by K. J. Parker
She opened her mouth to say something, then closed it again and thought for a moment; slow but sure, like a cart drawn by oxen. “That’s a thought,” she said. “All the rest of ’em will be getting out of luxuries and buying into staples; and you’re right about the savages, they won’t want to go home empty-handed.”
Ziani stood up. “You’ve got the idea,” he said. “If I were you, once your colleagues start selling out their fine ware at sacrifice, you want to be in there buying. After all,” he added, “you know something they don’t. Only,” he added, “for crying out loud be a bit discreet about it. We don’t want anybody putting two and two together.”
He left her to her long thoughts and the unopened bottle, and walked back up the hill. People were staring at him as he went by; not just because of the color of his skin, now that he was the hero of the hour, the man who’d raised the alarm and saved the Duke’s life. The thought made him smile.
He heard the foundry half a mile before he reached it. There were all sorts of rumors about what was going on there. The favorite, for the time being, was that all that steel sheet was for making armor, to equip the thousands of cavalrymen the Cure Hardy would be sending to help avenge the massacre. The proponents of this theory weren’t having it all their own way; they couldn’t explain to those awkward-minded cynics who wanted to argue the point how all these notional soldiers were going to get from the Cure Hardy homelands to Civitas Vadanis, given that there was a huge, impassable desert in the way. That uncomfortable fact was very much in people’s minds; had been ever since the news of the marriage alliance had broken. It was all very well making friends with a nation that had endless resources of warlike manpower, but what help was that likely to be if it was going to take them six months to get here? (Six months was the figure usually quoted; pure conjecture, since nobody really knew how big the desert was or how you got round it.) The same point had exercised the minds of most of the Duke’s court; but Carausius had been quite adamant that the problem was by no means insoluble, and since he hadn’t been prepared to discuss the matter, his assurance had been generally taken on trust. Hooray for autocratic government.
That thought made Ziani smile too, as he banged on the massive gates of the foundry and waited for the porter to let him in. It had cost him a good deal of effort and ingenuity to find a way of sharing the secret of the salt road across the desert with Carausius, since the late Chancellor had taken a dislike to him from the start. In the end, he’d had to plant in his business partner’s mind the idea of selling Carausius’ wife twenty yards of best hard linen at practically cost, and hanging around to chat after the deal had been made. He’d explained that if the marriage alliance went ahead, there’d be a need for regular traffic between the Cure Hardy and the Vadani; which meant convoys of troops, which meant free escorts for the shipments of salt they’d be taking across the desert, and quite possibly free fodder for the horses, someone else to carry the water, all sorts of fringe benefits. Thanks to his gentle, patient suggestions, Carausius had learned about the secret road across the desert, firmly believing he’d found out about it by happy chance rather than being force-fed it by someone he regarded as a threat to national security. In his apparent monopoly of the secret, he’d seen a wonderful opportunity to consolidate and maintain his grip on power. As far as Ziani could find out, he hadn’t even shared it with Valens himself; and now, of course, Carausius was dead. The Cure Hardy still believed that in order to get to Civitas Vadanis, they had to struggle across the desert the hard way, and that way was very hard indeed: the bride’s escort had consisted of the wedding party, fifty horses to carry water and supplies and their drivers. Twenty men and thirty-seven horses had died in the crossing, quietly and without complaint; these losses were rather lower than had been anticipated when the party set out. The Cure Hardy were serious about the alliance. How pleased they would be, therefore, when they saw the map Ziani had hidden under a floorboard in the cramped back room at the foundry that he used as an office.
“They’ll be pleased to see you,” the porter told him mournfully as he swung open the gate. “They’re having problems with the drop-hammers.”
Ziani closed his eyes, but only for a moment. There had been a short, happy interval when he’d actually come to believe that Vadani workmen could be trusted with mechanisms more complicated than a pair of tongs, but that was some time ago. “Where’s Daurenja?” he heard himself say. “Couldn’t he have sorted it out?”
