Janina got my beer, and the girls pounced on me.
'Sir Conrad, you promised to show us how to make that wonderful knot work.' Krystyana wasn't very good at playing the coquette. I think she was trying to imitate Francine, the priest's wife.
'Hmm. I don't remember promising anything, but I'll think on it.' Thinking did me surprisingly little good. Understand that my mother knitted constantly. Unless she was cooking or sleeping, her needles and yarn were always out. My grandmother had done the same while she was alive.
And, you know? I had never really looked at what they were doing. I knew that there was a needle in each hand, with little loops of yam that connected them to the fabric below. She did something complicated with them in the middle. I spent more than an hour trying to visualize what it was, and the girls drifted away, embarrassed.
Then a partial solution occurred to me. I didn't know what knitting was, but when I was seven, my grandmother had shown me how to crochet. I got some heavy slivers of wood from the carpenter, who was still splitting logs and laying them out.
Other groups were working. One bunch of men had piles of flax lying on the ground, and they were beating on them with large wooden mallets. Some women were shredding it into fiber. A few others were braiding a sort of rope. Some repair work was in progress on a straw roof. No one seemed to be in charge, but things were getting done.
I took my sticks back to my room, and in an hour I had whittled three usable crochet hooks. The lack of sandpaper was a nuisance, but if you take your time you can get things fairly smooth with just a knife. I borrowed a candle from the count's room and waxed them. I borrowed some yam and shortly produced a pot holder that was as good as anything I had done when I was seven.
The girls were thrilled and picked it up without difficulty. Within a week I had two usable linen undershirts and Lambert was equally well equipped. The ladies were soon experimenting with variations, some of which were quite nice, and the peasant women were following their lead.
One surprising thing about technology is that very often the simplest processes and devices take the longest to develop, or perhaps I should say that it's surprising until you've been a designer. It is much easier, conceptually, to design a complicated thing than a refined simple mechanism. Those intricate machines that came out of twentiethcentury Germany are really the results of lazy thinking.
Consider the evolution of the musket. The expensive and tricky wheel lock was produced for a hundred years before some nameless craftsman came up with the simple and dependable flintlock.
Or look at this crocheting business. It's hard to imagine a simpler tool than a crochet hook. It produces a useful cloth fairly quickly, yet I do not know of a single primitive tribe that uses it. Even nomads, who must carry all their belongings with them, haul along a simple loom to make cloth.
A designer can mull over complicated designs for months. Then suddenly the simple, elegant, beautiful solution occurs to him. When it happens to you, it feels as if God is talking! And maybe He is.
After supper, Mary escorted Ilya the blacksmith into my room. He was considerably less surly than he had been in the afternoon.
'Sir Conrad, please understand that when I have the forge going, I have to work! It takes me two or three days to make enough charcoal to feed the fire for a single afternoon.'
'Okay, Ilya. I'll count that as an apology if you'll excuse my temper. Now, about steel.'
The door was open, and Lambert walked in. 'Yes, Sir Conrad, about steel! I want to listen in on this.'
'You've had a productive day! All my ladies are busily tying balls of yam into remarkable knots, and I hear that you have invented a new technique for obtaining Ilya's attention. '
In a place so small, everybody seemed to know what everyone else was doing. 'I'm sorry about losing my temper, my lord. I imagine that anvils are expensive.'
'Yes, but Ilya fixed it and the mail as well.' His eyes twinkled. 'I've occasionally considered using a similar technique on his head, but I feared for my sword. Now, tell us about steel.'
'Well, the first step is to convert the wrought iron into blister steel. Wrought iron is almost pure iron; steel is iron with a little bit of carbon in it. Charcoal is mostly carbon, so the trick is to mix them.'
'You start by beating the iron until it's fairly thin, thinner than your little finger. Then you get a clay pot with a good clay lid. You put the iron in the pot and pack it all around tight with charcoal, crushed fine. You put the lid on and seal it with good clay. It's important that no air gets into the pot.'
'Then you build a fire around it, slowly heat it up to a dull red, and keep the fire going for a week.'
'What? A whole week?' Ilya interrupted.
'Yes. A wood fire is hot enough, though. Now, if you've done this right and the pot hasn't cracked and no air has gotten in, the iron will have little pimples on it, and it will now be steel. Not a good grade of steel but good for some things. What I've just described is called the cementation process.'
'You don't know anything about heat-treating, do you? No, I guess you wouldn't. Wrought iron stays soft no matter what you do with it. Well, steel can be hardened. You heat it until it's bright red, almost yellow, and dunk it in water. This will make it hard, so it can keep a good edge. The trouble is, it breaks easily.'
'Then there is tempering, which makes it tougher. After hardening, you heat it to almost red, then let it cool slowly.'
'That's what there is to it?' Ilya asked.
'That's what there is to making a decent kitchen knife or an axe blade, but it won't be springy enough for a sword. It might break unless you made it as heavy as the count's.'
'So let's have the rest of it.'
'Hey, this is going to be a lot harder than it sounds,' I said. 'Just learning how to cook a pot that long without breaking it is going to take a lot of tries, and tempering is an art form.'
'Well, I want to hear it anyway.'
'Yes, Sir Conrad, tell us the whole process,' Lambert said.
'Okay. I'll tell you how they do it in Damascus.' Actually, I didn't know how they did it in Damascus, but I'd seen Jacob Bronowski's magnificent television series, and he had showed how they did it in Japan, which was probably similar. 'You weld a piece of this cemented steel to a similar piece of good wrought iron. You know how to weld, don't you?'
'Does the Pope know how to pray?'
'I'll take that as an affirmative. You weld them together and beat it out until it's twice as long as it was. Then you bend it over and weld it again. Then you heat it up again, beat it out long again, bend it over again, and weld it again. You repeat this at least twelve and preferably fifteen times. This gives you a layered structure thousands of layers thick.'
'That sounds impossible.'
'No, but it is difficult. Look carefully at my sword. See those little lines? Those tiny waves? Those are layers of iron and steel. It's called watering, and it's the mark of the best blades.'
'That's it, then?'
'Almost. Then you beat it until it looks like a sword. Once you start playing with hardening, you'll learn that the faster the steel cools, the harder it gets. You want the edge very hard but the shank springy. You coat the sword with clay, thin near the edge and thick at the shank. You heat it, clay and all, until it's the 'color of the rising sun' and quench it in water the same temperature as your hand. Then you temper it and polish it. Soaking it in vinegar will bring out the watering.'
'That's a long-winded process,' Ilya said.
'But worth it, I'll wager,' the count said. 'Ilya, you work on it-in addition to your other duties, of course. Good night, Ilya. A game of chess, Sir Conrad?'
Lambert won one of our games that night. By spring he was beating me two games out of three.
Chapter Fifteen
I awoke to find that the carpenter was burning all the logs he had split and laid out the day before. Not one big bonfire, you understand, but hundreds of little fires, one in each split log. Furthermore, he had recruited half a dozen of the children to help him at this task. Two of the older boys were splitting kindling, and the rest were
