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.”
“ALL RIGHT, ALL RIGHT, your point is well taken,” Jack said, after they had, by dint of Enoch’s diplomacy, extracted themselves from the forge with all of their body parts present and in good working order. “If we want valuable cargo for the ship’s maiden voyage, there is no need to go to Batavia and load up with spices.”
“Ingots of wootz will fetch an excellent price at any of the Persian Gulf or Red Sea ports,” Enoch said learnedly. “You could trade them for silk or pearls, then sail for any European port—”
“Where we would all be tortured to death ’pon arrival. It is an excellent plan, Enoch.”
“On the contrary, you might survive in London or Amsterdam.”
“I had in mind going the opposite direction.”
“It is true that in Manila or Macao you might find a market for wootz,” Enoch said, after a moment’s consideration. “But you would make out much better in the Mahometan countries.”
“Let us strike out south and west towards the Malabar coast tomorrow.”
“Will that not take us through Maratha territory?”
“No, they live in citadels up on mountain-tops. I know the way, Enoch. We will pass through a couple of independent kingdoms that pay tribute to the Great Mogul. I have an understanding with them. From there we can pass into Malabar.”
“Wasn’t it Malabaris who stole your gold, and enslaved half of your companions?”
“That’s one way to look at it.”
“What is the other way?”
“Surendranath, Monsieur Arlanc, Vrej Esphahnian, and Moseh de la Cruz—our most cosmopolitan and sophisticated members—prefer to think of Malabar as a large, extremely queer, remote, hostile, and heavily armed goldsmith’s shop in which we have made an involuntary deposit.”
“We call such enterprises banks now.”
“Forgive me, I haven’t been in England for nigh on twenty years.”