Against the Tide of Years (12 page)

“So . . . so the force of the water will push against the
sides
of the embankment, where it butts into those ledges of rock!” Augewas said, pointing. Another thought struck him. “And we will not need to build it so thick, to be just as strong!”

“Exactly. That will flood all this land here.”

Augewas, a dark grizzled man, nodded brusquely. Enkhelyawon looked slightly shocked at the lack of formality, but Walker let it slide. He recognized the attitude; it was a professional focusing on his work, not somebody dissing the boss.

“That, yes,” he said. “That will give you a head of water. But where do you wish to take it, lord?”

He waved toward the valley of the Eurotas. Clustered, flat-topped peasant huts of mud brick showed here and there amid grainfields and olive groves, occasionally the larger house of a
telestai,
a baron. On the edge of vision was the megaron-palace near the site of classical Sparta. Like that later city, it was unwalled, but for a different reason—the High King of Mycenae forbade stone defenses, as he did at Pylos and a few other places directly under his gaze.

“We might use some of it for irrigation, eventually,” Walker said. “But come, I will show you what the first use will be.”

He led them over to a trestle table of logs. On it stood a model three feet high. “These are my handfast men Cuddy and Bierman,” he went on. “And this is a . . . replica in small . . . of what we will build below the dam.”

It showed a wheel of timbers forty feet across, with a chute to bring the water to its top and spill onto the curved blades within. At Walker’s nod, Bill Cuddy poured a small bucket of water into the pan at the top of the model, letting it run down a wooden chute. The wheel turned on its axle, and the cams on the shaft moved hammers, pumped a piston bellows, turned a small round grindstone.

Augewas looked on in fascination as Cuddy explained the operation of the machine with patient repetition, turning frequently to look at the dam site, visibly struggling to turn the model into an image in his mind.

“The first thing the
water mill
does,” Walker went on, backtracking occasionally to explain when he had to use an English word with no Achaean equivalent, “will be to drive the bellows for the
blast furnace.
”

“For the iron, lord?” Augewas said eagerly. He’d seen samples from the tons the
Yare
had carried, and these people knew about iron in the abstract—they bought small quantities through the Hittites for ornament or special uses. They just didn’t know how to smelt it or work it properly yet. “There is ore, near here?”

Bierman put a sack of cracked rocks down on the table and spoke in slow, careful Achaean: “About sixty-five percent . . . that’s six parts in ten, I mean . . . iron. Hematite ore—real nice, except I think there may be traces of nickel, maybe a little chrome.”

“Besides the ore of iron,” Walker said, “we need charcoal in large amounts and very pure, soft limestone for flux. We will need many hundreds of laborers, to bring those and all the other necessary things together. Metalworkers must be trained; I have a master ironsmith and a dozen men who have been learning from him. Then when we have the iron from the
blast furnace,
it must be further worked with heat and hammers—very heavy hammers . . .”

Enkhelyawon tossed his head in a purely Greek gesture. “The
wannax
has decreed that this must be so. Spend and spare not what is needed; I heard him say so, the royal word from the King’s own lips.”

Augewas nodded himself, more slowly, a beatific smile spreading over his lined face at the prospect of an unlimited cost-plus contract, or the Bronze Age equivalent. “That is a command worthy of a king indeed. One seldom heard in these sad times, when great lords clutch their bronze and silver hard and trade is so troubled. Then besides the dam, we must build channels for the water,” he went on. “This furnace itself . . .”

“It will be of stone, shaped like a tower that tapers from the base to the top, but it must be lined with a special type of brick,” Walker said. “My men are looking for it—fireclay, we call it. There must be ramps to the lip of the stack.” He went on, pointing out details.

Augewas stood silent for a moment after he finished. “I see, lord,” he said at last. “Then there are these buildings. And we must have roads, roads in the hill country here, to fetch the materials. Barracks and storehouses of food and other goods, for the workers. Houses for the masters and overseers. A great project, lord, one worthy of my skill. Here I will learn much, as well as do much.”

Walker smiled.
Great,
he thought.
An enthusiast.
Now he could get back to Mycenae for a while and do some intensive politicking.

