There was much to do, actually, in mending weapons and armor. Some of the mangled armor could not be repaired so easily, and had to be melted down and re-crafted into other things. Those pieces of armor did not have centurions to reclaim them, so Weyland spent time improving the arms and armaments of the living instead. The company sent a foraging party into the burnt out village nearby, and Weyland accompanied them to assess what might be available from the local smithy. They found little but the dead, though there was iron stock and some steel to be had at the smithy, and grain stores to be had.
Some of the villagers still lived, and when the man leading the group, Drusus, would have turned them away empty handed, Weyland gave them food and supplies.
On the third such excursion, Drusus took his complaint to Patricius, and confronted Weyland in front of the commander. "We need those supplies to feed the men, to arm them."
Weyland, thinking of his mother and the people of his father's hall, shook his head. "We need to support the villages, also."
"That's foolish, if the units starve, we will never clear this cursed island of monsters." Drusus stood firm, feet spread and fists clenched around his belt so tightly that the leather began to fold.
"If the people of the land starve, you will have more than monsters to fight," Weyland replied simply.
"That's nonsense, they are not trained for-" Drusus was cut off by the commander.
"No, Drusus. Weyland, explain yourself." The commander sat on a stool behind the table, maps rolled and stacked to the side.
"The people may not be soldiers, trained in the fashion of legions or other armies, but they are strong. A man or woman who can hunt a deer can hunt a man, and a single boar is more dangerous than any three trained centurions. Think of the strength needed to plow a field, or harvest grain and build a house. If you proceed further from the coast, the people you leave behind may come to take back their supplies, avenge the dead who have starved or been killed." Weyland was caught up in memory, his mother's shining golden hair a beacon to his people as his father's body and soul were burned and ascended to the afterlife. He saw the warriors arrayed against the Ravager, hands callused both by hard work and training, bodies strong from living a life from the soil. He saw them fold and die under the blows of the Nightstalker, and began to sweat as he saw the enormous form of the monster turn towards him, tangled in ropes, raising its cudgel.
"Blacksmith," Patricius's voice penetrated the roar of the monster's bellow, and a hand gripping his arm startled him. He stepped back, finding his knife in his left hand, reaching for a burning brand with his right - and the darkness evaporated into the midmorning light, mild in the commander's tent. Patricius stood beside and slightly behind him, a hand on Weyland's right forearm and the other on Weyland's shoulder. Shaking, Weyland sheathed the knife he'd made with the last of the bog-iron.
Both men, also soldiers who had seen horrible things, looked away as Weyland composed himself. The nightmares had never followed him at Myrddin's tower, had only begun when he left, and never found him during the daylight hours. Avril entered the tent, having finished some errand of her own, and found him. She was tall and gangly, now, her legs and body starting to fill out in splendid muscle and heavy bone. She shoved her head under his left hand, tilting her face to lick his fingers.
"You are right, Weyland. Drusus, going forward, distribute half of what you find back to the villages. It is wiser to face an enemy on only one front, and ours is difficult to find. Go, and tell the other unit leaders." Drusus saluted the commander and left without another word, looking long at Weyland as he left the tent.
The commander sat, unrolling one of the maps and another scroll covered with marks and tallies and words that Weyland could not decipher. "When we began this venture, given the charge to purge the serpents and monsters from this island, we did not know how difficult it would be. I had nearly five hundred men in my cohort. We are reduced to three hundred twenty four, now. We cannot lose more, or we would need to conscript men from the local villages.
Weyland nodded, thinking of the peasants who were fleeing the area. "If you conscript the men, you will lose the villages. They already are short on men, and they don't understand the purpose of your mission in this land."
"We need a better way to hunt serpents, a better way to kill them. Girgus is the best dragon-slayer the world has ever seen. That said, he doesn't have experience working with large units." Patricius looked up at Weyland. "Tell me what can be done differently."
