Chapter 2907: New Journey (13)

Yang Ning took no great interest in the RDA riding-horse scheme, so he skipped that part. The stud report set out in full their years of work on Jeju Island as keepers of the heavenly stables — Bimawen, as the joke ran — and much of it Yang Ning had had a hand in himself. The sweet and the sour of it, he could fairly claim, he had tasted to the last.

To Nick it was simply the keeping of horses. To Yang Ning, beyond helping keep them, fell the building of an entire system for the schooling and training of horses.

A horse is a sensitive creature: one great noise, the general din, a crowd packed too close, a sudden flash... even a shadow stirring behind it will set it off in fright — at best something smashed, at worst horse and rider both lost. Even a civilian horse must be schooled before it can be put to work; how much more the military one. Such an animal must gallop on a battlefield swept with shot and shell, must trample the dead without flinching before sabre and spear, must cross open flame — and all of it asks desensitizing drill past counting before it can be borne.

And the schooling system besides: the trainee soldiers of the Cavalry, Quartermaster, and Artillery training squadrons rotated through the stables on attachment, learning to keep, to drive, and to school horses. Every animal destined for service had to pass at least three months of schooling before it went to work.

Yang Ning thought of those trainees sweating rain on the training ground; of their clumsiness the first time they shod a horse; of the faces they made, teeth bared, after taking a kick. Six years on, many of that cohort had become backbone men — some sergeants now, some officers, posted away to Shandong and the Two Guangs as the riding and driving instructors of their units.

Yang Ning closed the report and leaned back in the rattan chair, silent for a while.

Through the window drifted the faint whinnying of horses from the distant stables. Six years of improved horses, bred one by one out of inferior Mongolian stock, and now they had been gathered into three squadrons' worth.

Only a man who had lived through all six of those years could know what those few whinnies were worth.

"A journey of a thousand li, truly," Yang Ning thought, as familiar faces streamed past his mind's eye: Luo Lan, Zhu Shengsong, Meng Xueqi, Song Fei, Tao Ran, Chen Handong... "How are you all?" he said silently.

These members of the Mosasaur Knights were now scattered to the four winds — some gone north to Liaodong, some south to the Andamans; even those left on Hainan were spread across departments, with scant chance of ever gathering again. The old dream of the "Great Cavalry" had slowly been ground away by work and by life.

The "Mosasaur Knights" was a club of Senators devoted to cold weapons and ancient war — "West-worshippers" whom the Steampunk Faction counted as mortal foes and the Huaxia Society as a thorn in the eye. They numbered ten or so in all, yet their appetite for hands-on work was a thing to see — not that they were much for making anything, but they loved nothing better than to gather and run "tests" of every description. Their meetings were not frequent, but every one was much the same picture: hauling along assorted heavy iron goods, leading horses by the halter, hacking at targets of every material with blades of strange pattern, or else kitted out in full harness and laying into each other with blunted swords and halberds — a scene of blazing good cheer. It beat hiding swords and crossbows at home before the crossing, by a very long sight.

Yang Ning's obsession with cavalry armor owed a great deal to his doings in the Knights.

"Might as well go and see how the two Germans' armor is coming on." The notion rose on him all at once. There was nothing else on the schedule at dusk in any case.

When Yang Ning pushed open the workshop's wooden door, a familiar smell — coal smoke, hot iron, quenching oil — rolled out to meet him. He breathed it deep, and found it dearer to him even than the smell of hay in the stables.

The workshop sat in a compound of its own within the Cavalry Training Squadron — an ordnance repair works Yang Ning had established specially for the cavalry. Since regulation equipment was all supplied from Lingao, its everyday work was mostly mending; only a little "experimental ordnance" was forged there.

The yard was small — one trussed shed and one workshop made up the whole of it. Though the light was failing, within was a blaze of industry: the forge glowing red, the ring of hammer on metal never out of the air.

Hans and Otto were hard at it in the shed.

Yang Ning stood in the doorway and watched a while. Hans was taking the measure of a steel plate, the caliper gauge remarkably nimble between his coarse fingers; Otto, hand-hammer in hand, was bawling instructions in off-key Chinese at the Korean lad tending the fire — having him trim the blower's draft to the heat of the flame — the firelight flickering bright and dark across his face. Both men wore coarse canvas work clothes and leather aprons, sleeves rolled to the elbow, their bare forearms ridged with old scars — the marks of decades at the smith's trade.

At their work the two were wholly absorbed — something of the fabled "German craftsman's spirit." Yang Ning was well pleased with them: as craftsmen, these two were beyond all cavil.

He had carried some worry at first — no one had yet seen what the German craftsmen of this time and place could truly do. Whether the sort of men willing to cross the oceans to China were craftsmen of real gift, or mediocrities who could not keep bread on the table at home, no one could say.

