by David Bell
Below in the courtyard Kanesh stood in the shadows looking up at this beautiful woman, now wife of Dareka, mother of Sharesh, matron servant of the Lady, and allowed his thoughts to drift back over the years to the mountains where the vineyards grew and the flax was as blue as the summer sky, and the high plains where the horses galloped faster than the wind. Then he shook the pictures from his head, hobbled to the gate and went out into the street. He set off to walk down to the harbour and back up again, to give his strapped leg some movement. Time was getting short.
AN ANCIENT MYSTERY
The days that followed never seemed long enough for all the work that had to be done. Merida turned up everywhere and was always impatient. He harried the carpenters with constant demands for faster work until Potyr at last warned him they would throw down their tools and leave the ship. He accused the sailmakers first of using shoddy cloth, and then of being too extravagant when they suggested using a heavier linen from his own warehouse. He plagued Dareka with endless questions about orders and deliveries and goods that had to be specially packed and ready in time for shipment to Keftiu. The only men he dared not pester were the smiths at work on replacement tackle for the rigging and bolts and bands to strengthen the new steering oar. Like everyone else he knew that smiths kept the secrets of their mysterious work to themselves and refused to be hurried in any way.
Kanesh looked on all of this activity and interference with a mixture of mild amusement and careful attention. He could now get about with greater ease, and ship repairers and warehouse men alike soon became aware of the big silent bearded man leaning on his crutch and watching them intently with his deep-set eyes as they went about their work. Dareka and Akusha were content for him to take Sharesh with him on some of his tours, leaving them free to deal with their own duties. Dareka hardly left the harbour during the day and when he did, it was to be closeted with Merida going through lists and accounts, or to visit weavers, potters, farmers, fish salters and innumerable other suppliers to see how the orders were coming on. Akusha was less often seen at home as the Festival of Spring was approaching, and she was under the constant command of the High Priestess, helping to ensure that all the arrangements between the Temple and the Governor for the celebration were planned to perfection.
So Kanesh was free to start his role as guardian and teacher of Sharesh. Early in the morning he took the boy to the ship, still held upright on the beach with props, and with the permission of Potyr, set him to watch how the repairs were done, how the carpenters chopped out the rotten wood from the keel with an adze and how they shaped mortises and tenons with their saws and chisels, and hammered the new parts tightly in place with mallets after painting the surfaces with a thick, stinking liquid they made from mixing tree resin with fish heads and bones before boiling the mess in a bronze pot over a fire on a bed of beach pebbles. Sharesh showed Kanesh where the plank with the painted eyebrow washed ashore from the shipwreck had been re-shaped to replace part of the worm-eaten garboard on the bow side, and Kanesh persuaded the carpenters to let the boy help with the caulking which he did by pressing strands of rope into the joints with a thin bronze chisel and then squeezing in a waxy mixture of lime and oil and smoothing it off with his thumb. After that he was sent off to wash his hands in the sea where he was quickly joined by Namun who was carrying a harpoon he claimed to have made himself and was deadly at catching fish.
After watching the boys for a while diving in and out of the waves like young dolphins, Kanesh joined Potyr and Typhis who were standing in the shade cast by the ship talking to the master carpenter.
“He says she’ll be ready to haul off in the morning,” said Typhis. “And the spar and the steering oar?”
“Spar’s waiting at the harbour now, he says, and they’ll bring the oar here in the morning by boat. The smiths are going to fit the straps on it after midday. Best time, they say, although they didn’t say why.”
“It is because the wood will be at its driest. They fit the straps straight from the forge and quench them tight on the oar. Wetness swells the wood so a strap fitted then would loosen when the wood dries out,” said Kanesh.
Typhis grinned at him. “You are a smith, then?”
“I have some knowledge of the skill.”
“Let me see your hands,” said Potyr. “Hm. Scars from old burns on the palm and a thumbnail that’s changed more than once. You use the other hand.” He looked keenly at Kanesh’s face. “And the trace of sparks. Likely more under that beard.”
