The Burning Stone

by Jack Whyte

  “Ajax saw something in this,” he said, and his voice suited his appearance, emerging as a long, deeply resonant series of rumbling sounds, although every word, every individual syllable, was clearly articulated. “What it was, I do not know, but whatever it was, it caught his attention instantly. In truth, I do not know if I would have seen it, or paid attention to it. But that is your good fortune, and now you have the opportunity to benefit by it. Ajax is master here in the armouries, not I, but it is my good fortune to be able to assist him.”

  The giant leaned forward and picked up the blade again, then held it up in front of him and pinged the nail of his middle finger against the slight but prominent ridge of metal that ran along the centre of the blade, from the boss to within a finger’s breadth of the point. “Tell me about this ridge,” he said. “This…spine.”

  “Spine is correct,” Varrus said. “That’s what Rhys Twohands called it.”

  “Who is Rhys Twohands?”

  “He is—He was my teacher. My boyhood teacher. He’s dead now. But he it was who taught me how to make a blade. No, that’s not true, either. He tried to teach me how to make a blade, but I was too young to learn at first, and there was never enough time afterwards. And where we lived then, he could never find the kind of fuel he needed for the forge.”

  “He had no fuel for his forge, a smith?”

  “No, there was plenty of fuel. We used the same charcoal as all the other smiths. But for the work Rhys wished to do—the crafts he had been taught over years by an exiled Persian smith, the knowledge he wanted to pass on to me, in turn—that fuel was not good enough, he said. Time after time, for years, I heard him say that, and he was always working to prove himself wrong. He never did, though. The charcoal we had would not burn hot enough, and he could never build a bellows big enough to do what he wanted most to do. His employer—”

  He stopped, having almost blurted out that Rhys’s employer had been his own father, Marcus Varrus. He drew a deep breath, composing himself. “His master had no interest in the things Rhys dreamed about. He wanted only implements his slaves could use to till the ground and harvest the crops, and he would not waste money on a furnace he believed he didn’t need. So Rhys swallowed his dreams and taught me simpler things. But he always said that someday he would teach me how the ancient Persians made their blades—the blades that could bend double and spring back into shape, their edges unharmed and so keen that men could sometimes make them sing.”

  “But he did not.”

  “No. He died before he could.”

  “So he taught you nothing.”

  “It was what he taught me that Ajax saw in my blade there. The spine, as you called it. Rhys was never able to make his ancient sword, but he never stopped trying, even though the tools he had were inadequate. And I paid attention to everything he did and listened to everything he said, even when he knew he would not succeed. I could see what he was trying to achieve, and I understood why he could not achieve it.”

  “And why was that?”

  “Because his tools were what they were and his fire was—”

  “No. I meant, why could you see what he was trying to achieve?”

  Varrus blinked, as if unable to believe that Hanno had failed to grasp what he had said. “Because I had been listening,” he said. “Because he was my teacher. I understood everything he told me. I knew how the process was supposed to unfold, how it would have unfolded had he been able to create a fire hot enough to do what needed to be done. But he couldn’t…”

  They sat in silence for long moments, interrupted only by occasional ear-shattering bursts of noise from the work outside, and then Hanno rose abruptly to his feet, his movements precise and deliberate.

  “Come,” he said, and once again Varrus followed him meekly until he heard a deep-throated roaring noise somewhere ahead of him and turned around the corner of a sooty brick wall to see a sight that made him forget everything else he had seen and heard that morning.

  He was standing in one corner of a huge, rectangular, brick-paved open-air space enclosed on three sides by high, windowless brick-walled buildings, and in the exact centre of the space, isolated from everything around it by an encircling walkway five or more paces wide, stood a single but complex structure: the tallest, largest brick-clad furnace he had ever seen. It looked as though it incorporated two separate, oversized ovens, but otherwise it was comparable in every detail to every other furnace he had seen, yet as different to all of them as Demetrius Hanno was to other men. Most of all, though, it made him think immediately of Dominic Mcuil’s tall oven, and he resolved to find some way of discovering, discreetly, if there was more of a connection between Dominic Mcuil and these men here than he had suspected.

  The air between him and the outer wall of the kiln shimmered from the heat being thrown out, and he noted now each feature of the thing, including a long, glazed earthen pipe, as wide as the chest of a large man, that emerged from the ground close to the base of the furnace wall and tapered to less than a quarter of its size before it disappeared into the brickwork. He turned to the giant, who was eyeing him.

  “Bellows?” he asked, and went on without waiting for an answer. “Tubular air chutes, piston driven, powered by a waterwheel on the far side of that wall. Am I correct?”

  Hanno inclined his head. “Correct,” he said. “You have seen such a device before now?”

  “Aye, very similar but much smaller, in my uncle Dominic’s forge.”

  The giant indicated the high furnace. “Would this have pleased your friend Rhys Twohands, think you?”

  “I believe the very sight of it would have gladdened him. Does it burn hotter than other furnaces?”

  “It does, as I differ from dwarves.”

