Maker of Fire

Emily, Sils'chk, Sussbesschem, Planting Season, 6th rot., 7th day

The Blessed Twee, revelator of the god Vassu, was happy with himself. The lizard creature was prancing about in front of me. I interpreted his actions as pride at my expense. He had fixed my cast iron problem. My conceit as a pyrometallurgist had suffered a terrible injury.

For years, my every attempt to cast a small cannon barrel had failed due to cracking. My attempt four years ago left my left hand burnt and bruised for weeks, and my face took a beating despite the stiffened rawhide mask I wore as protection.

Earlier this year, my attempts at the Sussbesschem iron works resulted in seven failed castings. After that, I gave up and changed my design. I cast trapezoidal bars and then cast the cascabel end of the cannon around them. Next, the bars were forge welded inside and out and bound by iron hoops to keep them from blowing apart.

My primitive cannon had a clunky design, but it worked. Twee demasted a slaver with it. When I left for a brief trip to the Kingdom of Foskos, Twee promised to make more cannon. When I returned, I was gobsmacked to discover Twee had discovered a way to cast a cannon in one piece. I found him gloating with twenty cannons lined up on the hillside of Sils'chk.

"Each one is perfect, Emily." Twee preened and danced in the manner of his people. "I did the water test for cracks, and then we fired them. They all work."

He was so happy over his achievement that I swallowed my discontent. I asked what he did to avoid cracking the iron.

"I ground up the old and spent ice gems, which we have never discarded. We have kept every spent charm gem for more than two thousand years. Vassu came to me in my dreams and commanded it. She said the sacred gems would now have a sacred second purpose. So, I added the ground gems to the furnace charge. At the same time, I cut back on the ground-up shells by a fifth. Last, I let the casting cool slowly over two days. Here is the result."

I should have known those were the remedies for my mistakes. I had not adjusted the fluxes for the pure goethite of Sussbesschem and cooled the iron too quickly. Better iron ore meant less lime was needed. Less lime meant less carbon, and less carbon led to less cementite formation. Cementite led to cracking.

Adding the ground quartz gems would also discourage cementite formation, allowing for flexible graphite growth. The slower cooling would lead to healing microcracks. In short, Twee had made malleable iron. Looking at those twenty cannons, I felt really stupid. I was the one with all the pyrometallurgy expertise, after all. This should have been my achievement.

It was not one of my better moments.

I consoled myself by rationalizing that Twee had some help from the god Vassu. I supposed it was fitting. After all, the invasion of Mattamesscontess was a holy war that Vassu wanted the Chem to wage. Tom and I were only here to help them; however, the god of war, Sophia Erhonsay, had appointed Tom as the commander of the Chem forces three rotations ago. The formerly peaceful Chem had no experience with war and Tom had been an artillery officer in Vietnam. This made the human Tom the leader of fifty thousand Chem fighters.

We had started war preparations the year before by designing mortars and exploding shells. My experience with making illegal fireworks back on Earth helped with that. Then, as soon as Twee, Tom, and I arrived in Sussbesschem, I taught the Chem how to mine their vast reserves of bog iron. With some help from me, Twee built and fired the first trompe-vented blast and cupola furnaces.

Tom managed the logistics of getting enough sugar and saltpeter made. We were lucky that the Chem had sugar cane and beaches full of bird poop for making both those compounds. The Chem had a limited number of trees to spare, so charcoal for gunpowder was impractical. Instead, based on my experience with fireworks, I used the chemistry of "sugar rockets" to make our propellants and explosives. I brought mercury fulminate with me to make impact fuses on the mortar shells. We tested all of these in Foskos last year.

The Chem amazed Tom and me with how fast and focused they were. Having a god command an entire race to carry out a holy war is a great motivator. Tom, Twee, and I brought the knowledge, and the Chem provided eager, willing, intelligent labor. Half of the non-breeding population of Sussbesschem worked on making the weapons and building the ships to invade Mattamesscontess.

When I left for Foskos, the Chem had forge-welded several hundred mortar tubes, made over ten thousand shells, cast one cannon, built twenty-seven clinker-construction ship hulls, and fitted out two of those. When Tom and I returned, the Chem completed the manufacture of over seven hundred mortars and hundreds of thousands of shells. They had launched over a hundred hulls and fitted out over twenty. The Caretakers, the five shamans who directed all national affairs for the Chem, had directed every village of the lizard people to build one ship apiece. Towns had to build five. As a result, most of the vessels were almost complete. The Chem would indeed fulfill Vassu's command to have the fleet sailing for Mattmesscontess by the middle of the Growing Season.

