“Your brother booked passage for you all the way to Crane Marsh Works,” the carter added, with a curious glance at me, as if wondering why I hadn’t known. “Last night.”
“I went to my bed early,” I said, “for I was exhausted after our harrowing encounter with the brigands.”
“How many were there?” asked Big Leon.
“I was hiding my eyes,” I said, perhaps too glibly, for the comment earned me a sharp, assessing look. Big Leon then hopped down from the moving wagon and fell back to walk at the rear beside Rory, musket under his right arm while he tamped tobacco into a pipe.
“Never mind him,” said Little Leon. “You know how some folk are.”
“He walks like a soldier.”
“Him? Why, I soldiered in my youth, and you’d not guessed it, had you?”
“What, in the Iberian wars? Him, too?”
“Him, too, but we don’t talk about that. We don’t dwell on old grievances here, lass, for you know how kin might have got mixed up on opposite sides of that war. Why, I’m the son of a Atrebates mother and a Trinobantic father, a mixed marriage if there ever was one, for you know the Atrebates Celts sided with the Roman invaders while the Trinobantes Celts fought against them.”
“The Roman invasion?” I laughed. “That ended two thousand years ago, not thirteen years ago like the Iberian war.”
“Yet folk recall them just the same, whether it were Caesar or Camjiata. Hard to say who might have fought on which side, eh? So tell me about Adurnam. I hear there’s a temple there dedicated to Ma Bellona, the Mother of War, She of the bloody hand, that’s so big a thousand men can stand in the forecourt without touching one shoulder to another. Is that true?”
Behind, someone began coughing convulsively, and I whipped around to see Rory with the lit pipe in hand, doubled over, hacking. Big Leon calmly removed the pipe from Rory’s fingers and began smoking as he walked; after a bit, wiping his eyes and starting to laugh, Rory loped after.
“Yes, it’s true,” I said, turning back. “I’ve seen such an assembly with my own eyes.”
Traveling by wagon was not fast but it was steady, and both Little Leon and I liked to tell, and to hear, tales. By the afternoon of the second day, we read the signs that meant we were approaching a blast furnace and mine. The land began to fold and rise; the woods—mostly elm, oak, lime, and alder—were heavily coppiced. Charcoal stacks or their blackened remains dotted the surroundings. Smoke smeared the blue sky, and gradually a sound could be discerned, faint at first and then rising into a din matched by a miasma of fumes that made my eyes water and my nostrils prickle. A pond made by damming streams spread silvery-blue waters alongside pits and mounds of dirt and heaps of slag. The huge stone edifice of the furnace spewed smoke that covered half the sky as we approached. I covered my mouth and nose with a kerchief, eyes streaming. Rory started to cough. Both Leons tied kerchiefs over their faces.
Two young men came running.
“Here you are come, Leon! After that storm blew off the snow, we put bets on what day you’d arrive. Old Jo won! Who are these folks?”
No snow or ice remained where the furnace baked earth and air. Men pushed wheelbarrows of raw ore over a bridge of planks and dumped it into the furnace’s fiery maw. What else transpired I could not discern, because the area below was roofed with timber. A bellows wheezed. Water splashed from a wheel and rolled along a wooden sluice.
We drove past and found ourselves in a tiny hamlet consisting of a barracks, a byre, and a temple to Komo Vulcanus, He whose knowledge is hidden, whose portals were wreathed with evergreen and myrtle necklaces from the year’s end celebration. Big Leon left us without a word, entering the temple precincts as several men came to the threshold to usher him in.
Set apart from the other buildings, a pretty cottage stood backed up against an uncut copse of yew. Raised on bricks and rimmed with a porch on the side facing the furnace, the main building had no chimney at all, but it was attached via a covered paved walkway to a brick building in back whose chimney produced a healthy trail of white smoke. A man stood on the porch watching over the valley.
“Who is that up there?” I asked, not sure why my pulse began to race.
“Eh, the cold mage,” said the carter, surprised I had to ask. “Falling Star House sends a young magister out each winter when the furnace is fired up. To keep a watch.”
“To keep a watch? That sounds ominous.”
He grunted. “Och, I did not mean it so. The Houses need iron, too.”