 

“Everything’s a trade-off,” Jared Cofflin said.

Martha made a noncommittal noise from behind him. “This one is an
expensive
trade-off,” she noted.

Cofflin grunted in his turn and pushed harder on the pedals. The two-person tricycles were the transportation of choice for those who could get them, and he didn’t feel easy commandeering a horse carriage now that Martha wasn’t lugging around a nursing infant anymore. Maybe they’d buy one in a year or two, when horses were cheaper.
Of course, then I’d have to rent space in a stable, and it’d take forever to get the damned thing ready.
Animals couldn’t just be parked until you needed them.

They were moving out Hummock Pond Road, south and west of town. It was a bit eerie, having so many different landscapes in your mind’s eye. The thick, tangled scrub that had covered the Island since long before he was born, then the frantic chopping and burning, and there were fields of grain and potatoes fertilized with ash and fish offal . . . and now changing again, to pasture and orchard.

Now and then they passed people at work, a farmer on a sulky-plow turning furrows as he rode behind two horses, wagons scattering fertilizer or pulverized oyster shells, long rows of harvest workers gathering late vegetables, a herd of close-sheared sheep flowing around the bicycle like lumpy white water as it was driven by two teenagers and an extremely happy collie. A wagon driven by a policeman went by with a dozen resentful-looking, hungover men in it; drunk-and-disorderly convictions, he thought, going out to work off a couple of days helping to mine Madaket Mall—the old landfill dump, which was full of irreplaceable stuff. He nodded and smiled to the peace officer. That was lousy work, worse than shoveling garbage in its way.

“Getting old for this,” Cofflin puffed, glad of the excuse to stop when a hauler did, dropping off bales of coarse salt-marsh hay from the mainland.

“Not as old as you were the first year,” Martha said, and he chuckled.

True enough. God, the way my thighs ached!
He felt stronger now than he had the day of the Event, and he’d certainly lost the small pot that had been marring his lean frame.

Farm wagons loaded with milk tins, vegetables, and crates of gobbling turkeys passed them on their way into town. He felt a little glow of satisfaction every time one went by, nodding and waving to the drivers. That was life itself, for his people and his family. Hard-won life; none of them except Angelica and a few others had known a damned thing about farming.

They came to a new turnoff, marked BESSEMER CASTING PLANT #1. “Well, here’s Starbuck’s Nightmare,” Martha said, as they wheezed up a slight rise.

Cofflin chuckled breathlessly as they coasted down the new-laid asphalt and braked to a halt. This thing had swallowed a lot of money—since the Event he’d gained a new appreciation of the way money represented crystallized sweat. And using it for one thing meant
not
using it for another.

Ronald Leaton was waiting for them in front of the office shack, wiping his hands on the inevitable greasy rag.

“ ’lo, Chief, Martha,” he said.

“Morning, Ron. Well, I’m glad we persuaded you to put
this
out of town, at least,” Jared Cofflin said, dismounting and peering around with his hands on his hips.

The complex itself was built on cleared scrubland, the buildings constructed of oak-timber beams and brick beside new asphalt roadways, with a tall wooden windmill creaking beside an earthen water reservoir. Smoke smut and charcoal dust coated everything, making even the fresh-cut wood look a little shabby.

“It ain’t pretty, but it works,” Leaton said. The engineer was grinning, the way he usually did when showing off a new toy. “This is the smelting stack of the furnace,” he said, pointing to a squat chimney-like affair of red brick fifteen feet high with a movable top like a giant metal witch’s hat.

“So that’s a blast furnace? Cofflin asked. It looked formidably solid.

“Cupola furnace, if you want to get technical, since it’s for remelting metal, not for refining ore. That’s where we melt down the ingots. Now, we
could
just melt down scrap and cast it straight—I’ve been doing that for a couple of years, on a much smaller scale—but we don’t have an infinite supply of scrap. And we are getting cast iron in some quantity from Alba. Pretty damned good iron, too; those little charcoal blast furnaces can give you excellent quality and Irondale is doing very well.”

