The Burning Stone

by Jack Whyte

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  —

  Perhaps half an hour had elapsed when Varrus opened the door again and joined Hanno, and the two went back into the sanctum. Hanno was carrying two steaming drinks, one of them in a pot that must have held five or six times as much as the mug he passed to Varrus, who raised it to his face and sniffed the fragrant steam deeply.

  “That smells wonderful,” he said. “What is it?”

  “The juice of crushed apples,” the big man said. “Heated and sweetened with honey and cinnamon. Do you know cinnamon?”

  Varrus nodded. “From when I was a boy, in Dalmatia. It brings back memories.”

  Hanno smiled. “And speaking of that, what have you remembered about your friend’s Persian?”

  Varrus wrapped both hands around the barrel of his mug and sipped from it cautiously, reluctant to consume it too quickly. “His name was Agaton—there was more to it than that, but that’s what Rhys called him. Rhys’s people were fisher folk who lived on the northern coast of Eire, and they took in Agaton when he was washed up from the sea after a storm. That was before Rhys was born.

  “He had worked as a smith in Persia, and his skills were highly valued by Rhys’s people, for they had no other smith. They built him a smithy, but the tools Agaton made for them were poor things, because he could never make his fires burn at the kind of heat he spoke of having used in Persia, so he was never able to create the kind of metal that he needed to make swords like the one he’d made for himself. Rhys spoke often of that sword, of how fine and how sharp it was. He told me it could cut a falling feather in half, and that its blade could not be blunted by other blades, for it would cut them in half as easily as it would the feather. That sounded incredible to me—it still does—but Rhys swore he had seen it do so with his own eyes.” He sighed. “I believed him then, and I believe him still. I believe that sword existed.”

  “I do, too,” the giant said, in what was, for him, a very quiet murmur. “I have seen such swords. Very few, but they were truly wondrous, so flexible and finely made that they could bend in half and immediately spring back into perfect shape. So tell me more about this Agaton, and how he taught your friend.”

  “He taught him all he could, according to the materials he had at hand. He smelted iron from red ore he found in the neighbouring hills, but he had to be content to work with all its imperfections. It was fortunate that what the village needed most were simple iron tools and utensils, for the smith had no way of hardening or tempering the iron he produced, other than case-hardening a few chopping tools. But yet he taught young Rhys the elements of forging and annealing metal, and taught him how to weld and shape a spined blade in the style, if not the substance, of the Persian sword, which was curved, Rhys said.”

  “So your friend taught you the art of case-hardening?”

  “He taught me how to case-harden a blade, if that’s what you mean, but he never spoke of it as being an art.”

  “Oh, it is, when done properly, and it produces wondrous results for certain tasks, like putting a hard edge on a wrought iron blade. How did your man do it?”

  Varrus hitched one shoulder. “Is there more than one way?”

  “Of course there is, just as there is in doing most things. How did he teach you to do it?”

  “By making a soft blade, then packing it in a tight-bound and clamped mixture of ground bones and charcoal and reforging it. The outer surface hardens and will hold an edge, but the inner core remains wrought-iron soft, strong and resilient.”

  The giant nodded. “That is the common method. Another is to pack the blade in a mixture of ground hooves, salt, and shredded leather mixed with urine and then reforge it. The sealing of the box containing the mixture apparently has great importance, in both instances, to the success of the procedure, but no one can say why.” He flexed his shoulders again. “I know there is no resemblance between the two methods, and no defensible reason why either one should work, but both of them do, so who are we to quibble?” He paused. “So where did your friend Rhys end up?”

  Varrus grinned. “The same place we have ended up. Searching for the secrets of forging stronger metals. He spent years in the army, as an armourer, then worked for a wealthy merchant, delivering military supplies to the legions. When the merchant retired, he took Rhys to live with him on his estate, as his smith. I met him there, for my father worked in that villa, too.”

  “And the Persian. What became of him?”

