Colours in the Steel

CHAPTER TWO

Traditionally, the best way to approach the island on which Perimadeia, oldest and most beautiful of cities, is built is from the seaward side. At first, only the lighthouse is visible over the skyline. As the ship comes closer, the towers of the Phylax and the spires of the Phrontisterion poke up above the horizon like green shoots of corn. Shortly after that, the mountain itself rises up out of the water and the foreigner sees the first distant prospect of the Triple City. The summit of the mountain is an unworldly flash of white marble and gilded rooftops, and ignorant offcomers who know no better than to believe in gods at once assume that here is where they live. When they’re told that the upper city is the residence of the imperial family, they find it easy enough to make the association in their minds between gods and emperors, a natural-enough reaction which generations of Perimadeian diplomats have exploited to the full. Since nobody ever enters or leaves the upper city, the assumptions of barbarian visitors cannot be refuted; not that the Perimadeian state ever tries too hard.

Below the white and gold crown lies the second city, a breathtaking jumble of palaces, temples, banks, market halls and public buildings of all kinds interspersed with and often indistinguishable from the private residences of the rich and mighty. All great Perimadeians intend their houses to look like glorious and awe-inspiring office buildings, and many a confused envoy or merchant has wandered for an hour among the cloisters and corridors of a second-city edifice only to find out eventually that he’s in some private citizen’s home.

The lower city can only be seen when the ship is close to land, since it is largely obscured by the colossal sea walls, invulnerable guardians of the city for seven centuries. Once visible, the largest and busiest section of the city looks like any city anywhere, except that it’s much larger and more concentrated; as if the great conquering emperors of the past had scooped up the cities acquired on their campaigns, picked out the loot and everything else worth having and dumped the empty buildings at the foot of the mountain like a huge pile of oyster shells.

If the city is approached from either of the two branches of the river in whose fork the island lies, the prospect is slightly less dramatic; the traveller sees the whole mountain at once as he comes through the narrow passes of the surrounding hills, and the land walls don’t mask the lower city in the same way as the maritime defences do. From the river approach, Perimadeia appears as a very large city divided into three levels, with freshwater estuaries on two sides and the sea on the third; impregnable, arrogant, infinitely rich, but not necessarily a dwelling-place of gods. Gods would have servants’ quarters, but they would be cleaner and not quite so dark and cramped.

Another advantage of approaching from the sea, as a result of the prevailing winds, is that the smell only becomes noticeable once the ship has made landfall in the harbour of the Golden Crescent. Travellers arriving by river get the smell rather earlier; by way of compensation, they have time to get used to it before they arrive at the bridge gates, whereas sea-travellers get it as an unpleasant shock when they walk off their ship.

Only one in a hundred native Perimadeians is even aware of the smell; on the contrary, citizens born and raised in it tend not to notice it and complain about the thin, bland air they find when they go abroad. There is no one single flavour to it; rather, it’s a rich and complicated mixture of wood and charcoal smoke, tanneries, refineries, distilleries, glassworks, bakeries, cookshops, perfumeries, brickyards, furnaces, workshops, fish, cattle dung, essence of humanity and rotting seaweed, the like of which is not to be encountered anywhere else in the world.

Temrai’s caravan had followed the western branch of the river down from the high plains, and accordingly they entered the city across the Drovers’ Bridge and through the Black Gate. Once through the gateway, the road becomes the main thoroughfare of the carpenters’ and machine-makers’ quarter, and the first thing Temrai saw in the City of the Sword was the famous bone-grinding mill that stood beside the gateway on the left-hand side.

It was an extraordinary sight for a young man newly arrived from the plains. What Temrai saw was a deep pit, out of which rose a huge wooden circle with fins radiating from it like the spokes of a wheel. Someone had cut a hole in the city wall seven feet or so from the bottom of the pit; since this was below the level of the estuary on the outside, water poured through the hole, fell onto the sails and pushed the wooden circle round before being fed back through a smaller hole controlled by some sort of mechanism which allowed the millstream out without letting the river in. The circle itself turned around an axle formed from the bole of an enormous pine tree. On the other end of the axle was a smaller wheel with pegs driven in all round it, which fitted into similar arrangements of pegs driven into yet another wheel standing at right angles to it. In fact there was a whole family of the things, all biting into each other like a pack of wild dogs, which were in turn connected to the grindstone itself. The miracle was that although the axle turned slowly, the millwheel went round much faster, ensuring that the bones fed into the hopper were crushed to fine powder.

