The Proof House

by K. J. Parker

  ‘Until you got too much seniority and they had to promote you?’

  Anax slapped him on the back. ‘It’s a pity, you know,’ he said. ‘The man’s just starting to get the hang of how this place works, and he’s getting posted. It’s a waste, if you ask me.’

  Before Bardas could object, Anax had marched out of the room. He walked so fast that Bardas had trouble keeping up with him, especially in the maze of corridors and galleries under the main shop, which was where he was headed. Bollo lumbered along some way behind; he wasn’t built for speed or agility, and he knew the way already.

  ‘Good,’ Anax said, peering in through a doorway, ‘nobody’s found it yet. One of these days I’ll come down here and it’ll be full of equipment and people working, and that’ll be my private workshop gone. Where’s Bollo with the lamp? We need to get a fire going so we can see what we’re about.’

  When there was light, Bardas was able to look round. In the middle of the floor stood an anvil, the full-sized three-hundredweight type, bolted to a massive section of oak beam to dampen the shock of the blows. Next to it on the beam was a swage block, a large square of heavy duty iron into which were cut holes and grooves and cups of various sizes and profiles, half-round and square and three-square; into these recesses the sheet metal could be hammered, to mould a variety of shapes, such as flutes and raised edges. At the end of the beam a cup-shaped hole had been chiselled out, about half a thumb’s length deep at its deepest point (it was shaped rather like a scallop shell, sloping gently at one end, steeply at the other). Bardas noticed that the fibres of the wood had been hammered smooth, hard and shiny.

  ‘Dishing stump,’ Anax explained. ‘For dishing and hollowing. And that’s the folder,’ he went on, pointing to a contraption mounted on a stout workbench at the far end of the room, ‘and next to that’s the rollers and the shear. All there is to it, really. Now then, let’s see what we’ve got behind here.’ He knelt down and reached behind the work-bench. ‘Unless somebody’s been in here and found it, we should have – yes, here we are.’ He hauled out a sheet of steel, dull brown under an even layer of rust. ‘I put this aside – what, fifteen years ago it must be, just in case I ever wanted to make some good stuff. I watched it being drawn down out of a single bloom of proper Colleon iron – lovely clean material, not full of bits of grit and rubbish like the garbage we use for work. There’s half a hundredweight here, plenty to be going on with if we cut neatly.’ He bit his lip, then went on, ‘You know, this probably sounds silly to you, but I knew when I saw it that I’d find a use for it some day.’

  Bardas felt vaguely uneasy about this. ‘Are you sure you can spare it?’ he asked. ‘I mean, if it’s such good material—’

  ‘That’s all right,’ Anax replied with a slightly cockeyed grin. ‘So long as it’s going to someone who’ll make proper use of it.’

  ‘I’m not sure I like the sound of that,’ Bardas said.

  From a shallow box in the corner Anax produced a set of patterns cut out of thin wood. ‘Breastplate,’ he said, handing up the largest of them. ‘Backplate, gorget, vambraces, helmet panel, cheekpieces, neckguard – damn it to hell, where’s the neckguard? Ah, got it. All seems to be here; cuisses, greaves, cops, rerebraces – are we going to bother with sabatons? No, I don’t think so, you’ll hardly be able to move as it is. Taces?’

  ‘What’s a tace?’ Bardas asked.

  ‘All right, no taces. That’ll do. Bollo, get the sheet up on the bench so I can start marking out.’

  Carefully, while Bollo held the sheet still, Anax drew round the patterns with chalk. ‘It’s just as well for you that you’re a decent height,’ he said. ‘I cut these patterns for us – the Sons of Heaven, I mean. Most of you outlanders are funny little short people.’

  ‘Like you,’ Bardas pointed out.

  ‘Precisely,’ Anax agreed. ‘But then, I’m different. Luckily for you. All you’d ever get free from the rest of us’d be your three days’ rations. Keep the damn sheet still, Bollo, you’re wobbling it about.’

  It took a long time to mark the patterns out, and longer still to cut out the sections on the shear. Bollo cut the straight lines, pulling down the long lever effortlessly, his mind obviously elsewhere; Anax cut the curves, something which Bardas would have sworn was impossible to do, since the shear was nothing more than a giant version of a pair of snips, one jaw bolted to the bench, the other fitted with a three-foot handle. ‘You’re worried,’ Anax said between grunts of effort, ‘that I can cut this stuff like paper. You think it must be too thin to be any good. Well, all I can say to you is, have faith.’

