I scooped more charcoal into the top of the bloomery, then stepped back from the heat. Ibriya was working the bellows, but once it was topped off, I switched in. We had been at it all morning, same as the last few attempts, and were both hoping for a win.
The first iteration of the bloomery didn’t use bellows. I had thought that the passive draw of air through the stack would be enough, but with the limited height and the quality of peat charcoal, it failed to produce slag. Perhaps if we built it taller, passive air flow would be sufficient even without good hardwood charcoal, but height meant instability and additional challenges with loading it. Also, if the iron bloom got stuck, we would have to tear it down, so it was better to build something smaller if we could make it work.
Our redesign was around the same height, but incorporated the bellows, which worked… until the clay pipe connecting the bellows to the bloomery cracked and fell apart from the heat differential. A little deep meditation later, and I dredged up an Argadian memory that led us to building a bloomey with a rudimentary tuyere, into which we seated the outlet from the bellows, and sealed with wet clay. That gave us a controlled weak point which we could keep cool with water and bandage with more wet clay as we worked.
Then it was just a matter of dialing in the timing, ratios of fuel and iron, and other important but minor details. The large chunks of pressed peat charcoal were great for the forge, but they created large gaps inside the bloomery and uneven heat. They needed to be broken down into smaller pieces, but that meant we could just use regular dried cut turf to make a finer charcoal, which saved us some labor.
Unfortunately, there was only so much previously cut and dried turf. Ibriya and I put in a bunch of extra shifts to cut more peat for the village in order to replace older stacked turf that we were able to get donated to our project, but that had a limit, and without results, it was getting harder and harder to obtain fuel. Unless I wanted to put a pin in our project and just spend a year cutting turf to create a larger store of dried peat for the following year, I needed to win the village over soon.
The other thing we started doing was measuring the amount of iron and charcoal that went into the bloomery. I made a primitive balance scale out of stone, leather, and bone, so that we could dial in what was successful and what was a failure.
As it turned out, the scale itself ended up becoming something of interest to the village, as it was new technology to the Sheowon. It could only measure relative mass, so in order to measure out ratios, I had to create standardized weights. The idea of creating a completely random standard for weight irked me, which forced me to undergo a sidequest where I attempted to create a unit that could at least somewhat stand the test of time.
To do that, I first needed to decide on a length as my standard—I chose the average Sheowon adult hand, to make measuring things by hand easier, and it was already an informal way to measure things in the village—then had a cube vessel created out of clay with that measurement, and the appropriate counterweight for the vessel. I filled the cube with filtered water, and from that, I made my standard weight unit. I carved out and marked stones of that weight, and of fractional weights, as well as my formalized “hand” ruler, and shared them with the people who were already starting to build balance scales of their own, and explained the relationships. It was far from exact, which is why I didn’t care about the temperature of the water, not that I could control that at this level anyway.
Since I was not a potter, I recruited Shappi to help, and she took to the idea quickly. She was the first person to demand a scale of her own, and she began to experiment with ideas, building off the standardized units. Soon, she was creating new vessels that used the same cubic hand volume, and also worked out what size we would need to scoop comparable weights of crushed iron and crushed charcoal, which streamlined our forging work a lot. Mostly, though, it was an excuse to get Shappi and Ibriya talking, and in no time, our duo had evolved into a trio.
“One more heat and then we’ll pop the plug and see if the slag’s running,” I said, wiping the sweat from my forehead.
“It’ll work this time. I can feel it,” Shappi said with a grin.
“It better. I don’t want to waste anymore charcoal,” I grunted, then stepped over to tap Ibriya on the shoulder, swapping places with him to take over the bellows. One of the nice things about having Shappi around was that Ibriya no longer complained about his arms getting tired, since he didn’t want to look weak in front of her, but I kept my eye on his speed and took over when he started to lag so he had time to recover between rounds.
Once the charcoal had burned through, but before the bloomery lost all its heat, we broke through the plug at the base with a stone chisel, and I jammed a rod up in there to loosen up any clogs, then we stepped back and watched.
A small trickle of liquid slag ran out. The molten glow was absolutely beautiful, the culmination of our work so far.
“Does that mean we did it?” Ibriya asked, hope in his voice.
“Possibly,” I said, not wanting to create false hope. “But it looks good. Now we have to bust open the rest of the access, try to pull out the bloom, and see if it consolidates.”
I had created a whole bunch of tools and equipment for us, even though most of it would break down and ultimately be replaced by superior iron versions. We had two hooked bone poles to pull the bloom out with, and a pair of bone tongs that I was reasonably certain would be strong enough to lift and turn the iron as we worked it. If not, I carved a stone spade that was unwieldy, but would let us lift the bloom onto the stone anvil, and we could flip it with the bone hooks.
