SCENT OF METAL
by Zhuhui Zou
Joseph Calingrad the Fifth leaned against the soft couch cushion in the library of the Calingrad Castle. Before him, on the table decorated with carvings of famous kings and heroes, rested a glass tea cup that reflected the golden morning sunlight along with marble statues with broken arms or legs standing in the corners.
Even though he was only seventeen years old, and a few elders of the family had questioned whether his youth was a suitable heir for this powerful family, his excellence in sword-fighting, public-relationship, and academia had quickly convinced the elders that he was the leader the family needed.
He was reading a book on bladesmithing. His family was now rich enough to gain wealth from places other than a furnace and whetstone, yet he could almost smell the rusty fragment rising from the hand-drawn forging diagrams in the book.
After finishing the ten pages that he had planned to read, he placed the book down and touched the necklace before his chest. It was a rare, silvery coin passed down from his ancestors.
The sound of a guard’s footsteps broke his concentration. He looked at the library’s door. A young guard he didn’t recognize, probably a newcomer, stopped, removed his sword, and placed it on the shelf outside the door before approaching with an envelope in his hands.
“Your armor,” Joseph Calingrad the Fifth said.
The guard paused. After looking down at himself, he hurried back to the door.
“Forgive me, sir,” he said while removing his body armor with shaking hands and almost dropped his pauldrons in the process.
“Take it easy.” Calingrad gave him a reassuring smile while the young man walked toward him in his clothes, metal-free. “Now, what do you have for me?”
“A letter, from Sir Bradenbury.”
Calingrad frowned as he received the envelope from the guard. After opening it, a small piece of rusty, rectangular metal slid out and landed in his palm.
His eyes widened. He looked up at the top of the bookshelves, where a row of paintings of men in black dress shirts hung on the wall. On the far left was a man with a wild, dark red beard—Joseph Calingrad the First.
Years before the splendid Calingrad Castle was built, a small, tattered bladesmith shop occupied that location.
“Joseph! Hey, wake up!”
The frantic pounding on the side door woke Joseph Calingrad the First from his sleep. He jumped off his creaky, wooden bed and rubbed his blurry eyes, trying to get used to the morning light that came in from the gaps on his aged door. Although being a young man who had started living independently only a few years ago, he already had a wild, dark red beard that looked like a flaming bush growing upon his chin.
“Coming, coming,” he grunted as he stumbled toward the door.
The instant he pulled it open, a gush of cold wind struck him, tickling his skin left exposed by his tattered clothes.
“All yours,” the man outside said and pointed at the box sitting on the ground, filled with iron pots, bars from fences, and pieces of broken swords.
Joseph sighed. He then turned around in his small bladesmith shop, found the three daggers that he had finished last night, and handed them over.
“Next time, I want something bigger, maybe a sword,” the man said as he walked away. “And at least decorate it a bit.”
“Well then give me some better iron!” Joseph shouted at the disappearing figure as he cursed beneath his breath and dragged the box inside.
After lighting his forge and warming himself up from Northern England’s cold morning, he rubbed his hands and placed the burning candle next to the shop counter outside.
Customers arrived shortly after. Some were old clients, who knew what “Joseph the mediocre bladesmith” wanted. They dropped off new clothes or his favorite apples on the doorstep and grabbed the sword or dagger or shield hanging before the counter.
Joseph liked his old customers, but the new customers could be a problem.
“I can give you two sacks of potatoes for a spear.”
“Will you take four leather boots for a sword with sheath?”
“What about three loaves of bread?”
“I know someone in the militia. If you give me three broadswords and four daggers, I can tell them that you make good swords for three. Maybe they’ll come and buy things from you. Not a bad deal.”
“I can heal your joint problems for two sabres.”
Joseph didn’t know how to trade with new customers. It wasn’t that Joseph didn’t like wearing leather boots or eating baked potatoes. He didn’t know how many sacks of potatoes to ask in return for a new sword; sometimes he didn’t even want to eat potatoes for dinner at all.
“What? You agreed to three jackets but not three crossbows?” An agitated teenager, who looked a bit younger than him, about seventeen years old, and had introduced himself as Berny, shrieked as he paced in front of the shop with beads of sweat rolling down his forehead.
He had been there all morning, trying to buy one riccandi, a thin sword with fancy decorations around the grip that had become popular a few generations ago. Berny had offered first with one crossbow, then two, and, finally, three.
“What am I supposed to do with crossbows? I’m a bladesmith!” Joseph scoffed, not looking away from his anvil, where he tried to shape a red-hot iron bar into a gladius for someone who had offered to fix his door that kept letting cold wind in at night.
“You could hunt with it! You know the Trudmans make the best crossbows in this area,” Berny cried as he watched Joseph nod to another customer who gave three new chairs for an iron javelin.
