Joseph sniffed and sighed, but showed no other sign of impatience with my brother's curiosity. "In two ways, which are really only one. First, it is but one rod, folded almost double and clamped into place along the outer edges of the pre-shaped blade core so that it follows the taper of the blade. Bear in mind what I said earlier—the drawing you are looking at is a section of the blade, through the thickest part of it. The edger is a long rod, at least twice the length of the others, and in the case of this sword we are contemplating, it will be very long indeed, requiring much time to make.
'The second difference is that it will be hardened with the paste treatment, then worked, or forged, for a longer time than the three central rods, since it has to be the strongest, keenest part of the blade. Hence the shading— that indicates the importance of the piece. When it has been added, and welded to the core, and if the smith has done everything with absolute correctness, then nothing remains but long, hard hours and days and weeks of chiselling and final shaping, and filing and polishing, followed by the process of pouring and finishing the hilt. And talking of pouring and finishing, my hot wine is cold and unfinished. Cay, have you more of it?"
"Aye, on the hob there." I paused. "What was that?"
The others stiffened, listening, but there was nothing. Joseph looked at me, frowning.
"What did you hear?"
"I don't know, but ... " As I spoke, I recognized what I had heard. "The wind has died down. It was the sudden silence that I heard."
Ambrose got up and crossed to the door, opening it and leaning out. Through the open doorway I could see that it was already approaching dusk. He straightened up and closed the door again.
"You're right. The rain has stopped, too. Are we going to eat tonight?"
Joseph barked a laugh. "Aye, but not for another hour or two, at least. It's early yet. That's not the real night you can see out there. The storm clouds have simply eaten the sun. Dinner's nowhere near being ready. I came through the kitchens on my way here. The fires were not even alight yet."
Dinner, a communal affair, was always served in the common mess hall in one of the refurbished barracks blocks just after full darkness had fallen, although that would change as high summer approached. Suddenly, however, the mention of dinner made me realize that I was hungry, and I remembered that I had not eaten since breakfast.
I reached for the jug of wine on the hob by the brazier, pleased with what we had achieved and knowing we had time to finish off the honeyed wine at our leisure. The others accepted a cupful each, and thereafter we sat talking quietly for a spell, replenishing our cups from time to time, enjoying the heat from the fire and the equally welcome heat from the warmed wine. Eventually our conversation died away completely, so that for a long time the only sound in the room was the guttering of the flames in the brazier accompanied by the occasional soft crunching of settling coals, and I found myself dozing contentedly in my chair. Suddenly Ambrose startled me wide awake again by jerking himself to attention, listening.
"What was that?"
"What? I heard nothing."
He glanced at me, then tilted his head backward. "Listen."
We listened, not knowing for what, and then the door shuddered in its frame in concert with the shutters on the windows.
"Damnation!" Joseph rose to his feet and crossed to the door, opening it to look outside, where it was now full night. Two hours at least must have elapsed, I realized, while we sat at our ease before the fire. As the thought occurred to me, the door was torn from Joseph's hand and blown back to slam against the outside wall and a gust of bitterly cold wind whirled into the room, fluttering one unweighted corner of the parchment on the table, extinguishing several candles and making the brazier flare up in a shower of sparks. Joseph leaped outside and in again, pulling the door with him and fastening it securely, after which he turned to look at us in disgust, wiping his hands on his tunic. His hair was tousled and his tunic splattered with heavy raindrops.
"So much for the passing of the storm," he said. "It was regrouping, not retreating."
I saw the woman Tressa at dinner that night and, as had been the case in every instance since I first saw her, once I had noticed her I remained disconcertingly aware of her presence.
Because of the foulness of the weather, there were no absentees from the dining hall on that occasion and the building was crowded, with every table occupied and a mass of children far more noisily in evidence than was normal. I remarked on that to Shelagh when I first arrived with Joseph and Ambrose, and she said it was because the weather had forced the children to remain indoors, depriving them of the opportunity to wear themselves out in their normal fashion and thereby keeping them awake and boisterous when they would normally be ready for their beds.
Ambrose went immediately to sit with Ludmilla and Donuil and Shelagh, where a place had been reserved for him beside his wife and between her and Arthur, Bedwyr, Gwin and young Ghilleadh. I moved with Joseph to sit with Lucanus, Rufio, Dedalus and Mark at a nearby table that was free of children.
Lucanus was in fine fettle that night, and he soon became embroiled in a debate with Dedalus, concerning the relative merits of work horses as opposed to cavalry mounts, that kept all of us vastly entertained. Lucanus, while admiring all living creatures thanks to his calling, had no great love of riding horses, and the discussion was lively and good-naturedly acrimonious, so that eventually others began to drift towards our table, attracted by the hilarity. Soon there was no room for anyone else to sit. Even so, Ambrose arrived after a time and sat himself down beside me, encouraging me with a thrust of his hip to squeeze up closer to Joseph, sitting on my left, and make room for him.
It was at that moment, as I laughingly complained about my brother's rude insistence, that I once again noticed Tressa, bringing a basket of fresh bread loaves to our table. From that moment on I barely paid attention to what was being said around me. My eyes followed her as she moved here and there about the hall fetching and carrying and making sure that supplies of food were replenished as they dwindled. She was not working as a servant, here. It had become traditional for the women to take it in turns to serve the food at night, and those who were sitting to dine tonight, Shelagh included, would serve at other times.
A particularly loud burst of raucous laughter from my companions recalled me, and I looked around to find everyone's eyes on me. My instantaneous reaction was to flush, thinking they had been watching me watching Tressa, but it quickly became apparent that they were all waiting for me to respond to something that had been said while I was distracted.
"Forgive me," I said, shaking my head as if to clear it. "I was somewhere else. Did someone ask me something?"
"Aye," Dedalus said, his big face creased in a huge grin. "I asked you what you're going to ride when that big black horse of yours breaks down, finally, beneath the weight of you." This brought another loud burst of laughter, and I realized that I had truly lost track of their discussion, for I had no idea what they all found so amusing. I took refuge in bluster.
"If you're speaking of Germanicus, Master Dedalus, I'll have you show him more respect. He has borne my weight now for more than a decade without the slightest sign of growing tired."
"Oh, no doubt, no doubt at all, but it's not your mount's redoubtable strength we're talking about here, Master Cay, it's the growing weight of you!"
"What are you saying?" I looked down at my midriff, searching for signs of growing girth that might have escaped me. "Are you saying I am growing fat?"
More hilarity greeted this, and Lucanus leaned forward to look at me from his end of the table. "No, Cay, Ded is but making fun of you, since it's obvious you have not been listening. We were talking about how the armour of our troopers has proliferated since we first began to ride as cavalry. Their armour, and hence their overall weight, has been increasing steadily, while our horses seem to have reached the limit of their growth in recent years. That's when Ded made a remark that you, with your size and the weight of your chain-armour shirt and leggings beneath your cuirass and your greaves, plus all your saddlery and weapons, must one day kill your horse."