sander did not like the inferences one could draw from their quiet and from their set expressions. The jovial, open friendliness the Traders displayed when visiting the Mob was gone. All those warnings concerning their jealous guardianship of their own territory were now, to Sander’s thinking, made manifest by this lack of welcome.
In a world where strangers, unless they were openly hostile like the White Ones and the Sharks, were made guests and asked for stories concerning their travels and lands farther away, this suggestion of hostility shocked Sander. However, he was a smith, no one could deny that. And in any civilization a man of such skill must be truly welcome. He glanced from face to face among that assembly, striving to see a forehead tattoo matching his own. Was there no smith here at all? As fellow members of a craft that had its own secrets, he could claim acceptance from that one man at least in this village.
But he could not sight on anyone’s skin the blue hammer brand. Still he rehearsed in his mind the work-words by which he could prove his claim to the metal mysteries.
There came another parting of the crowd and Sander saw Jon again. With him was a much older man. The newcomer walked haltingly, using sticks which he dug into the ground to support his forward-leaning body on each side. He held his head at a stiff and surely painful angle. For all his crookedness of body his gait was swifter than Sander would have thought possible. He nearly matched Jon’s strides in spite of his own more limited steps.
Alone among the Traders the newcomer bore a forehead marking. For a moment Sander thought that here must be the smith he had sought. Then he realized that no man so frail of body could carry out any but the easiest metal work. And his tattoo was not of a hammer, although it had a strange familiarity. At first, Sander could not remember where he had seen before the profile of that fierce-eyed bird head. Then he recalled the broken bit of stone he had found along the river, the symbol Fanyi said had once stood for a great and proud country.
The bird-marked man stopped before Sander and his group. For a long moment he studied each in turn, both people and animals. At last he spoke in a voice so deep and rich it seemed almost too powerful for his thin body.
“You”—he singled out Fanyi from the first—”are of Power. You”—now he swung his head around a little to look at Sander—”are a smith of the plains people. Yet you travel together with these who are your companions. What matter brings so strange and diverse a band together?”
“I am of Padford,” Fanyi replied. “But Padford no longer is. The Sea Sharks came and—” She made a gesture of negation.
“I have heard it said,” the other said, “that the Power of a true Shaman can walk in those people who believe.”
“It was the time of the Great Moon,” Fanyi answered steadily, though her face was bleak. “I answered the call of my need. It was at that time they struck.”
The old man’s lips and jaw moved a trifle as if he chewed upon words in some manner that he might thus test truth by the taste of them. He made no comment, only swung a second time to Sander.
“And you, smith, as you name yourself, what brought you out of the plains, away from your Mob and kin?”
“My father died.” Sander gave him the truth, seeing no reason to disguise it. “I was young, too young, my uncle claimed, to be full smith, though my father had named me so. There is no place in any Mob for two smiths—therefore I claimed out-right.”
“The impatience of the young, was that it, smith? You could not bend your pride, but rather chose to live kinless?” There was, Sander believed, a note of derision in that query. He held his temper manfully.
“There was also the wish for knowledge.”
“Knowledge!” That sharp word cut him short. “Knowledge of what, smith? Of some treasure trove you could plunder to buy your way back to your kin? Was that it? Hunt metal for yourself so that Traders cannot make their living!”
A growl akin to Rhin’s rose from the crowd about them. Before Sander could answer, the other continued:
“And what treasure have you looted, smith? Turn out your gear.”
Sander wanted to balk, but he knew that he would thus only provoke a struggle that would do no good. Sullenly he went to Rhin, unknotted the bag holding his work tools and the small bits of metal he had pried and broken loose in the ship. As he unrolled the covering, Jon pounced on one of those lengths of battered wire.