Colours in the Steel f-1

by K. J. Parker

  All these people, all these things; and everything a part of the whole, all useless and unable to function without a score of other trades and tradesmen, all of them similarly dependent on the union and fusion of many parts. As he sat and watched, Loredan had an uncomfortable feeling of being the only thing in this city that wasn’t a component, a dedicated part of something else. Yesterday, of course, it had been different; then, he had been very much a part of the business of Perimadeia, albeit the most specialised of specialists perched at the extreme edge of the process, where agreements sometimes slipped their gears and the smooth running of the machine occasionally needed to be lubricated with a little blood. Foolish speculation, he knew; because as soon as he had his board and his piece of parchment from the governors allocating him a pitch, he’d have a place once again, a part to play, a function to perform in the process. It would make more sense to relish this brief interval rather than agonise over it; few men in Perimadeia ever had the chance to stand aside and spend an hour or so not participating.

  ‘All done,’ said the painter. ‘You want to look before I put the varnish on?’

  Loredan nodded and stood up. It turned out to be a perfectly adequate piece of commercial art, with no fight scene and no radiate crown whatsoever. He was relieved.

  ‘Do my ears really stick out like that?’

  ‘Yes.’ The painter dipped his brush in solvent and wiped it on a scrap of rag. ‘Tell you what,’ he said, ‘just so happens I’ve got this really nice set of laudatory verses, five stanzas of elegaics, cancelled order, dirt cheap. Just go nicely round the edges, look. Two quarters.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Trouble with some people is, they fail to recognise the vital importance of positive marketing.’

  ‘Tragic.’

  The painter sighed and cut the beeswax round the neck of a jar of varnish. ‘How about a set of five identical miniatures to hang up in places where the rich and fashionable love to congregate? Gesture of goodwill, call it three quarters?’

  ‘You can call it what you like so long as you don’t expect me to pay for it.’

  ‘The miniatures and the laudatory verses for seven eighths, and I’ll throw in half a yard of picture cord.’

  (-From the ropewalks, three squares over to the west, where they stretch the skeins right across the square on sliding wooden pins; another trade, another hundred or so men whose lives extend just so far and no further.)

  ‘Thanks, but no. Finished yet?’

  ‘Give me a chance, will you?’ the painter groaned. ‘If you’re not careful it smears for a pastime.’

  And of course, Loredan reflected as the painter daubed on the varnish, there’s far more to it than that. On each of these busy tradesmen depends another complex system; wives and families to feed and clothe, children needing to be taught their proper skills, have husbands or apprenticeships found for them; rent to be paid, guild fees and licences and taxes to be met, parents and parents-in-law to be supported in their declining years, burial clubs and friendly societies to be given their dues. By these subsystems each component is locked into the whole so fast that he dare not stir out of his place, so that every part of the machine needs to run smoothly for fear of destroying everything. Curious to think that in other parts of the world, people somehow managed to live without all of this. They were, of course, savages, little better than beasts, creatures who never in all their lives had their portrait painted or took a case to the courts of law; which was why they had to be kept back where they belonged, out of sight of the walls and gates of the Triple City, just in case a busy man on his way to work in the morning might chance to see them and wonder just why in hell he bothered.

  ‘Finished,’ the painter announced. ‘Still be wet for an hour or so, mind. You can take it now if you like, but you’ll get dust in the varnish, sure as eggs.’

  ‘I see,’ Loredan replied, nodding. ‘How’d it be if I left it here for a couple of hours and then came back?’

  ‘Fine,’ said the painter, wiping his hands on a hank of flax. ‘That’ll be five quarters, please.’

  Two hours with nothing to do. Ordinarily, he’d find a tavern (when you have time to kill, it makes sense to take it to a purpose-built abattoir), but he remembered that he didn’t do that sort of thing any more. No money to waste on wine, no drinking in the middle of the day and sleeping it off in the afternoon. Well, then; he could walk back to the Schools, ask if his piece of parchment had been drawn up, be told to come back in an hour or so and still have time to get back to the signwriters’ district before the varnish was dry. Instead, he strolled lazily out in the direction of the Drovers’ Bridge, a part of the city he didn’t often visit. Hectically successful trainers don’t have time to go sightseeing during working hours, so he might as well make the most of it while he could.

