Before Kang Mujin could even reach the forge, Rakan came running down the slope.
“How many?”
“More than twenty.”
“Direction?”
“Northwest.”
Rakan asked nothing further and raised a hand. Inside the wall the militia began to move clumsily, while those who had been hauling stone cleared the passage, those with children hid behind the low earthen banks, and those who had been handed spears ran for the wall.
Someone dragged a spear tip along the ground. Someone else held a shield upside down.
Rakan’s voice burst out.
“Don’t run! Get the line straight first! You mean to trip and die before the enemy is even in sight?”
Kang Mujin set a hand on the ground and traced the movement of the iron.
The small vibrations he had taken for iron boots were not regular. They rang doubled, two at a time, then rested long, and the heavy lumps of metal were not a single suit of armor but pieces of different sizes knocking against one another inside wooden frames.
When he spread his senses thin, the rims of cartwheels and the iron nails biting the axles came to him first. Pots and hoes and a broken sickle were loaded in together, and half of what had looked like spears were farm tools. The movement was slower than a person’s walk.
“It isn’t a war party.”
Rakan looked back.
“Then what?”
“Three carts. Seven or so armed.”
Rosen, a board tucked under one arm, studied the northwest slope.
“Most likely refugees.”
“I’ll go and confirm.”
As Rakan drew his sword, Rosen said.
“Take only two.”
Rakan’s ears tilted flat.
“And if it is them, the three of us hold them off?”
“If it is them, you do not fight, you come back. What we need now is not victory but information.”
Rakan glared at him a moment, then slung the sword over his shoulder.
“Slick tongue. It grates all the more because you’re right.”
He picked out two of the militia with a finger. One was a human, a former hunter, the other a goat beast with one horn broken.
“You two, with me. Quiet feet.”
Even after the three had vanished beyond the slope, the people on the wall stayed as they were. No one could lower a spear, tendons stood up on the backs of their hands, and their knuckles had gone white.
The iron had not yet taken the heat properly.
Struck by force, it would crack.
“Come down.”
When Rosen said so, several of them traded glances.
“The watch is not over. But if you stand there shaking with a weapon in your hands, there will be no strength left in your arms when it is truly needed. Two at a time stay. The rest, rest.”
Only then did the line on the wall move.
Kang Mujin looked at the board Rosen had brought. Across the broad plank, lines were packed in charcoal and ink: not only the wall as it now stood, the forge, the well and the tents, but structures that did not yet exist.
“Is that it?”
“Yes. I finished it last night.”
“And sleep?”
“Two hours.”
“That’s little.”
“I think so too. But the wall does not stand watch in my place because I have fallen asleep.”
Rosen spread the board across the workbench.
At the center of the drawing were the forge and the well, and the living quarters were divided so as to wrap around the two of them. Of the three rings of lines drawn outside, the first was a palisade, the second a wall heaped up from earth and stone, the third a moat cut out of the slope.
Kang Mujin followed a line with his finger.
The northwest wall was thick, the southeast thin. The arrangement followed the terrain, so the gentle slope where demons could approach easily had three watchtowers, and the steep rock face had only one.
“Two gates.”
“With a single main gate we are shut in once we are surrounded. I will open a small gate to the south and use it for supply and for retreat. Only, I mean to hide it behind the rock so it cannot be seen at a glance from outside.”
Rosen laid small wooden tokens on the drawing. Red tokens were the militia, blue were water and food, black were the crew for putting out fires.
“If the enemy comes from the northwest, we set two squads here. Those who handle bows go to the towers, those who handle spears go behind the gate. The rest we keep in reserve.”
“There aren’t enough people.”
“That is why I drew up an organization.”
He unrolled a thin leather document, and names appeared with race, age, former trade, and the weapons each could handle. Beside the names of those who could not read, marks were drawn so that each could recognize their own: a pickaxe, a tree, an antler, a fish.
“Thirty-two can fight at present. Of those, only four have any army experience. Six hunters, nine miners, thirteen farmers.”
“Do you mean to make them all soldiers?”
“No.”
Rosen answered at once.
“If every miner takes up a spear, there is no one left to raise the wall. If every farmer climbs a tower, we cannot make fields before winter. Being able to fight and having to keep fighting are not the same thing.”
Kang Mujin looked at the document again.
