The forge was in its cadence. It was a dull, soul-killing rhythm, the unceasing thump-hiss-thump of the jigs and water mill. Shankara came to hate the sound. It was the sound of his art degraded to a formula. They had produced over two hundred of the boy's cruel, ugly-perfect swords, and work had become a kind of somnambulistic trance.
He had thought, with the pride of the craftsman, that this was the limit to the ambition of the prince. He was wrong.
Aditya came to the forge one evening, quite later than when the apprentices had left. He carried not a parchment, but a cloth-wrapped length. He placed it on the anvil. It was a simple matchlock musket, plundered from some war.
This, " Aditya murmured, his voice low, "is a clumsy, inefficient weapon. It is a tube that spits out smoke and noise. Its only virtue is that it frightens men who have never seen it."
Shankara snorted. "It is a coward's weapon. No skill. No honour.".
"No glory in death, Master Shankara," Aditya replied angrily. "Just a failure of policy. We are going to devise a better one."
He unfolded a new schematic. Shankara's heart sank. This was not the same, though. It was not a gun. It was a series of detailed, almost unreadable sketches. One was the interior of a gun barrel, but with strange, curved lines drawn upon it. Another was a complex arrangement of springs, screws, and a lump of moulded flint that seemed the work of a fine timepiece.
"A spiral?" Shankara asked, completely nonplussed. "Within the barrel? It would only slow the ball. And it would be impossible to clean. Ridiculous."
"I have an idea," Aditya said, using his now cosmopolitan way with words. "That a ball spinning in the air will fly straighter. Like an arrow fletched with a slight curve."
The comparison to archery was the only thing that made any sort of sense with the elderly smith. Everything else was madness. And the small, clockwork contraption…
"This is not the work of a smith," Shankara asserted, shaking his head. "Springs, screws. This is the work of a locksmith. A jeweller. I forge. I do not fiddle about."
"I know," said Aditya. "One is on the way."
The Trimbaks received a new craftsman a week later, one Bhaskar had imported into the valley. A reserved, cautious man named Dipa, who had previously been a craftsman of intricate locks for Vijayanagara merchants' treasure coffers. He looked at Aditya's drawings of the flintlock mechanism with the wide, awestruck eyes of a man being shown a puzzle from the gods.
Construction of the prototype began in a distant, fenced-off corner of the forge. It was a battle between two rival disciplines. Shankara and his finest smiths wrestled with the barrel. Folding a tube of iron dense enough to hold up to the explosion was hard enough. But machining the spiral channels—the rifling—was hellish. Their first efforts, using curved chisels and brute force, were clumsy and irregular.
Aditya would watch their errors, his face an unchanging mask of cold consideration. And then he would make another sketch. A design for a machine: a geared crank, a long bench. A hardened cutting tooth on a rod would be driven through the barrel, and as the crank turned, the gears would cause the rod to twist in a steady, controlled way. It was a tool to cut an exact spiral. They worked on the strange, homely-looking machine for two months.
Meanwhile, Dipa the locksmith worked at his small bench, filing and bending the small, fragile parts of the flintlock. It was an exasperatingly slow process. Springs shattered. Screws were stripped. But slowly, the delicate little engine of steel and sparks began to take shape.
Finally, after twelve months of bitter struggle, clandestine activity, and simple quantities of failed attempts, they had one.
It was as heavy as a musket, its barrel thick and black. Its wooden stock was coarse and unadorned. The flintlock mechanism, fitted to the side, looked odd and complex.
Aditya, Shankara, Bhaskar, and Dipa took the weapon to a secret quarry on the other side of the valley. A solitary wooden shield had been mounted on a stand two hundred paces away—a distance at which a man was little more than a silhouette.
Aditya loaded the weapon himself. It was a considerate, ritualistic procedure. He loaded an exact measure of fine, black powder down the barrel. He seated a small lead ball in a patch of greased linen and rammed it down the barrel. The final inches, where the ball interacted with the new rifling, required a great deal of effort. He primed the pan, closed the frizzen, and cocked the hammer.
He crouched on his belly, aimed, and fired.
The sound was not the dull booming report of a musket. It was a staccato, vicious CRACK that echoed off the quarry walls and boomed through the valley.
Everyone held their breath for a second. Then Bhaskar squinted, his soldier's eyes fixed on the distant target.
"I see…" he murmured in amazement. "I see a hole."
They marched up to the target. There, to the right of the middle boss, stood single, unobstructed, and splintered one hole. A lucky shot, but a mortally accurate one.
Shankara stared at the hole. The frustrating months, the battles, the plans of the boy that seemed lunatic… all for this. One small circle within a strip of wood. He looked at the sword in Aditya's hand. It was not a fire lance. It was a lightning bolt. A power strong enough to kill a man from a distance where he might not even see his killer's face.
He felt a deep, intense chill that had nothing to do with the mountain wind.
Aditya patted the warm barrel of the rifle, his expression impassive. He looked at the bullet hole in the target, then at the stunned faces of his two masters of commerce.
"Good," he said, his voice a gentle, frightening command. "Now we make forty-nine more."