“And you, ship’s master, you still hold one hand part clenched from the burn you got when sliding down the rope too fast, on your first ship, perhaps?”
They looked at each other, then both nodded almost imperceptibly, recognising some bond that had been forged between them.
“I am Potyr.”
“I am Kanesh.”
“Helmsman,” said Kanesh. “You have a voice to shake the balls off a bull; call those boys in from their sport. If the smiths are to do their work after midday, I must be there with Sharesh. He shall see how it is done.”
“They’ll not pour metal with you there, not let you, never mind the boy, see their mystery,” said Typhis who then bellowed at the boys to come out and bring their catch with them. “Like as not one’s stabbed the other in the foot with that harpoon.”
“The smiths will find their mystery is no mystery to him,” said Potyr to the helmsman, as they watched Kanesh trudge along the beach towards the harbour, nodding from time to time as Sharesh told him how many fish they had caught, but thrown back, of course, because they were too small.
The forge was outside the town, in the same area as the potters’ kilns, too far for sparks to carry to the houses, but close enough to the harbour to keep the labour of carrying the heavy ore and metal ingots to a minimum. Few people came to this place. The air was acrid and the smoke was like the poisonous breath of devils. The ground was bare of grass and piles of black clinker and red ash lay where they had been shovelled away from the kilns and furnaces. Nearby, firewood was stacked in piles and large wicker baskets filled with charcoal stood inside rough shelters ready for use.
Three strange-looking figures were standing round what looked to Sharesh like a stone altar which had to be very hot at the top because the air was shimmering above it like it did over black rocks on a hot afternoon. They wore black leather aprons and caps and had bands of cloth wrapped round their mouths and noses. Two of them were carrying a big pot shaped like a fir cone with tongs that had metal claws and long wooden handles. The third man, who was older and seemed to be in charge, beckoned the others towards him, using his hands to guide them as they lowered the jar into the fire.
Kanesh motioned Sharesh to stay where he was and walked towards the little group of men. Two dogs appeared from nowhere and sidled forwards, teeth bared, one circling round to get behind him. Kanesh kept moving and pointed at one dog and then at the other. Sharesh heard him say something to them that he could not make out. Whatever it was, both dogs dropped on their bellies and lay still. Sharesh thought Kanesh must have done something like that to Tika on the beach. The men were concentrating on their work and had not noticed what had happened. The pot was now firmly in place and the tongs put aside. The chief smith piled more charcoal around the pot with a small bronze shovel while another man picked up something which Sharesh knew was a bellows, and pushed the nozzle close to the fire and began pressing the handles in and out quickly. Sharesh watched as the third man bent down at the bottom of the stone altar, and he couldn’t see what he was doing at first but, as they drew nearer, he saw that the man was blowing hard through a thick reed into a hole at the bottom of the altar. Pale blue flames could now be seen rising from the top of the fire, all round the pot. The men stood back, away from the heat, and that was when one of them saw Kanesh. He gave a shout and the others turned and glared at the intruder. One picked up a long-handled hammer and stepped towards Kanesh. The chief smith stopped him and pointed towards the dogs. T
he hammer was dropped and the three smiths stood, heavy shoulders hunched, thickly muscled legs apart, squinting up at the big man leaning on a crutch with the sun behind him. Kanesh lifted an arm and swept his pointed finger in an arc round all three and then pointed at his own chest. Then he held up his left forefinger and placed his right forefinger across its tip, the sign of the hammer. He spoke to them once, pointed at the fire and spoke again. Sharesh somehow knew he spoke in the old words. The chief smith stepped forward, took Kanesh’s hands in his own and looked at them, turning them over to see each side. He spoke to one of the men who went over to a shelter and returned carrying two baskets which he put at Kanesh’s feet. Kanesh took some pieces of red metal from one basket, selected a few, and put them to one side. He turned to the other basket and took out a much smaller amount of grey metal. He spent a long time weighing the different pieces in his hands, matching one against the other. At last he decided on the quantities and held out a mixture to the chief smith. The man gave the metal a brief glance, peered into Kanesh’s face and briefly dipped his head. Then he slowly unwrapped the cloth bandage from his face and said one word to his mates who took off theirs. Finally, first the chief smith, followed by the others, seized Kanesh’s hand in a special grip, palm across palm, and made the hammer sign which Kanesh repeated to each of them. Kanesh waved to Sharesh to come forward. The dogs got up and followed him.
