Aedan could see from where he was that a mild crook in the wood had been completely removed. The string would now track down the middle.
Torval then repeated the heat-bending process, this time giving the bow a gentle recurve, pointing the ends of the limbs away from the archer.
“Much better recoil,” Wildemar explained.
Tension in the room grew as the sun passed its zenith and began the downward journey. Lively chatter became loud and Wildemar was compelled to hush the apprentices several times.
But now the other bowyers in the room had got wind of the bet and seemed to have arranged some bets of their own. One by one, they gathered around, ringing the old man as he settled at his bench to carve notches at the tips of the limbs.
“Need to make a natural tillering stick,” he mumbled to Wildemar, and stepped through the wall of onlookers to a pile of timber where he rummaged around and withdrew a stout, forked branch. He brought it back and nailed it vertically into his workbench, then used the knife and rock to chip half-a-dozen grooves across the branch, starting about six inches below the fork and going down about two and half feet. Wildemar, after conferring with Torval, explained to the class that the bowyer had set up the branch to mimic a standing sapling or a stick wedged into the ground.
Torval placed the bow’s handle in the fork, pulled the string down a few times, and hooked it into the first groove.
Aedan cringed with horror.
The curvature of the bow was so uneven that the whole thing was lopsided. It looked ridiculous. He heard sniggers from behind. Words drifted out – pathetic, crooked, can’t shoot that, not a real bow …
Using a piece of charcoal, Torval marked the rigid sections of both limbs, took the bow down and began thinning the belly in those areas with his same branch-and-handle drawknife. The next time he set the bow on the tillering stick it looked much better. Aedan released his breath.
After several stages of this, the bow was bending evenly and smoothly, but the wood itself was far from smooth. With a rough sandstone rock, he began to file the jagged sections until there were no protruding splinters.
He motioned to Wildemar who leaned in, and after a few hushed words, the master relayed the information.
“Better results if you make a paste of blackberries or some other dye. White wood can be conspicuous for hunting. Fur twisted into the string will help silence it too, reduce the chance of your quarry flinching before the arrow covers the distance.”
Aedan wished they would spend less time on these useful tips and just get on with it. The afternoon rays were slanting ominously when Torval started on the arrow, beginning with a slightly bent stick which he straightened over the fire. He bound a sharp stone to the tip and glued it in place using heated pine resin mixed with a little charcoal dust. Wildemar mentioned a few other simple glues that could be made from various saps or pounded from bulbs.
Torval sliced a nock in the back end of the arrow and faint grooves a little forward. Into these grooves he fixed three trimmed feathers using more pine resin and a fine thread from the original string fibres. It was surprising just how neat and precise the great sausage fingers could be.
His face was intent as he mumbled again, pointing and motioning with his hands. Wildemar turned and explained that the feathers selected were from the same side of the bird, producing arrow rotation.
Aedan blew out his breath noisily and stamped. This time-wasting obsession with trifling details was pushing him, and all those who had betted with him, to exasperation. They glanced constantly out the window. The sun appeared to have lost its grip in the sky and begun plummeting to earth. Aedan had never seen it drop this fast.
“Wait till you make your own arrows,” Wildemar said with a feral grin. “Bet or no bet, shoddy fletching – you may as well forget the bow and throw a stick.”
By this stage there was not a craftsman to be found at his bench. The entire workshop had gathered around, those at the back standing on chairs. The atmosphere was like the boiling hubbub preceding a fight or race. It seemed everyone was in on the wager.
Torval was squinting and fiddling with some little thread behind the feathers. He frowned, obviously dissatisfied. Then he pulled the thread off, tossed it away and began afresh with another. Aedan dropped his head in his hands. There were several exclamations of dismay, not all of them from the boys.
The crimson sun fell lower and lower. They could actually see it move as it began to fall behind the roofs outside, but Torval was lost in his world, apparently unaware of any need for haste as he carefully rewound the thread.
Then he tied it off, nodded, and placed the arrow on the bench.
Aedan looked up with a start. It was done! The last gleam of red was fading from the wall.
He turned to Malik and pushed out his chin.
“That was the easy part, you fool,” Malik said with a tone that was almost sympathetic. “It has to shoot. It breaks, you lose.”
All talk was shushed as the bowyer looked up at Peashot and nodded. Peashot stepped forward, taking the bow.
The bowyer’s attention was complete, his eyes young and eager. Aedan dreaded another snap, dreaded what it would do to the big man. He dreaded it even more than the difficulty he himself would face.
Malik and Cayde moved to the front. They would want to see if anything cracked or failed.
Aedan was breathing fast. Hope and fear wrestled in him as Peashot walked to his position and the arc of spectators gathered around. Aedan was near the front, and he saw with alarm that there was a slight hairline crack in the handle. Wildemar had said that forced drying could have that result. All he could do was hope.
Everyone held their breaths as Peashot lined up. He placed his feet, rested the arrow in the shelf, nocked it, and gripped the string. He took a deep breath, raised the bow, drew back, leaned into the handle … and hesitated.
