"You start by beating the iron until it's fairly thin, thinner than your little finger. Then you get a clay pot with a good clay lid. You put the iron in the pot and pack it all around tight with charcoal, crushed fine. You put the lid on and seal it with good clay. It's important that no air gets into the pot."
"Then you build a fire around it, slowly heat it up to a dull red, and keep the fire going for a week."
"What? A whole week?" Ilya interrupted.
"Yes. A wood fire is hot enough, though. Now, if you've done this right and the pot hasn't cracked and no air has gotten in, the iron will have little pimples on it, and it will now be steel. Not a good grade of steel but good for some things. What I've just described is called the cementation process."
"You don't know anything about heat-treating, do you? No, I guess you wouldn't. Wrought iron stays soft no matter what you do with it. Well, steel can be hardened. You heat it until it's bright red, almost yellow, and dunk it in water. This will make it hard, so it can keep a good edge. The trouble is, it breaks easily."
"Then there is tempering, which makes it tougher. After hardening, you heat it to almost red, then let it cool slowly."
"That's what there is to it?" Ilya asked.
"That's what there is to making a decent kitchen knife or an axe blade, but it won't be springy enough for a sword. It might break unless you made it as heavy as the count's."
"So let's have the rest of it."
"Hey, this is going to be a lot harder than it sounds," I said. "Just learning how to cook a pot that long without breaking it is going to take a lot of tries, and tempering is an art form."
"Well, I want to hear it anyway."
"Yes, Sir Conrad, tell us the whole process," Lambert said.
"Okay. I'll tell you how they do it in Damascus." Actually, I didn't know how they did it in Damascus, but I'd seen Jacob Bronowski's magnificent television series, and he had showed how they did it in Japan, which was probably similar. "You weld a piece of this cemented steel to a similar piece of good wrought iron. You know how to weld, don't you?"
"Does the Pope know how to pray?"
"I'll take that as an affirmative. You weld them together and beat it out until it's twice as long as it was. Then you bend it over and weld it again. Then you heat it up again, beat it out long again, bend it over again, and weld it again. You repeat this at least twelve and preferably fifteen times. This gives you a layered structure thousands of layers thick."
"That sounds impossible."
"No, but it is difficult. Look carefully at my sword. See those little lines? Those tiny waves? Those are layers of iron and steel. It's called watering, and it's the mark of the best blades."
"That's it, then?"
"Almost. Then you beat it until it looks like a sword. Once you start playing with hardening, you'll learn that the faster the steel cools, the harder it gets. You want the edge very hard but the shank springy. You coat the sword with clay, thin near the edge and thick at the shank. You heat it, clay and all, until it's the 'color of the rising sun' and quench it in water the same temperature as your hand. Then you temper it and polish it. Soaking it in vinegar will bring out the watering."
"That's a long-winded process," Ilya said.
"But worth it, I'll wager," the count said. "Ilya, you work on it-in addition to your other duties, of course. Good night, Ilya. A game of chess, Sir Conrad?"
Lambert won one of our games that night. By spring he was beating me two games out of three.
Chapter Fifteen
I awoke to find that the carpenter was burning all the logs he had split and laid out the day before. Not one big bonfire, you understand, but hundreds of little fires, one in each split log. Furthermore, he had recruited half a dozen of the children to help him at this task. Two of the older boys were splitting kindling, and the rest were tending the fires under his supervision.
I knew that I didn't want to get involved.
I scrounged up some splinters of about knitting-needle size and retired to my room.
You see, it often happens with me that a problem that I have in the day gets solved in the middle of the night. I'd woken up in the dark with the answer, sitting bolt upright and startling Natalia.
It was obvious. I had a product sample, a sweater that my mother had knitted. All I had to do was figure out how to stick the knitting needles into it and then perform the operation backward! Taking it apart, I could tell how to put it together.
I had the needles ready by dinnertime, and I eagerly went at it as soon as the meal was over. It was not as easy as I had thought. I was not aided by the fact that my sweater was very fancy, with lots of embossing and special twists. Also, I did not know which end was up. It was a long, frustrating afternoon. I learned little and lost a third of my only sweater.
Ladies wandered in and out, but I really didn't have time to be friendly.
The carpenter was still out there, burning his logs, with a new crew of helpers.
After supper, I was at it by the smoky light of an off lamp when Count Lambert took the stuff out of my hands, handed it to Krystyana, and sat me down at the chess board.
"Time for recreation, Sir Conrad."
By the end of the third game, Krystyana had my sweater partially reassembled.
"You see, Sir Conrad," the count said, beaming. "Another eldritch art that you have taught my people."
"Uh… yes, my lord."
"By the way, do you have any idea as to just what Vitold is doing out there with all those fires?"
"In truth, my lord, he has been confusing me for the past two days."
"Now that is refreshing to hear. I hate to be the only one who doesn't know what is going on. Sometimes I think they play a game called confuse the count."
"Bedtime. Coming, Krystyana? Or is it someone else's turn?"
At noon the next day Vitold showed me the first sample beehive; by dusk he had completed the entire gross. In three days he had finished a job that I had assumed would take months.
It seems that boards were hard to make. They had to be sawed by hand out of tree trunks, using a poor saw. Nails were even harder. They had to be hammered one at a time out of very expensive iron.
But though a modem carpenter thinks in terms of boards and fasteners, Vitold thought in terms of taking trees and making things out of them.
As the firewood was already cut, splitting was a fairly simple job. He then burned out a hollow in each half log, carefully leaving about five centimeters untouched all the way around. An entrance hole was chopped in with an axe, and the two troughs were tied back together again with a sturdy, though crude, linen rope. To harvest, you untied the rope, removed the combs, and retied it.
Vitold's method was one of those brilliantly simple things that I was talking about earlier. There was a lot I had to teach the people of the thirteenth century. There was also a great deal that I had to learn.
I haven't talked much about children in this confession, perhaps because the subject is so painful. In modem Poland, children are cherished, as they are in all civilized countries. In the thirteenth century, this was not always true. Perhaps because so many of them died so young, you did not dare love them too much.
From puberty to menopause, if they lived that long, the women of Okoitz were almost continually pregnant. Most of them averaged twelve to fifteen births. There was no concept of birth control, no feeling that one should abstain from sex. In that small community of perhaps a hundred families, there were typically two births a week. There was also more than a weekly funeral, usually a tiny clothwrapped bundle without even a wooden coffin.