The war to liberate the enslaved Chem in Mattamesscontess and Impotu was about to begin.

Emily, the Great Southern Mouth, Sussbesschem, Planting Season, 8th rot., 4th day

I found a group of Chem practicing their bomb-throwing technique, whipping empty practice bombs toward an array of targets on a beach with a strong flick of their tails. The problem I saw was with the strength of the fingers at the ends of their tails. More than one of the fighters broke the clay bomb casings while trying to throw them.

If those had been real clay bombs, the fighters would have died. If they were lucky, the initial explosion and shrapnel would have killed them. If they were less fortunate, they would have burned to death with flames that couldn't be put out with water. In fact, water would make the fire worse. Last, if they survived the first two paths to mortality, they would die from inhaling the smoke and fumes. Burning calcium phosphide creates phosphine gas, which reacts in the body like arsenic. As an extra benefit, phosphine gas is pyrophoric, meaning it likes to spontaneously combust in air. To make life interesting, amphibious creatures are more sensitive to arsenic and phosphorus than mammals.

The calcium phosphide bombs were the nastiest weapon I created on Erdos. I initially taught the slaves how to make them in Salicet last year. To my regret, that knowledge traveled home to Aybhas, where they were used in the slave riot three rotations ago, resulting in the death of my friend Wolkayrs. Now, I had taught the method of making the bombs to the amphibious Chem for their war to free their enslaved kin.

The ethics of using such a foul agent of death left me conflicted. Was any means of winning acceptable in a war whose cause was just? I had assumed this war was justified because the gods told me it had their sanction. That's one of the downsides of being a prophet: the gods occasionally talk to me.

I decided to introduce the Chem to my "clay bombs" after Aylem lectured me on the necessity of effective tactics against mages. We would face the giant Cosm mages who ruled the Empire of Mattamesscontess, the most populous polity on Erdos. Fifty thousand Chem in a thousand small ships were about to take on the navy and legions of a country that even Impotu was reluctant to antagonize.

Our best advantage was that the gods were on our side. We also had the water magic of the Chem, Tom's experience in the Vietnam War, and my talent for creating things like mortars, cannons, chemical warfare, and bombs. Given that I became a pacifist during my life on Earth, the irony of my current situation was painful. I really did loathe violence, even if it was justified. Necessity and liking are two different things, after all.

After I stopped the Chem fighters, I explained why they shouldn't throw the bombs. Then, I showed them how to make a sling they could use with their tails, which made throwing the bombs safer. The Chem could throw the bombs with the slings farther and faster than their tails alone. Chem tails were amazing. Afterward, I ordered all the Chem to make a sling for throwing the bombs and practice with them using old pottery before we left.

My original clay bomb design was based on Medieval Byzantine grenades from Earth. They were also used in WWI as improvised grenades. The recipe was both easy and dangerous: the bomb maker boiled chicken, pigeon, or rabbit bones in urine and then sealed the resulting calcium phosphide in one half of a container. Water was sealed in the second, separate half of the container.

On Erdos, the container was half-fired clay. The clay bomb was originally named for the primitive half-fired clay casings made by the Coyn slaves of Salicet and elsewhere. The bombs had become a weapon of choice for terrorism and guerrilla warfare by Coyn humans, and now by the Chem race of amphibious lizards against the giant Cosm.

The Chem improved on the design. They fired a kaolin spherical jar into which they layered glassy slag from the iron works, fuzzy seaweed, calcium phosphide made from fish bones, more fuzzy seaweed, a water bladder made of tanned sea snake skin, more fuzzy seaweed, and more glassy slag. They sealed the jar with a sponge wood stopper soaked and painted over with larch wood turpentine—natural, gooey, old-fashioned resinous turpentine and not the liquid distilled spirits of turpentine sold in the American hardware stores of my previous life.

The clay bombs made by Coyn slaves were firecrackers compared to the small but respectable explosions of the Chem version. Since the casings were ceramic, they were susceptible to breaking, which would set the bombs off. Because of this, I insisted that the bombs be wrapped in fuzzy seaweed, crated, and towed behind each ship in a dinghy. This led to a frenzy for the Chem when my order was conveyed to the Caretakers on Sils'chk. The villages and towns whose ships were already completed now embarked on creating a thousand twenty-hand-long dinghies to carry the clay bombs, which I was sure we would need when we went to war.