The Hammer Part 23

Marzo looked up sharply. "Am I?"

"Sure," Gignomai said. "Which means everybody'll be able to afford one. Which means you'll sell ten times as many. Do the arithmetic."

Marzo was silent for a moment, and Furio could feel a certain tension. "Depends what I've got to pay you for them," he said.

"No money changes hands," Gignomai said. "Not yet, at least. Same terms as before, until we've built up a solid market. You send us food, we send you finished goods." Suddenly he smiled. Just like his brother, Furio thought. "I can't say fairer than that, can I?"

"I guess not." Marzo was examining a shovel blade.

"Very practical approach," Furio muttered, but neither of them seemed to be listening. He left them to it and went outside to see to Gignomai's horse. After a while, Teucer came out to join him.

"Well?" Furio said.

"Well what?"

"Seems like we were both wrong."

She turned a bucket upside down and sat on it. "What makes you say that?"

"You've been in the store."

She nodded. "They've got tools and things spread out all over the floor. You can't get to the door without risking cutting your ankles."

"There you are, then."

"You aren't making any sense."

Furio sighed. "You told me-persuaded me that Gig was up to something. Apparently not. He said he was going to go away and make hardware, and that's exactly what he's done."

"Maybe that's not all he's been doing."

Furio laughed. "Teucer, he can't have had time time for anything else. He's been working flat out all day and half the night, and he's got to sleep sometimes." for anything else. He's been working flat out all day and half the night, and he's got to sleep sometimes."

She shook her head. "He's up to something. Someone like that doesn't change his whole life just so the working man can buy an affordable shovel." She picked up a few strands of straw and bent them till they broke. "Did you talk to him about his brother getting married?"

"Haven't had a chance."

"You should," Teucer said. "Do you think he'll go to the wedding?"

"I doubt it," Furio said. "I got the impression that if he sets foot on the Tabletop he's dead."

"That's an exaggeration," Teucer said. "If he goes back, they might even patch things up."

"Still fancy him, do you?"

She looked at him, as he leaned on the handle of the hayfork. "Yes," she said, "on balance. But I don't think I'd want to marry him."

Furio barked out a laugh. "Don't suppose there's much danger of you being asked," he said.

She shrugged. "Did he ever tell you what happened to his sister?"

Furio scratched his head. "No," he said. "I gather there was a sister once, when he was a kid. I a.s.sume she died." He leaned the fork against the wall. "Why, did he ever say anything to you?"

"No. But I just wondered. Maybe he's not interested in girls because they remind him of his sister."

Furio thought about it for a very short time, which was as long as he felt the hypothesis merited. "I don't think so," he said. "I think he's not interested in any of the girls round here because none of them are grand enough for the son of the met'Oc. I think he might have had a go at that cousin of his, if she'd held still long enough."

"I doubt it," Teucer said. "No, I get the impression she and Lusomai will be very well suited. Still, it really doesn't matter now, does it?"

Furio watched her go, then sat down on her bucket. As always when he'd said more than two words together with Teucer, he was left feeling slightly bewildered and vaguely uncomfortable. She reminded him of a character in a fairy tale, but he couldn't decide which one.

The news that Mayor Opello was practically giving stuff away swept through the colony like an epidemic. Since no s.h.i.+p had called, apart from the strangers', it was naturally a.s.sumed that Marzo was in some kind of trouble, which was forcing him to raise money by selling his stock at a loss. Deeper thinkers made a link between Marzo's presumed financial collapse and the weird project he was funding out in the savages' country, about which the colonists still knew tantalisingly little. Not that they cared particularly. What mattered was a new shovel for a turner, ploughshares for six bits, and a new pattern of tin plate n.o.body had seen before for half a double.

By the time the deep-country people reached the store it was all over, though that didn't stop them buying stuff, at full price, believing that what they were paying was the sacrificial discount. When Marzo eventually closed the doors on the second day, he calculated that his iron-bound cashbox now held at least a third of the coined money in the colony. He sat down in his chair behind the counter, feeling exhausted, exhilarated and more than a little scared.

Far from solving anything, the success of the first batch of home-produced goods had multiplied his problems to a terrifying extent. He now had money, more of it than he'd ever seen before (the image of Gignomai's sword came into his mind and he expelled it quickly), but he was running perilously short of flour, malt, dried foods and all the other stores he was pledged to supply the factory with. He could now pay for replacement stock with money rather than other goods (he was running low on that sort of thing; he was running low on everything everything) but that didn't help much. He'd more or less exhausted the surplus stocks of the colony, which was hardly surprising, given that they now had an extra twenty-odd mouths to feed: the sailors from the met'Ousa s.h.i.+p, now working at the factory. The colony's subsistence economy was so finely poised that twenty extra eaters endangered everybody.

