Chapter 3: Do Wrong Better

I made the journey to the cave where I was remade. I found the spear head from Ajax’s spear. For him it was a spear head, but to me it was entirely too long. Ajax must have loomed twice the height of a regular man and even so was muscled like some great bull, not like a normal man. I could only lift it by tipping it up onto my shoulder and carrying it out. The bronze of the spear was not green and flaked away like everything else he had worn. Being plunged into the heart of the dark tentacle covered primordial had changed it. The power of the Titans that bound it to order had been merged with the unmaking power of chaos that the primordial had been, the stuff of unformed madness that had been the universe before the Titans dared impose order upon it.

I could feel the power of my blood calling out to the bronze, I could feel my tentacle friends crooning to the darkness of it. Each part, the celestial bronze and the abyssal ichor called to me, and each part tried to unmake the part of me that didn’t call to it. I felt like a child in a custody dispute, less cherished and more ignored while two primordial powers fought over who got me to the point that their shouting almost made me toss the damned thing back down the hole and leave it. The fact was, I needed weapons to do the dance, and the dance that was in my blood, the dance that Ajax had shown me was done with the heavy bronze spear, or with the short heavy xiphos sword. The only bronze in the cave that hadn’t rotted away to nothing but green dust was the spear head of Ajax, so that is what I brought.

I didn’t know anything about metal working, but holding the spear, I could feel the memories it held. This Celestial bronze remembered every battle it had fought, ever training thrust, every strike on shield, on armour, on scale, on hide, and the sweet hungry joy of imposing the pure order, the ultimate reality of its cutting edge and driving purpose to destroy the lesser lives whose flesh, whose magic, whose will, and whose life failed at the thrust of its ultimate focus. I wished I could use it as it was, but I lacked anything like the power to do more than lift the damned thing. I needed to remake it. I slept with the spear head for three nights, dreaming its dreams of war, its dreams of training, and finally, to its birth.

It was not forged. I did not know that. I thought swords and spears were forged. Bronze, even celestial bronze, was not forged. It was poured hot into a mold, and then it was shaped with rasps, it was edge hardened with hammers so that the edge would be harder and less willing to bend than the body, that it would cut deep before yielding. I saw the making of the molds and the pouring. I saw its birth and figured, I could do that.

We had the huge clay ovens my mother used to bake, and she taught me how they were designed to optimize the right heat for cooking. She smiled when she told me that she could indeed build me one that would make the fire hot enough to melt metal, but that I would have to work the bellows to force air in to keep the fire hot enough to melt really strong metal if I wanted to make my spear melt.

I dreamed the making of the spear so many times that I knew how to make the wooden molds. I knew the shape of the spear head that I needed, I simply drew the spear head that Ajax used, only sized for a human’s body. I used a large human, since Mom told me father was the tallest man she had ever seen. I wasn’t there yet, but I was young. That would leave me a lot of metal. I remember the dream of Ajax’s sword. He called it a Xiphos. It didn’t really look like a sword. Kind of leaf shaped in the tip, but it began with a narrow very thick blade from the hilt that flattened and widened into the leaf shape for cutting and thrusting. I had thought a short sword was lighter than a long sword, just, you know, a regular sword on a smaller scale.

This was not true of what Ajax remembered. The Xiphos was as heavy as any longsword, but in a far shorter length, designed to be used when your spear was lost, or when the press of men and shields was too close to withdraw the spear to strike. It was a brutal cleaver and stabbing weapon, not a thing of fencing, it was for short sharp chops and thrusts delivered when you were chest to chest with the enemy. Honestly, the memories were not fighting like Clover imagined, more like frenzied murder. There was art in the spear, but only butchery in the Xiphos. Still, he had the bronze. He would make one.

I carved wooden models of the spear head, the other end of the spear, the ‘lizard sticker’ spike that allowed you to stand the spear up by ramming the spike into the ground. I made a mold for the Xiphos. Mom made the kiln and bellows for me, as I collected the firewood and burned/buried it to make the charcoal that would make flames hotter than burning normal wood.

