Bronze Summer

40

Hunda led Teel, Milaqa and Riban through the city to the Mound of Lelwani, Goddess of the underworld. This was the huge structure of sloped walls and steps which Milaqa had spotted from outside the city itself, a great flat-topped heap of stone over which the city wall strode. Hunda said it was a ‘pyramid’, and was the envy of every Egyptian who came to Hattusa, a boast that only made the Northlanders shrug and roll their eyes.

But it was beneath the Mound that the lair of the Hatti iron-makers was to be found.

Hunda was extremely wary, for, he said, the mystery of the Hatti’s hardened iron was kept secret from the ordinary population, and even from most of the court. ‘Some say only the King himself is supposed to know about it. On his accession each successor to the throne is led to this place by his Chief of Bodyguards to meet the Master of the Iron, and to be shown his secrets. I’ve never been this way myself before. I wouldn’t want to now, but Chief Muwa ordered me, as he was ordered by the Tawananna herself.’

‘You needn’t worry, man,’ Teel said. ‘We know how precious this secret is. After all, if not, we wouldn’t have come so far for it, would we? Or paid so high a price.’

Hunda glanced at him as he hurried them down yet another alley. ‘I am putting my life in the hands of you people. And my family’s, I suppose. But if it must be done, let’s get it over.’

He brought them to the base of the pyramid. A flight of steps led up to a raised platform — dozens of steps, perhaps a hundred, Milaqa thought — and on the platform itself a tremendous gate had been cut through the towering city wall. There was nobody around save a few supplicants to Lelwani, scattered on the steps, kneeling, nodding and praying.

Hunda grunted. ‘You’re supposed to climb the steps on your knees, and then climb down again the same way. This is to have Lelwani intervene on behalf of the spirits of your loved ones, down in the underworld. And there’s a tithe to be paid to the priests at the top. A few years of that and you end up praying to other gods for relief of the pain of your wrecked knees. But we’re not going up there today. Come on — this way.’

Keeping an eye on the pilgrims so they didn’t spy where they went, Hunda led the Northlanders around the side of the mound to where it butted against the city wall. This neglected corner was shabby and filled with litter, a few rags, smashed clay tablets, the bones of some small animal roasted and consumed. Checking again to be sure nobody saw, Hunda kicked this debris out of the way, bent down, and pressed a stone near the base of the mound wall. A section of the wall slid back, revealing a doorway. ‘There’s a counterweight, ropes and stone blocks, a clever little mechanism-’ The receding stone stopped halfway. ‘Jammed,’ growled Hunda. ‘Like all things clever, it trips up all the time. Help me.’ Teel stood back while Milaqa, Riban and Hunda got their shoulders against the polished surface of the stone slab. It gave with a jerk, scraping back and out of sight, revealing a darkened passageway. Hunda reached inside, fumbled in the dark for a shelf, and pulled out a clay lantern. He had a fire-making kit in a pouch on his soldier’s belt, a bit of flint and pyrite, and he soon sparked a flame.

‘Follow me into the underworld, then. And just remember — I’ve never been down here before either, and I’m even more afraid than you are. After all, Lelwani is my goddess…’ He led the way through, then hauled on a rope.

The doorway slabs slid back into position, and the last bit of daylight was shut out.

Hunda’s lantern revealed a stone-walled passageway, dank and cold. ‘Muwa didn’t give me directions past this point. Only one way to go, it seems.’ He led the way along the dimly lit passage.

Milaqa didn’t feel all that nervous; she had grown up exploring the Wall, which had its own tunnels and passageways and buried chambers. But she glanced up at the heavy stone slabs that spanned the roof, and hoped the Hatti engineers were as competent as Northland’s Beavers.

They had only walked a couple of dozen paces before the way was blocked by a curtain of thick, stitched leather. Hunda dragged this aside, revealing an eerie red glow, and hot, dry air rolled out over the Northlanders. Hunda beckoned them forward once more.

And so Milaqa entered the lair of Hattusa’s Master of the Iron.

It was a wide box of a chamber, with stone for its walls and roof, and with massive pillars of granite blocks regularly spaced. Evidently this was a workshop. The heart of it was a great pit within which a fire burned. The fuel was not wood, but lumps of what looked like some kind of glowing rock. Frames of wood and metal were suspended over the pit. Around the room were scattered benches and slabs of stone with tongs, hammers and pincers. There were mounds of rock in one corner, rust-red, and peculiar heaps of what looked like metal, but misshapen and almost frothy, pocked by frozen bubbles. Milaqa was reminded of the lumps of floating rock Deri had brought back as curiosities from Kirike’s Land.

One corner of the chamber was domestic. There was a kitchen with joints of meat hanging from hooks, heaps of clothing, jugs for drinking water or wine or piss, and a couple of pallets. And on one of the pallets a man was stretched out on his back, snoring with a deep rumble. He had a tremendous belly that strained the scorched tunic he wore, and massively strong arms, like a farmer’s, Milaqa thought, but his bare, hairy skin was pocked by scars and little black craters.

A boy came forward from the shadows, skinny, pale, with thick, unruly black hair. He wore a stiff body-length leather apron, and he was wiping his hands on a rag. ‘Muwa told me you were coming,’ he said.

His voice was oddly cracked, Milaqa thought, and his manner was ungainly, shy, but he looked too old for the way he was behaving — he was eighteen, nineteen maybe. Perhaps he just wasn’t used to company. Like the sleeping man his arms were pocked with scars and burn marks. There seemed to be a little crater burned into the point of his chin, but when Milaqa looked more closely she saw it was a mole, not a burn mark at all.

As Milaqa studied him, the boy blushed and dropped his gaze. She struggled not to laugh at him. He was worse than Voro.

Hunda said, ‘You aren’t Partahulla?’

