The village was surrounded by low earthen walls and wooden fences.
Dogs began barking as the cart reached the entrance. People carrying firewood paused in their work, while the women by the well looked Kang Mujin up and down. Work clothes of a cut they had never seen here, and a staff fitted with a fragment of rusty sickle. His clothes, intact and without a single scorch mark, still looked out of place despite the dirt and grass stains from the forest path.
The man driving the cart explained something to the villagers, even imitating the hammering motions Kang Mujin had made. A few people laughed. But when he lifted the broken hoe from the back of the cart, every gaze turned toward the same spot deeper in the village.
There stood a smithy.
It was less a smithy than a work shelter with a roof tacked over it. An earthen forge, a small bellows, a whetstone, and a few pairs of tongs were all it held. The anvil in the middle had a crack running from beneath its right horn.
It was the very fracture Kang Mujin had sensed outside the village.
An old man sat beside the anvil, his left hand wrapped in bandages. He frowned at Kang Mujin, exchanged a few words with the carter, then pointed his chin at the anvil.
Kang Mujin approached and laid a hand on it.
The grain of the cold iron pressed into his palm.
Only one crack showed on the surface, but inside, three more branches spread thinner than hairs. The anvil had been built by joining lumps of iron with uneven carbon content. It also bore traces of having stood too long beside the forge, one side heating over and over. If anyone struck it with a hammer as it was, the horn would break off.
Kang Mujin pointed to the crack, then held two fingers apart. As he spread them wider, the old man’s expression hardened.
“You mustn’t use it.”
Though the words meant nothing to him, the message seemed to get through.
The old man raised his bandaged hand, revealing a dark red stain that had seeped through at the edge. A flying fragment had apparently injured him already.
Kang Mujin inspected the forge. The charcoal had absorbed moisture, and the leather of the bellows was split in places. The conditions were poor, but not so poor that he could do nothing.
When he pointed to the hoe at the back of the cart, the man handed it over. Broken where the blade met the neck, it had been made by forcibly bending a thinly drawn piece of iron to fit the handle. Long streaks of black impurities ran through the fracture.
To repair the hoe, he needed an anvil.
He would have to save the anvil first.
Kang Mujin pointed out the tongs and charcoal to the old man, then mimed pulling the bellows handle. The old man looked from his hands to his face. While the carter spoke beside him, the boy showed him the small mark Kang Mujin had engraved on the sickle staff.
After a long while, the old man tapped his own chest.
“Bran.”
Kang Mujin pointed to himself as well.
“Kang Mujin.”
“Jin… cher?”
“Kang Mujin.”
Only after rolling the name around his mouth several times did Bran step away from the forge.
Kang Mujin began with the bellows. While discarded scraps of leather soaked in water, he picked out rusty nails whose cores were still sound, straightened them, and used them to stitch the splits closed. He also separated the wet charcoal from the dry, building the fire with the dry pieces while drying the wet ones around the edge of the forge.
People gathered before the work shelter, one by one.
Kang Mujin did not look at them. Fire made no allowances for spectators.
It took four strong men to move the anvil. Kang Mujin pushed only the cracked section into the forge, coating the parts he did not intend to heat with a thick layer of clay. Heating the whole thing could cause more cracks as different sections cooled at different rates.
The bellows stirred, and fire licked the iron.
Dark red brightened to scarlet, then orange. To Kang Mujin, the change was more than color. The heated grains swelled, their impurity-laden boundaries meshing roughly, while stress gathered at the tips of the cracks like slender needles.
He reached out.
The anvil trembled faintly without his touching it, and people around him drew sharp breaths.
Kang Mujin moved the iron on either side of the crack a little at a time. Forcing the sides together would seal only the surface and leave gaps inside, so he first pushed the impurities toward the edges. Then he aligned the contours of the fractured faces and brought the heated grains into mesh.
Sweat ran down his forehead.
This was different from moving the sickle fragment. The anvil was thick and heavy. His blessing might tell him the state of the iron, but it could not supply the strength or concentration needed to move it. If he missed even one hair-thin branch, the repair would not withstand hammering.
“Hammer.”
When Kang Mujin held out his empty hand, Bran gave him the largest hammer.
Clang.
The first note was dull.
Not yet.
Kang Mujin turned the anvil half a handspan, moving it away from excessive exposure to oxygen. As the temperature rose a little higher, a thin film of oxide bloomed on the surface.
The hammer fell again.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
At first, he struck lightly over a broad area outside the crack, gathering the scattered grain inward. Then he narrowed the area of his blows. He alternated between the edge and flat of the hammer, guiding its direction with his wrist. Too hard, and the structure just beginning to bond would shift out of place. Too soft, and the impact would fail to reach the interior.
After dozens of blows, the sound changed.
A clear note trailed the dull resonance.
Kang Mujin stopped hammering. Instead of putting the anvil in water, he buried it in a pit filled with ash and dry earth. Cooling it too quickly could crack the area around the joint he had worked so hard to make.