“You’re one of those Trudman boys?” Joseph raised his eyebrows. “I thought your family is rich and has your own bladesmith. You don’t need a poor one like me.”
Berny dug his fingers into his hair and scratched his head violently.
“I just need one riccandi, please!” He begged. “No other fancy stuff!”
Joseph didn’t reply.
“Just one!”
The bladesmith sighed, resting the hammer on the worktable and looked at Berny. “Riccandis are hard to make. They’re already fancy stuff. The blade is too thin for me to use normal steel. I don’t have the right steel because those are expensive. And, the decorating eccortsio lablerios stripes around the guard will take days to make.”
“What metal do you need then? I can get it for you,” Berny said with brightened eyes like a freezing man at night finding a bonfire at the end of the street.
“Why do you need a riccandi anyway?”
“Not your concern.”
“You always need a good reason to get something like a riccandi! Maybe as a betrothal gift?”
“I said it’s not your concern!”
“The Trudmans don’t hide things, right? Only the weak play sneaky tricks,” Joseph chuckled.
“It’s for… battle.”
“Then get a normal sword or spear! A riccandi is too light.”
“No, no, I mean… I’m fighting one of the Norburns.” Berny’s voice lowered as he looked at the ground while squeezing out the words.
“The Trudmans are having a war against the Norburns?” Joseph raised his eyebrow. “I thought they’re the poor guys. You don’t need to fight them. You can literally buy them to be your slaves.”
“It’s just me fighting.”
Joseph tilted his head in confusion, but after deciphering Berny’s words, the bladesmith’s eyes slowly widened.
“Berny Trudman is dueling one of the Norburn runts!” Joseph shouted as if he had discovered a scandal in the royal family.
Everyone in and near the shop stopped chattering and looked at him. For a second, it seemed that even the wind had even paused to listen. The next second, almost everyone, including Joseph, howled with laughter.
“Yeah, yeah, laugh all you want,” Berny grunted, resting his hands on his hips.
Dueling was considered childish play. One man would die at the end, yes, but only people who couldn’t solve things by talking would duel, and no matter who won at the end, both would be considered as barbarians.
It took Joseph a while to recall that even though riccandis were one of the most famous blades and would appear in important ceremonies, an unwritten rule of dueling was that both sides needed to use a riccandi.
“Now, now, boy, what are you dueling for?” A man had to bite his inner cheek to attempt to speak while laughing hysterically. “A box of sweets that you stole from those Norburn babies next door?”
“I see why your family’s bladesmith didn’t want to make it for you. It would bring shame upon his name if the words got out that he had made a riccandi for his master for a duel,” another client with unwashed hair and shoes that ripped at the toes added, looking around the shop as if he was a comedian. “And duel the Norburns! They still owe me two sacks of metal!”
A third man walked over and slapped a laughing Joseph on the shoulder, almost causing him to drop the hammer. “Make it for him, Joseph, so we get to watch two little bunnies fight!”
“Brother,” Joseph pointed at Berny. “Riccandi needs metal that they use to make armors for the nobles, the shiny ones that are rare and really expensive, you know? If you can get me those metal, I’ll make a riccandi for you to duel a Norburn…”
The rest of Joseph’s comment turned into gibberish as he resumed laughing.
Berny hesitated before nodding and walking away in silence. He hadn’t laughed at all the whole time; not even the tips of his mouth tried to curve.
When Berny entered the Truman Castle next to the shoreline, he looked up at the statue of a black dagger pointing downwards embedded on the wall above the front gate. It was the symbol of the Truman family. The stone material had turned rough after years of wind and rain, but it could still make pedestrians stop and admire it with awe.
“Did he agree?” Lady Trudman asked when Berny appeared in the hall
“Yeah, but he said I’ll need to give him some Rotary Iron to make it,” Berny grunted. He plopped down and rubbed his face. Joseph and other men’s unreserved laughter still echoed beside his ears.
“Kelvin has a few bars in his workroom,” Lady Trudman replied. “Those aren’t easy to get. I’ll say that.”
“I’ll throw him in jail after.”
“Why? Kelvin is a good bladesmith, and he’s loyal to us.”
“He refused to make it for me, so I had to beg that peasant, Joseph, to do it. Everyone there laughed at me at the end.”
There was a pause, when a servant came in with a silver tray with two tea cups, Lady Trudman waved him off.
“You don’t have to duel that Norburn, you know. They’re more like street mice,” she said finally. “And they’ll never prove it.”
“Then how do I prove it to them? They’ll just… gossip around about my birthright, and say that I’m actually the son of a peasant man and woman,” Berny spread his arms and exclaimed. “That’ll ruin my fame as the Trudman’s heir.”
“Don’t listen to them. You don’t need to prove anything. You believe you are a Trudman, I believe it, and your entire family believes it. That’s all the proof you need.”
