Colours in the Steel f-1

by K. J. Parker

  Wait for it. Here it comes.

  Imagine the fly that buzzes round your head, or the moth that flutters aggravatingly in your study at night as you crouch over the flame of your lamp. You reach out, your huge fist dwarfs the insect as your fingers close to crush it. Either it gets out of the way in time, or it doesn’t. If it does, the disturbance in the air as your enormous hand goes past flings the insect aside, and it wobbles helplessly for a moment, out of control. Alexius could feel the enormous hand sweeping down on him from behind, though he couldn’t see it; he could feel the displacement of air, buffeting him like a big wave at sea. There was nothing he could do; either the hand would catch him, or it wouldn’t.

  It didn’t; but the slipstream slammed him down, like a door slamming in his face. He tried to make a noise but there was no air left in him. He opened his mouth, and fell off the bed.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘No,’ Alexius replied. ‘Help me up.’

  The girl grabbed his sleeve; she was very strong. ‘What happened?’ she asked. ‘Did it work?’

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea,’ the Patriarch grumbled, rubbing the back of his head with rather more vigour than the slight bump warranted. ‘In my mind’s eye, or our minds’ eyes, I killed him. Or you did, rather. Whether or not it’ll actually-’

  The girl let go of him abruptly. ‘But that’s wrong,’ she said. ‘That’s not the curse I wanted.’

  Alexius glowered at her; the whole thing had stopped being a pain and was getting ludicrous. ‘But you must have,’ he said. ‘It’s revenge you’re after, isn’t it?’

  ‘I told you I don’t believe in killing,’ she replied, coldly furious. ‘What good’s killing him going to do? If only you’d let me tell you-’

  Alexius let his head fall back onto his one hard pillow. ‘Then what did you want, if you didn’t want him killed?’ he asked wearily. ‘Be fair. The two of you, in open court-’

  ‘I wanted to cut off his hand,’ she said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. ‘I was going to cut his hand off and then walk away, leaving him standing there, in front of everybody.’ She turned away, her hair falling across her face. ‘Getting killed isn’t a punishment for him, it’s part of his job. I wanted him to hurt.’

  ‘Well, tough,’ Alexius snapped. ‘You’ll just have to make do, that’s all. Assuming that it works, of course. As I told you, there’s a good chance that it won’t.’

  The girl stood up. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. She walked towards the door.

  Why is it, Alexius asked himself, that young people are simply incapable of saying thank you? She was just about to vanish into the sharp blade of light she’d come in through when he remembered.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he called out.

  ‘Iseutz.’ Her voice, in the dark. ‘Iseutz Hedin.’

  ‘See you in class,’ he called out as the door closed. He knew he wouldn’t. One down, four hundred and ninety-nine to go.

  When the hall steward came to lower the chandelier, Alexius threw a book at him.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Traditionally, the best way to approach the island on which Perimadeia, oldest and most beautiful of cities, is built is from the seaward side. At first, only the lighthouse is visible over the skyline. As the ship comes closer, the towers of the Phylax and the spires of the Phrontisterion poke up above the horizon like green shoots of corn. Shortly after that, the mountain itself rises up out of the water and the foreigner sees the first distant prospect of the Triple City. The summit of the mountain is an unworldly flash of white marble and gilded rooftops, and ignorant offcomers who know no better than to believe in gods at once assume that here is where they live. When they’re told that the upper city is the residence of the imperial family, they find it easy enough to make the association in their minds between gods and emperors, a natural-enough reaction which generations of Perimadeian diplomats have exploited to the full. Since nobody ever enters or leaves the upper city, the assumptions of barbarian visitors cannot be refuted; not that the Perimadeian state ever tries too hard.

  Below the white and gold crown lies the second city, a breathtaking jumble of palaces, temples, banks, market halls and public buildings of all kinds interspersed with and often indistinguishable from the private residences of the rich and mighty. All great Perimadeians intend their houses to look like glorious and awe-inspiring office buildings, and many a confused envoy or merchant has wandered for an hour among the cloisters and corridors of a second-city edifice only to find out eventually that he’s in some private citizen’s home.

