On the Rocks

by Peter Rhodan

  Oween smiled. "Not around here mate, although I've heard there is lead and silver in the mountains to the east, supposedly. I never heard exactly where though but I was told there be a Rufanig fort there where they used to mine both metals although if there was much silver why would they stop mining?" He shrugged at this last, indicating it made no sense to him that the Rufanig would stop mining valuable metal if there was plenty left in the ground.

  "Well." Arturo said slowly. "I know where I can get some gold, would that help?"

  "Really?"

  "Well, it may take some work getting it out of where it is, but I'm sure we can manage."

  "So where is this gold?"

  Arturo pointed up the valley. "You know that next lake, it's in there."

  Oween shook his head in negation. "There is no gold in those hills!"

  "I didn't say in the hills, it's in the lake."

  Oween just shook his head sadly as if Arturo was insane and he was humouring him but refrained from any further comments. The shadows were lengthening as they reached the spot where Arturo had cached the few bits and pieces he had rescued from the wreck. Oween looked on wide-eyed at the bits of modern tech gathered there while Arturo searched for the piece of metal he had planned to use as a chisel. Stripping off his outer garments and re-donning the thermal suit he waded into the water armed with his improvised chisel and a large rock to use as a hammer and waved a hand at Oween accompanied by a casual “Stay here and get a fire going.” Throwing the words over his shoulder he could see the puzzled look on Oween's face as he left him standing on the bank.

  After a quick mental review of the shuttle design, as best he could remember, he decided to go for some of the gold plating used on the flux manifolds as a first effort and angled towards where he thought the ship’s stern was. It took him longer to find what he was looking for than he had expected and it wasn’t until his second dive that he found the right spot on the manifold. It then took four more dives pounding away with his makeshift chisel and his primitive hammer to loosen a good-sized piece of the plating. Trying to chisel underwater was a lot harder than he had anticipated and his breaks on the surface to fill his lungs grew longer and longer after each dive into the frigid, murky water. Mind you it would have been a lot colder without the thermal suit he now had on.

  Finally, he managed to free a chunk of the stuff and staggered from the water with his golden, hard earned trophy clutched in his shivering hands. It was piece of gold plating about a centimetre thick, maybe ten centimetres long and about five wide. Gold was easy enough to obtain for a space based civilization and Federation engineers didn't skimp on things when building combat shuttles. Gold had the dual qualities of not oxidising and being fairly impervious to gravitons so was ideal for jump engine components. He heaved the metal section up out of the water and Oween came bounding over to help get it ashore, his eyes lighting up.

  "My god!" he exclaimed. "You really do have gold." He was almost hopping up and down in excitement.

  "What, you did not believe me?" Arturo said in a strained voice.

  Oween stopped his excited gyrations and smiled at Arturo. "Well no. There not be any gold in these parts as I told you. But this. This is certainly real gold that it is and I didn't expect so much!"

  Arturo smiled back and didn't tell him that what he had brought up was just one section of one flux manifold. Of which there were four. Still the two on the other side would be pretty hard to get at and because of that he had no intention of throwing gold around casually. Besides he didn’t want his shuttle found by anyone. “Tell no one of this Oween otherwise there'll be a horde of people up here looking for my gold.” He instructed. “It is our secret. You understand?” Oween nodded and returned to staring at the golden metal Arturo had brought ashore then back at the lake, but whatever thoughts he had he kept to himself.

  It was now getting dark, so the two set about building up the fire, something Arturo was particularly in need of, as the numbing cold of the water was seeping into his bones. At least the weather had improved somewhat from when he first arrived! Whilst he huddled getting warm Oween rounded up yet more firewood till he was satisfied there was sufficient to see the night through whereupon he settled down alongside Arturo and they shared a couple of the ration bars.

  The next morning Arturo decided he could not face the freezing water till after the sun had risen above the hills surrounding the lake. While they waited Oween tried to calculate the value of the piece of gold plate Arturo had worked loose from the wreck. He hefted it, tried lifting various rocks by way of comparison, and finally informed Arturo that the sheet was worth maybe three hundred solidi.

  “And a solidi is what?” Arturo enquired.

  Oween gave him a quick glance but refrained for saying anything despite his obvious surprise that Arturo did not know. It would seem that Arturo’s new friend was getting used to his strange questions!

  “A solidi is a Rufanig gold coin about yay big.” He made a circular shape with his thumb and forefinger to illustrate the size roughly. “The purity varies a bit depending on which Emperor they were coined under but most of the recent ones are not too bad.”

  “Is see. And three hundred of these solidi will buy us what?”

  Oween answered glibly. “Enough to start a war, maybe.” As Arturo really had no idea as to the practical value of the metal he was not sure if his friend was serious or not. When Oween saw the considering look on Arturo’s face he rapidly waved his hands in negation. “Hang on a moment! I wasn’t serious!”

  Arturo looked at him for a moment or two then gave his new friend a smile. “It’s a fair bit though?”

  “You bet. That’s enough to pay for like forty Auxiliaries for a year. Maybe more.”

