One King's Way

Chapter Twenty-eight

The scurvy lifted quickly as Hund forced his patients to eat onions and leeks, peas and beans, some dried, some still relatively fresh from the recent harvest. Hund made careful notes in runic script, saying that he would give the answers to other Ithun-priests. Certainly the answer to this disease lay in food, not in air or light.

With the disappearance of the scurvy went the feelings of gloom and weariness which had beset so many of the party, replaced as if by contrast by a mood of energy and excitement: all necessarily turned inwards, for the wind and the cold increasingly contrived to isolate the little community, except for the muffled sleigh-drivers trading for supplies or bringing back wood from the forest.

When he looked back on the events and the progress of that winter, Shef sometimes found it hard to believe. Sometimes easy. He had noticed already during his brief term of office as jarl of Norfolk, and even briefer term as co-king with Alfred, how little of a busy person's time was spent doing what that person wanted to do. Most time, for most people, was wasted on irrelevancies, on trivialities, on confusion and conflict, all seemingly inseparable from daily life. “It is like,” Shef had said to Hagbarth the seaman-priest, “it is like sailing along with a sail tied to the back of the boat, in the water, dragging you back.”

“You mean a sea-anchor,” said Hagbarth. “Very useful sometimes. In a storm at night when you fear you may be running on shore.”

“I dare say,” said Shef impatiently. “But think, Hagbarth, think what it's like when you cast the drag off!”

In the little community of perhaps forty souls, the drag was removed. Many of them were simply glad to be alive. Those who had once lived as slaves were disinclined to quarreling or self-assertion. And of the forty a high proportion—perhaps the highest proportion ever assembled in the history of the world under such circumstances—were curious, inquisitive and skilled. The forty included seven priests of the Way, all committed by faith and temperament to the quest for new knowledge. They had ten apprentices between them, all eager young men with their way to make, a way that would be much eased if they could show contributions to new knowledge. There was Shef himself, inventor and builder of the machines that had set the Northern world on a new course. And there was Udd, perhaps the most creative and persistent of all, in spite of his shyness and life's history of low regard.

Even the others made a contribution, Cwicca and Osmod, Fritha, Hama and Wilfi. What they all shared, Shef eventually realized, was belief. They were men who had been raised from the dirt by machinery, who owed everything they had to it. Furthermore, they had seen the pride of the Vikings and of the Frankish lancers fall before them. One might almost say they did not have belief, or faith, but something even stronger, impossible for any skeptic to argue with. They knew new machines could be made for new purposes, they were certain that novelty would work. It was impossible in their presence to shrug one's shoulders and say, “that's how it's always been done.”

Yet it was something like that which triggered the first major project and innovation of the winter. Large supplies of grain had been brought back from the farms towards the coast, and the bread-starved travelers were eager to have it baked. First it had to be ground. The task was handed over without thought and as a matter of course to the women in the community. Women ground flour. Many slave-women did nothing else.

However, in the spirit of fellowship which joint travel had brought, it was argued that men should take their turn too. In the end Udd was given a pestle, mortar and sack of grain, and told to take his turn at grinding. He ground ineffectively for half an hour, stared at the sack remaining, put his pestle down and went to find Shef.

“Why isn't there a mill to do this?” he protested.

Shef jerked a thumb out at the frozen ground beyond the wooden shutters. “Because the river's frozen, Udd.”

“There are other ways to run a mill.”

“I know,” said Shef carefully, “but are you going to suggest it to Cuthred? Maybe he'd like to take a turn at his old trade? If we had an ox I'd say we could use that for power, but we only have the cows for milking, and no-one will let you use those.”

“I told you,” said Udd. “We could make a wind-mill.”

In other circumstances a busy ruler would have been distracted from the detailed consideration needed by some task or other. In the winter waste, there was nothing else to do. Shef and Udd walked across to the water-mill which the Way-priests had set up, and which they used for half the year, to see what could be done.

