Colours in the Steel (29 page)

He took a deep breath and sighed. ‘More to the point,’ he went on, ‘slinging out good students for no readily apparent reason isn’t exactly the best way to build up a good reputation in this business, and I’m doing this for a living. I’d be better off accidentally killing the wretched girl, as far as that side of things is concerned. Not that I’d do that,’ he added, as the Patriarch’s eyes widened. ‘I may be a lawyer, but I’m not that bad. No, I think the safest way would be to let her finish the course and just keep an extra-special eye on her at all times. When I was in the army we used to have a saying: the enemy you can see is the least of your problems.’

‘Well,’ Alexius pushed against the arms of the chair. Loredan helped him up and handed him his stick. ‘You know your own business, and I’d better leave you to it. My attempts to interfere in your affairs so far haven’t exactly done any good to anybody. The best thing I can do, as far as I can see, is go home and read a book.’ He smiled. ‘Do you sometimes wonder what on earth possessed you to take up your particular career? I know I do.’

‘All the time,’ Loredan replied. ‘Well, sometimes. But then, what the hell else would I have done with my life? It’s not as if I was ever exactly spoilt for choice.’

Alexius wondered if he should offer him his hand, or pat him on the shoulder by way of informal benediction. He decided against it. ‘One last thing,’ he said. ‘Your brother - he lives on the Island?’

‘I don’t think so. It’s been a long time since I last had anything to do with him.’

‘Is he - involved in my line of work in any way?’

‘I have no idea. To be honest with you, I don’t get on with him, never did. He left home some time before I did, and I don’t think any of us were heartbroken to see him go.’ Loredan grinned bleakly. ‘He isn’t a terribly nice man, my brother.’

‘Ah.’

‘So I don’t think I can help you much there. Sorry about that. And now I’d better be getting back to my class, before they start grumbling about refunds. I was late in this morning, which doesn’t help.’

Alexius changed his mind and put out his hand. ‘Thank you, Bardas Loredan. For what it’s worth, I really am very sorry.’

Loredan laughed, and took his hand. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’ve been forgiving people who’ve tried to kill me since before I started shaving. It’s nice to be able to do it to someone who’s still alive.’

‘Now then,’ Temrai said, taking a deep breath and fixing a smile on his face. ‘I
think
we do it this way.’

Uncomfortably aware that he was being watched by several thousand people, he picked up a twig and started sketching lightly on the surface of the mud.

‘First,’ he said, ‘we make the frame, which is really nothing more than four big bits of wood joined together into a square. These bits—’ he skimmed the mud carefully, marking out the shape ‘—are the sides, and these bits join the sides together. Then we’ve got the uprights, with a beam across the top; oh, yes, and two struts like so, to keep it from getting knocked out of shape when the arm bashes into it.’ He paused for a moment, trying to picture it in his mind’s eye. ‘And there’s a roller back here, axles for the wheels, the arm itself, of course. Now, is there anything I’ve forgotten? Can’t remember. Winding gear, of course, and the slip; but that’s metalwork so we’ll leave that for now. I think that’s about it. All right, gather round and I’ll tell you how it works.’

The clansmen drifted up and formed a circle, almost reluctantly, around the crude sketch of a middleweight torsion engine. Temrai had based it on the one he’d passed every day as he walked to work;
catapult, fixed, medium heavy duty, class four,
to give it its proper nomenclature. It had looked elegantly simple back in the city, where far more complex and sophisticated engines were an everyday sight. Here, on a riverbank beside a mountain of newly sawn unseasoned timber, it all seemed rather different. His people, the clan, the men and women he’d grown up with, were staring at him as if he was proposing to build a bridge to the moon, or catch the winds in a bag. On reflection, he could see their point.

‘The idea is,’ he went on, ‘that when you twist a piece of rope - horsehair’s supposed to be the best material, but we’re going to use ordinary rope to start with and see if that’ll do instead - it makes a sort of spring—’

‘Temrai, what’s a spring?’

Oh, gods, this isn’t going to work.
‘A spring is - well, you know how the lathes work? When you bend over a sapling and then let it go it flies back? Or a bow, come to that. That’s a spring. Something that bends and then snaps back the way it was.’ He paused. ‘Am I making any kind of sense, or should I start again?’

‘No, that’s all right,’ someone said. ‘Go on, please.’

‘All right. Look, take it from me, if you twist a whole lot of rope together and put a pole in the middle like so, and then you pull it down like this—’ he did his best to demonstrate with his hands ‘—and then let go, it’ll shoot forwards; and if you put a stone on the end of the pole—’

‘Wouldn’t it fall off?’

‘Not if you hollow out the end of the pole, like a spoon. Right,’ he said, as inspiration struck, ‘let’s think of it like this. You know when you get a spoon and dip it in yoghurt or whatever, and then you pull it back and flick it, and the yoghurt flies out? We’ve all done that when we were kids, right? It’s exactly the same principle, only what does the flicking is the rope.’

Silence.
They must think I’m out of my mind
, Temrai reflected wretchedly.
They’re thinking I’ve made them cut down all those trees and build all those rafts, just so that we can sit under the walls of the city flicking yoghurt
.

‘Believe me,’ he said, with all the authority he could muster, ‘it works. You see that rock over there? One of these things can throw a rock that size - oh, easily as far as that tree there, probably even further. I’ve seen it myself.’

Nobody spoke; probably just as well, because if they had, they’d have said,
If you say so, Lord Temrai
, in that tone of voice exclusively reserved for humouring idiots. The only way I’ll convince them, he realised, is to build the bloody thing and show them. So that’s what I’m going to have to do.

‘Right,’ he said, ‘now you all know the basic principle, let’s get on with it. Now then, we’ll start with the sides. I want two beams of heartwood, ten feet by two by one. You lot, saws and adzes.’

