“Why doesn’t the charcoal just burn?”
“No air can get into the sealed crucibles,” Enoch snapped. “Instead it fuses with the iron to make steel.”
“We’ve come all this way to watch a bunch of wogs make steel!?”
“Not just any steel.” Enoch stroked his beard. “The diffusion must be very slow. Mark how carefully they tend the fire-they must keep it at a red heat for days. You have no idea how difficult that is-that boy with the poker must know as much of fire as Vroom knows of ships.”
The alchemist continued gazing at the furnace until Jack feared they would remain in that very spot for as many days as the firing might take. But finally Enoch Root turned away from it. “There are secrets about the construction of that forge that have never been published in the Theatrum Chemicum,” he said. “More than likely they are forgotten secrets, or else these people would have built more of them.”
They moved on to a pile of crucibles that had been removed from the furnace and allowed to cool. A boy picked these up one at a time, tossing them from hand to hand because they were still too hot to hold, and dashed them against a flat stone to shatter the clay crucible. What remained among those smoking pot-shards was a hemisphere of spongy gray metal. “The egg!” exclaimed Enoch.
A smith picked up each egg with a pair of tongs, set it on an anvil, and struck it once with a hammer, then examined it carefully. Eggs that dented were tossed away on a discard-heap. Some were so hard that the hammer left no mark on them-these were put into a hod that was eventually carried across the compound to another pit where an entirely different sort of clay was being mixed up, according to some arcane recipe, by the stomping feet of Hindoo boys, while a village elder walked around the edge peering into it and occasionally tossing handfuls of mysterious powders into the mix. The eggs of metal were coated in thick jackets of this clay and then set aside to dry. The first clay had been red when wet and yellow when fired, but this stuff was grey, as if the clay itself were metalliferous.
Once the gray clay had dried around the eggs, these were carried to a different furnace to be heated-but only to a dull red heat. The difference become obvious to Jack only when the sun went down, and he could stand between the two furnaces and compare the glow of one with that of the other. Again, the firing continued for a long time. Again, the eggs that emerged were cooled slowly, over a period of days. Again they were subjected to the test on the anvil-but with different results. For something about this second firing caused the steel egg to become more resilient. Still, most of them were not soft enough to be forged after a single firing in the gray clay, and had to be put through it again and again. But out of every batch, a few responded in just the right way to the hammer, and these were set aside. But not for long, because Persians and Armenians bought them up almost before they had hit the ground.
Enoch went over and picked one of them up. “This is called wootz,” he said. “It’s a Persian word. Persians have been coming here for thousands of years to buy it.”
“Why don’t the Persians make their own? They seem to have the run of the place-they must know how it’s done by now.”
“They have been trying, and failing, to make wootz since before the time of Darius. They can make a similar product-your sons and I made a detour to one of their forges-but they cannot seem to manage this.”
Enoch held the egg of wootz up so that fire-light grazed its surface and highlighted its terrain. Jack’s first thought was that it looked just like the moon, for the color and shape were the same, and the rugged surface was pocked with diverse craters where, he supposed, bubbles had formed. On a closer look, these craters were few and far between. Most of the egg’s surface was covered with a net-work of fine cross-hatched ridges, as if some coarsely woven screen-a mesh of wires-had been mixed into the stuff, and was trying to break free of the surface. And yet Jack had seen the crucibles prepared with his own eyes and knew that naught had gone into them save black sand, fragments of charcoal, and magic leaves. He pressed a fingertip against a prominent lattice of ridges; they were as hard as stone, sharp as a sword-edge.
“Those reticules grow inside the crucible, as plants do from seeds. And they are not only at the surface, but pervade the whole egg, and are all involved with one another-they hold the steel together and give it a strength nothing else can match.”
“If this wootz is so extraordinary, why’ve I never heard of it?”
“Because Franks name it something else.” Enoch glanced up, attracted by a distant ringing sound: a smith was smiting something. But it was not just some dull clod of iron. This was not a horseshoe or poker in the making. It rang with a noble piercing sound that put Jack in mind of Jeronimo wielding his rapier in the Khan el-Khalili.
The forge was about five minutes’ walk away, and when they arrived they joined a whole crowd of Ottoman Turks and other travelers who had convened to watch this Hindoo sword-smith at work. He was using tongs to grip a scimitar-blade by its tang, and was turning it this way and that on an anvil, occasionally striking it a blow with a hammer. The metal was glowing a very dull red.
“It isn’t hot enough to forge,” Jack muttered. “It needs to be a bright cherry red at least.”
“As soon as it is heated a bright cherry red, the lattice-work dissolves, like sugar in coffee, and the metal becomes brittle and worthless-as the Franks discovered during the Crusades, when we captured fragments of such weapons around Damascus and brought them back to Christendom and tried to find out their secrets in our own forges. Nothing whatsoever was learned, except the depth of our own ignorance-but ever since, we have called this stuff Damascus steel.”
“Damascus steel comes from here!?” Jack said, jostling closer to the anvil.
“Yes-the reticules you saw in the egg of wootz, when patiently hammered out, at low temperature, produce the swirling, liquid patterns that we know as-”
“Watered steel!” Jack exclaimed. He was close enough, now, to see gorgeous ripples and vortices in the red-hot blade. Without thinking, he reached for the hilt of his Janissary-sword and began drawing it out for comparison. But Enoch’s hand clapped down on his forearm to restrain him. In the same moment the forge was filled with a storm of whisking, scraping, ringing, and keening noises. Jack looked up into a dense glinting constellation of drawn blades: serpentine watered steel daggers, watered steel scimitars, watered steel talwars, Khyber swords, and the squat fist-knives known as kitars. Inlaid passages from the Koran gleamed gold on some blades, as did Hindoo goddesses on others.
Jack cleared his throat and let go of his sword.
“This gentleman with the hammer and the tongs is extremely well-thought-of among connoisseurs of edged weapons the world round,” Enoch said. “They would be ever so unhappy if something happened to him.”
“ALL RIGHT, ALL RIGHT, your point is well taken,” Jack said, after they had, by dint of Enoch’s diplomacy, extracted themselves from the forge with all of their body parts present and in good working order. “If we want valuable cargo for the ship’s maiden voyage, there is no need to go to Batavia and load up with spices.”
“Ingots of wootz will fetch an excellent price at any of the Persian Gulf or Red Sea ports,” Enoch said learnedly. “You could trade them for silk or pearls, then sail for any European port-”
“Where we would all be tortured to death ’pon arrival. It is an excellent plan, Enoch.”
“On the contrary, you might survive in London or Amsterdam.”
“I had in mind going the opposite direction.”
“It is true that in Manila or Macao you might find a market for wootz,” Enoch said, after a moment’s consideration. “But you would make out much better in the Mahometan countries.”