“They were looking for him,” the porter replied, “but he’s off somewhere. They’re having to do the blooms by hand.”
Patience, Ziani ordered himself. The idiots’ll be beating the sheets out to any old thickness, and quite probably cracking and splitting them as well; a day’s production, only fit to go back in the melt. “Wonderful,” he said, and he quickened his pace. He always seemed to be rushing about these days; not good for someone who didn’t really like walking, let alone running.
Nothing wrong with the drop-hammers that a blindfolded idiot couldn’t have fixed in five minutes; but the Vadani foundrymen were standing around looking sad, still and patient as horses in a paddock. He put the problem right — a chain had jumped a pulley and mangled a couple of gear-wheels, but there were spares in the box — shouted at the men whose names he could remember, and scampered off to get on with some real work.
He was building a punch, to cut mounting holes in the plates, to save having to drill each one. It was nothing more complicated than a long lever bearing on cams, bolted down for stability to a massive oak log, but he was having a little trouble with the alignment of the bottom plate, and the sheets were coming out distorted after the holes had been punched. All it needed was shims, but that meant laboriously hacksawing, drilling and filing each one by hand, since such basic necessities of life as a lathe and a mill were unknown in this godforsaken country. He clamped a stub of two-inch-round bar in the vise, picked up the saw and set to work, pausing after every fifty strokes to spit into the slot for lubrication. He was three-quarters of the way through when he heard footsteps behind him, a pattern he recognized without having to turn and look.
“Daurenja?” he called out.
Immediately he was there: long, tense, attentive, unsatisfactory in every way. Today he had his ponytail tied back with a twist of packing wire, and there was something yellow under his fingernails.
“Where the hell did you wander off to?” Ziani asked.
“I had some errands to run,” Daurenja answered. “I’m very sorry. I gather there was some bother with the —”
“Yes. Two hours lost. You should’ve been here to deal with it.”
Being angry with Daurenja was like pouring water into sand; he absorbed it, stifling the healthy flow of emotion.
“You know we’re in a hurry,” Ziani went on. The default had been trivial enough; two hours’ lost production wasn’t the end of the world, or even a serious inconvenience. If it hadn’t been for Daurenja’s energy, initiative and enthusiasm, the whole project would probably have stalled by now and be in jeopardy. “You know you can’t leave these clowns on their own for ten minutes, but you bugger off somewhere without a word to me; they could have trashed the place, wrecked all the machinery, blown the furnace …”
“I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
Ziani put the hacksaw down on the bench and wiped sweat and filings from his hands. “It’s not bloody well good enough, Daurenja,” he said, and the thin man’s pale eyes seemed to glow at him as Ziani took a step forward, balling his right fist. “I never asked you for help; you came to me, remember. You came begging me for a job.”
“I know. And I’m grateful, believe me.”
“Yes, you are.” Ziani grabbed the front of Daurenja’s shirt with his left hand and pulled, forcing Daurenja to come close. “You’re always so very grateful, and then when my back’s turned …”
He’d learned how to punch in the ordnance factory; not a scientific philosophy of personal comba
t, like the rapier fencing Duke Valens had tried to teach him, more a sense of timing refined by desperation into an instinct. You don’t have to teach a dog or a bull how to fight; it comes by light of nature and works out through practice. He jabbed his fist into Daurenja’s solar plexus, making him fold like a hinge; as his head came down, he let go with his left hand and bashed him on the side of the jaw. It felt hard and thin, like hammering on a closed door. Daurenja staggered sideways, and as his balance faltered, Ziani kicked him hard on the left kneecap, dropping him on the ground in a heap.
“Get up,” he said. “Oh come on,” he added, “you’re a fighting man, you held off the entire Mezentine army the other day, armed with nothing but a bit of stick.”
Daurenja struggled to his knees; Ziani kicked him in the ribs and put his foot on his throat.
“Fine,” he said. “Don’t fight if you don’t want to. I’ll break your ribs one at a time.”
