‘The purpose of this action,’ he announced, ‘which we term planishing, is to smooth out the finished work. In addition to this, it has two other important functions: to compress the metal and to close its surface pores, thereby imparting to the outside a level of work-hardening comparable to that imparted to the inside by the act of doming or raising. It is important not to overdo the planishing process, lest the metal be beaten thin or made too hard, in other words brittle. Should brittleness be imparted by excessive zeal at this juncture, the piece would have to be annealed by fire and worked again, both outside and inside.’ Bardas wanted to shout, but his mouth was full of the oval-head stake; his head vibrated and echoed with the countless rapid blows, each one pinching his skull between the stake inside and the hammer outside. He tried to close his eyes; but the rivets around which the steel lames of his eyelids pivoted were slightly distorted, and the lids wouldn’t shut properly-
He opened his eyes.
He was sitting bolt upright on his bed in his little room in the top back gallery, his mouth open in mid-scream.
‘Steady on,’ said a voice at the foot of the bed. ‘Were you having a bad dream or something?’
Bardas closed his mouth – he felt that his jaw ought to pivot around two hardened steel pins, like the visor of a bascinet; but that was plainly absurd. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘That’s all right.’ The man at the foot of the bed turned out to be the old Son of Heaven, Anax, who worked in the proof house. Just behind his shoulder, inevitably, was the enormous shape of Bollo, his assistant. ‘Though I’ll admit you startled the life out of me, shouting like that. Anyway, how are you feeling?’
Bardas shuddered and lowered himself carefully back on to the mattress. His head hurt.
‘Excuse me if this sounds strange,’ he said, ‘but are you real?’
Anax smiled. ‘You have trouble telling the difference, do you?’ he said. ‘I know the feeling. Yes, we’re real; or as real as it gets around here. It’s that sort of place, though, isn’t it?’
Bardas thought for a moment. ‘What’s been happening to me?’ he said. ‘Last thing I knew, I was walking down a corridor-’
‘And you flaked out, apparently,’ Anax said with a grin. ‘Dead to the world when they found you; couldn’t wake you up. They tried prodding you, slapping you round the face, even emptied a jug of water over you. Then they sent for us. I guess they decided you were our responsibility. Anyway, we brought you up here – or at least Bollo did.’
‘You’re heavy,’ Bollo said. ‘Especially going upstairs.’
‘I see,’ Bardas replied. ‘How long was I out for?’
Anax thought for a moment. ‘Let’s see,’ he said. ‘Half a day, last night and this morning; call it a round twenty-four hours, give or take half an hour. I don’t know,’ he went on, ‘fainting fits, at your age. That sort of stuff’s for old men and young girls who don’t eat properly.’
‘Maybe it was heatstroke,’ Bardas suggested. ‘Or cranial trauma.’
‘Cranial what?’
‘Trauma. A bash on the head.’
‘Oh. So who’s been bashing you on the head?’
Bardas shrugged. ‘Nobody, as far as I know. But it could be a delayed reaction to what happened to me in the mines.’
‘Nah.’ Anax shook his head. ‘That was weeks ago. Anyway, you seem to be all right now, which is the main thing. Tell you what; you stay in bed a day or so till you’re quite sure you’re all right; I’ll send Bollo or one of the lads from the foundry shop to look in on you from time to time – make sure you haven’t died or gone off your head. I’d stay myself, but we’ve got a lot of work on, and we haven’t made much headway with it sitting here watching you sleep.’
When they’d gone, Bardas tried very hard to stay awake. He managed to keep going for an hour; then he woke up in a panic to find Bollo standing over him with a bowl of salt porridge and a wooden spoon.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Once the fire has been lit, the report said, it must be kept going to maintain the necessary level of heat. Approximately twenty-four loads of charcoal are needed to produce eight tons of pig-iron.
Athli closed her eyes, then opened them again. It was late, and she wanted to go to bed; but the report had been sitting on her desk for two days now, and she wouldn’t have time to read it tomorrow – meetings all day, and the accounts to audit after that. She found the place again and tried to concentrate.
In refining the pig-iron into a bloom of plate, one ton in eight will be lost. Five hundredweight of plate will make twenty cuirasses, Imperial standard proof, with pauldrons. Four hundredweight will make forty sets of cuirasses, without pauldrons. Sixteen hundredweight will make twenty full suits of cavalry armour, Imperial standard proof. Four plateworkers will make up thirty-seven hundredweight of plates in a week, therefore one plateworker will make up nine and a quarter hundredweight in a week, or one and a half hundredweight a day, using a coal-fired furnace; where the fuel is timber or charcoal, the daily output is unlikely to exceed one hundredweight.
Athli yawned. At first glance, it had seemed like a sound enough proposition; with wars breaking out here and there, the Empire on the move, its neighbours panicking, generals and masters of ordnance everywhere looking to upgrade equipment, what better investment than an armour factory, either here on the Island or away in Colleon, where labour was cheap and raw materials conveniently to hand? But she was cautious, getting more so every day, and so she’d asked the librarian at the Merchant Venturers’ Hall, who owed her a favour, to see if there was anything about the economics of running an armoury; and he’d found an old report by the warden of the city armoury of Perimadeia, compiled thirty years ago and more, which he’d had copied and sent to her wrapped in silk and tied with a broad blue ribbon. It was very kind of him, though it wasn’t going to get him anywhere, if that’s what he was thinking; but the very least she could do was read it, after he’d been to all that trouble.
She tried to focus, but her eyes slid across the page like a colt trying to cross a frozen river. Dry stuff; well, of course, what did she expect, a love interest? Concentrate, she urged herself, this is the good bit. If one man can make one and a half hundredweight of plate a day, and if five hundredweight makes twenty cuirasses (with pauldrons, whatever a pauldron was), but using coal, not charcoal; twenty-four loads of charcoal makes eight tons, of which one ton is lost; but how much charcoal do you get in a load? She scowled, and rearranged the counters on her counting-board.
Coincidence, she thought; apparently Bardas has been posted to the armoury at Ap’ Calick. Hey, why don’t I just go to Ap’ Calick and ask him about all this stuff, instead of killing myself trying to understand it from a book? What a good idea. No, thank you. Not even if he knows what a pauldron is, or whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing to have with a cuirass.
Who could she think of – who else could she think of who’d be likely to know what a pauldron was? On the Island, armour came in barrels stuffed with straw and sealed with the factory seal, and it stayed there until it was offloaded on the customer’s dock and paid for. What was inside the barrel, nobody knew or cared. The Islanders knew a lot of things – they had a library, after all – but technical military information wasn’t the sort of thing that interested them. Chances were, she could find ten people who could tell her how much a pauldron was worth, twenty who happened to know where there was a consignment of best-quality pauldrons, cancelled order, virtually at cost; forty who were crying out for pauldrons to meet an order, cash on the nail, good customer, but the stuff’s never about when you want it. Show them a pauldron and they’d probably try to poach an egg in it. She shuffled the counters up and down the lines and wrote the result on the wax tablet next to the board. Good, solid, meaningless data.