Ishaq paused when one of the other loaders came down the aisle with a piece of paper. Ishaq read the paper the man gave him, while the man gave a sidelong look at Richard. Ishaq sighed and gave brief directions to the man. After he was gone, Ishaq turned back to Richard.
“I can only transport what the review board allows me to move. That paper, just now—it was instructions from the board for me to hold a shipment of timbers to the mines because the load was going to go to a company that needs the work. You see? I can’t put other people out of business by being unfair and delivering more than they do, or else I have trouble, and I get replaced by someone who will not be so unfair to his competitors. Ah, it’s not like the old days, when I was young and foolish.”
Richard folded his arms. “You mean to say that if you do a good job, you get in trouble—just like I did.”
“Good job. Who’s to say what is a good job. Everybody’s got to work together for the good of everybody. That is a good job—if you help your fellow man.”
Richard watched a couple of men off in the distance loading a wagon with charcoal. “You don’t really believe that mouthful of mush, do you, Ishaq?”
Ishaq sighed in a long suffering manner. “Richard, please, load the wagon when you get to the foundry and then go with the wagon out to the Retreat and unload it at the blacksmith’s shop. Please. Don’t get sick on me, or get a bad back, or have infirm children in the middle of the run? I don’t need to see the blacksmith again, or I will have to go swimming with an iron bar around my neck.”
Richard grunted a laugh. “My back is feeling fine.”
“Good. I’ll get a driver over here to drive the wagon.” Ishaq waggled a cautionary finger. “And don’t ask the driver to help load or unload. We don’t need that kind of grievance brought up at the next meeting. I had to beg Jori not to lodge a complaint after I asked him to help me unload the wagon that day in the rain, when the wheels broke—the day you helped me get the load to the warehouse. Remember?”
“I remember.”
“Please, don’t give Jori any trouble. Don’t touch the reins—that’s his job. Be a good fellow, then? Get the iron loaded and unloaded so that blacksmith doesn’t come to see me again?”
“Sure, Ishaq. I won’t make any trouble for you. You can trust me.”
“There’s a good fellow.” Ishaq started away, but turned back. “Was not so much trouble on a farm—am I right?”
“No, it wasn’t. I wish I was back there, now.”
Before he got far, Ishaq turned back once more. “You be sure to bow and scrape if you see any of those priests. You hear?”
“Priests? What priests? How will I know them?”
“Brown robes and creased caps—oh, you’ll know them. You can’t miss them. If you see any, you be on your best manners. If a priest suspects you of having an improper attitude toward the Creator or such, he can have you tortured. The priests are Brother Narev’s disciples.”
“Brother Narev?”
“The high priest of the Fellowship of Order—” Ishaq waved his arms impatiently. “I have to get Jori to come with the wagon. Please, Richard, do as I ask. That blacksmith will feed me to his forge if I don’t have that iron out there today. Please, Richard, get that load out there. Please?”
Richard gave Ishaq a smile in order to put his mind at ease.
“You have my word, Ishaq. The blacksmith will have the iron.”
Ishaq heaved a sigh and hurried off to find his driver.
Chapter 48
It was late in the muggy afternoon by the time they made it to the site of the Retreat. Sitting in the wagon beside Jori as they cleared the top of the final hill, Richard was awestruck by the sight. It was beyond huge. He couldn’t imagine how many square miles had been cleared. Gangs of thousands of men, looking like ants spread out below, worked in lines with shovels and baskets reshaping the contour of the land.
Jori was disinterested in the construction, and only spat over the side, offering the occasional “I suppose” to some of Richard’s questions.
The foundation was still being laid in deep trenches, enabling Richard, looking down from the road, to see on the ground the outline of the future structure. It was hard to fathom how enormous the building was going to be. Seeing the specks moving slowly beside it, it was hard to keep in mind that they were men.
For sheer size, the structure would rival anything Richard had ever seen. There were miles of grounds and gardens going in. Fountains and other towering structures along entrance roads were beginning to be erected. Sweeping stretches of mazes were being constructed with hedges. Hillsides were dotted with trees that had been planted according to a grand plan.
The Retreat faced a lake in what was to be that majestic park. The short side of the main building was to run a quarter mile along the river. Stone pilings marched partway out into the river, with a series of connecting arches just starting to be constructed. Apparently, part of the palace was to extend out over the water, with docks for the emperor’s pleasure craft.
Across the river lay more of the city. On the palace side of the river, too, the city spread all around, though at a great distance from the Retreat. Richard couldn’t imagine how many buildings and people had been displaced for the construction. This was to be no distant and remote emperor’s palace, but rather it was set right in the center of Altur’Rang. Roads were being paved with millions of cobbles, giving the multitudes of citizens of the Order access to come and see the grand structure. There were already crowds of people standing behind rope barricades, watching the construction.