There was something about the way he lay there; it took Ziani a moment to recognize what it was. Practice, because this wasn’t the first time, not by a long way. He was enduring the beating the way a chronic invalid endures some painful but necessary treatment he’s been subjected to many times, holding still so as not to inconvenience the doctor as he goes about his work, tilting his head sideways or holding out his arm when he’s told to. To test the hypothesis, Ziani lifted his foot off Daurenja’s throat and swung it back for a kick; sure enough, Daurenja moved his head a little to the side, anticipating the attack, not trying to avoid it but seeking to minimize the damage it would cause without being too obvious about it. Ziani stepped back. “Stand up,” he said. “Beating’s over.”
He held out his hand, caught hold of Daurenja’s bony wrist and pulled him to his feet; Daurenja swayed a little and rested his back against the bench. He hadn’t even tried to ask what the attack had been for.
“Now we’ve got that out of the way,” Ziani said pleasantly, “maybe you could tell me what it is you want.”
“I don’t —”
Ziani frowned, and punched him on the side of the head, just above the ear. His skull was just as bony as he’d imagined it would be. “Yes you do,” he said. “You understand perfectly well. You want something from me, something really valuable and important, and there’s nobody else you can get it from.” He took a step back, a unilateral declaration of ceasefire. “I’m not saying you can’t have it,” he said, reasonably. “I just want to know what it is, that’s all.”
Daurenja looked at him. “Do you mind if I sit down?”
“Be my guest.”
“Thanks.” Daurenja slid one buttock onto the top of the bench; he seemed to hang as well as perch.
“Something,” Ziani hazarded, “to do with sulfur.”
“In a way.” Daurenja sighed. It was, Ziani realized, the first indication of weariness he’d ever seen from him. “I’d better begin at the beginning, hadn’t I?”
Ziani shrugged. “If it’s a long story.”
“It is.” Daurenja paused for a moment, as if composing himself before giving a performance. “Some years ago,” he said, “I met a man who was trying to set up a pottery business. He’d found a seam of a special kind of clay, the sort you need to make the fine wares that people pay a lot of money for. It’s always been a Mezentine monopoly, and everybody’s always believed they controlled the only sources of this special clay. Well, he convinced me, and it turned out he was right. The stuff he’d got hold of was the right sort of clay, or at least it turned out the same way when you fired it. We thought we’d got it made. After all, making pottery’s no big deal, peasants do it in villages. All we needed to do was find out how you decorate it — make the pretty colors you get on the genuine article. We thought that’d be the easy bit.”
“But it wasn’t.”
Daurenja nodded slowly. “We could produce colors all right, reds and greens and blues. You can find out how to do that from books, anybody can do it. But they weren’t quite the right colors — very close, but not quite. It was pretty frustrating, you can see that. We worked at it for a long time, experimenting, fine-tuning the mixes, trying everything we could think of, but we could never quite get there. Anyhow, I’ll skip all that, it’s not relevant. One day, I was messing about with some of the ingredients, grinding some stuff up together in a mortar, and there was an accident.” He rolled up his sleeve to reveal a scar, a handspan of smooth, melted skin. “That’s where this comes from,” he said, with a wry grin. “There’s another one like it right across my chest. Burns. The stuff I was mixing suddenly caught fire and went up; it was like when you let a drop of water fall onto molten metal. The mortar I was using — big stone thing the size of a bucket — smashed into a dozen pieces, and the heat was amazing, just like leaning over a forge at welding temperature. All from a few spoonfuls of this stuff I was grinding.”
Ziani realized he’d forgotten to breathe for a while. “What stuff would that be?” he asked.
Maybe Daurenja hadn’t heard him. “Obviously,” he said, “that got me thinking. As soon as I was on my feet again — I told my partner I’d tripped and fallen into the furnace, and that’s how I got all burned up; I don’t think he believed me, but that couldn’t be helped — I set about trying to do it again, on purpose, as it were. It took me a while. Where I went wrong to start with was assuming that it was the pounding that set it off. In fact, it must’ve been a spark or something, that first time. What actually gets it going is plain ordinary fire; a taper or a spill. Once I’d figured that out, it was just a matter of getting the proportions right. And keeping it to myself, of course.”