  The lower city can only be seen when the ship is close to land, since it is largely obscured by the colossal sea walls, invulnerable guardians of the city for seven centuries. Once visible, the largest and busiest section of the city looks like any city anywhere, except that it’s much larger and more concentrated; as if the great conquering emperors of the past had scooped up the cities acquired on their campaigns, picked out the loot and everything else worth having and dumped the empty buildings at the foot of the mountain like a huge pile of oyster shells.

  If the city is approached from either of the two branches of the river in whose fork the island lies, the prospect is slightly less dramatic; the traveller sees the whole mountain at once as he comes through the narrow passes of the surrounding hills, and the land walls don’t mask the lower city in the same way as the maritime defences do. From the river approach, Perimadeia appears as a very large city divided into three levels, with freshwater estuaries on two sides and the sea on the third; impregnable, arrogant, infinitely rich, but not necessarily a dwelling-place of gods. Gods would have servants’ quarters, but they would be cleaner and not quite so dark and cramped.

  Another advantage of approaching from the sea, as a result of the prevailing winds, is that the smell only becomes noticeable once the ship has made landfall in the harbour of the Golden Crescent. Travellers arriving by river get the smell rather earlier; by way of compensation, they have time to get used to it before they arrive at the bridge gates, whereas sea-travellers get it as an unpleasant shock when they walk off their ship.

  Only one in a hundred native Perimadeians is even aware of the smell; on the contrary, citizens born and raised in it tend not to notice it and complain about the thin, bland air they find when they go abroad. There is no one single flavour to it; rather, it’s a rich and complicated mixture of wood and charcoal smoke, tanneries, refineries, distilleries, glassworks, bakeries, cookshops, perfumeries, brickyards, furnaces, workshops, fish, cattle dung, essence of humanity and rotting seaweed, the like of which is not to be encountered anywhere else in the world.

  Temrai’s caravan had followed the western branch of the river down from the high plains, and accordingly they entered the city across the Drovers’ Bridge and through the Black Gate. Once through the gateway, the road becomes the main thoroughfare of the carpenters’ and machine-makers’ quarter, and the first thing Temrai saw in the City of the Sword was the famous bone-grinding mill that stood beside the gateway on the left-hand side.

  It was an extraordinary sight for a young man newly arrived from the plains. What Temrai saw was a deep pit, out of which rose a huge wooden circle with fins radiating from it like the spokes of a wheel. Someone had cut a hole in the city wall seven feet or so from the bottom of the pit; since this was below the level of the estuary on the outside, water poured through the hole, fell onto the sails and pushed the wooden circle round before being fed back through a smaller hole controlled by some sort of mechanism which allowed the millstream out without letting the river in. The circle itself turned around an axle formed from the bole of an enormous pine tree. On the other end of the axle was a smaller wheel with pegs driven in all round it, which fitted into similar arrangements of pegs driven into yet another wheel standing at right angles to it. In fact there was a whole family of the things, all biting into each other like a pack of wild dogs, which were in turn connected to the grindstone i
tself. The miracle was that although the axle turned slowly, the millwheel went round much faster, ensuring that the bones fed into the hopper were crushed to fine powder.

  Temrai had never seen so many bones in one place; more even than littered the plain at Skovund, the site of the great battle between the eastern and western clans three generations ago. Two men stood on top of the hopper, shovelling them in from a plank bin. Most of the bones were bits of ox and horse and goat, but mixed in with them were the occasional patently human shin, arm, rib, and skull. The crackly crunching sound as the millwheel rode over them was like horsemen riding over dry twigs and bracken in a forest, but much louder.

  ‘What’s it for?’ he asked the men with shovels.

  They couldn’t hear him; or if they could, they couldn’t understand his accent. But the man who had the copperware stall next to the mill tugged his sleeve and explained; bonemeal, he said, was highly prized by farmers and market gardeners. It made things grow.

  ‘Oh,’ Temrai said, ‘I see. Thank you.’

