by Miya Kazuki
“Spit out what? I haven’t done anything wrong. These are false charges. I’m innocent.”
“Don’t play dumb, idiot. I’m talking about what you’re about to do. What’re those boards for? What is the ink for? What are you making? What do you need? Spit it all out.”
Lutz leaned in from the side to block Benno’s fervor a bit. His eyebrows lowered with concern and he tossed his opinion in. “Whatever it is, it’s gotta balance with the Myne Workshop’s paper-making. We don’t wanna go under projections here. Is the stuff you’re making gonna need anything from the forest?”
“Ummm... One second. I need to organize my thoughts.” I took out my diptych and started writing down what I needed. To make toys, I needed boards and ink. To make ink, I needed... to think for a minute. When I finally looked up, I saw that Benno and Lutz had boards and ink at the ready to write down what I said.
“I’m planning to make (reversi), (shogi pieces), and (playing cards). All of them will need boards and ink.” My list of things made Benno shake his head with a doubtful look in his eyes.
“What in the world is any of that?”
“They’re toys like the karuta. Oh, but they’re not designed around teaching kids to read, so even adults can play with them. I think they’ll be perfect for killing time in the winter.” They would be a good form of entertainment to pass the time with when locked in by blizzards. Just doing winter handiwork all winter would get boring. Poor people needed to do winter handiwork for the extra money, but what did rich people do over the winter?
“Ink is necessary for each of them, so I would like to get ink made as soon as possible.”
“You said something about making a different kind of ink than the ink workshop makes, yeah?”
“Yes. Since it will be made in an entirely different way from the workshop ink, we won’t need to get permission from anyone to make it, right? Nobody will come complaining?” If we made the same ink that had its manufacturing process kept secret by the Ink Guild, it was possible that we would break some contract magic or violate some obscure rule.
“Yeah, we won’t need anyone’s permission if it’s something new. They might come complaining, but we can brush’m off. But since you spilled the beans to the ink workshop’s foreman, they’re probably gonna be sending people over here to probe what we have.”
“What? I didn’t leak anything. I said the bare minimum necessary to learn what I wanted to know.” We sure do interpret some things differently, I thought as Benno’s eyebrows shot up with anger.
“If telling them you know their trade secrets, know different kinds of ink, and know how to make those different kinds of ink isn’t spilling the beans, what is?!”
“Bwuh? But I only said that to figure out what kind of ink they’re making. It was necessary to prepare myself emotionally for making a new kind of ink. Plus, my plan right now is to sell the manufacturing process to the Ink Guild once I have a prototype ready, so they can mass produce it. Them learning about it sooner isn’t a big deal.”
The second I said that, Benno shut his eyes tightly and rubbed his temples. He shook his head several times in disbelief, then glared at me. “Hold up. You’re going to sell the manufacturing process to the Ink Guild?”
“That’s right. I mean, just think about how dangerous it got when you were fighting with the vested interests to make your Plant Paper Guild. Otto’s still scrambling to help you keep it going on top of his soldier work, isn’t he? You’ve spread your wings too far and don’t have enough employees to keep up; making another new guild for ink would just be too much. If other people will make the ink for us, I say we let them.”
He had made the Plant Paper Guild without my knowing and was somehow managing to keep it going by enlisting the help of others, so okay. I was fine with that. But I heard from Lutz that Benno was running his relatives in circles getting Plant Paper Guilds and paper-making workshops established in other cities. Even the Italian restaurant, which he had made to compete with Leise, was giving him a lot of trouble—according to Mark, he was suffering for going out of his area of expertise. I didn’t think making yet another new guild would be anything but reckless.
“...You really make my head hurt sometimes. Why can’t you respect profit a little more?”
“Well, I’m not a merchant. If they don’t mind the Myne Workshop making some itself, I think only good will come from spreading how to make new ink and lowering its price worldwide.”