This anvil was large and slightly concave, to seat the bloom, for the initial consolidation. I had a smaller flat one to actually work the metal into an ingot, which in time I would need to make a metal surface plate for at some point. Forging an entirely metal anvil wasn’t in the cards, not with only bog iron. Stone might crack, but I could replace it easily enough.
My hammer was also stone, which I carefully carved a hole through and wedged in a bone for the handle. This would almost certainly crack, so I made a handful in preparation. An iron hammer was one of the first tools I wanted to make in order to leapfrog forward, though I would probably need to make an iron punch and drift first, in order to forge the eye. Fortunately, despite my interest being primary swords, I had seen enough axes forged in Nialdan for our forestry and lumber needs that I knew about those simple tools, since I didn’t think I could carve the eye with my blood like I did for the stone sledges.
There was so much tooling to make just to get started, so if stone hammers and bone tongs worked, we would keep using those while we worked on making iron ingots. But ultimately, that tooling would be necessary to actually forge out useful items. I just wasn’t sure that I could convince the Sheowon of the value of working iron if the only things we produced were more tools to work said iron, and not something the village actually needed.
I shook my head. That was a future problem. First we needed to succeed at making usable iron.
“Put on your gloves and apron,” I said. “Remember, the first few hits are probably going to spray.”
“Even though I’m looking at it, I still can’t believe stone can be a liquid,” Shappi said with wonder in her voice.
“Yup. And it will burn the shit out of you if it touches you, so protective gear is essential.” Thankfully, leather wasn’t in short supply thanks to domestic livestock, so I had gained some and made double-layer aprons and gloves for Ibriya and Shappi. Neither of them had the Blood to augment or heal themselves, since neither of them were Bonded, so I had replicated the equipment I had seen Argadian smiths using with my [Sewing] skill.
In testing, [Blood Augmentation] allowed me to withstand quite a lot of heat, though a red hot coal still seared me if I held it for too long. [Blood Restoration] fixed up any burns I did get pretty well. Even though I could use my Blood to tough it out, I made an apron and gloves for myself as well, because the “uniform” made us seem like more of a team.
“Okay. Let’s do this,” I said, and we all got into position.
Ibriya busted open the clay door at the base of the bloomery, and Shappi stepped in to move the bricks out of the way while Ibriya grabbed the shovel to dig out the hot coals. I stepped forward with a bone hook and jabbed it in, prodding around until I hit something hard sitting in the coals.
After some grunting and swearing, I managed to get both hooks on it, and squeezed them together as I wrestled the iron bloom out onto the ground.
Ibriya grabbed the tongs and clamped down on it, tentatively lifting it off the ground. The bone held, at least for now.
“I’ve got it,” he said, so I handed the hooks off to Shappi and grabbed the sledge.
“Onto the anvil,” I said. “As soon as it’s in place, let go and I’ll strike while it’s hot.”
Ibriya swung the bloom up and into the concave seat. It made a loud clunking sound, and something hissed as it made contact, but as soon as it was still, he stepped back, and I brought the hammer down on the bloom with a thunk. A small shower of sparks and slag shot off, but no one cried out about burns.
Nothing cracked, so I swung again. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.
“Flip it on its side,” I said. “You might need to hold it up while I strike, so hold it low so I don’t hit the tongs.”
Ibriya nodded and manipulated the bloom around, and when he was ready, I hit it again. And again. And again.
“Now flip it the other way, standing it up lengthwise.”
Thunk, thunk, thunk.
We continued to rotate it and hammer it. Small pieces of slag fell off, and Shappi stepped in to sweep those away and keep the workspace clear as we continued to work the bloom down. My hammer cracked and split apart, so I switched to another, beating it into shape before it cooled enough that it would need another heat to get further consolidated.
“Into the pot,” I said, and Ibriya swung the bloom over into the clay pot of water, quenching it.
The water hissed, spat, and sputtered as some of it rapidly boiled into steam, and once it fell silent, I had Ibriya lift it back out. He set it on the clean, flat anvil, and the three of us surrounded it.
“Is this… what we wanted?” Ibriya asked.
It was an ugly, blobby, blackened mess. It still needed a ton of forge work, hammering and folding to strip it of its remaining slag, before it would further reduce into something pure and usable, but that could wait until the next day.
I grinned. “It’s just the start, but yeah. We did it.”
The first step was done. We had finally made iron from bloodstone, opening the doors to a whole new world of possibilities.