  ‘I wasn’t worried, actually,’ Bardas said, but Anax didn’t seem to have heard, because he went on, ‘The point is, steel is wonderful stuff. I can cut it and bend it and shape it like it was parchment or clay; and then when I’ve finished with it, Bollo and his biggest big hammer won’t be able to make so much as a dent in it. And you know what the secret is? Stress,’ he went on, before Bardas could answer. ‘A bit of stress, a bit of tension, maybe just a little torture even, and suddenly you’ve got good armour, the genuine proof. Ouch,’ he added, as he cut his finger on a sharp sliver of swarf. ‘Serves me right, I wasn’t thinking about what I’m doing.’ A drop of blood plopped like a single raindrop on to the surface of the section he was cutting out and stood proud, like the head of a rivet.

  ‘Stress,’ Anax repeated, putting a steel plate into the folder. It was an odd-looking thing – two square frames, like window-sashes, one fixed, the other pivoting at right angles. Anax trapped the plate between the two frames and pushed down on the pivoting arm, neatly folding the plate down the middle like a sheet of card. Next he transferred it into the roller, which reminded Bardas of the big iron mangle they used in the laundry round the corner from his apartment in the island-block in Perimadeia. Anax adjusted a setscrew to allow a little play between the rollers, then turned the handle with a sharp, jerking motion and the sheet fed through, coming out the other side with a pronounced curve; the right-angled edge that the folder had put in had become an arched rib, running up the centre-line of the sheet. ‘Stress,’ Anax said again. ‘This bit here,’ he went on, running a finger along the rib, ‘is stressed outwards, like an arch; bash on it from the outside and you’ll have a devil of a job to move it. So it becomes your first line of defence, see; it follows the line of your leg-bone up the piece, and no matter how hard you get clobbered, that force won’t come through and smash your leg. You’ll thank me for that when someone feints high and then sweeps low across your shins.’

  Bardas smiled politely. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘That’s a leg-guard, is it?’

  ‘Greave,’ Anax corrected him, ‘don’t show your ignorance. It covers you from the knee down to the ankle.’ He was holding the piece up between his hands, squeezing the edges gently together, lifting it up so he could see along it, pulling it apart a little, repeating the process. ‘Just adjusting it to fit,’ he went on, ‘not too tight and not too loose. It doesn’t look it, but you’re watching pure skill here.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ Bardas said.

  When he was finally satisfied (Bardas couldn’t tell the difference from when he’d started) Anax went over to the anvil and picked up a hide mallet. Propping the piece at an angle against the horn, he tapped and pecked at the edge, raising and curling it around the radius to form a lip. The hand holding the mallet rose and fell in a quick, impersonal rhythm; with the other hand he fed the piece along, making sure that the blows fell evenly spaced. ‘More stress,’ he explained, a little breathlessly. ‘Once the lip’s curled, you can’t just go bending it between your hands like I’ve just been doing; it’s stiff and inflexible, like provincial office regulations. There,’ he added, as he finished drawing the lip round, ‘we’ll call that done and do another one, while we still remember how. Planishing can wait till we’ve finished.

  ‘Hollowing, now.’ Anax was making cops, the cup-shaped pieces that covered the knees and elbows. ‘Hollowing’s wh
ere you really put in the stress.’ He was standing in front of the dishing stump, holding the truncated-diamond-shaped section over the scooped-out hole at an angle so that the middle of the plate was directly above the deepest part. ‘But you’ve got to understand stress really well to do this,’ he went on, ‘or you’ll ruin everything.’ With the edge of the mallet-head he started to peck at the plate, pinching it between the mallet and the wood. ‘Bash it too hard in the middle and you’ll make it thin, you’ll squeeze the metal out of it, like wringing out a wet cloth. Bad stress, that; too much, too soon. So instead you come at it gently, starting on the edge of where you want the hollow to be, and you work in from the edge to the centre – that way, you’re squeezing thickness out of the sides into the top of the dome, where you need it most.’

  He stopped, wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist and grinned. ‘Sneaky, I call it,’ he said. ‘But nobody ever said this business was fair.’ His right hand rose and fell quickly and precisely, so that the hammer dropped in its own weight and bounced itself back up off the metal – minimal effort, the effect being achieved by accuracy and persistence, the sheer number of precisely aimed blows. ‘As well as stress,’ he went on, ‘there’s compression, you’re crushing the inside up tighter than the outside, making more stress; and stress is strength, to all intents and purposes. It’s what we call work-hardening, and it’s a wonderful thing, except when you overdo it. You want to remember that, my friend; stress on the inside is strength on the outside, and hardness comes from getting bashed a lot. Understand that, and you’re pretty much there.’

