The swamp mine was a patch of rocky ground at the edge of the swamp, a little way inland from Finlay's fishing spot. There were ten big rocks, each about the size of a cart. Five of them were streaked with orange-brown, and five with dull grey.
Copper and tin. Five of each, exactly as in the game.
An old man sat on a stump beside the rocks, smoking a pipe. He had a grey beard down to his belt, a leather cap and hands like knotted roots.
"Afternoon," he said. "Come to learn mining?"
"If you'll teach me."
"Monlum. I teach whoever comes." He looked at Tam's empty hands. "You'll want a pickaxe, then." He reached under the stump and pulled one out. It was a bronze pickaxe, just like the one Tam had paid Bob a coin for. "Here. Free to learners."
"I've got one, thanks." Tam turned half away, as if reaching behind his back, and brought out his own pickaxe. "I bought it. One coin, from Bob."
"Bob charged you a coin?" Monlum shook his head. "Robbery."
One coin well spent, Tam thought. The best coin I ever spent, actually.
Monlum started to teach him. Hit the rock where it was already cracked. Let the weight of the pick do the work. Don't swing at your own feet. Copper broke easier than you'd think, and tin was crumbly. When a rock ran dry, you left it and worked another, and after a while it had ore in it again.
Tam knew all that from the game. His hands set his feet and found the crack in the copper rock without his looking for it. They let the pick fall with its own weight. It bounced off anyway and jarred his whole arm. Level 1, he thought. The game still rolls the dice.
He swung again, and a chip of orange stone flew off. On the sixth swing a fist-sized lump of copper ore broke loose, and it never hit the ground. It was simply gone, and something new and heavy sat in a square of his inventory. He took it out to look: cold, streaked with green, much heavier than it looked.
After that he mined with his back to Monlum's stump, so the old man wouldn't see the ore vanish. He mined until his arms shook. On the fifth ore the words came.
Congratulations, you just advanced a Mining level. Your Mining level is now 2.
The warmth went down his arms, and the next swing bit deeper.
"You've done that before," said Monlum, watching him.
"Never in my life."
"Then you're a quick one."
He mined five copper and five tin. The tenth lump brought another Mining level. Then he stopped. He had his net, his coins, five shrimp, a hammer, a pickaxe and ten lumps of ore. The inventory was more than half full. He could have filled the rest.
But he could feel the ore. Each lump had vanished into the inventory, but each one still added a little weight. Now it dragged at his legs and shoulders. So weight still counts, he thought. Even in there. In the game, the furnace was next to the general store. He'd walked from there that morning. It was a long way back.
He thanked Monlum, and Monlum said, "Bring me a story next time," and went back to his pipe.
* * *
The smiths' building stood north of the castle, near the general store. It was a long stone shed with wide doors and a chimney pouring black smoke. Inside, it was hot enough to make his eyes water. A big stone furnace glowed orange at one end. At the other end stood an anvil.
It was a sorry-looking anvil. It was pitted and red with rust, and one corner was broken off.
A young man was sweeping the floor. He was short, shorter than Tam by a head, with soot on his face and a leather apron down to his knees.
"You'll want to use the furnace?" he said. "Go on, it's for anyone. I'm Feoras. I'm apprenticed to Sani, the master smith up in Varrock. He sent me down here to teach the beginners." He said it with great pride and a little disappointment, as if Varrock was where the real smithing happened.
"What's wrong with the anvil?" Tam asked, although he knew.
"That old thing?" Feoras laughed. "Bob dragged it out of the swamp. It's too far gone for anything hard. It'll only take bronze."
In the game, if you tried anything else on that anvil, it told you so in a little line of text: You can only use bronze bars to smith on this anvil. Today it didn't matter. Bronze was all he had.
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"Right," said Feoras, rubbing his hands. "Smelting. First thing you do is..."
He stopped, because Tam was already doing it.
Tam hadn't meant to. He had turned his back to Feoras and taken out a lump of copper and a lump of tin. He had stepped up to the furnace, meaning to wait to be told. But his hands put the ore in the right place. They found the bellows and worked them at the right pace, without being asked. A net and a pick were one thing. This was a craft, and he had never learned it.
In the game, you used the ore on the furnace, and a bar came out. You never saw how.
Here, he watched his own hands do it. The ores glowed, softened, melted and ran together into the mould. When it cooled, it was a bar of bronze, dull gold and the length of his hand. It was perfect. It looked like the little picture of a bronze bar he had seen thousands of times.
Feoras looked at the bar.
"Who taught you that?"
"Nobody," said Tam truthfully.
He smelted the other four, and they came out the same as the first. Each bar went into his inventory as soon as it cooled, with his back to Feoras. Then he went to the rusted anvil. He took out one bar and his hammer and thought about a dagger.