Sixteen in the combat group, nine in construction, seven in supply, and in an emergency half of construction and half of supply were to join the wall as well. The night watch was four at a time, in three shifts.
The blanks caught his eye before the numbers did.
Archer corps. Medical care. Messengers. Reserve weapons.
If Silvana did not return, the archer line would stay empty. There was no medicine to treat the wounded, and no one trained to handle it.
Rosen laid a hand over the blanks.
“I did not write down what we do not have as though we had it.”
“Good.”
“Instead I noted two ways to get each. For healers, we find someone among the refugees who knows herbs, or send people to the nearby villages and bring one back. For archers, we wait for Silvana’s return, but in the meantime we group the hunters separately and start them on short-range shooting.”
“And stone?”
“The northern quarry is closest, but it is exposed. Cutting the southern rock is slow, but safe.”
“Do both.”
Rosen looked at him, and he went on.
“Quarry in the north by day, and open a road to the south so work can continue at night as well. If one side is closed off, the other must remain.”
Rosen added a short line to the drawing.
“It will be done.”
Doria came walking over from the forge. Black ash was smeared across the apron, and the end of the beard was bound tight with a leather cord.
“Hrm. The faces on the pair of you, as though you were drawing up a whole country beside my forge.”
“It is a layout plan for the walls.”
“Make it big enough and it is a country. What’s the difference?”
Doria peered at the board, then jabbed the northwest wall with a thick finger.
“This part is wrong.”
Rosen’s eyebrow rose, very slightly.
“Which part?”
“The foundation is shallow. Raise only the outside and it will swell and burst at the first rain. A stone wall gets buried downward before it is stacked upward.”
He picked up a piece of charcoal and drew sawtooth marks beneath the existing line.
“Set the big stones upright and cinch the gaps with gravel and clay. Iron cramps go into the corners. Humans think stones become a wall if you pile them up, but stones have to be married off too if they are to live together long.”
“We will need a great many cramps, then.”
“That is what a smithy is for.”
Doria lifted his chin toward Kang Mujin.
“Well?”
Kang Mujin studied the drawing and felt the ore veins underground at the same time. The nearest vein was low in purity, and smelted as it was, the cramps would likely crumble at the corners first. But if he drew the metal out flat without feeding it too much carbon and folded it in layers, it could be used. Something that would go inside a wall needed no blade’s hardness. Toughness that bent without breaking came first.
“I can make them.”
“How many?”
Rosen asked.
“Thirty today. Fifty if we add another bellows.”
“And if more hands join?”
“A hundred from three days on.”
Rosen calculated for a moment.
“At that rate, the foundation of the northwest wall can be tied together within five days.”
“If the people hold up.”
“Making them hold up is my work.”
Kang Mujin looked at Rosen’s hands. The middle finger, long clamped around a pen, was pressed red, and new calluses were forming over the calluses left by a sword.
A knight’s hands were learning a different tool.
“We will need a lord.”
At Rosen’s words Kang Mujin lifted his eyes from the drawing, and Doria’s hand stopped moving the charcoal.
“When the wall grows and the people increase, someone must make the final decisions on water and food, the order of the watches, and disputes. I can take the administration, but there is no ground on which people must obey my orders.”
“It is necessary work. They can follow it for that reason.”
“Not everyone thinks the way you do.”
Rosen touched the forge at the center of the drawing.
“People gathered because they saw the fire you set. They dig the ground with the hoes you repaired, and they stand on the wall with the spears you forged. Even without wearing a crown, you already stand at the center.”
“A crown does not make iron better.”
“But it can decide what the iron is used for.”
Just then the northwest lookout blew the horn twice. Rakan and the two militia appeared beyond the slope, and behind them came three battered carts and more than forty refugees. Half of them were children and the elderly, and there were those who limped and those with arms wrapped in bloodstained cloth.
At the opened gate, the supply leader blocked the way.
“If we take them in, we run short of grain from three days on. The living quarters are already full. Who decides?”
Rosen did not answer, but looked at Kang Mujin. The faces waiting outside the gate came to his eyes before the blanks on the drawing. Having made nails with a hammer, he could not pretend not to know where they were driven.
Kang Mujin walked toward the gate.
“Open it. The wounded and the children go in first, inside, by the well. Tonight we empty the work tents, and from tomorrow we extend the southern line of quarters.”
The supply leader licked dry lips.
“And if the grain runs short?”
