The harsh blowing of the bellows, the rhythmic thud of the hammer, the shrill scrape of the tongs and the violent hiss of the cooling tub. This relentless cacophony forced some of the metalsmiths to plug their ears with rags but not Thorumvar. He sat on the foremans chair, his head leaning back against the top rail, relishing the discordant, metallic song that blared in his ears. It was a sweet sound. An honest sound.
And since my wife isn't singing to me anymore, this song will have to do…
Thorumvar looked around his smithy and allowed himself a few warm moments of self-aggrandizement. It was one of the biggest (though not thee biggest) smithies in Hightown. It pumped out over eighteen thousand glittering pieces of weaponry a year, had strong trade-links from Ansburg to Denerim, was signed onto several lucrative contracts with local security services and employed and trained around forty local people in the art of smithing.
And all this started with one anvil and one hammer, sitting in a rotten, mildewed shack in one of the back-alleys of Lowtown…
Thorumvar allowed a little soft smile to spread out beneath his shaggy, white-peppered beard. Then he gave his beard a sharp tug (a little habit he had developed when trying to snap himself out of introspection) and climbed down off his chair.
Time to play the boss.
"Awk, not like this lad, have I taught ye nowt?" he snapped in his voice of gravel and rust (one that his apprentice smiths trembled at the sound of) and pulled the fuller from a startled adolescents grasp.
"By Andraste's sweet arse, why would ye use a U-shaped fuller with a V-shaped top-tool? Are ye trying to wreck my equipment? Are ye tryin to ruin me lad?"
The boy blanched and stammered; "sor..sorry Sir, I just thought I could…"
Thorumvar cut him off; "Thought? You know what 'thought' did? 'Thought' put an egg in the soil and thought it would grow a chicken! You do not think – you know. If you do not know, you ask me and I'll tell you what you need to know!" Thorumvar was growling now.
"Yes sir," the boy nodded vehemently.
"Now come here and I'll show ye."
Thorumvar wasn't actually as cantankerous as he came across. In fact he quite liked all his apprentices and trainees this year and thought they were making remarkable progress. But he didn't want to come across as a slack boss; he knew that these kids needed someone imposing and stern to be their master. If he was as malleable to their whims as their parents were, then they'd march all over the shopfloor pouring melted iron here and there and not listening to a word he said.
These Hightown kids…so spoiled. Not like how my father had me whipped.
He brought the apprentice close to him and began working the metal with the appropriate fullers and hardies. The apprentice leaned in and watched intently, keen to learn.
In the past, most of Thorumvar's trainees were from Lowtown. He'd wanted to give those disenfranchised children a skill to help them forge their own way out of Lowtown – but Knight-Commander Meredith's recent missive stating that the flow of all Lowtown residents into other parts of the city had to be controlled - made employing any Lowtown folk almost impossible. And so recently he had to take most of trainees from merchant and middle class Hightown families.
Indolent, pampered, skin as soft as warm butter. Not a hopeful-looking bunch when they first arrived. But I've got them working hard and they're doing well.
After he had shaped the metal enough, he handed the tools to the apprentice.
"Now, can you see what I did there? Do it again, like that."
"Yessir!"
Thorumvar continued his inspection around the smithy. Oily, smoke-stained faces cast him wary glances behind steaming spumes and orangey licks of flame. He let his chest puff out and allowed one of his sausage-shaped fingers to twirl some loose strands of his beard – this was another habit he had developed – he twirled his beard at the onset of introspection and tugged it at the end.
I am doing pretty well. I'm making some of the most exceptional weapons I've made in years. I'm ordering in the finest ore I can procure – at fair prices, and I'm ever-expanding my trade-links. My name is becoming well known all over the Free Marches. If only old Pa could see me now eh….but then why do I have this constant niggling in my belly?
Feeding was one of the greatest pleasures a dwarf could experience, and Thorumvar was no exception. When he fulfilled his first ever multi-weapon batch contract, a contract that proved extremely gainful, he visited nearly every inn, eatery and restaurant in Hightown and almost exhausted all of his profits on the most succulent of meats and the richest of wines. He became quite the gourmand and as his business and popularity increased he was getting invited to restaurants to try out new dishes by nervous chefs who knew his approving opinion could triple their businesses.