‘No. That’s him.’ He gestured at the sleeping heap on the pallet. ‘That’s the Master of the Iron. I’m his apprentice. My name’s Zidanza. Should I wake him?’

Hunda regarded the Master of the Iron. He was sleeping soundly, an empty wine flask his side. ‘He’s drunk.’

‘And old. Very old,’ said Zidanza. ‘Older than you’d think. Spends most of his time asleep. And the rest kicking my backside.’

‘Then you must do most of the work around here,’ said Teel.

‘Well, yes. But he is the Master, not me.’ Zidanza studied them doubtfully. Milaqa supposed the Northlanders must look very strange to him, as he looked strange to her, a pale creature like a worm, a creature of the underground, toiling in this gloom. He laughed, a kind of giggle. ‘You can imagine we don’t get many visitors down here.’

‘And I imagine you’re good at keeping secrets, Zidanza,’ Teel said.

‘Well, I have to be. Not that I’m let out much.’

‘What about your family?’ Milaqa asked.

‘They think I’m serving with the army. Off fighting Hurrians or Kaskans. Sometimes I think I rather would be. Look, I’m not sure what you want. Muwa just said you would come.’

Milaqa dug the iron arrowhead out of her tunic and held it out on its thong. ‘I’m here because of this.’

He took the arrow in his hand, turned it over. He wouldn’t look her in the eye, but he let his gaze stray from the bit of iron so he got peeks of her chest. ‘Ah, yes.’

‘What do you mean, ah, yes? This thing killed my mother.’

He looked directly at her, startled. ‘Well, it would. This is our iron — though we meant the arrowhead to be ornamental, not functional. That’s what our iron is for, you know. Ornaments. The old man,’ he nodded at the dozing Master, ‘says his grandfather made gifts for the King to give to the Pharaoh Tutankhamun. Two armlets and a dagger. Or it may have been his grandfather’s grandfather. That’s what we make here, luxury stuff, mostly for the King to give as gifts. But of course they’re functional too. The Pharaoh’s dagger could have killed a man. And this arrowhead, if shot properly, would penetrate bronze armour.’

‘It did,’ Milaqa snapped, and she pulled the arrowhead back.

‘That’s the secret, you see,’ the boy said. ‘Our iron isn’t brittle, like the common stuff you’ll find bandied about in the market. Ours is hard and resilient. It’s all to do with the way we make it. That’s why Hatti gifts of iron are so precious — because nobody else in the world knows how to make iron the way we do here. The secrets are all in the head of the Master of the Iron, one man in each generation, who answers only to the King.’

Teel asked, ‘And will you be the next Master?’

The boy looked shocked to be asked. ‘Me? No. Of course not. I’m not nearly high-born enough. No, my job is to assist the current Master, and to help train his replacement, when he is selected.’

Riban walked around the workshop, curious, peering into the pit. ‘How do you make your iron, apprentice?’

Zidanza looked doubtfully at Hunda. ‘We don’t talk about this. Let alone to foreigners. No offence. Maybe I should wake the Master-’

The sergeant shook his head. ‘These aren’t normal times, Zidanza. Answer their questions.’

Zidanza grinned. And, with an audience for perhaps the first time in his life, he opened up.

He took them around the secret stages of the processing. In the pit of fire, twice-burned coal was consumed to give a high temperature, much higher than you needed for the smelting of mere bronze — which, by comparison, Zidanza made sound like a game for children. This twice-burned coal was what Milaqa had taken for rocks on the fire. Iron ore subject to such heat resulted in the porous, floating-rock-like product he called a bloom. But this was not yet the finished product. You had to heat it again, and beat it, and quench it with water to cool it — but not too rapidly or you would crack it — and then heat and beat and cool it again, over and over. This got rid of ‘slag’ that you removed from the melt, until you were left with ingots of iron — he showed them samples, small finger-sized bars — that you could work up into finished objects like Milaqa’s arrowhead.

Teel smiled at Milaqa. ‘Following all this?’

‘Very little. But I see how complex it is. I wonder who first worked all this out.’

‘Who knows? Probably not one person. A whole chain of people, trying this and then that, over generations perhaps, trying to make this hard, useful iron, out of humble rock.’

Hunda joined Milaqa and Teel. ‘So what do you think? What do you need to take away, if you’re to have a gift of Hatti iron-making?’

‘Nothing,’ Teel said, ‘save the wisdom in the head of the Master. Everything else we can build in Northland.’

Hunda looked doubtful. ‘I can’t imagine the King allowing you to steal away his Master of the Iron.’

Partahulla stirred and snorted, choked briefly, then chewed a lump of phlegm in his sleep. Zidanza, eagerly showing a lump of bloom to Riban, didn’t notice.

Milaqa said to Teel, ‘But it’s not the Master who’s doing all the work down here. Not him, but his apprentice. Perhaps his is the head we need.’

Teel frowned. He seemed startled by the idea. ‘Well, let’s test him.’ He walked over to Zidanza and Riban. ‘Apprentice. I’ll share one of our secrets with you now. We don’t want iron-making so we can make gifts for kings. We want it so we can fight wars. Not just one arrowhead, not just one dagger — we want to equip an army, as now they are equipped with bronze.’

Zidanza looked astounded. ‘A whole army. Why, the first army with decent iron weapons would be unbeatable.’

‘We know,’ Teel said. ‘That’s why we want to be the first. But don’t worry, we are allies of the Hatti kings. If, in theory, I asked you to turn out, not one arrowhead, but hundreds — thousands — and daggers, swords, even armour — could you do it?’

He looked around the workshop, thought about it, and scratched his head. ‘I’m going to need a bigger pit.’

Teel grinned at Milaqa. ‘Good answer. I think you’re right, niece. Now all we need is for Kilushepa to persuade the King to let him go..’