"I know little about fighting monsters with large units. Small units, yes, and trusted people from my village, but nothing so large as this cohort." Reaching out a hand to Patricius' armor tree, he tapped the mended rent in the breastplate. "These beasts seek opportunities to eat men. They don't much care for stamped coins or precious metals, but gems, they might be inclined to be lured with gems and possibly with things finely crafted from gold."
"Can you work in gems and fine metals as well as you do in iron and steel? Can you devise a better kind of weapon to use against these monsters, that is not going to let the soldier using it get mauled or eaten in the first encounter?" A great weariness loomed in the commander's expression, in the way he held his shoulders.
"I can do that, perhaps. I've not done much with fine metals, but I know some of how it's done. I've not done much with gems, beyond setting a gem in the pommel of a sword. I know that I can, without question, craft weapons, and given a look at the monster you are hunting, maybe one more deadly to it than the weapons you have."
Three days later, a runner brought news of a serpent nest inland, an adult and several young. The cohort broke camp the next morning, marching through the day and making camp late in the afternoon. A hunting party had run in parallel to the main van, bringing back sundry small game and a couple of older stags. Weyland set up the smithy tent as the rest ate, taking several different kinds of spear and comparing them in the torchlight.
Drusus brought him a wooden bowl of stew as Weyland started working the bellows, pumping them with one arm and examining the pyramid shaped head of a lance with the other hand.
“What makes a serpent deadly?” Weyland asked the centurion as he set down the bowl.
Drusus looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. “Teeth? Venom? Maybe fire? What isn’t deadly about them?”
“The fact that they can be killed. When a serpent kills a man, how does that happen?”
“Why not ask Girgus?” Drusus was still inclined to be sulky after their conversation about feeding the common people.
“Because Girgus fights alone, and he is alive. You fight with companions, and you have seen them die.”
Drusus thought for a moment, looking down at Avril, where she gnawed on an ox-leg bone. “It’s not so much that they have teeth, or venom. It’s more that they might be pierced by a spear and slither down the shaft to bite the centurion wielding it. If they could be stopped, the centurion and his shieldmates would only need worry about the fire. That’s bad enough, but at least it can be deflected a bit.”
"Bring me a spear, and a sword, let's see what can be done." Weyland pumped the bellows three more times, until the glow of the fires and coals were sufficient, and when Drusus brought him the spear and sword, acid stained, of a shield-brother who had fallen to the last serpent, Weyland set to work.
Drusus stayed with him that long night, watching. Weyland sent him several times for water, and Drusus noted that the stew went uneaten, and fed it instead to Avril, who was grateful for the gift. As the evening progressed, other centurions came to observe. Weyland removed the head from the spear, turning the pyramidal head in his hands, looking at it in the firelight. With a casual blow of his hammer, he popped the tang of the sword off of its hilt and crosspiece. Some of the gathered soldiers jumped, exclaiming; the sword had been made by their last smith, who was considered a fine artisan in his own right before he died to a serpent's bite.
Weyland sent Drusus for sand, and melted down the sword. The crosspiece he heated in the forge and then took to the anvil, lengthening it from side to side, Quenching it and setting it to the side, he had a soldier dig out a rectangular trench and fill it with the sand. Weyland dampened it with water from the bowl that had held Avril's stew, and then refilled the bowl with water for the dog.
Consideringly, Weyland pressed the spearhead into the sand, and then set it back on the table next to the crosspiece. He dug at the sand a bit more with one of the flat tools he found in the old smith's chest, and then poured the rendered steel of the sword blade into the mold.
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More men gathered as he worked, torches brought to the area around the smith's tent until it was as bright as day and warm as summer.
When dawn touched the eastern sky with faint light, red fingers on the clouds, Weyland reached for the shaft of the spear. It was handed to him by Girgus, who had come to watch, himself, fascinated by the process. Weyland slid the crosspiece over the end of the shaft, and then worked the hardened steel tang of the lancehead into the groove, fastening them together with heat and pressure, until the three pieces were solid.
The resultant spear had a longer head, still with the pyramidal design at the end, but with an additional flange of steel behind it, a cutting blade that would work from side to side, and a crosspiece at the base of the head, a hand's length on either side and curved forward. Weyland set about sharpening it with the whetstone, and as the sun itself crested the horizon, he lifted it a final time, examining his work.