  “Hmm. And what are those?” He nodded towards a wide rectangular board equipped with long carrying handles and shoulder straps and loaded with thick, empty earthen bowls, some of them nested inside one another and all of them heavy looking. They were made from a material he did not recognize.

  “Those are crucibles,” Hanno said. “They probably mean nothing to you now, but you will come to know them well.”

  Varrus nodded, and looked around him one more time. “Rhys would have loved this,” he said, “and I will hope to earn the privilege of working here.”

  Hanno nodded his huge head impassively. “I believe you might,” he said.

  SEVENTEEN

  Throughout the month that followed, Varrus spent most of his time head to head or side by side with Demetrius Hanno, bent over an anvil as the big man hammer-welded metal strips or gazing down with him at drawings on a workbench as Hanno sought to perfect the tapered outline of a cutting edge or an emerging sword blade. Varrus seldom spoke, but by that time, whenever he did say something, his words were heeded, and though his opinions might later be dismissed, Hanno always discussed their dismissal with him, analyzing their weaknesses so that his student was constantly learning.

  The true beginnings of his comprehension of where his studies might be going, though, came on a morning when he had been watching his mentor finishing a blade, shaping it effortlessly into a long, slender, flawless weapon with a barely discernible leaf-waisted flair in the first third of its length. Varrus had been watching the birth of this particular piece, admiring the care and attention with which Hanno had used a round-nosed chisel to fashion the delicately graduated twin channels flanking the central spine, and he was now anticipating the pleasure of watching the giant start smoothing and burnishing the lovely blade and adding a hilt. He was astounded, then, when Hanno hoisted it up to eye level with the tongs, studied it for several moments, hefted it speculatively, and then turned away to bury it in the coals of the forge again.

  “What are you doing?” Varrus made no attempt to mask the horror in his voice, and Hanno glanced sideways at him.

  The giant selected a long, slender rod from the pile beside him and thrust it, too, into the forge beside the blade. “It needs to be a little hea
vier,” he said.

  “But it was perfect!”

  Again came that sideways glance. “No. Had it been perfect there would be no need to add more weight. It was flawed—too light. What frightens you?”

  “Frightens me? Nothing frightens me. It simply seems like a waste—a waste of time, more than anything else.”

  The giant turned down his lips and tilted his head sideways. “Time well spent is never wasted. This will be a better blade next time. Are you afraid the metal will grow soft, with too much forging?”

  “No! That’s nonsense. You know that’s not why I objected.”

  “Then why did you object?”

  “Because it was done! It was beautiful and you threw it back into the fire. Some soldier might have taken great pleasure in owning that sword.”

  To Varrus’s astonishment, Demetrius Hanno began to smile, and his gigantic features were transformed. He stood up and flexed his enormous shoulders, then bent his elbows and clenched his fists, twisting slowly from the waist, first left, then right. When he was done, he picked up his tongs again and removed the barely heated sword blade and the fresh metal rod from the charcoal, setting them side by side on the brickwork edge of the firepit. “We can reheat these later,” he said. “For now, walk with me.”

  He crossed directly to a wall cabinet that contained finished samples of some of the work his people had produced in the armouries. He picked out two Hispanic swords and hefted them, one in each hand, before replacing one and closing the cabinet. He tested the edge of the sword he had chosen with his thumb, then made his way outside, into the vastness of the high-roofed, clamorous armouries, carrying the naked blade. There, to Varrus’s surprise, the giant ambled about aimlessly, looking all about him as he weaved his way around and between obstacles until he reached a junction of two wide pathways, where he stopped, staring off to his right before he straightened up to his full height and headed off in that direction. Varrus followed him, but saw no attraction there, other than a pair of legionaries in the distance, talking with one of the armoury’s staff, recognizable by his dark grey tunic.

  That, though, was indeed what had attracted Demetrius Hanno, for he made directly towards the distant trio, shouting to them to wait. They stopped talking, watching curiously as he and Varrus approached. Hanno flipped the sword he had been carrying and held it out, hilt first, to the decanus, who took it hesitantly, his eyes shifting nervously from Hanno to Varrus and back, wondering what was happening here.

  “Swing it, try it,” Hanno ordered, and the fellow did so, tentatively at first, and then more boldly as he began to appreciate the weight and balance of the weapon in his hand. “You like it?”

  The man’s eyes widened and he nodded.

  “It’s yours, then,” came the growling rumble. “Take it and look after it well. But give me yours, the one in your belt.”

  Mystified, but agreeably, the decanus did as he was bidden, and Hanno thanked him with a nod that included the other two men, then strode away again, retracing his route until he and Varrus were back at the smithy.

  “Now,” the smith said. “Watch this.”

  He went straight to a heavy vise bolted to one of the wooden workbenches and spun its screw open far enough to let him insert the first six inches of the decanus’s blade vertically between the jaws. “Six unciae,” he growled. “Far enough to clear the point and isolate the blade.” He took hold of the sword’s upright hilt, the heel of his hand down so that the boss of the hilt showed above his thumb. “This is a standard, state-issued Hispanic sword, selected at random, as you witnessed, from the equipment of a serving soldier of decanus rank. This is the weapon that ensured Rome’s conquests and carved out its empire. Now watch.”