“But the people won’t believe it. And those Norburns asked for the duel first. If I don’t accept, people will think we’re cowards.”
That night, when Berny went out for a walk along the castle’s lawn, three peasant boys with dirty shirts walking outside the fence paused after seeing him. They exchanged a quick look before running away and shouting:
“You’re not a Trudman! You don’t even walk like them. You’re just a Norburn runt!”
The next day, after finding the last few Rotary Iron bars each as thick as his thumb and as long as his forearm in Kelvin’s workroom, Berny Trudman changed into a casual green shirt and set off for Joseph Calingrad’s bladesmith shop. He kept his eyes forward and his chin up, but he could feel the villagers turning to stare at him as he traveled down the dirt road. Their chattering echoed behind him.
“Excellent,” Joseph said. After placing the shiny, silvery bars of iron on his scratch-covered, wooden work table, Joseph’s eyes had never left them and his thumbs hadn’t stopped rubbing along their glass-smooth surface.
“When can you get it done?” Berny asked with a straight face.
“Three days, maybe four.”
Berny handed another bar to Joseph, and the bladesmith snatched it over without blinking.
“I need it this afternoon,” Berny demanded.
“But a riccandi needs a lot of time, I need to…”
Joseph paused when Berny handed over three more bars.
“I need it this afternoon.”
“Whatever.” Joseph shrugged. A grin appeared on his face as the morning sun reflected off the bars and struck his face. The bright light scorched his eyes, but he didn’t mind.
The instant Berny turned away, Joseph grabbed one of his old clothes stacked in the corner and wrapped it around the seven bars carefully. He then looked over the shop counter, saw no one looking in his direction, and slid it under his bed.
The word of the duel spread around the small, coastal town like a wildfire fanned by a strong wind. When the sun began to set, people gathered outside the Trudman Castle’s lawn, chattering and laughing at each other as they waited for the duel to begin.
Most of them were wearing old, dark blue shirts or dresses that had been re-dyed countless times and were covered with patches after years of farming or labor. Even though people considered dueling as childish play, watching two men fighting was still a great afternoon entertainment. Some of them even brought a few handfuls of nuts for snack.
Joseph came too after Berny picked up the riccandi from him. The bladesmith didn’t even get the time to eat lunch that day since the elegant carvings and decorations required for a riccandi took way longer than forging the blade itself.
“You actually made it in one day?” One of Joseph’s long-term customers sidled up next to him and asked. He looked and smelled like he had come straight from the fields. When he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a chunk of stale bread, he offered half to Joseph, who accepted it.
After taking a large bite, Joseph nodded carelessly in reply. He then peeked through the shoulders of other people to see Berny wearing a bright red tabard while holding the riccandi in his right hand and glaring at a Norburn man, who only had a tattered shirt and held a rusty old riccandi without decorations and carvings on the guard. The blade looked as if someone had dug it up from the mud.
“Interesting… ” the customer murmured to himself.
“What are they dueling for?” Joseph asked.
“That Norburn said Berny is actually a Norburn child.”
Joseph laughed. “They can’t be serious!”
Lady Trudman was sitting not far away, watching nervously and fisting her hands while three servants stood behind her. Lord Trudman, meanwhile, was talking to a gardener and wasn’t paying much attention. He knew his son would win. As the heir to the Trudman, Berny had the best sword-fighting teacher, and his opponent was just a farming peasant. Besides, Joseph, although being as a peasant bladesmith, still forged Berny’s riccandi out of the toughest material anyone could find in England, Rotary Iron.
A gentle clang when the two opponents touched their weapons together signaled the beginning of the duel. Unlike Berny, who extended his free arm to balance himself during the fight and moved his feet like a boxer, the Norburn swung his riccandi wildly in the air. He’d never received any sword-fighting training, but years of farming and laboring made his arms and legs as strong and thick as a tree trunk. Sparks jumped out each time their riccandis contacted.
The audience laughed when the Norburn slipped on the grass or Berny stumbled back to dodge a lunge.
When the Norburn lunged like a bull at Berny’s waist, he tried to parry it away. But instead of hearing another clang, Berny’s riccandi broke. Metal splinters shot out in all directions like the shattered pieces of a glass cup.
The crowd ceased their gossiping, eating, and betting. They watched with wide eyes as the Norburn’s blade pierced into Berny’s flesh.
A wide smile stretched across the Norburn’s face as he watched Berny fall to the ground with his mouth open in shock while blood dyed his clothes into dark red.
The crowd silenced after the faint thud when Berny’s body collapsed.
When Lord Trudman dashed toward the lawn and dropped to his knees beside the body of his son with a loud gasp. Lady Trudman screamed, but the cheering from the watching Norburns covered her voice.
