The craftsmen of the Šternberk domain gathered once again in my workshop.
Pavel the potter.
Tomáš the blacksmith.
Jakub the carpenter.
"So you have all come."
I smiled gently at the three men standing before the workbench.
"The victory in the last battle was thanks to all of you. Had it not been for you, this castle would already be ashes."
At the plain but heartfelt praise, the craftsmen bowed their heads, not knowing what to do with themselves.
"Not at all, my lord. We merely followed my lord's wisdom."
"Modesty is a virtue, but credit should be divided fairly."
At a gesture from me, Konrad, waiting by the door, handed each of the craftsmen a parchment scroll and a heavy leather pouch he had prepared in advance.
"My lord, what on earth is this...?"
"Take them without hesitation. It is my small recompense for your service."
The craftsmen received my gifts with awe. The weight of the leather pouches in their hands was no ordinary thing.
When they cracked the pouches open, a clear ring of silver coins knocking together came from within, along with a dazzling gleam.
But the real reward was not mere silver.
When Pavel unrolled his parchment with trembling hands, his name was there, and with it the position of 'Meister, Technical Officer in Direct Service to the Lord of Šternberk', clearly stamped. The parchments of Tomáš and Jakub were the same.
"Technical officer...?"
I nodded and spoke.
"From now on you are not ordinary craftsmen but my direct retainers, charged with the technology of this domain. Naturally you must receive treatment befitting that. From here on, all technical development within the domain will pass through your hands, and all the glory that follows will likewise be yours."
A sum of money greater than any they had ever handled in their lives, and a position beyond their station. The faces of the three men flushed with emotion.
They looked at one another, and then, as if by prior agreement, knelt before me.
"Thank you, my lord!"
"We shall never forget this kindness as long as we live!"
"We shall give our loyalty to my lord on the honor of our families!"
I grinned and got to the point.
"From now on, there is something you must build."
Having received rewards like these, refusal was out of the question. The three men, now technical officers, bowed as one.
"Give us any order at all, my lord."
I nodded with satisfaction.
"We cannot lean on luck forever. Unless the enemy are fools, they will come back next time fully prepared. So we need an asymmetric force that goes beyond the enemy's common sense."
"An asymmetric force?"
"Yes. What we are going to build from now will be the first step toward it."
I spoke in a solemn voice.
"We are going to build a blast furnace."
The technical officers wore bewildered expressions.
"......Yes?"
"Did you say a blast furnace?"
It was a word all three technical officers were hearing for the first time in their lives. I explained briefly.
"An enormous furnace that melts iron like water."
"M-melts iron?!"
The first to be astonished was Tomáš the blacksmith. He had handled fire and iron all his life, but melting iron was something he had never heard of.
In this era iron was something you heated red and beat; it was not something you melted like water.
Without a word I spread a new design on the workbench. It was a structure incomparably more complex and enormous than the catapults from before. Seeing the drawing of a bizarre tower they had never laid eyes on, the technical officers tilted their heads.
At last Tomáš spoke. His voice carried the conviction of an expert.
"My lord, however I think about it, it is impossible. With our current techniques we cannot make fire hot enough to melt iron. Even if we mobilized every bellows in the domain, the largest of them, it would not come close. Iron can be heated, but it cannot be melted."
Pavel the potter chimed in with a worried expression.
"He is right. Even if by some miracle we produced such heat, the vessel to hold it is the problem. I pride myself that the kilns I build are the finest in Bohemia, but at a heat capable of melting iron they would crack and crumble and melt in the end. There is no clay in this world that could bear such heat."
Jakub the carpenter, who had been quiet, added a word as well.
"The timber for building a structure that enormous is a problem too, and how do you intend to handle the charcoal needed to run it? Even if we felled every tree around the castle it would not last a few days."
The technical officers' objections were sound. By the technology and common sense of this era, they were only natural.
"You are right. By the current methods it would be impossible. But if you follow exactly what I tell you, it is possible."
I looked each of the technical officers over in turn and spoke in a voice full of conviction.
"Pavel. You are to go to the clay pit. If you dig deep down through the clay layer, earth as white as snow will appear. It is called kaolin. Fire bricks from it."
"Yes? Kaolin... ah! Do you mean white clay? That is the soft earth used only for painting designs on vessels, but..."
"No. It is more resistant to fire than any clay we know. Trust me."
Leaving Pavel to tilt his head, I looked at Jakub the carpenter.
"Jakub. You are to make coke."
"Co... coke? And what might that be?"
"Put coal, not wood, into a kiln, cut off the air, and fire it a long time as though steaming it. Along with dreadful smoke, a black, hard lump will remain, and that is coke. It will show a heating power beyond any comparison with ordinary charcoal."
