Shades All Over Babylon: Chapter 1
Title: Shades All Over Babylon (Chapter 1)
Rating: Pg-13 (for now >D)
Pairing: WataruxKomu, (in future: MizuxKomu, MizuxTomu, TomuxKomu, and more)
Summary: In a medieval universe, Hikaru is a blacksmith's daughter working under the abusive authority of her father and his assistant, Wataru. At the time of the story she has forged a sword to be presented to the prince from the Red East, Todoroki. Hikaru, determined not to live another day in her father's house, will do anything she can to become a part of the prince's entourage...
Shades All Over Babylon
Chapter 1
By El Higgins
Asami Hikaru was the only waking life in the sleeping outskirts of the city. It was deep night and the stars were cold and far away, little more than pinpoints. Even the bats were sleeping, and the insects still against their twigs and leaves. But in the forge noise and fire raged in tamed ferocity. The mortar in the walls rattled with the silvery ring of hot steel, and smoke billowed up from the banks of flaring embers as it had since early that morning. Asami’s skin was black from it, except where sweat painted bronze lines down her back and arms. Her shoulders worked with feline power as she raised her hammer and snapped it down on the blade that lay glowing against the stone work table. There her eyes caught the miniscule fault, the imperfection. There and now there, one last stroke. Sparks snapped around her scarred hands but she took no notice and her arm kept working despite its bone-deep ache. When the blemish she chased out from the soft, red, metal was gone she paused and wiped her forehead. Weariness had carved deep lines under her eyes. She had been awake since the night before and her father had not brought her any drink or food. She’d eaten only the heel of bread and the ladle of water she had been able to snatch for herself from the kitchen. She would have grabbed more but her father’s assistant Wataru was there, looking at her with that calculating stare and false smile, always staring at people as if she was considering purchasing them.
None of that mattered to her. Her hunger and weariness were nothing. Asami couldn’t pull herself away from her work, no more than a mother could leave her crying infant. And this infant, the sword that was to be a gift to the ambassador from the Red East, was not yet born. Asami ached to hear its birthing cry, and had resolved to work until the last hammer-stroke fell. She was in love with the way her hands took the flowing liquid metal and shaped it into a weapon that would taste blood and battle. Death might come from a sword, but the swords came from her cracked, scorched, hands. More than once Asami had raised her head to the prize blades hanging in the wall of her father’s shop. She had caught her bleak, black, glaze in their polished metal bodies and thought, “I am your mother and I am your father. Do not forget.” And then, thinking quieter, deeper in her heart, bring pain for my sake.
When the sky grew lighter and smoke began to snake up from city chimneys her father entered the forge, scratching his belly and wiping breakfast from his face. Asami’s nostrils flared at the smell of fried bacon. Compared to her father she seemed ridiculously small. Her shirt was her father’s cast-off and she had to tie it up around her shoulders. Her muscles were strong but slender, but dwarfed against her father’s which were thicker than squash and had knocked many a nose out of its place. She hated how he made her feel like something he could destroy at any moment. He knew it, as well, beneath his heavy brow, and used it against her. It was his revenge. He’d held his disdain of her black in his heart since she’d grown out of childhood. She’d been nothing but a disappointment to him, a burden that spoke. Marriage was his only hope, but in all the years it was custom to be married in she’d not caught the eye of one suitor. Young men avoided her like she had the wasting sickness. She was quiet and quick to anger, had no hand for sewing or spinning or baking. And there was something in her rolling saunter, in the way her father’s clothes looked too handsome on her, in the way more than one doe-eyed girl of the city looked upon her with flushed cheeks. This “something” irked and disquieted them like nothing else.
The marriage-time had passed now, and she was reminded of her father’s bitter disappointment everyday.
“When will you finish?” He asked gruffly, chewing a strip of bacon with relish and watching her face grow pained.
“I’ll finish when it’s finished, you old boar,” she snapped. In truth the blade was done. Now it cooled, and it would be ready for the ambassador when he passed through the town in the afternoon.
“That sword is important to us.” Her father said. She growled and wiped her hands off with a rag. She’d heard this speech too many times.
“This is our chance to extend our wares into the Red East! Think of it! If the prince likes it word will spread from one sea to the other! We’ll be flooded with business!”
Hikaru flinched. She knew who it was that would break their shoulders under that extra business, and it wasn’t her father or his assistant.