With trembling hands, Lord Trudman picked up a small, rectangular piece of Berny’s fragmented riccandi and examined it under the sun. It was a bit less shiny than Rotary Iron.
He rubbed his thumb against its surface—a bit rougher than Rotary Iron.
It was a piece of polished scrap metal.
“Bastard!” He let out a roar so loud that it would make a lion run away with its tail between its legs. He then stood up, glared at the silent crowd with fire burning behind his eyes, and drew his sword, one with golden guard and silvery patterns along the dark blade. “Where is the peasant who forged the riccandi?”
Everyone turned at each other while a few gave Joseph a worried glance.
“Berny lost, so that means…” an old man murmured to himself while staring at the ground, shaking his head. Then, he looked up. “The Trudmans are gone now! Berny is their heir, and he had just lost the fight for his birthright!”
There was another pause. Even Lord Trudman’s hand that held the sword lowered a bit.
Everyone started laughing.
“Doesn’t he know that already?” One chuckled.
“He knows it, but he’s too weak to admit it!” Another one exclaimed.
“They should move out of the castle!”
“Silence!” Lord Trudman shouted, raising his sword to the air, hand shaking.
But no one listened. They laughed on, and when Lord Trudman swung his sword at the crowd in fury, everyone was already leaving the area, heading back to their own houses, and gossiping along the way.
“You… you…” Lord Trudman’s eyes shot daggers at the people, but no one payed attention. “By the name of the Great Sword of Trudman, we will hunt down the person responsible and plunge this sword into his chest!”
A man was running down the road, a man with a wild, bush-like red beard. He constantly turned back and looked in the direction of the castle.
“That’s the bladesmith!” Lady Trudman called out from behind, pointing at the bearded man.
Four guards rushed down the lawn and went after the bladesmith while Lord Trudman yelled at the disappearing peasant. “I promise that the Trudmans will find you and make you pay with your life! And your children will forever be hunted by the Trudman because of your treachery!”
Joseph Calingrad dashed into his small, tattered bladesmith shop and removed the small package of thin, metal disks, each the size of his thumb that he had made out of the seven bars of Rotary Iron Berny gave him in the morning. When the guards arrived at the front counter with their weapons, he slipped out the side door and into the mountains with a package pressed against his chest.
He was fleeing from this place, leaving his bladesmith shop and his past behind. He only carried that package of Rotary Iron disks.
Dueling was childish play, but making the Trudmans angry was serious business, considering that they were known for defending their pride and fulfilling their promises.
Joseph had heard about tales of a remote village hidden inside the vast mountains, where the villagers viewed Rotary Iron as diamond. One small piece the size of his fingernail could buy a farm there, and with that package, he could buy at least ten villages.
When receiving those seven bars of Rotary Iron from Berny, Joseph had to bite his tongue to act normal and prevent himself from shouting with joy.
It took him two days to reach the village. It was hidden so deep into the mountains that its only small trail to the outside world was occupied by trees and grasses long ago and left not a single trace, so sometimes he would run in the wrong direction for an hour before realizing his mistake. But it also helped him to evade the Trudmans’ pursuit.
When he arrived, the villagers stared at the foreigner with leaves in his hair and his beard all tangled up as Joseph dragged his tired legs down the village’s dirt road. His stomach groaned and his limbs ached, but he still clung onto the package for dear life.
“I’ll… I’ll buy your house and your field,” Joseph said while breathing heavily as he staggered like a beggar to a man fixing the front door of his house.
“How much did you drink last night?” The man sneered without looking at him.
Joseph took out one disk from his package.
“I’ll pay one… one…” Joseph stammered, licking his dry lips while trying to come up with a good name for his Rotary Iron disk. “I’ll pay you one coin.”
But he quickly realized that he had overthought the “naming part” after seeing the piece of wood slipping out of the man’s hand as his vision glued to the so-called “coin” with his jaw hanging open for an entire minute.
In just a week, the entire village was under Joseph’s command. In the same year, he became a powerful tribal leader of that area.
Three years later, when the Trudman had lost their power after Berny’s death and no heir had appeared, he returned to his town like a king visiting the land under his control.
He seldom forged. He didn’t need to. He had enough servants to do it for him. When merchants from faraway lands had heard that people around here almost worshiped Rotary Iron, they brought in more, all forged in the same, thin disk that Joseph called coin.
He died, at the age of seventy-three, as a powerful man. But what Lord Trudman had said still echoed beside his ears on his deathbed, so he passed on a tradition:
No one shall enter the room where a Calingrad is in with metal on him.
Joseph Calingrad the Fifth didn’t even have the time to shout for reinforcement when the dagger held in the young guard’s hand sank its entirety into his chest. He fell down on the white, marble floor, with his mouth and eyes wide with surprise.
The small, rectangular piece of rusty scrap metal slipped out of his hand when he fell. Its resounding clang when contacting the marble floor echoed across the library.
