Ink & Sigil by Hearne Kevin

Author:Hearne, Kevin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-356-51522-9
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2020-08-25T00:00:00+00:00

INTERLUDE

Having the Gall

The Irishman who found me near Aviemore in Cairngorms National Park and made me his apprentice was hunting the same thing I was hunting: gall nuts.

He was also hunting the hobgoblin Holga Thunderpoot, though I didn’t learn that until much later. At the time, we were both startled to find someone else into the same hobby.

Gall nuts are growths on oak trees caused by gall wasps laying eggs in the buds at an important early stage in their growth. These nuts—which are not really nuts at all and have the look and feel of a gourd more than anything else—contain tannic acids essential to the production of black inks since the Middle Ages. Many inks used to be made with gall, and gall-nut production has become industrialized the same way silk production has: Groves of oak trees are exposed to gall wasps and the insects do their thing, just as silkworms turn mulberry leaves into silk. The tannic acid is used for all sorts of things, not merely ink.

But I was in a wild area—or as wild an area as anyplace could be on an island continuously occupied for millennia—and the gall nuts were scattered and needed to be sought out rather than easily spotted in a grove.

“Beggin’ your pardon,” his voice called to me from some distance away in the forest. “Ye wouldn’t be huntin’ gall nuts, now, would ye?”

“I am,” I said, surprised but also guarded. He was dressed fancy in a white suit and hat, not the sort of outfit one typically wears into the forest. It was the sort of getup one wore to polo and cricket matches, sipping mint juleps and laughing at the silly struggles of the working classes.

“Oh, well, in that case, I’ll stop. I’m not local and can find some elsewhere. Were ye planning on making ink with them?”

“I was,” I admitted, my surprise increasing.

“Ah, excellent! Would ye mind sharing your recipe? I’m a bit of an ink enthusiast.”

It was already the strangest conversation I’d ever had at the time, and I thought I might be hallucinating the whole thing. Was I really about to shout an ink recipe to a stranger in a white suit?

“Are ye taking the piss?” I said instead.

The Irishman laughed. “I’m very serious, I assure ye. But, look, I don’t mean to make ye uncomfortable, and I can simply leave. I know talking to strangers is probably a low priority for ye, so I won’t take it too hard.”

“What’s your recipe, then?” I asked. “I mean, if you’re really here for gall nuts, you’d know an ink recipe and could share it right now. Otherwise I guess ye’re here hoping to run across a nice boy to murder.”

“Right, right. Well, I use a cold bath rather than a boil for the gall, and then I use iron sulfate and gum arabic like anyone else, plus a couple other things.” He listed the ingredients and proportions to me, and I felt a smile splitting my face at the thought that we might have created a new hobby: ink shouting.

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