Temrai had never seen so many bones in one place; more even than littered the plain at Skovund, the site of the great battle between the eastern and western clans three generations ago. Two men stood on top of the hopper, shovelling them in from a plank bin. Most of the bones were bits of ox and horse and goat, but mixed in with them were the occasional patently human shin, arm, rib, and skull. The crackly crunching sound as the millwheel rode over them was like horsemen riding over dry twigs and bracken in a forest, but much louder.

‘What’s it for?’ he asked the men with shovels.

They couldn’t hear him; or if they could, they couldn’t understand his accent. But the man who had the copperware stall next to the mill tugged his sleeve and explained; bonemeal, he said, was highly prized by farmers and market gardeners. It made things grow.

‘Oh,’ Temrai said, ‘I see. Thank you.’

‘You’re a plainsman, aren’t you?’

Temrai nodded. He could understand the stallholder perfectly well, although he found the man’s sing-song voice rather irritating. He’d been told before he set out that the city people sang rather than spoke; until now, he hadn’t seen how that could be possible.

‘In that case,’ said the stallholder, ‘you’ll be wanting to buy a genuine Permadeian copper kettle. And it just so happens-’

Explaining that he had no money (fortunately the stallholder believed him) Temrai escaped and led his horse up the hill to where he’d been told the city arsenal was to be found. On the way he passed any number of even more remarkable and fascinating stalls and workshops – a man who was using a bent sapling to turn a spindle, to which was attached a chair-leg which the man was shaping with a chisel as it spun; a crossbow maker chiselling out a latch socket from a bar of iron; two men working the biggest bow-drill Temrai had ever seen, with which they were boring a hole through a cast-iron wheel; carpenters joining the frame of a magnificent beam-operated press, presumably for crushing grapes or olives. Temrai was astonished by what he saw, so much so that he was nearly responsible for several disasters as he narrowly avoided walking into carefully arranged displays of merchandise through not looking where he was going. It was incredible, he told himself, that men’s hands had made all these marvellous things. There was clearly more to the business of being human than he’d realised.

And this was the city where he was going to earn a good living as a metalworker. That didn’t seem right, somehow; with all this amazing knowledge and all these unbelievable machines and devices, how was it possible that he could know something they didn’t?

Had it been up to him, he wouldn’t have dared. But of course it wasn’t; so he tethered his horse outside the imposing bronze doors of the arsenal, found the rather less imposing side door, and went in.

Unlike most of his race, Temrai had been inside buildings before. He knew what it was like to be between walls and underneath a roof, and although he didn’t exactly like the experience, it didn’t bother him too much. This, however, was something else entirely. It was dark, like the inside of his father’s tent, and what little light there was consisted of a flickering red glow. That and the oppressive heat came from the enormous furnaces, from which bare-skinned sweating men tapped off streams of brilliant white molten iron into long rows of identical gang-moulds that clustered around the base of the furnace like piglets round a sow.

The noise was worse; at home, there was nothing that pleased Temrai more than the sound of the smith’s hammer, but these must surely be the hammers of the thunder-genies. When his eyes were a little more accustomed to the light, he was able to identify the source of the noise: a battery of what could only be gigantic mechanical hammers, vast wooden piles shod with iron or copper that were lifted by thick beams until some mechanism tripped them and let them fall. Behind the machine hammers he saw another giant wheel, similar to the one that had driven the bone mill but even larger still. Remarkable; these men made the river do their work for them. The very thought disturbed Temrai; it was like enslaving the gods. Except that, by all accounts, there were no gods in this city. Perhaps, Temrai reflected, with all these machines they didn’t need any.

‘You.’

He turned round to find a short fat man with two little feathers of white hair in either side of a shiny bald head staring at him. Temrai smiled.

‘You,’ the bald man repeated. ‘What do you want?’

Like all the other men in the building, this one was naked except for a little kilt of grubby white cloth. Understandable, Temrai thought, if you had to work in this heat all day, although with all the sparks flying about from the spitting furnaces, he reckoned he’d rather keep his shirt on and sweat. And this was the place he’d come to find work in. He felt a great urge to run away, but managed not to.

‘Please,’ he said, ‘I want a job.’

The man looked at him as if he’d just asked for a slice of the moon between two pancakes. ‘A job,’ he repeated.

‘Yes, please,’ Temrai said. ‘I’m from the plains. I’m a blademaker.’

The bald man raised both eyebrows, and nodded. ‘Are you indeed?’ he said; or rather, sang. If he lived here for the rest of his life, Temrai reflected (and gods forbid!) he’d never get used to that extraordinary way of speaking. It cost him dearly not to giggle.

‘Yes,’ Temrai replied, not certain what else he was supposed to say. ‘And I’ve brought some solder with me. Would you like to see?’

