Someone picked up the tinderbox, but Daurenja took it from him. They were laying kindling in the middle of the pit; first small dry twigs and hay, then thin splinters of scrap planed wood stacked in a cone. Daurenja turned the tinderbox handle, blew on it, swore, called for more dried moss and shavings (Ziani smiled; he always had trouble getting a fire going himself). Someone leaned over his shoulder, offering to help, and was pushed out of the way. A little curl of smoke from the box. Daurenja took a long stride towards the pit and dumped the smouldering rubbish out of the box into the hole in the top of the stack of kindling. One of the bellows wheezed gently. An orange glow swelled and burst, like over-ripe fruit, into flames.
Two men started shovelling charcoal, sprinkling it slowly on to the fire as the second bellows started up. Apparently satisfied, Daurenja turned his back on the fire-pit and shouted something Ziani couldn't catch over the huff and roar of the bellows. Four men dragged a long wooden box out of the shadows, and two of them stooped and lifted out an iron plate, bending their knees and straightening up under the weight. The plate was five feet long, about a handspan wide, two inches thick. They laid it down on the table and stepped back, as Daurenja darted forward to examine the edges.
"Bloody rust," he shouted. "I thought I told you to keep the staves dry." He was scrubbing the edges with a small chunk of brick. "Got to keep the edges clean or the welds won't take." Someone handed him a clay pot, flux mixed with water to the consistency of thick porridge. He scooped out a thick blob with his finger, examined it and started smearing it on the freshly scrubbed edge.
"In the fire," he snapped; two men clamped heavy tongs on the plate, locking the handles shut with rings, and heaved it into the lire-pit, while other men raked orange-hot charcoal over it until it was buried. The bellows sighed, provoking the fire into a wild outburst of flame. Five men were dragging up the massive square iron swage block. A wide groove, like a gutter but shallower, was cut into the upper face. Daurenja nodded to two of the men, and they each took a sledgehammer from the table. Daurenja himself lifted the top swage, a half-round bar on a long handle; it must have weighed forty pounds, but he moved it easily. He rested it in the groove on the top of the block, and peered into the fire as the third and fourth bellows started to blow, stirring up six-foot plumes of flame.
"Keep the charcoal coming," Daurenja yelled. "Got to keep the heat even." Sweat was pouring out of his face, as though he was melting or leaking. "Right, that'll do, get it out."
The iron plate rose out of the fire-pit like the sun rising, a blazing yellow shape that defeated the eye as it swooped down on top of the groove in the block. Daurenja set the curved face of the top swage down lengthways, exactly in the middle, and nodded to the hammermen, who started striking the swage's flat back, squeezing the hot, soft plate down into the groove, as the men with the tongs drew it down the block, an inch between the fall of each hammer blow. By the time they were halfway down, the bright yellow had faded to orange; Daurenja lifted the top swage clear, and the plate went back into the fire to heat up again. Men came forward to scrub clinker out of the groove with wire brushes.
"You could have done this bit earlier," Ziani said. "You don't need me here for this."
Daurenja swung round and looked at him as though he didn't recognise who was talking to him. "I'm sorry," he said, "but I wanted to keep the heat in the fire. Once this lot cools down…"
It was a fair point, but Ziani made no sign of acknowledging it. "How many staves?" he asked.
"Eight," Daurenja replied.
"Fine. I might go outside for some air."
But he stayed, as they swaged down all eight staves, quenched them, cleaned up and squared off the edges and laid them one at a time on the mandrel to make sure they fitted snugly on the curved face. He wasn't sure why; it was painfully noisy and unbearably hot, and there was nothing for him to do except stand still and quiet and admire the frightening intensity of Daurenja's concentration. For once, he felt no desire whatever to take part, not even to set a square or a pair of callipers on the quenched, fettled staves to test them for straightness or uniformity of thickness. He found his own reluctance disturbing, but couldn't decide why.
"As near as makes no odds," Daurenja panted in his ear; which was his way of saying that the staves fitted together perfectly around the mandrel, their long edges lying so tight that the blade of a rule wouldn't slip in between them. Ziani nodded grudgingly (was it simple jealousy, he wondered; because this was the greatest, most ambitious piece of work he'd ever seen, and all he could do was watch? A part of it, yes, but only a small one), as Daurenja ordered the staves laid flat on the ground, dropped to his knees and began smothering the edges with flux. He worked quickly but with extraordinary care, verging on tenderness, like a mother feeding her baby some pulped-up mess with her fingers. Behind him, everybody was moving; carrying water, shovelling charcoal, damping down the mandrel, the tongs, the air-pipes, brushing off and sweeping up scale, grinding flux, laying out tools in order for the next stage, while Daurenja knelt beside the components of his dream like a man at prayer. Ziani glanced at him as he looked up, and saw that he was wide-eyed and pale with fear.
He's vulnerable now, Ziani thought, for the first time ever. I could get to him now and hurt him. He thought about that, as unconsciously he counted the slow, even gasps of the bellows. A few sharp, insidious words to wreck his confidence, get him worrying; pretend to find fault or foresee a problem. He was so tense that the slightest thing would break him, like a single drop of water on the red-hot air-pipes. It was like watching a lover waiting for an answer (yes or no, like the gauges; either everything fits together or it doesn't), one man kneeling still and quiet while everything behind him was fire and movement. Two possibilities. A genuine choice.
He tried to think straight. If Daurenja failed, what would he do? It was impossible to say. Valens would want to know, would want an informed and reasoned opinion, whether it'd be worth letting him try again, or whether the project was impractical, a waste of precious time and resources. But it wasn't about rational decisions; it was whether to kill the monster now, while he was weak, his guard down, stripped of his impenetrable armour by love and desire. It's the only thing he wants, Ziani thought, so is it better to stop him having it, or let him win his beloved and hope he'll be satisfied and go away?
"Right," he heard him say, in a voice as hard and brittle as glass. "We've only got one chance. If anything goes wrong, we're screwed." He wasn't talking to anybody; he mouthed the words like the responses in a religious service, a prayer, a general confession.
Two of the staves were in the fire, buried under a glazed roof of glowing charcoal. Ziani forced himself to clear his mind. When the staves were white hot, at the precise moment when the surface but not the core of the iron was just starting to melt, they'd be hauled out of the fire and held on the mandrel side by side. In the two seconds during which the surfaces were still molten, they could be joined by firm but gentle hammering, little more than a brisk smack; and that was what Daurenja didn't know how to do.
Success or failure; yes or no.
Rather than choose, Ziani watched the fire, looking for the stray white sparks drifting lazily upwards out of the charcoal oven that would tell him the iron was approaching welding heat. Apart from the snoring of the bellows there was dead silence. They'd put the lamps out, so he could judge precisely the colour of the glowing iron. As he waited, he could feel the tension in his mind, yes or no, the gauge set on the work, and he desperately wished he knew the grounds on which he was supposed to decide.