Then we hit the problem. The damned thing would not melt. My blood sang as the fire lapped at the bronze spear head in the blast furnace. As I pumped and pumped, it blazed bright white, but refused to melt. The ultimate order, the pure Titanic will that bound it into shape refused to yield to such a paltry thing as the fire of a mortal. I was almost mad with fear when my tentacle friends began to croon. Crawling from my clothes, from my shadow, they formed and the began to sway from side to side like so many cobra. They swayed and they sang and the black blood of the primordial abyss spawn that soaked into the spear head heard the song, and took it up. I heard the song of the abyss, the song of the primordial chaos from which both dark and light were carved. The endless change, the madness of the unformed where everything is possible, but nothing is actual. It worked against the ultimate order imposed by the Titan’s will upon the celestial bronze and it began to melt.

I poured bronze into the spear mold, and fire blasted upwards as I did so. I poured again into the lizard sticker mold, and lastly into the Xiphos mold. There was just enough bronze for all. Ajax was a giant among titans, and even if I became a giant among men, well, we were very much a lesser species.

Cooling took a while, and once I took them out of the molds, the hard part of scraping away the bronze I didn’t need was there. I bled a lot. The iron rasps I used kept failing. Celestial Bronze is harder than iron, or the weird alloy of celestial bronze and primordial blood certainly was. The damned spear head seemed the thirstiest, as scraping away bits of it kept cutting me and the blood just sunk into the blade. My own blood started feeling the connection to the spearhead, the tentacle friends looked at the spear head with eyeless suspicion, like if they stopped watching it might leap out and attack them. I didn’t laugh at them. The spear was a bit disturbing.

The lizard sticker didn’t have to be that sharp, so I didn’t have to risk my poor flesh as much, and I was rapidly running out of tools to sacrifice. It was the Xiphos that was the real problem. The hilt was part of the mold, so my lack of skill attaching things wasn’t really an issue, but the sharpening was. As hard as I struck this thing to make the edges edge tempered, I kept breaking both the stones I used for anvils and chewed up the face of my hammer pretty bad. The strikes left an edge that looked snaggle toothed, and in trying to sharpen that, I lost the last of my good iron tools, and lost enough blood that the skin on my hands was healing so much tougher than the rest of my skin that it felt more like armour than flesh.

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Growing stronger in the broken places had some consequences when idiots do metal working. I was an idiot, and this metal liked hurting people. I was honestly relieved when I could take the spear out to train. I didn’t have a heavy shield to train like the memories showed me I needed, but the first training memories were of running with a spear (butt naked) and of hunting boar (also naked, which sounded deeply suspect to me). I would skip the naked, but do the running and hunting.

The spear shaft with the lizard sticker and heavy bronze spear head topped out at eight feet long and four pounds or so. Four pounds sounds light doesn’t it. Now, take that four pounds in one hand, extend the unstable thing eight feet, and go sprinting through the forest, leaping over roots and holes, where every vine, leaf and branch catches at it, and see how light the unstable thing seems. My wrists and arm were the first to feel the pain, then both knees as the thing really screwed up my balance as I ran. I began to understand the shield was needed to balance the spear. The spear alone, in one hand was a constant distraction. I had the Xiphos in my left hand, as I hadn’t made a sheath yet, and wanted to make sure my left arm didn’t get too much weaker, but the sword was short, very handy, and didn’t’ test the wrist and shoulder the way the big spear did. It hardly ever caught on things, and instinctively when something was going to catch me, I would slash the Xiphos through it so it made running through the forest easier.

Did I mention the distracted bit? Yes running with spears when you have no idea what you are doing is distracting. I had been running and doing practice spear thrusts, using the full power of my twisting body to drive the spear into trees of my choice as we ran. Each thrust with a shouted challenge in a language I did not speak, but my blood memories seemed to remember. They didn’t care what the word meant, but I shouted it with each thrust anyway. Right up until I heard the enraged squeal of a wild boar answering the perceived challenge.

How in the nine hells did I miss this thing? It was below my shoulder in height, but so much broader and heavier that its stubby little legs should have looked comical, if they were not tearing up the ground beneath them like a plow blade as it snorted and tore at the earth preparing to charge me for daring to shout a challenge. Point of order, I was yelling at the tree, not the pig, but you try explaining that to a boar. The boar had four heavy tusks longer than my hand and curved like throat cutting daggers. His eyes were lit with porcine fury, and he broke into a charge at me.

My mind froze, but my body had spent days doing nothing but running and practicing thrusting, so in the absence of thought, I ran forward and thrusted.

