The Spirit Ring (23 page)

      
"Cut the stitches and pull them out in about ten days, if the wound doesn't go bad," the surgeon advised Thur. "If it goes bad come see me again. All right, run along.

      
The pain dulling with use, Thur managed a "Thank you, sir." He folded up his bloodstained tan jacket and rummaged carefully in his pack for his spare, a shabby gray linen tunic. Should he attempt to plant a little ear in this chamber? Would it hear anything of value? But for its frescoes this seemed much like the infirmary in the monastery. The men all looked the same, stubbled and shocked or flushed and fevered; the smell was the same, sweat, drying blood, the tang of urine and feces, a burnt whiff suggesting some recent cautery.

      
The surgeon's back was turned. Thur palmed a little parchment disk and looked around for a place to hide it. A mess of equipment was piled in a corner behind the trestle table: a dented cuirass, somebody's empty pack, a pike, and a couple of stretcher poles. Thur started to stoop, but was stopped abruptly by the twinge of his belly. He caught his breath, murmured the activating words Abbot Monreale had given him, and dropped the little disk in behind the pile. He straightened up more carefully.

      
The surgeon finished putting his needle away in its little leather case, which contained even larger and more unnerving implements of the sort, and stuffed the bloody rags into a laundry bag. Thur laced up his jacket and asked casually, "How many of these men are Lord Ferrante's, and how many are your prisoners?"

      
"Prisoners? Up here?" The surgeon raised bemused black brows. "Not likely."

      
Dare he ask after Uri by name? "Did you take many wounded prisoners?"

      
"Not too many. Most ran off after that militant abbot, and we traded back all the ones that were so bad off as to be no further threat to us. Let them consume the enemy's resources. Just as well. I'd rather serve my own."

      
"Uh... where are they now? The few you did take."

      
"The dungeon, of course."

      
"Officers too? Even the Duke's captains and officials?"

      
"All the same enemy." The surgeon shrugged.

      
"Won't... Lord Ferrante risk criticism, for such harshness?"

      
The surgeon barked a short, humorless laugh. "Not from his soldiers. Look—you read, don't you?"

      
"Yes, sir. A little."

      
"Thought so. Or you wouldn't be repeating such priests' and women's twaddle. I had my start as a surgeon in the camp of a certain Venetian condottiere—I will not foul my lips by naming him. We were pursuing some Bolognese. Dogged 'em for days. Caught up with them by a marsh—and our dear commander stopped and let them
prepare
for our assault. He got a reputation for chivalry out of it, and retired rich. I got a tent full of dying men who should never have been wounded. A fiasco. Peh! Give me a captain who puts his own men first. The enemy can have the crumbs of any sentimentality left over."

      
"Then you admire Lord Ferrante?"

      
"He's a practical soldier. The older I get, the better I like that." The surgeon shook his head.

      
Thur puzzled this over. "But now Lord Ferrante has to be more than a soldier. Now he has to be a ruler."

      
"What's the difference?" The surgeon shrugged.

      
"I'm not sure. It just seems there ought to be one."

      
"Power is power, my young philosopher, and men are men." The surgeon smiled, half-sour, half-amused.

      
"I'm a foundryman."

      
"You reason like one." The surgeon clapped him on the shoulder in a gesture copied, Thur could swear, from Lord Ferrante. "Just make us some cannon, Foundryman, and leave the aiming of them to your betters."

      
Thur smiled dimly in return and, clutching his pack, escaped the painted chamber.

*****

      
He found himself wandering through a bewildering succession of rooms, some bright and paneled and frescoed, others plain and dim. In a tiny hall a couple of Losimon soldiers dozed atop their blankets in the heat of the afternoon, while a couple more pursued a desultory game of dice. They barely glanced at Thur.
Down. I must find a way down, somehow.