  The orange light of the fire rolled in the steel-burnished brightness of the plate, like the last of the wine in the bottom of a silver cup. ‘I think I see what you’re getting at,’ Bardas replied. ‘But doesn’t bashing it sometimes make it weak?’

  ‘Ah.’ Anax nodded his head. ‘That’s something different. That’s fatigue. That’s when you’ve stressed it so many times that it can’t take any more. Bad stress. Or there’s brittle; brittle is when you make it so hard it’s got no give. You make something too hard and when you drop it, the damn thing shatters like glass. Very bad stress. You don’t want to worry about that; we take stuff like that out in proof. That’s what proof’s for.’

  When he’d finished, the piece of sheet had gone from flat to perfectly domed, without any flat spots or wrinkles. ‘Got to be smooth,’ he said. ‘Unless you get it smooth, you’ll have weak spots. That’s why you’ve got to bash every last bit the same.’ He held the cop up, to see if any flaws caught the light. ‘Bashing gives shape,’ he said. ‘Shape is strength, too. Look; that’s the shape it wants to be. The God of our forefathers could jump up and down on that all day in heavy boots and he’d never so much as mark it.’

  Bollo was feeding the biggest section through the rollers, applying so much force that the handle flexed. ‘Memory,’ Anax went on, ‘that’s how you achieve stress. Give the metal a memory, a shape it’ll return to when something tries to distort it; then, when it flexes, it’ll try to get back to that shape, which is what gives it the strength to resist. Memory is stress, stress is strength. It really is remarkably straightforward once you understand the basics.’

  ‘The Sons of Heaven,’ Bardas asked, as Anax carefully bent a curve into the breastplate blank, holding it by the edges and pressing down the middle on to the horn of the anvil. Bollo had already folded in a ridge up the middle line and rolled it into its basic shape; Anax was adjusting it, a series of careful, controlled distortions. ‘I’ll be straight with you, I’ve never really managed to figure them out. You don’t mind me asking, do you?’

  Anax looked up at him and flashed him a rather terrifying smile; a controlled baring of the teeth. ‘You’re asking me,’ he said. ‘I suppose that’s a compliment, by your standards. You said to yourself, the Sons of Heaven are bastards, but he’s not like them, he’s almost normal.’ Anax applied pressure and the metal obeyed him. ‘Which only goes to show, you don’t know spit about the Sons of Heaven. Nobody knows anything about us,’ he said, pressing a little more, ‘except us; and we’re not telling.’

  ‘I see,’ Bardas replied. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be offensive.’

  ‘Nothing offensive about ignorance,’ Anax replied pleasantly. ‘Not to an enlightened mind, that is; and we’re enlightened, you see, that’s what gives us our edge. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do: I’ll give you a few hints. Armour for the soul, that’s what inside information is.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Bardas gravely.

  ‘The Sons of Heaven –’ Anax was hammering a lip around the edges of the breastplate; he raised his voice a little and Bardas could hear him clearly, in spite of the shrill, crisp noise of the mallet ‘- well, the Sons of Heaven are this.’ He stopped the mallet halfway down in its descent and held it still for a moment. ‘And you’re this,’ he added, nodding at the plate. ‘Or you’re the Sons of Heaven, and this breastplate is you. Has it ever occurred to you that everything in the world might possibly have a meaning? Well, I’m not saying that’s so, that’d be a really stupid generalisation. But if it’s true, in whole or in part, then the Sons of Heaven are the meaning, or at least they’re what everything is about. We’re the axle,’ he went on, turning the metal a little, ‘and everything else is the wheel. Basically, the whole world’s here for our benefit, to make it easier for us to do our job.’

  ‘I see,’ Bardas said. ‘And what would that be?’

  Anax smiled. ‘Perfection,’ he said. ‘We perfect. We make everything we touch perfect. Well,’ he admitted, shifting his grip slightly on the mallet handle, ‘that’s the theory. In practice, we also smash up a lot of things and do a great deal of damage. Do you see what I’m getting at, or do you want me to explain a bit more?’

  ‘I think I get the idea,’ Bardas said. ‘You’re proof.’

  Anax stopped what he was doing and grinned broadly. ‘Bless the man, he has been listening all this time. That’s right, we’re proof. We perfect by testing to the point of destruction. What passes proof, we add to our collection; what fails, we junk. Like absolutely everything, it’s totally simple once you start thinking about it the right way.’