The man nodded; whereupon Temrai reached into his satchel and produced five sticks of the thin silver wire that these remarkable people were said to covet so much. The man took them from him reverently, as if he’d just been handed the soul of his grandmother.

‘You know how to use this?’ he asked.

Temrai nodded. ‘Also the ordinary brass and lead solder,’ he said. ‘And I can make wire and sheet and weld them for the cores, and forge the hard edges.’

‘Quite the young master,’ the man replied. ‘You don’t look old enough to be out of your indentures.’

‘Excuse?’

The man shook his head. ‘Indentures,’ he said. ‘Like you’re still a ’prentice. Forget it. Come over here.’

The part of the vast room the man led him to was mercifully quite close to one of the tall windows, and for the first time since he’d stepped through the door, Temrai felt as if he could actually see. There were anvils, properly set up on elm logs; racks of hammers, tongs and pincers, hardies, swags, fullers, mandrels and setts; all reassuringly familiar among the strange and wonderful things that crowded out the rest of the room. There was also a neat little brick hearth with a goatskin bellows, in which a sword blade was glowing dull red; and beside it sticks of spelter and lead solder, and an earthenware jar of flux. When he saw these, Temrai understood what was being asked of him and was instantly reassured.

In every part of the world, swords are made in approximately the same way; a soft iron core, around which hundreds of layers of iron wire or ribbon are wrapped before being heated and hammered into a single fused piece; and the separate cutting edges, made from old nails or horseshoes melted down, hammered, tempered, hammered again and baked in an oven with charcoal, dried blood and ground leather to make the iron into steel. By this method a blade can be made to take a true edge that will cut the softer materials from which helmets and armour are made, but which is not so brittle that any sort of hard blow will shatter it like a cup dropped on stony ground. Provided the smith has the basic skill and plenty of time and patience, the separate parts aren’t hard to make; the trick lies in joining the edges to the core, using solder and flux.

Temrai selected a pair of tongs, pulled the red blade out of the fire and examined it. The edges were wired to the core, and all down the join were little orange crumbs of glowing flux. He looked round, found the bucket of water and plunged the blade into it.

‘Sorry,’ he explained. ‘Wrong way.’

The bald man was scowling, but Temrai took no notice. When the blade was cool he cut the brittle wires with pincers and tapped the edges free of the core with a small hammer. From his satchel he took his own jar of flux – a ram’s horn hollowed out and full of the dusty white powder that constituted the most substantial part of his nation’s greatest miracle.

He shook out a few pinches of the powder onto a flat stone, nudged it into a heap and spat into it a few times; then he mixed with the tip of his little finger until he had a smooth, creamy paste. Taking care not to lay it on too thick, he smeared the core and the edges where they were to join, having first scraped off the old, baked flux with his small knife. The bald man handed him a length of wire, and he bound the blade up tight, making sure that the seams were true. Then he put it back into the small furnace and pumped the bellows enthusiastically until he could feel the heat pricking his legs.

‘We must get it hot,’ he explained, ‘or the silver won’t run.’

The difference – virtually the whole difference – was that here they used spelter (made from copper and zinc), or (even worse) soft solder made out of lead and tin. On the plains, they knew better. Three parts copper, one part zinc and six parts silver made a solder that flowed like water at a far lower heat and joined steel to iron in a way that spelter and lead never could.

When the blade was bright orange, Temrai took a stick of solder from his satchel, rolled it in what was left of the flux and spat down it for luck. Then he lifted the blade out of the heat and drew the stick along the join. As soon as the stick touched the blade, the solder melted and vanished into the thin crack, leaving only a trace of a white line under a greyish crust. When he’d done both sides, front and back, he returned the blade to the fire, recited the prayers to the swordsmith’s god under his breath (not because he expected the god to hear him in this distant place, but because that was how long it took to cook the solder deep into the joint), pulled the blade out and looked round for the pot of oil. There wasn’t one.

‘No,’ the bald man said when he asked. ‘There’s water. What d’you want oil for?’

‘Oil,’ Temrai repeated. ‘If you have any. Or lard or butter if you don’t.’

The man shrugged and walked away, returning a few seconds later with a tall jar full of rancid butter. ‘Sure we use it for tempering,’ he said. ‘But water’s for cooling.’

‘No,’ Temrai replied, as kindly as he could. ‘Oil is best, but butter will do. Otherwise the blade cools too quick, and the joint is weak.’

The blade slid into the butter with a hiss and a curl of foul smoke. He left it there for the space of three invocations to the fire-genie, pulled it out and let it rest in the water bucket.

‘Done,’ he said.