  Arturo had earlier had the term Auxilia explained as a type of foot soldier, the quality varying a good deal depending on several factors but border troops like the ones in this area were pretty second rate Oween seemed to indicate. He considered this number of men in relation to Federation military numbers. The Hood alone carried more Marines than that so he was not particularly impressed. “Not that much then.”

  Oween spluttered. “Enough to get us killed if anyone sees this.” He pointed at the gold plate.

  Arturo waved a hand to both acknowledge Oween’s point and to dismiss it as not being urgent. He was going to need a lot more currency than he would be able to salvage from the wreck he could see or at least the equivalent, such as banknotes or bonds. He tried to remember what he could of the limited historical finance information he had picked up at college. Being able to make paper suddenly became a lot more important, as did investigating the local printing industry. And banking or at least moneylenders. And the metal industry, which he supposed from what he had seen so far, would be limited to little more than blacksmiths.

  Once the sun appeared over the hills, things warmed up considerably, relatively speaking. The near clear skies made a nice change from the generally overcast and cold days he had experienced when he had first arrived. Gritting his teeth, he stripped off once more and returned to the frigid lake. The fine days and sunshine had seemingly made no difference to the temperature of the water unfortunately. He made several trips inside the ship working to get the door open to where the rations were stored. Using the knife and then the makeshift chisel, he managed to get it open enough that he could use his rod as a lever to prize it open sufficiently for him to get through. All that work left him totally exhausted so he broke off for lunch and a chance to recover and warm up a bit in the noon day sunshine.

  After he had restored his energy levels with some food and had managed to warm up his frozen limbs in the weak if warm sunshine he got himself back on his feet and resumed his salvage operations. He retrieved more ration packs and some metal utensils he found plus some plastic plates which had to be more hygienic than anything local. It was hard going and after another short rest he made one more dive and returned from the wreck with a large flake of battle armour whic
h had broken off from the outer hull as a result of hitting the mountain on the way down. He had trod on it several times during his salvage operations and hurt his foot once so decided to bring it ashore to get it our his way more than anything.

  Oween had gathered more wood and had the fire going again so the shivering Arturo stood in front of the flames to warm himself and then organised some food for the two of them. Arturo was pleased with his day’s activities. At Oween’s urging he used his makeshift chisel to chop a few flakes of gold from the large plate he had retrieved which they would be able to use as small change and then they dug a hole and buried the main piece along with a lot of the salvaged gear Arturo had brought up. They carefully noted several landmarks to use to find the spot again and then took some pains to cover the spot in a natural manner so no one would notice their excavation.

  The piece of battle armour was smaller than he had intended to come away with but was heavy enough for all that. He had thought the piece big enough that he would be able to get two katanas out of it, but on closer inspection, he realised that it was much thinner than it had seemed in the watery gloom and he wouldn’t get much more than one sword from the flake with a bit left over. Certainly not a highly worked katana like he had intended to possess himself of for use as a weapon in this primitive place. He was fortunate that one of the defects of battle armour was its tendency to flake when jarred with sufficient force, like say running into the side of a mountain. It was really designed to stand up to plasma and energy weapons rather than kinetic attacks although the flaking was in fact a deliberate structural attribute to dissipate blunt force. Instead of bending inwards and damaging the interior of the ship, the armour flaked instead. Hadn’t actually worked that well, he thought to himself remembering the mangled wreckage where Cranston was entombed.

  As he lay down for another well-earned sleep another idea occurred to him. He was pretty sure no one here could duplicate the battle armour the shuttle was clothed in as it was a product of a lot higher tech level than which seemed to be prevalent in this Rufanig Empire. Which didn’t mean that there was not some high tech enclave somewhere else on the planet of course, but that seemed unlikely given the lack of electromagnetic signals when they had been orbiting in preparation for their disastrous landing. So, besides using it to give himself and his close associates fearsome swords, he could quite possibly use the rest as additional coinage. Set some silly value like twenty times the value of gold on it and go from there. Of course he would have to persuade people of the relative value of the battle armour coins and think of a sexy name for his metal as well. The fact that the local tech would struggle to do anything to the battle armour would help it hold some arbitrary value.

  All right. One thing at a time. The wreck wasn’t going anywhere and Oween had a point about carrying valuable stuff around with them and the temptations that would create. The local state of law enforcement seemed to be who had the force did the enforcing which had both advantages as well as the obvious disadvantages. The next step was to see if he could find a good blacksmith and preferably one who was pretty flexible in his attitudes. Oween would know of one no doubt, but it could wait till morning he dreamily thought to himself.

  Chapter 6

  Civilisation, of a sort

  The blacksmith was old, well he looked old, solid with heavy shoulders and arms, wore a stained leather apron thing and smelt of old sweat and burnt stuff. His small, round smithy was crammed with odd bits of metal items, most of which Arturo had no idea the purpose of, on rough wooden shelves with a stone hearth full of coals in the centre below the opening in the roof. Next to this was a metal block used for hammering things, an old looking wooden table with lots of hammers and a large pot of something liquid that looked foul and smelt worse. He’d grunted acceptance of the simple task of heating the piece of metal Arturo had shown him, but when he tried heating the piece of battle armour but couldn't get enough heat to make the metal even change colour despite the way he was pumping his 'blower', really just a leather bag connected to a metal nozzle that was being squeezed by a wooden board hung from above it and which fed into the hearth.

