The Castle of the Winds

by Michael Scott Rohan

  Most masters, and the better journeymen, could create more remarkable works, as for example vessels, lined hogsheads even, which could keep their contents cool or hot, or preserve them for long periods; cunning hinges and locks; harness to control difficult horses and oxen; small works such as jewels to enhance the wearer, or the remarkable musical instruments Gille is said to have made; and large ones such as fastenings to secure house walls against damp, roof staves to ward off thunderbolts, stoves that would channel heat where needed and be safe to touch. They also made filters to freshen water, on many different patterns and principles. Kunrad’s, it seems, was unusually good. He appears to have known of the properties of activated charcoal, but also its limitations, preferring silver. This is often a constituent of water filters, but he must have had some way to enhance its properties. It may not have been very efficacious on a microbial level, but served against parasitic infections such as Giardia, possibly what afflicted Olvar after his ducking. Folk of that time, accustomed to less thoroughly treated water, would probably have had more resistance to infections, so the filter might well have been enough to tip the scales of survival in the smiths’ favour.

  Beyond such everyday smithcraft came less conventional creations such as sobriety goblets, love brooches, bracelets and other tokens, fertility girdles, and curiously shaped amulets whose virtues, if that is the word, were intended to have the opposite effect. Serious mastersmiths often looked askance at these, unless they were in need of money, in which case they traditionally had their journeymen make them as test pieces. There was no doubt that such things worked; but even apart from the ethical aspects, the question, as at least one incident in Gille’s career was to show, was how well – and for how long.

  More reputable and more striking, though, were the so-called direction bracelets. Sothrans tended or pretended to confuse these with ordinary magnetic-needle compasses, and the uncannily precise astrolabe-like navigational instruments fashioned by a few specialist smiths. A direction bracelet, though, was deeply imbued with subtler virtues, depending on its maker’s skill. The simplest would swing for a long period in any set direction, for example to mark a path in the dark, or note the sun’s direction behind cloud; but more advanced ones would indicate the direction of a place the user held in his mind. The most powerful models, made, with some difficulty, by practised masters like Kunrad, could often follow a person or a thing, if only the holder set it fixedly enough in their mind, and most surely if the mind was their maker’s. In later years, as the High Roads were extended, and cheaper magnetic compasses became more sophisticated, the sheer expense and effort of making direction bracelets led them to fall from use, until the art was all but forgotten.

  The greatest masters of all, however, those most revered by their fellows, sought to develop one special skill, often to new limits. Sometimes they achieved great leaps forward, discoveries without precedent. Often this was innate genius, but equally often the evidence suggests they were inspired, if nothing more, by contact with the ancient knowledge of the duergar. In this context the smith’s book that Kunrad found, full of marginal hints and scribbles, is especially interesting; the casual references here make little of what it was to become.

  No record of its maker’s name has been preserved. It seems he was a young man, probably a journeyman of scholarly mind well on the road to mastership when he was taken captive. Gille always believed it was the duergar woman who disclosed so much knowledge to him, out of pity for his distress; it is no bad guess. He felt also that it was the very possession of that knowledge that went to the man’s head, and led him to betray the duergar, and also, perhaps, terror at discovering how far superior they were to men. That too is not unlikely.

  Kunrad, when he forswore his craft, seems to have given the book to his prentices, and with them it returned to the North. Its fate is uncertain, unless there is a clue in a text called the Skolnhere-Book. This was a recondite work by a mastersmith of Morvan’s eastern highlands; but it was revised, some seventy years after these events, by another mastersmith of ability called Skolne, who extended and amplified it with strange and highly original observations, theories and experiments. Some were half-intelligible puzzles, only gradually solved, if ever, hundreds of years later. This book renewed the scholarship of smithlore, and was consulted and pondered by the great mastersmiths down to Elof’s day and after. And Skolne, it seems, was one of Gille’s many grandsons.

  Gille himself became better known as a trader and a flamboyant musician and singer of rare skill, and save for his instruments he made only one contribution to the scholarship of smithcraft. That was to commission and take part in an attempt to duplicate the duergar’s strange contracting wire, no doubt for its commercial potential. Apparently the basis was one or more dramatically expansive alloys, woven as wires of varying gauge into loose, subtle webs, which were held between interwoven sheaths – a structure not unlike living muscle. Even with what Kunrad could remember, though, Gille created only feeble structures, apparently little better than modern ‘muscle wire’ alloys.

  Iron and Steel

  What Kunrad, significantly, came to consider his truest achievement was not the armour, or any actual metalwork, but smithcraft in the wider sense – the great furnace. It was all the more remarkable, certainly, because accounts suggest that smelting and steelworking were nowhere near as advanced as in Elof’s time. In both North and South each smith or group of smiths would make what they needed for themselves, often by the co-fusion process, melting cast iron with ‘seeds’ of wrought iron. This could be done in a crucible at the forge hearth, allowing the smith to control the crucial carbon content and any other alloying with great precision. The cast iron itself was smelted on a largely local scale, in small so-called natural-draught furnaces which used low temperatures and relied for their draught on gas buoyancy in a long chimney flue, usually too long to be self-supporting and so built as a shaft of stone or brick running up the side of a hill. More advanced models used various bellows mechanisms to increase the pressure; the largest of these were water-driven, like mills, and could, at their best, produce high-carbon steels of modern quality. It was this kind which the prentices may have expected Kunrad to build. He, however, had been inspired by the smith’s book, perhaps some elementary reference or some duergar comment, and saw how, with the constant lake winds to help, an older and simpler method could be vastly expanded for both smelting and steel-making of unusual quantity and speed.