Much of what was needed was there already: the two great stone wheels that did the grinding. The thick axle that turned the upper stone and the system of cog-wheels that transmitted power from the river to the wheels. That changed it from horizontal to vertical rotation, following the very latest developments. All that was needed was a new motive force. “Like a big sail, on four arms,” said Udd. “There's sail-cloth in the boat-house.”

“It won't work,” said Herjolf, listening. “The river always flows in the same place. Wind can come from anywhere. I grant you, here it comes mostly from the mountains, the north-west. But if you set it up and the wind changed, it could tear your wheel off its supports.”

“I know how to fix that,” said Udd with the confidence that came to him when faced with a technical problem. “Think of the way we made the catapults rotate. We put them on small wheels and turned those on a larger wheel. We can do the same thing here. Make the whole mill rotate. It can be trained round by a beam, as we turn the trail of the new mules.”

In other circumstances, again, some scoffer would have laughed the matter off. There were no scoffers here. Herjolf hesitated, then said, “Well, let's try it.”

Soon most of the community was outside, dismantling the old mill, helping to build the shell of the new one, sent off to the main forge to make the heavy nails and bolts that were needed. Shef, thinking back over the event in later times, noted again how many valuable skills were present among the people there. Many were perfectly familiar with heavy weights, not daunted at all by the process of lifting the mill-wheels and taking them to the new site. Hagbarth, who had lifted and laid many a ship's keel made all of one timber, directed operations. For several days all energies were directed to the mill, even the grinding of the grain put aside by common consent till there was a better way of doing it.

Finally all was in place, and Udd was allowed to slip the retainer catch that had held the wheels from turning. He did so. The wind blew, filled the sails, they turned the vertical wheel that was to turn the horizontal one that was to turn the mill-wheel. Nothing happened except a great straining of timber. Udd slipped the catch back again.

“We need bigger sails,” he said.

A day later the process was in full stream, Herjolf rubbing his hands as he thought of the profits that might be made by setting up mills of this kind all over Scandinavia. Nearly all of it country unsuited to water-power, but a ready market for a mill that would grind all year. Priests of the Way, it was their boast, supported themselves by working rather than by claiming tithes and landholdings like the priests and monks of the Christians. There was no objection, furthermore, to priests becoming rich by their knowledge—as long as they shared it.

Yet the success of the first windmill seemed only to whet Udd's appetite. As soon as the first one was working, he was at Herjolf's ear with plans for another: this time, to drive the trip-hammer that he had sketched out for Shef the year before in Kaupang. Herjolf listened dubiously, at first, not hostile, but not able to understand what Udd was proposing.

The appeal was clear enough. Iron, though well-known and well understood everywhere in the Western world, remained if not a precious metal, a valuable one. One reason for the dominance of the Franks' and Germans' armored lancers was the weight of metal they carried. This was a great investment in a world where the peasant's spade characteristically had only an iron tip over a wooden blade, and where many plows as well were little more than iron-shod scratching-sticks. Iron was expensive not because it was hard to find, like gold or silver, but because it took so many man-hours to work. The ore had to be heated again and again and beaten by hand with hammers until the slag was worked out of it, then being smelted in the crude charcoal-burning ovens. The iron of Jarnberaland was the best in the world. Still, it needed working, as did every grade of iron except the very rare pieces taken from fallen thunder-stones. Herjolf had fuel, he had ore. If the hammering time could be cut he would have the more trade-goods in the spring. But how could a turning wheel make a hammer go up and down?

Udd drew his pictures in the snow again, while Shef, called into service as the argument grew heated, translated from English to Norse—Udd's Norse had never reached the technical stage. Finally Herjolf sighed, and agreed to let Udd try. “It's a blessing,” he remarked, “that this time he only wants something half the size of the last one.”

“A hammer is easier to lift than a mill-wheel,” Shef explained. “Udd says he is willing to start with only a light hammer.”

“How light?”

“A hundredweight.”

Herjolf shook his head and turned away. “Tell him to see Narfi Tyr's priest, the chronicler, and ask him for vellum and a pen. His sketches will be easier to follow if they are in pen and ink, not drawn in the snow. Besides, if what he says is true, in time to come men will fight for a page of them.”

