Camulod Chronicles Book 5 - The Sorcer part 1: The Fort at River's Bend

by Whyte, Jack

  "Anyway, here are the dimensions of the thing, this list along the edge, as exactly as I could measure them. The angle of the taper, two ways, length and thickness. The length of the tang—it has a triple tang, did you know that?" He checked himself, glancing at me. "Of course you did— it was you who showed me how and why. Anyway, as you know, one piece of that tang, the central strip, looks like a normal tang, but the other two are bent at right angles, to form the bracing—skeleton might be a better word—for the poured cross-hilt, here. Then there is the length and the thickness of the cross-hilt itself, the length and diameter of the hilt, the size of the pommel, and of course, in the case of Excalibur itself, the binding and securing of the covering on the hilt—silver and gold wire intertwined above this blackish, rough material that I guess to be some kind of leather." He stopped speaking and moved around the table to where he could face both of us.

  'That brings me to the reason for making two sets of drawings. I could have used Excalibur itself to highlight the differences in the two, but in the preparation for this meeting, I chose to make two sets of drawings, so we will be comparing like to like. Look here."

  His index finger swooped to touch on the drawing of the ornately carved and decorated bar of Excalibur's cross- hilt. "This workmanship is superb. Unique and pure Celtic. Loops and twining branches, thorns and leaves, with every detail perfect. Whoever did this was a master. But I see no need to have anything resembling that on the new sword. A plain crossbar is all we need for that one—a functional guard against accidental dismemberment, as I remember you described it, Ambrose. Plain, simple, straight bar of metal—fundamentally an abnormal, lateral extension of the standard boss with no adornments at all, that's what's called for here.

  "Same thing with the hilt and the pommel. We'll pour the whole thing, of course, so the pommel will be poured as part of the mould and it won't look anything like the cockleshell on the real one. But there's a problem there, perhaps minor, although it could be major. Either of you have any idea what I'm talking about?"

  I glanced at Ambrose, and both of us shook our heads. "What is it?" I asked.

  "Weight, and perhaps balance, since the one affects the other. Weight is the one that concerns me. We've weighed the sword, as it is, but I've no idea of the individual weights of the various elements—the blade itself, minus the hilt, for example—but most particularly the weight of the cross- hilt. That is a big, heavy cross bar, functional and solid, built to be a strong protector against other blades, but the decorations on it there are deeply graven, almost as if they were incised, although we know that's not so and they were simply poured into the shaped mould. There's a profusion of them, and it doesn't take a sorcerer's eye to see that. Not an unused thumb pad's width on the whole thing, front and back. Replacing that with a plain bar of iron's going to throw the weight right off, because all those deep grouts between the upraised figures will now be filled with solid metal."

  I raised a hand to stop him. "It doesn't have to be a perfect duplicate, Joseph. There's no need for that degree of nicety."

  "Isn't there, Master Cay? You told me you required a duplicate. A duplicate is a perfect replica. Besides, if it's too different, the balance is likely to be as ill bestowed as in a drunken man. If this new weapon is to do the job you want it to, then it behooves us to make the damn thing as close as possible to a perfect twin of the original. And we want to get it right the first time, because it will take long months to make, and months again to remake, starting from the basic elements, if it's wrong. That would mean a complete re-start—we can't make modifications to correct errors. D'you take my meaning?"

  "Aye, I do, and there's no doubt you're absolutely right. But all we require is a working replica, not necessarily a perfect duplicate. Is your brother capable of doing this?"

  Joseph looked squarely at each of us in turn. "I'll tell you true, I would rather make this sword than anything else I could ever think of, and I believe I could make it as easily here as my brother can in Camulod. But common sense says differently. The forges at Camulod, built as they were by Publius Varrus and my father, are well established and the best equipped I've ever seen. Besides that, the iron statue's there, not here, and you, Ambrose, will be returning there tomorrow, so the work could be in hand within the week. Having said all that, I'll state my opinion on my brother. Carol is the only other man in Britain I would trust with such a task."