  This was the ‘frontal’ wind-draught principle. Northerners in particular used this during the first settlements, but later it fell from use. Rather than forced in a chimney, the wind was captured and directed through a series of cells, technically called tuyaus, spread over a wide front along a relatively shallow furnace, essentially a walled open trench. Modern authorities have assumed that such a design could not produce sufficient temperatures for anything more than charcoal-burning. Supposedly wind and pressure fluctuations would disrupt the furnace action and ‘freeze’ the interior, and the open top would let too much heat escape. In fact the open top is part of the operation, the flow both drawing air through the tuyaus and creating a recirculating eddy between the walls which rolls the hot air more evenly through the furnace. The result, by a process still not wholly understood, is a ‘bloom’ of lower-carbon steel in the middle of the furnace, with a layer of high-carbon steel at the bottom, in quantities as great or greater than other designs. Wind-furnace operation turns out to be highly efficient, and probably the only reason it fell from use was that natural-draught furnaces could be built on lower ground, the base rather than the summit of a hill. It is not unlikely that the duergar, favouring the windy mountain heights, would have developed the design further.

  Moreover, increasing the scale of the furnace, as Kunrad did, has a marked effect on its operation. As the area of the frontal wall increases, so does the wind pressure along it, and the speed of the flow over the top, increasing the already fierce pressure gradient which draws
air through the tuyaus. One can easily imagine this producing the weird organ effect the Chronicles mention. The furnace’s hot core area becomes larger and therefore more self-sustaining, easily maintaining temperatures of 1,500°C and higher (the melting point of steel) over a long period. While much depends on factors such as the ratio of ore to fuel and the size of the ore fragments, there is little doubt that this design could far outclass anything else of the time. With the subtle enhancements of smithcraft, it might well match (though with less mechanical control and convenience) early designs of the modern blast furnace, and with many times the capacity. The wash of metal it could unleash, therefore, needs little confirmation.

  The ore Kunrad was so alarmingly given seems, from the description, to have been some form of haematite, a ferric oxide mineral, often occurring very pure and easy to smelt, and a favourite industrial-era source. While it was well chosen by the duergar, it also says something for Kunrad’s own knowledge that he selected such a likely area to search.

  Armour

  While the armour of the time is well documented, relatively little is known of the techniques which produced it. Most of the great weaponsmiths were men of Kunrad’s stamp, single-minded to the point of monomania and often intensely secretive, inclined to pass on their craft, if at all, by whispers. The Daybook of Ambrys, which Elof made use of more than once, was one of the few texts of any depth, and chiefly a collection of useful material from ancient sources otherwise lost, with minutely detailed illustrations and patterns. Designs and fashions changed, but one fact is immediately apparent; that although this was an old and sophisticated culture, plate armour never ousted mail, as it did elsewhere. Ringmail remained the basis throughout North and South, as it had in Morvan of old, and even in Kerys. Plate was added to it as a reinforcement, and only on more expensive suits. Now and again a master armourer such as Kunrad, or Elof in his captivity, would actually incorporate plate and mail into a single unit, using the mail as an underlay for joints and other flexible areas; but this was held to be most difficult, in which none but a master could be trusted.

  It is hard to be sure why this was; not lack of ability, certainly. Many descriptions suggest a skill at shaping subtle joints and mechanisms far in advance of later cultures. One possibility is the fighting style that was passed down through the centuries by the aristocratic warrior orders of Morvan and Ker Bryhaine, brought thence from Kerys itself. There are innumerable accounts of the startling speed and fluency of the fighting skills they drilled into their elite warriors, with a deadly dancer’s grace which plate suits might have hampered. The same preference is found, surprisingly, in astronauts, who consistently prefer more cumbersome flexible suits to solid armour, even though this is demonstrably lighter and less restrictive. It may simply be that mail developed to such a pitch that plate’s lightness and strength were never commanding advantages. Even if their mail was heavier, which is doubtful, it allowed the body to bend and stretch and flex its limbs with a life that plate could not match. Also, it allowed a greater flow of air, especially important in hot climates such as Ker Bryhaine’s. It is known that medieval knights armed cap-a-pie in plate would sometimes suffocate or die of heatstroke in the crush of battle.

  In the North the demand for plate armour would anyway have been limited. Nordeney town guards, usually more of an armed watch than an army, tended to reserve even their mail for parades or battle array, and preferred it as light as possible. Otherwise they wore jerkins of leather, stiffened or studded with riveted metal, of which surplates were also made. Armour such as Kunrad made was mostly worn by the important – and wealthy – citizens and professional captains who commanded such forces.

