‘Dishing stump,’ Anax explained. ‘For dishing and hollowing. And that’s the folder,’ he went on, pointing to a contraption mounted on a stout workbench at the far end of the room, ‘and next to that’s the rollers and the shear. All there is to it, really. Now then, let’s see what we’ve got behind here.’ He knelt down and reached behind the work-bench. ‘Unless somebody’s been in here and found it, we should have – yes, here we are.’ He hauled out a sheet of steel, dull brown under an even layer of rust. ‘I put this aside – what, fifteen years ago it must be, just in case I ever wanted to make some good stuff. I watched it being drawn down out of a single bloom of proper Colleon iron – lovely clean material, not full of bits of grit and rubbish like the garbage we use for work. There’s half a hundredweight here, plenty to be going on with if we cut neatly.’ He bit his lip, then went on, ‘You know, this probably sounds silly to you, but I knew when I saw it that I’d find a use for it some day.’
Bardas felt vaguely uneasy about this. ‘Are you sure you can spare it?’ he asked. ‘I mean, if it’s such good material-’
‘That’s all right,’ Anax replied with a slightly cockeyed grin. ‘So long as it’s going to someone who’ll make proper use of it.’
‘I’m not sure I like the sound of that,’ Bardas said.
From a shallow box in the corner Anax produced a set of patterns cut out of thin wood. ‘Breastplate,’ he said, handing up the largest of them. ‘Backplate, gorget, vambraces, helmet panel, cheekpieces, neckguard – damn it to hell, where’s the neckguard? Ah, got it. All seems to be here; cuisses, greaves, cops, rerebraces – are we going to bother with sabatons? No, I don’t think so, you’ll hardly be able to move as it is. Taces?’
‘What’s a tace?’ Bardas asked.
‘All right, no taces. That’ll do. Bollo, get the sheet up on the bench so I can start marking out.’
Carefully, while Bollo held the sheet still, Anax drew round the patterns with chalk. ‘It’s just as well for you that you’re a decent height,’ he said. ‘I cut these patterns for us – the Sons of Heaven, I mean. Most of you outlanders are funny little short people.’
‘Like you,’ Bardas pointed out.
‘Precisely,’ Anax agreed. ‘But then, I’m different. Luckily for you. All you’d ever get free from the rest of us’d be your three days’ rations. Keep the damn sheet still, Bollo, you’re wobbling it about.’
It took a long time to mark the patterns out, and longer still to cut out the sections on the shear. Bollo cut the straight lines, pulling down the long lever effortlessly, his mind obviously elsewhere; Anax cut the curves, something which Bardas would have sworn was impossible to do, since the shear was nothing more than a giant version of a pair of snips, one jaw bolted to the bench, the other fitted with a three-foot handle. ‘You’re worried,’ Anax said between grunts of effort, ‘that I can cut this stuff like paper. You think it must be too thin to be any good. Well, all I can say to you is, have faith.’
‘I wasn’t worried, actually,’ Bardas said, but Anax didn’t seem to have heard, because he went on, ‘The point is, steel is wonderful stuff. I can cut it and bend it and shape it like it was parchment or clay; and then when I’ve finished with it, Bollo and his biggest big hammer won’t be able to make so much as a dent in it. And you know what the secret is? Stress,’ he went on, before Bardas could answer. ‘A bit of stress, a bit of tension, maybe just a little torture even, and suddenly you’ve got good armour, the genuine proof. Ouch,’ he added, as he cut his finger on a sharp sliver of swarf. ‘Serves me right, I wasn’t thinking about what I’m doing.’ A drop of blood plopped like a single raindrop on to the surface of the section he was cutting out and stood proud, like the head of a rivet.
‘Stress,’ Anax repeated, putting a steel plate into the folder. It was an odd-looking thing – two square frames, like window-sashes, one fixed, the other pivoting at right angles. Anax trapped the plate between the two frames and pushed down on the pivoting arm, neatly folding the plate down the middle like a sheet of card. Next he transferred it into the roller, which reminded Bardas of the big iron mangle they used in the laundry round the corner from his apartment in the island-block in Perimadeia. Anax adjusted a setscrew to allow a little play between the rollers, then turned the handle with a sharp, jerking motion and the sheet fed through, coming out the other side with a pronounced curve; the right-angled edge that the folder had put in had become an arched rib, running up the centre-line of the sheet. ‘Stress,’ Anax said again. ‘This bit here,’ he went on, running a finger along the rib, ‘is stressed outwards, like an arch; bash on it from the outside and you’ll have a devil of a job to move it. So it becomes your first line of defence, see; it follows the line of your leg-bone up the piece, and no matter how hard you get clobbered, that force won’t come through and smash your leg. You’ll thank me for that when someone feints high and then sweeps low across your shins.’
Bardas smiled politely. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘That’s a leg-guard, is it?’
‘Greave,’ Anax corrected him, ‘don’t show your ignorance. It covers you from the knee down to the ankle.’ He was holding the piece up between his hands, squeezing the edges gently together, lifting it up so he could see along it, pulling it apart a little, repeating the process. ‘Just adjusting it to fit,’ he went on, ‘not too tight and not too loose. It doesn’t look it, but you’re watching pure skill here.’
‘I’m sure,’ Bardas said.
When he was finally satisfied (Bardas couldn’t tell the difference from when he’d started) Anax went over to the anvil and picked up a hide mallet. Propping the piece at an angle against the horn, he tapped and pecked at the edge, raising and curling it around the radius to form a lip. The hand holding the mallet rose and fell in a quick, impersonal rhythm; with the other hand he fed the piece along, making sure that the blows fell evenly spaced. ‘More stress,’ he explained, a little breathlessly. ‘Once the lip’s curled, you can’t just go bending it between your hands like I’ve just been doing; it’s stiff and inflexible, like provincial office regulations. There,’ he added, as he finished drawing the lip round, ‘we’ll call that done and do another one, while we still remember how. Planishing can wait till we’ve finished.
‘Hollowing, now.’ Anax was making cops, the cup-shaped pieces that covered the knees and elbows. ‘Hollowing’s where you really put in the stress.’ He was standing in front of the dishing stump, holding the truncated-diamond-shaped section over the scooped-out hole at an angle so that the middle of the plate was directly above the deepest part. ‘But you’ve got to understand stress really well to do this,’ he went on, ‘or you’ll ruin everything.’ With the edge of the mallet-head he started to peck at the plate, pinching it between the mallet and the wood. ‘Bash it too hard in the middle and you’ll make it thin, you’ll squeeze the metal out of it, like wringing out a wet cloth. Bad stress, that; too much, too soon. So instead you come at it gently, starting on the edge of where you want the hollow to be, and you work in from the edge to the centre – that way, you’re squeezing thickness out of the sides into the top of the dome, where you need it most.’
He stopped, wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist and grinned. ‘Sneaky, I call it,’ he said. ‘But nobody ever said this business was fair.’ His right hand rose and fell quickly and precisely, so that the hammer dropped in its own weight and bounced itself back up off the metal – minimal effort, the effect being achieved by accuracy and persistence, the sheer number of precisely aimed blows. ‘As well as stress,’ he went on, ‘there’s compression, you’re crushing the inside up tighter than the outside, making more stress; and stress is strength, to all intents and purposes. It’s what we call work-hardening, and it’s a wonderful thing, except when you overdo it. You want to remember that, my friend; stress on the inside is strength on the outside, and hardness comes from getting bashed a lot. Understand that, and you’re pretty much there.’