Chapter 249 Crossbow (Part-1)

As a former mercenary, Hemicus certainly could appreciate the significance of what this bow would be able to do and he had a hard time imagining what the battlefield would look like when this was used en masse.

"I know what you are thinking you know," Alexander gently broke his guard captain from his fantasy, and then spelled out what this stoic man was likely thinking, "You are probably thinking that a thousand soldiers using this bow would create almost a literal wall of arrows for the enemy, where even if they were to form a testudo, a few of them would be able to find the gaps and reap lives by the minute."

And by the look on Hemicus's face, Alexander was sure he had hit the bullseye.

So, Alexander asked him the next question, "What do you think would be the cost of the bow?"

Hemicus gave himself a bit of time to think at the question, and then in a low voice said the estimate, "Ummm, well…about one hundred ropals."

"Hmmm, yes around that," Alexander nodded and then asked, "So tell me, at one arrow costing around one and a half (1.5) ropals, and assuming one archer takes one second to shoot one arrow, how many much would it cost to have a thousand archers shot arrows for one minute? Take the time to reload the bow to be five seconds."

"That…." Hemicus was known for his ferociousness on the battlefield, not in the field of mathematics and so naturally he stumbled at the long-winded question.

"Forty-five thousand (45,000)." Alexander gave the answer, and then repeated it, "Forty-five thousand ropals per minute."

"What? We can't afford that!" Alexander for the first time in his life saw the stoic man become frightened.

"Yes, we can't," Alexander nodded with agreement, and then asked in a teasing tone, "So, where will we use then?"

"That…." Hemicus drew blank at that question.

"Okay, tell me about it once you thought of it," Alexander lightly smiled and then turned to Faziz.

But before he could say something, Faziz quickly said before him, "Master, I'm willing to give up my salary to see the bow work. I know it's minuscule that still…"

Faziz found the thought of this super bow not being able to be used due to money troubles a great shame.

One keynote of the sentence was Faziz's use of the word salary, as he was not like the other slaves that Alexander had bought.

He was an expert bowmaker of Adhan that came to Zanzan with Alexander as a freeman.

And once here, recognizing the man's talent, Alexander offered one hundred acres of land to the man to sell himself for ten years.

What this basically meant was that Faziz was contractually obligated to never leave Alexnader's estates without the latter's permission within this time frame, while he was required to fulfill a quota for the product throughout the time period, after which he would be given the land.

Of course, another small same caveat was that he never disclosed the secrets of the bow to anyone, which would risk him forfeiting all claims.

And so what Faziz was asking Alexander was that he was ready to sell some of his land to fund the bow.

"Haha, mister Faziz's devotion to Zanzan makes me very happy," Alexander chuckled at the suggestion, but then politely turned it down, "Mister Faziz, the best way for you to serve Zanzan is by making the bow. We will somehow manage to find the funding."

This deflated the bowmaker a bit, but his mind was quickly distracted by Alexander's next question, "So, how goes the crossbow making?"

'Another bow?' Hemicus wondered.

"It's going well." Faziz gave a large nod and then added in a worried voice. "But that bow will likely also be very expensive, almost three times the instant one!"

'How can a bow cost five hundred ropals (500)? Is it made out of gold?' Hemicus thought incredulously at the stated price tag and was interested to know what kind of bow could cost so much.

"Mmmm, I expected it as much. Both the bow and the stirrup is made of iron after all." Alexander nodded understandingly, knowing that the price of iron was astronomical.

But the only alternative to iron would be animal horns and the time that would be needed to grind and polish a horn into a bow would make the weapon as much, if not even more expensive.

Unlike the bow, the crossbow that Alexander had designed was just a normal crossbow.

It had a wooden stock, a cut groove to place the bolt in, a trigger mechanism at the bottom to unhook the string, an iron bow, and a stirrup at the head of the crossbow.

The stirrup was a D-shaped iron product and how it would be used was that the crossbow would be placed vertically on the ground with the stirrup hitting the earth, then a foot would go through the stirrup, stabilizing the vertical crossbow, which would allow one to employ not just his arms muscles but also all his back and leg muscles to reload the crossbow, thus making the reload much more manageable.

Because reloading even a light crossbow, which had a draw weight of around three hundred (300) pounds was no joke, even when using all the muscles available to one, and not just the arm muscles.

"Where is the crossbow?" Alexander was interested to see the real thing and thus, Faziz quickly led Alexander to near a furnace, to the side of which, on a wall hung the crossbow.

And as Faziz trotted ahead to retrieve the bow for his master, Alexander's eye's wondered to the man working the furnace and silently watched as the man turned iron ore to iron and steel.

In this time period, the process of getting iron, or more specifically mild steel was an arduous one.

It started with acquiring the iron ore.

This might have come in a variety of forms, from ore-rich iron sands (typically found at river bends) to "bog iron" formed by biological processes in swamps to veins of ore mined from underground.

This had to be purified with a variety of processes, like being repeatedly washed to remove loose non-ore particles (often in a ribbed trough, where the heavy iron ore would collect at the bottom, allowing lighter fractions to come to the top to be removed), heated to burn off other impurities, and crushed to help with the other processes.

Once the ore was suitably purified, it would then be put into a charcoal-fired furnace heated to a high temperature.

Once heated to about metallic iron would separate from the compounds it's chemically bound to; some of those would escape as exhaust from the furnace, though others plus remaining impurities from the purification process would remain as slag.

This would create a soft but not liquid "bloom" of wrought iron.

Ironworkers would then pound the bloom with hammers to force out the slag inclusions, thus making steel, i.e- iron mixed with carbon.

The reason why the slag could not be removed by melting the iron and allowing the impurities to rise to the top was because furnaces could only reach the temperatures necessary to smelt iron (that is, produce metal from ore at around 1250oC,) but not the significantly higher temperatures (about 1538C) necessary to melt iron.

In fact due to the practice of beating out the iron, at this time blacksmiths had a misconception that the more one hammered the bloom, the better the quality of the steel.

But this is actually not true, as too much hammering would not only drive out the bad elements, but also the good impurities like carbon which gave the iron its strength.

Without the addition of carbon, pure iron is a soft, ductile material that is pretty useless in every case imaginable.

Thus about 0.04% to 0.3% carbon was desirable in most iron products.

As Alexander saw the blacksmith, to put in coarse words, 'beat the shit out of the bloom' to make extract the iron and shape it into a bow, he could not wait for work on the blast furnace to start.

And then he added, 'If only these poor sods knew of the double-acting position bellows,'

Double-acting piston bellows were a type of bellows that had the property that air was blown out on both strokes of the handle (in contrast to simpler and more common bellows that blow air when the stroke is in one direction and refill the bellows in the other direction), allowing for getting a much higher temperature, high enough that possibly molten iron could have been produced.

And this was also the bellow that Alexander had given Krishok and Jazum to produce, which due to its complexity and novelty was taking the man a few days to produce.

"Here, master," Faziz's loud call broke Alexander's inner thoughts, and he quickly turned to see the crossbow being offered to him.