The Proof House (30 page)

Theudas scowled. ‘Go back to sleep,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a long day tomorrow, and you need your rest. In fact, I’m going to have a word with the drover; you can’t be expected to rattle along in a cart all day at your age.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t fret about it.’ Gannadius smiled bleakly. ‘I happen to know that I survived to a ripe old age, all my hair fell out and half my teeth as well. So did you; survive, I mean. Probably you died of pneumonia, but don’t hold me to that; I’m extrapolating from associated data.’

‘Uncle—’

‘I know, I’m talking crazy again. I’ll stop.’ Gannadius yawned conscientiously and turned over, his eyes still open. ‘Put out the lamp,’ he said, ‘I promise I’ll try to get some sleep.’

Theudas sighed. ‘I worry about you, I really do,’ he said.

‘So do I,’ Gannadius answered, trying to sound drowsy. ‘So do I.’

 

‘You’re cured then, are you?’

Bardas smiled. ‘Apparently,’ he replied. ‘At least, I’m no crazier than I was to start with. Also, I was making the infirmary look untidy, so they threw me out.’

Anax, the ancient Son of Heaven who ran the proof house, nodded sagely. ‘It’s not the sort of place you’d want to hang about in,’ he said. ‘What they’re best at is sawing off limbs - they make a wonderfully neat job of it, probably because the surgeon used to be the foreman of the joinery shop, until he got too much seniority and had to be promoted. You should see some of the false legs he’s fitted; they turn them out of whalebone on the big pole lathe they’ve got down there. Works of art, some of them.’

‘I shouldn’t wonder,’ Bardas replied.

While Bardas packed his few belongings into a kitbag, Anax sat perched on the end of the bed, reminding Bardas of a pixie in a story he’d heard when he was very young. To the best of his recollection, the pixie occupied its time by making marvellously detailed and complicated lifesize mechanical dolls that were well nigh indistinguishable from real boys and girls, and substituting them for the children he stole from poor families in the dead of night. The story had horrified him so much that he hadn’t slept for weeks afterwards, and (rather illogically) had got into the habit of tapping his arms and legs to make sure they weren’t made of metal.

‘So you’re off, then,’ Anax said, after he’d been silent for a while.

‘Apparently,’ Bardas replied. ‘It’s a shame, really. I was getting used to being here.’

Anax smiled. ‘Getting used to,’ he said. ‘That’s about the furthest anyone could ever go, unless of course they happened to love bashing sheet metal with hammers. Don’t laugh, some people do. Bollo here, for instance; don’t you, Bollo?’

Anax’s enormous young assistant pulled a face. Bardas laughed.

‘Don’t let him fool you,’ Anax went on. ‘Secretly he loves his work. When he was a child, he was always getting yelled at for breaking things - and something that size in a small peasant cottage is bound to break something every now and again, it’s inevitable. Here, he can break things all day long and get paid money for it.’ Anax looked down at his fingers, then up again. ‘If you’re going to the wars, what are you going to do for equipment? You don’t seem to have much kit of your own.’

Bardas shrugged. ‘They’ll issue me with some, I suppose,’ he replied. ‘At least, I assume—’

‘Seems a bit long-winded,’ Anax interruped. ‘After all, we make the stuff here. Why take pot luck with some provincial quartermaster’s clerk when you can have the pick of the production run? Better still,’ he added, hopping down from the bed, ‘you could have some made bespoke. At least that way you’d know it was proof.’

‘I haven’t really given it much thought,’ Bardas replied, holding a shirt against his chest to fold it. ‘From what they’ve told me, my main function’s going to be to stand up on a high point where Temrai can see me and look terrifying. Which’ll suit me fine,’ he added. ‘Gods know, I’m in no hurry to get involved in any fighting.’

Anax sighed. ‘He hasn’t given it much thought,’ he repeated. ‘Deputy inspector of the proof house, or whatever he calls himself, and he’s prepared to make do with any old piece of junk off the shelves in the QM stores. We can’t have that, can we, Bollo? Imagine how it’d reflect on us if he got himself killed, or lost an arm. Some people just don’t think, is their trouble.’

‘All right,’ Bardas replied, smiling. ‘You choose some for me, then I’ll know who to blame.’

‘We’ll do better than that,’ Anax replied. ‘We’ll make it for you, ourselves.’

Bardas raised an eyebrow. ‘I thought you only smashed it up,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know you could make the stuff too.’

Anax made a show of looking affronted. ‘Do you mind?’ he said. ‘I was a tin-basher for twenty years.’

‘Until you got too much seniority and they had to promote you?’

Anax slapped him on the back. ‘It’s a pity, you know,’ he said. ‘The man’s just starting to get the hang of how this place works, and he’s getting posted. It’s a waste, if you ask me.’

Before Bardas could object, Anax had marched out of the room. He walked so fast that Bardas had trouble keeping up with him, especially in the maze of corridors and galleries under the main shop, which was where he was headed. Bollo lumbered along some way behind; he wasn’t built for speed or agility, and he knew the way already.

‘Good,’ Anax said, peering in through a doorway, ‘nobody’s found it yet. One of these days I’ll come down here and it’ll be full of equipment and people working, and that’ll be my private workshop gone. Where’s Bollo with the lamp? We need to get a fire going so we can see what we’re about.’

When there was light, Bardas was able to look round. In the middle of the floor stood an anvil, the full-sized three-hundredweight type, bolted to a massive section of oak beam to dampen the shock of the blows. Next to it on the beam was a swage block, a large square of heavy duty iron into which were cut holes and grooves and cups of various sizes and profiles, half-round and square and three-square; into these recesses the sheet metal could be hammered, to mould a variety of shapes, such as flutes and raised edges. At the end of the beam a cup-shaped hole had been chiselled out, about half a thumb’s length deep at its deepest point (it was shaped rather like a scallop shell, sloping gently at one end, steeply at the other). Bardas noticed that the fibres of the wood had been hammered smooth, hard and shiny.

‘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.’