Jakub tilted his head at a method and a word he was hearing for the first time in his life. The very concept of firing coal rather than burning it was unfamiliar.
But my voice held an unshakable conviction.
"Tomáš. You are to gather up every scrap of iron in the domain. Rusted farm tools, broken armor, down to a single nail rolling about. Everything. When the blast furnace is complete, we will melt it and have it reborn as steel harder than any iron in this world."
Kaolin, coke, and steel.
It was a string of explanations they could not comprehend at all, but the technical officers raised no further objections.
They simply grasped for certain that the picture the young lord was drawing lay outside their imagination.
The words of their lord, who had already proven a miracle, carried a weight and a conviction that could not be defied.
The three men bowed their heads at once.
"We shall obey my lord's command."
***
Tábor, the heart of the Hussites and the impregnable stronghold of southern Bohemia.
In a cold stone chamber at the core of it, Jan Žižka sat in the high seat looking down at a map.
Even after the overwhelming victory at Vyšehrad, his one remaining eye had not relaxed its vigilance for a single moment.
In the room there hovered only leather and steel, and the ineradicable smell of the blood of battlefields.
Then Žižka's eyebrow twitched as he heard an unbelievable report.
"...Mikuláš is dead?"
Žižka's voice settled low and dangerous, like boiling lava.
Before him stood Hynek Krušina, soot and blood staining his whole body, his head bowed.
"...I have no face to show you, General Žižka."
"You could not bring down a single castle held by fewer than a hundred heathens, and you lost several hundred of our valiant brothers and the commander in chief besides... what in the world is this, Krušina?"
Žižka's one eye glared at him fiercely.
Krušina could not bring himself to meet that gaze and squeezed out an excuse in a trembling voice.
"Our own errors were great, but beyond that the enemy's resistance exceeded imagination. That... that was not the strength of men! They wield fire sent by the devil!"
"The devil's fire?"
Žižka's eyebrow twitched. Recalling the nightmare of that day, Krušina explained urgently.
"That is so! They threw jars and flames that would not go out swallowed our soldiers and wagons. And even... even when we threw water on it, the flames exploded like something mad!"
Fire that explodes when water is thrown on it. At that one phrase, a memory flashed through the mind of the old general who had ranged across countless battlefields.
"That liquid, did it happen to be sticky and foul-smelling?"
"Yes, yes! That is right!"
A flashing light crossed Žižka's one eye.
"Fools...! I saw something similar when we fought the Turks at Nicopolis. That is not the devil's fire. It is Greek fire!"
"Greek... fire, you say?"
"It is a worn-out trick used by the men of the Eastern Roman Empire. It is made by mixing quicklime, sulfur, and the like into oil lighter than water. It exploits the property of giving off heat and exploding when it touches water."
Žižka fell into thought for a moment. In the head of a man who had wandered all of Europe as a mercenary for decades, several countermeasures against Greek fire were already surfacing.
Smothering the flames with sand and earth, neutralizing the chemical reaction by dousing them with vinegar in quantity, or simply flattening the place with artillery from beyond its range.
Žižka clicked his tongue and muttered.
"Tsk, that fool Mikuláš. Drunk on victory and careless. There are any number of countermeasures, and yet he fell to a stale old trick like this."
He looked down at the map again. Suddenly a new question raised its head.
'Still... the method of making Greek fire has long been lost even in the Eastern Roman heartland, and even the altered recipes are treated as state secrets by every country. How on earth did that greenhorn at Šternberk...?'
Just then Krušina spoke up carefully.
"...General. In truth... that was not all."
"There is more?"
At Žižka's short question, Krušina swallowed hard and continued.
"At the end... the master of their castle threw something. It was a small ceramic vessel. But the instant it touched the ground... along with a flash, a roar burst out as though the world were collapsing. Our siege tower... vanished without a trace."
For a moment Žižka's expression hardened.
'A flash and a roar...'
Gunpowder? Impossible. He knew the power of gunpowder and how to handle it better than anyone. Was gunpowder not the very trump card that had smashed Sigismund's crusade?
But gunpowder was as fickle and unstable as it was powerful. The slightest error in the mixture and it was apt to blow, and with bad luck it would send the man firing it to the next world as well; it was a perilous thing.
And yet... he made a bomb that would blow away an entire siege tower? That greenhorn? That is not the knowledge of a man. Not unless he has literally made a contract with the devil....
"...A foolish thought."
Whatever the reason, he could not withdraw as things stood. It would not do to bear the disgrace of the army of God being brought down by the petty tricks of a heathen noble.
"Šternberk... I took him for a mere greenhorn, but was he hiding rather sharp teeth?"
The moment Žižka murmured it quietly, his one eye gleamed chillingly in the dark stone chamber.
"Very well. I shall pull those claws out myself."
It was the look in the eyes of a lion sighting its prey.