  ‘You’re a plainsman, aren’t you?’

  Temrai nodded. He could understand the stallholder perfectly well, although he found the man’s sing-song voice rather irritating. He’d been told before he set out that the city people sang rather than spoke; until now, he hadn’t seen how that could be possible.

  ‘In that case,’ said the stallholder, ‘you’ll be wanting to buy a genuine Permadeian copper kettle. And it just so happens-’

  Explaining that he had no money (fortunately the stallholder believed him) Temrai escaped and led his horse up the hill to where he’d been told the city arsenal was to be found. On the way he passed any number of even more remarkable and fascinating stalls and workshops – a man who was using a bent sapling to turn a spindle, to which was attached a chair-leg which the man was shaping with a chisel as it spun; a crossbow maker chiselling out a latch socket from a bar of iron; two men working the biggest bow-drill Temrai had ever seen, with which they were boring a hole through a cast-iron wheel; carpenters joining the frame of a magnificent beam-operated press, presumably for crushing grapes or olives. Temrai was astonished by what he saw, so much so that he was nearly responsible for several disasters as he narrowly avoided walking into carefully arranged displays of merchandise through not looking where he was going. It was incredible, he told himself, that men’s hands had made all these marvellous things. There was clearly more to the business of being human than he’d realised.

  And this was the city where he was going to earn a good living as a metalworker. That didn’t seem right, somehow; with all this amazing knowledge and all these unbelievable machines and devices, how was it possible that he could know something they didn’t?

  Had it been up to him, he wouldn’t have dared. But of course it wasn’t; so he tethered his horse outside the imposing bronze doors of the arsenal, found the rather less imposing side door, and went in.

  Unlike most of his race, Temrai had been inside buildings before. He knew what it was like to be between walls and underneath a roof, and although he didn’t exactly like the experience, it didn’t bother him too much. This, however, was something else entirely. It was dark, like the inside of his father’s tent, and what little light there was consisted of a flickering red glow. That and the oppressive heat came from the enormous furnaces, from which bare-skinned sweating men tapped off streams of brilliant white molten iron into long rows of identical gang-moulds that clustered around the base of the furnace like piglets round a sow.

  The noise was worse; at home, there was nothing that pleased Temrai more than the sound of the smith’s hammer, but these must surely be the hammers of the thunder-genies. When his eyes were a little more accustomed to the light, he was able to identify the source of the noise: a battery of what could only be gigantic mechanical hammers, vast wooden piles shod with iron or copper that were lifted by thick beams until some mechanism tripped them and let them fall. Behind the machine hammers he saw another giant wheel, similar to the one that had driven the bone mill but even larger still. Remarkable; these men made the river do their work for them. The very thought disturbed Temrai; it was like enslaving the gods. Except that, by all accounts, there were no gods in this city. Perhaps, Temrai reflected, with all these machines they didn’t need any.

  ‘You.’

  He turned round to find a short fat man with two little feathers of white hair in either side of a shiny bald head staring at him. Temrai smiled.

  ‘You,’ the bald man repeated. ‘What do you want?’

  Like all the other men in the building, this one was naked except for a little kilt of grubby white cloth. Understandable, Temrai thought, if you had to work in this heat all day, although with all the sparks flying about from the spitting furnaces, he reckoned he’d rather keep his shirt on and sweat. And this was the place he’d come to find work in. He felt a great urge to run away, but managed not to.

  ‘Please,’ he said, ‘I want a job.’

  The man looked at him as if he’d just asked for a slice of the moon between two pancakes. ‘A job,’ he repeated.

  ‘Yes, please,’ Temrai said. ‘I’m from the plains. I’m a blademaker.’

  The bald man raised both eyebrows, and nodded. ‘Are you indeed?’ he said; or rather, sang. If he lived here for the rest of his life, Temrai reflected (and gods forbid!) he’d never get used to that extraordinary way of speaking. It cost him dearly not to giggle.

  ‘Yes,’ Temrai replied, not certain what else he was supposed to say. ‘And I’ve brought some solder with me. Would you like to see?’