Jared found himself giving the riveted boilers an occasional uneasy glance. There had been some nasty accidents with those in the beginning.

“That’s for blowing the blast into the stack,” Leaton said, pointing to the larger engine.

A long
chuff
came from the little donkey engine, and the tender threw a lever. The wooden links of the endless belt rattled, and the ingots began to lift toward the top of the furnace stack. When they reached it, they fell against the side of the conical plug with a loud, dull clanging and down into the furnace. Another wagon brought up big wicker tubs of charcoal, and they went up the conveyor likewise.

“So once we’ve tapped the molten iron from the furnace . . . over here, Chief—”

They walked around the massive construction.

“We take it in the holding car here and bring it over to the converter.”

That was the second structure, twenty yards away. The core of it was a tubby egg-shaped construction of riveted steel plates twelve feet long; it was rather like a fat cannon pointing at the sky. Beneath it was more rail, and men and women in stained coveralls were unbolting the bottom with wrenches a yard long and lowering it onto a waiting cart with jacks and levers.

“You can see where they’ve got it open, the inside is firebrick and calcinated limestone. . . . We really should have two, one up and one being relined. Anyway, we pour the molten iron in the top and blow air in through that removable bottom—it’s called a tuyere, the long pipe thingie over there swings in and we get the blast from a blowing engine, two double-acting steam pistons.”

“That what created that almighty racket last night? Had a couple of people riding into town hell-bent-for-leather, screeching that the Event had happened again.”

“Ayup. Better than fireworks—exothermic reaction, great
big
plume of colored lights, flame . . . that’s why we’ve got tile on all these roofs. Oxygen in the air hits the carbon in the iron and it
burns
. Took a while to get from theory to practice, but we’re getting usable batches now. And heck, even the
slag
from a basic-process converter is useful, ground up fine for fertilizer. It’s all phosphate and calcium.”

Leaton’s slim, middle-aged features took on a look of ecstasy; he’d run a computer store back before the Event for most of his living, but the little engineering shop in his basement had been his real love. He’d done nonstandard parts for antique automobiles, prototypes for inventors, some miniature steam engines for collectors.
And
he’d had a big collection of technical books; one of the most useful had been a World War II government handbook on how to do unorthodox things in small machine shops.

Seahaven was the island’s biggest single employer now, if you didn’t count fishing, and it had spawned dozens of smaller enterprises.

“And here’s where the steel goes,” Leaton went on. “We’re using graded scrap in the smelter to alloy it. Hard to be precise with this Bessemer process, but it works in a sort of more-or-less fashion. Eventually we’ll have to get manganese and alloying materials of our own, but for now . . . anyway, the converter pours the steel into this crucible, the insulation keeps the steel molten while we put a couple of batches in, we close it up and rotate it to mix ’em up and get a homogeneous product, and then we pour
that
into the mold.”

The shape being swung up out of the timber-lined casting pit on an A-frame crane was nearly as long as the converter itself but much thinner, still radiating heat as it lay on its cradle with bits and pieces of sand and clay sticking to its rough-cast exterior.

“That’s no steam engine cylinder,” Cofflin said grimly.

“Nope,” Leaton said regretfully. “Eight-inch Dahlgren gun. Still have to turn the exterior and bore it out, of course. The boring mill’s going in over there.” He pointed to a set of stone foundations and a pile of timber. His expression clouded slightly. “Marian
did
say her project had priority?”

“Ayup,” Cofflin nodded grimly. “The Meeting agreed. Right now, that’s the form
progress
takes. First priority, now that the
Emancipator
is off on its trials.”

“You can see this is a lot of work, hard-sweat work, though,” Leaton went on. “About that immigration quota—”

“Goddammit, Ron, save it for the Council meetings!”

The furnace belched smoke and sparks into a sky thick with geese heading southward. Their honking sounded forlorn through the rumble of burning iron.

 

Odikweos of the Western Isles heard the flat cracking sound of metal on hard leather and then the unmusical crash of blade on blade. He flung up a hand to halt his followers—right now, only a boy with a torch and a single spearman—and listened.