Silk and Song by Dana Stabenow

Author:Dana Stabenow [Stabenow, Dana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784979515
Publisher: Head of Zeus

They were attacked twice more before Damascus, and both times Jaufre blooded his sword. He wasn’t sick again either time. He was glad he acquitted himself well, and knew a growing confidence in his ability to do so in future, but he had also learned that a life by the sword was not the life he would choose. Trading, buying and selling, the exchange of goods to the profit of both sides of the bargain, that was work for a man. And he didn’t feel like a piece of him had died when he sold a copper pan to a cook or a Homeric scroll to a scholar studying the classics.

He wondered how long the attacks would continue before one of the lords and masters of the East would see fit to put the bands of raiders down once and for all. He wondered how trade could continue if they did not.

Of course if Ogodei, or some other powerful lord bent on conquest appeared on the horizon, the matter of itinerant raiders would be moot.

Damascus was a once-great capital of an independent empire that had dwindled into a regional capital ruled from Egypt by the Mamluks. It didn’t look particularly downtrodden and it had a thriving marketplace, with an entire section of the city devoted to the blacksmiths and their forges. Damascus steel was a legend over the known world. A blade forged from Damascus steel was said to be able to cut a single hair dropped across it, and to be able to cut straight through other blades of lesser make.

Jaufre didn’t know that he quite believed any of the legends, but as he made the rounds of the forges he had to admit he had seldom seen more beautiful blades. Some looked as though the makers had somehow replicated ripples of water on the surface of the steel. Others bore leaf-like striations that gave the impression they were about to sprout. The grips were made from every material, steel covered in sharkskin like his own but also made from antlers from oryx and ibex and one the dealer said was from a unicorn and told Jaufre with a wink that it wielding it was guaranteed to enhance one’s sexual prowess. There were handles made from every kind of hardwood that grew from Cambaluc to Eire, which Jaufre had never heard of, and even some from a kind of molded, hardened animal skin. There were blades with and without pommels and pommels with and without inlaid jewels. The hand guards of the swords were always of steel and as beautiful as they were useful. The daggers ranged from decorative to deadly and were always elegant, if you didn’t count the cheap knockoffs made from pig iron one found in the less prosperous sections of the souk.

He decided not bring out the knives he had acquired in Kerman. He had the feeling that the farther away he got from Damascus, the better chance he had of making a profit on them, or any profit at all.

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