  “He died, a long time ago, but that’s all I know.” He stopped and his eyes narrowed. “What? There’s something in your eyes. Some doubt. I can see it.”

  The big man nodded. “I doubt he was a smith at all. Your friend’s tutor, the Persian. He had worked in a smithy, that’s clear, perhaps as an apprentice or trainee—he might even have been a slave—but he could not have been a smith. And he most certainly did not make that wondrous sword himself.”

  Varrus was frowning now. “How could he not have been a smith? What are you saying?”

  The big man grimaced. He picked up his cider pot, peered down into it, then set it down again. “Empty,” he said regretfully. “I don’t remember drinking all that…I am saying that this man had rudimentary knowledge of the craft he claimed. He had sufficient knowledge to build a smelting oven and produce wrought iron, and he had the basic skills to fashion tools from that and do some primitive metal crafting. Fortunately for him, he needed no more than that, working with iron among your friend’s fisher folk people. Bear in mind what the ancients said about people who have such good fortune. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”

  Varrus shook his head. “No. I told you, he was hampered by the fuel he had to use, the peat. He could not generate or sustain high heat.”

  Every aspect of Hanno’s giant face showed his scorn. “Am I then to believe that in all of Eire there are no smiths to make weapons for the throngs of warriors described by every soldier who has landed there since the time of Claudius? That no one, in all that land, understands the making of strong fighting blades? And so there was no one, anywhere, to whom this man could turn for assistance, in desperation?”

  He shook his head with finality. “Had your Persian really been a smith, Mcuil, he would have known about the second stage of making superior iron, and clearly he did not. And there can be only one reason for that. He had not been taught.” He crinkled his eyes at Varrus. “I said that smiths are secretive by nature, jealous of their knowledge and unwilling to share any of it with people they consider undeserving. That, I have been told, is especially true of the Persian smiths, where their lore is considered precious beyond price, to be safeguarded at all costs.”

  “From slaves, you mean.”

  “No. I mean from everyone who is not among the elect, the sacred smiths. Even here, in the army of our state, we grade our students with great care. Not one of them can ever advance in his training without having proved beyond a doubt that he has earned the right to learn more. That is all part and parcel of craftsmanship, of establishing and maintaining standards by which we can abide and prosper. And the truth of that enables me to look at any smith and know, within moments, how far his training has advanced.” The great head cocked to one side as the deep basso voice growled, “You are aware of that, I hope.”

  “I am. What you say is true.”

  “That rule is strict here, but it is far more so among the smiths of Persia, I have been told. No ill-trained pretender would ever be permitted access to the secrets of their guilds. Had your Persian been a smith, he would have known, and understood beyond doubt, the second step to making better iron. He would have learned the secrets of the oven and the crucible. And despite all the difficulties he encountered later, had he even known of those secrets, or heard about them and their uses, he would have—must have—spoken of them to your friend. But Rhys Twohands never spoke to you of crucibles.”

  Varrus shook his head in reluctant agreement, but then added, as an afterthought, “But could Rhys
not have learned about them otherwise, in his time with the legions?”

  “He might have,” the giant said quietly, “if he had worked in places where the crude metal was prepared. But there are few of those. For the most part, those few places—armouries like this one, all of them near the sea or on navigable rivers—have an area specially made for that kind of work, because it is incessant, and the furnaces are never cold. They make iron constantly, with shifts of slaves labouring day and night to keep the process flowing smoothly. And then they ship the finished goods in trains of wagons, in bars and rods and ingots, to the docks, where they are loaded onto ships and distributed throughout the empire.”

  “Would it not be easier to—?”

  “To have every garrison produce its own? No, it would not, and if you but think about it you will soon see the chaos that would result from such laxity. Production on the scale required to supply the legions is an enormous task, and it demands highly disciplined maintenance and meticulous controls. The individual crucibles yield very small amounts of metal, and they have to be small in size, though please do not ask me why that should be so, because that falls within the realm of mystery. So the oven racks are built to hold as many as they can. But that capacity, too, depends upon the size of the oven and the bellows.”

