::Right.:: So, what he should do is put in Bear’s mind the direction things should take, and let Bear do the telling, and comforting, and so on. “Ye haven’ been all that around yersel’,” he told Bear, with just the tiniest bit of reproach in his voice. “Ye ken? So wha’s she gonna do, wi’ me runnin’ about after Nikolas, an’ you off doin’, too. She gots nobody she talks to but us.”
“Yes, but—” Bear faltered. “Damn it, why do you have to be right all the time? And the only time I can get her out of class is—”
“When I’m agone, aye.” He nodded. “Nay, look, Bear, ye kin afford t’take a liddle time off Amily. Ye gots th’ Herald what draws stuff she sees i’ other peoples’ heads, aye?”
Bear nodded and crunched a carrot. “She said she’d do it when I asked her this morning. Just have to get her an’ Amily an’ the right Healer together. Dean’s finding me the Healer, an’ Dean’s gonna set it up. She says the best way is for her to make a bunch of drawings, then we use those to rough-saw the cow bones in the right places, then we all get back together again with her and the Healer and Amily and we make adjustments on the cow bones and pin ’em together exactly the right way. Then—I dunno, we’re gonna have to figure out how t’ do something more permanent than cement pins—we’re gonna have a bunch of Healers handling the bones and turning them and studying them. I just can’t figure out how to make ’em stand up to that much abuse.“
“So who’d know how t’do stuff like stickin’ bones t’gether?” Mags asked patiently. It was beginning to dawn on him what his job was in all of this. It wasn’t necessarily to find answers. His job was to ask the right questions. Then even if neither he nor Bear nor Lena knew the answers, at least knowing the question would mean that they had a direction to go to find someone who did know the answers.
“Who sticks things together? ’Twouldn’t be a Healer, the bones would have to be living. I dunno . . .” Bear ran his hand through his hair, making it stand on end.
Gennie noticed and smacked his hand lightly. “Quit that, you look like a hammerbird. Stick what together now?”
“Bones—bone pieces, I mean,” Bear said, and explained. Now, anything that Gennie was interested in was bound to get the interest of the rest of the team, and they all leaned over to hear what Bear was up to. They were all gratifyingly encouraging in their enthusiasm, and not one of them expressed any thought that Bear wasn’t up to the job; Bear began to brighten visibly.
And all of them began tossing ideas back and forth about how the bone-model could be made, until people at other tables started to notice. Ideas were tossed out and discarded. Glue obviously wasn’t going to hold past rough examination. You couldn’t nail the pieces together, the bone would split, and screws had the same problem. Pins by themselves were too unstable—
Finally one of the oldest people listening spoke up—not a teacher, but one of the servers. “Why does’t have to be one thing?” he asked.
They all stopped talking and looked at him. He flushed, obviously unused to that much attention. “Oh—don’t mind me—” he stammered.
“No, no, go on,” Bear said, encouragingly. “Please. What did you mean by that?”
“Well... look, my ma is a seamstress for real special stuff for the Guard. Say she’s got something that has got to hold up. Life or death. Uh—like the seams on the carry-bags they use to get sick or hurt people down off mountains, where you can’t even get a stretcher. Well, she don’t use just one thing to put that seam together. First, she sews it loose, so she can adjust curves and all. Then she sews three seams close together. Then she sews something to protect the seam on the outside. Then she glues the seam, then glues a layer of leather down, then she gets a saddler to stitch the leather down. So it’s not just one thing... the loose stitches would pull out if that were all there was. One line of stitches might break. Three might get cut. The glue might give. The leather might get torn off if it was only glued. The saddle stitches might pop. But with all of that there, even if part of it goes, the rest is gonna hold it together . . .” The man flushed again. “Sorry. I—I shouldn’t have—”
“Yes, you should have!” Bear exclaimed. “All right then... so, he’s right. The pins only have to hold so we can do what?”
At this point there were three tablesworth of Trainees and other students involved in this.
“Well . . .” someone who wasn’t in any of the three Collegia, who was up here taking classes so he could learn how to plan things like bridges and buildings, tentatively put his oar in. “What you need after you position the bones is something to hold them in place, temporary, aye? Well... look, is there any reason why your model has to be made of bone at all? Can’t you just make a model directly?”
Bear frowned a little. “Sort of. I mean, I dunno of anyone who can mold the way the bone is out of clay, if that’s what you’re asking. The Herald that’s making the drawings doesn’t make sculptures, she told me so when I asked her to help.”
“Right, that clarifies things. I’m Myca, by the way.” He stuck out a hand, and Bear shook it. He tapped the server on the arm; the server jumped. “Introduce yourself, man. It’s only polite.”
“Pawel,” the server said, diffidently.
They all nodded a friendly greeting. “Look, sit down—” Bear said, but Pawel shook his head. “I’m on duty, and if I don’t work, the cook will have my hide and I might get my wages cut. Thank you, but I really need to get back to work—” He picked up some empty bowls and headed for the hatch to return them to the kitchen.
“Huh.” Bear stared after him a moment. “Well, all right. So, Myca, I guess we could use something other than bone once we have the sketches, but there’s no way that I know of to make a model that’ll be accurate other than by pinning bits of bone together.”
“Fair enough. Then Pawel was right. First pin. But then, go ahead and use carpentry glue, but glue the pins in first. Then glue the two surfaces. Then start working on something more permanent. I guess this is going to get a lot of handling, so it is going to have to be sturdy. I’d say to make a carpentry join, a dovetail or something like that, but that would be difficult to get right, and you’re only going to waste time if you spoil it and have to start over. So—I’d use metal staples out of soft wire so you can set them in rather than hammering them in.”
“Staples?” Bear wasn’t the only one that looked puzzled, but this time it was a first-year Bardic student who suddenly popped his head up.
“Like a jeweler!” the boy exclaimed. He scrabbled in his belt pouch for a writing stick and began to sketch on the tabletop. “My cousin’s a jeweler. Sometimes you have to join stone or metal together, and you don’t dare put heat to it. So this is what you do. You drill a hole. You cement in one end of your wire. You bend that like so, and so, make it flat to the surface, you drill another hole, and you cement the other end of the wire in, make sure it’s flat to the surface, and you can even burnish it into place, like inlay—”
Nods all around the table. “Oh, and you know what else I would do, once you have your staples in place all around the bone?” said Pip. “I’d get pliver-suede and fish-skin glue and sinew—”
“Or maybe horsehair, or gut, or harpstring wire—” put in one of the Bardic students.
“Aye, any of those. And I’d glue the pliver down, all the way around the break, then I’d glue the string and wrap the break. Just like fitting an arrowhead to the shaft. That’ll hold the staples in place, the staples will hold the bone from shifting and the pins and the glue will keep the pieces from falling apart.”