On a grassy area above the beach, colorful silken tents, lounge chairs, and long tables of food had been set up. Servitors floated to and fro, sometimes bobbing above the heads of the arriving guests.
Walking behind Ada from the carriole, Daeman recognized some of the workers on the strange scaffolding: Hannah at the apex, tying on more structural elements, a red bandana tied around her head; the demented man, Harman, shirtless, sweating, showing bizarrely tanned skin, was stoking a contained fire twenty feet below Hannah; other young people, presumably friends of Hannah’s and Ada’s, shuttled back and forth up the wooden ramps and ladders, carrying heavy loads of sand and extra branches for construction and round stones. A raging fire burned in the clay core of the structure and sparks rose into the early evening sky. All of the workers’ actions appeared purposeful, even though Daeman could see no possible purpose to the tall stack of sticks and troughs and clay and sand and flame.
A servitor floated by and offered him a drink. Daeman accepted and went off in search of a lounge chair in the shade.
“This is the cupola,” Hannah explained to the assembled guests later that evening. “We’ve been working on it for about a week, floating materials down the river in canoes. Cutting and bending branches to fit.”
It was after a fine dinner. Sunlight still illuminated the high hills on the near side of the river, but the valley itself was in the shadows and both rings were glowing bright in the darkening sky. Sparks leaped and floated toward the rings and the puff of bellows and roar of furnace were very loud. Daeman took another drink, his eight or tenth of the evening, and lifted a second one for Ada, who shook her head and turned her attention back to Hannah.
“We’ve woven wood into a basket shape and coated the center of the furnace—the well—with refractory clay. We made this by shovel, mixing dry sand, bentonite, and some water. Then we rolled the claylike goop into balls, wrapped them in wet ferns and leaves to keep them from drying out, and lined the furnace well with the stuff. That’s what keeps the whole wooden cupola structure from catching fire.”
Daeman had no idea what the woman was going on about. Why build a big, gawky structure of wood and then set a fire at its center if you don’t want the thing to burn down? This place was an asylum.
“Mostly,” continued Hannah, “we’ve spent the last few days feeding the fire while putting out all the little fires the cupola furnace started. That’s why we built this thing near the river.”
“Wonderful,” muttered Daeman and went in search of another drink while Hannah and her friends—even the insufferable Harman—droned on, using nonsensical terms such as “coke bed,” “wind belt,” “tuyere” (which Hannah was explaining meant some little air entrance on their clay-lined furnace, near which the young woman named Emme kept working the wheezing bellows) and “melting zone” and “molding sand” and “taphole” and “slag hole.” It all sounded barbarous and vaguely obscene to Daeman.
“And now it’s time to see if it works,” announced Hannah, her voice revealing both exhaustion and exaltation.
Suddenly the guests had to stand back on the sandy river’s edge, Daeman retreating to the grassy sward near the tables, as all the young people—and that damnable Harman—leaped into a frenzy of action. Sparks flew higher. Hannah ran to the top of the so-called cupola while Harman peered into the clay-furnace-contained flames below and shouted for this and that. Emme worked the bellows until she fell over, and was relieved by the thin man named Loes. Daeman half listened to Ada breathlessly explaining even more details to huddled friends. He caught phrases like “blast pipe” and “blast gate” and “chilled slag” (even though the flames were raging hotter and higher than every before) and “blast pressure.” Daeman moved another fifteen or twenty feet further back.
“Tapping temp of twenty-three hundred degrees!” Harman shouted up to Hannah. The thin woman wiped sweat from her brow, made some adjustment to the cupola far above, and nodded. Daeman stirred his drink and wondered how long it would be before he could get Ada alone in a carriole on the way back to Ardis Hall.
Suddenly there was a commotion that made Daeman look up from his drink, sure that he would see the whole structure in flames, Hannah and Harman burning like straw figures. Not quite. While Hannah was using a blanket to swat out flames on the ladder below the top of the cupola—waving away helpful servitors and even a voynix that had come in close to protect the humans from harm—Harman and two others had finished poking inside the fiery furnace and had just opened a “taphole,” allowing what looked to be yellow lava to flow down wooden troughs to the beach.
Some of the guests surged forward, but Hannah’s shouts and the radiating heat from the flow of liquid metal forced them back.
The crudely carved and lined troughs smoked but did not burst into flame as the yellow-red metal flowed sluggishly from the cupola structure, past the ladders, spilling the last foot or two into a cross-shaped mold set in the sand.
Hannah rushed down a ladder and helped Harman seal off the taphole. They both peered through a peephole into the furnace, did something to—Ada was explaining to a guest—the “slag hole” (different from the taphole, Daeman vaguely noticed) and then the young woman and the older man—soon to be a dead older man, Daeman thought cruelly—leaped from the cupola structure onto the sand and rushed over to look at the mold.
More guests surged down the beach. Daeman wandered down, setting his drink on a passing servitor’s tray.
The air was very cool down here by the river, but the heat from the red-glowing mold in the sand struck Daeman’s face like a fiery fist.
The molten stuff was congealing into a red and gray cross-shaped mass.
“What is it?” Daeman asked loudly. “Some sort of religious symbol?”
“No,” said Hannah. She took off her bandana and wiped her sweaty, soot-streaked face. She was smiling like a crazy person. “It’s the first bronze cast in . . . what, Harman? A thousand years?”
“Probably three times that long,” the older man said quietly.
The guests muttered and applauded.
Daeman laughed. “What good is it?” he asked.
Harman looked up at him. “Of what good is a newborn baby?” said the sweating, bare-chested man.
“Precisely my point,” said Daeman. “Loud, demanding, smelly . . . useless.”
The others ignored him as Ada gave Hannah, Harman, and the other workers hugs, just as if they’d actually done something of worth. Guests milled. Harman and Hannah climbed ladders and started fussing, peering through peepholes and poking into the furnace with metal bars as if there was to be more of this lava production. Evidently, thought Daeman, this pyrotechnics show was to continue into the night.
Suddenly needing to urinate, Daeman wandered up past the tables, considered the tent-covered rest room pavilion, and decided—in the spirit of all this pagan nonsense—to respond to this call of nature al fresco. He climbed above the grassy shelf toward the dark line of trees, following a monarch butterfly that had fluttered past him. There was nothing unusual at seeing a monarch, but it was late in the day and season for it to be out and flying. He walked past the last voynix and moved under the high branches of elms and cycads.