The Invention of Fire

by Holsinger, Bruce

  In the narrowing of the armorer’s eyes Stephen saw the first glimmer of discernment. “Fewer arrows.”

  “Correct,” said Stephen. “More men, yet fewer arrows in the air. To get the same number of arrows presently shot from fifty bows by fifty men, your company of archers would have to be doubled in size. More men, more mouths to feed, more horses, more supplies—”

  “Yet less death,” the armorer mused, bringing a hand to his mouth. Snell’s words raised a chill on Stephen’s arms. “Go on, Marsh.”

  “Now, Master Snell, consider these handgonnes of yours redesigned in such a way so as to mimic the self-sufficiency of the longbow and the arrow, or the crossbow and the bolt. Rather than seeing a company paired along the line, two at each weapon, you would have in battle a solid wall of gunmen, each capable of loading, aiming, and firing his own gun, from beginning to end. We remove the need for a companion to touch the flame to the powder. Give the gunman himself that capability, and thus the power to hold, aim, and fire all on his own.”

  “And your snaky device here promises this innovation?”

  “It does.”

  Snell’s eyes narrowed. “I shall be quite impressed if this proves true.”

  Marsh bowed slightly. “There is more.”

  “Yes?”

  “This design promises two increases in efficiency, the first of personnel, the second—and perhaps the more important—of portability.”

  “Explain.”

  “It is one of the great barriers to efficiency presented by these weapons. In order to fire the powder, you must have a ready source of flame. As I have observed in the case of the Tower’s guns, a coal or stick is placed in the fire, then lifted and held to the pan. Anyone who wishes to deploy a gun in battle must be positioned next to a fire pit, and must fight from a stationary position.”

  “Yes, the evidence of warfare bears this out,” Snell mused. “The guns deployed at Aljubarrota last year could only be fired in place. Their use on the battlefield was quite limited. They were wielded by immobile infantry rather than riding cavalry, to the detriment of the Castilian effort—though it must be said, they struck terror in the heart of Lisbon. Until the cursed barrels blew apart.” He looked closely at Flame, reached out to stroke her stock. “I have wished for a means of rendering these guns portable. What do you propose, Marsh?”

  “What impedes their use on horseback, or even by infantry at a run, master, is the matter of fire,” said Stephen. “A burning stick will expire in the wind. A hot coal cannot be carried for long in the hand. The only means of getting adequate flame to the task is for every gunner to have a fire near at hand—and no soldier is capable of carrying fire with him into battle.”

  Snell scoffed. “You’ve not heard of torches?”

  A question Stephen had expected. “It would be difficult beyond reckoning to hold a torch, light a match from it, and aim and fire a gun, all with the same two hands. The need for a torch, and thus another man to bear it, only brings out all the more clearly the problem of efficiency.”

  “I happily concede the point, Marsh.”

  “What is needed, then, is a means of firing the powder in the pan with a tool ready to hand. A carried flame, able to be deployed near and far, whether mounted or on foot. More than this, an ability to fire more quickly than ever before.” He held up a short length of twine. “Each gun, I believe, should be equipped with one of these.”

  Snell took it from him, fingered it, held it before his nose. “What is it?”

  “Simply a cord soaked in saltpetre, then dried and cut to length. Saltpetre burns slowly when not mixed with charcoal and sulfur. This cord will glow happily in place or at a run, and even in a fearsome wind. When affixed to the device I have created, it will light as many as a dozen pans of powder, with minor adjustments as the shots proceed.” He took the cord back from Snell, fixed it within the snake’s mouth, then pushed it down and up again, demonstrating the agility of his device.

  Snell stared at the mechanism. “One man to fire, then, and he may move about the battlefield as he wishes, firing multiple times from any position—and without the need for a source of flame.”

  “Yes, Master Snell. Thus increasing the element of surprise.”

  The armorer hefted the gun again, then sighted down its barrel toward the nearest span of wall. “Had a hundred Castilians with such handgonnes ridden against King John’s several guns, Portugal might have fallen after all. And your snake simply attaches to the stock and barrel?”

