The Gift of Stones

4

LEAF’S FIRST BLOWS were simple ones, and hardly trembling. He had to form a rough but tidy core from the quarried flint so that it would sit firmly on his anvil. One blow with a crude stone hammer removed the flint’s grey rind. Another squared its base. A third removed a nugget of intrusive chalk. It was a simple matter requiring not skill or strength, but confidence. The core stone that remained would have served elsewhere, in some less sophisticated place, as an implement in itself. You could club a man to death with such a stone, or crack nuts. Where was the craft in that? But how to make a knife? Where to begin?

Untutored hands would muster all their energy and smack the hammer on the flint. With luck, there might be tiny scrapers accidentally made that would serve as barbs for arrows or for cleaning skins. But only one stone, thus struck, in twenty thousand would provide, by chance, a long, strong splinter for a blade. Craftsmen — cautious, focused, their tongues curled and dry — would take their time. They would seek to understand the stone, to know its valleys and its hills. That tendon-like ridge on the hoof of stone — was it the length and thickness, would it serve as a blank for the amputation knife? Could it be detached easily from the core?

Leaf placed his sharpened antler tine on the flint, exactly where the tendon was attached, and struck it with a wooden mallet. These were the perfect tools but only in hands like Leaf’s that were firm and certain. If the direction of his impact were a feather’s breadth too shallow the fracture would surface too soon. The knife blade would be shorter than a thumb. It would be chisel-shaped. Or, if the impact were a feather’s breadth too deep, the fracture would plunge so that its blade end curved in a lumpy hook, a talon, a beak, a keel. Who’d want a poisoned arm removed with that?

For Leaf himself there was no tension. He knew what to do. He’d done it many times. One blow and the blade blank broke loose, spiralled for an instant on the anvil and fell into the apron on Leaf’s lap. There, on its underside at the point of impact, was the distinctive raised tump of stone, like a tiny bulb or a winkle shell. Beyond, in the foothills of the tump, the flint feathered and radiated like a slow tide on a flat beach. It was a good, long blade, still warm from the fire.

Once again Leaf and his daughter returned the stone to the flames. Leaf exercised his hands and — half exultant, half impatient — blew out his cheeks to match the working of the bellows. He chose the best tools from his workshop for turning the blank into a finished blade. He sat, with a different, lighter anvil on his knees, to receive the hot stone. Again he worked with antler tines but with no hammer. A little sideways pressure removed the tump, the shell, the bulb. More pressure produced a mounting nest of fine and shallow flakes on the anvil as the blade was patterned and reduced.

Enough, you say. A boy awaits. The afternoon has almost gone. There is no need to detail the patience and the expertise with which Leaf etched a pattern of shallow facets along the cutting edge, or how the flint’s parallel flaking scars were ground ice-flat with grains of sandstone, or how the stoneworker reconciled his quest for beauty, symmetry, utility with the urgency of his task. If there had been time he would have cut a block of ash and made a handle for such a knife. He would have fixed the blade into the ash with birch resin. It takes two days to harden. He would have worried at the flint until it had lost all resemblance to stone. As it was he simply rubbed the blade in grease, to boast its natural colours and to catch the light, and — picking up a few sharp scraps from the flake nest on his anvil — delivered his newest tool to the crowd who waited at his gate. He was not patient with their flattery. The blade was good, for sure. It’d do the job. But he was aggravated by the thought of what the new knife might have been were there time to finish. It would have been a tool too fine to use. It would have been an ornament.