Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [16]
The mason sat beside him. He rubbed his hands slowly back and forth, palm to palm, scowling at them, as if searching for signs and portents among the scars and swollen knuckles. The little finger of the left hand was missing, crushed off in a long-ago accident. He shook his head. “What?”
“Affix the buckets to a belt moved by Klaus Müller’s wheel. It wants only Herr Manfred’s grace and the services of a skilled cam master. No. Not a belt. A bellows. And a pump, like the one used at Joachimstal.”
Gregor frowned and turned his head so he could see Klaus Müller’s waterwheel downstream from the millpond. The mason pulled a reed from the earth and held it dangling at arm’s length. “Müller’s wheel is out of plumb,” he said, sighting along the reed. “From that strange wind, do you think?”
“Have you ever seen a water pump?” Dietrich asked him. “The mine at Joachimstal is at the top of the hill, but the miners have fashioned a latticework of wooden spars extending up the hillside from the stream. It takes its power from a waterwheel, but a cam translates the wheel’s circular motion into the latticework’s to-and-fro.” He moved his hands in the air, trying to show Gregor the motions he meant. “And that to-and-fro works the pumps up at the mine.”
Gregor wrapped his arms around his knees. “I like it when you weave these fancies of yours, pastor. You should write fables.”
Dietrich grunted. “These are not fables, but fact. Would paper be so plentiful without water mills to pound the pulp? Twenty-five years ago, a cam was fashioned to run a bellows; and I have lately heard that an artisan at Liège has joined the bellows to the hearth and created a new kind of iron furnace—one that uses a blast of air. For now eight years it has been smelting steel in the north.”
“These are wondrous times,” Gregor acknowledged. “But what of your bucket line?”
“Simple! Equip the bellows to throw water instead of air and attach it to a pump, as at Joachimstal. A few men holding such a siphon could direct a continual stream of water at the fire. There would be no need for bucket lines or—”
Gregor laughed. “If such a thing were possible, someone would have built one by now. No one has built one, so it must be impossible.” Gregor stuck his tongue in his cheek and looked thoughtful. “There. That was a logic, wasn’t it?”
“Modus tollens,” Dietrich agreed. “But your major premise is faulty.”
“Is it? I’d not make a good scholar. These things are all a mystery to me. Which is the major premise?”
“The first.”
“How is that faulty? The Romans and the Greeks were clever men. And the Saracens, heathen though they are. You told me yourself. What was that you called it? The one where they do the numbers.”
“Al-jabr. The cipher.”
“Algebra. That’s the one. And then that Genoese fellow when I was apprenticed down in Freiburg who claimed he walked to Cathay and back. Didn’t he describe arts that he had seen there? Well, what I mean is, with all these clever people, Christian, infidel and pagan, ancient and modern, inventing things since the beginning of the world, how could they have overlooked something as simple as you say?”
“There would be difficulties in the details. But mark me. One day, all work will be done by clever machines and people will be free to contemplate God and philosophy and the arts.”
Gregor waved a hand. “Or free to contemplate trouble. Well. I suppose anything is possible if we ignore the details. Didn’t you tell me that someone had promised a fleet of wind-driven war chariots to the king of France?”
“Yes, Guido da Vigevano told the king that wagons rigged with sails like a ship—”
“And did the French king use them in this new war with the English he’s gotten?”
“Not that I have heard.”
“Because of the details, I suppose. What of the talking heads? Who was that?”
“Roger Bacon, but it was only a sufflator.”
“That’s right.