  Marsh took the gun and began to affix the snake in its proper position. Back at Stone’s he had designed a simple clip to hold the device in place while the three bolts were tightened. Once the snake was attached he removed the clip and slipped it in the pouch at his side. All was done smoothly, as Marsh had practiced every maneuver a dozen times during his half day in the woods.

  “Ready for a firing, Master Snell.”

  “You’ll need a target.” The armorer signaled to one of his attending guards. He whispered in the man’s ear and nodded in the direction of the barbican. “The elder one.”

  “Aye, sire,” said the soldier. He walked briskly off, signaling to another guard to follow him.

  “It won’t be long, Marsh,” said Snell, with a sly grin. “Please continue your preparations.”

  Stephen checked the serpentine for a second time, tightening the bolts, scraping out the touchhole, testing the serpentine’s hinge. When he looked up a small company was walking toward them from the direction of the barbican.

  “Richard Wolde,” Snell murmured to the soldier by his side. “A lover of cats. He swyves with them, it’s said.”

  “And the softest ewes as well,” one of his men put in.

  Snell laughed from his belly as the strange company approached. Behind them strode a lion. A body impossibly long, the head framed by an immense mane of particolored hair, gold-flecked blacks and browns. Upon its mouth was fastened a stout leather muzzle, the animal’s lips and whiskers barely visible beneath the thick straps. The paws were huge, though a rear one appeared injured, as the beast was clearly favoring it. A lengthy tail played in the air as the lion limped along, not, as the beast books claimed, furtively clearing away his own tracks, but held upright and proud, its curled length whipping from side to side: the part of the great animal that seemed most truly wild.

  Stephen had seen the king’s cats only once, years ago, during that long season of celebration marking King Richard’s coronation, when the Tower menagerie was thrown open to all England for gaping and delight. The animals were so foreign to the English mind, so unlike their unmoving counterparts depicted in the various liveries of the realm. Lions rampant and supine, lions embossed and embroidered: these were as nothing compared with the living, breathing cats themselves.

  The man Snell had identified as Richard Wolde stepped forward from the group and stuck out his chest. “By what rights do your men bring this beast from the menagerie, Snell?” Small of bone, nearly dwarflike in stature, Wolde made a comical figure as he confronted the powerful armorer in his domain.

  “The beast’s time has come,” Snell said. “Can’t be helped, I’m afraid.”

  Wolde weakly scoffed. “You are a mere armorer, Snell. I am keeper of lions and leopards for King Richard. This is my lion.”

  “Your lion? Hardly. This is the Tower’s lion, Wolde, and thus the king’s. You know as well as I that our sovereign lord has ordered this old beast to be put out of its suffering. And yet here you are, defending it with all your will. Why, look at the poor fellow.”

  All heads turned to the great cat. The lion was a sorry spectacle. Bare patches of mange on its flanks, a long and ugly scar running along its left side, a gaping wound at the snout. The animal’s eyes were drooped and overly moist, sad smears of phlegm pouched in the lower lids.

  “This is an absurdity, Snell,” Wolde continued his protest. “An outrage against Lady Nature herself. You cannot put such a royal animal to death with one of your
foul tests.”

  “Enough, Wolde,” said Snell. “This is beyond and above you now. I suggest you take your cat-swyving cock back to the menagerie, and leave this task for the true men of the armory.”

  Snell chinned a signal. Two of his men stepped forward and pinned Wolde’s arms behind his back, pulling him away from the lion.

  “No!” Wolde shouted, his short legs dangling in midair. “You will regret this, Snell!”

  The armorer turned away with another gesture to his men. A guard took the guide rope from Wolde’s hands and led the great animal away from its keeper.

  “Come along, Marsh,” Snell said, softly now, gesturing for him to follow the lion as Wolde’s shouts of protest faded. “Let us put your ingenuity to the test.”

  Stephen followed him blindly, his head growing light and his thoughts distant, as if all this were unfolding in some life he was merely observing rather than living. The lion was tied to an iron stake hammered into the ground, and now stood before the firing wall. This, a high, whitewashed plane of hardwood timbers and boards, had been erected before the Tower’s western rise and was already riddled from previous firings. Stephen’s gaze roamed up and across the pocked and ugly surface, taking in the holes caused by arrows, bolts, and shot. There were a few brownish spatters that looked like dried blood.