  ‘’Scuse me.’

  He looked round, then down. A small child, female, slightly grubby, was pulling his trouser leg. He sighed and felt in his belt pouch for a coin.

  ‘’Scuse me,’ the child said, ‘but you’re Bardas Loredan.’

  Don’t blame yourself, kid, it isn’t your fault. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘How do you know who I am?’

  ‘You’re an advocate, aren’t you?’ The child said the long word like a chicken laying a hexagonal egg: slowly, carefully and with a triumphant flourish at the end. ‘You’re the best in the world, my dad says.’

  ‘Was,’ Loredan replied, frowning. ‘What’s your dad do, then? Is he an advocate?’

  The girl shook her head. ‘He makes barrels,’ she said. ‘But he likes watching law. He takes me to see law, sometimes.’

  ‘Does he? How… That’s nice.’

  The girl nodded. ‘He took me to see you yesterday when you killed that man.’ She beamed. ‘I like going to see law, because my dad always buys me a cake to eat when I’m watching.’

  ‘You like cakes, then?’

  ‘Cakes are my favourite.’

  He fished a copper half out of his pouch. ‘Then why don’t you go and buy yourself a nice cake right now? You’d like that.’

  The girl shook her head vigorously. ‘My dad says I shouldn’t take cakes from strange men.’

  Loredan sighed. ‘Your dad is quite right,’ he said. ‘But I don’t think it applies to being given money and sent to buy your own. Go on, shoo.’

  The girl thought for a moment. ‘I could go to my dad’s shop and ask him if it’s all right,’ she said. ‘You wait here.’

  ‘Tell you what,’ Loredan suggested. ‘You go and find your dad, and take the money with you to show him. How’d that be?’

  The girl hesitated, then nodded. ‘All right,’ she said.

  As soon as she was safely out of sight, Loredan hurried across the street and dived into the nearest large building, which happened to be the city arsenal. With any luck, she wouldn’t follow him in there.

  Over ten years since he’d last been in the arsenal. He winced – first meeting Garidas, now this; the damned army was following him around today like a hungry dog. It didn’t appear to have changed much since he’d come here with his uncle to collect twenty barrels of arrows, frequently promised and never delivered and finally having to be fetched personally. (Why was it they’d had to tussle with the Ordnance Department for every last hobnail, bow cover and biscuit?) Still a hot, dark, noisy place, with sweaty backs gleaming in the forgelight, sparks flying unexpectedly and sizzling on bare skin, huge billets of metal in transit to be sidestepped, incomprehensible shouts from men high up on scaffolding towers, the clanging of dropped tools, the thump of mechanical hammers seeping up through the paved floor. Boiling glue, burning fat, smoke, sawdust and the distinctive smell of freshly cut metal, the squeal of badly lubricated drills and lathe tools, the scudding rhythm of treadles and the scouring sound of hard-driven grindstones, the clatter of ball-peen hammers beating out sheet metal over wooden forms, the fizz of tempering. In another mood, he’d find it an exciting place; there was no lack of vitalit
y in the midst of all this creation.

  ‘You.’

  ‘Me?’ He glanced round but couldn’t see where the voice was coming from.

  ‘Yes, you. What d’you want?’

  Loredan grinned sheepishly. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘just looking around. I didn’t mean to-’

  ‘Then bloody well go and look around somewhere else. This isn’t a park.’

  Still he couldn’t see who was talking to him; not that he particularly wanted to carry on the conversation. ‘Sorry,’ he repeated and headed for the door, to find his way blocked by a cart full of charcoal. He walked round it and found himself eye to eye with a short, slight young man who was holding a billet of red-hot iron in a pair of tongs about six inches from his face.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’

  The young man quickly moved the iron out of the way. ‘My fault,’ he said in a familiar accent. ‘I didn’t see you with the cart in the way.’