Let them eat beef, he told himself, because there was still plenty of that. Trouble was, it was spoken for, it belonged to the Company, it wasn't his to buy or the farmers' to sell. So what? If he tendered a hundred fewer steers than he was contracted to deliver, all that'd happen would be that he'd get paid a smaller quant.i.ty of trade goods, which wouldn't matter a d.a.m.n since Gignomai would be making all that stuff for him. True. But he'd have had to pay the farmers in cash and credit, and in return he'd be getting goods that would now be too expensive to compete with Gignomai's products, so he'd be stuck with them or have to sell them at a loss (pretty irony). Furthermore, most of the things Gignomai was going to make, most of the stuff people in the colony wanted, were made of iron. He'd bought up practically every piece of rusty sc.r.a.p in the colony, and Gignomai had used it to make his machines and the first batch of samples. There wasn't any more. Gignomai had said that wouldn't be a problem, but he hadn't been prepared to expand on that, so Marzo felt entirely within his rights to worry.

Also, there was the inevitable fact that the colonists could only use so many shovels, spades, axes, tin plates, nails, wedges, saw-blades, knives and buckets. It wouldn't be long before everybody had all the things he needed, and then what would become of the glorious bloodless revolution? Not to mention the reaction of the Company and (in Marzo's mind, at least) its evil twin the government, when they figured out what was going on.

And that wasn't all. Practically every eager buyer who'd been through his door over the last two days had stopped to talk, the way country people do when they come to town, and there'd been one predominant subject of conversation: what did the mayor propose doing about the met'Oc, following the spate of unprovoked murderous attacks? The stories had waxed fat in the telling, and the further out people lived, the more lurid the tales they'd heard. On the second day, when the people from the eastern hills showed up, he was reliably informed that Desio Heddo had been shot dead, or at least he was dying, and the Adrescos' entire cattle herd had been slaughtered and left lying in grotesque heaps out on the pasture. You could smell the rotting meat for miles around, they said, though since most of them would have had to pa.s.s within half a mile of the Adresco house and none of them had smelt anything, Marzo wondered where that particular gem had come from, and how it had managed to survive the sharp frost of common sense. Most remarkable of all was the way that everybody, no matter how far out they lived or how rarely they saw another human face, had learned to call him Mayor Opello. Some of them were quite friendly about it, but there were clearly some who wondered who the h.e.l.l he thought he was, awarding himself grand t.i.tles and putting on airs. They sort of spat the honorific at him, and scowled at him to show they weren't impressed, not one bit.

He'd done his best, of course. He'd told anybody who looked as though they might be listening (a depressingly low percentage) that he'd met with Lusomai met'Oc (they already knew that) and that they'd had a full and frank discussion about the recent disturbances, and he had the met'Oc's word that there wouldn't be any further trouble. His p.r.o.nouncements were met with a mixture of awe and disbelief. Awe, because here was a man who actually talked to the semi-mythical creatures who lived on the mountain top. Disbelief, because who could trust a man who kept company with that sort of people?

After all that, the other snippet of news had come as light relief. It was weird, but he couldn't see how there was any harm in it, which made it the exception. Apparently, several families who lived near the southern border had seen parties of savages, in most cases for the first time in their lives. No big deal, they said. The savages, usually in groups of a dozen or so, men and women, had taken to standing on hilltops and other vantage points and staring at people as they went about their daily ch.o.r.es. Nothing hostile, no reports of any visible weapons or aggressive posturing, and if you called out to them, they took no notice-maybe they were all deaf; after all, we know so little about them-and n.o.body was missing any cattle or chickens, no fences had been broken down, no unexplained footmarks on this side of the border. They just stood and watched, was all.

Two days later, Furio volunteered to be driver's mate on a cartload of flour barrels headed for the factory.

"Please yourself," Marzo replied. "It's not like we're rushed off our feet right now."

Which was true. Ever since the orgy of buying, business had been painfully quiet. Just as well, Marzo made a point of saying, since we've hardly got anything left to sell. That was a gross exaggeration, but Furio couldn't be bothered to raise the issue. He left Marzo leaning on the counter doing sums on a sc.r.a.p of the coa.r.s.e brown paper that came wrapped round scythe blades.