Patricius stood close by, with Girgus on the other side, and Weyland looked up at both over the shining steel length of the new spear.
"Look here. The end will pierce the thing's armor and dig deep into flesh and bone." Weyland pointed to the features as he spoke. "The sides along the length of the blade will slice as the creature struggles to get at the man, increasing the damage. When it turns back on him, it will not reach the soldier, the crosspiece stopping it. A shield will deflect the fire for a time, and other soldiers can move in for the kill while the serpent is thus immobilized." Girgus held out a hand, and Weyland passed the weapon to the dragon-slayer, stepping back and reaching for the flue to purge heat from the forge.
Patricius raised a hand, and Weyland paused. They both watched Girgus examine the weapon. "Why is it green here and here? There is no copper in the blade, nor bronze."
"The metal was discolored from the blood of the beast the sword and spear had killed before being remade," Weyland said simply.
"Can you make more?" Patricius took the spear from Girgus.
"Certainly. Do you have more serpent stained weapons to reforge?" Patricius looked at Drusus, and the man spoke quietly with several of the men, who left with determination to find other swords and spears that had been stained with the blood of serpents and men in battles before.
In the end, there was only enough scrap and damaged weaponry to make four more of the dragon-spears, as the centurions began calling them, and a strange synthesis of strategy began among them. Weyland looked up to see them practicing under the watchful eye of Patricius and Drusus, a spearman on horseback and four footmen armed with swords, attacking a mock foe. The spearman would pin the imaginary beast to the ground, and the footmen would advance with their rectangular shields to protect them from fire and hack at the foe until they were all satisfied that it was dead.
Girgus sat and watched the practice from the shade of Weyland's tent, eating an apple and feeding bits of jerky to Avril, who flirted outrageously to get his attention. "Do you think a man alone could slay a beast, with one of these new spears?" he asked finally.
"Perhaps, but he'd have to let go of the spear and advance on foot. The sword would have to be a bit longer, perhaps, to extend the reach of the man, and he would have to juggle shield and spear and sword - I don't believe I would recommend the single-man strategy." Weyland slid the whetstone down the length of the lateral blade of the fifth spear, thinking carefully, imagining the action he described.
"The strategies recommended by blacksmiths are rarely the ones that work with the most glory," Girgus mused dismissively. He tossed the apple core into a brazier, filling the air with the bitter-sweet scent of burning fruit.
"Glory is hard on the bodies of soldiers," Weyland replied, and Girgus laughed, mirth twisting his scarred face.
"Indeed, blacksmith, you speak the truth. Make me an enchanted sword and I will slay every dragon in the empire, with one of these spears and that sword."
Patricius entered the tent and heard the exchange. His expression hardened as he regarded his friend the dragon-slayer. "Witchcraft and enchantments are forbidden," he said, the tone of the words sounding like an old argument.
"You are crippled by the teachings of your church, Patricius. If witchcraft and enchantments will kill evil things, I'll take them into every battle, and beg forgiveness afterwards." Girgus stood, coolly meeting the commander's gaze.
"You'll be burned by more than dragonfire if you continue talking that way, and acting on those words," Patricius warned.
Weyland pulled the last of the rendered steel from the makeshift bloomery the men had built for him, and poured it into the sands as the two men continued their argument. The casting he pulled out of the sands was a short knife, only half a hand in length and curved wickedly. He hammered out the shape, quenched and heated it thrice more, and then sharpened it. Setting it on a short hilt and binding it up with leather, he sharpened the inner curve of the hooked blade, and then handed it to Patricius.
"What is this, then?" the commander asked, turning it in his hands.
"A pruning knife, perhaps," Weyland answered. "Use it as it speaks to you." He vented the bloomery and forge, and the men fled the heat. Weyland looked at the practice ring that had been set up beside his workspace and shook his head, suddenly exhausted. He stretched out on the cot at the back of his tent and fell asleep to the sounds of man clashing against imaginary foes, dreaming of lakeshores soaked in greenish blood and the charred bodies of men.
