Temrai stepped backwards. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I was just looking.’ The engineer scowled, and spat into the sawdust. ‘Haven’t you got any work to do?’ ‘I finished it. I’m waiting for the next batch of blanks. So I thought I’d just look around.’ The engineer muttered something and went back to what he was doing. He was working on the frame of a small trebuchet, the kind that threw a hundredweight stone. Using a chisel and a beech mallet, he was cutting dovetails in a thick twelve-foot-long plank; earlier, he and another man had sawn it out of a massive billet of seasoned ash, using a ten-foot saw. ‘Is that for the main frame?’ Temrai asked. The engineer looked up, surprised. ‘Left-hand A-frame,’ he replied. ‘Already done the right one. How come you know so much about engines?’ ‘I’m interested,’ Temrai said. ‘I’ve been watching.’ The engineer, a man of about sixty-five with shaggy white hair on his chest and arms like a bear, nodded. ‘I know you,’ he said.