It was the first time Furio had been back to the factory since his grand departure, so he wasn't expecting the noise. When he first noticed it, miles away, it was a faint, almost dainty tinkling, like a cow-bell. Once they were inside the wood, it made hearing the cart driver impossible. When they reached the factory, Furio could feel the blood pumping in his ears in counterpoint. No doubt about it, the drop-hammer was working just fine. It was, he discovered by taking his own pulse, a very slightly longer interval than a heartbeat. Maybe that was why it jarred so badly. Each time the hammer fell, it crashed on the anvil, a dampened ring, the sound of sheer weight and frustrated motion. After a minute, he found he was having difficulty with his breathing.

The carter didn't want to hang around. He pulled up the cart, jumped down, dropped the tailgate and started hauling barrels in a way that was bound to damage his back. Furio didn't offer to help. Instead, he leaned in close and shouted, "I'll stay here for a bit. You go on, I'll walk back."

"What?"

"I'll walk back," Furio yelled, but it was obviously no use. He shook his head and walked away. The carter carried on wrestling barrels.

Furio stopped by a fallen tree and tore a couple of handfuls of moss off the trunk, but he couldn't get it to stay in his ears. He looked round to see if he could find Gignomai, but there didn't seem to be anybody about. It occurred to him to wonder what the hammer was pounding, if there wasn't any metal left.

A man hurried past him, someone he didn't recognise. He shouted, but the man didn't hear, so he followed him, and was led to a building that hadn't been there when he left. He went inside.

He saw what looked like an enormous mound of clay, swelling out of the ground like a huge fungus. Its top disappeared through a hole in the roof. There was a small door, just big enough for a child to crawl through, about a foot above ground level. A two-foot-diameter clay pipe branched off the other side and disappeared through the wall. For a brief, bewildering moment he wondered if Gignomai, in an intense burst of homesickness, had built a scale model of the Tabletop, but he wouldn't do that, would he?

"It's a furnace," a voice yelled in his ear. It was too loud to recognise; he turned, and there was Gignomai, covered in dirt and soot, grinning at him. "Come on, I can't hear myself think."

He followed Gignomai out, and they walked beside the river for quite a while, then up the hill to the hollow where Furio had watched Gignomai fire the snapping-hen. At the bottom of the hollow, the thump of the drop-hammer was m.u.f.fled, and Gignomai could be heard without yelling.

"Nice to see you again," Gignomai said. "How are you keeping?"

"What is that thing?"

Gignomai laughed. "It's a furnace," he said. "It melts iron out of rock. After the hammer, it's our biggest project yet."

"Does it work?"

"I b.l.o.o.d.y well hope so. We'll find out tomorrow, when we fire it up." He sat down cross-legged on the ground, and after a moment's hesitation, Furio joined him. He felt very young, sitting in the leaf mould. "You didn't answer my question," he said. "How are you?"

"What? Oh, fine. What rock?"

Gignomai pulled an exasperated face, which flowed into a grin. "That's where iron comes from," he said. "Iron ore is a kind of rock. There's a whole hillside of the stuff not two miles from here downstream. You don't even have to dig, you can wander around filling buckets with it."

Furio frowned. "You can really get iron out of it?"

Gignomai nodded. "We smash it up really small under the drop-hammer, then pack it in baskets with lime, sulphur and charcoal. There's three tons of charcoal in the bottom of the furnace already. Tomorrow we tip the ore and the lime and stuff in on top and get it burning. That pipe you may have seen leads to the big bellows we've got for the drop-hammer forge. You need to blast lots of air in to get the fire hot enough. When it's up to full heat, apparently, the whole thing'll glow red. We won't be in there with it, of course. We'll be outside, chucking buckets of water on the shed walls to keep them from catching fire."

Furio thought for a moment. "That little door in the side?"

"To tap off the molten iron when it's melted," Gignomai said. "It runs down a clay channel into a nest of about a dozen moulds, where it cools off, and then you've got a stack of iron bars, ready to make into stuff."

"Why keep it in a shed," Furio asked, "if it gets that hot?"

"Rain," Gignomai replied. "A few drops of water on it when it's good and hot, and there'd be a blast you could hear back Home. And it'd be raining droplets of iron right across the colony. Rain falling down the chimney's not a problem, it evaporates before it would hit anything, but we daren't risk it on the furnace walls. Besides," he added, "if it burns the shed down, so what? We stand well back, and once it's cooled down we build another shed." He shook his head. "It scares the life out of me, but we need it. All the iron we can use for free."

Furio looked at him. There was genuine happiness in his grin, but his eyes were cold. "You got all that out of a book, I suppose," he said.