“The master smith and these other gentlemen welcome us to their forge. You are privileged to see great mysteries of which you will never speak unless another master smith shall ask. How do you say?”
Sharesh faced the master smith, placed his hands together in front of him, briefly bent his head and said, “I am Sharesh. I will not break the trust.”
“I am Kakelus and these are my sons. You have come at the right time. This job was ordered by master Dareka. Wrap this round your mouth and nose. You don’t want to get poisoned, do you? Now listen.”
Sharesh learned that what he thought looked like a stone altar was called a furnace, built as a ring of stone round a hollow in the middle called a flue. At the bottom was a hole to let the air in. Some way below the top some bronze bars had been built in to hold a bronze plate with small holes in it on which charcoal could be piled and heated by the air rushing through it from below until it was bright red. That was the time to put in the big crucible he had called a pot, which had the right mixture of tin metal and copper metal in it to make bronze. It took a long time and a lot of hot charcoal for the metals to melt and mix together and that was why you had to use the bellows to help the charcoal get really hot.
“More charcoal on, quick about it, and keep forcing that draught,” said the master smith in his wheezing voice to his sons. “Don’t lose the heat.”
“Are you saying your prayers now, to get the time right?” said Sharesh, pulling the rag mask down to speak. Kanesh turned his face away to hide a smile.
“I don’t have to say any prayers. I can tell by the smell,” said Kakelus. “Now while they’re seeing to that you come over here and learn something else.”
He took Sharesh over to one of the rough shelters where there were boxes with cut-off pieces of metal and ingots of copper and tin covered with planks of wood. Some baskets had in them other things, beautiful things, like blue and green stones, the green ones with smooth round shapes like grapes or peas cut in half, and in others there were powders, some black and glittery and some yellow and others red. And one had lots of little shiny black blades stuck together with sides so smooth they looked as if they had been polished. He asked what all these things were.
Kakelus picked out a piece of silvery black stone and banged it with a round-headed bronze hammer he pulled from a pocket in his apron.
“Here. Smell that,” he said, and pushed the stone under Sharesh’s nose. “It’s garlic!”
“Smells like garlic, doesn’t it? But it’s not. That smell tells you there’s a metal inside that stone that we can get out. I’ll tell you how sometime, or your friend will, and it’s another sort of metal we can use to make bronze like the sort I was telling you over there, for knives and needles and things like that.”
“What about this green stone? The Lady Tuwea has a brooch made of that.”
“There’s copper inside that one. And the blue one as well.”
“I can’t see any. Copper is red.”
“Well, it’s in there and we know how to get it out. Have you seen what happens to bronze and copper things, tools and bowls and things like that, when you leave them out, don’t keep them polished?”
“They go a sort of green. My mother gets cross and scolds the maid.”
“See?”
“You mean the copper inside bronze turns back into a stone like this? What does the tin do? And that garlic metal, when you get that out, what colour is it, does it change back again?”
“You ask a lot of questions. I like that, but we have to get on now and that crucible’s nearly ready to tap. Come on. And put that mask back on. I’ve told you about getting poisoned.”