Before leaving the room, the guard placed on the table a small stone statue of a black dagger pointing downward.
Even though he was only seventeen years old, and a few elders of the family had questioned whether his youth was a suitable heir for this powerful family, his excellence in sword-fighting, public-relationship, and academia had quickly convinced the elders that he was the leader the family needed.
He was reading a book on bladesmithing. His family was now rich enough to gain wealth from places other than a furnace and whetstone, yet he could almost smell the rusty fragment rising from the hand-drawn forging diagrams in the book.
After finishing the ten pages that he had planned to read, he placed the book down and touched the necklace before his chest. It was a rare, silvery coin passed down from his ancestors.
The sound of a guard’s footsteps broke his concentration. He looked at the library’s door. A young guard he didn’t recognize, probably a newcomer, stopped, removed his sword, and placed it on the shelf outside the door before approaching with an envelope in his hands.
“Your armor,” Joseph Calingrad the Fifth said.
The guard paused. After looking down at himself, he hurried back to the door.
“Forgive me, sir,” he said while removing his body armor with shaking hands and almost dropped his pauldrons in the process.
“Take it easy.” Calingrad gave him a reassuring smile while the young man walked toward him in his clothes, metal-free. “Now, what do you have for me?”
“A letter, from Sir Bradenbury.”
Calingrad frowned as he received the envelope from the guard. After opening it, a small piece of rusty, rectangular metal slid out and landed in his palm.
His eyes widened. He looked up at the top of the bookshelves, where a row of paintings of men in black dress shirts hung on the wall. On the far left was a man with a wild, dark red beard—Joseph Calingrad the First.
Years before the splendid Calingrad Castle was built, a small, tattered bladesmith shop occupied that location.
“Joseph! Hey, wake up!”
The frantic pounding on the side door woke Joseph Calingrad the First from his sleep. He jumped off his creaky, wooden bed and rubbed his blurry eyes, trying to get used to the morning light that came in from the gaps on his aged door. Although being a young man who had started living independently only a few years ago, he already had a wild, dark red beard that looked like a flaming bush growing upon his chin.
“Coming, coming,” he grunted as he stumbled toward the door.
The instant he pulled it open, a gush of cold wind struck him, tickling his skin left exposed by his tattered clothes.
“All yours,” the man outside said and pointed at the box sitting on the ground, filled with iron pots, bars from fences, and pieces of broken swords.
Joseph sighed. He then turned around in his small bladesmith shop, found the three daggers that he had finished last night, and handed them over.
“Next time, I want something bigger, maybe a sword,” the man said as he walked away. “And at least decorate it a bit.”
“Well then give me some better iron!” Joseph shouted at the disappearing figure as he cursed beneath his breath and dragged the box inside.
After lighting his forge and warming himself up from Northern England’s cold morning, he rubbed his hands and placed the burning candle next to the shop counter outside.
Customers arrived shortly after. Some were old clients, who knew what “Joseph the mediocre bladesmith” wanted. They dropped off new clothes or his favorite apples on the doorstep and grabbed the sword or dagger or shield hanging before the counter.
Joseph liked his old customers, but the new customers could be a problem.
“I can give you two sacks of potatoes for a spear.”
“Will you take four leather boots for a sword with sheath?”
“What about three loaves of bread?”
“I know someone in the militia. If you give me three broadswords and four daggers, I can tell them that you make good swords for three. Maybe they’ll come and buy things from you. Not a bad deal.”
“I can heal your joint problems for two sabres.”
Joseph didn’t know how to trade with new customers. It wasn’t that Joseph didn’t like wearing leather boots or eating baked potatoes. He didn’t know how many sacks of potatoes to ask in return for a new sword; sometimes he didn’t even want to eat potatoes for dinner at all.
“What? You agreed to three jackets but not three crossbows?” An agitated teenager, who looked a bit younger than him, about seventeen years old, and had introduced himself as Berny, shrieked as he paced in front of the shop with beads of sweat rolling down his forehead.
He had been there all morning, trying to buy one riccandi, a thin sword with fancy decorations around the grip that had become popular a few generations ago. Berny had offered first with one crossbow, then two, and, finally, three.
“What am I supposed to do with crossbows? I’m a bladesmith!” Joseph scoffed, not looking away from his anvil, where he tried to shape a red-hot iron bar into a gladius for someone who had offered to fix his door that kept letting cold wind in at night.
“You could hunt with it! You know the Trudmans make the best crossbows in this area,” Berny cried as he watched Joseph nod to another customer who gave three new chairs for an iron javelin.
“You’re one of those Trudman boys?” Joseph raised his eyebrows. “I thought your family is rich and has your own bladesmith. You don’t need a poor one like me.”
Berny dug his fingers into his hair and scratched his head violently.