The moment Hans and Otto reached Jeju, he had placed his order: one suit of three-quarter plate. Partly to test their quality — and partly, and in truth chiefly, to gratify his own taste.

When he saw the finished work, Yang Ning half believed he had stumbled onto treasure.

The suit was beautiful past hoping. It could not stand with the great pieces of the old time-line's Metropolitan Museum or the Tower of London armory — but by the standard of "fighting armor" it was already a superior piece. Set beside the reproduction harnesses he had paid dear money for in the old time-line, the gap showed itself at once. Those copies managed "likeness of shape"; the finest of them could replicate the detail one to one — and not one had any soul in it. This suit before him: lines flowing, proportions even, every rivet set in exactly its right place, as if life itself had been poured into the iron.

With the Germans' craft proven, Yang Ning had handed them the making of the half-armor with an easy mind.

Hans and Otto had first come to the "Land of Australia" to seek their fortunes half in doubt of it. Landing at Lingao, they had been struck almost to believing they had arrived in hell — the great ship of iron, the train trailing black smoke, the factories roaring without pause: every bit of it past their maddest imagining. The days in the quarantine camp had all but driven them out of their minds — men in white coats probing their bodies with gleaming instruments, pressing them down into water and scrubbing them over and over, as if they carried a plague of fearful account.

But Germans adapt remarkably well. By the seventeenth century they had spread into every corner of Europe's "Christian world," from the Atlantic coast to the outskirts of Moscow — everywhere one found quarters of German settlers. Wandering and adapting were instincts carved into their bones. Before long, Hans and Otto had slowly settled into the life of the place.

More surprising still to them, they found they rather liked it.

The quick tempo and hard labor of an industrial society soon worked on them a strange, almost hypnotic absorption — nothing like the old work in the Nuremberg shops. Then, at the worst of it, it was the body that was weary; now it was an exaltation, the whole self caught up into some vast rhythm. And the unheard-of materials and equipment the "Australians" set before them opened their eyes wide — above all the finely rolled steel plate and the nails of one uniform gauge. Once, all such things had to be hammered out blow by blow, at a cost of endless hours and strength. Now they could take them ready-made and spend their minds on the true craft.

Output rose — and the quality rose with it.

"Chief!" Otto spied the man at the door first and sprang up, wiping his hands on his apron.

Hans looked up too, laid down his work, and said in slightly stiff Chinese: "Chief. You have come."

Yang Ning waved them on and sauntered in, looking about him. On wooden racks against the wall lay several finished pieces — half-armor, arm guards, leg harness, and a few saber blanks not yet fitted with grips. In the corner stood rolled steel plate shipped from Lingao, stacked square to the height of a man. On the workbench at the far end lay tools of every sort: hammers, tongs, files, calipers, and sundry contrivances whose names even Yang Ning did not know — plainly brought along by Hans and his fellows.

"Do these plates handle well?" Yang Ning walked over to the stack and rapped the topmost sheet with a knuckle. The steel gave back a dull ring. He asked in German.

Hans came over and nodded. "Very well indeed. The thickness is even, the metal nearly free of dross — no need to forge it over and over to draw the slag out." He paused, then added, "In Nuremberg, even the best iron had to be heated, hammered, folded, and hammered again — dozens of rounds — before you had material fit to use. Here..." He patted the plate. "It goes straight to the cutting and the shaping. Seven or eight parts of the labor in ten are saved."

Yang Ning smiled. The two Germans did not know that the most valuable material in the whole works was precisely this unprepossessing plate — some of it had gone faintly to rust on the sea passage. It was high-carbon wear-resistant steel out of the Maniao Iron and Steel Works, its surface hardened, its hardness and toughness both far beyond the finest armor steel of Milan in this time and place.

"And the pace?" Yang Ning asked.

Otto took it up, something like wonder in his voice. "Before, to make one half-armor, from cutting to finishing, three months at the fastest. Now..." He pointed at the finished pieces on the rack. "These — from first cut to last polish — ten days in all. Ten days!" He held up two fingers and wagged them before Yang Ning's eyes. "And that while teaching the apprentices."

Yang Ning stepped to the rack and took up a cavalry cuirass. It ran to some ten kilograms — no feather — yet far lighter than the "moving fortresses" of contemporary Europe, which went twenty or thirty kilograms at a stroke. It matched to the hair the sample the machine works had first turned out.

The plates were polished bright and smooth, the rolled edges round and without a burr. The curve of the breast flowed naturally, protection weighed and room for movement kept besides. He turned it to look inside: the rivets stood in true rows, each driven home to the last fraction. Here was their high craft — helped, too, by all the auxiliary equipment, tools, and gauges of the works.

"These things are a joy to work with." Hans was fairly glowing. "The bench vise above all, and the grinding tools — every one of them sits so well in the hand. Whatever shape you conceive, out it comes. I have never known my fingers so nimble."

(End of chapter)