The work has begun. And with the work, the friction.
The valley, which had found a simple, hard rhythm in the months since its founding, now had two competing heartbeats: the sharp, percussive clang of Bhaskar's training yard, and the slow, grinding construction of Shankara's forge. The two sounds were at war with each other, and the men who made them were not so different.
Shankara was a man reborn in the crucible of his own craft. The bent-backed despair of the refugee camp sloughed off him like dead skin, revealing the unyielding master smith beneath. He was a tyrant in his own small, growing domain. He demanded precision. He made the masons tear down and rebuild a furnace wall three times because the mortar mixture was, to his eye, a fraction too sandy. He berated a carpenter for a gear tooth on the great waterwheel that was a hair's breadth out of true.
"A single weak tooth will cause the entire wheel to shudder," he had roared, his voice echoing in the half-finished workshop. "Under load, a shudder becomes a fracture. A fracture becomes a failure. Do you think this is a toy? The forge demands perfection!"
The soldiers, accustomed to being the undisputed center of the valley's purpose, watched with a simmering resentment. They were warriors. Yet now they were tasked with hauling stone for the forge, digging clay pits, and felling trees under the critical eye of the old smith.
"We are guards, not labourers," a young soldier, one of the original company, complained to Bhaskar one evening. "We followed the prince to fight, not to be masons for this… this grumpy old man."
Bhaskar, who was inspecting the sharpened stakes of the palisade, did not turn around. He ran his hand along a fresh, wickedly sharp point. "The prince gave you an order. I gave you an order. The old man is building the weapons that will keep us all alive. Right now, that stone you carry is more important than the sword on your hip. Carry it. Or you can leave the valley and take your chances with the scavengers."
The soldier fell silent. The logic was inescapable, but the feeling remained. A subtle rift was forming in the community between the men of the sword and the men of the hammer.
Aditya seemed oblivious to it all. Or, more unsettlingly, he seemed to view it as another predictable variable in his great calculation. He was a constant, quiet presence, moving between the different work sites. He would spend an hour watching the soldiers drill, making a quiet correction to a man's posture. Then he would spend three hours with Shankara, the two of them hunched over a large, scraped-hide schematic, arguing in a low murmur of technical terms that no one else understood.
Shankara, for his part, found the boy to be a constant, infuriating miracle. One day, as they were hoisting the massive ironwood axle for the waterwheel into place, a deep crack appeared in one of the primary support beams. Work ground to a halt. It would take a week to fell a new tree and shape it.
Aditya simply stared at the problem for a long, silent minute. He then picked up a piece of charcoal and began to sketch on a flat stone. He drew a design for a complex wooden truss, a web of smaller, interlocking beams that would distribute the weight away from the crack.
"It will hold," he said simply. "In fact, it will be stronger than the original design."
Shankara studied the drawing. It was a principle of structural engineering he had never seen, yet its logic was flawless, an elegant solution born of a knowledge he could not fathom. They built the truss. It worked. The boy had not just solved a problem; he had improved upon the original, as if the failure had been a planned step in his process.
Slowly, painstakingly, the forge took shape. It was a beast of stone and clay, squat and powerful, its great chimney rising toward the sky. The work bonded Shankara's people. They were no longer refugees; they were builders, their shared purpose rekindling the pride that had nearly been extinguished. Even the soldiers began to watch with a grudging respect as the immense, intricate machine came to life.
Finally, the day came. The entire valley gathered. A nervous silence fell as Shankara and his apprentices fed the furnace with charcoal and ore. He gave the signal. The sluice gate was opened, and the great waterwheel began to turn, its gears engaging with a deep, resonant groan. The bellows came to life, and the fire in the heart of the furnace awakened with a hungry, deafening roar.
Hours passed. The heat was a living thing, a shimmering wall that kept the onlookers at a distance. Shankara, his face grim and beaded with sweat, watched the color of the flame, a physician reading the signs of his patient. At last, he gave the nod.
The tap was opened. A blinding stream of molten metal poured forth into the prepared molds.
They waited for the ingots to cool. The silence was absolute. This was the culmination of months of labor, the test of the boy's impossible theories.
Shankara, using a pair of long tongs, lifted the first, dark billet of new steel. It looked no different from any other. He carried it to the great anvil that stood like an altar in the center of the workshop. He hefted a heavy, two-handed sledgehammer. He looked once at Aditya, who stood watching, his face a mask of calm calculation.
Shankara raised the hammer high over his head, his powerful muscles bunching. He brought it down with a full, brutal, testing blow.
TWWAAAANNNGGGG!
The sound was unlike anything anyone in the valley had ever heard. It was not the dull thud of common iron. It was a clear, high, impossibly pure musical note that sang out and echoed off the granite cliffs, a single, perfect tone that hung in the cold mountain air.
The hammer, its head vibrating from the shock, flew from Shankara's stunned grasp. The ingot on the anvil was not dented. It was not cracked. It was pristine, the spot where the hammer had struck gleaming faintly.
Shankara stared at the ingot. He reached out a trembling hand and lightly touched its surface. It was the sound of a new age. And he, Master Smith Shankara, had just been delivered its first note.