“I just need one riccandi, please!” He begged. “No other fancy stuff!”
Joseph didn’t reply.
“Just one!”
The bladesmith sighed, resting the hammer on the worktable and looked at Berny. “Riccandis are hard to make. They’re already fancy stuff. The blade is too thin for me to use normal steel. I don’t have the right steel because those are expensive. And, the decorating eccortsio lablerios stripes around the guard will take days to make.”
“What metal do you need then? I can get it for you,” Berny said with brightened eyes like a freezing man at night finding a bonfire at the end of the street.
“Why do you need a riccandi anyway?”
“Not your concern.”
“You always need a good reason to get something like a riccandi! Maybe as a betrothal gift?”
“I said it’s not your concern!”
“The Trudmans don’t hide things, right? Only the weak play sneaky tricks,” Joseph chuckled.
“It’s for… battle.”
“Then get a normal sword or spear! A riccandi is too light.”
“No, no, I mean… I’m fighting one of the Norburns.” Berny’s voice lowered as he looked at the ground while squeezing out the words.
“The Trudmans are having a war against the Norburns?” Joseph raised his eyebrow. “I thought they’re the poor guys. You don’t need to fight them. You can literally buy them to be your slaves.”
“It’s just me fighting.”
Joseph tilted his head in confusion, but after deciphering Berny’s words, the bladesmith’s eyes slowly widened.
“Berny Trudman is dueling one of the Norburn runts!” Joseph shouted as if he had discovered a scandal in the royal family.
Everyone in and near the shop stopped chattering and looked at him. For a second, it seemed that even the wind had even paused to listen. The next second, almost everyone, including Joseph, howled with laughter.
“Yeah, yeah, laugh all you want,” Berny grunted, resting his hands on his hips.
Dueling was considered childish play. One man would die at the end, yes, but only people who couldn’t solve things by talking would duel, and no matter who won at the end, both would be considered as barbarians.
It took Joseph a while to recall that even though riccandis were one of the most famous blades and would appear in important ceremonies, an unwritten rule of dueling was that both sides needed to use a riccandi.
“Now, now, boy, what are you dueling for?” A man had to bite his inner cheek to attempt to speak while laughing hysterically. “A box of sweets that you stole from those Norburn babies next door?”
“I see why your family’s bladesmith didn’t want to make it for you. It would bring shame upon his name if the words got out that he had made a riccandi for his master for a duel,” another client with unwashed hair and shoes that ripped at the toes added, looking around the shop as if he was a comedian. “And duel the Norburns! They still owe me two sacks of metal!”
A third man walked over and slapped a laughing Joseph on the shoulder, almost causing him to drop the hammer. “Make it for him, Joseph, so we get to watch two little bunnies fight!”
“Brother,” Joseph pointed at Berny. “Riccandi needs metal that they use to make armors for the nobles, the shiny ones that are rare and really expensive, you know? If you can get me those metal, I’ll make a riccandi for you to duel a Norburn…”
The rest of Joseph’s comment turned into gibberish as he resumed laughing.
Berny hesitated before nodding and walking away in silence. He hadn’t laughed at all the whole time; not even the tips of his mouth tried to curve.
When Berny entered the Truman Castle next to the shoreline, he looked up at the statue of a black dagger pointing downwards embedded on the wall above the front gate. It was the symbol of the Truman family. The stone material had turned rough after years of wind and rain, but it could still make pedestrians stop and admire it with awe.
“Did he agree?” Lady Trudman asked when Berny appeared in the hall
“Yeah, but he said I’ll need to give him some Rotary Iron to make it,” Berny grunted. He plopped down and rubbed his face. Joseph and other men’s unreserved laughter still echoed beside his ears.
“Kelvin has a few bars in his workroom,” Lady Trudman replied. “Those aren’t easy to get. I’ll say that.”
“I’ll throw him in jail after.”
“Why? Kelvin is a good bladesmith, and he’s loyal to us.”
“He refused to make it for me, so I had to beg that peasant, Joseph, to do it. Everyone there laughed at me at the end.”
There was a pause, when a servant came in with a silver tray with two tea cups, Lady Trudman waved him off.
“You don’t have to duel that Norburn, you know. They’re more like street mice,” she said finally. “And they’ll never prove it.”
“Then how do I prove it to them? They’ll just… gossip around about my birthright, and say that I’m actually the son of a peasant man and woman,” Berny spread his arms and exclaimed. “That’ll ruin my fame as the Trudman’s heir.”
“Don’t listen to them. You don’t need to prove anything. You believe you are a Trudman, I believe it, and your entire family believes it. That’s all the proof you need.”
“But the people won’t believe it. And those Norburns asked for the duel first. If I don’t accept, people will think we’re cowards.”