  Plainsman; all he needed. Haven’t seen a plainsman in a very long time. Never particularly wanted to see one again. The flaming sword waggling about a few inches from his nose didn’t improve matters, either. He smiled bleakly and edged his way past, not stopping until he was out in the fresh air again.

  He wandered for a while until he came to the city gate; if he was going to spend the day rubbing his own nose in his inglorious past, he might as well make a complete job of it. He climbed up onto the wall and stood for a long while, thinking in general terms about a great many things, all of them now past mending. Then he found a tavern.

  Strange man, Temrai thought. Quite a few of them in this city, mind; certainly more than at home. Chances are, they have better odds of surviving here. At home there wasn’t much use for the weird, the feckless and the inadequate, and they tended not to live very long.

  He stood beside the forge watching the colours change in a once-heated steel blade as the warmth soaked into it; from grey to yellow, yellow to dull red, to purple and finally blue, the right colour for the second quenching. Having checked that the brine bath was just nicely tepid (too cold a quench would crack the steel), he pulled the blade out of the heat and plunged it under the surface of the water. A round ball of steam lifted off the brine, the hissing reached its peak and died away, like the squeaking of a drowning puppy. Curious, the way a hot flame and lukewarm water can turn a soft, malleable piece of steel into a hard cutting edge. Not for the first time, he wondered why it worked.

  They had known the answer back home. Steel is like the human heart, they said. To make a man hard enough to be useful, first you must heat him up with the fires of anger and cool him immediately in the quenching bath of fear and the awareness of his own weakness; for metal quench in brine, for men, in tears. This is only the first stage; this makes a man hard but also brittle, and as such no use as a tool, or a weapon. Now he must be heated again in the slow, careful fire of deliberate hatred, and quenched a second time in salt water; it’s the second process that makes him useful, able to cut and inflict wounds but unlikely to shatter. Only men of a good temper are useful to the gods of the clan.

  Having cleaned off the colour with a file, he tapped the blade sharply a couple of times against the beak of the anvil, just to make sure that the tempering hadn’t upset the brazed join between blade and core, then took a pot of pumice paste and went over to the buffing wheel to start the long, tedious job of polishing. By rights this was a cutler’s work, the sort of chore a bladesmith shouldn’t be bothered with; but the cutler assigned to him was at home with his sick wife, and Temrai had willingly offered to cover for him. Another curiosity of the city, this. At home if a man’s wife or child fell ill, it went without saying that others would do his work and bring him his share of the milk and cheese. Here, a man was lucky to lose only his day’s wages if he stayed at home to look after his own. Presumably it was that way for a reason, although nobody seemed to know what it was.

  Yesterday he had watched them erecting the great torsion engine that had been a month in the making; a fine machine, reckoned to be able to hurl a two hundredweight stone over three hundred and fifty yards. Most of the workers in the building had been called in to help, pulling on ropes or leaning on levers while the wooden frames were positioned and locked in place with dowels, pegs and nails. Once the frame was together and had been pronounced sound, they had wound in the rope skeins that, when twisted, gave the engine its power. Another parable? It was an easy game to play; to say that the ropes stood for the men of his clan, who having lain slack and peaceful for so long were now twisted and racked and ready to strike… Portents and omens are all very well, but it’s too easy a game to be worthwhile. Observing an eagle with a fawn in its claws flying over your enemy’s army is really only nature study; now, if you saw a fawn with an eagle in its velvet-covered hooves soaring and wheeling above their standards in the early dawn, that would be a portent.

  Still; the great engine, officially named by the Department of Ordnance mangonel, large, stationary, number thirty-six and known to its creators as the Hardened Drinker (it takes a long time to get it to chuck up, but when it chucks it chucks hard…), was now in place on the third mile-tower of the land wall, wet with pitch against the damp east wind and covering the last undefended blind spot; or, at least, the last blind spot apparent to the unimaginative officials from the Department. The city, in its own estimation, was now ready for anything. Anything would need to be fairly obtuse not to recognise so obvious a cue.