  "Excellent! Then I am satisfied. Have you any other questions? Anything further you wish to discuss?"

  "Aye, one thing. The colour of the blade. It's like polished silver, it's so pure, How was that achieved?"

  I shook my head. "I don't know, with any kind of certainty. Publius Varrus did not write of that stage of the sword's development. But I have always assumed it worked the same way as the shine on the skystone dagger."

  "On the what?"

  "The skystone dagger. That was what Publius Varrus called the knife that launched him on the search for his skystone, the mysterious rock that fell from the heavens, the one from which he smelted the metal of the statue we call the Lady of the Lake. His grandfather, Varrus the Elder, had made it from the metal smelted from another, smaller skystone he had found when Publius was a mere child. That was more than a hundred years ago. Publius buried the dagger, eventually, with Caius Britannicus—his parting gesture to his finest friend. Anyway, in his writings Publius Varrus mentioned that he had asked your own father, Equus, how his grandfather had made the metal of the blade shine so brightly, and Equus responded that the brightness was already there, within the metal. They had merely had to polish it to bring it out, and the more they burnished it, the brighter it grew. That is all I can tell you."

  "Hmm, Then if you're right, and if the same holds true of the metal in the statue, all we need do to keep it dull is simply to refrain from polishing or burnishing the blade. I've never seen this statue. Does it shine like the sword?"

  "No, not at all, and yet it is lighter in colour than all other iron I have seen, and it does not rust—well, I suppose I can't really say that. It has never been exposed to any risk of rust. It has been sitting dry and well maintained in Publius Varrus's own Armoury since the day it was first made. The only time he removed it was when he melted it. down to obtain the metal for Excalibur, after which he resculpted it and returned it to its place in the Armoury. Is that important?"

  Joseph shrugged. "Only you can answer that. You are the one who will be using the new sword. How important is it to you?"

  "It isn't, but I suspect, if our conjectures prove true, that the blade will have a brightness all its own. Even so, we should warn Carol not to make it mirror-bright, like its twin, here. Our purpose in making it is not to draw attention to it—quite the opposite, in fact." I turned to Ambrose. "Will you remember all of this when you speak to Carol, Ambrose, or should I write it down?"

  He shook his head. "No need. The drawings are all I will require. I won't forget a word of this discussion or the ones that went before. My head works well, in such matters."

  "One more thing I have to ask," Joseph resumed. "Perhaps the most important. How big is this statue, this Lady? I mean, is there enough metal in it to make another sword?"

  I gazed at him, speechless and suddenly filled with apprehension. "I have no idea," I said. "I mean, I know how big the statue is now, but I never saw the original, so I have no way of knowing how much metal Varrus took from it to make Excalibur. I've always presumed he took half, but that is sheer presumption. What will we do if there is not enough metal?"

  "Well, we will find out early in the proceedings, as soon as we begin to melt it down and turn it into work rods, because we know the number, weight and dimensions of what we require. But by God's bones, we might end up making a scaled-down version, according to what we have to work with. Will that suffice, if it should come to that?"

  I shrugged. "I suppose so, but I really can't see that being the case. The statue must be at least three times, perhaps five times or mor
e the weight of Excalibur. I haven't tried to carry it in years, not since I was a boy, but I recall its being very heavy."

  "Aye, for a boy." Joseph made a harrumphing sound. "Well, it needs must be twice the weight, at least, for I'll guarantee that half the original weight will be chiseled out and filed away. On the other hand, if you are right and it's five or six times the weight, we may be able to make two of them."

  "That would be most unlikely, I should think." I glanced at Ambrose. "What do you think, Ambrose?"

  "I'm the last person you should ask. I've seen the statue, but I've never paid much heed to it. It is not the most beautiful sculpture in the world. It is large, though, I remember that." He paused, and then pointed to the set of drawings that I myself had found so strange and incomprehensible. "What are these things, Joseph, these strange symbols?"