“You didn’t want your partner to find out.”
“Well, of course not.” Daurenja frowned. “I’d come to realize he wasn’t to be trusted. All my life people have cheated me, taken advantage. Once I’d worked out the proportions of the mix, I left him; I didn’t need his workshop anymore, and in any case, he was getting on my nerves. I think he believed I’d found the formula for the colors we’d been looking for, and I was keeping it to myself. There were other problems too, but I won’t bore you with them. Personal stuff.”
He was silent for a moment. “So you left,” Ziani prompted.
Daurenja nodded. “I set up a little workshop of my own,” he said. “I had money, so it wasn’t a problem. What you’ve got to understand about the mixture I discovered,” he went on, “is the extraordinary power it produces when it flares up. The first time it happened, one chunk of the stone mortar was driven an inch deep into a cob wall. It’s like a volcano; a little volcano you can set off whenever you want, and if you could only contain it …” He stopped; his voice had risen, and his hands were clenched. “If you could contain it,” he said, “in a pot, or a bell, so that all the force went in one direction only …” He looked up; his eyes seemed very wide and round. “You worked in the ordnance factory,” he said, “you know about the scorpions and mangonels and torsion engines that can throw a five-hundredweight stone a quarter-mile. If only I could contain this — this thing that happens when the mixture flares up; if I could build a sort of portable volcano, something you could carry about and point at a wall or a tower, it’d make all your Mezentine engines seem like toys. You could crack open cities like walnuts.”
Ziani breathed out long and slow. “You’ve tried, of course,” he said.
Daurenja laughed, like a dog barking. “I’ve tried all right,” he said. “I tried stone mortars, but they shatter like glass. I tried casting a mortar shape, only in metal. I used brass first, then bronze, then iron. I think the problem is something to do with the way the metal cools down.” His words were coming out in a rush now, a fast, smooth flow like lava. “Because it’s got to be thick, to contain the force, I think that by the time the metal on the outside has taken the cold, the inside’s still hot, and this causes little flaws and fractures; either that, or there’s air bubbles, I don’t know. All I do know is that I’ve tried everything, and every time it either cracks or shatters.
I’ve lost count of how many times it’s nearly killed me. In the end, I reached the point where I couldn’t think what to do next. Everything I know about casting in metal, everything I could find out, none of it was any good. I tried casting a solid trunk and boring out a hole in the middle; I built a lathe ten feet long, with a three-inch cutting bar. Still no good. I nearly gave up.”
He looked away. It was as though he’d just said, I died.
“And then you heard of me,” Ziani said.
“Yes.” Suddenly Daurenja stood up; and Ziani wondered what on earth had possessed him to attack this man, because he was as full of strength and speed and anger as a wolf or a boar. “I heard about you: a Mezentine, foreman of the ordnance factory — if anybody knew how to do it, you would. It was like a miracle, like something out of a story, when the gods came down from heaven. I knew I had to have you.” He stopped. “I knew I had to have you help me, because the Mezentines do the most amazing castings, great big bells and statues, the frames of machines; you’ve got ways of blowing a furnace so you can pour iron as easy as bronze. I’d even thought of going to the Guilds myself, except I knew they’d take it away from me and make it their own, and I can’t have that. But I can trust you; you’re an outsider too, like me, you’ve been thrown out of your home and persecuted.”
(He didn’t say, Just like I was; he didn’t have to.)
“I’m sorry,” he went on — Ziani could see the effort that went into calming himself down. “I thought, first I’d prove to you that I’m not just some lunatic who thinks he’s figured out how to do magic. I’d prove that I’m what I say I am, an engineer, a craftsman, so you’d take me seriously. I heard all about what you did in the defense of Civitas Eremiae; how you built the scorpions, practically from nothing. I knew you’d need an assistant, someone you could rely on — an apprentice, really. And then, when we’d come to know and trust one another …”
