The Iron Age (3)
To humanity, fire was the light of civilization. This was never merely a story about how people learned to roast meat once they could kindle a flame.
Because fire existed, humans could conquer the cold. Unlike other animals, they kept moving through winter, leaving their footprints across a pure white world where everything else slept, and even pushed those footprints into the eternally frozen deserts of snow where no human should have been able to live.
And above all else, once fire was in their hands, humanity could melt metal.
The day someone happened to notice “melted metal” left behind in the ashes of a campfire, humanity gained a weapon to replace its soft teeth and weak nails.
Of course, metal that melted at the modest heat of an ordinary campfire was soft and held little real power.
Yet it was only natural that people who possessed not a scrap of smelting knowledge would attach special meaning to the mysterious, gleaming substance that had suddenly appeared in the earth where they had built their fire.
The first human to find it lit a fire, melted the wondrous material, and shaped it.
No one knows what form that first piece took.
It might have been a lumpy, ugly stick. It might have been a clumsy copy of the hand axes people already used every day.
But that was not what mattered.
What mattered was that the man began to believe he had been specially chosen. People gathered at his feet of their own accord, and from that gathering rose a tribe, a group, a civilization, a society.
By raising a single special symbol, a clear ruling class was born. Power was inherited. And in the eyes of other humans who watched that power, greed took root.
Someone who wanted the same power would have tried to kill the leader, and the group would have split.
Or another group watching from outside might have decided to seize it for themselves.
Or someone might have left the group entirely, lighting campfires everywhere in a frantic search for metal so that he too could become “special.”
Human society was formed before fire and metal, advanced by the power of fire and metal, and is still held up by fire and metal.
To hold the power to command fire and metal was to hold something of extraordinary meaning.
And Chester, who now possessed both fire and metal, reached out and took hold of the wooden stick rising from the clay mold.
He pulled hard. The stick came free with a soft pop, its tip blackened as if scorched by flame.
“Let’s see how well this turned out.”
Chester opened the clay mold and looked inside.
Because the wooden stick had been left in place while the molten metal was poured, a solid metal casting now sat there with a clean hole punched straight through its center.
…Pretty heavy, actually.
Black flecks of impurity clung here and there where he had failed to skim them properly, but nothing worth fretting over.
He turned the hammer head this way and that, studying the hole, then took a scrap of wood and rounded it carefully with his claw knife.
He jammed the rough handle into the hammer head, gave it a few solid taps and shocks until it seated firmly, then wrapped cord tightly around both head and handle until the whole thing was bound fast.
“Done.”
A finished hammer.
“Came out better than I expected. I could probably make an axe blade the same way.”
“We’re finally getting metal axes?!”
Monia, who had already tasted the wonder of civilization through the machete, instantly pictured how much easier life would become with a metal axe.
A tool as brutally simple as an axe only needed a solid basic shape and decent toughness; performance more or less took care of itself after that.
Even now, when stone knives had become claw knives and hand-drill fires had become lighters, the stone axe—together with rope and cord—remained one of the tools they had used without pause from the very first day they set foot on the Floating Island.
Monia had half-realized that truth while handling so many different tools… yet the machete, equally a “use-it-however-you-want” tool, had been so well made of metal that from the lucky moment they found it until now it had been treated like treasure between Chester and herself.
“Hmm.”
Chester tossed the finished hammer, caught it, spun it, twirled it playfully on his palm, then suddenly clamped the handle in a crushing grip.
“Let’s see how tough it really is.”
Veins stood out thick on his forearm as he squeezed. The wooden handle creaked and screamed.
In that same instant he swung the hammer at a boulder. A deafening crash hammered against Monia’s eardrums.
“Kyaa!”
Was this the sound you would hear if someone locked you in a tiny room and beat metal from every side? The sharp, ringing collision of metal and stone burrowed deep into her ears and kept rattling around inside her skull for a long time afterward.
At the same moment the wooden handle, unable to withstand the shock, shattered. The hammer head spun through the air and thudded to the ground.
Chester tossed aside the broken handle and examined the head. It had struck the rock hard enough to raise gooseflesh, yet aside from a slight dent the metal showed no serious deformation.
He looked at the boulder next. A chunk of its edge had split clean off and now lay on the dirt.
“Oh. Pretty solid.”
“Y-You could have said something first!”
“Hm? Did I startle you? Sorry.”
