Chapter 170: The Old Textile Trade
The warehouse district was easing into late afternoon. The sounds from the loading bays had begun to fade, and the crowds had thinned to workers heading toward meals and heated rooms. Beorn walked through the last stretch of the workday with four guards following at the same distance they had maintained since morning. He didn’t bother checking on them. Their duty hadn’t changed. They would still be there.
The building he had selected for the textile project was near the wall. From the outside it looked like an ordinary storage warehouse. The only sign of its actual purpose was the secondary belt housing fixed to the south wall, where a line-shaft connection entered from the engine system.
He pushed through the door.
One guard took position inside by the entrance. The others remained outside.
The interior had been cleared to make room for three machines. Above them, a line shaft ran from the south wall across the ceiling. The iron rod sat motionless for now, waiting for power from the engine network. Once a belt was engaged, any machine connected to it would begin operation.
The designs had come from a reconstruction effort Beorn had no interest in repeating.
Three days of fever in had left him confined to the citadel while the city continued without him. The illness had recovered enough information to build from, but not enough to build perfectly. The source itself was lacking, as his reference were only textbooks.
He could reconstruct principles. He could not reconstruct the practical knowledge accumulated by people who had spent decades working with their hands.
He had known from the beginning that the machines contained flaws. The problem was identifying which ones.
The carding machine stood closest to the intake wall. A sequence of roller pairs fitted with fine wire teeth stretched across its frame. A feed trough sat at one end and a collection bar at the other.
The intended process was straightforward.
Raw wool entered tangled and compressed. The rollers combed the fibers as they passed through. A soft rope of straightened fiber emerged from the output. Work that normally occupied a person for hours could be completed in minutes.
The spinning machine occupied the center of the room. It was narrow, with rows of spindles running along both sides and a large drive wheel mounted near the front. Rovings from the carding machine fed into the spindles. Each spindle twisted the fibers into thread while drawing them upward.
One worker at a spinning wheel could only do one thread at the time.
This machine was designed to produce twenty simultaneously.
The power loom stood at the far end. Warp threads stretched lengthwise from the rear beam to the front under constant tension. The machine alternated between lifting and lowering different thread groups to create a hole. A shuttle carried the cross-thread through that gap. The reed drove the thread into place. Then the frame positions switched and the cycle repeated.
Back and forth.
The process that normally required human hands became mechanical.
Beorn was examining the spinning frame’s drive connection when the door opened.
The expert he called for, Gytha, entered before acknowledging him. Her attention went immediately to the machines.
That told him what was important to her.
She was well past sixty, with gray hair twisted into a practical knot and hands roughened by decades of wool, flax, and thread. Deep lines marked her face, especially around the eyes. She crossed directly to the carding machine before she had fully stopped walking.
She walked the length of the machine, then looked across the room at the other two.
Only then did she glance at Beorn.
"Never seen anything quite like it."
"Neither has anyone else."
Beorn nodded. "They work. At least, they appear to. I need to know what they’re doing wrong."
A sound escaped her nose.
"That’ll be easier once I see them running."
Her fingers tapped one of the rollers.
"Hard to judge a loom from a sketch. Harder still from a machine that’s sitting still."
Beorn engaged the belt connection. The rollers began turning in sequence, each set moving slightly faster than the last. The wire teeth passed against one another.
He took a handful of raw wool from the prepared supply and fed it into the trough.
The machine pulled the material inward. Moments later a continuous strand of fiber emerged and collected at the output.
Gytha was already there.
She lifted a bundle of fiber, rolled it between her fingers, then held it toward the narrow window.
"Here."
She stretched the strand between both hands.
"See that?"
Her thumb stopped at a thicker section.
"Then there."
The difference was subtle. Beorn would not have noticed it without her pointing it out.
"Every few inches it swells."
She rubbed the wool between finger and thumb.
"Most of it’s fine. Then you hit a patch like this. A spinner would feel it straight away."
Beorn studied the strand.
"What’s causing it?"
"If I knew that, I’d be the one building the machine."
A faint snort escaped her.
She stepped closer to the carding frame and looked over the rollers again.
"What I can tell you is that the wool’s catching somewhere."
Beorn stopped for a moment, wrote down a note and moved on the process.
He shifted power to the spinning frame.
The drive wheel began turning. The connected spindles along both sides followed. Preloaded rovings fed into the system as each spindle drew and twisted the fibers into thread.
Twenty threads at once.
Continuous production without fatigue.
He removed a section of finished thread from a completed bobbin and held it out.
Gytha took it immediately.
The thread moved back and forth between her fingers. She stretched it lightly, then held it closer to the lamp.