That night, when Berny went out for a walk along the castle’s lawn, three peasant boys with dirty shirts walking outside the fence paused after seeing him. They exchanged a quick look before running away and shouting:
“You’re not a Trudman! You don’t even walk like them. You’re just a Norburn runt!”
The next day, after finding the last few Rotary Iron bars each as thick as his thumb and as long as his forearm in Kelvin’s workroom, Berny Trudman changed into a casual green shirt and set off for Joseph Calingrad’s bladesmith shop. He kept his eyes forward and his chin up, but he could feel the villagers turning to stare at him as he traveled down the dirt road. Their chattering echoed behind him.
“Excellent,” Joseph said. After placing the shiny, silvery bars of iron on his scratch-covered, wooden work table, Joseph’s eyes had never left them and his thumbs hadn’t stopped rubbing along their glass-smooth surface.
“When can you get it done?” Berny asked with a straight face.
“Three days, maybe four.”
Berny handed another bar to Joseph, and the bladesmith snatched it over without blinking.
“I need it this afternoon,” Berny demanded.
“But a riccandi needs a lot of time, I need to…”
Joseph paused when Berny handed over three more bars.
“I need it this afternoon.”
“Whatever.” Joseph shrugged. A grin appeared on his face as the morning sun reflected off the bars and struck his face. The bright light scorched his eyes, but he didn’t mind.
The instant Berny turned away, Joseph grabbed one of his old clothes stacked in the corner and wrapped it around the seven bars carefully. He then looked over the shop counter, saw no one looking in his direction, and slid it under his bed.
The word of the duel spread around the small, coastal town like a wildfire fanned by a strong wind. When the sun began to set, people gathered outside the Trudman Castle’s lawn, chattering and laughing at each other as they waited for the duel to begin.
Most of them were wearing old, dark blue shirts or dresses that had been re-dyed countless times and were covered with patches after years of farming or labor. Even though people considered dueling as childish play, watching two men fighting was still a great afternoon entertainment. Some of them even brought a few handfuls of nuts for snack.
Joseph came too after Berny picked up the riccandi from him. The bladesmith didn’t even get the time to eat lunch that day since the elegant carvings and decorations required for a riccandi took way longer than forging the blade itself.
“You actually made it in one day?” One of Joseph’s long-term customers sidled up next to him and asked. He looked and smelled like he had come straight from the fields. When he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a chunk of stale bread, he offered half to Joseph, who accepted it.
After taking a large bite, Joseph nodded carelessly in reply. He then peeked through the shoulders of other people to see Berny wearing a bright red tabard while holding the riccandi in his right hand and glaring at a Norburn man, who only had a tattered shirt and held a rusty old riccandi without decorations and carvings on the guard. The blade looked as if someone had dug it up from the mud.
“Interesting… ” the customer murmured to himself.
“What are they dueling for?” Joseph asked.
“That Norburn said Berny is actually a Norburn child.”
Joseph laughed. “They can’t be serious!”
Lady Trudman was sitting not far away, watching nervously and fisting her hands while three servants stood behind her. Lord Trudman, meanwhile, was talking to a gardener and wasn’t paying much attention. He knew his son would win. As the heir to the Trudman, Berny had the best sword-fighting teacher, and his opponent was just a farming peasant. Besides, Joseph, although being as a peasant bladesmith, still forged Berny’s riccandi out of the toughest material anyone could find in England, Rotary Iron.
A gentle clang when the two opponents touched their weapons together signaled the beginning of the duel. Unlike Berny, who extended his free arm to balance himself during the fight and moved his feet like a boxer, the Norburn swung his riccandi wildly in the air. He’d never received any sword-fighting training, but years of farming and laboring made his arms and legs as strong and thick as a tree trunk. Sparks jumped out each time their riccandis contacted.
The audience laughed when the Norburn slipped on the grass or Berny stumbled back to dodge a lunge.
When the Norburn lunged like a bull at Berny’s waist, he tried to parry it away. But instead of hearing another clang, Berny’s riccandi broke. Metal splinters shot out in all directions like the shattered pieces of a glass cup.
The crowd ceased their gossiping, eating, and betting. They watched with wide eyes as the Norburn’s blade pierced into Berny’s flesh.
A wide smile stretched across the Norburn’s face as he watched Berny fall to the ground with his mouth open in shock while blood dyed his clothes into dark red.
The crowd silenced after the faint thud when Berny’s body collapsed.
When Lord Trudman dashed toward the lawn and dropped to his knees beside the body of his son with a loud gasp. Lady Trudman screamed, but the cheering from the watching Norburns covered her voice.
With trembling hands, Lord Trudman picked up a small, rectangular piece of Berny’s fragmented riccandi and examined it under the sun. It was a bit less shiny than Rotary Iron.
He rubbed his thumb against its surface—a bit rougher than Rotary Iron.