And that's what a good feeling is. A stretched, satisfied belly. That's how a dwarf can tell that everything is going right. So what is my belly doing now? Contracting and tightening and paining me like this. How can she have this effect on me? How can one woman have this effect on me? Vesper…
Thorumvar tugged sharply on his beard and resumed his round. He came to the front of the smithy where he placed his older and most experienced metal workers. If any passers-by were to look in they'd see what they should see; professionals, a group of large-armed, sweat stained smiths hammering away at screaming, sparking metals – and they would walk away with a good impression of Thorumvar Blackhewn's business.
"Good work lads!" He called in his gruff voice and received some nods and winks in return. He was a lot more relaxed with his regular staff, with whom he didn't have to put on any performance, than he was with his trainees.
"Thorumvar, my sweet," a girlish voice called from over the large smithy window, "how is my most handsome dwarf today?"
Thorumvar didn't need to look to know whose voice called him. He pushed a small stool towards the window and clambered up onto it. He peered over the ledge and found the face he was expecting to find.
"All the better for seeing you, Flotsam, my dear."
Flotsam's laugh was short-lived and incredulous, as if the sight of her could never better anything.
"How goes business today?" Flotsam inquired casually whilst reaching one grimy hand into her seaweed-brimming sack.
"Same old, same old," Thorumvar let out a mock-sigh, he was not the kind to flaunt his fortune (even if, in his head, he was constantly congratulating himself). "Still working on these youngsters. It's no easy task turning them into the smiths of tomorrow ye know."
"You are like the hammer and they the iron," she quipped, "you will have them melded, beaten and bent into fine little smiths in no time."
"Aye. That's the plan."
Flotsam was a seaweed seller who mostly worked out of the docks. She sometimes came by his forge on the way to the sewer through which (he assumed) she made her way out to the waterfront to collect her goods. Without his asking she always gave him a few crispy morsels from her stock. She never demanded payment, she seemed to give him the seaweed out of generosity, but he always gave her a silver or two.
Poor lass, she probably just wants to see a friendly face and exchange a kind word or two. Life must be tough for her down there on the docks.
"Well, I'll be on my way," she smiled cheerily. She had a narrow, tanned face and two pretty little eyes, leaf-brown, which were framed by loose threads of hair that had escaped from the grey scarf she pulled tight around her head.
"Have a good one lass," he called after her.
He watched her turn and disappear into the crowd of Kirkwall citizens busying along the streets. The contours of her slight body were just visible through her blue shift which hung from her shoulders and hips a little awkwardly. His fingers found their way into his beard again as he considered Flotsam's bright smile.
How it would make me feel, how it would ease my griping stomach, if Vesper would smile at me like that again. She used to. Oh she used to alright. In our first few years together. That smile was all I lived for, and I all I wanted to see. And I was able to bring it out on her anytime of the day just as quick and easily as I can get iron from ore. I haven't seen that smile in so long…it is now just a vague, distorted memory. I can't even remember how it used to push her cheeks up or the way it sucked in her lips…the image is so garbled in my head now that if I try to imagine it, her smiles becomes thin and hard, almost wicked…vampiric…
And Thorumvar knew what he needed to do to get that smile back again. That smile, warm and glowing, like a thin curl of melted gold.
Gold for gold…
And then he tugged at his beard.
I will not do that again…
He jumped off the stool and began making his way back to the centre of the smithy. It was nearing midday, almost time to break for lunch. He rechecked the production targets that were scratched onto a piece of vellum nailed to the wall, and deciding that they were close to their desired output, he rang the rest bell. The clatter of tools dropping onto worn surfaces, the sizzling of hot metal in cool water and the exhausted sighs of forty smiths followed its long-awaited peal.
"Go on, you've got one hour! If you're a minute late, you'll not get back in!" Thorumvar called as his workers filed out into the hectic streets of another Kirkwall weekday.