      
Beyond the soldiers Thur found a larger-than-usual chamber with a marble-paved floor. Double doors stood open to the breathless air and a hazy brightness. Thur peeked through, into a garden bounded on the other side by a high wall. Insects hummed sleepily in the white afternoon. A few wilted crossbowmen manned turrets atop the stonework. Thur oriented himself by the shadows; the garden wall must run along the cliff that fell sheer to the lake. There was little fear of assault from that quarter. There was very little fear of assault from any quarter, Thur admitted grimly to himself. But perhaps Lord Ferrante didn't know that.

      
Off the larger chamber stood a smaller one, wood-paneled. A desk with piles of papers, shelves of books, and a map-strewn table marked it as a study. Duke Sandrino's office? Jolted by his opportunity, Thur glanced around and nipped inside. He dug a little ear from his pack and stared about.

      
Peculiar brown stains were spattered over the wooden floor, caked in the grain of the oak. A set of shelves stood taller than Thur. He reached up and swiped a hand across its top, and found only dust. Footsteps sounded on the marble outside. Hastily Thur murmured the words and pushed the little round tambourine out of sight above. A man would have to be half a head taller than Thur to see it. He stepped away from the shelves.

      
Messer Vitelli entered the study and frowned suspiciously at Thur. "What are you doing in here, German?"

      
"Lord Ferrante told me that you would show me the work, Messer," Thur replied, trying not to sound too breathless.

      
"Huh." The little man rummaged among the papers on the map table, found the one he was looking for, and motioned Thur out into the sun-heated garden. Thur bit his lip in frustration and followed. He glanced back at the bulking brick and stone of the castle.
So close. I must find a way down.

      
Vitelli led Thur to the bottom of the garden, opposite to the stables through a locked gate. A couple of sun-reddened workmen, naked to the waist, torsos shiny with sweat, were slowly excavating a hole. Nearby piles of sand, wood stacks, brick, and broken brick indicated a foundry-in-the-making, A bronze bombast, weathered green, sat on a sledge, its wide black mouth gaping to heaven. "That's the piece." Vitelli pointed to it.

      
An ogre's stewpot. Thur knelt beside the cannon and let his hands trace over its scale-encrusted ornament, animal masks, knobs, vines cast in relief winding about the barrel. The crack was obvious, a jagged spiral that ran halfway around. The damage must have propagated while the ordnance was cooling after a bout of firing. A flaw that severe which occurred when the bombast was actually being fired would have torn the bronze apart and killed its artillery master. Another firing would do just that. But an iron ball belched forth from that pot could crack stone as thick as Saint Jerome's walls, no question.

      
"How often could it be fired?" Thur asked Vitelli.

      
"About once an hour, I'm told. Its previous owner tried to exceed that limit."

      
Such a battering, kept up night and day, could breach Saint Jerome in less than two days, Thur guessed. The spiral path of the crack made quick and easy reinforcement with iron tyres a doubtful proposition, or Duke Sandrino's artillery master would have already had it done. The bombast had obviously been set aside to await recasting.

      
"What do you think, Foundryman?" Vitelli was watching him closely, Thur realized.

      
Might he tell Ferrante's secretary the bombast could be bound with iron, and so lure the enemy into blowing it up themselves? No, Thur decided regretfully. From the preparations it was clear the Losimons already knew what had to be done. But a complete recasting would take time, and much labor, and Ferrante was man-short and many things could go wrong. Of that, Thur realized, he could make sure. He was no foundry master, but for such sabotage he scarcely needed to be. The clumsier the better, in fact. He brightened. "It will have to be recast."

      
"Can you do it?"

      
"I've never done anything that large before, but—yes. Why not?"

      
"Very well. Take over. Make a list of what you need to finish the job, and bring it to me. And, Foundryman..."—Vitelli's secretive smile twitched a comer of his mouth—"our artillery master has an iron chain about six feet long. One end will be bolted to the caisson. The other ends in a manacle that will be locked around your ankle. It will be your honor to light the match, the first time your new piece is fired. Immediately afterwards you shall be given a purse of gold."

      
Thur grinned uncertainly. "That is a joke... Messer?"

      
"No. It is Lord Ferrante's order." Vitelli favored Thur with a small ironic bow and turned back toward the castle. Thur's grin turned to grimace.

