Strange man, Temrai thought. Quite a few of them in this city, mind; certainly more than at home. Chances are, they have better odds of surviving here. At home there wasn’t much use for the weird, the feckless and the inadequate, and they tended not to live very long.
He stood beside the forge watching the colours change in a once-heated steel blade as the warmth soaked into it; from grey to yellow, yellow to dull red, to purple and finally blue, the right colour for the second quenching. Having checked that the brine bath was just nicely tepid (too cold a quench would crack the steel), he pulled the blade out of the heat and plunged it under the surface of the water. A round ball of steam lifted off the brine, the hissing reached its peak and died away, like the squeaking of a drowning puppy. Curious, the way a hot flame and lukewarm water can turn a soft, malleable piece of steel into a hard cutting edge. Not for the first time, he wondered why it worked.
They had known the answer back home. Steel is like the human heart, they said. To make a man hard enough to be useful, first you must heat him up with the fires of anger and cool him immediately in the quenching bath of fear and the awareness of his own weakness; for metal quench in brine, for men, in tears. This is only the first stage; this makes a man hard but also brittle, and as such no use as a tool, or a weapon. Now he must be heated again in the slow, careful fire of deliberate hatred, and quenched a second time in salt water; it’s the second process that makes him useful, able to cut and inflict wounds but unlikely to shatter. Only men of a good temper are useful to the gods of the clan.
Having cleaned off the colour with a file, he tapped the blade sharply a couple of times against the beak of the anvil, just to make sure that the tempering hadn’t upset the brazed join between blade and core, then took a pot of pumice paste and went over to the buffing wheel to start the long, tedious job of polishing. By rights this was a cutler’s work, the sort of chore a bladesmith shouldn’t be bothered with; but the cutler assigned to him was at home with his sick wife, and Temrai had willingly offered to cover for him. Another curiosity of the city, this. At home if a man’s wife or child fell ill, it went without saying that others would do his work and bring him his share of the milk and cheese. Here, a man was lucky to lose only his day’s wages if he stayed at home to look after his own. Presumably it was that way for a reason, although nobody seemed to know what it was.
Yesterday he had watched them erecting the great torsion engine that had been a month in the making; a fine machine, reckoned to be able to hurl a two hundredweight stone over three hundred and fifty yards. Most of the workers in the building had been called in to help, pulling on ropes or leaning on levers while the wooden frames were positioned and locked in place with dowels, pegs and nails. Once the frame was together and had been pronounced sound, they had wound in the rope skeins that, when twisted, gave the engine its power. Another parable? It was an easy game to play; to say that the ropes stood for the men of his clan, who having lain slack and peaceful for so long were now twisted and racked and ready to strike… Portents and omens are all very well, but it’s too easy a game to be worthwhile. Observing an eagle with a fawn in its claws flying over your enemy’s army is really only nature study; now, if you saw a fawn with an eagle in its velvet-covered hooves soaring and wheeling above their standards in the early dawn, that would be a portent.
Still; the great engine, officially named by the Department of Ordnance mangonel, large, stationary, number thirty-six and known to its creators as the Hardened Drinker (it takes a long time to get it to chuck up, but when it chucks it chucks hard…), was now in place on the third mile-tower of the land wall, wet with pitch against the damp east wind and covering the last undefended blind spot; or, at least, the last blind spot apparent to the unimaginative officials from the Department. The city, in its own estimation, was now ready for anything. Anything would need to be fairly obtuse not to recognise so obvious a cue.
Two hours beside the buffing wheel and the blade was polished; not to the clear mirror surface he’d have liked, but good enough for government work, as his colleagues put it. It joined the rest of the week’s output in a rack on the wall, ready to be hilted, assayed and placed in store; which meant being smeared with grease and packed in oily straw in a barrel along with twenty identical swords, humped into a cellar in a guard tower, and left. Temrai washed his hands, returned to his place and started again.
He made three complete blades that day and started on a fourth. ‘What’s the hurry?’ his colleagues demanded, annoyed that he turned out half as much work again as they did. ‘You know something we don’t?’ He didn’t answer that.
After work he swept up, oiled his tools with camellia oil and tidied them away, put on his coat and walked back to the hostel. It was the cool part of the evening, the little respite between the fresh heat of the sun and the stored heat of the night, radiating out of the stone like warmth from a firebrick. An attractive time in the city; friendly light leaking out through the doors of shops and taverns, cheerful voices and the sound of music played well or badly. Wherever you went, you could see men and women walking together, in no particular direction and no apparent hurry, husbands familiarly with wives, boys tentatively with sweethearts, drunks erratically with tavern girls. At home, generally speaking, you rode or you sat down; more sensible but not so picturesque.
At the door of the hostel he saw a man in a long leather coat leaning in the shadow of the doorway. So, he thought. It was an omen, after all.
‘Jurrai,’ he said softly. ‘Has he…?’
The man nodded. ‘Peacefully,’ he replied – so strange, to hear his own language again. He felt longing, regret and mild distaste, all at the same time. ‘The fever, a week ago.’ It occurred to the man that he’d forgotten something. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘He was a great chieftain.’
Temrai shrugged, knowing the praise to be false. Not a great chieftain; a good one, perhaps, just as he’d been a reasonably good father, an adequate teacher. He hadn’t been the sort of man the gods could make use of; put into the fire too late, cooked up too hot, likely to prove too brittle. His son, now, there was a different case.
‘I suppose I’d better come home,’ he said. ‘Where did you leave them?’
‘At the Korcul ford,’ Jurrai replied. ‘The flood was heavy this year – it won’t be fit to cross for another week, they reckon. If we hurry, we can catch them there.’
‘They won’t be hard to find, even if we don’t,’ Temrai replied absently. He couldn’t help thinking that he had work to finish here; but he hadn’t. He had learnt everything he’d come to learn, more in fact. And he had worked hard, earned his wages, done some good while he was a guest in the city. A man should always try and do good wherever he goes, leave any place better than it was when he found it.
‘They’ll probably wait,’ Jurrai said. ‘There’s plenty of timber there, and you’d said you’d be needing…’
‘True.’ He frowned. ‘I suppose I’d better get ready. Did you bring a horse for me? I sold mine.’
‘One each and a change,’ Jurrai replied. ‘We don’t want to hang about.’
‘Good. Right. I won’t be long.’
He left Jurrai there and walked into the hostel. Strange; it felt very much like home, this huge stone wagon without wheels that never went anywhere, where you had to pay money just for the privilege of being in it. He could smell the evening bread in the oven, and the women were laying the table. A group of men, his friends, looked up from a game of dice and nodded. Under the circumstances, he hoped he’d never see them again.