Colours in the Steel (26 page)

For some reason Loredan felt a cold shiver down his neck. ‘My apologies, Master,’ he replied stiffly. ‘And we’ve finished for tonight, thank you. I’m sorry for any inconvenience. ’

The governor made a faint snuffling noise conveying disapproval. ‘Very well, Master Loredan. Miss,’ he added, nodding rather reluctantly at the girl. ‘Good night.’

As he locked the side door of the Schools behind him, Loredan felt rather better. His head was still pounding like a drop-hammer, but it wasn’t as bad as it had been.
Now then, what was all that about? Well, at least we can knock Athli’s theory on the head
. He pulled out the key, dropped it in his pocket and shouldered the equipment bags. It was a cold night, and he could smell rain.

Thank heaven for small mercies
, he added.

 

Purple to blue; blue to green; watch the colours in the steel as the heat of the furnace soaks into it. Wait for the last change, green darkening almost to black but catch it before it goes over—

‘That’ll do,’ Temrai said, wiping his forehead with his sleeve. ‘Now quench it, quick.’

The long, flat ribbon of steel hissed in the water and became invisible under a blanket of steam. Once the hissing had stopped they pulled it out, and he examined it carefully.

‘All right,’ he said, trying to mask his apprehension. ‘Now bend it double.’

Two strong men couldn’t quite do that; but it bent like the limbs of a bow and didn’t snap. ‘That’ll do,’ Temrai said, relieved. ‘That’s all right, then. Now we know how to temper long saw-blades.’

He left them to sharpen the teeth, using splinters of sandstone knapped into wedges, and walked back along the bank to the main logging camp. With six- and eight-feet saws instead of axes, adzes and drawknives they could fell timber and cut it up into logs and planks at twice, maybe three times the pace. Just as well, if all the timber he needed was to be assembled at the downriver station before the winter came on and froze everything up. Carting the stuff, especially over snowed-up passes, would be a complication he could do without.

The whole valley was full of noise and movement. On the hillside, above the belt they’d already cleared and turned into a stubble of tree-stumps and lopped branches, the forest was ringing to the sound of hundreds of axes and the shouts of the lumberjacks and drovers as the teams of horses and oxen were hitched up to the trimmed logs. Below, on the rafting stages, logs were being unhitched and rolled down to the water to be prodded and cajoled together into rafts, while the rafters scampered from log to log, swearing, yelling, getting the job done somehow.
We’re making this all up as we go along
, Temrai reflected with a mixture of wonder and panic.
Well, now we’ve got saws, and we can dig saw-pits. It’d have been interesting to try and build water-powered saws like the ones I saw in the city, but I don’t think we’ve got time. And besides, there’s being clever and there’s being clever for cleverness’s sake.

What worried him most of all was the guesswork. The first week they’d been here, all he and his people had done was count trees, cutting marks in the bark of the ones tall and straight enough to be worth felling, trying to estimate how many good planks and beams each tree would produce, double-guessing how many planks and beams they’d need to build an unspecified number of engines and machines. At the end of the week he’d given up and told them to fell anything that looked halfway useful. It was either going to be far too little or far too much.

There was also the problem of keeping the clan stationary in a generally unsuitable spot for an unprecedentedly long time. Already they’d had to send the herds off upriver to fresh grazing, and too much badly needed manpower with them. That meant detailing yet more men to carting supplies and hunting game in the back end of the forest, away from the noise and disturbance. Add to that the parties he’d had to send away to forage for iron ore and lime, the charcoal-burning details, the contingent sent to guard the women who were gathering and twisting reed for the quite staggering quantities of rope they seemed to be getting through - somehow, there were always enough people left to do the work. This clan is
big
, he was beginning to realise. There’s more of us than I thought.

‘I gather the saw worked.’ Jurrai had appeared behind him, mud-splashed and dishevelled from supervising the dispatch of the latest log raft. ‘That’s good. Shall I take the smiths off nailmaking and put them on saws?’