While he waited, he worked on the hoe.
He cut away the broken section and drew out a new neck along the grain of the remaining iron. Of two old horseshoes, he chose the tougher one for the added material. He heated the hoe blade, leaving the face that would strike the earth hard and the neck tough. When he quenched it, he lowered it into the water at an angle, cutting edge first.
Hiss.
White steam rose.
The instant the boundary of cooling metal reached the middle of the blade, Kang Mujin took the hoe out. He sharpened its edge on the whetstone and dressed the handle socket.
Last, he picked up a small chisel.
Near the neck of the hoe blade, he engraved a line with two bends and added a short stroke in the middle. It was a simple mark that, from a distance, looked like a hammer laid over an anvil.
The carter recognized the engraving, and the boy held the mark on the sickle fragment beside it. The two were the same.
Kang Mujin handed over the hoe, and the man swung it into the hard ground.
Thud.
The blade bit deep into the earth. Even after a second and third blow, the neck held firm, and the impact passed smoothly from blade to handle.
The man brought a small pouch and offered it to Kang Mujin. Inside were five flat coins, but Kang Mujin took only one.
The charcoal and horseshoe had both belonged to the village. One was enough for his labor.
The man offered the rest again.
“One is enough.”
When Kang Mujin raised a single finger, the man stopped insisting. Instead, he took a round loaf of bread from the cart and placed it in his hand.
Kang Mujin did not return the bread.
“Thank you.”
They dug out the anvil as the sun sank low.
Once the oxide film had been ground away, a faint line remained where the crack had been. The material had been uneven to begin with; he could not make it as good as new.
Still, it would last a few more years.
Kang Mujin tapped the center of the anvil with a small hammer.
Ting.
A clear resonance spread beneath the shelter’s roof.
Bran took up a hammer himself and struck the horn, the edge, and the center in turn.
Ting. Ting. Ting.
The old man rested his hand on the anvil for a long time. At last, he bowed his head to Kang Mujin.
Kang Mujin bowed just as deeply.
That night, he slept in one corner of the work shelter.
From the next day on, sickles and pots, handcarts and door handles poured in. Kang Mujin could not understand long sentences, but he decided the order of work by looking at the hands and clothes of those who brought things. A farmer’s sickle needed for the fields right away and a pot for boiling the morning water came first. A guard’s spear that would hold out a while longer and a grain merchant’s order for ornamentation came later.
Bran and the children taught him the local language. Fire was “ar,” iron was “fer,” and a hammer was “marto.” When the children shouted, “Marto!” Kang Mujin answered, “Mangchi,” and within days, words from two worlds rang together beneath the shelter. Hold it, turn it, strike, stop. The sound of iron had never needed an interpreter.
A month later, plowshares and horseshoes began arriving from neighboring villages. Kang Mujin saved his wages and forged a hammer of his own. He placed iron rich in carbon at the striking face and tough wrought iron in the body, tending the heat from the feeble bellows for three days. His blessing told him the state of the iron, but a lifetime of experience determined where his hammer fell and at what angle.
On the side of the finished hammer, he engraved the line with two bends and the short stroke in its middle. The mark resembling a hammer and anvil made its way through the markets before his name did, and imitations soon appeared. A merchant had scratched similar lines onto a poorly made knife, hoping to charge more for it.
“This is not mine.”
Kang Mujin pointed to the misplaced stroke, then tapped the spine of the knife lightly against the edge of the anvil. With a sharp crack, the blade split, exposing a cross section streaked with black impurities.
“Iron does not lie.”
After that day, no one copied his mark.
Before winter came, Kang Mujin packed two hammers, tongs, a file, and a whetstone. Bran gave him an old portable bellows. In his newly learned words, Kang Mujin promised that he might return in spring, then set out on the road.
He passed rivers, hills, and small walled towns, repairing hooks, plows, and spearheads. Even when a lord’s official held out a perfectly sound longsword ahead of a farmer’s cracked plow, the order did not change.
“The sword won’t break today.”
Over the course of a season, the bent line crossed mountain paths and rivers. Rumor reached the next village faster than anyone could walk.
Unaware of this, Kang Mujin sat before the forge in yet another village. He held a chipped axe blade in his hands.
As he examined the distribution of carbon, he raised his head.
Heavy metal objects were approaching from a distance.
Three thick hammers.
A pair of iron-banded boots.
Chain mail and a double-bladed axe as tall as a man.
The footsteps pressing into the earth were short and firm.
A moment later, the smithy door opened.
A man entered, his waist-length beard bound with metal rings. He stood a head shorter than a human, but his shoulders were broad enough to brush the doorframe.
He set a plowshare bearing the engraved mark on the workbench.
“Are you Kang Mujin?”
This time, Kang Mujin understood the words.
He set down his hammer.
“I am.”
The man tapped the mark with a thick finger.
“Doria Stonebeam.”
His eyes burned hotter than the forge.
“Strike iron before me. I’ll see whether your reputation is as solid as your hammer blows.”
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