“We redraw the ration table. Cut the smithy’s share by the same proportion.”
“In whose name is that decision recorded?”
Kang Mujin looked for a moment between the refugees outside the gate and the drawing.
“Record it in my name.”
The moment those words fell, the halted gate swung open. Rakan pulled the cart of a limping old man himself, and Kang Mujin pointed the child standing at the very front toward the well.
“The name, king or lord, we settle later.”
He turned to Rosen.
“Until then, bring decisions about people’s survival and about the wall to me. If it goes wrong, write my name on the first line of the record as well.”
Rosen wrote letters in the blank at the top of the drawing.
Provisional command, responsible: Kang Mujin.
“I will take it as an order.”
“Leave it as a responsibility.”
Doria stroked his beard, but this time he did not laugh. He thickened and extended the southern line of quarters on the drawing, and inside the wall, water barrels and blankets began to move to receive the refugees.
In the afternoon, twenty people, new refugees mixed among them, stood in the clearing. Rakan did not put spears in their hands first. He had them carry sandbags and walk beneath the wall. If one fell, the person beside them caught them. If one pushed ahead alone, they were sent to the end of the line.
“Fall in front of the enemy and you get dragged away. Get dragged away and your name is the first thing to go. So learn how to stand together before you learn how to stab.”
Rakan put the same weight on his own shoulder. The line that had trembled every which way in the morning moved like the stride of a single person by sundown.
In the smithy, Aisha worked over a rusted sword. Instead of putting a keener edge on it, Kang Mujin had the child strip away only the ruined parts, and on the whetstone the child learned to ease off and learned where to stop. When the steel beneath the red rust showed evenly, Kang Mujin pushed a thumb along the edge.
“That will do.”
Aisha set a small chisel against the soft iron near the handle and struck twice with a hammer. One crooked triangle remained. It was not a perfect mark, but it told who had repaired the blade and to whom it should be brought if it broke again.
Before night came, the first thirty iron cramps were finished.
Kang Mujin laid the red-hot iron on the anvil and bent the ends. The iron out of that vein was full of impurities, and its surface went brittle if it took even a little too much heat, so he waited for the moment when the temperature spread evenly through the metal. The outside was a bright orange, and the inside a tone darker than that.
As the hammer came down, the impurities were pushed out to the edges. The grain stretched long and wrapped around the bend, and Kang Mujin left the metal tough rather than making it hard. Enough to bend with the wall when it shook and come back again was enough.
The last cramp cooled in the water barrel.
Doria picked one up, slammed it against the ground and twisted it underfoot, but the cramp only bent. It did not break.
“You know the taste of iron.”
“They are going inside the wall.”
“Can’t make a thing carelessly just because it won’t be seen.”
At those words, Kang Mujin left a small mark on the end of the cramp.
Once it was buried in stone it would be a sign no one would ever see, and still he left it.
Rosen came with the finished drawing. There were more lines than in the daytime. Quarters for the newcomers had been added, and the order of work on the wall and the militia’s rotation table were attached as well.
At the very top of the drawing a title was written.
Steel Bastion: Walls and Residential Districts.
Beneath it was a single line that had not been there during the day.
Provisional command, responsible: Kang Mujin.
The title was temporary, but the name that would bear responsibility was no longer blank.
“From tomorrow we move according to this.”
Rosen said.
“If problems come up, fix it.”
“The drawing, you mean?”
“The drawing, and the wall.”
Kang Mujin put the cooled cramps into a box.
“Nothing is perfect from the start.”
Rosen bowed his head.
Outside the wall, Rakan was setting the last watch, and Aisha wiped the finished blades with a cloth and laid them out one by one. Doria lowered the flames in the forge while waving a hand to keep anyone from coming near.
The lines on the drawing were being moved onto the ground, one by one.
It was not yet a kingdom.
But from the moment people fixed the places they would defend, wrote down one another’s names, and began raising a wall that would still stand tomorrow, this was no longer a simple campsite.
Kang Mujin felt the iron underground one last time.
Close by, cramps and spears, pots and nails cooled each at its own temperature, but beyond the wall there was no movement at all.
Farther out, at the northwest edge, his senses did not reach.
What was moving there, he could not know.
Kang Mujin closed the cover of the forge.
“Post two more on the night watch.”
Rosen nodded without asking why.
That night, four more torches burned atop the walls of the Steel Bastion.
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