The Confusion

Once the gray clay had dried around the eggs, these were carried to a different furnace to be heated-but only to a dull red heat. The difference become obvious to Jack only when the sun went down, and he could stand between the two furnaces and compare the glow of one with that of the other. Again, the firing continued for a long time. Again, the eggs that emerged were cooled slowly, over a period of days. Again they were subjected to the test on the anvil-but with different results. For something about this second firing caused the steel egg to become more resilient. Still, most of them were not soft enough to be forged after a single firing in the gray clay, and had to be put through it again and again. But out of every batch, a few responded in just the right way to the hammer, and these were set aside. But not for long, because Persians and Armenians bought them up almost before they had hit the ground.

Enoch went over and picked one of them up. “This is called wootz,” he said. “It’s a Persian word. Persians have been coming here for thousands of years to buy it.”

“Why don’t the Persians make their own? They seem to have the run of the place-they must know how it’s done by now.”

“They have been trying, and failing, to make wootz since before the time of Darius. They can make a similar product-your sons and I made a detour to one of their forges-but they cannot seem to manage this.”

Enoch held the egg of wootz up so that fire-light grazed its surface and highlighted its terrain. Jack’s first thought was that it looked just like the moon, for the color and shape were the same, and the rugged surface was pocked with diverse craters where, he supposed, bubbles had formed. On a closer look, these craters were few and far between. Most of the egg’s surface was covered with a net-work of fine cross-hatched ridges, as if some coarsely woven screen-a mesh of wires-had been mixed into the stuff, and was trying to break free of the surface. And yet Jack had seen the crucibles prepared with his own eyes and knew that naught had gone into them save black sand, fragments of charcoal, and magic leaves. He pressed a fingertip against a prominent lattice of ridges; they were as hard as stone, sharp as a sword-edge.

“Those reticules grow inside the crucible, as plants do from seeds. And they are not only at the surface, but pervade the whole egg, and are all involved with one another-they hold the steel together and give it a strength nothing else can match.”

“If this wootz is so extraordinary, why’ve I never heard of it?”

“Because Franks name it something else.” Enoch glanced up, attracted by a distant ringing sound: a smith was smiting something. But it was not just some dull clod of iron. This was not a horseshoe or poker in the making. It rang with a noble piercing sound that put Jack in mind of Jeronimo wielding his rapier in the Khan el-Khalili.

The forge was about five minutes’ walk away, and when they arrived they joined a whole crowd of Ottoman Turks and other travelers who had convened to watch this Hindoo sword-smith at work. He was using tongs to grip a scimitar-blade by its tang, and was turning it this way and that on an anvil, occasionally striking it a blow with a hammer. The metal was glowing a very dull red.

“It isn’t hot enough to forge,” Jack muttered. “It needs to be a bright cherry red at least.”

“As soon as it is heated a bright cherry red, the lattice-work dissolves, like sugar in coffee, and the metal becomes brittle and worthless-as the Franks discovered during the Crusades, when we captured fragments of such weapons around Damascus and brought them back to Christendom and tried to find out their secrets in our own forges. Nothing whatsoever was learned, except the depth of our own ignorance-but ever since, we have called this stuff Damascus steel.”

“Damascus steel comes from here!?” Jack said, jostling closer to the anvil.

“Yes-the reticules you saw in the egg of wootz, when patiently hammered out, at low temperature, produce the swirling, liquid patterns that we know as-”

“Watered steel!” Jack exclaimed. He was close enough, now, to see gorgeous ripples and vortices in the red-hot blade. Without thinking, he reached for the hilt of his Janissary-sword and began drawing it out for comparison. But Enoch’s hand clapped down on his forearm to restrain him. In the same moment the forge was filled with a storm of whisking, scraping, ringing, and keening noises. Jack looked up into a dense glinting constellation of drawn blades: serpentine watered steel daggers, watered steel scimitars, watered steel talwars, Khyber swords, and the squat fist-knives known as kitars. Inlaid passages from the Koran gleamed gold on some blades, as did Hindoo goddesses on others.

Jack cleared his throat and let go of his sword.

“This gentleman with the hammer and the tongs is extremely well-thought-of among connoisseurs of edged weapons the world round,” Enoch said. “They would be ever so unhappy if something happened to him.”