  Stephen glanced about for a fire. “I must light the matchcord, Master Snell.”

  Snell ordered one of the guards to assist. Stephen handed him the saltpetre cord. “Light it at one end only, if you please.”

  The guard nodded and began to walk to the nearest forge, the cord held lightly between his fingertips.

  “Quickly now,” Snell said. The soldier took off at a jog. Stephen turned to the lion, watched its tail flick through its last lashes, wondering at the beast’s solemn stillness.

  The soldier was soon back with the cord, the tip smoldering with a steady glow. With care, Stephen fixed it by the middle within the snake’s mouth, careful to keep the hot end free of the powder.

  “A moment, Marsh.” Snell approached him, asking for Flame. Stephen handed her over.

  “The first shot is mine,” said Snell. “Show me.”

  Stephen, hiding his displeasure, demonstrated the serpentine lever, showing Snell how to keep the spark from prematurely igniting the pan. “You may sight along the barrel, Master Snell, though you would be advised to keep the stock well away from your eyes.”

  Snell asked a few more questions—keen, discerning, with an expert’s eye for details—then assumed a firing position. Just before lowering the gun he turned and said to Stephen, “After the ball leaves the barrel I will hand the gun back to you. You’ll reload it and fire, and I shall count the time elapsed between shots. My own ball will be well high of the mark, but yours must be true. Do you understand?”

  “Aye, Master Snell.” Stephen’s gut roiled. It would be his lot, then, to kill the lion, and as quickly as he could. A grim reward for a successful commission.

  “Good.” The armorer turned toward the wall. Steadying the gun against his chest, he craned his head back, sighting along the side of the barrel, then lowered the snake.

  Crack!

  A fragment of wood flew off the wall several feet above the lion. The beast flinched across its body, then reared up feebly on its hind legs. As the report echoed across the Tower compound, the soldiers gathered round murmured their appreciation, and the lion made a vain attempt to throw off its muzzle. Snell handed Marsh the gun and began to count. “One. Two. Three. Four . . .”

  As Snell ticked off the intervals Marsh seized Flame and went to work on unfouling, blowing, wiping, reloading, those hours in the woods coming back to him.

  “Eight. Nine. Ten.”

  A measure of gunpowder down the barrel.

  “Sixteen. Seventeen.”

  A ball.

  “Twenty. Twenty-one. Twenty-two.”

  A good tamp with the drivel to ram it all to—though not with too much force, as only powder leavened with air would ignite; nor with too little, as an excess of the same air would cause a misfire.

  “Twenty-six. Twenty-seven.”

  A small tap of powder in the pan.

  “Thirty-two. Thirty-three.”

  Stephen took his time, as this was the most delicate part of the reloading.

  “Thirty-six. Thirty-seven.”

  All the while Stephen kept the still-smoldering matchcord away from the pan and touchhole, moving gingerly but swiftly as the Tower guard and William Snell looked on.

  “Forty-one. Forty-two.”

  Now he took aim, settled his mind, and stared down the barrel at this beautiful creature, this noble beast.

  “Forty-nine. Fifty.”

  Just as his hand lifted the near end of the serpentine device, the lion turned to him. The beast stared at Marsh with the saddest eyes he had ever seen.

  “Fifty-three. Fifty-four.”

  Cord touched powder. A flash.

  Crack.

  The sharp report echoed around the walls. A bloom of red jellied the animal’s skull. Flame had done her work. Stephen stared through the smoke as the beast collapsed, its mane rippling with the afternoon’s full sun. Over it, as if a reflection on the stillest water, he saw the milk-white face of the woman in the woods, the golden spread of her hair against the forest floor.

  Stephen swooned.

  He would never know how long he lay on the ground, with his senses closed to the world. When he awoke and sat up, he was alone in that portion of the Tower yard. Twenty feet away Snell was clustered with several of his men, all speaking in low voices. Noticing his alertness, a soldier by the near span of the wall pointed. His fellows laughed.

  The armorer approached Stephen as he sat up. Snell’s hands were spread in exaggerated concern. “You are quite recovered, Marsh?”

  “Yes, Master Snell.”