  "I said it might need more than one blower." Arturo offered watching the man fail to achieve any real effect.

  The man snorted and put down his tools. "This is some devilish trickery, ain't it?" He said scowling at the two men while the sweat ran down his face from his brow. His accent was far stronger than Oween’s and Arturo had trouble following what he said.

  "No trickery blacksmith." Arturo answered calmly. "If you'd set up another blower to heat the coals more I'm sure it would become workable."

  "Aye, and then you'll be telling me I need three blowers I'm sure too." The man grumbled shaking his head. The fellow looked ancient but was probably in his late thirties or early forties given they had no gene therapy here although given the layers of sweat and grime Arturo could not be sure of exactly how old he was. Arturo had passed beyond gagging and merely wanted to hold his own nose when he stood near him as the fellow stank like he had not had a shower since he was twenty! His smithy was a mess too despite the shelves around the walls, clearly cleaning up and organisation were two items a long way down on the fellow’s list of priorities.

  Arturo decided he had seen enough of this rather poor tempered fellow to be fairly certain this was not a man he would enjoy working with. "Can you quench it please?" he asked the blacksmith. "I will pay you for your time." He offered as well not wishing to appear stingy. The man grunted and lowered the metal into the trough of the foul looking water placed next to the forge. The water bubbled and hissed momentarily from the metal's contact proving he had in fact managed to apply some heat to it and the place was filled with a new stench that was nearly as bad as the blacksmith’s aroma.

  Arturo waved at Oween. "Pay the man two bronze for his time please Oween." He said.

  The blacksmith snorted. "Two bronze!" he said loudly. "Should be payin' me double for wastin’ me time!" He may have complained loudly, but he put his calloused hand out for the proffered bronze coins just the same.

  They waited a few minutes for the metal to properly cool then left the blacksmith's work shed with the burley fellow pointedly ignoring them while he went on with one of his regular tasks.

  "Okay, where is the next blacksmith?" Arturo asked once they were out of earshot.

  "Over this way in Paddishyll." Oween said pointing to the north. Paddishyll proved to be yet another clutch of round buildings with thatch roofs like the last little village, this being the design of pretty much every building they had come across so far apart from obvious barns which were more like open sheds, only the barns were rather more poorly constructed than the houses. Like the village containing the odorous blacksmith there were no more than four or five families living in the ‘village’ although Oween assured Arturo that there were plenty more farms in the immediate area and just to the north was a fair sized estate owned by a real Rufanig gentleman. The place exuded the same mixture of smells as the previous hamlet, namely a mixture of damp rot, unwashed humanity, poorly organised cess pits overlain by the odours coming from the blacksmith.

  The blacksmith in Paddishyll turned out to be a young man of stocky build, not quite as muscular or overfed as the older man they had left earlier. He had dark hair with a hint of red in it when it caught the light, grey eyes and a ready smile. Arturo estimated the fellow to be his early twenties and thus not overly experienced. His youth was offset by his being overseen by his father who had apparently suffered a serious injury some years before with his left arm and leg being severely mangled. According to Oween he still helped his son with advice but could offer only limited physical help, mostly with the fine type of work that required more skill and less brute force, which was also happened to be the work that took up the most time even though it made the most money. As with the previous blacksmith the man’s work space was a simple round building, much the same size as the houses but with a wooden framed tiled roof,
presumably thatch was too much of fire hazard for smithies as the previous had been of similar construction. The smithy was positioned next to and slightly in front of the actual family house from which a trail of smoke rose indicating the hearth of the house was in use.

  Ceri Dylfon stopped the hammering he was engaged in when they entered and from the pleasant welcome appeared to know Oween, if only distantly. Or possibly he knew of Oween's reputation given the way he glanced over at his father who nodded slightly in reply. After being presented to Arturo he looked at the strange metal carefully and tapped it few times with various tools before handing it over to his father for that worthy to have a look at. The older man likewise tapped it a few times with a variety of tools before glancing over at the patiently waiting Arturo.

  "Ain't never met metal that looked or felt like that." He said flatly.

  Arturo smiled. "It comes from very far away. You will almost certainly need two blowers to get it hot enough to work on."

  The young blacksmith looked at him keenly for a few moments then turned to his father.

  "What do you think, da?" he asked.

  The older man was resting the metal on his thighs and feeling it with the fingers of his left hand. His right arm ended in a metal shape from which a sort of clamp like thing protruded. The sight of it prodded something in Arturo's memory but no clear image came into his mind. The man took the metal in this clamp, balancing it against his leg while he tightened it with his other hand then held it on the big metal block of the forge and gave it a good bang with a hammer. He looked at Arturo again before speaking to his son. "We could set up the old bellows on this side." He said indicating the side of the forge closest to him and opposite to where the burly third person who was presumably the journeyman Oween had mentioned during their approach, stood by the large leather bellows they used normally to get the hearth hot. This individual was larger than the blacksmith, with well-muscled arms and stocky legs and looked young enough that despite his current size he possibly still had some to growing to do.