Joseph's father had been known as Equus, the Roman name for a horse, because of his great size and strength; his three were all big men, but they lacked the sheer massiveness that had earned Equus his name. Lars, the eldest, having no wish to spend his life as a smith, had run away from his home in Colchester as a boy to enlist in the legions, and had not been heard of again for more than a score of years until I found him, by sheer accident, running a road house for travellers on the way to Isca, while I was pursuing my cousin Uther, several years earlier. He had journeyed to Camulod at my urging, and there had been reunited with his surviving brothers, Joseph and Carol, who had become the Colony's senior smiths.
Joseph, I remembered from my boyhood, had once had black, thick-curling hair. Although he was now completely white-headed, his hair remained a thick, healthy-looking mane, and it occurred to me now, for the first time, that he was vain about it, keeping it clean and quite long, in a fashion I had seen in no other smith. Publius Varrus, my beloved uncle, had always worn both hair and beard close- cropped, and I remembered him telling me that long hair is a hazard in a spark-filled smithy. By some miracle, Joseph had managed to retain most of his teeth, at an age when his contemporaries were all toothless, and his skin was dark, almost swarthy, so that in the summer sun he quickly turned a deep, dark brown against which his pale blue Celtic eyes stood out startlingly bright. He was, I realized for the first time, a fine-looking man, with a narrow, intelligent face and a finely chiselled nose with a distinct Romanness to it, despite his Celtic blood. As he stood there, gazing into the fire and oblivious to my inspection, I ran my eyes down from his head to his feet, noting the square, solid strength of him and seeing how the hardship of his craft had kept the signs of his advancing age to a minimum. His forearms were corded with muscle, the lines of them thrown into tension by the way he was holding his cup, and I knew that his upper arms and shoulders held the same, clean-cut definition.
Joseph wore only a plain, dark-grey, knee-length tunic of heavy, coarse wool devoid of decorations, a functional garment, tightly belted at the waist, designed and intended to disguise the ravages of working among smoke and charcoal all day, every day. On his feet and legs he wore heavy leather boots of the kind that our foot soldiers wore, thickly soled with several layers of cured and toughened bullhide then studded with heavy metal hobnails made in his own forge; the upper portions were bound and sandalled up to just below his knees, and beneath them he wore heavy stockings of the same thick, dark-grey wool, their tops turned down to cover the boot tops.
At that point, he became aware that I was watching him and turned to look at me, one eyebrow raised in curiosity, but at precisely the same moment Ambrose straightened up from his first scrutiny of the drawings and called to me to come and look at them.
They were very fine, although some of them were scarcely comprehensible to me, and I found myself surprised at the precision of Joseph's penmanship.
"These are excellent, Joseph, but why are there two sets?"
He grunted and sniffed, then put down his cup before answering. "For comparison. We'll use but one of them, the plain set. The other, showing Excalibur as it is, we'll burn as soon as we are all satisfied the main one is correct." He left the fire and crossed to where we stood, holding his cup in one hand while he pointed out details of the drawings with the other. As he stood close by my side I detected the odour of the smithy on his clothes, a nostalgic mixture of forge smoke and something I could only think of as "the iron smell" that transported me immediately to my boyhood. Joseph spoke with the authority of the craftsman as his hand moved swiftly across the drawings. "Here you have Excalibur as it is, and I swear, by all the gods, I've never seen a thing so wondrous fine. I knew it had been made, by Publius Varrus and my father, but the making of it was all I had heard of. My father spoke of it with pride, but now I know he also spoke with great reserve, because he never mentioned the beauty of the thing, or its · greatness, or the size or colour of it. I knew it was longer than a short-sword, but I thought of it in those days as something resembling a spatha, but finer, with a blade an arm's length long. Nothing, no imaginings of mine, could have prepared me for the actual sight of it—the sheer size and splendour of the thing. I mean, from what my father did say from time to time, I knew this wondrous sword had no blemishes, but I could never have imagined what he truly meant by calling it flawless. Its beauty is unnatural ... " He paused, shaking his head again in amazement.
"Anyway, here are the dimensions of the thing, this list along the edge, as exactly as I could measure them. The angle of the taper, two ways, length and thickness. The length of the tang—it has a triple tang, did you know that?" He checked himself, glancing at me. "Of course you did— it was you who showed me how and why. Anyway, as you know, one piece of that tang, the central strip, looks like a normal tang, but the other two are bent at right angles, to form the bracing—skeleton might be a better word—for the poured cross-hilt, here. Then there is the length and the thickness of the cross-hilt itself, the length and diameter of the hilt, the size of the pommel, and of course, in the case of Excalibur itself, the binding and securing of the covering on the hilt—silver and gold wire intertwined above this blackish, rough material that I guess to be some kind of leather." He stopped speaking and moved around the table to where he could face both of us.
'That brings me to the reason for making two sets of drawings. I could have used Excalibur itself to highlight the differences in the two, but in the preparation for this meeting, I chose to make two sets of drawings, so we will be comparing like to like. Look here."
His index finger swooped to touch on the drawing of the ornately carved and decorated bar of Excalibur's cross- hilt. "This workmanship is superb. Unique and pure Celtic. Loops and twining branches, thorns and leaves, with every detail perfect. Whoever did this was a master. But I see no need to have anything resembling that on the new sword. A plain crossbar is all we need for that one—a functional guard against accidental dismemberment, as I remember you described it, Ambrose. Plain, simple, straight bar of metal—fundamentally an abnormal, lateral extension of the standard boss with no adornments at all, that's what's called for here.
"Same thing with the hilt and the pommel. We'll pour the whole thing, of course, so the pommel will be poured as part of the mould and it won't look anything like the cockleshell on the real one. But there's a problem there, perhaps minor, although it could be major. Either of you have any idea what I'm talking about?"
I glanced at Ambrose, and both of us shook our heads. "What is it?" I asked.
"Weight, and perhaps balance, since the one affects the other. Weight is the one that concerns me. We've weighed the sword, as it is, but I've no idea of the individual weights of the various elements—the blade itself, minus the hilt, for example—but most particularly the weight of the cross- hilt. That is a big, heavy cross bar, functional and solid, built to be a strong protector against other blades, but the decorations on it there are deeply graven, almost as if they were incised, although we know that's not so and they were simply poured into the shaped mould. There's a profusion of them, and it doesn't take a sorcerer's eye to see that. Not an unused thumb pad's width on the whole thing, front and back. Replacing that with a plain bar of iron's going to throw the weight right off, because all those deep grouts between the upraised figures will now be filled with solid metal."