Grantville Gazette.Volume XVII (ring of fire)

by Eric Flint

  ***

  The villagers made something of a holiday of the shearing. And Agustin was surprised at how fast that went. Shearing, however, he learned, was not the biggest job. Even docking and culling the lambs was not as big a job as cleaning the wool turned out to be. There was, though, plenty of meat for several weeks after the shepherds decided which lambs to cull.

  Washing the wool, at least in this village, took almost every hand that was available. And because he and Luis were somewhat extraneous to the machine project at the moment, they decided to help. Luis, it turned out, had his eye on Lucia's cousin, Beatriz, because of her cheerful, loving nature. Agustin had to admit that Beatriz was better looking than Lucia, but she was also a bit flighty for his taste.

  So they both wound up putting the wool in cold water, which was then warmed until the grease and dirt loosened, then lifting out the heavy, wet, smelly stuff to drain and rinse. Throughout it all, the women chattered and made sure that no one poked and prodded the wool too much, as it would then stick together and become unusable. After rinsing, the wool was laid to dry in clean, grassy areas, where the breezes would dry it as quickly as possible.

  Lucia explained that the wool would be turned several times a day, and that it would take about four days to dry completely. Surprisingly, they did not sell the finer grades of wool, not this year. This year, Don Alfonso had pre-purchased all of it, so that the machine team would have wool to experiment with. Rather a lot of wool to experiment with, Agustin thought. And too soon to be doing much experimentation, at that.

  ***

  "If you want to make spinning faster," Lucia grumbled, "find a better way to loosen the wool and get all the hairs lined up in the same direction."

  It seemed that if women weren't actively spinning wool, they were preparing it for spinning. Even after washing and removing most of the grease from a fleece, wool was just naturally clumpy. It grew in tangled locks, which had to be separated and made smooth before the wool could be spun into thread.

  Carding and spinning were laborious, repetitive tasks, although not particularly difficult. Or so Agustin thought, until Lucia tried to teach him to use the carding combs she was wielding. In spite of Luis' laughter about it, Agustin felt that the machine would never work unless the men building it understood the process of making thread. Which, of course, none of them did.

  So, Lucia not-so-patiently showed him how she loosened and carded the fibers with a set of carding combs, then removed the straightened fibers and rolled them into what looked like a sausage. After that, the wool was ready to be spun, either on her hand spindle or a wheel.

  "Why do you roll it that way? Why not just leave it flat?"

  Lucia shrugged. "It is the way I was taught. I've never tried it any other way. Besides it would take up too much room in my basket and might tangle again."

  At Agustin's urging, Lucia sat at one of the treadle wheels he and the others had built from a drawing and began to spin the flat mass of fiber. After a false start or two, it only took a few minutes to spin. Of course, it only took her minutes to spin one of the sausage shapes, as she pointed out.

  "But was this faster? At all?" he asked.

  "Perhaps. But it would only make a real difference if the mass of wool was larger, I think. No. Not larger. Longer. And, maybe, thinner." Lucia used her hands to try and describe what she meant. "With these, I must stop the wheel, pick up another, attach it, then start the wheel again. With a longer, thinner, ah… I don't have the words. But if the wool was like a rope, long and thin, instead of a flat square…" She looked at him. "Do you understand what I'm saying?"

  "I think so. And I think I read something about that, in all the papers. Let me think for a while."

  ***

  It was often easier to understand Lucia's gestures than the stuff they received from Don Carlos. Rumor had it that the papers and notes they got from Don Carlos were sent to the de Aguilera family from Germany. Judging from the shape the papers were sometimes in, Agustin thought they might have been sent from even farther away. By now they were sending questions back along the route, wherever it lead. Agustin wasn't involved in that part. The questions went from him to Miguel to Master Munos. Agustin was increasingly concerned that the important questions weren't making it all the way to wherever the source of the information was.