  Joseph glanced at me and grinned. "Do you know what they mean, Cay?"

  When I shook my head, Joseph moved to unwrap the long cloth-wrapped bundle that had clanked so heavily when Ambrose laid it down, and we watched curiously as he extracted a longish, boss-hilted sword, in the style of a Roman cavalry spatha, together with a handful of plain, thin iron rods about the length of his arm, from wrist to shoulder, approximately two handspans. Some of them were round in section, less than the tip of a man's little finger in diameter, others flattened into strips.

  Joseph offered the sword, hilt first, to Ambrose. 'That is the finest blade I ever made." He nodded towards the iron rods. "Do you know what those are?"

  Ambrose smiled, looking from the sword he now held to the rods.

  "Joseph, I have a feeling you will be unsurprised when I tell you I have no idea."

  "Well, those are working rods. They're the next sword I will make." He reached into the bundle again and brought out a large, shapeless lump of pasty, whitish material with a chalky consistency and placed it beside the rods. "And this is what I'll use to help me achieve that."

  Ambrose prodded the lump with the point of the spatha. "And what is that?"

  "Birdshit, for the most part—pigeon dung, in fact— mixed with flour, honey, milk and a little olive oil."

  I laughed aloud, for a sudden memory of my Uncle Varrus had sprung into my mind, bringing with it a recollection of many long summer afternoons spent with a small scraper and a metal container, scraping pigeon droppings from the dovecote in the Villa Britannicus, for which I was rewarded in a variety of delightful ways. Ambrose glanced at me askance, thinking we were mocking him, and I held up my hands, palms outward, shaking my head to disclaim any complicity in this.

  "It's true," Joseph protested. "One of the oldest secrets of the ancient smiths. A paste made of these ingredients, and coated on the iron during heating and forging, hardens the iron." From the expression on his face, Ambrose was still plainly unconvinced and Joseph went on, laughing now, "I wouldn't lie to you in this, Master Ambrose. If you think of that lump there as being made of a hundred equal parts, then forty of those parts will be pigeon shit, twenty- one of them plain, wheaten flour, fourteen of them honey, twenty-three parts milk, and two parts olive oil. That, you'll see if you count them, makes a hundred, and if you think I came up with that out of my head, you give me too much credit. Now these—" He broke off, his hand outstretched towards the thin iron rods, and turned to me again. "May we look again at Excalibur? It will be easier to explain my point if I have it here, to show you what I mean."

  I brought out the great sword and handed it to him, and he held it extended in front of him, gripping the hilt in both of his square, strong, smith's hands, his lips pursed in a low whistle of wonder.

  "Even now, I can't believe this tiling exists. Look at the size of it! Unblemished, absolutely flawless. Until I set eyes on this, I would never have believed such a weapon could be made, let alone made so well. God's bones, I

  know men who are not as tall as this is long from tip to tip, and so do you! No man, nor no armour in the world, could withstand such a blade." He raised it, straight- armed, until it reared above him to touch the low, vaulted roof above his head, and then he lowered it again swiftly, bringing the cross-hilt close to his face and pointing to the greatest width of the blade as he addressed himself again to Ambrose.

  "Look you here, now, at this portion, the thickest and the strongest section. It is, what? three and a half, four fingers wide? Now look here, where the twin blood channels begin, and note the depth to which they sink. Note, too, the patterns in the metal. You see them?"

  "Aye, the wavy lines. What causes those?"

  'The forging of the sword. Now look here at the parchment and learn a little of the weapon-maker's craft. These marks that mystified you are easily explained." He indicated the strange, stylized markings that had puzzled us.

  "If you count, you'll see the entire process of making a sword blade, right there, in ten descending steps. It's an oversimplification, of course, and it gives no indication of the amount of work involved, but to a smith's eye, it's absolutely simple and straightforward. The trick is to realize that you're looking at the thickest part of the blade, the piece I just pointed out to you, just beneath the cross-hilt. Look at the bottom one first. If you were mad enough to saw through the blade at that point, just beneath the cross- guard, and look directly at the sawed-off stump of it, that's what you would see. Then, moving back up to the top one step at a time, you see a reversal of the smithing process, all the way back to the seventeen narrow rods of plain, wrought iron that you started with. Can you see it? Cay, can you?"