  Throughout the tale the terminology of armour has been rendered in terms of the medieval European equivalents – vambrace, gardbrace, greave and so on. However, the actual pieces would not always have looked the same. The calf protection corresponding to a greave, for example, was almost always jointed or otherwise flexible, conforming more closely to the flexion of the muscle without yielding to blade or blow, and probably transferring much of the force of such a blow to the shinguard. The better mastersmiths evidently understood such mechanical principles, and the lesser ones imitated them. In general, armour seems to have been made more living and expressive than the kinds we are accustomed to, more like an enhancement of the body within; and in that, as in all else, Kunrad’s creation excelled.

  Smithcraft and Trade

  Smiths, like most craftsmen, generally settled in a particular town or district, but many travelled, some or all of the time. As journeymen they would often spend time with different masters to broaden their skills, or seek somewhere their special abilities were in demand. Others travelled to sell their wares, many into the Southlands; there Northland gold and worked metal fetched high prices, however little men professed to believe in its power. The majority of smiths, less adventurous like Kunrad, simply sold their wares to ordinary traders, often on commission, to be sold on in the Southlands alongside Nordeney’s rich furs and skins, wool, wood and paper, waterproof ropes of seabeast hide, spices, whalebone and oil, dried fish and distilled drink. Sothran merchants, also the great travellers of their land, would come north bearing the trappings of a richer, more leisured country – cheap grain, fine leather, sophisticated furnishings and fabrics, tapestry hanging for draughty walls, carven wood, books (some of them printed), glass, sugar, wine, preserves and other sweetmeats. Yet all of these treasures could not outprice the works of Northern smithcraft.

  Healers

  In both Nordeney and Ker Bryhaine healing was a specialised skill, but the healers did not correspond exactly to doctors and surgeons of later days. Many folk professed wisdom in the care of sickness and wounds; but above and beyond them there were a few who possessed an innate talent or power for such things, very like smithcraft, but rarer. Whether any such link existed cannot now be said, but it was thought of in much the same way, as an innate ability bequeathed by the Powers to man and passed down along particular bloodlines. Like smithcraft, it could be heightened by study and labour, and often lay latent without them; and it could appear in either sex. Culturally, however, just as smithcraft was largely reserved to men, so healing was thought of as women’s work. Very occasionally a smith would also display powers of healing, and would make extraordinary surgical instruments or other devices that only he could use to their full.

  Metrye was a well-known character of the Northlands who features in other tales of the time, both as healer and seeress, a sour and ambiguous, but basically benign creature. She may simply have been incorporated in Kunrad’s story by the usual process of heroic accretion; but it is by no means impossible that she knew him.

  OF BELIEF AND WORSHIP IN THE

  TWO LANDS

  There are only casual references in Kunrad’s tale to the beliefs of the time, because these seem to have been largely taken for granted, and not dominated society as they did, for example, in medieval Europe. Paradoxically this may have been easier in a world where supernatural potencies were an accepted and everyday fact, but appeared very rarely to ordinary men. Belief centred on two main areas – the governance of the world, and the destiny of mankind.

  The latter was thought to have been given into the hands of a wide range of intelligent forces considered benevolent, hostile or simply indifferent. These, usually called Powers, were thought of as animistic but anthropomorphic beings of many kinds, greater or lesser, who dwelt in nature but sometimes walked among men. At times they would manipulate men’s destinies, for better or for worse, in pursuit of higher causes and according to laws largely hidden.

  The Powers of the Ice were considered to be older, steerers of the world in its lifeless youth and hating the life that had come to defile it, most of all the creature called man. Another, less ancient group espoused life but displayed little special sympathy for man, and in some instances even outright hostility, especially as his realms encroached upon theirs. Only a select few of the gre
atest seemed to care for man at all, among them Ilmarinen, giver of smithcraft, and Raven, a wandering spirit of strange mien and stranger disposition. It was rarely safe to call upon him, unless it were to repay some obligation, for his aid could be almost worse than the original predicament. Others could be kinder, but usually only in individual, exceptional ways – those who most often took human shape, and with it, perhaps, some human empathy.

  Often these were the lesser Powers, vassals, servants or soldiers of their higher brethren, for to them a bodily form, human or otherwise, was comfortable enough. Many enjoyed the appetites and sensations that came with it. The Ice Powers affected to despise these, and be disgusted by flesh; yet they all too often fell victim to it. Their greater fellows, of hostile or friendly persuasion, rarely assumed human form. It seems to have been as uncomfortable for them as being crushed into a small container would be for a human, and as limiting; for it distanced much of their perceptions and powers, their memories even. This, and their unfamiliarity with form and sensation, may account for the peculiar quirks and characteristics many of them, such as Raven, displayed.

  Far more often they would inhabit their chosen medium, as Niarad the great oceans, or Tapiau the forests. By his own account Tapiau was present in every tree, and every growing thing that made up the forest life-cycle, but only in fairly large concentrations, their root systems interwoven like nerve ganglia, did he have enough presence to be fully aware.