Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen: Paratime Police Saga. H. Beam Piper
goes up over whose gate!”
Xentos went out. Morrison asked for a pistol, and Ptosphes brought him one from a cabinet behind him. It was loaded; opening the pan, he spilled out the priming on a sheet of parchment and touched a lighted splinter to it. It scorched the parchment, which it shoudn’t have done, and left too much black residue. Styphon wasn’t a very honest powder maker; he cheapened his product with too much charcoal and not enough saltpeter. Morrison sipped from his goblet. Saltpeter was seventy-five percent, charcoal fifteen, sulfur ten.
After awhile Xentos returned, accompanied by Mytron, bringing a bucket of charcoal, a couple of earthen jars, and the other things. Xentos seemed slightly dazed; Mytron was frightened and making a good game try at not showing it. He put Mytron to work grinding saltpeter in the mortar. The sulfur was already pulverized. Finally, he had about a half pint of it mixed.
“But it’s just dust,” Chartiphon objected.
“Yes. It has to be moistened, worked into dough, pressed into cakes, dried, and ground. We can’t do all that here. But this will flash.”
Up to about 1500, all gunpowder had been like that—meal powder, they had called it. It had been used in cannon for a long time after grain powder was being used in smallarms. Why, in 1588, the Duke of Medina-Sidonia had been very happy that all the powder for the Armada was corned arquebus powder, and not meal-powder. He primed the pistol with a pinch from the mixing goblet, aimed at a half-burned log in the fireplace, and squeezed. Outside somebody shouted, feet pounded up the hall, and a guard with a halberd burst into the room.
“The Lord Kalvan is showing us something about a pistol,” Ptosphes told him. “There may be more shots; nobody is to be alarmed.”
“All right,” he said, when the guard had gone out and closed the door. “Now let’s see how it’ll fire.” He loaded with a blank charge, wadding it with a bit of rag, and handed it to Rylla. “You fire the first shot. This is a great moment in the history of Hostigos. I hope.”
She pushed down the striker, set the flint down, aimed at the fireplace, and squeezed. The report wasn’t quite as loud, but it did fire. Then they tried it with a ball, which went a half inch into the log. Everybody thought that was very good. The room was full of smoke, and they were all coughing, but nobody cared. Chartiphon went to the door and shouted into the hall for more wine.
Rylla had her arms around him. “Kalvan! You really did it!” she was saying.
“But you said no prayers,” Mytron faltered. “You just made fireseed.”
“That’s right. And before long, everybody’ll be just making fireseed. Easy as cooking soup.” And when that day comes, he thought, the priests of Styphon will be out on the sidewalk, beating a drum for pennies.
Chartiphon wanted to know how soon they could march against Nostor. “It will take more fireseed than Kalvan can make on this table,” Ptosphes told him. “We will need saltpeter, and sulfur, and charcoal. We will have to teach people how to get the sulfur and the saltpeter for us, and how to grind and mix them. We will need many things we don’t have now, and tools to make them. And nobody knows all about this but Kalvan, and there is only one of him.”
Well, glory be! Somebody had gotten something from his lecture on production, anyhow.
“Mytron knows a few things, I think.” He pointed to the jars of sulfur and saltpeter. “Where did you get these?” he asked.
Mytron had gulped his first goblet of wine without taking it from his lips. He had taken three gulps to the second. Now he was working on his third, and coming out of shock nicely. It was about as he thought. The saltpeter was found in crude lumps under manure-piles, then refined; the sulfur was evaporated out of water from the sulfur springs in Wolf Valley. When that was mentioned, Ptosphes began cursing Styphon’s House bitterly. Mytron knew both processes, on a quart-jar scale. He explained how much of both they would need.
“But that’ll take time,” Chartiphon objected. “And as soon as Gormoth hears that we’re making our own fireseed, he’ll attack at once.”
“Don’t let him hear about it. Clamp down the security.” He had to explain about that. Counter-intelligence seemed to be unheard of, here-and-now. “Have cavalry patrols on all the roads out of Hostigos. Let anybody in, but let nobody out. Not just to Nostor; to Sask and Beshta, too.” He thought for a moment. “And another thing. I’ll have to give orders people aren’t going to like. Will I be obeyed?”
“By anybody who wants to keep his head on his shoulders,” Ptosphes said. “You speak with my voice.”
“And mine, too!” Chartiphon cried, reaching his sword across the table for him to touch the hilt. “Command me and I will obey, Lord Kalvan.”
He established himself, the next morning, in a room inside the main gateway to the citadel, across from the guard-room, a big flagstone-floored place with the indefinable but unmistakable flavor of a police-court. The walls were white plaster; he could write and draw diagrams on them with charcoal. Nobody, here-and-now, knew anything about paper. He made a mental note to do something about that, but no time for it now. Rylla appointed herself his adjutant and general Girl Friday. He collected Mytron, the priest of Tranth, all the master-craftsmen in Tarr-Hostigos, some of the craftsmen’s guild people from Hostigos Town, a couple of Chartiphon’s officers, and half a dozen cavalrymen to carry messages.
Charcoal would be no problem—there was plenty of that, burned exclusively in the iron-works in the Listra Valley and extensively elsewhere. There was coal, from surface outcroppings to the north and west, and it was used for a number of purposes, but the sulfur content made it unsuitable for iron-furnaces. He’d have to do something about coke some time. Charcoal for gunpowder, he knew, ought to be willow or alder or something like that. He’d do something about that, too, but at present he’d have to use what he had available.
For quantity evaporation of sulfur he’d need big iron pans, and sheet-metal larger than skillets and breastplates didn’t seem to exist. The iron-works were forges, not rolling mills. So they’d have to beat the sheet-iron out in two-foot squares and weld them together like patch quilts. He and Mytron got to work on planning the evaporation works. Unfortunately, Mytron was not pictorial-minded, and made little or no sense of the diagrams he drew.
Saltpeter could be accumulated all over. Manure-piles would be the best source, and cellars and stables and underground drains. He set up a saltpeter commission, headed by one of Chartiphon’s officers, with authority to go anywhere and enter any place, and orders to behead any subordinate who misused his powers and to deal just as summarily with anybody who tried to obstruct or resist. Mobile units, wagons and oxcarts loaded with caldrons, tubs, tools and the like, to go from farm to farm. Peasant women to be collected and taught to leech nitrated soil and purify nitrates. Equipment, manufacture of.
Grinding mills: there was plenty of water-power, and by good fortune he didn’t have to invent the waterwheel. That was already in use, and the master-millwright understood what was needed in the way of converting a gristmill to a fireseed mill almost at once. Special grinding equipment, invention of. Sifting screens, cloth. Mixing machines; these would be big wine-casks, with counter-revolving paddle-wheels inside. Presses to squeeze dough into cakes. Mills to grind caked powder; he spent considerable thought on regulations to prevent anything from striking a spark around them, with bloodthirsty enforcement threats.
During the morning he managed to grind up the cake he’d made the evening before from what was left of the first experimental batch, running it through a sieve to about FFFg fineness. A hundred grains of that drove a ball from an 8-bore musket an inch deeper into a hemlock log than an equal charge of Styphon’s Best.
By noon he was almost sure that almost all of his War Production Board understood most of what he’d told them. In the afternoon there was a meeting, in the outer bailey, of as many people who would be working on fireseed production as could be gathered. There was an invocation of Dralm by Xentos, and an invocation of Galzar by Uncle Wolf, and an invocation of Tranth by his priest. Ptosphes spoke, emphasizing that the Lord Kalvan had full authority