Lutz, looking exasperated at my conversation with Benno, took out his diptych and tried getting us back on track. “Myne, Master Benno, why don’t we worry about how to sell the ink once it’s finished? What do we need to make that ink?”
“Oh, good point. Ummm... I thought of four things that could work as ink here: (India) ink, (oil paint), (Gutenberg ink), and (crayon). But we can forget about (crayon), since out of all those it’s the least suitable for being woodcut ink.”
“Yeah, your explanations never make sense, Myne. What do we need to make those things?”
I looked down at my diptych. “We need something called a pigment to color the ink, and the easiest pigment for making black is soot. Any kind of ink will turn black if made from soot, so getting soot comes first.” India ink, as traditionally made in China, could be made from mixing soot, animal hide glue, and spices. Oil paint could be made from mixing soot and drying oil. The extremely sticky kind of ink historically used after the advent of printing, which I was calling “Gutenberg ink” for convenience, could be made by mixing soot into boiled linseed oil.
“The (India) ink I know is made from coleseed oil and sesame oil mixed with lamp soot and burnt pine soot, but I guess we shouldn’t be picky when making prototypes. We should be fine just cleaning our hearths and getting the soot from them... whiiich is something we did last year.” I remembered Mom making me wear a bunch of rags and clean the hearth last year when I wanted to make soot pencils. I was pretty sure Lutz had ultimately cleaned his own hearth to get more soot too.
“Oh yeah, I remember that. Sounds good to me, our moms sure loved us helping.”
“I’ll go ahead and drop my soot on you too. Be grateful, you don’t even have to work for it.” Benno grinned as if he was plotting something. I didn’t know what his plan was, but chimneys and hearths needed to be cleaned before winter anyway. I had no reason to reject free soot.
“What’re you gonna do with the soot? Do you need anything else?” Lutz said, and I saw him write “gather soot” on his own diptych. I looked at my diptych to double check that India ink needed soot and hide glue.
“Next is (hide glue), I think? The really sticky paste that you can harvest from the skin and bone marrow of cows, pigs, and so on is important for making (India) ink. I’ll also want it to harden the cover of my books once they’re ready.”
“The skin and bones of animals, huh? Shouldn’t be too hard to get if we buy some meat for winter prep and butcher it all in the orphanage.”
I faltered, thinking back to the pig that got stabbed and strung up in the farming village. I had naturally gotten used to that kind of thing by now, and I wouldn’t pass out or scream at the sight of meat being butchered, but it was hard for me to participate when I didn’t have the strength to cut meat like that.
“Butchering meat in the orphanage? Do they normally do that?” asked Benno, and the answer was clear as day. No way did the orphan kids have experience butchering meat when all their food was given to them and they hadn’t even seen a raw potato before.
“Definitely not.”
“In that case, how about I order some extra meat for the orphanage when I do my own winter prep?”
“That would be a big help! Thank you.” I hadn’t participated in the neighborhood butchering due to being sick so often, which meant I didn’t know any butchers and I couldn’t use a smoke room for myself. I appreciated Benno’s help so much that I clasped my hands and thanked him.
“You can make that, uh, stuff if you have skin and bones
?”
“I do know how to make (hide glue), roughly, but I don’t have any experience actually making it. But since it’s so useful for so many things, I want to succeed in making it no matter what I have to do.”
Hide glue was made by soaking animal skin and bones in limewater to break them down and remove impurities such as hair, then boiling them in water, then drying the concentrated “glue liquor.” Glue made from skin had more water resistance than glue made from bones. I would prefer glue made from skin, but my priority was just getting any glue at all made and finished.
This variety of hide glue was mainly composed of collagen, a protein, so our amateur India ink would rot if left on its own for too long. It would rot faster during the summer heat and humidity, but on the other hand it would harden too quickly in the cold. Overall, the hide glue was surprisingly hard to deal with.
“So, we need (lime) to make (hide glue). That’s the white stuff you use when building the walls of ho—”
“Oh, lime.” Lutz’s reply taught me the word for lime here. Since lime was used for mortar, Deid—who worked in construction—probably knew where to buy it.