  I nodded, for what he had described was the missing step between reading Uncle Varrus's observations and notations and seeing them put into effect in very simple terms. Ambrose, however, had never met or known Publius Varrus and had probably never set foot inside a forge. He was staring in perplexity at the drawing. Joseph watched him.

  "You have a question, Master Ambrose. Ask away."

  "The three large black dots, marked as 'twisted and forged.' What does that mean? I can see the seventeen rods on the first line becoming the flattened and squared pieces on the second, but where did the three come from?"

  "Here, here and here," Joseph answered, tapping a finger on the second line. "See, there are three sets of five black rods divided from each other by two whites. Each of those sets of five black rods—three flat in the middle and one square on each flat side—is twisted and forged into a single spiralled rod. We coat each strip of them in the bird dung mixture, bind them together with wire, fire them up, weld one end, just to hold them together, and then clamp that end in a vice. Then, using tongs, we twist the other ends into a spiral. It's tricky, and it takes a long time and many heatings of the metal, because it can only be done when the iron's yellow-hot and soft, and it loses its heat quickly—but in the end, provided you don't do anything stupid, you end up, in each instance, with a single, tightly wound, spiralled rod of layered iron. That's where those markings along the edges of the blade and in the blood channel come from."

  He reached over and pulled several pieces of parchment towards him, layering them carefully, one atop the other, so that the deckled edges showed as a succession of tiny steps. "See that, the pretty way the edges flow together? Same thing happens with the iron. You twist five flat straps of metal into a spiral, and you end up with a rod that has twenty grooves running its length—four edges for each strap, you see? Then you heat the whole thing up again and pound it with a smith's hand maul until it's flat again, and you see those markings in the iron, where the edges have been hammer-fused so flat that all they leave are line markings."

  "But why go to so much trouble, Joseph? Why not just work with one thick piece of iron in the first place? And why the pigeon dung? I don't follow any of that."

  I crossed my arms and leaned my buttocks comfortably against the table as I heard the incomprehension in my brother's voice. I had no urge to interrupt, even though I could have answered his first question, at least. In response, Joseph picked up one of the thin, round rods and casually bent it
into a circle shape with his hands, then handed it to Ambrose.

  "Wrought iron is too damn soft, in its natural state. Don't ask me why, or why it changes character when you layer it and forge it in multiple strips, because I can't tell you. But I can tell you that if you try to twist a single piece of iron into a spiral, sooner or later it will break, and usually sooner than later. So we layer the strips and twist them, and they reinforce each other. As we do that, even before we do it, we coat the individual strips with the heating mixture. I only know it works, and smiths have been using it for hundreds of years because the simple truth is that a spiral rod made that way is harder, and tougher, than an identical rod made the same way, without the mixture.

  "Adding the mixture demands an additional degree of care in the heating process. We can't simply coat the rods and thrust them into the coals—the paste would simply burn away. So we smear on the paste, pack the bundles in it, wrap them in cloth and tic them with string. Then we pack the whole thing again, this time in sand, in what we call a gutter trough. That done, we heat the package in a wood fire to orange-red heat for a couple of hours, and then allow everything to cool. Take my word for it, those rods, when the time comes to twist them, are much harder to manipulate than the untreated rods.

  "Now, if you look again at the second line, there, you'll see that only two of the sets of rods—the outer sets—are marked for heat treatment. That's because they're the two that need to be hardest. The central piece won't need to do the work of the two outside rods. Its prime function is simply to support the others. The three rods, though, in their upper extensions—about a handspan in each case—will not be welded together. They will form the triple tang on which we'll build the hilt and cross-guard. So, there you have it. The secrets of a sword-maker."