Alberich dismounted and gave a hard rap on the door to the glassworks courtyard with his fist. Two of the apprentices met them at the door; one took charge of their mounts, and with an evil grin, the other took charge of the miscreants. Alberich understood the reason for the grin perfectly; the apprentice would now be put to doing something far more interesting and less labor intensive than mere manual work, while Adain and Mical took his place at the bellows. The furnaces were always going in a glassworks; the fire needed to be quite hot indeed and at an even temperature. The least-skilled job was that of keeping the bellows pumping air into those furnaces, so that the molten glass was always ready to use, cane for decoration could be melted, and glass being blown into vessels could be reheated.
Alberich knew from his previous visits where to find Master Cuelin; in the Master Workshop. That was where he headed. The glassworks itself was a dangerous place, and he was extremely careful as he made his way through it.
Even now, in the dead of winter, it was very warm in here. Surrounding the furnaces were stations for molding glass, for those who decorated finished vessels, for beadmakers, for glassblowers. The floor was of pounded dirt, the benches and tables made of metal and stone. There was very little that could catch fire, logically enough. It was surprisingly dark here, too; Alberich supposed there was a reason for that. Perhaps it made the hot glass easier to see while it was being shaped.
Glass was both blown and molded here, and all manner of things were made. The most common pieces were molded disks and the thick “bullseye” glass for inferior windows, made by dropping hot glass into molds and pressing it. That was a job for an apprentice; it was relatively easy, relative being the proper word when you were talking about glass, a substance that ran like melted wax and would burn you to the bone if it got on you. Beadmakers formed their amazing little works of art on mandrels at their own little benches—or spun out long, thin tubes of colored glass to be chopped into bits and sand-polished in big drums when cool. Glassblowers formed the molten stuff into every shape imaginable, and decorators took the finished vessels and shapes and embellished them with ribbons of colored glass.
Alberich had been here once before, when he had commissioned his window, and then, as now, it had occurred to him how like a glassworker Vkandis Sunlord was. The glass had no notion of what it was going to be; it was melted in the heat of His regard, then molded or shaped, polished, turned into something that bore little or no resemblance to the grains of sand it had been.
Sometimes mistakes happened. And when they did, He gathered up the broken shards with infinite patience, put them back in His furnace, and began again.
The more conventional analogy—and the one that the Sunpriests favored—was to compare Him to a swordmaker. But it had come to Alberich that He was really nothing like a swordmaker; for one thing, the vast majority of the people He made were not creatures of war. And for another, few of them were tempered and honed. Most of them were simply made, humble creatures of common use, as perfectly suited to their lives as a thick pressed-glass window. Some were merely ornamental, like a bead. Some were honed and polished like the glass scalpels the Healers used for the most careful surgery. But they all came from the same hands, and the same place.
Better window glass was made in the same way as mirror glass, and required a glassblower as well. Alberich had been rather surprised by that when Master Cuelin told him; it had not occurred to him that one would use the same technique that created a goblet or a vase to make a flat pane of glass.
But, in fact, that was precisely how it was made. Glass was blown into a bubble of the right thickness, the bubble was then rolled against a flat and highly-polished metal plate to form a cylinder, the ends were swiftly cut off the cylinder and the cylinder slit up the middle while the glass was still soft enough to “relax,” and the resulting pane unrolled itself onto the plate and cooled flat. A master of the craft created a flat, rectangular pane of even thickness with irregularities so few as to be trivial.
But of course, the larger the pane—or mirror—the more difficult the task of blowing and cutting. Something the size of the mirror in the salle was going to be extremely difficult to do.
And in fact, it was Master Cuelin himself who was taking the first tries at it. A pile of rejected shards to one side testified that he had already tried and failed a time or two this morning.
“Ah, I give over,” he said, as Alberich arrived. “I thought I’d give it a try, but I’ve not the lungs anymore. I’ll stick to my colored glasses and let young Elkin here do what he does best.”
But “young” Elkin—who was older than Alberich—shook his head. “It won’t come quick, Master Cuelin,” he said honestly. “I’ve never done aught that big. I’ll need to work up to it.”
“I wouldn’t expect anything else, my lad,” Cuelin told him. “Give it time; you’ll manage. Kernos knows so long as you don’t make the mess of it that I just did, we can find buyers for the smaller panes and mirrors while you work your way up to the right size.”
“Are you sure of that, Master?” the other craftsman asked, surprised.
Cuelin laughed, and pulled off his leather gauntlets. “Certain sure. You just wait; as soon as word gets out that we’re replacing a salle mirror up there on the hill, there’ll be a stream of highborn servants at the door. ’If you’d happen to have a spare window glass, so-by-so, Master Cuelin . . . if you’re like to have a mirror for milady’s dressing table . . . ’ They know we have to work our way up to a pane that big, and they know they’ll get a bargain they wouldn’t get if they’d commissioned those glass panes and mirrors special. Then it’ll be the polishing, and then the silvering, and that’ll be a bit tricky as well. Master Alberich, I want to show you something that’ll catch your interest, aye, and you, too, Elkin—I had the Collegium servants bring me down the old glass, and when I got it, this is what I found.”
He held up a shard of silvered glass. “This’ll be from the top of your mirror—” and a second, “—and this’ll be from the bottom. Now, what d’ye think of that?”
The top shard was clearly thinner than the bottom. Alberich scratched his head. “Glass not so good as you can make it?” he hazarded.
Cuelin laughed. “Oh, flattery! No, no, it was fine glass, and we’ll be hard put to match it. But I’ll reckon that mirror was over two hundred years old if it was a day, Master Alberich. Maybe more. And when it was made, top to bottom was the same thickness.”
He wanted Alberich to look puzzled; with some amusement, Alberich obliged him. “Then, how?” he asked.
“Glass never quite sets, Master Alberich,” Cuelin told him. “It’s like slow water, my old Master told me. Believe it or not, it keeps flowing—oh, slow, too slow to notice, but over a century or two, or three, you look, you’ll see that any glass has got thicker at the bottom than it is at the top. Mind, most of it doesn’t stay unbroken long enough to find that out, ’specially with lads like your two troublemakers about, but there you have it. You can tell the age of a piece by how thick it’s got on the bottom compared to the top.”
Alberich examined the two shards, then passed them on to Elkin, and blinked at that, and tried to get his mind wrapped around the idea of something that flowed that slowly. “I am—astonished,” he admitted after a moment. “Astonished.”
“Wonderful stuff, is glass,” Master Cuelin said with pride and pleasure. “And I’ll see to it your lads get their heads stuffed full of more than they ever cared to learn about it. No point in exercising their arms and leaving their heads to come up with more mischief. I’ll send them back up the hill on time for their classes, though, no worry. And—” he took a slip of paper out of a pocket in his tunic and consulted it, “—I see I’m to expect them back down here at fourth bell, and keep them until our suppertime. We eat late, mind.”
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