The Copper Sign (37 page)

“The longer you help me, the more you will understand why some steps take so much time at first but in the end save time and energy,” Ellen replied gruffly. When the handle had been removed, she placed the square point in the notch and laid the other half of the billet over it. Now the front part had disappeared in the two grooves.

“The square point is made of softer iron, and that’s why I chose it for the core of the blade.” Ellen pointed to the two halves. “The billet is of much harder iron and is thus well suited for the jacket. In just a moment we shall have to weld it again. You’re not afraid of that anymore, are you?”

Jean grinned and shook his head. “I’ve gotten used to it.”

“The square point is sticking out far enough so we can use it as a holding rod, do you see?”

Jean nodded and put the billet in the fire, turning it from time to time, but when it was all glowing evenly he just stood there as in a trance staring into the flickering flames.

“Can’t you see that the iron is burning?” Ellen scolded and came running over. The billet was already spitting white sparks. Jean grabbed it and quickly took it out of the fire.

“Burned iron is worthless for making swords,” Ellen emphasized. She had paid a lot of money for the piece of iron, and Jean had to know just how important it was not to let the iron burn. As soon as it lay on the anvil, she began to hammer every inch of the billet with steady, heavy blows. Jean had to put it back in the fire three more times, and Ellen hammered and checked the stack until she was satisfied with the welding.

“So,” she said, heaving a huge sigh of relief, “we’ve done it! There must be no crack in the packet. Everything has to fit exactly. If there are any remaining air bubbles or slag trapped in the layers, the sword will be worthless later on. Tomorrow I’ll start forging the blade. If you want to, you may watch and help me a bit at first, but then the rest I can do alone.”

The next evening Jean came to the smithy earlier than usual. “I was afraid you might start without me,” he said.

“Never!” Ellen pretended to be furious, and then grinned at him. “We’ll start as soon as I am finished with this.”

Jean waited, and Ellen could see he was just as excited as she was. She eagerly explained to him what she was planning to do. “First I have to draw out the billet, just as I did before the folding, only this time it has to become much longer, and that will take several heatings. That’s why I need you here.”

“Ellen?”

“My name is Ellenweore!” she growled at him, more harshly than necessary. As long as there was a possibility that William might show up at the smithy, it was better that no one called her Ellen. She didn’t want him to suspect that Alan and she were one and the same person.

Jean promised to be careful, and then he started asking questions again. “Why do you always talk about the warmth? The iron is more than just warm, I’d call it hot.”

Ellen shrugged. “Smith’s language. Every trade has its own expressions, and you can tell who is experienced by their use of those words. Can we continue now?”

Jean was eager to see finally how the blade was made, and nodded emphatically. It seemed to him like a miracle that Ellen could shape a blade blow by blow from a block of iron.

“The rod here will be a part of the tang, that is the piece the hilt or grip will be attached to. It’s more practical if it is not too hard, as then the pommel can more easily be riveted on it later.” Ellen was so fascinated by the work on Athanor that her cheeks were glowing with excitement. Out of the corner of her eye she could see that Pierre had returned to the workshop. He acted busy and poked around as if he were looking for something, but she was sure it was his curiosity that brought him back. He certainly wanted to see how she made out with the difficult material. Every smith had his secrets and didn’t like it when another smith came to watch him while he worked. But Pierre was the master, and in an itinerant smithy it was practically impossible in any case to keep secrets. It was fortunate that the other smiths were not interested in what she was doing. They were still convinced that only a man could make a good sword, and finally Pierre, too, left without looking more closely at the piece she was working on.

The blade quickly took shape. Ellen kept checking its length and breadth, heated some parts again until they glowed yellow, and then reworked them again with a hand hammer. The regular rhythm of her strokes resounded through the silence. As soon as the iron started to glow red, she put it back in the forge again.

“It’s late, Ellenweore!” Jean ventured to say after being silent for a long time. He had watched each of her movements with fascination.

Ellen looked up in surprise. “What did you say?”

