Colours in the Steel Read Online Free PDF Page B

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