Temrai shook his head. ‘I’ve already seen to all that,’ he said. ‘The nailmakers are now making arrowheads while the arrowmakers start making the saws. The grinding crews are teaching the spare five to seven year olds how to grind arrowheads, so they’ll be available to grind the saws. And I’ve put the flintcutters onto shaping and dressing grindstones, which means the—Anyway,’ he added with a tired grin, ‘it’s all in hand.’ He stopped and looked around at the thousands of busy dots moving about the scarred and unreal-looking landscape. ‘We must be mad,’ he said, ‘even trying to do all this. It took the city people hundreds of years to figure out what they know—’

Jurrai shrugged. ‘Good of them to do the boring bit for us,’ he said. ‘And in the long run it’ll serve them right.’ He too spent a moment looking about him; maybe he didn’t particularly like what he saw. ‘Gods alone know what this is doing to us,’ he said quietly. ‘There’s been muttering about it already. People are saying it’s not right.’

‘I bet,’ Temrai grunted. ‘What’s it this time? Offending the river gods, offending the forest gods, offending the fire gods—’

‘All of that,’ Jurrai replied cheerfully. ‘But what they’re saying now is, if the city folk are evil and have got to be put down, why exactly are we running ourselves ragged trying to be like them?’

‘Ah.’ Temrai smiled, rather sadly. ‘I don’t know the answer to that one. Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, maybe. They try and wipe us out; we learn by their example.’ He rubbed his face between his hands. ‘I’m not exactly happy about it myself. Still, it’s got to be done. I think we’re all agreed on that, down where it matters. And anybody who thinks we can bust through the walls of Perimadeia with a cavalry charge is welcome to see me and tell me how it can be done. I’d love to hear.’ He yawned, stretched and stood up. ‘Now then,’ he said briskly, ‘arrowshafts. I’d better go and see how they’re getting on with the pole lathes.’

The lathe-making detail was busy in a small high-sided combe just over the brow of the nearby hill, which had already been cleared of timber. As he walked over the crest, Temrai could see what looked like a plantation of saplings; except that these saplings had been felled, trimmed and fixed in the ground to act as the springs for the hundred or so arrow-making lathes that Temrai hoped to have up and running in the next day or so. It was very basic stuff, by city standards; the bent sapling had a rope tied round its top, which was in turn wrapped round a spindle mounted on two trestles and then fed through to a hinged treadle. The arrow-turner pressed the treadle down with his foot, pulling in the rope and turning the spindle in one direction. Then the sapling pulled it back, turning the spindle the other way. The end of the spindle was fitted with two prongs which went into the end of the length of branchwood destined eventually to be an arrowshaft; the other end was supported by a tailstock, which held the branch level. As the spindle turned, so did the branch, and the turner pressed a sharp steel blade against it, shearing off spirals of wood and eventually producing a uniformly straight, slender shaft—

(
But we’re mostly using green timber, which at best makes lousy arrows, which’ll fly crooked and slow even if they don’t break on the bowstring. It’s quite possible we’re wasting our time and energy doing all this. If only we could take a little more time about it, make sure we get it right. Except we’d all be long dead before it’s as right as it should be. All I can do is try and make it the least wrong I can
.)

‘As to how many arrows we’re going to need,’ Temrai commented ruefully as they walked between the rows of three-quarters-finished lathes, ‘I really don’t want to know. Think about it. A man can aim and shoot twelve arrows a minute; one of these machines can make maybe twenty a day, if these men are prepared to work until they drop. We’ll never have enough, even if there’s enough wood to make the wretched things from. And it’s the wrong sort of wood,’ he added. ‘And it’s green. As to where we’re going to get the feathers from—’

‘I was coming to that,’ Jurrai said. ‘One of my people says there’s a lake up in the next range of hills that’s covered in ducks.’

‘Ducks,’ Tumrai repeated. ‘Right.’

