With an abruptness born of decision, Chen stepped to a pile of scrap iron and selected three pieces. Then he pumped his bellows till the fire in the forge was white not. With the tongs he thrust in one of the pieces, after
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a long moment withdrew it, and began to hammer. Heat, hammer, and quench! Heat, hammer, and quench! The hisses were explosive, and the place smelled of steam and hot metal. He kept it up till he held a finished grappling hook in his tongs, with a ring to take a rope, then took a file to its three hooks till they were pointed. Finally he wrapped it in a cotton towel that hung by the quenching tank, to conceal what it was and eventually to muffle the sound it might make. This done, he laid it aside, grinned at Wu and bowed slighty. The farmer thought he knew what the smith had in mind.
The smith took another swig from the crock. “I will talk to this Mongol,” he said softly, “and see what he is like. At the Pine Point, you say. And your son is there with him?”
“I will take you,” said Wu.
“No,” Chen replied. “You stay here. You will help ensure that the man who is watching, the man of my son-in-law, stays, and doesn’t follow me.”
“I?”
The smith wasn’t listening. He hung up his leather apron, his thick, muscular forearms flecked with scars from hot flakes of metal sent flying by his hammer. Then strode to the door, stepped outside, and called back for anyone to hear. “I’m expecting a fanner to come. If I’m not here when he arrives, tell him I’ll be back when Doctor Liang is done sticking needles in me. You don’t know what it s like to stand all day at my age. My knees are killing me.”
Pretending to limp, he walked to his home then, fifty meters away, in the front and out the back, to the shed where he kept his horse. There he took down a ten-meter coil of rope and tied on the grappling hook. Then he saddled the animal, rode it along behind a mulberry hedge to an alley, followed the alley to another street, and headed south out of town.
As he rode, he thought about his daughter, the bailiffs wife. It ground him to think that at first he’d been pleased with the marriage. But she’d been a difficult girl,
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passionate, willful, dissatisfied. With an eye for young men; he and his wife had had to watch her like a hawk! Marriage, they thought, would calm her. And it had, but . . . Sometimes, when he saw her, he could tell she’d been crying. And three years with no pregnancy! He wondered if Lo was impotent, or preferred unnatural acts.
Jik recognized the blacksmith and came out of the woods to meet him. “Honorable smith! Where is my father?” he asked.
The smith rode the horse into the edge of the trees before answering. “He is watching my shop. Where is the Mongol?”
Mongol? The boy felt uneasy at that; the giant was no Mongol, though who knew what he was. “He is back where no one can see him from the road. Come! I will take you to him.”
Nils had not climbed the slope, but simply hiked back along its foot, to settle behind a sapling thicket. As the smith rode toward him through the trees, he stood up and stepped out, Mrs. Wu’s hat in hand, blanket over an arm, exposing his blond hair, long braids, and sword.
“What?!” began the smith, for clearly this was no Mongol. Then Nils spoke.
“You are Chen, who speaks Mongol?” He put it as a question, though he knew.
“I am. But you …”
“I am a Northman from far to the west, who has been among the Mongols. My name is Nils.”
“Ah!” Chen stared, taking in not only Nils’s size and musculature, but now his eyes. “You are blind!”
“I am not blind. I have wizard eyes, and see by night as well as day.”
Breath hissed out of the old smith, like air from a bladder. “A wizard!”