“It’s late. If you don’t stop soon,” he said, raising his eyebrows, “you might just as well spend the night here.”

Ellen looked around in astonishment. Her cheeks had a feverish glow. “It’s dark already.”

“It has been for a long time!”

“Oh!”

“You should stop now and continue the work tomorrow.”

Ellen nodded absentmindedly and examined the blade, holding it up closer to her eye to look at it.

“Whew, I thought that was a crack, but it’s just hammer scale.” She blew the tinder away and wiped the blade with a piece of leather, breathing an audible sigh of relief. “You’re right, it’s time to go to sleep. I didn’t notice how tired I am, and my eyes are burning like fire. Let’s stop now.”

That night Ellen dreamed of William again. She was anxious to show him Athanor and met him in the forest, but he wouldn’t let her speak, wooing her with his irresistible caresses and boldly seducing her. Ellen felt powerless—as if overjoyed and at the same time furious. She wanted to tell him about the sword, but as soon as she began to speak, he closed her lips with a long kiss. With anxious expectation, she tried to show him Athanor, but the sword was so heavy she could hardly pick it up. It looked like it had been made for a giant, incredibly large and primitive. Instead of gleaming in the light, it was covered with rust spots. Ellen was so ashamed of the ugly sword that she wished the earth would swallow her up. William took it in his hands, holding it at arm’s length, and examined it in disgust. In his hand, Athanor seemed as small and light as a toy sword. Ellen closed her eyes, not believing what she was seeing.

“It looks like it was meant for a dwarf,” William laughed, and put the sword down.

It lay in the grass as limp as a snakeskin.

Ellen rolled around restlessly in her sleep and woke up bathed in sweat. Anxiously she reached out for Athanor and then realized it had all just been a nightmare. Relieved, she ran her hand over the material covering the blade. William’s opinion was important to her, but was that her only motivation? She sighed. Basically it didn’t matter whether he liked the sword. “Athanor will be something special,” she murmured, and once again fell back to sleep.

“Doesn’t it look a bit narrow for a sword blade?” Jean asked the next day, when Ellen was looking at her work with satisfaction.

“The cutting edges still need to be sharpened, and that will make the blade a bit wider.”

“How can that make the blade wider?” Jean asked.

“Because the iron will now be drawn out laterally.”

Jean’s face brightened. “Ah! Then the sides will be thinner, is that correct?”

“Right!” Ellen smiled. The boy was quick to understand.

“Just the same, I don’t understand why you sharpen the sword now. Somehow I thought that would come much later.”

“You’re not entirely wrong there. It isn’t made really sharp yet, but the drawing out in both directions actually gives the blade two cutting edges. At first they are dull, but we’ll work on them later on with drawknife and file before we give them their final sharpness by hardening and polishing the edges.” Ellen looked at the roughly forged blade with satisfaction, checked it once more, and straightened it a little. “Good work,” she said to herself, proud of what she had accomplished. “Let’s stop for tonight, and tomorrow I’ll begin with the sharpening. By the way, from this point I can do it by myself.”

“Can I stay and watch just the same?” Jean asked carefully.

“Whenever you like,” she said, pleased that he was interested.

“The next thing I’ll do is to flatten the surface and scrape the fuller. And then it gets not just really interesting, but very dangerous, too.” Ellen paused for effect and looked at Jean. “Because then the actual hardening begins—and with that comes the moment of truth.” On the way back to their tent she told him, full of enthusiasm, why the hardening process was so important and at the same time so difficult. “You’ve got to have a feeling for it.” She clutched dramatically at her chest. “It comes from here, from the heart. It’s a mixture of…yes, what exactly?” She paused for a moment. “It’s a mixture of experience and intuition.”

“Intu…what?”

“Intuition is a special feeling for the right moment. You just have to have it in order to be a good swordsmith.”

“And how do you know if you have this special feeling?”

“Oh, that’s something you learn in your first years as an apprentice.” Ellen pinched his cheek and got an angry glance as a response.