The group he’d pointed to got to their feet and trudged towards the timber pile, with the air of men who’ve been sent to gather moonbeams in a jar. He turned back to the diagram.

‘You lot, I want you to rough out these struts here. Heartwood again, six foot by one by one. I’ll want tenons cut out on the ends; I’ll explain what a tenon is later,’ he added quickly before anyone could ask, ‘after you’ve made the beam. Now, you lot can cut me out the beam that’s going to be a fiddly bit, but we’ll start with a beam seven and a half by a foot by six inches, leave the sapwood on because it’ll want to have some bounce in it. Now, the uprights I’m going to have to think about, because they’re a funny shape.’

For the time being, he reassured himself, it’s still just a big game, they’re all entering into the spirit of the thing and enjoying themselves. With any luck I’ll have a machine finished and working before that wears off; and once they see one actually hurling a big rock, that ought to do the trick.

I hope so, because otherwise I’m going to be in trouble.

 

Things didn’t go quite as well as Temrai had hoped. In the event, several parts turned out wrong and had to be done again, and it took a week rather than a day to make the components of the prototype. On the positive side, morale in the joinery squad stayed high and proved to be contagious; a large excited crowd, full of good humour and very anxious to help, comment and generally get under the joiners’ feet, gathered to watch the parts being put together and the finished machine tested.

They’ve come to watch it fail
, Temrai told himself gloomily, as he listened to the bee-hum of conversation and watched the women spreading rugs and cushions and setting out food, as if this was Temrai’s funeral games.
Or maybe not
, he reflected.
I think they’ll enjoy themselves either way
. He took a moment or two to survey the scene; colour and noise and movement; families and friends sitting together, children running about and shrieking as they jumped in and out of the river, mothers chasing them with towels and hauling them out of their wet clothes. A strange way to greet the birth of a terrible new weapon.

He walked to the top of the rise and stood there; that was enough to get the crowd’s attention. Children were shushed, plates passed round, mead and milk poured. He wondered if he should make a little speech, decided not to. Time to make a start. He cleared his throat and started giving orders.

The largest and heaviest components were the two sides of the frame, cumbersome slabs of timber ten feet long into which most of the other components were going to have to fit. His mother’s uncle Kossanai, whom he’d appointed as head joiner on the project, organised a team to line the sides up and hold them steady while the crossbars were slotted into place. First snag: the tenon on the front crossbar was too big for the mortice in the left-hand frame panel. At once a heated argument broke out between the crossbar makers and the team who’d made the sides, one party insisting that the tenon was the right size but the mortice was too small, the other side maintaining that the mortice was perfect to within the thickness of a hair, but the tenon was a sloppy piece of work and the whole crossbeam was only fit for firewood. After a brief interlude for despair, Temrai quietly got up, found a drawknife, a chisel and a cupful of soot for marking, beckoned to a couple of spectators from another team, and set to work paring down the tenon. When the crowd saw what was going on they started laughing and clapping, and the argument quickly broke up.

‘Right,’ Temrai said quietly, straightening his back and dusting off his hands. ‘Now listen up, because I won’t say this again. One more performance like that, and I’ll have the whole lot of you dunked in the river. Understood? Now then, let’s have the other crossbar.’

Mercifully, the back crossbar was a good fit, and the joiners started grinning and slapping each other on the back, as if the job was finished. Temrai ordered them to take it apart again.

‘Lord? But it fits, you can see for . . .’

Patiently, Temrai explained that they still had all the other bits to slot in, and they couldn’t do that without dismantling it. ‘First we’re going to check all the joints, piece by piece,’ he said. ‘Then we’re going to put the whole thing together and drive in the pegs. All clear?’

The windlass roller came next. It had been too large to make on an ordinary pole lathe, and Temrai had had to design a whole new type of lathe to turn it on. He was rather proud of it, for it was the first part of this project that he’d thought up for himself, rather than just copying something he’d seen in the city. The roller slotted neatly into place, but it was three inches too long; it had to go back onto the lathe to be trimmed, twice, before it was right. Next came the cross-bracer for the uprights; that was a reasonable fit, only needing a little skilful whittling. With a sigh of relief, Temrai ordered the pegs that locked the tenons into the mortices to be driven home. The joiners did so, and stood back. When they let go, it didn’t fall apart.

Well, that’s all right
, Temrai muttered to himself.
Now for the uprights
.

It was only when the two massive lumps of carefully worked timber were hauled out and held up by Kossanai’s men that he realised he’d forgotten something. He swore under his breath.

The uprights, which supported the beam that the catapult arm slammed into, were supposed to slot into mortices cut on the top face of the two side pieces, where they were held in place by three-quarter-inch iron bolts. The mortices looked as if they’d been cut neatly enough; likewise the tenons cut on the bottom end of each upright. The problem he’d overlooked until now was how to lift the two solid, heavy uprights up over the side pieces so that they could then be lowered into position (assuming they were going to fit; let’s assume that for now, shall we?) and bolted into place. He put his hands to his face, rubbing both sides of his nose with his fingers. Some sort of crane, it’d have to be; or a scaffolding, and lift the pieces into position by brute force. If they got clumsy and dropped one of those things onto somebody, there’d be one hell of a mess. He shut out the buzz of impatient excitement from the happy picnickers and tried to visualise the best way of doing it.

Cranes . . . Yes, that’d do it.

‘Kossanai, I want the new lathe taken to bits and the A-frames brought up here,’ he said. ‘Lasakai, Morotai, get me a couple of poles ten feet long by eighteen inches across, or as near as you can find; something with a bit of spring in it, but not too bendy. Panzen, I’ll need forty foot of rope, not the good stuff we’re keeping for the engine.’