When we, too, finally processed out of that lovely church into the sunlit morning, it was still early enough.
Mass evidently did not intrude on the business of the day.
Eoain pointed out to me the way to Ilfor’s forge. I detoured first to my cubicle and collected my packs of horse sandals and tools. Pausing briefly in the kitchen, I took a handful of the cold meats and bread set out on the trestle tables, and these I munched as I strode to my appointment. The unfinished outer court was already crowded with people and stacks and piles of the supplies which had been among the loads brought in the day before. Workmen were struggling up ladders with tiles; nets of rock were being hoisted to the masons awaiting them on the heights, and carpenters banged merrily away at various other projects.
Alun’s forge at Deva had been generous in size but Camelot’s was immense: sprawling from one vast cavern to another across the one completed wall of the castle. I don’t know how many smiths there were working metal at their anvils, but obviously Ilfor was an important person to have charge of so many.
Master Ilfor, however, broke off the orders he was giving two underlings and whirled on me as if I had lost an entire day’s work. I had not seen him at mass and somehow did not think I ever would. Later, I would learn that religious tolerance was a part of Lord Artos’s way of dealing with diverse people and attitudes.
“I want to see these sandals of Canyd’s,” he said, scowling. He had not seemed so critical the night before. But then, Lord Artos had been present. Now I was in the smith’s own domain, and considerably inferior to him in rank. When I went to remove some sets from my packs, he shook his thick hand. “No, not ones you brought. Show me how you make them.”
‘I made,” and I stressed that word slightly because Ilfor had the look of a bully and I would no longer let myself be a victim, “all those.” I was also feeling extremely charitable after the cleansing effect of hearing mass.
“Show me,” he repeated, and he gestured peremptorily at a handily empty anvil at the nearby fire. Then he folded his heavily muscled arms across his chest, obviously skeptical.
I shrugged; diffidence is a good defense against men of his temperament. I knew, as I withdrew my leather apron from my pack and laid out my tools on the anvil’s pedestal, that I did not look as much a smith as he. I had neither his bulk nor his sinew. Nor could I fold metal for a sword and hammer the blade into shape, nor make arrows and lanceheads or shields and breastplates as he could. But horse sandals I could fashion quickly, deftly, and have them fit the horse that needed to be shod.
“Where is the horse?”
“Horse?” he asked, widening his eyes. “Why would you need a horse?”
“To fit the sandal to, of course,” I replied, undaunted.
“Make the sandal!”
There was no evasion from that command. I shrugged and, walking to where his store of iron was kept, selected a length that would be suitable for a pony sandal. No, not a pony! I realized I had the gray stallion in mind. Why not sandals for Ravus? Lord Artos rode him often.
I had acquired the habit of checking the feet of any horse I rode, assessing how wide, or narrow, a sandal would be to fit the beast. I had done so the day before with Ravus. That trick of observation stood me in good stead now.
I nodded to the bellows boy to stoke up the fire, and I thrust the metal into its reddening coals. I turned it until the center was bright orange and, grabbing it with my tongs, began with my hammer to curve a sandal out of the shapeless length.
There is a joy in working metal, in watching it take the shape you have in your mind-as if you have been able to translate form from mind to matter. I heated and bent the metal several times to obtain the appropriate semicircle. I then heated and flattened it within that form to match the gray’s feet. I heated it again to make the nail holes, hammering the iron spike through the pliant metal. Then I thrust it into the water butt and began the second sandal.