David Drake - The Heretic

Did she not know she’d become quite a legend?

And by winning her, he had won a bet, a rather large wager, with a friend that no one , ever, would tame that woman.

So it was all a sort of rich boy joke, according to him. But now that he had her, the joke was over, for both of them, and life must begin. Respectable life. Doing things the way they had always been done.

Had he not known her before? Had he thought her entire way of being in the world would disappear from the sheer act of marriage under the Law and Zentrum?

They’d fought. Endlessly. And of course he could not bloody her lip, twist an arm, or bruise her body, without the aid of a servant or two to restrain her, which proved far too embarrassing to him to do more than once or twice.

She was a much better fighter than he, and-if she’d had a mind-could repeatedly have beaten him to a bloody pulp.

The sex had remained good, got even better, until, after two years, the good sex was all there was other than the hatred.

No child resulted. Of course he blamed her.

Now that was gone. At least, she thought it must be gone along with her torn flesh. She had no doubt that in appearance, her vagina would seem little more than the extension of the mass of scar that was forming upon her inner thigh and belly. Unless, of course, she could convince him he was hurting her, opening the wound once more, by fucking her.

Edgar was the sort who would go for that.

But she knew herself that it would become just too…wearying to keep up. She’d laugh one day instead of cry, and he’d be on to the fact that she was enjoying herself once more, and that would ruin everything for him.

Yet he would not divorce her. Jacobsons didn’t divorce. It was almost unheard of in Treville, in any case.

So the solution would be-living apart. But how could she manage that?

Because she still would want and need. She could feel it now. She was still a woman, despite her ravaged womb. And if Edgar wouldn’t have her and she could take no other lover…

Why didn’t he kill me? Why did he aim low? Did he know he was letting me live? Allowing me to crawl the earth, with me knowing I did so only because of his passing whim?

It was going to be a long and painful life, any way she looked at it.

Then the day came when she could stand. He was there at the moment she did so, Abel. He was the one who helped her to her feet, who braced her from behind as she slowly learned to use her legs again.

There would always be the limp, yes. Always the reminder to the world of what she knew she was inside now. Torn. Broken. Barren. But she learned to walk again.

I calculate that this representation is an accurate interpolation to nine-six point seven-three-five hundreds of a percentage point,said Center.

Observe what? Abel thought. What did you want me to learn, to see? Her state of mind? Why did you show me this, Center?

I think he’s pointing out the fact that you are falling in love with her, lad, Raj said.

And how this may become a problem,Center added.

Shut up, both of you. Let’s see to the breechloaders.

“So you understand, muzzle loading is the issue,” Abel said to the priest.

Raf Golitsin sat back in the chair in his small office. They were in the rear of the armory, which itself was one of the four primary structures in the temple compound of Hestinga. It was where the muskets came from.

Abel had passed through what had seemed an erupting hot spring of heat and activity on his way back to the office. He’d been blindfolded by Golitsin, as was required of all nonclerical entrants to the area, but Golitsin had used muslin gauze, which was the understood blindfold of choice for officials who were in small danger of misusing priestly secrets. Abel had seen all.

The firing mechanisms of the muskets in for repair were dismantled to a degree Abel had not imagined possible. Flaws were annealed in glowing forges. Other parts were filed, planed, oiled. Barrel bands were pulled from rifle stock, and barrels themselves were dismantled, reamed. Rifling was done with an enormous handcranked screw, itself made of a metal of a hardness Abel had never seen before. Golitsin called it a drillpress and die.

The stocks were lovingly reconditioned. Some were willow-wood, but most were made from the hardwood maple of the Delta.

A local cambium-producing flora, not related to Earth’s maples genetically, but similar in dendrological characteristics,Center said.

And in the rear was the rebuild shop, where all came back together to produce the reconditioned rifle. Here the most skilled priest-smiths worked, checking each component and, in a final step, test firing and calibrating sights using complicated instruments that, anywhere else, would have been considered utterly nishterlaub, and probably poisonous to the touch, as well.

They closed the door to Golitsin’s office-a wooden interior door, rather than beads, was a necessity here to keep out the noise of the shop-and Abel, still excited from what he’d just witnessed- From the possibilities , most of all, he thought-proceeded to lay out his plans for a new kind of gun that would help them stem another Blaskoye invasion.

“It comes down to this: reloading is slow and you die,” Abel continued. “You have to put in the powder, put in the ball, ram them down the barrel. Put your primer cap over the nipple so that its fire will ignite the gunpowder within the barrel. And only then can you aim and fire. And hope you’ve done it all right. And then start all over again as fast your love of life demands of you, because they are coming right for you, the ones who want to kill you, while you are doing this.”

“So you need to make the steps quicker,” said Golitsin. “Or combine them.”

“Yes,” Abel said. “And here is my idea.”

Or the idea that was delivered to me from the stars, Abel thought. The stars that are suns, and the planets that circle them filled with other men who have discovered and lost this knowledge a hundred, a thousand times. I can barely conceive of this after a lifetime’s instruction, so I won’t tell you that, my friend Golitsin. You’ll think I’m crazy, as I may well be.

“First of all, the cartridge. It needs to combine the percussion cap. And we have to get rid of this biting off and pouring. I’ll show you my idea-”

Abel took out the scroll. On it was the cartridge design he had copied from memory, from the picture that Center had placed in his mind.

“I see, I see,” Golitsin said. “A cylinder. One end the cap, the other the minie ball.”

“Yes,” Abel said. “The paper cartridge should be the diameter of the rifle bore. It should fit snugly, but not so tightly it can’t slide into place. They must be extremely uniform.”

“We can wrap them around a dowel,” Golitsin said, scratching his head. “We can hold them together with glue, I suppose. I’ll have to work up a prototype for you to take a look at.”

He grunted in consternation. “But this will be pointless without a way to load it. You can’t ram it down the barrel from the muzzle.”

Abel smiled. Golitsin was getting it. He was understanding the problem, and so approaching the solution. Raf Golitsin was a very intelligent man, but if he could get it, many others might, as well.

“We are going to load it from the rear of the barrel,” Abel said. He broke out the second scroll with his drawings on it. “It will require a new mechanism.”

“A new…mechanism?”

“Yes,” said Abel.

“Use of nishterlaub remains is sanctioned only for piecemeal work. Combinations are forbidden,” Golitsin said from rote memory. “A mechanism is a combination of simple machines. You know this, of course. It’s a basic Thursday school lesson.”