The bronze bowl had been cast eighty winters ago by an itinerant bell-founder who traded it to Jon’s grandfather for six seasoned oak barrels of salt lard.
It weighed twenty-two pounds, with walls three-quarters of an inch thick and two heavy lug-handles shaped like coiled river eels. The metal had taken on the dull, greenish-black patina of submerged bronze, pitted around the rim where cellar damp had eaten into the alloy, but when Jon struck the lip with his horn-handled knife, it rang with a clear, lingering middle C that hung in the cellar vaults for fifteen seconds.
Jon sat on a three-legged stool beside the wash-tub, his sleeves turned up to his armpits, his forearms gray with wet river sand.
He had gathered the sand himself from the gravel bar below the weir three days before the siege lines closed—coarse, sharp quartz grit that had been tumbled down from the high granite gorges, clean of silt and organic rot. In an earthenware crock beside him sat two quarts of sour cider vinegar, pressed from the small, bitter green apples of the high orchard. When he poured the vinegar over the sand, the acid hissed softly against the carbonate dust, releasing a sharp, pungent vapor that cleared the smell of stale blood and cellar mildew from his nostrils.