"Eutropius' Concerning Metals Concerning Metals. There isn't one like it in the world, not any more. All the commentators say building one's impossible, it wouldn't work, it'd crack and blow up. They think Eutropius dreamed it up but never tried it out."

Furio blinked. "You don't suppose they're right, do you?"

"We'll find out, won't we? If you're sitting on your porch this time tomorrow and suddenly there's a loud bang and it starts raining body parts, you'll know Eutropius was a liar. I don't think so, though. I think it'll work."

"You've been busy," Furio said.

"You could say that," Gignomai replied. "I'll tell you what, though. This beats sitting in my father's library reading law books."

Furio nodded slowly. "Gig," he said, "where's Aurelio?"

Gignomai picked up a bit of twig and crumbled it between his thumbs. "You asked me that before," he said.

"Yes. You lied to me. Where is he?"

"Third shed from the left as you come in." Gignomai jerked his head in what Furio a.s.sumed was the right direction; he'd lost his bearings some time ago. "Don't go telling anyone. His relatives are quite keen to meet him, but he doesn't share their enthusiasm."

"Is he making guns?"

Gignomai's face went blank. Then he said, "Not whole ones. Parts for the lock mechanisms. He can't start making barrels till we've got the furnace going."

"That's what you wanted the snapping-hen for," Furio said. "So you could copy it."

Gignomai smiled. "Rough copies," he said, "none of the fancy stuff. The original's a work of art, you couldn't squeeze a hair between the parts, the tolerances are so fine. I'll be happy with something much cruder, so long as it works."

Furio took a deep breath. "What do you want them for?"

"To sell, of course." Gignomai raised an eyebrow. "So that when the government sends soldiers to stop us doing all this, we can persuade them to go home and leave us in peace. If it comes to that," he added quickly. "But it might, so there's no harm in being prepared. Also, people will be prepared to pay good money. After all, your uncle wanted one, and he's the most peaceable man I've ever met."

"Have you made one yet?"

Gignomai's face was empty. "I told you," he said, "we can't start production till we've got the furnace running. Aurelio says you need a special sort of iron for making barrels out of. You can't just weld them up out of old rubbish."

"So the one you tested..."

This time, he got a reaction. It was a little spurt of anger, quickly stifled and overlaid with a big grin. "You were watching me."

"Yes."

"You saw me..."

"Miss a tree stump." Furio nodded.

"Quite." Gignomai shook his head. "I'd always wanted to have a go with one, but of course Luso wouldn't let me. It looked so easy when he did it. You hold it out at arm's length, pull the trigger and bang! There's a hole the size of your thumb in the middle of the target. Presumably there's rather more to it. Anyway, I don't plan on wasting much time on it. Just so long as they work, I'm not fussed. That's why it's got to be guns, you see. If we make swords and pikes and arrowheads and the soldiers come, chances are there'd be actual fighting. In which case, we'd probably lose and people would almost certainly get hurt. But if they show up and we start shooting at them, they'll p.i.s.s off back Home so fast they'll make your head spin. Doesn't matter a d.a.m.n if we hit anything or not. They'll a.s.sume they're outmatched. All the noise and the smoke, you see. It's why Luso's so fond of the things."

"Fine," Furio said. "So that explains about Aurelio. Why didn't you tell me?"

Gignomai shrugged. "Be realistic," he said. "The whole point is that I don't want anybody knowing about it. Even my people here don't know-just Aurelio and me. And now you, of course. You're smart, Furio. How did you figure it out?"

"Why not? Why the big secret?"

"Because it's illegal," Gignomai said, with a big smile. "Not just breach of monopoly illegal, like making shovel blades. I should think it probably const.i.tutes high treason, procuring arms for use in a rebellion, but I'd need to look it up in Father's book. Anyway, it's not the sort of thing I wanted anybody knowing about."

"But there won't be a s.h.i.+p till the spring."

Gignomai nodded. "True," he said. "But then cousin Boulomai shows up. It might suit him very nicely to play the good citizen and help foil a rebellion in the colonies, don't you think? Good way for him and his loathsome sister to get back home. It's what I'd do in his shoes. So," Gignomai went on, shaking his head, "hence the deadly secrecy. I had to keep Aurelio hidden where n.o.body would see him."

"He was in the livery?"

"You're very smart. Yes, for a while, but that was no good, obviously. Had him stashed away in an old barn on the Gimalli place, and that was a risk I wasn't happy about taking. And n.o.body could know about it. Not even you."

"I see."

"I'm sorry. I wish I could've told you. You've always been like a brother to me."

Lusomai and Sthenomai. "I hope you don't mean that."