Aedan wanted to scream for him to release. The wood creaked under the strain as the little boy steadied his aim. Every eye was wide, every mouth open.
Peashot’s arm grew still. Then a noise split the breathless tension in the room as he released the string and it snapped away from his fingers.
The arrow hissed through the air, flew straight, and thudded into the target.
The room erupted in wild shouts and cheers. Torval smiled a shy smile while his fellow craftsmen gathered around, clasped his arm and thumped him on the back. Coins began to slide from hands and clinked into others.
Torval refused to accept the bow when Peashot tried to hand it over. “It was made for you,” he said, handing it back along with the borrowed knife.
The small boy’s confusion was all too obvious as he stuttered, “But – I – but …”
Aedan knew what the trouble was, understood the torment. He watched. When the attention shifted elsewhere, Peashot sidled around the back of Torval’s workbench. With a movement so slight, so well covered as to be almost invisible, he slipped a fletching clamp from his pocket and placed it where it had been before the lunch break.
Aedan chuckled.
Peashot caught the look and scowled in return.
Before leaving, Wildemar thanked Torval for sharing his remarkable knowledge with the apprentices. The old bowyer studied his shoes, grimaced through the speech directed at him, and merely nodded when it was done.
“Wish we could have given him more than that,” Aedan said to Peashot as Wildemar finished off and led the way out. They looked back and watched Torval cleaning his bench and replacing his tools with infinite care. The other craftsmen had left the building and he was alone again.
Peashot stopped, and then ran back inside. He drew up in front of the workbench where he placed his knife and sheath, nodded to the bowyer, and returned to the departing group.
The last sight they had was of the silent man smiling as he held the little knife in front of him. Words of appreciation were not close to his heart, but this was something he did understand.
–––
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Malik paid all his debts but one. He and Cayde insisted that Aedan had pulled out of the wager. Of course the boot-lickers had witnessed it too.
Hadley was even angrier than Aedan. If it had not been for Dun’s looming presence, there would have been a fight to rattle the walls and make the previous one look like a polite discussion. Peashot let his tongue loose within Matron Rosalie’s field of surveillance and found himself on kitchen duty that evening. That same evening, Malik found himself eating a decomposed toad buried in his stew. Peashot was given a whipping from Dun and hero’s welcome from the dorm.
Over the next five days, the boys worked with the assistance of several bowyers to imitate the demonstration they had been given, first with tools, and then with only their knives. They came to a full appreciation of Torval’s skill and discovered just how many ways there were to ruin and break a sturdy piece of wood.
After they had each produced something resembling a bow, Wildemar set them loose in the forests. Not everyone had paid attention to the wood-selection process. As a result, some fine-looking bows were produced using soft, un-springy woods, from which eager arrows dribbled only a little further than a boy could spit.
Some tried to bypass the drying and tillering processes, scoffing at the talk of hand-shock. Aedan was one such. His first bow was made of such a thin branch that it would have endangered nothing more than a mouse at close range, so for his next attempt he used a much thicker branch. The first shot almost gave him concussion. The bow, still heavy with sap, delivered bone-rattling jolts, contributing nothing to accuracy and much to headaches. Annoyed, he tracked Kian down in a woody valley and got some help starting over.
Most of the early results were less than spectacular, but enough, perhaps, to maim very small, short-sighted and deaf antelope from a few paces downwind – ideally, not much wind. But over the weeks, the bows improved, and some, like Kian’s and Peashot’s, were weapons to be respected.
Wildemar revised the string-making technique that Torval had demonstrated, and introduced them to other natural fibres like flax and nettles. He then went onto rawhide and gut strings which required less labour but more drying time. Sinew strings were the most difficult to make. Tendons had to be dried and pounded until they separated into fibres which would be twisted together. One of the useful advantages with sinew was the way it could be soaked into strands that dried with their own natural glue.
The different kinds of strings – which could be combined to form rope – were useful for more than bows, so the apprentices spent several classes learning the techniques.
As the range and power of survival bows did not always stand up to larger prey, Wildemar demonstrated how to make many poisons – poisons which were sometimes used in war. He led the boys through the riverbeds, plains and forests where he ferreted about, saying nothing and noticing everything until he had found what he was after. He started with a large tree known as the quarter-mile tree – anything poisoned with its sap would collapse within a quarter mile – to the larvae of a spotty beetle that looked much like a toadstool on legs. When extracting and applying the poisons, Wildemar was very clear about never letting them onto the tips or edges of the arrow, for fear of the hunter scratching himself.
“Very dangerous. Very very dangerous,” he chattered. “No antidote for any of these poisons except for the hermit rose. Some of them are slow though. Can take five days to drop your prey. The beetle larvae is the slowest, so only use it if you can’t find anything else. It will give you many days hard tracking before you catch your meal.”
“Won’t the meat be poisoning of you?” Kian asked.
“No, no, not from eating. These poisons don’t kill when swallowed. All the same, cut out the area where the arrow struck. Burn the meat. Might have broken skin on your lips or in your mouth. Not worth the chance. Dead marshals are no good.”