  After the armour had been shaped and planished, Anax punched holes for the rivets, cut the straps and fitted the buckles, put all the parts together. ‘There you are,’ he said eventually. ‘You can try it on now, if you like.’

  It was, of course, a perfect fit. It covered Bardas like a second skin; the strength on the outside, the stress inside. ‘What about proof?’ Bardas asked with a smile.

  ‘Proof?’ Anax pulled a face. ‘Huh. What do you think you’re for?’

  CHAPTER TEN

  The war between the plainspeople and the Empire started late one afternoon, on the edge of a lake in the marshy region between Ap’ Escatoy and the Green River estuary. It was started, somehow appropriately, by a duck.

  The party of trebuchet builders to which Temrai’s old friend Leuscai was assigned had run out of timber; accordingly, Leuscai was put in charge of a small scouting expedition and sent off to find tall trees suitable for shaping into the main arms of trebuchets. Straight, fast-growing pines were the best bet, though occasionally it was possible to find an unusually straight fir or spruce in the forests to the south. When Leuscai reached the region he’d been told to try first he found plenty of evidence of pine, fir and spruce: a considerable number of stumps, carefully sawn off close to the ground by generations of Perimadeian shipwrights, rough-hewn on the spot and shipped back to the City to be made into masts. Time was pressing; there weren’t enough suitable timbers in the store to furnish arms for the current production run, let alone the fifty extra trebuchets Temrai had just commissioned.

  On the other side of the Green River, Leuscai knew, there were a fair number of suitable trees; he could see them as he sat on an ivy-covered pine-stump and gazed at the bank opposite. Technically, however, the southern bank of the river was Imperial territory – at least, it
had been until recently part of a long, narrow tongue of land claimed by Ap’ Escatoy, although the claim had been unenforcible for at least forty years owing to the general decline in the city’s fortunes. Leuscai considered the risk; invading the Empire hadn’t been part of his mission briefing and he didn’t really want to do it, but he badly needed the timber, and he assessed the chances of being noticed, let alone challenged, by Imperial personnel as too slight to worry about, compared with the reception he’d undoubtedly face if he went back home, or even returned to the camp, without any timber. He took a deep breath and started thinking about how he was going to cross the river, which was wide, deep and fast.

  After a long, irritable day of brainstorming, he rejected all the ideas so far canvassed and led the way downstream in the hope of finding a natural ford of some description. As luck would have it, he didn’t have to look far; he’d come out only a few miles up from a treacherous but passable shallow point just above some rather spectacular rapids. The crossing itself was tense and not particularly pleasant, but they made it without loss of life or any essential equipment. What they did lose were half a dozen supply mules which were carrying the food.

  This stroke of bad luck changed their immediate priorities. Leuscai, who’d been brought up on the principle that starving in a forest or beside a river takes a deliberate act of will, split his group up into a number of hunting parties, told them when and where to meet up, and set off into the forest.

  He was quickly disappointed. The forest turned out to be a swamp with trees growing in it, and what little game there was saw or heard him coming. He came back empty-handed to find that nobody else had done much better; but one party reported that they’d stumbled on a lake about a mile due south that looked promising for duck.

  Leuscai wasn’t enthusiastic. He’d had enough of duck a few years back, when he’d been one of the men Temrai had sent to hunt the wretched creatures for food and feathers during a hiatus in supplies just before the attack on Perimadeia. He’d been a victim of his own success; they’d found what seemed like an inexhaustible supply of ducks and proceeded to exhaust it, grimly and piecemeal, with nets, slings, throwing sticks, arrows – in some cases, where they’d found a strain of particularly trusting, stupid ducks, their bare hands. For weeks on end he’d done nothing but wring necks and pull out feathers, with nothing but duck to eat (fishy and stringy) and the creatures’ obnoxious smell always in his nose. He’d come to loathe the sensation of killing them, gripping the neck tight just below the head and swinging the body round and round in circles until the bird suffocated – but you kept getting ones that were the next best thing to immortal, that carried on living even after you’d broken their necks and crushed their heads into the ground with your heel; nothing on earth is harder to kill than a horribly injured duck, not even a bull buffalo or a man in full armour. And here he was again, about to kill and eat yet more ducks if he wanted to stay alive. Maybe, he speculated, he was really the Angel of Death for ducks, and killing them was what he’d been put into the world to do (he thought of Colonel Loredan and the plainspeople); if so, there wasn’t any point trying to avoid the inevitable. Yes, he said, by all means; let’s go and scrag some ducks. So they went.