As soon as the glue was hard and he’d slipped off the clamps and unwound the cord, he’d mixed up another batch and begun the tedious, messy work of putting on the sinew backing. First, he’d sized the back of the core once again, this time with the residue of the last batch of hide glue. Next, he set it up on blocks at the front of the workbench, on which lay forty neatly sorted bundles of sinew fibres at convenient intervals. The glue was right – still warm and the consistency of new thin honey. He picked up the sliver of bone he’d chosen to use as a smoother and put it in a small clay cup full of water.
He selected the first bundle of sinew, the longest he had, and dipped it in the glue until it was saturated and limp. He squeezed out the excess, starting at the top and working the runout down to the bottom, flattening the bundle in the process, then carefully laid it down the middle of the core’s back above the handle, spreading it from the centre outwards with the piece of dampened bone until it was just over half an inch wide. The next bundle he butt-ended onto the first, pushing firmly with the smoother to stretch the fibres slightly, and repeated the process until he’d covered a strip up the centre of the back from nock to nock. When that was done he paused briefly to wash some of the surplus glue off his hands.
As he laid in the next row, to the left of the first, he made sure that the butt-seams didn’t line up to create a weak spot, two seams side by side; instead he staggered them like rows of bricks in a wall, then worked each bundle over with the smoother until it was indistinguishable from the material above, below and beside it. He continued until the whole of the back and sides of the core were covered in a homogenous mat of glue-sodden sinew, a long, flat artificial muscle that, once dry, would be next best thing to impossible to break no matter how hard it was stretched. As soon as he’d done one layer he laid on the second, working fast while the glue was still tacky and malleable so that each bundle of fibres would be fused with its neighbour and no weak spots could form. Finally he used up the last of the sinew in wrapping the joints in the bone on the belly, and smoothed all the leftover glue over the back; every last fibre of sinew and smear of glue used up, without waste or spoilage.
Because time was so short, he’d made up a drying oven out of slabs of firebrick; he heated the bricks in the fire until they were just too hot to hold and stacked them round the blocks on which the bow was mounted, where the sunlight through the window would catch them and keep the bricks warm once the heat of the fire had dissipated. He’d never used this technique before, and was afraid that the intensity of the heat would warp or spoil the bow, or that the glue would dry brittle, or that the sinew would dry too fast and pull away from the back as it shrank (and those were only the disasters he could easily anticipate; the unforeseen problems would doubtless be even worse).
Now all that was done, and he held the bow in his hands, to be strung and tillered, trimmed, smoothed and polished, the final layer of parchment-thin rawhide to be wrapped round.
In his hands now, it was as ugly and messy as a new-born baby; a man-made limb, put together out of bone, tendon, blood and skin, with all the body parts refined, corrected, pulled out and put back together again in a better, more efficient way. On the back, the tendons to be stretched, in the belly the bone to be crushed and compressed, the two held apart by an intrusive wafer of timber, held together by blood, skin and bone-dust; an arm stronger than any man’s arm when stretched and crushed to the very point of destruction, made by violence for violence out of body parts, heat, desiccation and skill. Wonderful beyond words, if the dead muscle still remembered its function, if the dead bone withstood the unbearable force of compression, if dead limbs could take lives, if nothing but a smear of blood and the scrapings of skin could bind the bits of dead body together as they strove with all their stored-up might to tear apart from each other-
(Like the Loredan family, Bardas thought with a smile; some of us bend and stretch, some of us crush and are crushed, but a little blood and sawdust and a shared skin keep us glued helplessly together, and when we bend and stretch and crush together, at the moment before breaking, we have infinite capacity for doing damage. I have been at the back of this family for many years, and now I’m in the belly of the bow, in the place where compression turns to expansion, where the stored force is converted into violence. And I have made this bow for my brother Gorgas.)
He lifted his left leg and stepped over the handle, trapping the lower limb over the instep of this right foot and drawing the belly-side of the handle up into the hollow of his left knee, then pulled as hard as he could with his left hand on the upper limb, bending it back until he could slip the top loop of the string over the nock. It was amazingly stiff to bend; he could feel the bone trying its utmost to break – but there was nowhere for it to break to, it was trapped against an equally unbearable tension in the sinew of the back, each tension preventing the other from giving way; trapped like the members of a family at war with each other, held by bonds they can never escape but which create the very tension that stresses them to their limit. Just when he thought he would never be able to string the bow, he managed to edge the loop of twisted gut over the sinew-wrapped nock. The bowstring took the strain, the loops and serving held, and Bardas let the bow lie across the palm of his hand, finding its balance around its centre of gravity. Against all his expectations, the tiller was perfect: two beautifully balanced convexes on either side of the concave handle, utterly symmetrical, the recurves bent back on themselves to create yet another tension. He held his breath and lifted the bow – how light it was – set his fingers to the served middle of the string, pushed with his left hand and pulled with his right (again the power of forces in opposition, working against each other to produce force, violence), straining the tendons and bones of his arm, back and shoulders; carefully testing, an inch further with each flex, until the base of his thumb touched his chin, and then it would go no further.
He rested for a moment, flexing his tortured muscles, thinking, So, the wretched thing draws short and stacks like crazy; that’s a hundred-pound bow with a twenty-five-inch draw. It’ll never be much for accuracy, but the power’s there. Well, it wouldn’t suit me. But Gorgas was always the strong one in our family, he can draw a hundred without breaking into a sweat, and a short draw suits fast, instinctive shooting. And Gorgas has always shot on instinct, ever since he was a boy. He picked an arrow out of the quiver that leant against the doorframe, fitted its nock to the string, aimed at a flat oak board three inches thick on the the side of the room, drew and loosed, letting the force of the draw pull the string off his fingers. The arrow struck high and its shaft disintegrated, leaving the bodkinhead driven clean through the board. The power was terrifying, and Bardas stood and stared for a while before unstringing the bow and laying it carefully down on the bench.
Later he tidied it up with scarpers and abrasive reeds and grits, wrapped the handle with more fine rawhide, waxed it thoroughly to keep out the damp and finished it with two thick coats of pure, horrendously expensive Colleon lacquer, which dries fast and is completely waterproof. It looked a bit smarter now, all milk-white except for the dark line of the wooden core, and shining.