  Two hours beside the buffing wheel and the blade was polished; not to the clear mirror surface he’d have liked, but good enough for government work, as his colleagues put it. It joined the rest of the week’s output in a rack on the wall, ready to be hilted, assayed and placed in store; which meant being smeared with grease and packed in oily straw in a barrel along with twenty identical swords, humped into a cellar in a guard tower, and left. Temrai washed his hands, returned to his place and started again.

  He made three complete blades that day and started on a fourth. ‘What’s the hurry?’ his colleagues demanded, annoyed that he turned out half as much work again as they did. ‘You know something we don’t?’ He didn’t answer that.

  After work he swept up, oiled his tools with camellia oil and tidied them away, put on his coat and walked back to the hostel. It was the cool part of the evening, the little respite between the fresh heat of the sun and the stored heat of the night, radiating out of the stone like warmth from a firebrick. An attractive time in the city; friendly light leaking out through the doors of shops and taverns, cheerful voices and the sound of music played well or badly. Wherever you went, you could see men and women walking together, in no particular direction and no apparent hurry, husbands familiarly with wives, boys tentatively with sweethearts, drunks erratically with tavern girls. At home, generally speaking, you rode or you sat down; more sensible but not so picturesque.

  At the door of the hostel he saw a man in a long leather coat leaning in the shadow of the doorway. So, he thought. It was an omen, after all.

  ‘Jurrai,’ he said softly. ‘Has he…?’

  The man nodded. ‘Peacefully,’ he replied – so strange, to hear his own language again. He felt longing, regret and mild distaste, all at the same time. ‘The fever, a week ago.’ It occurred to the man that he’d forgotten something. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘He was a great chieftain.’

  Temrai shrugged, knowing the praise to be false. Not a great chieftain; a good one, perhaps, just as he’d been a reasonably good father, an adequate teacher. He hadn’t been the sort of man the gods could make use of; put into the fire too late, cooked up too hot, likely to prove too brittle. His son, now, there was a different case.

  ‘I suppose I’d better come home,’ he said. ‘Where did you leave them?’

  ‘At the Korcul ford,’ Jurrai replied. ‘The flood was heavy this year – it won’t be fit to cross for another week, they reckon. If we hurry, we can catch them there.’

  ‘They won’t be hard to find, e
ven if we don’t,’ Temrai replied absently. He couldn’t help thinking that he had work to finish here; but he hadn’t. He had learnt everything he’d come to learn, more in fact. And he had worked hard, earned his wages, done some good while he was a guest in the city. A man should always try and do good wherever he goes, leave any place better than it was when he found it.

  ‘They’ll probably wait,’ Jurrai said. ‘There’s plenty of timber there, and you’d said you’d be needing…’

  ‘True.’ He frowned. ‘I suppose I’d better get ready. Did you bring a horse for me? I sold mine.’

  ‘One each and a change,’ Jurrai replied. ‘We don’t want to hang about.’

  ‘Good. Right. I won’t be long.’

  He left Jurrai there and walked into the hostel. Strange; it felt very much like home, this huge stone wagon without wheels that never went anywhere, where you had to pay money just for the privilege of being in it. He could smell the evening bread in the oven, and the women were laying the table. A group of men, his friends, looked up from a game of dice and nodded. Under the circumstances, he hoped he’d never see them again.

  The hostel keeper was stirring a large pot of soup, occasionally sipping a sample off the end of a long wooden spoon, adding a pinch or so of some herb or other with a faintly ridiculous air of precision. She smiled when she saw him, and promised it wouldn’t be long.

  ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I’m not stopping. I’d like to settle up, please.’

  ‘You’re leaving?’ She seemed disappointed. ‘Oh. Nothing wrong, is there?’

  ‘My father’s died.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Had he been ill?’

  Temrai nodded. ‘I’d better be going as soon as I can.’