After two months of this, Dun, with Wildemar fidgeting nearby, gathered the boys and banished them from the city for a week, allowing them no equipment but their knives. They had to prepare sensible, concealed shelters, make weapons, hunt, and feed themselves. Wildemar would find them and assess the survival skills. Dun would meet them on their return and assess the weapons.
Some of the boys grumbled and looked like they were about to protest.
Dun told them that the following year they would not be allowed knives, and that the next person who muttered would not be allowed clothes.
Aedan took to the hills like a gazelle set loose. He had a rough idea of where the others might go, and chose a different direction, setting a course where even Wildemar would struggle to find him. He laid a false trail up a dry rocky riverbed and then doubled back through a section of dense woodland, climbing from tree to tree. When he finally dropped to the ground there wasn’t a footprint within half a mile. He scouted a little further and found an overhang that could be inconspicuously protected by bending and not breaking a branch from a nearby tree, so the leaves would not dry out and draw attention.
The plan worked better than he had expected. He placed a few snares with string twisted from nettles, and after eight or nine days he began to feel bloated with rabbit and quite lonely. Eventually he abandoned the exercise and wandered back to the city where Wildemar was only too happy to see him alive and gave him full marks for survival skills. It was a good thing because Dun drove a splinter deep into his hand while examining Aedan’s crooked bow, a rough specimen that had been heated and bent so many times it looked like an overdone steak. Shot like one too.
It was disappointing. Aedan had held such bright hopes for the bow, cutting it from an oak branch swaying high in the air, and almost falling to his death in the process.
Dun frowned. “Did you manage to kill anything with this?” he asked.
“Almost,” said Aedan, grinning slightly.
“There’s a room we need to explore.”
Spoons lowered and five sets of eyes looked across at Aedan – the usual four and Kian’s.
Over the past few weeks Aedan had been feeling as he had so often done back in the north, that it was time for his friends to share an adventure. He was still convinced that adventures were the only real forges of true friendship.
“What is it? Where is it?” asked Hadley.
“Will it get us in trouble?” Lorrimer whispered.
“It’s down a corridor I discovered last night. There’s another level under the training hall. The stairways are always locked but there’s a collapsed section of the floor that hasn’t been repaired and you can climb down –”
“Don’t you sleep at night?” Vayle interrupted.
“Sometimes I get the adventuring fidgets at night, and it’s been too hot to sleep lately. It’s nice and cool down below. Anyway, as I was saying, there’s this huge black door made of some kind of metal that looks so heavy I would have to use all my weight to open it a crack. Whatever is in there is going to be worth seeing. And, yes, of course it will get us in trouble – if we are stupid enough to get caught. Wouldn’t be worth exploring otherwise.”
“I’m out,” said Lorrimer.
“In,” said Hadley and Peashot.
Vayle and Kian looked at each other, unsure.
“How will we get in?” Vayle asked.
“Well, I know the door has to be opened sometimes ’cos I saw the scrape grooves on the floor had bits of grindings in them. Maybe they use it during the day when we are busy. But I know the cleaners work at night. They never lock themselves into a room when they are busy. If we can find the night when they are there I’m sure we’ll be able to get a good look. Just need to keep quiet. They don’t notice things very well.”
“If they let cleaners in there, it can’t be that much of a secret.”
“The cleaners I’ve seen on the lower sections are different. I think they are more like curators or inspectors – don’t know if they actually do any cleaning. I’m sure they know the biggest secrets out of everyone.”
“If you are sure that
it’s open, I’ll go,” said Vayle, “but I’m not dragging myself all the way and risking a misbehaviour charge for a locked door.”
“Fine. I’ll check it tomorrow,” said Aedan.
The following night they were all waiting up for him when he returned to the room.
“Locked,” he said, throwing down a coil of rope and falling into bed.
The same thing happened the next night, and the next. Eventually the others stopped waiting up, which made the shock all the more when Aedan burst into the room, puffing.
“It’s open!” he called through the darkness in a hoarse whisper, “and it doesn’t look like there’s anyone there!”
There were a series of yawns and confused questions from various points, and then some very strange words from a sleep-talking Lorrimer who began to spill a few dreaming thoughts over the edge of his slumber – something about third helpings of byoodifil schoew.
“Do you think we should wake him?” Peashot asked.
“He’ll say no,” Vayle reminded them.
“Better than having him complain that we left him out,” said Aedan, shaking Lorrimer from his gourmet dreams and getting ready to deliver a customised version of his usual pre-adventure speech.
“Wha – were – haa – who?”
“Lorrimer. Wake up. The secret room’s open. We’re going. Vayle is off to fetch Kian. If you don’t come you’ll spend the rest of your life regretting it and wondering about what you might have found, and it will drive you crazy and make you wish you hadn’t been such a coward, and all the girls who hear that you –”
“Alright! Alright! Just let me find my boots.”
Dawn of Wonder (The Wakening Book 1) Page 34