‘Which isn’t a bad idea even if we forget the feathers,’ Jurrai went on. ‘I gather we’ve run the last of the deer out into the hills, and if we don’t want to have to start culling the milch herd—’

‘Don’t. All right, how many people do you need to go duck-hunting? Not that I ever heard of anybody fletching arrows with duck feathers, but we haven’t got anything else.’ True, he reflected as he said the words. Green wood and duck feathers, and we’re meant to be a nation of mighty archers. Looks like we’re doing our best to lull the enemy into a true sense of security.

At midday the noise and movement stopped, or at least became less obtrusive as the food was handed round and the clan gathered in groups to eat. Temrai had just enough time to bite a mouthful out of the wedge of hard cheese before they descended on him; the puzzled, the exasperated, the querulous, the offended -
How do we do this? What were we meant to be doing? What in hell are we going to make that out of? How are we expected to do this and that without the proper tools? Do you seriously expect us to do that with this?
He fended off the enquiries and complaints as best he could, smiling, shaking his head, sympathising, promising he’d think of something or it’d all be seen to, until at last they all went away and it was time to start work again. He threw the rest of the cheese to a passing dog, and plodded away to see what was the matter with the raft ropes, which kept breaking.

Ah, well,
he comforted himself,
the gods must feel like this all the time. And to think I used to envy them.

Halfway through the afternoon, he’d just managed to convince the raft crews that the ropes were fraying because they were putting too much strain on them when he noticed something on the other side of the river; a party of horsemen, up against the skyline, watching what was going on. For a moment, he was seven years old again and terrified; he wanted to run through the camp and warn them,
Run for your lives, it’s the cavalry!
But then he counted them, and thought about it, and called to his cousins Mesbai and Pepotai, who were working their way through the camp enlisting duck hunters.

‘Quick as you like,’ he said, ‘get twenty men and go up round the back of that rise there—’ He pointed to where the riders were. ‘Don’t do anything, just get the other side of them, make sure they don’t notice you until you’re in position, then come up on the crest and let them see you. If they move off, shadow them but don’t make contact. Got that?’

Pepotai, a short, square youth with a long, wispy beard, nodded. ‘We can bring ’em in if you like,’ he said. ‘Or shoo ’em off, if you’d rather.’

‘No.’ Temrai shook his head emphatically. ‘I don’t want that. For all they know, we love them dearly and wouldn’t dream of hurting them. Let’s keep it that way for now. Plenty of time for the other stuff later.’

When they’d gone, he allowed himself another look across the river. Ten riders from the city, sent to keep an eye on him, try and work out what he was up to down here among the tree-stumps. If Maxen was still alive, there’d have been none of this respectful watching from afar. Instead, the first they’d have known of it would have been heavy cavalry cascading down on all sides, flooding the camp, shooting, slashing, burning before anybody had a chance to get to a bow or a horse.
There’s another thing I’ve got to do,
he decided,
post lookouts on all the approaches, and along the riverbank, too. Maxen’d have blocked the river by now, and slaughtered the men downstream
. . . An unpleasant thought, that. A few men up there armed and ready, just in case they did try anything? Or would that be counterproductive, put them on their guard by showing men-at-arms as well as peacefully industrious lumberjacks?

Gods above, I shall be glad when this is all over, and we can go back to doing what we were always meant to do
. He turned his back on the obtrusive presence of the city and walked away.

 

 

The man knocked, came in, hooked up the chandelier and went away again. Alexius, who had been asleep, yawned and sat up. Couldn’t be that time already, could it? Well, presumably it was. He lit a candle from the small lamp, found his place in the book he’d been reading, and tried to concentrate.

It wasn’t much better the second time he tried to read it; it was still like trying to catch a runaway goose in a thicket of brambles. He didn’t put the book down, but he allowed the page to go out of focus. Not long afterwards, he was asleep again—

—And standing on the city walls, up on the top platform of one of the towers that guarded the Drovers’ Gate, looking out across the place where the river forked out towards the plains. In the distance the clouds met the horizon; there was a keen wind blowing them towards the sea, like a young sheepdog rounding up the flock, but these were clouds of dust.