‘That’s it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh.’ The bald man shrugged. ‘I thought there was more to it than that. I thought you people did magic and stuff.’

Temrai shook his head. ‘No magic,’ he replied. ‘Silver. And flux. And oil or lard is better than butter, if you could get some.’

He lifted the blade onto the anvil, praying that he’d done it right and that when he knocked the crust off there’d be a beautiful, straight, golden line with no holes or pockets. He wasn’t disappointed; it was a good job. He nipped off the wires, took a small file from the rack and wiped away the few little knobs of flash that stood up proud of the blade. Now all that remained was to heat the blade gently until it turned a dark straw colour and quench it in water (not oil, lard or butter, as the man had said; how come they didn’t know these things?), then polish it and grind the edges; simple work that anybody can do, a chore the master can safely leave to the boy. Strange, though, that here in the City of the Sword, where everything was decided by swords and good blades were valued above all else, they didn’t know the proper way to make things. And yet on the plains, where they had the skill and the knowledge, swords were largely an afterthought, little valued by a nation of archers. If you came close enough to the enemy to be able to use the sword, the chances were that someone had made a serious mistake.

The man looked at the blade, rubbing his chin. He inspected both sides, ran his fingertip up and down the seam a few times, then quite suddenly swung his arm over and brought the blade down with all his might on the beak of the anvil. There was a dreadful clang, the sword cut a gash the thickness of a bowstring in the metal of the anvil, bounced off, twisted out of the bald man’s hand and fell on the floor with a clatter.

‘You’re hired,’ the man said. ‘Five gold quarters a month. Be here an hour after dawn tomorrow.’ He rubbed the palm of his right hand with the thumb of his left. ‘I’ll get some oil,’ he added. ‘Olive do you?’

Temrai shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he said ‘Where I come from we have purified fat. I expect your sort will do just as well.’

Five silver pennies bought him a corner of a room in an inn round the corner; the old, thin woman who ran the place had grumbled about something-or-other foreigners in her nice clean house (except that it wasn’t clean, and a man and a woman were making love noisily in the far corner and an old man was apparently dying in the bedspace next to his, and nobody but Temrai seemed to notice) and took pains to make sure he understood about no animals in the room and meals being extra. If the half-eaten messes on the various plates that lay about on the tables in the common room were anything to go by, Temrai reckoned he’d far rather get his own food. As for animals, he sold his horse later that evening and got two gold quarters for it. At home you could buy a string of good horses for two of the Emperor’s gold quarters, and have somewhere to ride them into the bargain.

So here he was, he reflected, as he squirmed his way into a comfortable part of the straw and pulled his coat under his head for a pillow. So far he’d done everything right, greatly to his own surprise. He would be able to learn what his father needed to know; where the walls were weak and how the sentries were organised, how many people lived here and who held the keys to the gate; how many arrowheads and spear blades the arsenal could produce in a day; at what times of day the tides were low in the estuary and whether the bridges could be cut in time to prevent an assault party gaining control of them.

If he did his work well, he might make it possible for his father to fulfil his oath and find peace when his time came to ride into the sky; and that would all be well and good. Nevertheless, he couldn’t help but wonder exactly why his father wanted this place. To burn it to the ground would be a waste, hateful to the gods. To sack it – but all the wagons of his clan couldn’t hold the wealth of this city, and none of it was anything anybody actually needed. And to drive the city people out and live here themselves; that was truly unthinkable, an abomination. There had to be some other reason why his father would shed so much of the blood of his archers in order to buy this strange thing; but for the life of him he couldn’t work out what it might be.

Which (he reflected, as he fell into a doze) is why I’m still not ready to be a clan chief. So that’s all right.

At the last moment, Loredan stepped into the other man’s lunge, turning his body sideways, and thrust out his right arm as far as he could. The other man’s blade scored a line across his chest an inch above his nipples; his own sword stuck neatly in the other man’s eye, killing him before he even had a chance to take the smug grin off his face. The usual dead-weight flump! as the body hit the floor; judgement for the plaintiff.

The usher waved languidly to the court surgeon, but Loredan shook his head; contrary to popular belief the official doctors didn’t kill quite as many people as the lawyers did, though not for want of trying. It didn’t hurt yet, though the blood was coming freely. Gingerly, Loredan picked the sodden cloth of his shirt away from the cut and shivered.

‘Come on,’ said Athli at his elbow. ‘That needs cleaning up. I really thought you’d had it then, you know.’

‘So did I,’ Loredan replied quietly. ‘I hate divorce work.’