"This thread is horribly done."
She checked it again.
"There."
A finger tapped one section.
"Then there."
Another.
"Tight. Loose. Tight again."
She handed it back. "You’ll get away with it for a while. Then somebody puts a proper run through a loom and starts cursing whoever built this thing."
Beorn looked past the thread to the machine itself.
"Any thoughts?"
She pointed toward the spindle. "If the machine’s doing the same job from start to finish, then the thread ought to feel the same from start to finish too."
Her gaze lingered on the rows of spindles.
"This doesn’t."
Another note wrote down.
Then they moved to the power loom.
Beorn engaged the final belt connection. The heddle frames began alternating. One set rose while the other fell, creating a path through the warp threads. The shuttle crossed. The loom reed struck forward and seated the new thread. The frames switched positions. The shuttle returned. The reed struck again.
The cycle repeated.
Cloth advanced steadily onto the front beam without direct human control.
Beorn watched through the first cycle. Then the second. Then the third.
Gytha remained silent.
That alone caught his attention.
For the first time since entering the building, her hands had stopped moving.
She stood a few feet from the loom, watching every motion.
Shuttle. Reed. Frame change. Return.
The third cycle completed.
"It gets the weave right."
Her voice remained flat.
"And it doesn’t need anyone standing over it."
She watched another pass.
Then she stepped closer.
"That reed’s hitting too hard."
She crouched slightly.
"You won’t see it here. Everything’s behaving."
The shuttle crossed again.
"But put this on a real floor. Full tension. Long hours."
Her eyes followed the warp threads.
"You’ll start hearing snaps before the hour’s out."
Beorn nodded.
Another flaw identified.
"What tells you that?"
Gytha watched the loom through another cycle.
"Because I’ve spent my life around looms."
The answer came as though it should have been obvious.
She stepped closer.
"The weave is coming out right."
The shuttle crossed again.
"But the machine’s working harder than it needs to."
Her head tilted slightly as she listened.
"You can hear it."
Beorn listened.
All he heard was the regular rhythm of machinery.
Gytha continued watching the cloth advance.
"A good loom settles into its work. This one sounds like it’s forcing it."
She glanced at him.
"I couldn’t tell you which part needs changing."
Her eyes returned to the machine.
"But I’d wager good wool that something does."
A pause.
"That’s the trouble with work like this."
The shuttle crossed once more.
"Half of what matters isn’t something you learn from looking."
She listened to the machine for another moment.
"You learn it from years of hearing when something doesn’t sound right."
Beorn wrote a final note.
Calibration requires operator judgment.
Then he closed the ledger.
"There’s a textile quarter planned."
He moved on to his offer. "These machines, more like them. Full production scale. I need someone to oversee operations, identify failures, and fix problems the designs can’t solve themselves. Five marks a month."
Gytha didn’t answer immediately.
Her attention drifted back to the loom.
"The people spinning and weaving now."
She watched the cloth advancing.
"What happens to them when you’ve got ten of these running?"
Beorn had already considered the question.
"Some will work here. Others will unfortunately need to find a new profession."
Silence stretched between them.
The loom continued its steady rhythm.
Beorn understood the question. Every improvement left someone behind. A machine that created more cloth with fewer hands inevitably displaced the people who had once made their living doing it.
Gytha’s attention remained on the cloth, but Beorn doubted she was seeing it anymore. Five marks a month was more money than most textile workers would earn in years. Enough to change a household. Enough to matter.
Gytha studied the loom one last time.
Then she looked back at him.
"I’d rather be running them than watching somebody else make a mess."
The decision was made.
"What do you need to begin?" Beorn asked.
"How large is this district?"
Beorn started to explain, "A full block in the industrial district. Carding, spinning, weaving, storage, finishing. One entire operation."
He described the scale in terms of buildings.
Her fingers moved at her side, rubbing together against a texture that wasn’t there.
Beorn had noticed the habit throughout the meeting. Now he understood it.
Forty years working with fiber had trained her hands to keep searching for it even when none was present.
"When do you want me to start?"
Beorn recognized acceptance when he heard it. There was no reason to negotiate further. He told her a vague estimative, and that the steward office would contact her soon.
Outside, evening had fully arrived. The winter sky above the district had darkened. The Scar hung over the rooftops, sharp and unchanged against the cold air. The guards resumed their positions without instruction.
Beorn started back toward the citadel.
To the west, the foundries were beginning their evening shifts, and the rhythm of industrial work was building again.
The day had been productive
A problem identified. A solution found. A note made.
Nothing further was required.
The citadel lay twenty minutes away.
He continued walking.