Despite the poverty of the Old World, it would appear that this grand palace was to be a crown jewel of unsurpassed splendor.
Stone of various kinds lay in great piles. In the distance, Richard could see men working at cutting it into the required shapes. The heavy afternoon air rang with the faraway knells of hundreds of hammers and chisels. There were stockpiles of granite and marble in a variety of colors, and massive quantities of limestone blocks. Special quarry wagons waited in serpentine columns to deliver yet more. The long blocks of stone, called lifts, were slung under heavy beams that bridged the front and rear axles. Huts and great open shelters had been built for the stone workers so they could work no matter the weather. Timber was stickered in row upon row of huge stacks covered with purpose-built roofs. The overflow was covered in canvas. Small mountains of materials for mortar were scattered around the foundation, looking like anthills, the illusion aided by all the dark specks of men moving about.
Away from the site itself, on a road that snaked its way along the side of a hill, among a small city of new work buildings overlooking the site, lay the blacksmith’s shop. It was quite large, compared with such places Richard had seen before. Of course, Richard had never seen anything on this scale being built. He had seen grand places that already existed. To see one just beginning was a revelation. The sheer scale of everything was disorienting.
Jori expertly backed his team, putting the rear of the wagon right at double doors standing open into blackness.
“There you be,” Jori said. It was a long speech for the lanky driver. He pulled out a loaf of bread and a waterskin filled with ale and climbed down from the wagon to find a place farther down the hill, where he could sit and watch the building while Richard worked at unloading the iron.
The blacksmith’s shop was dark and stifling hot, even in the outer, cluttered, stockroom. Like all blacksmith’s shops, the walls in the workroom were covered in soot. Windows were kept to a minimum, mostly located overhead and covered with shutters, so as to keep it dark in order to more easily judge the nature of the glowing metal.
Despite being recently built for the work at the palace, the blacksmith’s shop already looked a hundred years old. Nearly every spot held some tool or other in a dizzying array and variety. There were rows of tools, piles of them. The rafters were hung with tongs and fire pots and crucibles and squares and dividers and contraptions like huge insects
which looked to be used for clamping pieces together. Low benches seemingly cobbled together in haste were hung all round with long-handled dies of every sort. Some benches held smaller grindstones. Slots around some tables held hundreds of files and rasps. Some of the low tables were covered in a jumble of hammers in such variety as Richard had never imagined, their handles all sticking out, making the tabletops look like huge pincushions.
The floor was choked with clutter: boxes overflowing with parts, bars, rivets; wedges; lengths of iron stock; clippings; pry bars; pole hooks; dented pots; wooden jigs; tin snips; lengths of chain; pulleys; and a variety of special anvil attachments. Everything was covered with soot or dust or metal filings.
Broad short barrels full of liquids sat around the anvils where men hammered on glowing iron held in tongs, flattening, stretching, cutting, squaring, clipping. Glowing metal hissed and smoked in protest as it was quenched in the liquid. Other men used the horns of their anvils to bend metal that looked like bits of sunset held captive in tongs. They held up those fascinating bits and matched them to patterns, hammered on the metal some more, and checked it again.
Richard could hardly think in all the noise.
In the darkness, a man worked a big bellows, putting all his weight on the down-stroke. The blast of air made the fire roar. Charcoal overflowed from baskets sitting wherever there had been room to put them. Cubbyholes held pipe and odd scraps of metal. Metal hoops leaned against benches and planks. Some of the hoops were for barrels, bigger ones were for wagon wheels. Tongs and hammers lay here and there on the floor where men had dropped them in the haste of battle with the hot iron.
The whole place was as agreeable a clutter as he had ever seen.
A man in a leather apron stood not far away at a door to another workroom. He held out a chalkboard covered with a maze of lines as he studied a large contraption of metal bars on the floor in the room beyond. Richard waited, not wanting to interrupt the man’s concentration. The sharply defined muscles of his sooty arms glistened with sweat. The man tapped the chalk against his lip as he puzzled, then swiped a line clean on the board and drew it again, moving its connecting points.
Richard frowned at the drawing. It looked familiar, somehow, even though it was no recognizable object.
“Would you be the master blacksmith?” Richard asked when the man paused and looked over his shoulder.
The man’s brow seemed enduringly fixed in an intimidating scowl. His hair was cropped close to his skull—a good practice around so much fire and white-hot metal—adding to his menacing demeanor. He was of average height and sinewy, but it was his countenance that made him look big enough for any trouble that might come along. By the way the other men moved, and glanced at this man, they feared him.
Taken by inexplicable compulsion, Richard pointed at the line the man had just drawn. “That’s wrong. What you just did is wrong. You have the top end right, but the bottom should go here, not where you put it.”
He didn’t so much as blink. “Do you even know what this is?”
“Well, not exactly, but I—”