Soon, when the wind blew, the trip-hammer pounded, beating out metal at unheard of rates like the never-ceasing hammer of Völund, the lame smith of the gods.

It was Cwicca who was responsible for the next step. Not having a skilled trade, other than playing on the bagpipe and shooting a catapult, he was usually assigned to some repetitive task. One day, struggling with the leather bellows which provided forced draught to the forge, yelled at continually by the smiths not to stop or everything would be ruined, he stepped off the upper handle he had been working with his leg and shouted, “We need a machine to do this as well!”

Converting a trip-hammer to pump a bellows was almost easy. And yet the alteration brought about more change, as if one change was feeding off another. The very much improved flow of air through the ovens which smelted the finished ore raised the temperature very markedly. The smiths said iron went first blue-hot, when it was dangerous because you might put a hand on it without realizing, to red-hot, when it was soft enough to work. Only rarely had they seen iron white-hot, beginning to melt. Though cast-iron had been made, usually by accident and under especially lucky circumstances, the forced-draught bellows made molten iron for castings a possibility.

Underlying all the activity was the threat and fear, or certainty, of war. Shef had consulted Hagbarth and Narfi the priest of Tyr, and following his custom, tried to make a map of where he and his fellows had been. From all that they said, and from his own experience, he was in what looked very much like a trap, more of a trap even than the coast of Norway. From there, if he had had a ship, he could have sailed out into the open sea and tried to make the long passage to the Scottish shore, and then down the east coast to England. Where he was, even if he had free passage in Hagbarth's Aurvendill, he would have to make his way out of the gulf between Sweden and the far shore of the Eastern Sea, where the Baits lived, then round Skaane and through the narrows between it and Danish Sjaelland to make his way home.

“How wide is the gap there?” he asked.

“Three miles,” said Hagbarth. “That's how old King Kolfinn got rich. Levying tolls. Last I heard, he wasn't likely to be there much longer. If you're right about the Ragnarssons getting rid of Hrorik, there wouldn't be too much left to stop them.”

“And where is their famous Braethraborg, the Stronghold of the Brothers?”

“There,” said Hagbarth, tapping the map at a spot on the north shore of Sjaelland maybe fifty miles from the narrows. Half a day's sail.

The only other way back to England that Shef could see was to go back to Hedeby and walk across the marshes to the Ditmarsh, and so be back where he started. He would be once more without a ship. And anyway, if his vision was true, and it was confirmed by Hagbarth's definite knowledge that the siege had started, then Hedeby was in enemy hands. Ragnarsson hands. Nothing anyone could imagine was worse than falling into Sigurth Ragnarsson's hands. Shef would rather have died and been hung up in Echegorgun's smokehouse.

So the iron-workers made not only ingots of pig-iron and easily-traded goods like axe-heads. They also, following Udd's direction, made bow after bow of spring-steel, cocking-handles, iron quarrels. Men and women carved wooden parts, set them in piles. Every few days they would turn from that task and assemble them. Shef noted how much quicker it was, say, to make a dozen sets of parts and then assemble them all the same way, instead of following the time-honored procedure of working on one implement till it was done, and then starting the next one. The pile of crossbows grew, well beyond the numbers they had to use them.

“We can always sell them,” said Herjolf cheerfully.

“That is looking on the bright side,” said Shef.

Of all the innovations Udd had brought, though, none interested Thorvin and the other smiths more than the case-hardened steel. They had borrowed Cuthred's shield repeatedly, testing its powers, and been amazed. Ideas sprang up quickly. Make mail of the strange hard metal. It proved impossible to work, too hard to bend, too hard to fit together. An attempt to take a mail-shirt and case-harden it as one unit produced only an extremely expensive lump of rings half-welded together, the waste of a month's work for a skilled smith, as Herjolf pointed out. Flat plates were relatively easy to make, but useless once made. People did not have flat surfaces to fit them over. The metal seemed to have no use in war except for shields, and even then it had disadvantages. Shields were convex both because missiles tended to fly off such a surface, and—no trivial consideration—because a rounded shield could be carried on the shoulder. No-one, not even Brand or Cuthred, could march all day holding a shield up on his arm alone. Most deaths in battle went to the side whose shield-arms tired first.