  “And so places like this contain many furnaces and ovens,” Varrus concluded.

  “Correct.”

  “And like me, most people never suspect that such places exist.”

  “Also correct, although no one tries to conceal them. People simply do not care. They have other matters to concern them, and though iron governs their lives in many ways, the matter of making it has no importance to them.”

  Varrus sat silent for a while, mulling over what he had been told before he asked his next question.

  “These crucibles,” he said. “What do they do? What is this second step you spoke of?”

  “It is the next step into the mysteries the gods keep hidden from us. The crucible is a key to understanding their will, but it is an imperfect key. It works as they intended it to work, but it does not permit us to see how it works, because it works within the furnace. Come with me now. I’ll show you.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Ignatius Ajax arrived as they were leaving, meeting them at the door of Hanno’s sanctum. He said nothing of why he had come. He simply looked at both of them with a raised eyebrow, stepped aside with a sweep of one arm to allow them to pass him, then fell into step behind them. The armourer was wearing armour again, but it was a simple leather harness, scuffed in places where he had bruised it in the course of his work, and his wearing of it indicated he had been conducting business in the headquarters building that day.

  Hanno spoke over his shoulder to Ajax. “It has come time for Mcuil to learn about the second step,” he said.

  “That was quick,” Ajax responded, sounding not at all surprised and speaking as if Varrus were nowhere near. “I thought he’d take another month, at least. That’s what we talked about, you and I, not ten days ago. What happened to make you change your mind?”

  Hanno stopped so abruptly that Varrus, directly at his back, walked right into him and had to step back hastily as the giant turned around to face the armourer.

  “He told me about cooks,” he said.

  “Cooks.” Ajax looked from Hanno to Varrus. “You talked about cooks. That’s very…profound. Is it not?”

  “Not profound,” came the reply. “But relevant. And you have never thought of it before, any more than I had.”

  “You might well be correct, because I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  The giant swung away, walking again until he reached the yard with the tall furnace, then went through a door that Varrus had not noticed before. Inside, the walls were lined with sturdy, waist-high workbenches, some with low shelves mounted above them, and all with much-used storage space beneath. Varrus saw metal bins and large wooden barrels, and in one corner, a low-sided wooden box full of high-grade, glossy charcoal. The room was bright and airy, thanks to the rows of narrow windows lining two exterior walls. The three men working in there had all stopped what they were doing when the door opened, and the giant dismissed them with a wordless grunt and an unmistakable jerk of his head. They left immediately, without so much as a glance at either Ajax or Varrus.

  As soon as the door closed behind them, Hanno spread his arms dramatically, indicating the room and all its contents.

  “I’m waiting,” Ajax said, after an uncomprehending look around. “Enlighten me, O Wise One.”

  “Mcuil observed that cooks are like smiths. Both are secretive, jealous of what they know, afraid of being robbed of their ideas, their knowledge, their hard-won experience and expertise.”

  “No one can steal experience.”

  “No, but they can steal secrets, which in turn may enable a clever thief to claim expertise…The expertise of processing iron blades, for one thing.”

  “And how is that like cooking? Because the cook and the smith both wear aprons?”

  Hanno gave Ajax a pitying look. “A cook fears to lose his secrets of preparing food. A smith fears losing his secrets of preparing metal. And in a parallel unseen before today, a smith cooks his creations with great similarity to how a cook prepares his finest meals. Wait! Before you say more, look.”

  He stepped to the workbench running along the wall beside the door and gently folded back the long white cloth that covered the items laid out on it. One of them was a heavy bowl with thumb-thick sides, and he picked it up and threw it casually to Varrus, who caught it easily but came close to falling backwards with the unexpected weight of it.

  “That is a crucible,” Hanno said. “You already know that.”