      
The two workmen, Thur discovered upon inquiry, were already digging the pit for the proposed sand casting. Thur fended off the pointed offer of a shovel by displaying his new bandages, and poked around the piles of supplies trying to look shrewd and unimpressed, like Master Kunz. Plenty of brick, though the firewood was scant. A couple of barrels of good clay, well-seasoned. The sand pile was clean and dry, but should be covered with canvas in case the rain the monks were praying for to fill Saint Jerome's cisterns ever came. Thur tilted up his face, blinking. The sky was cloudless, if hazy. All right, canvas to keep out foreign matter. Thur still remembered Master Kunz's plaque casting the time the village cats had gotten to his sand pile, and the workmen had failed to sift the sand before shoveling it into the pit. Molten bronze had met cat turd, instantly creating a steam explosion. The casting had been ruined, the workmen beaten, and Master Kunz had spent the next two weeks heaving cobbles at any stray cat unwise enough to show its whiskers near his shop.

      
Or perhaps Thur ought to salt Ferrante's sand pile with, say, old fish heads?
Here, kitty, kitty
.... Thur recalled Vitelli's six-foot chain and set the idea aside. For now.

      
His preliminary inventory finished, Thur returned to the castle in search of Messer Vitelli, reminding himself to look for more good places to conceal the little ears. As soon as he had them all distributed, he could be gone, and the devil take Ferrante's cannon foundry. As soon as he found Uri.

      
Unfortunately, Thur found Vitelli in the first place he looked, the Duke's study. Ferrante's secretary was penning letters by the window in the last light. He turned his paper face down as Thur entered. "Yes, German?"

      
"You asked for a list of needs, Messer."

      
Vitelli took a fresh quill and a scrap of paper. "Say on."

      
"A crane, or the long timbers, fittings and chains needed to build one. Iron pipes for the channels. Enough canvas to protect the work in progress. And scrap bronze, or new copper and tin to add to the melting, to make up the waste in the melting and the channels and vents. More firewood. What's there will only be enough to dry the mold. Charcoal, and fine lute clay to line the bricks of the furnace. A rammer. A couple of good big bellows made of ox hide, and enough strong workmen to take turnabout to keep them pumping during the tricky parts. Six men would do."

      
"I can lend you some soldiers for that. How much more bronze?"

      
"I'm not sure. A couple hundred pounds at least." At Vitelli's pained look Thur added, "What's over, too much, you can recover from the channels, but if you're under the casting will fail. And the mold will be destroyed, and since the old bombast would be melted down by then, you could not make another."

      
"More bronze, then." Resignedly, Vitelli bent his head over his scratching quill. Thur schooled himself not to glance at the top of the shelf across the study. Vitelli frowned up at him. "Carry on, German."

      
No escape from this pantomime yet. Thur retreated to the garden, where he marked out the dimensions of a furnace on the high side of the pit, and directed the workmen to begin building up its base with their dirt pile. By then it was nearly twilight, and the workmen led him off to the kitchen where a curt camp cook issued them fried bread, a few scraps of meat, and cheap wine. Thur, ravenous, ate his portion out of hand as they took him to the workmen's dormitory over the stables, shared with the grooms. Thur found an uninhabited straw pallet to claim for his bed. At least, he trusted it was uninhabited—he peered suspiciously into its weave for signs of life. In an unobserved moment he concealed another little ear under the foot of the tattered quilt he was issued by a senior groom, and tucked the remaining three into his gray tunic. Leaving his pack, he escaped his new acquaintances' offer of wine and a game of dice. "I have to go talk to Vitelli about cranes." He excused himself.

      
Actually, the unnerving little secretary was the last man Thur wished to see again right now. He descended the ladder from the dormitory and passed uncertainly through the stables, crowded with Losimon cavalry horses. A few overworked grooms carted fodder and water. These could only be a portion of Ferrante's horses, Thur realized, counting under his breath; the rest must be pastured outside of town somewhere, with yet another complement of guards.