  He flexed his fingers and then gripped the sword tightly, and Varrus watched in awe as the enormous muscles in the giant’s arm twisted into corded knots from the pressure he was exerting. And then, slowly, the blade began to bend and buckle, yielding with a stressful groaning sound until it was barely recognizable as having been a sword at all.

  “The noise came from the friction between the blade and the jaws of the vise,” Hanno said. “Swords do not scream as they bend. That is reserved for people to do.”

  Varrus had been watching grimly as the sword blade twisted and bent. “Tell me, then,” he said. “What did all that achieve?”

  “To this point? Nothing at all, except to demonstrate that the blade was of inferior quality. But if the demonstration of that inferiority enables you to see from now on that we, as weapons smiths and sword makers, have responsibilities, then it will have served its purpose. Our sole purpose as makers of blades should be to ensure that those blades are as close to indestructible as we can make them. The moment you accept that as the truth that governs your life as a smith, your life itself will change.” He loosened the jaws of the vise, pulled out the ruined weapon, and tossed it casually on top of a pile of scraps waiting to be melted down and reused. “You cannot degrade a blade by reforging it, unless you are unforgivably careless. Reforging enhances the best features of your metal—makes it more malleable, more ductile, more willing to be shaped and handled. Do you remember asking me about the crucibles?”

  “I do. By the furnace oven.”

  “It is time now for you to learn what we use them for. Or do you know already?”

  Varrus shook his head slowly. “I know nothing about them, save that they looked heavy and I didn’t recognize the material they were made from.”

  Hanno nodded gravely. “Many smiths are strange people,” he said quietly, without making any effort to explain his change of topic. “Taciturn, moody, often solitary and secretive by nature. Jealous of their knowledge and unwilling to share it.”

  “Cooks are the same way,” Varrus said, smiling.

  Hanno looked down at him sharply. “What did you say?”

  “I said cooks are the same, the same as smiths, solitary and secretive, afraid of having people steal their most precious secrets.”

  “That is absolutely true,” the giant said, his face awash with astonishment. “I had never thought of it before. What made you think of it?”

  “I knew a cook like that once, in Dalmatia. He ran a large kitchen and could feed more than a hundred people at a time, and his food was famous. There were things that he alone knew how to do, dishes and intricate blends of tastes and flavours that he alone could make. But even though I was a young boy, I could see he lived in fear of someone stealing his secrets, for they were what kept him separate from other, lesser cooks.”

  Hanno was nodding. “And so he kept them to himself, safe in his head. That surpasses simple selfishness or foolishness, for when such people die, whatever special knowledge they have dies with them and is lost forever. That is why those of us who are glad to share our knowledge are grateful to be able to do so. Your friend Rhys Twohands was one of those, the enlightened kind. I fear, though, that he never even knew what he was lacking—” He held up a hand to forestall Varrus’s protest. “It is true,” he insisted. “You told me so yourself, by your failure to recognize those crucibles. Time now to learn,” he said. “But notice I do not say to understand, for no one seems to really understand what I will tell you now. It is all mystery and sorcery.”

  He looked around to see what everyone else was doing, and apparently seeing nothing to cause him concern, he beckoned with his head and led Varrus again into his sanctum, where he waved him to a chair and sat at his table, thinking and frowning for a few moments before he began to speak.

  “You know that we smelt iron and then work it to remove impurities, and you know the metal thus made is called wrought iron. Beyond that point, though, no one knows anything with certainty. Clear understanding stops and the mysterious ways of the gods assume control. The deities inform us what we ought to do.”

  “Do you mean Vulcan?”

  Hanno shrugged massively. “We assume that Vulcan’s is the loudest voice in this arena, but who can say with certainty? The gods a
re gods. We are but men. The gods permit us to achieve the things they wish us to achieve, but at the same time, they defy us to understand why we should achieve what we then do. And that is more true with iron than with any other thing I know. We, being mere men, fail to understand what we are doing, even while achieving the results the gods decreed. Are you understanding me thus far?”

  “I believe so. You are saying we do what we do in ignorance of how we do it.”

  “Not quite. We do what we do in ignorance of why we do it. The how is straightforward. We follow the rules we were taught by our own teachers. In time, if you follow faithfully the rules I will teach you, you will be able to do everything I do, and if I have taught you well, you should be able to surpass me in skill one day. That is simple truth, dictated by logic. But in the making of strong blades, logic has no validity. And so at times we must rely on simple faith, and place our trust in matters that appear to be sorcerous. Tell me about the Persian smith who taught your friend Rhys.”

  The shift left Varrus blinking. “I—I don’t know much at all,” he said, looking bewildered. “I never asked about him. Rhys spoke of him from time to time, and always with affection, but I didn’t know the man. He died years before I was born.”

  Hanno nodded his great head slowly. “That is reasonable, but think hard, for it could be important, and I believe you may find you know more about the man than you believe you do. Take as much time as you need. When you are ready to tell me what you can, I will be outside.”