“That’s it, Lutz. Could you ask your dad where to buy it?”
“Sure. Just gotta write lime down. Do we just need to buy a little of it, like we only used a little bit of the ashes for the paper?” Unlike back when we first made paper, Lutz knew how to read and write, his parents had more or less accepted his dream to be a merchant, and he had the funds to buy what he needed. It almost seemed crazy that only a year ago we had no money and relied on our parents’ approval to get anything. So much had changed so fast.
As I wallowed in nostalgia, Lutz finished writing some stuff down and looked back up at me. “Need anything else?”
“Mmm, (India) ink only needs soot and that (hide glue). I’ll need (linseed oil) to make (oil paint), but I think Benno probably knows where to buy that already.” I turned to look at Benno, and so did Lutz.
Benno scratched the back of his head and thought for a bit, but ultimately shook his head. “...Never heard that name before. What is it?”
“Your store deals with linen and flax thread, doesn’t it? Surely you know where to buy the (linseed oil) made from squeezing flax seeds.”
“Oh, linseed oil. Now that’s something I know... but oil doesn’t come cheap,” said Benno, to which I gave an empty smile. Regardless of how expensive it was, we had no choice but to buy it.
“We’re not going to start cultivating flax just to get the oil, and even if we buy the seeds, we don’t have any compressors. I think it would be cheaper just to buy the oil than to go out of our way buying devices to squeeze it out ourselves. You can compare the prices of the seeds and a compressor with the price of the oil to figure out what we should do next year.”
We could also use other kinds of drying oil, but I imagined the linseed oil used in the making of cloth would be easier to get than sunflower oil or safflower oil. I had never seen any safflowers or sunflowers around here.
“I can make the most simple kind of ink there is with these ingredients. All that’s left is the equipment. The best way to get the ink is to put the ingredients on top of a hard slab of rock and grind them together. Kind of like a mortar and pestle, but bigger.”
“Need any weird tools like you did for paper?” asked Benno, and I shook my head.
“No, we don’t actually need many tools. The slab, the pestle, an airtight container for storage, and a scraper. You can probably get most of these by asking a painting workshop. My mom works at a dyeing workshop, I could ask her.”
“...Alright. Everyone get your part of the stuff ready and take it to the Myne Workshop.” Benno ended the discussion there and we said our goodbyes.
Getting soot was easy since Mom and Karla were glad to get our help, but by this point it didn’t even need to be said that I caught a fever after working too hard. While I was bedridden at home, Lutz cleaned the Myne Workshop and Benno’s place for more soot.
“Master Benno was right, we got twice as much soot just like that. Heck yeah.” Lutz brought me up to date when he came to visit me. Apparently Corinna got really excited when she heard Lutz was cleaning Benno’s hearth for soot, and ended up using Otto to get soot from her place as well.
“Otto really is a slave to love. I don’t think he’ll ever be able to say no to Corinna.”
“Oh, and the gray priests worked super hard for us.” When the gray priests heard from Lutz that we were gathering soot, they went right to work cleaning fireplaces in the blue priests’ rooms, the hearths in their kitchens, and the chimneys to get soot for us. They didn’t mind, since it was about time to do winter cleaning anyway. And according to Lutz, Gil cleaned the hearth and fireplace in my chambers.
“Thanks to all that, the Myne Workshop’s got plenty of soot now. Plus, Master Benno bought the linseed oil and I got Dad to buy some lime for us. We asked a painting workshop about the tools, and they should be getting here soon. Right now we’re crushing the soot into fine powder.”
It seemed that the tools and materials were being gathered at the Myne Workshop while I was stuck in bed. ...It sure is nice to have a lot of people working for you.
“Okay, winter preparations haven’t started just yet, so let’s try making the kinds of ink that need oil and put off the hide glue until later. Once that’s done we can make woodcuts and try printing. Oh! Oh, right. We need to order boards for the woodcuts too. But since it’ll be prototype ink, maybe I should make stamps first instead? What do you think, Lutz?”
