Cold Flames Chill the Metal
ONE EVENING, after a day when the forge had been glowing with its fiercest light and hammer blows had been echoing busily off the scorched, stone walls, the fires went cold.
“That’s odd,” thought the blacksmith, as he shivered and wiped his dry brow. “It’s chilly in here.” He took a step closer to the forge, and shivered again, as if it had blown an icy draught right at him from its wide, orange mouth. “Very odd,” he said out loud, and he set down his hammer and reached out to the nearest iron poking out of the fire, and gingerly touched its end. It was cold. So he put down his tongs and, big finger by big finger, he cautiously wrapped his broad, hammer-tough hand around the metal and lifted it out of the flames. The far end glowed yellow with the intense, ready light of metal waiting to be wrought. He held it to within inches of his face, and felt the cold coming off it. He spat on it, as he had first done in his apprenticeship twenty years before, to watch the tell-tale hiss and sniff of steam fly up; but instead his spit froze and shattered into a hundred tiny icicles that skittered over the floor. Then he pressed the glowing tip into the back of his other hand—something he would never normally do, because even blacksmiths, with their tough leathery skin and their tough leathery hearts, feel pain—and where the spark and sickening smell of burning should have been, he felt a tooth-wringing stab of coldness, and he shivered again.
“Fire’s gone cold!” he said; and so it had. “Well now. That’s never happened before. Tom! Tom! Come here and have a look at this!”
He turned to the doorway, but it wasn’t his young son he saw. Walking straight towards him was a woman, a sleek woman in a long black dress, with her black hair brushed back and silver earrings, pendants, and rings that caught the light from the forge and twinkled it back at him. She was a witch, and by the time Tom did come running in, she had already crossed the floor and taken the blacksmith’s heavy hand in hers. Tom saw his father looking down into the painted face of the woman who stood before him. She was saying something to him in soft words the boy could not hear, and tracing a line around the blacksmith’s hand with one of her slender fingers. Tom shivered, and goose bumps stood up on his arms and neck, probably because the place was so strangely icy-cold. But then, some witches make you shiver, even when they don’t mean to.
Then the blacksmith’s wife, Tom’s mother, arrived, and she dropped the jug she was carrying, and it smashed into pieces on the stone floor. The witch turned to look at her with her pretty witch-green eyes and, from that moment on, the two women hated each other, cold and simple as that.
The witch pressed a black velvet purse into the blacksmith’s hand, as his wife started screaming at her to leave.
“Get out!” she shouted, and picked up a poker from a rack nearby, “We don’t want your sort here! Get out!” The witch circled smoothly away, avoiding the shaking poker, but looking, unblinking, at the blacksmith, who stood, open-mouthed, with the cold iron he was still holding in one loose hand and the little black bag of coins in the other.
“Remember what I asked,” whispered the witch as she glided backwards through the door, and left them there, the family of three. Tom’s mother dropped the poker to the floor and ran to her husband, and grasped him, shaking him, crying, “Jake! Jake! Stop it! Look at me!” But the blacksmith just stood there, his face slack, as if he were trying to remember something puzzling. “No, come back to me!” she sobbed, and she snatched the purse from his hand and flung it into the fire of the forge. Then she threw her arms around him and buried her face in his neck. But Tom saw his father turn his head, and even as he wrapped his broad arms around his wife, he was looking into the forge to see where the purse had gone.
. . . continues
The Knot-Shop Man © Beholder / David Whiteland 2009