"It's true," Joseph protested. "One of the oldest secrets of the ancient smiths. A paste made of these ingredients, and coated on the iron during heating and forging, hardens the iron." From the expression on his face, Ambrose was still plainly unconvinced and Joseph went on, laughing now, "I wouldn't lie to you in this, Master Ambrose. If you think of that lump there as being made of a hundred equal parts, then forty of those parts will be pigeon shit, twenty- one of them plain, wheaten flour, fourteen of them honey, twenty-three parts milk, and two parts olive oil. That, you'll see if you count them, makes a hundred, and if you think I came up with that out of my head, you give me too much credit. Now these—" He broke off, his hand outstretched towards the thin iron rods, and turned to me again. "May we look again at Excalibur? It will be easier to explain my point if I have it here, to show you what I mean."
I brought out the great sword and handed it to him, and he held it extended in front of him, gripping the hilt in both of his square, strong, smith's hands, his lips pursed in a low whistle of wonder.
"Even now, I can't believe this tiling exists. Look at the size of it! Unblemished, absolutely flawless. Until I set eyes on this, I would never have believed such a weapon could be made, let alone made so well. God's bones, I
know men who are not as tall as this is long from tip to tip, and so do you! No man, nor no armour in the world, could withstand such a blade." He raised it, straight- armed, until it reared above him to touch the low, vaulted roof above his head, and then he lowered it again swiftly, bringing the cross-hilt close to his face and pointing to the greatest width of the blade as he addressed himself again to Ambrose.
"Look you here, now, at this portion, the thickest and the strongest section. It is, what? three and a half, four fingers wide? Now look here, where the twin blood channels begin, and note the depth to which they sink. Note, too, the patterns in the metal. You see them?"
"Aye, the wavy lines. What causes those?"
'The forging of the sword. Now look here at the parchment and learn a little of the weapon-maker's craft. These marks that mystified you are easily explained." He indicated the strange, stylized markings that had puzzled us.
"If you count, you'll see the entire process of making a sword blade, right there, in ten descending steps. It's an oversimplification, of course, and it gives no indication of the amount of work involved, but to a smith's eye, it's absolutely simple and straightforward. The trick is to realize that you're looking at the thickest part of the blade, the piece I just pointed out to you, just beneath the cross-hilt. Look at the bottom one first. If you were mad enough to saw through the blade at that point, just beneath the cross- guard, and look directly at the sawed-off stump of it, that's what you would see. Then, moving back up to the top one step at a time, you see a reversal of the smithing process, all the way back to the seventeen narrow rods of plain, wrought iron that you started with. Can you see it? Cay, can you?"
I nodded, for what he had described was the missing step between reading Uncle Varrus's observations and notations and seeing them put into effect in very simple terms. Ambrose, however, had never met or known Publius Varrus and had probably never set foot inside a forge. He was staring in perplexity at the drawing. Joseph watched him.
"You have a question, Master Ambrose. Ask away."
"The three large black dots, marked as 'twisted and forged.' What does that mean? I can see the seventeen rods on the first line becoming the flattened and squared pieces on the second, but where did the three come from?"
"Here, here and here," Joseph answered, tapping a finger on the second line. "See, there are three sets of five black rods divided from each other by two whites. Each of those sets of five black rods—three flat in the middle and one square on each flat side—is twisted and forged into a single spiralled rod. We coat each strip of them in the bird dung mixture, bind them together with wire, fire them up, weld one end, just to hold them together, and then clamp that end in a vice. Then, using tongs, we twist the other ends into a spiral. It's tricky, and it takes a long time and many heatings of the metal, because it can only be done when the iron's yellow-hot and soft, and it loses its heat quickly—but in the end, provided you don't do anything stupid, you end up, in each instance, with a single, tightly wound, spiralled rod of layered iron. That's where those markings along the edges of the blade and in the blood channel come from."
He reached over and pulled several pieces of parchment towards him, layering them carefully, one atop the other, so that the deckled edges showed as a succession of tiny steps. "See that, the pretty way the edges flow together? Same thing happens with the iron. You twist five flat straps of metal into a spiral, and you end up with a rod that has twenty grooves running its length—four edges for each strap, you see? Then you heat the whole thing up again and pound it with a smith's hand maul until it's flat again, and you see those markings in the iron, where the edges have been hammer-fused so flat that all they leave are line markings."
"But why go to so much trouble, Joseph? Why not just work with one thick piece of iron in the first place? And why the pigeon dung? I don't follow any of that."
I crossed my arms and leaned my buttocks comfortably against the table as I heard the incomprehension in my brother's voice. I had no urge to interrupt, even though I could have answered his first question, at least. In response, Joseph picked up one of the thin, round rods and casually bent it into a circle shape with his hands, then handed it to Ambrose.
"Wrought iron is too damn soft, in its natural state. Don't ask me why, or why it changes character when you layer it and forge it in multiple strips, because I can't tell you. But I can tell you that if you try to twist a single piece of iron into a spiral, sooner or later it will break, and usually sooner than later. So we layer the strips and twist them, and they reinforce each other. As we do that, even before we do it, we coat the individual strips with the heating mixture. I only know it works, and smiths have been using it for hundreds of years because the simple truth is that a spiral rod made that way is harder, and tougher, than an identical rod made the same way, without the mixture.
"Adding the mixture demands an additional degree of care in the heating process. We can't simply coat the rods and thrust them into the coals—the paste would simply burn away. So we smear on the paste, pack the bundles in it, wrap them in cloth and tic them with string. Then we pack the whole thing again, this time in sand, in what we call a gutter trough. That done, we heat the package in a wood fire to orange-red heat for a couple of hours, and then allow everything to cool. Take my word for it, those rods, when the time comes to twist them, are much harder to manipulate than the untreated rods.
"Now, if you look again at the second line, there, you'll see that only two of the sets of rods—the outer sets—are marked for heat treatment. That's because they're the two that need to be hardest. The central piece won't need to do the work of the two outside rods. Its prime function is simply to support the others. The three rods, though, in their upper extensions—about a handspan in each case—will not be welded together. They will form the triple tang on which we'll build the hilt and cross-guard. So, there you have it. The secrets of a sword-maker."
"Not all of them." Ambrose was still frowning. "How is the welding done?"
"By heating and forging. We heat the metal to a yellow heat and beat it. In the beating, the components are welded together perfectly."
"Hmm. I didn't know that. There are two more bars here, of a different shading, marked as cutting edges. How do they differ from the black rods?"