Near the furnace was a flattened heap of sand with some round lumps of what looked like grey pot half buried in it. The pots had holes in the tops that widened upwards like the burrows made by sandworms on the beach. Sharesh hadn’t seen these when they first looked at the furnace and Kanesh told him that one of the smiths had just brought them over from a potter’s kiln and they were still hot. Kakelus picked up a pair of tongs and looked into the red-hot charcoal heaped around the crucible in the furnace. He sniffed once or twice and then tapped the crucible carefully three times with the tips of the tongs, listening intently each time. He gave a loud whistle and things happened very quickly and smoothly. One of his sons fastened the jaws of his tongs around the upper part of the crucible and lifted it free of the fire. It was heavy and his arm muscles bulged and sweat fell from his brow. At the same time Kakelus took off the lid with his tongs, dropped it to one side, and then clamped the tongs lower down the crucible. The two of them carried it across to the heap of sand. While the younger smith held the crucible firmly by the top his father raised the bottom and carefully poured crackling, smoking molten metal in a fiery golden stream through one of the holes in the top of a pot until it brimmed over and blobs fell into the sand. They then filled the other two pots in the same way. Gas and smoke bubbled and wafted out of the other holes and Sharesh could smell hot metal and something like burning oil or wax, even through his mask.
“That’s the rings done for the lifting tackle,” said Kakelus, wiping the sweat from his brow with the rag he had just unwound from round his mouth. He pointed at his two sons who were now lifting another crucible onto the furnace top. “They’re going to fire the bronze for the straps we’re putting on the new steering oar. Should have been here by now, but that’s carpenters for you.” He coughed hard and spat on the ground.
A battered wooden cart pulled by two panting men and followed by a third came into view and bumped heavily across the hummocky blackened ground towards the forge. Tied on it by ropes, blade to the front, was the new steering oar, twice the height of a man, tapered gracefully from blade to handling end, its planed surface gleaming pale brown. A few words were exchanged between Kakelus and the master carpenter who had followed the cart, not deigning to help by pushing, and the cart was dragged near to a table close to the furnace. The table was made of big slabs of stone one of which was rounded and smooth like the trunk of a tree stripped of its bark and stuck out at one end for use as an anvil. One of the young smiths pulled aside some wooden planks lying on the ground to reveal a pit, wide and deep enough for a man to stand in leaving him free from the chest up. Sharesh watched fascinated as the labourers and young smiths untied and lifted the oar from the cart and lowered it carefully, blade first into the pit. He asked Kanesh what was going on and what were the straps that Kakelus talked about.
“The oar is made of pieces of wood jointed and glued together as you saw the carpenters did with the ship’s keel. This ma
kes it stronger than a single big piece of wood. But to make sure, bronze belts, what they call straps, have to be fixed round the wood and made fast. You can see where the master carpenter has drawn charcoal rings round the oar where the straps have to go and marked where the fixing nails will fit. Now watch and later you will see why the smiths need that oar to stand in the pit.”
Kakelus and the master carpenter stood looking at three pieces of heavy grey pottery that one of the young smiths had brought to the stone table. They looked like long shallow boxes without tops and the insides were very smooth with a thin coating of plaster just painted on. The carpenter marked off a different length in each box with his measuring rod and Kakelus filled in the unneeded parts with a paste of sand mixed with plaster that began to dry almost as soon as he put it in. When he was satisfied that all was ready he went to the furnace, tested the crucible in the same way as before, and told the young smiths to bring it to the table. The golden liquid was poured into the shallow boxes, Kakelus signing when to move from one to the next. The fuming metal seemed to find its own level without overflowing and soon began to lose its fiery colour as it cooled.
“Have to wait now while the moulds cool down,” said Kakelus. “Better drink, and eat if you’ve brought anything. Water in the jar here. Hot enough here for you, is it? Over there, in the shed, there’s shade.
“This place reminds me of Korus, all those black stones and the yellow and red ones and hardly any grass, and the smell,” said Sharesh.
“You have been there?”
“There’s a boy I know whose father has a fishing boat at Balloso. We went with him but he said we must not land because it was a sacred place, or there were devils on it, I’ve forgotten which.”
“People believe in one or the other, whichever is needed at the time. What did you see?”