  The man nodded; whereupon Temrai reached into his satchel and produced five sticks of the thin silver wire that these remarkable people were said to covet so much. The man took them from him reverently, as if he’d just been handed the soul of his grandmother.

  ‘You know how to use this?’ he asked.

  Temrai nodded. ‘Also the ordinary brass and lead solder,’ he said. ‘And I can make wire and sheet and weld them for the cores, and forge the hard edges.’

  ‘Quite the young master,’ the man replied. ‘You don’t look old enough to be out of your indentures.’

  ‘Excuse?’

  The man shook his head. ‘Indentures,’ he said. ‘Like you’re still a ’prentice. Forget it. Come over here.’

  The part of the vast room the man led him to was mercifully quite close to one of the tall windows, and for the first time since he’d stepped through the door, Temrai felt as if he could actually see. There were anvils, properly set up on elm logs; racks of hammers, tongs and pincers, hardies, swags, fullers, mandrels and setts; all reassuringly familiar among the strange and wonderful things that crowded out the rest of the room. There was also a neat little brick hearth with a goatskin bellows, in which a sword blade was glowing dull red; and beside it sticks of spelter and lead solder, and an earthenware jar of flux. When he saw these, Temrai understood what was being asked of him and was instantly reassured.

  In every part of the world, swords are made in approximately the same way; a soft iron core, around which hundreds of layers of iron wire or ribbon are wrapped before being heated and hammered into a single fused piece; and the separate cutting edges, made from old nails or horseshoes melted down, hammered, tempered, hammered again and baked in an oven with charcoal, dried blood and ground leather to make the iron into steel. By this method a blade can be made to take a true edge that will cut the softer materials from which helmets and armour are made, but which is not so brittle that any sort of hard blow will shatter it like a cup dropped on stony ground. Provided the smith has the basic skill and plenty of time and patience, the separate parts aren’t hard to make; the trick lies in joining the edges to the core, using solder and flux.

  Temrai selected a pair of tongs, pulled the red blade out of the fire and examined it. The edges were wired to the core, and all down the join were little orange crumbs of glowing flux. He looked round, found the bucket of water and plunged the blade into it.<
br />
  ‘Sorry,’ he explained. ‘Wrong way.’

  The bald man was scowling, but Temrai took no notice. When the blade was cool he cut the brittle wires with pincers and tapped the edges free of the core with a small hammer. From his satchel he took his own jar of flux – a ram’s horn hollowed out and full of the dusty white powder that constituted the most substantial part of his nation’s greatest miracle.

  He shook out a few pinches of the powder onto a flat stone, nudged it into a heap and spat into it a few times; then he mixed with the tip of his little finger until he had a smooth, creamy paste. Taking care not to lay it on too thick, he smeared the core and the edges where they were to join, having first scraped off the old, baked flux with his small knife. The bald man handed him a length of wire, and he bound the blade up tight, making sure that the seams were true. Then he put it back into the small furnace and pumped the bellows enthusiastically until he could feel the heat pricking his legs.

  ‘We must get it hot,’ he explained, ‘or the silver won’t run.’

  The difference – virtually the whole difference – was that here they used spelter (made from copper and zinc), or (even worse) soft solder made out of lead and tin. On the plains, they knew better. Three parts copper, one part zinc and six parts silver made a solder that flowed like water at a far lower heat and joined steel to iron in a way that spelter and lead never could.

  When the blade was bright orange, Temrai took a stick of solder from his satchel, rolled it in what was left of the flux and spat down it for luck. Then he lifted the blade out of the heat and drew the stick along the join. As soon as the stick touched the blade, the solder melted and vanished into the thin crack, leaving only a trace of a white line under a greyish crust. When he’d done both sides, front and back, he returned the blade to the fire, recited the prayers to the swordsmith’s god under his breath (not because he expected the god to hear him in this distant place, but because that was how long it took to cook the solder deep into the joint), pulled the blade out and looked round for the pot of oil. There wasn’t one.