  The words were often unfamiliar, which frustrated everyone, as they would then have to ask for explanations. Still, every packet from Don Carlos gave them more information. The big breakthrough, though, finally came. The man in Germany-if that was where he was-had started tracking down the various names of the inventors, and come across more detailed information and drawings. Still not enough, but it helped.

  The spinning machine was stalled. It should work. It was supposed to work. As they looked at each part of the operation, it even seemed to work. But the thread it produced was clumpy and came apart with even gentle tugs. Miguel, nearly howling with anger, had stomped away this morning, cursing all the way. Munos, who was being pressured by Don Carlos, wasn't in any better a mood, and had left for Zamora to explain the delays. With those two gone, Agustin and Luis had time to experiment with a better way to card the wool.

  ***

  They started, much to Lucia's dismay, by tearing apart a set of carding combs to see how they were made. "Any idiot can see how they're made!" she said. But, better to check, anyway.

  Agustin and Luis were a bit embarrassed to have to admit that she was right. The carding combs were just bent pins, stuck through leather, which was then nailed to a flat piece of wood. After a handle was added to the flat piece, the carding comb was complete. But it, combined with some of the drawings they'd recently received, did give them an idea.

  It took some time to find enough leather to cover a large and a smaller wooden drum. It took longer than that to make the tiny pins to insert through the leather, bend them at the correct angle, and secure them to the drum. And more time to construct a frame to hold them.

  It wasn't an exact duplicate of the "drum carder" in the drawing. For one thing, in order to take advantage of one type of motive power they had available, Agustin and Luis positioned the drums differently. The drums were laid on their sides, supported in the air by a pole that ran through the center of each drum. The drums were held up with a spacer, so that they could harness one of the bellwethers to a shaft that would turn the drum. The shaft was about five feet long and the large drum about three feet across with a radius of half that. A small boy was initially used to walk the bellwether around in a circle, but that same small boy eventually attached a turnip to a stick and hung it in front of the sheep. The sheep kept chasing the turnip, although he never caught it. As bellwethers were used to walking all day, leading the vast flocks throughout Spain, the sheep took no harm.

  The smaller drum turned at a faster pace, of course, and quite a large amount of wool could be gradually placed on it. The teeth from the larger drum picked up and straightened the wool as it came off the smaller drum. Taking the wool off of the larger drum proved to be somewhat problematical in the beginning, but they eventually contrived a tool for that.

  ***

  "Can you spin this, Lucia?" Agustin asked. He presented her with a blanket of wool that was about two inches thick, nearly ten feet long, and about two feet wide.

  She looked at it carefully. "I think so. But it's too wide. We need a way to draw it out."

  "Into sliver, yes?"

  "Pardon?"

  "Sliver. Or top. That's what the papers call it. Long, thin ropes of wool are called 'sliver' or 'top.' They call this a 'batt.'"

  "Why? If it looks like a rope, why not call it a rope? If it looks like a blanket, why call it a batt?"

  At her curious look, Agustin laughed. "I have no idea. But you can read them for yourself." He stopped abruptly. Probably Lucia didn't know how to read. Why would she, living out here in the middle of nowhere?

  She didn't get angry as he feared. She just shrugged. "Or you can re
ad them to me, if you think it will do any good. Which I doubt. Meanwhile, let's try this." She took the batt of wool and began to tear it into strips. With care, she could tear a two-inch wide strip of it from the batt without the strip of wool falling apart. These she coiled in a basket, pinching a new strip to each end as she tore it. That took a while. The "rope" they ended up with was over ninety feet long. Finally she sat at the wheel. And began to spin. And spin. And spin. The only time she had to stop the wheel was to move the thread from one hook on the flyer to another, so that it filled the bobbin evenly. Then to change the bobbin, after each of them got full.

  ***

  "Aunt Lucia! Aunt Lucia!"

  Lucia went toward the garden, where her niece was supposed to be gathering vegetables for soup. "What, Elena? What is the problem?"

