Dawn of Wonder (The Wakening Book 1) (38 page)

The next morning, Dun stopped them when they tried to leave
the dining hall after breakfast. “To the academy gates,” he said.

Skeet was waiting for them, glaring. As always, he
seemed annoyed at something or other, though the sky was young and bright and
the birdsong full. The boys hurried into line, falling silent as the glare
passed over them.

Aedan tried not to fidget and managed to work up a
look of bored unconcern. Had the curator reported the incident?

“You’re going to find this a little different to
the bowyers’ workshop,” Skeet said. “The next few days will leave your ears
ringing and your fingers jangling.”

“Swords!” The whispered word ran up and down the
line, bringing forth twenty sets of gleaming teeth. Aedan’s fears dissolved
into the bright morning.

Skeet returned no eager smile. “Usually we keep
this until your second year,” he said. “But two weeks ago we had an update on
weapons production in Greel. It seems that Fennlor is stepping up their
preparations. Their smithies are opening an hour earlier and running an hour
later. We cannot afford to lag behind so we have decided to keep our forges hot
day and night. Though you won’t be given time to fully master the art of
working with steel, you need to be able to at least hammer out a basic weapon.
If the Fenn begin their assault before you are old enough to be deployed on the
field then you will likely find yourselves with the bowyers or the smiths.”

He ran a critical, disapproving eye over them.

“The border threat has given our weapons
manufacturing a much-needed kick. If you misbehave, you too will receive a kick
that will send you all the way back to the academy. If you behave, you will
learn how to make a sword.”

The grins reappeared. Skeet rolled his eyes, signalled
for them to follow and marched away.

The group wound through the streets to a section
near the north wall where there were several warehouses and workshops. Outside
a particularly smoky building, Skeet turned back and raised his voice over the
general clangour of industry filling the area.

“We split the process into stages, beginning here
– the bloomery.”

He led them into a hot, smoky chamber, where despite
good ventilation, the air was dry and sharp.

“Here, iron is extracted from ore by burning with
charcoal. Smelting, not melting. The porous blooms that emerge are hammered to
get rid of the slag, giving us pure wrought iron. Depending on where it is
mined, ore can have different qualities. There are some interesting stocks
reserved for special blades.”

He moved across to another set of furnaces. The
boys at the front had to shield their faces as they looked into the flames.

“In order to produce steel, the smelted iron is brought
here where it is heated, again with charcoal, and kept at a higher temperature
for a long time, sometimes for days, depending on what grade of steel is
needed. This is a tricky process. Too much of the charcoal essence in the metal
and the steel is brittle; not enough and it’s soft as iron.”

They left the bloomery and the boys jogged to keep
up as Skeet marched along a sooty road towards a steady pounding din. It was
not necessary for him to explain that they were approaching a smithy. He did,
however, mention that it would be unwise to refer to the swordsmiths within as
blacksmiths.

Again, several coal forges kept the large chamber at
a sweaty heat. The room was packed. Not a bench stood empty, not a forge was
cold. If Skeet’s earlier words hadn’t convinced the boys, one look into this
room was enough to make it clear – this was a city preparing for war.

About fifty men worked at various stations –
swordsmiths and their attendant strikers. Before the visitors entered, they
stood in the wide doorway and Skeet shouted, “As you can see, steel weapons are
not melted and moulded. Bronze weapons are, but they are weak by comparison.
Steel that is moulded is far too brittle for weapons, so forges and hammers are
used to draw the blades out.”

He led them inside and began explaining the
process, but there was a problem. What the boys heard was, “Over here is the
clang!
and if you
clang!
carefully you’ll notice
clang! bang!
Can you
all see it?”

He was met with twenty blank stares. “Sorry Master
Skeet,” Hadley said.
Clang!
“Can we see what?”

“Weren’t you listening? I said this is the
clang!
bang! bang!
”

More blank stares

Skeet was growing red. He turned a dangerous eye on
the nearest striker, raised his voice and tried again, “The
cling! bang!
Oh for mercy’s sake!” He whipped around and bellowed with such force that every
hammer froze on its descent. “The next one of you mangy curs who uses his
hammer while I’m talking is going to swallow it!”

The response was impressive. Hammers were
cautiously laid down. Apart from the rumble from the forges, the space was
filled with a respectful silence. Aedan guessed that Skeet was known here and
that he held an intimidating rank.

“Now, as I said, here is where the steel is heated
and hammered into the right dimensions. He pointed to a steel ingot the size of
a fist. “This,” he said, “is a sword hatchling, fresh from the bloomery.
Depending on the price offered, it is either beaten directly into shape or
subjected to processes that can include combining with other grades of steel or
iron, twisting, and folding – all of which result in superior properties.”

He drew his own sword and held it out.

“See the interwoven pattern on the steel that
looks like the work of a thousand woodborers? This sword was a combination of
four ingots that were hammered into rectangular billets, forge-welded, twisted
into tight coils, flattened, folded ten times and wrapped around a softer core
before being lengthened. It was a technique developed by Magnus over there, who
is our chief swordsmith for good reason.”

This was said for all to hear and Skeet inclined
his head to the white-headed, sinewy man who bowed in acknowledgment.

“The swordsmiths are always experimenting, trying
and testing new ideas. But this makes for expensive weapons. The quicker and
cheaper option of hammering out a single ingot produces a useable but inferior
blade that is heavily dependent on the charcoal infusion process, which if you
remember, is a tricky one, often unreliable.”

He moved to another bench where he used the tongs
to pick up a longer piece.