The hardened metal, while fascinating, seemed to be practically useless in war. Yet Shef could not shake off the words that Svipdag the prisoner had hurled at him. “The only man who could get through what waits for you would need an iron skin.” He knew who would be waiting for him at the Braethraborg, Where was his iron skin? And how to carry it?

Shef found himself talking, often, to Hagbarth. Hagbarth was interested especially in the details of the various new types of ship that Shef had sailed or had encountered. He had nodded consideringly over Ordlaf's design for the English mule-armed “battleships,” and pressed Shef again and again for details of the short action with the Frani Ormr, a famous craft in her own right, the greatest warship of the North, of the traditional ocean-going type.

“It's no wonder you were outsailed by her,” he remarked. “I am not sure even my own Aurvendill would have done better. Faster by sail, I dare say. But the more oars you have for foot of keel, the faster you are rowing. In enclosed waters, Frani Ormr might be better.”

He was interested also in the design of the two-masted Crane, about which Shef could tell him a good deal, having helped to dismantle her for planks and parts. King Halvdan's coastal patrol ships were familiar to Hagbarth in any event. He could make a good guess at how one would have been strengthened to take catapult shock. It was the sailing qualities of the two masts that puzzled him. Yet, Shef assured him, the Crane had sailed, and sailed well. The Norfolk, on the other hand, had been something of a tub.

“Now we've got the idea of putting the mules on wheels, to rotate them,” Cwicca said one meal-time. “What we'd really like would be a mule at each end, front and back, high up. But I suppose all that weight high up would make the boat tip over, like, if the wind came from one side. Even the Norfolk wasn't very high out of the water.”

Hagbarth, listening, snorted beer through his nostrils. “ ‘Make the boat tip over, like,’ ” he gasped. “ ‘Each end, front and back.’ It's well for you you're not at sea and the sea-trolls listening. They punish sailors who do not use the proper haf words, the words to be said at sea.”

“So how would you make a boat like Cwicca said?” asked Shef, ignoring the complaint about sea-language.

“I've been thinking,” said Hagbarth, scratching lines in the table with his dagger. “What you want, I think—it's what they did with the Crane, but they only did it half way—is a rigid frame for the ship, much more solid than the way we build.”

Remembering the way the Aurvendill had flexed on her passage from Hedeby to Kaupang, both Shef and Karli nodded.

“Then you would want to build up the sides, like this.” Hagbarth drew on.

Studying the plan on the table, Shef said thoughtfully, “What you have there looks to me, in a way, like one of your own ships with a second one built over it.”

Hagbarth nodded. “Yes, you could do that. A conversion.”

“So we could convert, for instance, your Aurvendill, out there in the boathouse. Extend the keel and rivet it—we have plenty of hard steel—put in a frame, build up the freeboard, as you call it, ballast her heavy and put mules on fighting platforms bow and stern.”

Hagbarth cried out in honest pain. “Not the Aurvendill! The most beautiful sailer in the north!”

“Though not as fast as the Frani Ormr,” Shef pointed out.

“If you did all that,” said the unnoticed Edtheow, who had been staring grimly at Hagbarth's dagger marks on the polished table, “you could put iron plates all over it and really weigh it down.”

Shef stared at her open-mouthed.

“The words of fate will be spoken by someone,” remarked Thorvin, yet again.

In the end Hagbarth was sent out on skis while work started on Aurvendill. He had been reconciled to the idea, and confessed that he would have been fascinated to see it tried on anyone else's ship. He could not bear, though, to watch them slice into his own. After the main sawing was done, he promised, he would watch and assist. Till then, he would stay away.