‘You should have quit,’ Athli said, leading him by the sleeve. He was still holding his sword, and it was awkward threading a way through the milling crowd of spectators without accidently laying someone’s knee open. ‘He had you beaten from the start.’

Loredan shook his head. ‘Quitting’s for losers.’

‘That is the general idea, yes. But you’re allowed to lose in divorce, that’s the whole point. Gambling your life on a split-second reflex and winning by a thousandth of an inch – well, in this context it’s just plain silly.’

‘Thank you so much.’ Once they were outside, Loredan handed the sword over to Athli, who wiped it and put it away in the case. He felt weak, and sick, and rather as if he was the one who’d been killed but nobody else had noticed. ‘Drink?’

‘Forget it. Home.’

Loredan decided not to protest. ‘Your place or mine?’

‘I knew you’d say that to me one of these days. I think yours is nearer.’

Of course, Athli had never been to Loredan’s home; no reason to, after all. She knew roughly where it was, and guessed from the address that he lived in one of the ‘islands’, the tall, jerry-built apartment blocks that had sprung up in the circus district after the great fire a hundred years or so ago. Some of them, she knew, were better than others; some of them had clean water in the courtyard, hypocausts to provide heating in winter, walls that stayed put because of sound engineering rather than force of habit.

The block Loredan lived in was not one of these.

‘Seventh floor,’ Loredan said, leaning against the door-frame to catch his breath.

‘Right,’ Athli replied through gritted teeth. The weight of his arm was crushing her shoulder, and he kept treading on her feet.

The stairwell was dark – some ‘islands’ had lamps burning on the stairs at all hours of the day and night; not this one – and the stairs were narrow and slippery. It was a long climb.

‘Key?’

‘There isn’t one,’ he replied. ‘Kick the door, it sticks.’

Loredan’s home turned out to be bare, cold and immaculately clean. There was a bed and a table, a finely carved chair with dragons’ heads for arms, a once-valuable threadbare tapestry on the far wall; one cup, one pewter plate, one spoon, a large book box with a heavy padlock, a clothes-press, a chopping block with a knife lying across it, the blade worn foil-thin with careful sharpening; a spare pair of shoes and a leather hat hanging from a nail driven into the wall; a pottery lamp; a jar with the monogram of some wine shop embossed in the side; one spare blanket.

‘All right,’ Athli asked. ‘What do you spend your money on?’

Loredan groaned and flopped onto the bed. ‘There should be some wine in the jug,’ he said. ‘And bandages in the press.’

Athli watched while he bathed the wound, swabbed it out with wine from the jug and wound himself up in bandages with a skill that clearly came from practice. ‘What about something to eat?’ she asked.

Loredan turned his head towards the chopping block. ‘Apparently not,’ he said. ‘I’ll go down to the bakery a bit later on. Thanks for the help.’

Athli shrugged and said nothing. She had blood all over her clerk’s gown. Loredan was making it clear he expected her to leave now. ‘Can I get you something?’ she asked awkwardly. Loredan shook his head.

‘When’s the next one?’ he asked.

‘Three weeks.’

‘The charcoal people?’

Athli nodded. ‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Doesn’t matter. Any idea who they’ve got yet?’

‘I haven’t heard anything definite,’ Athli lied.

‘Indefinitely, then.’

She pulled a face. ‘Alvise,’ she said. ‘Perhaps. Like I said, it’s not confirmed.’

‘Alvise. I see,’ Loredan sighed; he looked very, very tired. ‘Looks like our boys offended the opposition good and proper, if they’re prepared to lay out that sort of money.’

What a dismal epitaph, Athli reflected. What she said was, ‘Probably just a rumour, to make our boys settle out of court. He’d cost them twice the sum in issue.’

Loredan shrugged painfully. ‘Matter of principle, quite probably. Ah, well, we’ll see.’

Athli opened the door. ‘If you like, I can drop by later on, make sure you’re all right.’

‘I’ll be fine. Thanks again.’

Athli could feel the blood seeping through her gown onto her skin; cold and clammy, like sweat. ‘Be seeing you, then,’ she said, and closed the door behind her.

Loredan listened to the clicking of her footsteps on the stairs; then he rolled uncomfortably onto his back and lay staring at the long crack in the ceiling. In three weeks, with this messy cut just starting to knit together properly (if he was lucky and it stayed fresh) he’d have to stand up in court against Ziani Alvise, the Advocate General and Imperial Champion. There was better fencers; four of them, maybe five, none of whom was Bardas Loredan. Strange, he reflected, how calmly I’ve accepted advance notice of my own death. A nod of the head, a wry face, as if to say, Well, that’s that, then; two lines of script cut on a plain headstone-