Vesper's smile. I know what it was. A transaction. But I wanted to believe, I really wanted to believe that she loved me. I think she does. She has to. The way I am feeling cannot be felt by me alone. Surely she must feel it too. We have a son together…she has to feel it too…
As the last of his workers slipped out the large arched door of his smithy, he cast a wistful eye up at the Viscount's Keep, towering atop ragged Kirkwall like a gleaming crown on a vagrant-king's crooked head. When his business was first flourishing he'd provided the weapons for many well-known and esteemed citizens of Kirkwall – to protect their merchant caravans and to guard their lordly houses. He became somewhat of a celebrity and was invited to many of the parties, ceremonies and balls the upper classes so often organised. It was at one of these events, at the Viscounts Keep, that he had first met Vesper.
He'd caught her eye from across the room.
"Someone your size should not drink so much," she said to him in a honeyed voice, as a servant had filled his goblet for the umpteenth time that evening.
"They shouldn't make this wine so drinkable."
Her gilded smile then was the one that he fallen in love with. The one that he wanted time and time again. The one that he would do anything for. This liquid gold smile spread up along her rounded, flushed cheeks to reach two eyes, as green as purest jade, scintillating beneath locks of hair as fine and shimmering as spun silver. She was adorned in all manner of finery – a gossamer, silken gown, a diamond circlet, a ruby choker, pearl rings. She was the most precious thing he'd ever seen.
But I will never do that again. Not besmirch my trade and sell my smiths out like whores just to turn a quick penny. Not after what happened.
And at that point, no matter how hard and how quickly Thorumvar pulled at his beard, he could not pull from his mind the images of bone-shattering screams and the blood-choked pleadingand the wet eyes, closing forever, behind slowly-falling lids.
No, I can never do that again. Vesper's smile, as much as I crave it, as much as I weep and cry for it, is not worth that. I will show her. I will show her how to love me again.
"Sir Blackhewn?" came a quivering voice.
"Huh?" Thorumvar was startled, so lost was he in thought that he didn't see the lad approach. He was a pale, thin boy wearing a squire's robe with the two-faced, winged symbol of the city guard emblazoned on his shoulder puff.
"A request from Captain Jeven, of the City Guard," the squire said and placed a wax-sealed letter in Thorumvar's hand, nodded respectfully and then returned to the chaotic flow of the city street.
Intrigued Thorumvar brought the letter towards the still-flaming forge. He held the letter a good distance from the heat, so as not to singe the paper but to melt the wax. He read it hungrily.
This is one of the deals I've been waiting years for…a chance to make weapons for the city guard…
He read the letter twice, thrice and then set it down. His fingers were suddenly back in his beard, twisting, whirling, spinning. He went over the letters details in his head.
The city guard is hiring a hundred or so mercenary men to bolster their ranks during the upcoming Cammasham Ball. They need extra men for the security operation they've planned. They've just requested my smithy to produce, in bulk, all the swords, shields and lances for these extra men…I can't believe it. This deal is huge! I will turn a fat profit - the city will spare no expense for the weapons they purchase! And the recognition! Just imagine…Thorumvar Blackhewn supplying the very defence of the city of Kirkwall with his finest iron and steel! This is the deal of a lifetime.
And then his rabid beard-fidgeting slowed to a stop. A small, gnawing pain again made its presence known in the pit of his belly.
A lifetime? What's a lifetime alone? What's a lifetime without Vespers smile? Without her touch?
He looked down again at the letter. It was made from good paper, well produced. Firm, golden-edged, and painted with words made from glistening, expensive ink. All at once a manifold of thoughts streamed into his head creating a dissonant, frenzied hum.
How I wish I could hear the song of the forge again to drown this out…
A rove of city guards sporting refined blades, the screaming of a bedamned soul at the bottom of the world, expensive dark letters scratched on expensive white paper, the clinking of coins and the gilt smile of a bejewelled beauty…all melded together in a painful alchemy of thoughts that left his head pounding.
The gilt smile of a bejewelled beauty…
I will not do that again. I can't.
Thorumvar picked up the letter and held it before him. His eyes glazed over.
Can I?