All of these ingredients came together before a towering mud hearth, a sort of blazing termite-mound the size of a small church that rose from the center of the compound, looking twice as ancient as anything Jack had seen in Egypt. An old man with a priestly look about him squatted on his haunches next to a pyramid of rough teacups. He stirred his hand around in a sack of black sand just like what the Carnaya had panned out of the riverbank, and sifted it between his fingers into the crucible, seemingly feeling every single grain between his wrinkled fingertips, flicking away any that didn’t feel right. Then he chose a few shards of charcoal and distributed them around atop the black sand, crumbling them into smaller bits as necessary, and finally plucked some leaves and blossoms from a giant spraying faggot of magic twigs and arranged these on the charcoal like a French chef placing a garnish atop a cassoulet. Then his hand went back into the sack of black sand and he repeated the procedure, layer upon layer, until the tiny vessel was full. Now the lid went on, and it was passed with great care to an assistant who sealed the lid in place with wet clay.
The finished crucibles, looking like slightly flattened balls of mud, were stacked like cannonballs near the great furnace. But they did not go in just now, because a firing was in progress: Jack could look in and see a heap of similar crucibles glowing in the heat like a bunch of ripe fruit.
“I’ll be damned,” said Enoch Root, “they are only red-, not yellow-hot. That means that the iron ore is not actually being melted. Instead the charcoal is being absorbed by the iron, though the iron is yet solid.”
“Why doesn’t the charcoal just burn?”
“No air can get into the sealed crucibles,” Enoch snapped. “Instead it fuses with the iron to make steel.”
“We’ve come all this way to watch a bunch of wogs make steel!?”
“Not just any steel.” Enoch stroked his beard. “The diffusion must be very slow. Mark how carefully they tend the fire—they must keep it at a red heat for days. You have no idea how difficult that is—that boy with the poker must know as much of fire as Vroom knows of ships.”
The alchemist continued gazing at the furnace until Jack feared they would remain in that very spot for as many days as the firing might take. But finally Enoch Root turned away from it. “There are secrets about the construction of that forge that have never been published in the Theatrum Chemicum,” he said. “More than likely they are forgotten secrets, or else these people would have built more of them.”
They moved on to a pile of crucibles that had been removed from the furnace and allowed to cool. A boy picked these up one at a time, tossing them from hand to hand because they were still too hot to hold, and dashed them against a flat stone to shatter the clay crucible. What remained among those smoking potshards was a hemisphere of spongy gray metal. “The egg!” exclaimed Enoch.
A smith picked up each egg with a pair of tongs, set it on an anvil, and struck it once with a hammer, then examined it carefully. Eggs that dented were tossed away on a discard-heap. Some were so hard that the hammer left no mark on them—these were put into a hod that was eventually carried across the compound to another pit where an entirely different sort of clay was being mixed up, according to some arcane recipe, by the stomping feet of Hindoo boys, while a village elder walked around the edge peering into it and occasionally tossing handfuls of mysterious powders into the mix. The eggs of metal were coated in thick jackets of this clay and then set aside to dry. The first clay had been red when wet and yellow when fired, but this stuff was grey, as if the clay itself were metalliferous.
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.”