I’ve heard it said by many that you don’t become a blacksmith; instead you are born a blacksmith.
The knack for working metal seems to be as innate as an artist’s talent, a writer’s skill or a musician’s ear. It can be taught, yes, but a true master can only be forged from the right stock.
And I’ll tell you now – without the slightest hint of arrogance – that I am quite likely the greatest blacksmith who has ever lived.
Everything to which I turn my hand is flawless. Each piece of steel is wrought in crystalline perfection, the symmetry of the atomic structure uncanny, unnatural. I have forged blades for collectors, enthusiasts, the rich and the famous; each of them the newest pinnacle of my craft, and unmatched by any other blacksmith on this Earth.
Amongst those in the know, I go by the name ‘Wayland’ – a tribute to the English god of the forge. If you haven’t heard of me before now, then it’s because you lack the aesthetic sensibilities to appreciate my work – or the money to pay me well enough for it.
But having completed my metallic Magnum Opus, I feel it is time for the world to know my story.
‘Pig Iron’ in the business is the base product you get from archaic smelting methods. It can be consolidated and refined from there in the forge, to ease the impurities from the iron, but that is inferior to modern smelting procedures – hence why smiths usually order bar stock from modern smelters rather than making their own steel.
Once in a blue moon a customer will want a sword or knife forged from raw materials – for example, some enterprising idiot will want a blade forged from ore he’s mined himself and I’ll have to work it down into something that can be shaped with hammer and forge.
But the phrase ‘Pig Iron’ gave me a curious idea.
What if you could literally smelt iron from pigs?
The idea wasn’t so preposterous; as with human blood, pigs bind iron into haemoglobin. To extract that iron, the water would need to be boiled off from the blood, then the dried proteins would become the base ‘ore’ for the smelting – using charcoal and calcium to take up the bulk of the impurities and leaving the molten iron to flow out the bottom of the kiln.
I’d calculated that getting enough iron to make even a small blade would take the blood of over one hundred pigs. Getting that volume of pig blood wasn’t a problem, given my financial status, but processing it to the pre ore state posed some interesting problems.
I chose to fabricate a huge copper cauldron in which to boil the blood, something that could be easily cleaned between batches of organic materials and something that wouldn’t taint the ore I was producing. The first batch was a disaster; the blood caught, and I was left with little more than rank-smelling charcoal.
But with practice, I refined the time and temperature until I had produced enough material to begin the smelting process.
I admit it felt a little odd, pouring ladles of powdered pig blood into a coke and lime furnace. I pondered for a moment if this was something a sane person would do, but then dismissed the idea.
None of the greatest minds in human history were sane by the standards of ordinary folk.
The bloom steel from the bottom of the furnace was orange and tacky, like Hell’s taffy, and I levered it out of the charcoal with tongs, then took it to the forge to consolidate into a cake of rough pig iron.
It had worked.
You could indeed make pig iron from pigs.
The knife was beautiful; I’d carved the handle from a butcher-bought pig’s femur and polished it up until it gleamed like ivory. But I felt unsatisfied by the final product. It seemed such a waste that I’d used so little of the pigs themselves.
The next blade I planned better; it would be larger, for starters – the blood of roughly three hundred healthy hogs should be sufficient. The coke and lime for the kiln would be rendered from the drained flesh and bones of my porcine victims; I would use every part of the pigs I could in the process – right down to using their fat to render oil for the temper.
It wasn’t an easy process, and I was inexperienced at dressing carcasses. After all, I was a blacksmith, not a butcher.
But after a month and a half of gruelling work the task was complete, and I held aloft a beautiful pigsteel sword, set with tusks and polished bone, and bound with pig leather.
And in holding it, I felt a curious sense of power that I had never experienced before.
In a moment of madness, drunk on my success, I roared with exultation and brought the sword down on the horn of my anvil.
Metal should have struck metal with a belling clash, but instead the pigsteel sheared into the iron as though the anvil was flesh, lodging halfway into the metal.
What had I created?