His hands put the bar in the fire and took it out at the right moment. They held it on the anvil with the tongs that hung there for anyone to use. The hammer came down, and down, from the middle outward, in a rhythm he didn't choose. The bronze flattened and lengthened under it into a blade. The end of the bar drew out into a grip, all of a piece. He didn't hit his thumb once. He didn't think about what came next. When he tried to think about it, his hands faltered, so he stopped trying and let them work.
It took about as long as it took Feoras to finish sweeping the floor.
When it was done, he held it up to the light from the door.
It was a bronze dagger. A short, plain blade and a short, plain grip, all one piece of dull gold metal. In the game it was the most basic weapon there was. New players made one on their first day and threw it away inside an hour.
He had made it himself, from a rock in the ground to a blade in his hand.
He held it, and it stayed.
Feoras had stopped sweeping. He came over and looked at the dagger. He took it from Tam, turned it over, ran his thumb along the edge and checked the point. Then he gave it back, and it stayed in Tam's hand. Because I made it? Tam wondered. Or because it's mine now?
"You've never smithed before," said Feoras. "Not once?"
"Never."
"Sani made me practise daggers for a year," said Feoras. "My first one looked like a squashed toad." He shook his head slowly. "That's not beginner's luck. I don't know what that is."
"Neither do I," said Tam, and that was true too.
In the game, a bronze sword needed Smithing level 4. When he tried to think about a sword at the anvil, his hands did nothing at all. They just waited. Not yet, he thought. Same as the game. He'd come back when he had it.
He turned toward the door. Then he slid the dagger inside his shirt and let the inventory take it.
* * *
When he came out of the smiths' building, the sun was going down. He heard someone shouting.
"Again!"
Between the smiths' building and the castle wall, a grassy hill rose up. On top of it, in the red evening light, an old soldier was drilling three people with swords.
He was about fifty-five, with short grey hair, a straight stiff back and a voice like a door slamming. Two fingers were missing from his left hand. He walked up and down behind his pupils with his hands behind his back.
Harlan, Tam thought. The melee tutor. In the game, Harlan stood on this hill all day and taught close fighting: a few lines of advice, a training sword and a shield. That was all Tam knew about him.
Two of the pupils were boys of about fourteen, sweating and miserable. The third was Wren.
She was dry this time. She wore a padded jacket and leather trousers, and she held an iron sword. She was moving through the same drill as the boys: step, cut, step back, guard. But she did it easily. Her feet didn't stop. Each cut finished exactly where the last one had.
"Again," said Harlan.
She did it again, and it was perfect, as far as Tam could tell.
"Again."
Tam stood at the bottom of the hill and watched. He had watched people play the game at the top, people who had spent ten thousand hours learning exactly where to click. He knew what it looked like when someone had practised something until it lived in their body.
It looked like this.
Feoras took a year, he thought. I took an afternoon.
Harlan finally called a stop. The boys collapsed on the grass. Wren wiped her sword on a rag, slid it into its sheath and came down the hill. She saw Tam and stopped.
"Fallow."
"Hi. Wren." He suddenly didn't know what to do with his hands. "I wanted to say thank you. For the river. For pulling me out. I didn't get to say it, before. I was busy throwing up."
"Don't."
"Don't say thank you?"
"I didn't do it for thanks."
"Then why did you do it?"
She looked at him as if it were a stupid question. "You were in the river."
Tam opened his mouth. Then he closed it.
Up on the hill, Harlan was looking at them. "Is that the Fallow boy?" he called. "The drowned one? Come up here, lad. Let's see your arm."
Tam went up. Harlan picked a training sword out of a barrel and tossed it to him, handle first.
Tam caught it. For one second he held it.
Then it fell straight through his hand and clattered on the grass. The old message hung in the evening air where only he could see it.
Everyone on the hill looked at the sword, even Wren at the bottom.
"Hands," Tam said. "Since the river."
"Come back when you can hold a sword, lad," said Harlan. He didn't laugh.
"I can hold a sword." Tam put his hand inside his shirt and took out the dagger. It sat in his palm, plain and bronze. "I can hold this one. I made it."
Harlan raised his eyebrows. Wren came halfway back up the hill to look.
"That's a butter knife," said Wren.
"It's a dagger."
"It's a butter knife, Fallow." But the corner of her mouth moved, slightly. It might have been a smile. Then she turned and walked off toward the bridge with her long, even stride.
Harlan was still looking at the dagger.
"You made that," he said. "Today?"
"Today."
"First one?"
"First one."
Harlan grunted. He picked the training sword up off the grass and dropped it back in the barrel. "Feet first," he said. "Sword second. Come back when you're well."
* * *
Tam walked home in the dusk with six coins, a net, a hammer, a pickaxe, four bronze bars, five cooked shrimp and a dagger.
He went the long way, along the river, over the bridge, and up the east bank to the farm. Lozar's house stood on his right, with firelight moving behind its broken windows. He heard goblins laughing inside. He kept walking.