  “Very well,” he said, looking down at him, contempt unmasked. “I shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose. Even the greatest of gunmakers may prove the weakest of killers. It unsettles you, does it, to put a ball in a brain?”

  “N—no, Master Snell,” Stephen weakly said, seeing a girl’s ravaged neck. “I am merely fatigued. I’ve stayed up many nights perfecting the serpentine, the pan, the cord and its clip, measuring the ideal dose of powder and the quality of shot—”

  “Never mind that. Indeed I am delighted that you fainted at the sight of a dying animal. It proves a point I have been trying to make about these new handgonnes, though I seem unable to get anyone in Westminster to listen.”

  “What point is that, Master Snell?” said Stephen. He stood, relieved to have the armorer’s attention diverted from his unmanly show.

  “Handgonnes are the ultimate weapons of the weak,” said Snell. “You have proved it yourself. It would take a skilled archer to bring down a lion with one arrow. A steady hand, a strong arm, a knowledge of anatomy. Yet you felled the beast with a single shot to the head, from a weapon you banged together in your own foundry. Simply point, touch, and a life is ended, with no strength or skill or even courage required.”

  Stephen wanted to protest, to show Snell just how much skill and knowledge had gone into the making and testing of Flame and her sisters. Why, he had already killed a young and living person with his own gun, not only the already half-dead and compliant beast killed just now.

  “Loud miracles of efficiency, these guns,” Snell went on. “Soon enough there will be one in every farmer’s hand, Marsh, to say nothing of Burgundy’s army. It will be up to us to stay ahead of those who oppose us. More and better guns, more and better powder. And that, Marsh, is why you are here. We shall keep three of your four guns and snakes in the Tower for now, and you will continue perfecting this device until I give you further instruction about your next role in this great matter. There is much work yet to be done.”

  Snell left him there, staring at the lion, the great animal’s corpse still leaking on the Tower ground.

  Chapter 20
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br />   FROM THE CHURCH OF ST. PANCRAS Soper Lane two narrow alleys run northward toward Cheapside, drawing vice from the thoroughfare as twin drains pull filth from a gutter. Popkirtle Lane twists up from the churchyard through a series of ugly bends, while Gropecunt Lane, its near companion, makes a straight line up to Cheap along a row of abandoned horsestalls and old shopfronts. Within London’s walls, it is here that a man, and more rarely a woman, can most easily find carnal companionship for two or three pennies, and avoid the public and visible arrangements across the river in the Southwark stews. Though I had never sought out a maudlyn for anything but information, many of my friends and acquaintances saw them regularly, and it was no rare thing to encounter a man I knew emerging from the precincts with a hung head, wiping a hand across his mouth, adjusting his hose.

  Joan Rugg, the bawd of Gropecunt Lane, was a dun-clad mound of a woman, with as many chins as words, and a banded hat fitted with seeming permanence atop piles of curling, unpinned hair the color of old hay. We had met the year before during another crisis pitting town against crown. Though she would have no reason to recall me given the quantity of men who sought her services, to my surprise she remembered my name.

  “Why, it’s Master Gower it is, come to nose out our fine ladies of Gropecunt Lane!”

  “I am seeking out only one of your maudlyns, Mistress Rugg.”

  “Have you a name, good master?”

  “I do not, though I believe she fashions herself a swerver.”

  “Aye, a swerver,” Joan said with a knowing nod. “Fancy some of that arse-queynt do you?”

  “Hardly,” I said, refusing to show her my disgust.

  “You’ll want Eleanor,” she said. “Edgar’s how she mans.” She looked up the lane and signaled to a fresh-faced young woman leaning against a post. “Get our Ellie, will you, Bet?”

  “Aye,” called the girl. She went briefly around the corner and returned with another maudlyn who approached us with a light step, and when she arrived I looked at her closely. Rykener’s was a face I had glimpsed more than once on the city streets, one of those hundreds of nameless Londoners a man passes along the lanes and avenues without a thought. Yet there was something familiar about Rykener, and it came to me that she had been among the company of maudlyns at the center of last year’s turbulent events. I saw a young man entering a Southwark stewhouse, a broken kitchen door, a clutch of maudlyns avenging a bawd on the flesh of a dying knight.