“This ingot has been partially extended. If you
look carefully, you’ll –”

“Eeeeyooww!”

All eyes turned on Lorrimer who was furiously
shaking his oversized hand and hopping over the steel block he had just flung
on the ground.

“Did you think I was using the tongs to keep my
fingers clean?” Skeet asked.

Lorrimer recovered himself, blushed with a heat to
shame the forges, and apologised profusely. The swordsmiths and strikers were
grinning. Skeet ignored him and carried on.

“Here, you’ll see that two metals have been
combined – a hard steel and a softer iron on the inside.”

“Master Skeet,” Vayle asked. “Why use a softer
metal? Doesn’t that make it weaker?”

“Fired clay is harder than wet, but which shatters
when dropped? If you make a sword too rigid it will break on impact.”

He moved over to where a blade had been drawn out
to its full length. It was straight, double-edged, and partially fullered. He
held it up and pointed first to the stumpy section at the back.

“The tang,” he said, “is far more important than
you would think. Get this part wrong and the handling will be horrendous. The
fuller,” he indicated the partly formed groove running down the middle, “reduces
the overall weight without taking from the strength.” He put the blade down and
turned to another that was glowing in the nearest forge.

“Once the blade has reached its basic shape, it is
put through several stages of heat treatment that takes two forms – annealing
and tempering – differentiated by how the heated metal is cooled. Annealing is a
slow cooling, making the blade softer and more flexible, while tempering …” he
drew their attention to one of the smiths who had removed a red hot blade from
the forge and now submerged it in a quenching tank, producing a short, angry
hiss of steam, “tempering hardens the blade, allowing for a sharp edge. Heat
treating is an art that has a big influence on the final strength.”

The clanging resumed as they followed Skeet through
a partial division and into an adjacent workshop. This one was just as noisy,
though less percussive. Skeet made his explanations from the door.

“The grinders are the craftsmen who shape,
sharpen, and eventually polish the blades so that they don’t look like beaten fire-irons.
The rough grinding takes place before the tempering while the steel is still
soft from annealing, and the final sharpening and polishing afterwards when the
edges have been hardened. So the blades and some of the swordsmiths move
between these workshops. There are loyal chains of craftsmen running through
the process. Each chain has its own particular methods, arrangements, and even a
few secrets.”

Inside were a number of men working at grinding
wheels and many more at tables, scraping away with stones and files. Others
polished. The boys were still feasting their eyes on the emerging blades when
Skeet clapped his hands and shooed them out.

They followed a courier hefting a thickly wrapped
bundle of sharp steel up a flight of stairs to the next workshop, the cutlers. Here,
hilts were produced to match the size and weight of each blade. Some were plain,
like the standard military arming sword of which several were to be seen at
every bench. Others were of a far higher breed – mostly the swords of officers
and wealthy clients.

“A poor cutler,” Skeet told them, “can ruin a good
blade in a number of ways, balance being the first of these. A cutler must, before
anything else, be a swordsman.”

As if to establish the point, one of the men at a
bench nearby stood and executed a sequence of sweeping cuts and thrusts with
the sword he had just completed. Satisfied, he placed it in a tray and started
on another.

“The scabbard-makers produce standard scabbards
for the standard-issue blades, but custom blades must take another journey.
Once the scabbards are done, the blades are cleaned, oiled and ready. Right!”
he said, with a note of animation. “Classes are suspended. This is where you will
be for a little over a week. One day in each of the workshops, and three days
making your own sword. When you are done you will swap weapons and test their
strength and handling. And if you don’t want to be deaf by the end of it, stuff
something in your ears.”

The smiles reappeared, even bigger than before.

Aedan could see the sword he was going to make. It
would be magnificent. It would be legendary, a blade by which epic battles
would be won. He would call it
The Avenger
, or
The Bane of Lekrau
,
and it would pass down the generations, hoarded in the vaults of kings and
coveted by all …

The glittering eyes around him revealed that he
was not the only one with such ambitions. And rightly so. How difficult could a
bit of hammering and grinding be?

“I’ll challenge you one shift of clean-up duty,” Aedan
whispered to Peashot. “Best sword wins.”

“Deal. You’ll lose.”

“You’ll both lose,” said Hadley. “Just you wait
and see what I have in mind.”

“Also me,” said Kian. “I’m hating clean-up.”

Soon everyone was in and the winner would have no clean-up
duties for a long time.

Over the next week, they were tutored through the details
of the process, and then each was given a steel ingot and a place at a forge.
They were guided but not assisted in producing their own blades. When the
blades cracked, which happened to more than one, they had to be forge-welded –
heated and hammered together – and beaten out to length again. Every night the
boys returned to the academy with grimy faces, blistered hands, dry eyes, and
ringing ears.

On his second day, Aedan decided that the heat of
the room would be better endured without shoes. He discovered that of all
environments he had ever known, none offered nearly as many sharp objects on
which to step, not to mention the showers of sparks that anointed his feet from
time to time.

When he returned from the forge that evening, he
approached the gate alone, barefoot, hobbling, and filthy beyond recognition.
He was, of course, denied entrance, the guard thinking him a street urchin
trying his luck. One of the clerks had to be summoned to verify Aedan’s
identity.

After his dismal failure with bows, he had chosen
to heed what Skeet had said about a soft inner core. Warton too. It made for
longer hours of hammering and some late nights, but they pushed on and
completed their blades. For Aedan it wasn’t about impressing anyone – he had a
little scheme in mind, a little payback for Malik who would want to win the
contest no less than the rest of them and who would certainly cheat.