When he woke, it was to the excited shouts of men returning from a hunt. Twenty one men came back to camp, carrying four serpent heads and the bodies of four comrades. They further dragged the body of one of the serpents for examination.
Weyland watched the victorious parade file past his tent towards the command tent, led by Patricius and followed by Girgus. He stretched and began ordering the blacksmith’s tools and supplies, packing them away in their crates and satchels, stowing his own tools in his pack. His mother’s spear came to hand as he sorted his belongings, and he was careful to leave the sword in the pack. The thought crossed his mind that Girgus may covet the blade, and Patricius’ warning about witchcraft and enchantments put him on his guard.
“Blacksmith, your weapons were a grand success,” Drusus said, bringing a skin of wine and a couple of cups to share.
“It appears the hunting party was the success. Weapons are merely tools.” Weyland took a polite sip of wine and set the cup down.
A messenger came to him that evening, summoning him to the commander’s tent for supper.
“You did not celebrate with the men,” Patricius remarked, passing Weyland a plate of roast meat and bread.
“The victory was theirs, not mine to intrude upon.” Weyland gave Avril the first bite of meat, accepted with dainty grace.
“They do not necessarily agree.” The commander cut his meat, also feeding a bit to the dog. “You are a bit of a hero, now.”
“Ironic, considering how ill they thought of me when I had almost bested you in the training ring.” Weyland was at a loss to describe or explain his foul and wary mood. He did note that the commander was uninjured from the skirmish with the serpents of the nest.
“Perhaps. I think it’s time to consider the other notion, that of crafting precious things, rings and jeweled brooches and the like.”
“To lure them out?” Weyland took a bite of the venison. “I don’t have the right tools for jewelry-making.”
“We’ll find them for you, and the materials to craft with them.” Patricius gazed off into space, not considering Weyland’s silence, or ignoring it.
“Very well. Congratulations, commander, on the successful hunt. My condolences on the deaths of your men.”
The commander looked up at him finally. “Is that what has you in a mood tonight, Weyland? The deaths?” He gestured with his knife towards the sounds of revelry in the camp. “Four is less than a quarter of the deaths we usually take on a serpent hunt. Girgus accompanies us because he likes taking on the solitary monsters, which also saves the lives of our men.” He wiped his mouth on a piece of cloth.
“Why do you hunt them, commander?” Weyland put down his own knife, leaning forward with his elbows on the table.
“It’s a holy crusade to liberate Anglia and its sister lands from the monsters, to establish a foothold again for the glory of Rome.”
“And what do you get from this holy crusade, when all of the monsters are gone?”
Patricius turned and looked at him directly. “I will be made archbishop of the western island. But only after it is safe.”
“And Girgus?” Weyland tried to imagine the dragon-slayer content with a title and power.
“Girgus wants nothing of lands and power. He has a sweetheart who’s the daughter of a minor lord to the east. I daresay if Sabra would send him word and ask him to abandon his quest, that he would do so without so much as a good-bye to this cohort.” Finishing his meal, the commander leaned back in his chair. “So, what do you say? Will you craft us a chest of bait for these foul creatures? If you need the incentive of lands and a title as well, that can surely be arranged.”
“No, commander, I do not need such an incentive.” Weyland was suddenly tired again. “I will craft you your bait for the serpents, and see that your men are well armed against them. If that is all, I would retire for the evening.”
“Very well.” The blacksmith stood to leave, Avril crowding close to his legs. “Weyland,” the commander said, his voice quiet and his eyes hooded. “None of the spears broke or were damaged in the fighting today.”
“That is fortunate,” Weyland replied, equally quiet.
“It’s almost as if they were enchanted.” Patricius sat very still, waiting for Weyland’s reply.
“Perhaps tempered by the blood and bile and venom of the dragons. After all, that was the nature of the metal provided to me for their creation.”
“Ah. Perhaps blessed by those who died before us. That does make a sort of sense.” The commander smiled slightly, and Weyland left.