Amaadio was more than an ordinary herbalist. He was a supplier: He produced pharmaceuticals for sale to other herbalists. At Hidden Haven he did his work in a communal summer kitchen with the ends open, large windows in the two walls, a large brick stove and tiered oven. For six days, with their help, he separated guano into its constituents and tested them. Reeno gave Juliassa what Brokols thought of as the worst job. She worked in a shed, breaking up guano, putting it into a leather sack a quart at a time and beating it with a bat, then pulverizing it in a pestle to the consistency of flour.
Amaadio stirred or shook weighed portions of it into water or some other solvent, in a flask or retort or beaker, with or without some further reagent. Some of the solutions and suspensions he boiled. Some he boiled dry. From some, he decanted off the fluid and spread the wet residue to dry. From others he skimmed off a precipitate. And from the solids he obtained, he took portions and dissolved them in presumably some other solvent.
From some of the stinks, Brokols was glad the building was so well ventilated.
Brokols' main job was to pulverize sulfur; crush, grind, and pulverize charcoal; and mix small, carefully weighed amounts of them thoroughly with various powders that Amaadio gave him, then put the mixture in small bowls. Before he mixed anything though, Amaadio examined the constituents, settling for nothing but the finest flour-like texture, and mixing had to be thorough beyond what Brokols considered all reason.
Reeno's job was to weigh guano samples, solvents, and reagents, and keep records of everything. No solid from any of Amaadio's brews escaped labeling and recording. And as Amaadio separated one derivative and subderivative after another, Reeno's lists grew long. Brokols came to realize why the herbalist had brought so many bowls and built so many shelves.
The work was neither hard nor intense, simply unrelenting. Both Brokols and Juliassa prepared the raw materials in quantities well in advance of Amaadio's needs, on the assumption that they'd need more when his tests were done. The first day found one ingredient of guano that flashed nicely when, mixed with sulfur and pulverized charcoal, it was ignited in air. The second day produced another, plus a third derived from the first. The next morning produced a fourth that flashed, derived from the third. By that day's end, Amaadio said he'd gotten all there were to get, but threw none of them away yet.
Brokols had no idea whether any of the derivatives was saltpeter or not, nor of course did Amaadio. If none of them were, hopefully one of them would do as a substitute.
Each evening Juliassa went to the beach and talked with Sleekit and K'sthuump, soon after sunset.
The fourth day they tested each of the candidate ingredients in various proportions with sulfur and charcoal for maximum vehemence of flash, on the assumption that this equated with explosive power. And again threw nothing away. Brokols, remembering his courses in Almaeic history, tried burning them damp; one flashed, the others didn't. From that point they gave their attention to the one that flashed damp, and rightly or wrongly, Brokols named it saltpeter. The fifth day was given to making a quantity of it.
On the sixth afternoon they settled tentatively on a mixture of twelve parts "saltpeter," three parts charcoal, and two of sulfur. The recipe was a grave disappointment to Brokols; he'd hoped that saltpeter would prove to be necessary in only small quantities. This one required that they process guano in quantity, a nuisance. As far as that was concerned, he didn't even know whether large quantities were available.
Among Amaadio's goods was a basket of small ceramic pots with narrow mouths. After supper, while Juliassa went to let the serpents know that the noise was no threat to them, Amaadio filled three of them with powders: one with the mixture that had flashed best, one that contained only two parts saltpeter (a wild hope), and one that contained seven. After sealing them with a fiber wick moistened with lamp oil, they lit them one at a time behind a large rock. The grenade with the low saltpeter mixture didn't even blow the wadding out. The one with the 12:3:2 mixture exploded most violently.
* * *
That night Brokols lay on his pallet staring through the darkness at the crossbeams. They'd occupied their minds for more than a week with the production of gunpowder. Now they'd made it, and presumably the manufacture of grenades would be no problem. Amaadio was familiar with what presumably were fulminates, and had three of them in mind to test for fuse caps. Time fuses seemed unfeasible; they had to get into production too soon. They'd have to settle for impact grenades, and hope that they came up with a fuse which wasn't too touchy. Amaadio felt that the putative silver fulminate—silver something anyway—would serve.
But of what avail were grenades to them, really? They could kill and demoralize Gorballis with them. It was even conceivable that with them they could save Hrumma from Gorrbian conquest. But the real threat wasn't Gorrbian. When the imperial army controlled Djez Gorrbul, grenades wouldn't help, and the belief that some god would intervene was wishful thinking of the worst sort.
He turned onto his side, jaw clamped. The Hrummeans were right about one thing though. It was better to tough it out and fight with what you had, than to lie down and wait.