“Ah, then what happens if, after a few years, you realize you really don’t have it? Then was all that work as an apprentice in vain?”

“Well, if you don’t have this special feeling, this intuition, it’s better to stay away from swords to start with. They are the crowning achievement of the smith’s art, do you understand?”

“That really sounds conceited.”

Ellen looked at him in astonishment. “Do you think so? I can’t find any fault in knowing your abilities and doing whatever you can do best. For me, that’s sword making. Whether you are a bad, good, or outstanding stonemason, carpenter, or smith all depends on the ability God has given you—it’s as simple as that. And just as not every priest has the good fortune to become a bishop, not every smith has what it takes to be a swordsmith.”

“But according to what I have heard,” Jean countered, “what you need is good connections and not necessarily a special talent to earn a high church office.”

Ellen shrugged, bored, and changed the subject. “You can help me again with the smoothing if you like.”

“Smoothing? But didn’t you just talk about hardening, and isn’t sharpening exactly the opposite?” Jean tried to play dumb.

“Oh, come on! Smoothing the blade just means to even it out,” she explained. “Now do you want to help me or not?”

“Well of course!” Jean nodded enthusiastically.

When he arrived at the smithy the next day, Ellen already had prepared everything. On the anvil was a tool that Jean had never before seen.

“Are you going to use that to smooth the blade?” he asked skeptically.

Ellen handed him the blade. “The face of the hammer has left dents and scars on the blade. Here, have a look at how rough and uneven the surface is. We’ll use this flatter,” she said, picking up the tool from the anvil, “to smooth the blade. Do you see how wide its face is?”

Jean nodded. One side of the hammer was about the size of your palm and square-shaped.

“To prevent new dents, you don’t hit the workpiece with the flatter itself; you have to use a hammer or sledgehammer and strike the top of the flatter.”

“Well, I didn’t quite understand that,” Jean objected uncertainly.

“Hold the blade with your left hand and the flatter with the other. It has to lie on the blade at a right angle. I’ll show you how—do you see now?”

Jean nodded. After he had moved the flatter a bit further for the first time, he already could see how smooth the blade became with this technique.

With a device similar to a carpenter’s drawknife, Ellen scraped a fuller in both blade surfaces and sharpened the edges again. She would wait for a moonless night to do the hardening just as reputable swordsmiths always did. It was only in absolute darkness that the color of the glowing metal could be determined exactly. Since the heat temperature was extremely important for the success of the hardening and since everyone knew the great influence of moonlight on men and animals, it was safer to wait for a new moon. In the meanwhile, she would have sufficient time to deal with the problem of the water.

Ellen’s next step was to forge little tiles from remainders of the blade material that she could use to test the hardening.

After moving to Tancarville, Donovan had cursed because he had to adjust to another kind of water. In Ipswich he had always fetched it from a particular spring, just as his master had done before him. After his first failure with quenching in Tancarville, he had Ellen prepare a whole stack of such iron tiles and experimented with them until the hardening process was perfect.

Ellen fetched some water from a nearby brook, added a bit of urine, and checked the mixture until she was satisfied with the result. Two days before the new moon, everything was ready, but she was beginning to get nervous. Her heart pounded and her hands sweated at the thought that the next step could destroy all the efforts of the past few weeks. To prepare the blade for quenching, she had purchased some clay from a potter, which she now spread on the sword.

Jean watched every one of her movements, speechless.

“First I will apply a thin layer to the entire blade, and when the clay dries I will check if there are any cracks in the coating,” she explained, “which is something we definitely do not want.”

“What could you do then?”

“If it cracks, that means the clay is too firm and heavy, which also means it will be difficult to recognize the right color of the workpiece in the forge, as clay glows brighter than iron. So what I would have to do then is to add water, coal dust, and crushed sandstone. The right mixture is important because if I add too much of one of them the clay might not stick to the blade anymore. The work can only proceed when a thinly applied coat of clay dries uniformly.”