The next morning, he caught me on my way to the blacksmith. If I couldn't get a box made, what was I going to do about the twentyodd complicated steps involved in making watered steel?
"Sir Conrad?" Vitold asked. "Would it be all right with you if I just went ahead and built what I think you want? If you don't like them, we can always use 'em for firewood."
"That would be fine, Vitold." I figured that it would keep him out of my hair for a while, and once we had a sample, I could show him what he was doing wrong.
The blacksmith, Ilya, was the man who had been chosen king during the holidays. He had put me in diapers, and I did not have a favorable impression of his character.
"Ilya, the count wants me to tell you about steel."
"Well, since the count wants it, I'll listen. But I already know about steel."
He was working at his forge and didn't look up when he talked to me. This forge was a primitive affair about the size of an outdoor barbecue. It was a table-high rock pit with the back wall raised as a windscreen. A crude leather bellows forced air into one side. A roof without walls covered it and his anvil, his other major piece of equipment. A few pliers, punches, and hammers completed the smithy's small collection of tools. Charcoal in the forge burned yellow-hot.
"You know something about wrought iron. You know nothing about steel," I said.
"Huh." He still didn't look up. He was a short man, but he looked to be immensely strong. Even though we were outside in the snow, his sleeves were rolled up, revealing arms twice as thick as mine. He was repairing the armor that the pig had worn when I killed it a few weeks before. "Damned lucky work, here. You must have hit a couple of weak links."
"I did nothing of the sort! I killed that pig because my sword is good steel and that armor is cheap wrought iron!"
" Nothing wrong with this armor." He still didn't look up. He was beating an iron ring into the mail shirt draped over the anvil, working over the tip of the point.
"Damn it, look at me when I'm talking to you!"
He glanced up. "I see you." Then he went back to his work.
"Well, if you won't look at me, look at my sword!" I drew it to show him what watered steel looked like.
"Skinny little thing."
Obviously, I was going to have to get his attention. It occurred to me that chopping a hole through the mail he was working on might do the trick.
"Damn you, Ilya! You stand back or you're going to lose a hand!" I swung at the armor draped over the anvil and he got out of the way in time.
The results were surprising. Fortunately, Ilya was too busy staring at the anvil with his mouth open to notice my expression. I had cut three centimeters off the end of the anvil, and the armor was almost in two pieces, hanging by a shred. My sword was undamaged.
My experience as an officer had taught me to recover quickly. "Now fix that, Ilya," I growled. "Then you come to me after supper tonight and we'll talk." I walked off as though I knew what I was doing.
The carpenter was selecting logs from the firewood pile, about a meter long and half that thick, splitting them in half and laying the halves side by side on the snow.
I didn't want to ask.
I went back to the castle, thinking about a mug of beer. Maybe the count would want a game of chess. A noble wasn't allowed to play with commoners because he might lose.
Janina got my beer, and the girls pounced on me.
"Sir Conrad, you promised to show us how to make that wonderful knot work." Krystyana wasn't very good at playing the coquette. I think she was trying to imitate Francine, the priest's wife.
"Hmm. I don't remember promising anything, but I'll think on it." Thinking did me surprisingly little good. Understand that my mother knitted constantly. Unless she was cooking or sleeping, her needles and yarn were always out. My grandmother had done the same while she was alive.
And, you know? I had never really looked at what they were doing. I knew that there was a needle in each hand, with little loops of yam that connected them to the fabric below. She did something complicated with them in the middle. I spent more than an hour trying to visualize what it was, and the girls drifted away, embarrassed.
Then a partial solution occurred to me. I didn't know what knitting was, but when I was seven, my grandmother had shown me how to crochet. I got some heavy slivers of wood from the carpenter, who was still splitting logs and laying them out.
Other groups were working. One bunch of men had piles of flax lying on the ground, and they were beating on them with large wooden mallets. Some women were shredding it into fiber. A few others were braiding a sort of rope. Some repair work was in progress on a straw roof. No one seemed to be in charge, but things were getting done.
I took my sticks back to my room, and in an hour I had whittled three usable crochet hooks. The lack of sandpaper was a nuisance, but if you take your time you can get things fairly smooth with just a knife. I borrowed a candle from the count's room and waxed them. I borrowed some yam and shortly produced a pot holder that was as good as anything I had done when I was seven.
The girls were thrilled and picked it up without difficulty. Within a week I had two usable linen undershirts and Lambert was equally well equipped. The ladies were soon experimenting with variations, some of which were quite nice, and the peasant women were following their lead.
One surprising thing about technology is that very often the simplest processes and devices take the longest to develop, or perhaps I should say that it's surprising until you've been a designer. It is much easier, conceptually, to design a complicated thing than a refined simple mechanism. Those intricate machines that came out of twentiethcentury Germany are really the results of lazy thinking.
Consider the evolution of the musket. The expensive and tricky wheel lock was produced for a hundred years before some nameless craftsman came up with the simple and dependable flintlock.
Or look at this crocheting business. It's hard to imagine a simpler tool than a crochet hook. It produces a useful cloth fairly quickly, yet I do not know of a single primitive tribe that uses it. Even nomads, who must carry all their belongings with them, haul along a simple loom to make cloth.
A designer can mull over complicated designs for months. Then suddenly the simple, elegant, beautiful solution occurs to him. When it happens to you, it feels as if God is talking! And maybe He is.
After supper, Mary escorted Ilya the blacksmith into my room. He was considerably less surly than he had been in the afternoon.
"Sir Conrad, please understand that when I have the forge going, I have to work! It takes me two or three days to make enough charcoal to feed the fire for a single afternoon."
"Okay, Ilya. I'll count that as an apology if you'll excuse my temper. Now, about steel."
The door was open, and Lambert walked in. "Yes, Sir Conrad, about steel! I want to listen in on this."
"You've had a productive day! All my ladies are busily tying balls of yam into remarkable knots, and I hear that you have invented a new technique for obtaining Ilya's attention. "
In a place so small, everybody seemed to know what everyone else was doing. "I'm sorry about losing my temper, my lord. I imagine that anvils are expensive."
"Yes, but Ilya fixed it and the mail as well." His eyes twinkled. "I've occasionally considered using a similar technique on his head, but I feared for my sword. Now, tell us about steel."
"Well, the first step is to convert the wrought iron into blister steel. Wrought iron is almost pure iron; steel is iron with a little bit of carbon in it. Charcoal is mostly carbon, so the trick is to mix them."