He unwound the cord, scraped and pried the splintered wood out of the socket with his claw knife, fashioned a new handle, and fitted it back into the hammer head.
“All right. Time to get serious.”
Where he settled himself, a metal plate—melted as flat as he could manage—lay waiting on a rock. That plate would serve as the anvil for the lower-level branch of the Floating Island’s forge.
Even if it was only a “lower-level branch,” this was still the only forge on the entire island. Unless the People of the Summit took an interest, it would never grow beyond this.
Chester first lit the kiln, then pressed only one of the four bellows levers to feed in a measured amount of air and raise the heat.
He kept the fire at a temperature just hot enough to heat ore, and laid across the kiln mouth a knife blank he had already poured into a mold and allowed to set.
“So what kind of ore is this, really? Just iron?”
“Not sure. Doesn’t feel like plain iron.”
In its raw state the metal had looked like any ordinary mineral. Once melted, skimmed of impurities, and allowed to solidify again, it now gave off a soft silvery sheen and an almost mystical air.
Even though the shape was crude and the workmanship rough, the mineral’s own color and that silver light made it look like some mysterious relic of an ancient civilization.
“Doesn’t seem all that strong, does it?”
“Yeah. But it’ll still be way more useful than the stone tools we’ve been using.”
When the knife blank was hot enough, he shifted it onto the iron plate with a wooden stick, held the handle end down with a stone, and began swinging the hammer at the blade.
Clang!
The moment the hammer struck the glowing metal, oxygen trapped inside the blank burst free in a shower of bright sparks.
Clang! Clang! Clang!
Chester kept hammering while the sparks flew.
Well, I’m playing blacksmith… but I have no idea how long I’m supposed to keep this up.
His home village had been too poor to support a blacksmith. A blacksmith made tools for people and lived off that work; unless some scandal or secret misfortune forced him there, no craftsman would ever settle in a place with few customers and no money.
Blacksmiths were artisans, and artisans were needed everywhere.
Still, Chester was not completely without connection to the craft. Fascinated by knives, he had used the rare free hours of his butler duties to wander forges, hunting for blades that caught his eye.
It was from one of those blacksmiths that he had learned the purpose of hammering: to drive out impurities and air so the metal would grow denser and harder.
Maybe I’ll just keep going until the sparks stop flying.
When the knife cooled he returned it to the fire and talked with Monia while it reheated. While he hammered, she had been practicing whistled commands for Ant.
“Hup! Hooo-up!”
She still could not produce a proper whistle, so the exercise was closer to play than real training, yet Monia kept trying with earnest determination.
“Heuk! Ah! A sound came out! Finally!”
“That wasn’t a whistle.”
Even to the woman who was his first love and now his wife, Chester could still say when something was simply not true.
“Hiiing.”
Monia knew perfectly well that calling that noise a whistle was a stretch, so she gave up and returned to conversation.
“What are you going to make next?”
“Not sure. By the way, why haven’t Black Wind and his people shown up yet?”
“That Grace of the Summit? Maybe it’s so important it just takes time.”
“Could be. As for the next thing… is there anything you want, Monia?”
“Something I want… Am I really allowed to choose?”
“I already made the first thing I wanted, so you pick one too.”
“Hmm.”
Monia thought of the machete carefully displayed inside their home and said,
“Then I want a machete of my own.”
“A machete? All right. I’m not sure how well I can make one, though.”
“Anything you make for me will be perfect.”
Chester gave a slightly shy smile at her answer and returned to hammering the knife, blow after steady blow.
He worked the entire piece evenly—from blade to tang—then took up a whetstone and began sharpening the edge.
The knife that had once been smooth was now dented and uneven from repeated hammer strikes. He held it firmly and ground it for a long time against the stone until the edge was as keen as he could make it.
When the edge was finished he returned the knife to the kiln once more. Fully heated, he plunged it into a vessel filled with cold water drawn through the aqueduct from the waterfall.
The red-hot blade hissed into the icy cascade water and instantly threw up a thick plume of pure white steam.
Once the knife had cooled completely, Chester took a length of sturdy cord and began wrapping the handle, binding it carefully line by line until the grip was complete.
He then took the finished knife in hand and put it through a series of flourishes, the blade flashing as it caught the sunlight.
Finally he reversed his grip and drove the knife into a block of wood. Satisfied, he nodded.
“Yeah. This is good.”
With that knife as their beginning, Chester and Monia started using the ore brought by the People of the Summit to replace their stone tools, one by one, with iron.