“Don’t get too excited. You can’t do anything until your fever’s down, remember?”
“Ngh...” I’ll... I’ll start with the oil paint once my fever’s down. Right.
Black Oil Paint
“Dad, pleaaase? I want to use it to check the ink.”
My fever refused to go down, and after Dad brought me a glass of water I sat up and clasped my hands together to start begging. I wrote mirrored letters on a block of wood large enough to grip and asked him to carve the letters out to turn it into a stamp.
“...Sheesh. When I’m done, I’m not gonna show it to you until your fever’s down.”
Two days passed since I asked Dad to see the carved-out block. My fever finally went down and the debate of the century began, with my family arguing that I needed to stay home for a bit before going to the workshop and Lutz arguing that making ink would get me so excited I would get a fever the next time I went to the workshop no matter what.
“Um, I think th—”
“Be quiet, Myne! We know you want to go already!”
Everyone agreed with Tuuli, and I was denied participation in a debate that was about me. Bored, I fished through the storage room and took out a thin wooden board. I stayed in the corner of the kitchen while everyone was arguing and wrapped a cloth around it, then wrapped a layer of bamboo around it so it wouldn’t hurt the paper.
...Eheh, I made a baren. Kinda. This will definitely be important for the woodcuts. The debate ended by the time I finished my baren, with the ultimate decision being that I would stay at home today, but could go to the temple again starting the next day.
A day of waiting built up my hype. With some old clothes I wouldn’t mind throwing out, soap, and the stamp Dad made for me, I was ready to go.
“Are you as excited as I am, Lutz?”
“Yeah. So, how do you make this stuff anyway? You’re gonna have to explain, since you don’t get to help.” He was kinda hiding it, but Lutz did look excited to be making something new again. I couldn’t participate in the making myself since I was forbidden from working in the workshop as a blue shrine maiden, which meant I had to tell Lutz exactly what to do.
“When adding the paint, add small amounts bit by bit. Things will mix together better that way. But to start with, you have to put the soot on top of the marble slab. Then you dig in little holes with your fingers, pour the linseed oil into the holes, and mix it up with the scraper. We don’t wan
t too much oil, so if you think you need more, add only one drop at a time. Once you’ve mixed it up with the scraper, go to town with the pestle.” I explained what to do while using my hands to show how much soot and oil to add.
Lutz fell silent, thinking for a few moments. “...How hard do you mean when you say ‘go to town’?” he asked.
“I’m not sure, it depends on the pigment. When I made this in the past it took about twenty minut— Uuum, about as long as it takes for a pot of water to get boiling, but someone using another pigment might not finish by the time the water’s boiling.”
You had to keep mashing it all until it got silky. The mashing was exhausting and took a lot of grit and endurance. When I explained in cooking terms, Lutz opened his eyes wide in surprise.
“...You managed to make something like that? You, Myne?”
“Back then I was a peppy girl, okay? Everyone always said I was full of energy as long as I got to read books. I even got (perfect attendance) at my (school’s) library.”
“Life sure comes at you fast.”
I gave a big nod. It was hard not to complain that if not for this body, things would have been a lot easier for me. There would be so much more that I could do.
“Alright, I’m going off to the workshop. Come on over whenever you’re ready.” Once we reached the gate, Lutz handed me off to Fran and speed-walked to the workshop. I was going to my chambers to greet my servants before going to the workshop, since I had been bedridden for so long.
“And now that I am better, I believe I shall go to the workshop.”
“Your harspiel practice comes first, Sister Myne.”
I wanted to get started making ink right away, but Rosina stopped me with a smile. An ambush had been set in the place I least expected.
“Daily practice is vital for learning an instrument, but you have already missed practice five days in a row. You will need to practice more than twice as long today to minimize the damage. I believe five times as long will suffice, given that you missed five days.”