It was a piece of polished scrap metal.
“Bastard!” He let out a roar so loud that it would make a lion run away with its tail between its legs. He then stood up, glared at the silent crowd with fire burning behind his eyes, and drew his sword, one with golden guard and silvery patterns along the dark blade. “Where is the peasant who forged the riccandi?”
Everyone turned at each other while a few gave Joseph a worried glance.
“Berny lost, so that means…” an old man murmured to himself while staring at the ground, shaking his head. Then, he looked up. “The Trudmans are gone now! Berny is their heir, and he had just lost the fight for his birthright!”
There was another pause. Even Lord Trudman’s hand that held the sword lowered a bit.
Everyone started laughing.
“Doesn’t he know that already?” One chuckled.
“He knows it, but he’s too weak to admit it!” Another one exclaimed.
“They should move out of the castle!”
“Silence!” Lord Trudman shouted, raising his sword to the air, hand shaking.
But no one listened. They laughed on, and when Lord Trudman swung his sword at the crowd in fury, everyone was already leaving the area, heading back to their own houses, and gossiping along the way.
“You… you…” Lord Trudman’s eyes shot daggers at the people, but no one payed attention. “By the name of the Great Sword of Trudman, we will hunt down the person responsible and plunge this sword into his chest!”
A man was running down the road, a man with a wild, bush-like red beard. He constantly turned back and looked in the direction of the castle.
“That’s the bladesmith!” Lady Trudman called out from behind, pointing at the bearded man.
Four guards rushed down the lawn and went after the bladesmith while Lord Trudman yelled at the disappearing peasant. “I promise that the Trudmans will find you and make you pay with your life! And your children will forever be hunted by the Trudman because of your treachery!”
Joseph Calingrad dashed into his small, tattered bladesmith shop and removed the small package of thin, metal disks, each the size of his thumb that he had made out of the seven bars of Rotary Iron Berny gave him in the morning. When the guards arrived at the front counter with their weapons, he slipped out the side door and into the mountains with a package pressed against his chest.
He was fleeing from this place, leaving his bladesmith shop and his past behind. He only carried that package of Rotary Iron disks.
Dueling was childish play, but making the Trudmans angry was serious business, considering that they were known for defending their pride and fulfilling their promises.
Joseph had heard about tales of a remote village hidden inside the vast mountains, where the villagers viewed Rotary Iron as diamond. One small piece the size of his fingernail could buy a farm there, and with that package, he could buy at least ten villages.
When receiving those seven bars of Rotary Iron from Berny, Joseph had to bite his tongue to act normal and prevent himself from shouting with joy.
It took him two days to reach the village. It was hidden so deep into the mountains that its only small trail to the outside world was occupied by trees and grasses long ago and left not a single trace, so sometimes he would run in the wrong direction for an hour before realizing his mistake. But it also helped him to evade the Trudmans’ pursuit.
When he arrived, the villagers stared at the foreigner with leaves in his hair and his beard all tangled up as Joseph dragged his tired legs down the village’s dirt road. His stomach groaned and his limbs ached, but he still clung onto the package for dear life.
“I’ll… I’ll buy your house and your field,” Joseph said while breathing heavily as he staggered like a beggar to a man fixing the front door of his house.
“How much did you drink last night?” The man sneered without looking at him.
Joseph took out one disk from his package.
“I’ll pay one… one…” Joseph stammered, licking his dry lips while trying to come up with a good name for his Rotary Iron disk. “I’ll pay you one coin.”
But he quickly realized that he had overthought the “naming part” after seeing the piece of wood slipping out of the man’s hand as his vision glued to the so-called “coin” with his jaw hanging open for an entire minute.
In just a week, the entire village was under Joseph’s command. In the same year, he became a powerful tribal leader of that area.
Three years later, when the Trudman had lost their power after Berny’s death and no heir had appeared, he returned to his town like a king visiting the land under his control.
He seldom forged. He didn’t need to. He had enough servants to do it for him. When merchants from faraway lands had heard that people around here almost worshiped Rotary Iron, they brought in more, all forged in the same, thin disk that Joseph called coin.
He died, at the age of seventy-three, as a powerful man. But what Lord Trudman had said still echoed beside his ears on his deathbed, so he passed on a tradition:
No one shall enter the room where a Calingrad is in with metal on him.
Joseph Calingrad the Fifth didn’t even have the time to shout for reinforcement when the dagger held in the young guard’s hand sank its entirety into his chest. He fell down on the white, marble floor, with his mouth and eyes wide with surprise.
The small, rectangular piece of rusty scrap metal slipped out of his hand when he fell. Its resounding clang when contacting the marble floor echoed across the library.
Before leaving the room, the guard placed on the table a small stone statue of a black dagger pointing downward.
Zhihui Zou is a high school student studying creative writing at an art school.