Jack Whyte - The Sorcer part 1 - The Fort at River's Bend

I know that saws have been around forever, ever since the first men learned how to shape and sharpen metal and make it do what they required of it. The story of the making of the first saw blade is one long lost to history, but, once discovered, the secret swept across the world. Saws earned their place among the most widely used of tools and implements: first they were used on wood, to shape round tree trunks into straight-sided beams, and then eventually, with the development of stronger metals, they were used for cutting certain kinds of stone. Saws became so commonplace that people who were not sawyers seldom took note of them. It must have been similar, therefore, it seemed to me, with saw-pits: they were common things, but seldom noted and widely ignored. Most men might live their lives in ignorance that such things even existed. I know now, however, from my own experience, that no man who has worked in a saw-pit could ever forget or ignore the existence of such places.

Consider the felling of a tree. It has grown to maturity in its own place, while endless generations of men have lived and died, and its heartwood is sound and solid, the finest, strongest material available to men for building their constructions, from huts to barns to houses and great halls, and from wagons and wains to galleys and the great biremes, triremes and quadriremes of the now vanished Roman trading fleets. The time arrives for the tree to be felled, trimmed and fashioned into lumber, squared and planed and shaped to men's requirements. The axes bite and chew, and after time has passed and sweat and toil and keen-edged blades have done their work, the tree falls crashing to the ground. Now the limbs and branches are removed, and the great tree is sawn into log lengths. That part is easy. The difficulty comes in transforming the logs, which are cylindrical, into squared beams or planks.

Thus was the saw-pit created, and it is among the simplest, most functional workplaces in the world: a pit beneath a system of cradles and pulleys for holding logs. Each log is laid above the pit and sawn lengthwise, by teams of men using long, heavy, double-handed saws. One man stands above the log, the other in the pit beneath, and they change places frequently, since the man on top must work harder than the man beneath, pushing downward on the cutting stroke and pulling up on the return. Nevertheless, the man below spends all his time waiting for the moment when he can climb above, because below, he is constantly enveloped in the sawdust from the cutting above. His entire body is a seething mass of relentless itching caused by the sawdust, and the sap it contains, adhering to his sweat-covered skin, clogging his eyes, ears and nostrils, and clinging densely to every hair on his tortured body.

Sawyers love to see a novice approach the pit, and they take intense delight in pointing out how much less work there is in being beneath, and then in gulling the raw newcomer into a rash commitment to remain below for longer than a normal man can stand. Hence the jocularity of our quartet of assistants and the hilarity with which the others all came to watch as Ambrose and I laboured mightily, and sweatily, beneath the constant, clinging, aromatic cascade that blinded us and blocked our nostrils and our mouths and drove us to our knees, coughing and spluttering among the mounds of yielding, treacherous, foot-fouling and sweet-smelling oaken sawdust.

By the time they relented and allowed us to alternate and work above the pit, as well as in it, my brother and I had learned a new analogy to apply to the high and low fluctuations of life and fortune. The effort of grappling with green wood for one short, but seemingly endless day had bred in us a lasting appreciation of well-seasoned timber. That very night, sitting exhausted by the cooking fire outside the fort's front gates, I found myself gazing at the carving on my two-handed staff with more appreciation than I had ever felt before, and testing its strength and resilience in my hands, trying in vain to make it bend or even flex.

Dedalus and Rufio had talked at length with Ambrose and me, in the bathhouse and afterwards, at dinner, about some of the things they had already discovered about fighting and training with the new staves. Both men were very enthusiastic about the potential of this new form of training—for they saw it as training in a new technique, plain and simple—and had no difficulty visualizing armies being trained using the new method to learn the skills that had to be applied to fighting with long swords.

Ambrose, however, was sceptical of that. He believed that widespread use of the long sword would be curtailed by the technological and logistical difficulties of large- scale production. Iron ore was no longer being widely mined and smelted in Britain, he pointed out. With the legions now gone for more than four decades, the industry of forging swords had dwindled to a local skill. We had forges in Camulod capable of smelting ore, could we but procure it, and of turning out long swords by the hundred, but Camulod was unique in that. Ambrose believed that warriors henceforth would carry motley weapons and armour, garnered, bought or stolen from wherever they could be found. Few of those weapons, he felt, would be swords of any description. He believed that clubs and axes would once again become more common than swords, and that the spears of ordinary men would soon degenerate again into long poles with fire-hardened, wooden points.

I sat silent as I listened to him speak of all of this and then, when he had finished, I pointed out that if what he suspected came to pass, it would be to our great advantage, since nothing would then threaten us and there would be no armies to march against Camulod. He sat staring at me for some time, then smiled and nodded, saying nothing more, and soon after that, worn out from our exertions in the saw-pit, we crawled off to sleep. Ambrose and Dedalus and Rufio would be foregathering in the morning, to come to terms on some of the basics of fighting with the ash staff. I had other things to do.

TEN

In the week since our return from Ravenglass, I had thought long and hard about the letter I wished to write to Germanus in Gaul, and what it should contain. Now I set aside the last of several sheets of notes I had made and sat back, rubbing at my eyes and flexing my shoulders. I wondered how much time had passed since I had sat down to my task after leaping from my bed in the pre-dawn darkness to light a lamp and pace the floor, struggling with my unruly thoughts. Instead of writing a letter, I had found myself deeply engrossed in making notations on the topics with which I wished to deal in the missive.

Idly I counted the sheets and found six of them, each covered with densely packed script—too little of it, I knew, touching upon or concerned with the question that plagued me more than any other: the matter of the boy's education. The extent of the boy's potential, his abilities and talents and his astounding, vibrant mind, so far advanced beyond his small sum of years, left me bereft of the words to write of them. On the point of starting to read my copious notations over, I felt a wave of mounting frustration and pushed them away instead, rising up impulsively from my chair and beginning to pace the room as restlessly as I had in the darkness before daybreak, aware of the tension roiling in my chest and tightening the back of my neck.

On one transit of the outer and far larger of my two rooms, I glanced through the open doorway of my sleeping chamber and saw the untidy rumple of my unmade bed, and the sight of it made me stop in mid-step with the realization of how greatly I had changed since coming to Ravenglass and Mediobogdum. Throughout my entire life, raised as I had been with a soldier's discipline, the first thing I had done, every morning, was to straighten, remake or stow away my bed before proceeding to whatever else I had to do that day. It was as natural to me as breathing, something done without consideration or a conscious thought. Now, however, the sight of that unmade bed brought home to me the hugeness of the changes that had swept through my life in recent months and years.