“How could the prince possibly like a sword?” Hikaru found herself saying bitterly. “It’s well known that the prince of the Red East hardly raises herself off the cushions, much less raise up a sword.”
Her father grew very quiet. Hikaru stepped away from him, her fists rising. Silence was dangerous from her blustery old father. His rippling arm snapped out and caught her shoulder, yanked her forward so his breakfast breath was in her face.
“This sword had better be nothing less than a legend, or you’ll feel it, you will.”
Hikaru twitched against his hold but couldn’t gain an inch. Anger flooded her, anger and the anguish of being trapped by those stronger than her. Her eyes couldn’t stop from glancing at the image of the sword, which she called Alexandria, flickering beneath a cooling pool of water. It was a good sword, yes, a great sword even… but a legend? A legend was a legend for a reason: because it couldn’t simply be found from a forge run by an evil-hearted old man who left the work to his daughter.
He shook so hard she bit her tongue. “You hear me, girl?!” He sneered.
She swallowed blood and nodded. He let her go. Her arm pulsed with pain and she already felt the bruises spreading from his finger-hold.
She lifted Alexandria from the water, set it aside, and followed her father back to the house. The air was cool and the sky looked like water paints. New sunlight turned the morning moths to gold blurs. Crickets sang their last under the drooping ferns that lined the path from the forge to the house. Hikaru began to feel every drop of her exhaustion and barely made it to the table where the remains of breakfast waited. Wataru was waiting there, too. She groaned inwardly.
Kozuki Wataru handled the actual selling of the family’s swords; she vended in markets and in courts and occasionally followed the traveling caravans to other cities. She was a smooth-tongued woman, always cloaked in thick robes that hid her shape from eyes that might be distracted from business. Here eyes were perfectly almond-shaped, and these she fixed on Hikaru.
“You’re all dirty,” she said. Her voice toyed like a cat.
Hikaru’s father groaned in disgust in left. He hated seeing the two women bicker, it only served to remind him of his daughter’s shame: If Hikaru were ensconced in a husband’s house there would be no bickering.
Wataru’s gaze watched him leave. Her expression remained unmoving.
Hikaru swallowed the last of the bacon and reached for a hunk of staling bread. She didn’t let the woman out of her sight. The past had taught her better.
“I was disappointed you did not return to your room last night,” Wataru said, easing down in the chair beside her and scooting it close. Hikaru stiffened as the woman’s thumb found her lips. “Very disappointed.”
Hikaru knew her next words would be dangerous, but she was too tired to stop them. “Why don’t you just get out of here? I’ve done the brunt of the work, now why don’t you do your pitiful part. My father doesn‘t pay you to loiter in our house.”
Wataru slapped her. It was so fast that only the sound served to confirm what had just happened. Hikaru would have whimpered at the pain, maybe fled from the room, but rage made her numb.
The woman’s thumb slipped into her mouth as her other hand found her throat. The squeeze that she gave could have been seen as affectionate to lovers, but it was a warning. Hikaru tried to pull away but the bigger woman had trapped her against the table.
“Come now, darling. You have such a sweet mouth. Use it.”
Hikaru’s anger flared up and scorched her heart. The food she’d eaten turned rotten in her stomach. She wanted to lash out, to fight, her whole spirit burned her for the cause. But fear had taught her a broken obedience, pain had taught her the faces of those she could not fight: her father, Wataru, the young city men who roamed the evening streets in packs and had more than a fair share of nasty words to share.
Wataru pressed another finger into her mouth. She met them with her tongue but found her fury could not be curbed. Not this morning. She made as if to take her fingers in deeper, but instead pressed them against her teeth and bit down. Wataru sprung away like she was flame and held her fingers in a fold of robe. Blood bloomed through the cloth. Hikaru, terrified and pleased at once, smiled. And then Wataru pulled out the whip from a pocket in her robe. The whip she used for horses. Hikaru knew that whip; The bite of it and its voice. Wataru stepped forward. The color had drained from her face but she was smiling and shaking her head as if regretful of what she was about to do. Hikaru hated her. She burned the image of Wataru’s face into her mind even as she flinched and backed away. I will one day destroy this face. There was nowhere to run to. She crouched in the corner, coughed at the stirred dust. Her mouth tasted like forge smoke still. She could see no one outside the windows in the yard. No one would hear, or else they would hear an animal in the distance being disciplined.
Am I really anything other than that?
She lowered her face. Her eyes bled defeat. The whip arced back.