  “What’s it made of?” Varrus tried not to gasp with the effort of holding it motionless.

  “Fire clay.”

  “Fire clay.” He grappled with the rough-surfaced thing until he had it firmly grasped in both hands, then braced himself and held it up and out as though to weigh it. He could not decide whether it had been thrown on a wheel or made by hand.

  “And where would a man find fire clay?”

  “Here?” Hanno pointed with his chin. “In one of those barrels beneath the bench over there. Look for yourself.”

  Varrus set down the crucible, then lifted a loose lid on one of the barrels and saw bricks of greyish clay, immersed in water. He hesitated, then answered his own unvoiced question. “Of course. To stop the clay from drying out.” He looked to Ajax, whose lips were pursed and whose eyes looked speculative, then at Demetrius Hanno. “This must have something to do with the second step you spoke of.”

  “Everything. And everything to do with those unknown ways of gods that I spoke of. And now it has also to do with the secret formulas of cooks.” He stepped over to where a number of long cloth aprons hung from a row of pegs along the wall. “Mcuil,” he said, taking an apron from the end peg and slipping it over his huge head before tying it around his waist, “I know you have been in a crowded kitchen before now, when you lived in your villa in Dalmatia, but, Ajax, tell me, have you ever been in one?”

  “In a kitchen?” Ajax looked amused. “What kind of question is that? Of course I have.”

  “Ah, I know you have, Natius, but what I really meant was, have you ever looked at what is there, at the heart of a large kitchen, where the senior cooks prepare their finest, most jealously guarded dishes?” He paused, looking expectant, then said, “No? I thought not. Well, look now, because it differs little from this.”

  Ajax cocked his head, not quite smiling. “Demetrius, my friend, should I be concerned about you? Are you feeling unwell?”

  “No, Natius, my friend, you should not. I am merely amazed by how unobservant I have been. You know my friend Claudius Casper, do you not? His rank is yours.”

  Ajax jerked his head in acknowledgment. “Quartermaster’s centuriate, both of us. I run the armouries, he runs the caterers.”

  �
��No, he has responsibility for the catering division, but he actually runs the kitchens. And he permits me to stand beside him, talking with him while he works, even while he is preparing banquets.”

  “So?”

  “He has no fear I might steal his secrets, because he knows I have no slightest knowledge of what he does. He has no fear of me, no jealousy. Because I offer him no threat. And yet we both go about our work in exactly the same way.” He waved his hand again towards the bench, including Varrus in his invitation to look. “For you were right, we both wear aprons to protect our clothing. We both assemble, measure, and prepare our ingredients in advance, with great care, and then we mix and blend them, with great care, in order to achieve a desired effect. We cook them in an oven, with great care, paying attention to the cooking time and to the way we remove them afterwards, with greater care than ever, from the heat…And I cannot believe that has escaped my notice until now.”

  “Ingredients,” Varrus said, looking at the contents of the tabletop.

  “Precisely.” Hanno reached into a large, deep, wide-mouthed jar and pulled out a fistful of whatever was in there, then opened his fingers to let it fall onto the workbench with a sound like falling gravel. “What is it?” he asked Varrus.

  Varrus picked up a few pea-sized pieces and examined them. They were tiny drops of solid metal, heavy, dark grey and flecked with black. “Iron?” he asked. “Bits of iron?”

  “Bits of wrought iron. Yes. But specially prepared for this process. Smelted and hammered to remove most of the slag, though not all of it. That remaining slag is of great importance to us, but we do not know why. And so, for this procedure, we do not hammer the entire mass until we drive out all the slag, as we do in creating cleanly wrought iron. We work it slowly instead, until the iron, which is porous and sponge-like at this stage, falls apart in tiny pieces. When that happens, we stop and gather the pieces and the slag that still pollutes them, and we wash them carefully, taking care not to dislodge the slag that still adheres to them.”