  "Look," Elena said. She pointed to a row of beans. "I was pulling beans and a rabbit ran out. It was that rabbit, the one that got away."

  Lucia looked at the row of beans, then kneeled down and fished around in the tangled plants. "Ah." She drew her hand out of the tangle. It was full of long, silky, white hairs. "Well, now we know where that dratted rabbit got off to. Perhaps we can trap it, now that we know where it is."

  Elena tapped her on the shoulder and whispered, "Look."

  Lucia did, then laughed out loud. The smaller rabbit, not quite as long-haired and not quite as white, ran away. "Well," Lucia gasped when she stopped laughing, "I see that Mrs. Bunny has been busy, hasn't she? We'll need several traps, I think."

  In spite of the several traps that caught some of the half-wild, half-Angora bunnies, Mrs. Bunny managed to evade capture. That didn't, however, seem to lessen her fertility, as they continued catching an occasional half-breed rabbit well into the fall.

  Which led to the question of who owned the half-breed rabbits. By long tradition, the wild rabbits of that portion of Spain belonged to the people that lived there. Mrs. Bunny would have been returned to the patron as a matter of course, but these weren't purebred Angora rabbits. These were the kits of Mrs. Bunny and the wild bucks of the valley, as could easily be shown by the fact that Mr. Bunny was still in his cage. And probably none too happy about Mrs. Bunny's errant ways. Those wild bucks had always been the people's rabbits.

  If some of the villagers found occasion to slip a wild doe into Mr. Bunny's cage to give him a little consolation, what could be the harm in that? And later, how could anyone be sure that the newly-common long-haired rabbits weren't the offspring of Mrs. Bunny's wild shenanigans? Granted, Mrs. Bunny would put all other rabbits to shame in the productivity department if all the little kits that had been captured were hers. But in the case of any given rabbit, who was to say?

  By the time anyone involved in the administration of the Angora project noticed anything odd, there was quite a little breeding program going on. Enough of the half-breed rabbits with longer hair had appeared that some Spanish Angora garments were appearing in the valley.

  ***

  "Master Munos, what is the hold up?" Ricardo asked with a bite in his voice. "You promised us a spinning machine over a year ago. Where is it?"

  Master Munos had been dreading that question. He considered claiming that the drawings and notes were incomplete but he suspected that it wouldn't work. It hadn't worked when the journeymen and other masters had tried it on him. "It's the journeymen. They talk back. They refuse to do as they are told." He honestly didn't remember that most of their talking back and refusing to do as they were told amounted to him telling them to make the thing work and them asking him how. They were, in Master Munos' memory, intentionally disobedient and disrespectful.

  By this time, most of them were lacking in anything resembling respect for Master Munos. However, most of them were pretty good at faking it. Agustin Cortez was not so good at hiding his opinion. "That Cortez is the worst. He spends all his time with that village spinster. He claims that he is trying to come to know the process spinning. Ha! That is not the sort of knowing that he is after with Lucia. And he encourages dissension among the other journeymen."

  "Do you think he should be fired?" Ricardo asked.

  Master Munos froze for just an instant. He knew that firing Agustin Cortez would be a disaster for the project and for him. Though he would never admit it, even to himself, Cortez had been the spark that had led to several of the minor breakthroughs that had gotten them as far as they were. Master Munoz desperately needed a reason for keeping Cortez that wouldn't sound like praise. "I wish we could," he said, "but he knows too much about the project. He could take what he knows to someone else and let them catch up to us in a few months."

  Ricardo nodded.

  "I wonder," Master Munos mused, "could that be what he's hoping for? To delay the project until he's fired. Then go to someone else."

  Ricardo looked doubtful.

  Master Munos shrugged it off as a passing fancy. "In spite of the difficulties with the journeymen, I have managed to get built a simple but ingenious device to speed up the carding part of the process." He snorted a laugh. "Part of what makes it ingenious is that it is simple enough that even the journeymen couldn't mess it up.