It was a good thrust, driving the spear head deep into the boar’s muscular chest. The problem is the boar also made a good thrust, and tore my thigh almost to the bone, driving forward into me with a weight I could not hope to control. He tore again and again with his tusks, tearing my testicles and poor manhood deeply with his tusks. I lost control of the spear, and was left thrusting the Xiphos desperately into the boar’s throat. Both my thighs and genitalia were ripped, but the boar was dead. I felt my power surging up, demanding to heal instantly, to make it like I was before the injury. I fought it down. The power in my blood was not letting me bleed out, and the boar was dead. I would be damned if I gained nothing from this. I focused inward, and set the darkness of my tentacle friends down into the wounds, letting them unmake the parts of me that were not strong enough to resist. Then the power of my blood, the blessing of the Titan went to work. I screamed in pain as the magic in me remade what was savaged, only stronger this time. Better.

I gripped my Xiphos and glared at the boar. I hacked down again and again, cutting the tusks from the boar. I felt my genitals being remade. This pig accepted his own death just to rip my nuts off as it died. I have never hated an animal so much in my life. It would be hours before I was healed. Hours of agony. Three things were clear. I would need that damned shield, I understand why Ajax made a helmet out of boar tusks, and we are going on an all pork diet.

In the weeks that followed, I made a heavy oval shield faced with layers of boar hide. I had boar leather armour made. Sure we had cows, and cattle. I had regular leather. That isn’t the point. The cattle didn’t half rip off my testicles and cause me to regrow my own penis. Some things didn’t get forgiven. Same with the boar tusk helmet. Granted, those things were hell for hard, and it was probably more protection that an iron pot helm, but I would have worn it if it protected less than feathers. Those were my testicles, and it hurt.

The following hunts went much more smoothly. I planted one foot on the end of the spear, let the boar charge onto it. When he drove himself on the spear, I took the charge on the shield. The follow up thrusts with the Xiphos were a merciful end to an already dying beast. The charge hurt, even armoured, even shielded. Each one left me strained and shocked. I could feel myself growing stronger and tougher with each charge survived. The boar were not stupid, they charged yes, but no two the same, they all had feigns and dodges they had practiced, and more than once it was almost me that died, and them that feasted. Almost.

We had enough hanging hams that mom would be able to trade meat for almost anything she wanted, in addition to the honey she usually supplied. I was honestly expecting another wagon from the village for some of our trade goods when what came up was not a wagon and trader, but a column of five horsemen. A chain mail armoured man with a face covering helm hung on his saddle horn, a heavy sword at his side, and a lance and shield at his side, and four men at arms in leather riding behind, with light targes and slim thrusting spears and daggers.

Mom was closer to the road in the house than I was in the smoking shed where I was hanging more boar to smoke, but I could hear her words and his response.

“I am Sherriff Tyrol. When I came to Cloomb to collect the lairds taxes, I learned that your boy Clover had struck and killed another boy with a rock. When I asked around the village, I was told that he was a fatherless bastard, besides being a murderer, and his mother was most likely a witch as well as a whore. I see that you are doing quite well for yourself on this farm, so you are at least a good whore. Well you will get the chance to prove it while we put that animal you birthed in chains. He can repay his debt working the lairds mines.”

Mom raised her voice to protest, but I couldn’t hear. All I could hear was my blood pounding. The gift of the celestials in my blood sang with the need to defend my mother. The only voices of reason that might have restrained my reaction were my tentacle friends, but in the darkness of the smoke hut, the chorus rang from a hundred dark throats. “They want to lay hands on her? Cut them off. They want to slander her? CUT OUT THEIR TONGUES! Oh just kill them already. No, hurt them first, then kill them. Kill them first, then hurt them. Kill them though right? Agreed? Agreed! Kill them first. Hard.”

I took up my shield, it looked so crude compared to what they used. My spear was simple and only bronze, my Xiphos shorter than the knight’s sword, my armour was only hardened leather, a breastplate, greaves and arm guard. My helmet was boar tusk, not shining steel, but that Sherrif just rides up and announces he is going to rape my mother before giving her to his men? Before we even get to the fact that I only punched back the rock thrown at me, for the second time they had tried to kill me with hurled stones, they don’t get to decide what happens to me, when they will die for trying to lay hands on my mother.

I raised my shield and strode forth. They wanted me for murder? I hadn’t murdered anyone yet, but I was growing open to the idea.