  "It has turned the warehouses full of washed wool into warehouses full of carded wool."

  "I will see about sending you some spinners until you get the spinning machine operational," Ricardo said calmly. "Do you have more questions for our source in Germany?"

  "Only a few." Master Munos wondered if perhaps he hadn't been overzealous in weeding out the questions from the journeymen and the other masters. But he certainly didn't want a repeat of that first meeting with Don Carlos.

  ***

  In the little village in the Cantabrian hills, they did in fact have a spinning machine that worked. Unfortunately it was a spinning machine for cotton. They, of course, were in a wool-producing area. If they had had some cotton to try on it, it would have spun decent, but not spectacular, thread. But they didn't have cotton or even realize that they needed it. They didn't realize that to spin wool they would need to adjust the machine. Agustin had considered the possibility and even asked about it indirectly, in one of many questions that he had included in the latest information request to go up the line. But he didn't really think it was important because, after all, who would send designs for a cotton-spinning machine to wool country?

  "That works quite well," Lucia admitted a bit grudgingly. Then she sniffed. Again.

  Agustin hid his grin. "I'm pleased you think so."

  It was shearing time again. And if they couldn't get the machine to work, Augustin, Luis and some other journeymen had decided that perhaps they could do other things to help speed up the process. They developed a wooden cage to hold the unwashed wool. Then they were able to lower it into the cold water bath, with ropes and pulleys to make the lowering and lifting easier and keep the wool from being manhandled. Some of the metal smiths managed to tinker together flat pots that would need less water, and therefore less wood, for heating.

  Cleaning the wool did take time, but perhaps a bit less than it usually did. As well, they had rigged up drying platforms, raised about eighteen inches off the ground, to allow for greater air flow around the wet wool. Drying was certainly sped up.

  ***

  "More women will be arriving," Master Munos said when he got back from Zaragoza. "Beds will need to be arranged for them. De Aguilera is sending them to spin the wool that's in the warehouse, as well as the new crop."

  Miguel nodded. "They'll need more wheels, as well. We haven't any extra."

  Munos waved off the statement. "Just do what you have to. And get the machine working!"

  Miguel left, steaming with anger. Just do what you have to. And get the thing working. There was a long list of questions that they had sent and most of them remained unanswered. How were he and his men to accomplish anything if they couldn't find the answers? If whoever it was wanted this machine really wanted it, why didn't he try to find the answers they needed?

  Miguel was afraid
to experiment. It was an incredibly complicated device, the spinning machine. Able, the papers said, to spin fifty threads at once and have them all of consistent quality. No one had ever done anything like this before; it wasn't how innovations happened.

  Honestly, Miguel wasn't sure how innovations did happen. It wasn't that he was either unskilled or that he lacked creativity. But his training had focused on quality and art, not whatever this was. Miguel could build a table that was a work of art. Show him a picture of something made out of wood and he could make it. He could inlay a family crest into the side of a chair using five different woods and make look like God had grown it that way. He could also look a piece of wood and know how strong it would be once it was cut and carved into shape. He could attach it to another piece of wood, never needing a nail. But never in his life had he been asked to do systematic experimentation. Just do what you have to. And get the thing working. Willingly. Except he had no idea what he had to do to get the thing working.

  ***

  Agustin was frankly relieved that the women who arrived had done so unequipped with spinning wheels. It gave him something to do other than sit around staring at the uncooperative spinning machine. He and the other carpenters divided their time between the spinning wheels and housing for the new arrivals.

  ***

  "Oh, yes. I heard him say that."

  Lucia looked over at the scrawny young woman who spoke. How this one might have heard Don Carlos speak anything but an order was beyond her, unless she'd been eavesdropping. Unless, perhaps, Don Carlos was very indiscriminate about what he said in front of strangers. Well, he might just be. Nobles did tend to ignore servants. But had this girl even worked for the de Aguilera family? Lucia decided to find out. The rumors the new employees brought with them were somewhat distressing.