Cuthred volunteered to escort him. Of all the men and women there he had played least part: refusing even to look at the mills being erected, taking little interest in the forge. He lay abed a long time with his leg-wound open, as if his body were taking revenge for the way he had overridden its demands during the berserk fit. When it healed, he took to skiing alone, quickly becoming expert, often staying out all day. When Shef asked him once whether he felt hungry or thirsty out in the waste, he replied, “There is food out there, if you know how to get it.”

Shef wondered. Echegorgun had trailed them across the mountains to Piruusi's camp. Could he have followed further? The Hidden Folk seemed to be able to go where they pleased in the wastelands. Cuthred had said once that there were more of them than true people realized. Maybe he was meeting Echegorgun, or even Miltastaray, in the wasteland. The Hidden Folk liked him. Hardly anyone else did, though some among the women were sorry for him. At least he was a good protector for Hagbarth, and Hagbarth was not one of the men who were likeliest to offend him, unlike Karli, now paired with Edith, or Ceolwulf, who seemed to remind Cuthred of what he had once been.

Yule came, with roast pork and blood sausage to add to their usual fare, with tale-telling and songs from the Way-priests of their mythical stories. The deep winter came after it, with such howling winds that the mill-sails had to be taken down and stored for a while, and thick snow drifting. The small community, with ample food and fuel, blankets and down-lined bags, ignored it. Shef wondered again at the good cheer on every face, but not for long.

“It's cold up here, right enough,” said Cwicca. “But if you think what it was like back in Crowland in the fens, slaving for the black monks! Lucky to have a blanket at all, no food but porridge and not much of that, living in a hut with an earth floor and that soaked through from Michaelmas to Easter. And nothing to look forward to but Lent! No, I've never passed a happier winter.”

One thing that added to the gaiety was yet another of Udd's experiments. He had never forgotten the total failure of his attempt to make winter ale by steaming water off rather than freezing it off. Winter ale could be had now for the trouble of putting a bucket outside, but Udd persevered. If the strength in the drink was not left in the heated ale, he reasoned, it must have flown off with the steam. Slowly he experimented. Catching the steam. Enclosing the heated pot. Running a pipe, a copper pipe for its ductility, out from the heat into the cold, to liquefy the steam more quickly. Catching the end product. Repeating the process with ever tighter seals and more careful catchment. In the end, Udd had something which he was prepared to offer to the others. They tasted gingerly, curiously, appreciatively.

“A good drink for a cold day,” said Osmod. “Not as good as mulled winter ale, I reckon, but that's more natural, isn't it. This has still some of the reek of the forge about it. ‘Burnt ale,’ we'll call it.”

“It might be better to use wine,” said Udd, though he had tasted wine no more than twice in his life.

Cuthred said nothing, but took a flask with him next time he skied alone into the snow.

The day came at last when they were ready to roll the remade Aurvendill out of the boathouse into a backwater of the river, now beginning to flow stronger under the ice, and to show signs of break-up.

“Should we not put something on the rollers, for luck?” asked Shef.

Hagbarth looked at him sharply. “There are some who do that,” he said. “Blood usually, a sacrifice to Ran, the troll-goddess in the deeps.”

“I don't mean that. Udd, have you a small keg of burnt ale? Put that under the keel. As she rolls forward, she'll crush it.”

Hagbarth nodded. “And then you must give her a new name.” He patted the stem-post. “She is my Aurvendill no longer. That is a star, you know. Made from the frostbitten toe of a giant which Thor flung into the sky. A good name for a fast ship. She is that no more. What will you call her?”

Shef said nothing till the men were at the drag-ropes, ready to pull her out of the shed in which they had worked for so long. Then, as they heaved together and the strong brown liquid splashed on the keel, he called out, “I name you Fearnought!”

Fearnought slid slowly down the runway and crunched through the thinning ice, to lie at rest on her ropes.

She seemed a strange craft. They had cut, spliced and riveted her keel with the stoutest wood and steel they could contrive. On the extended keel they had fitted frames every few yards, and to these frames, against the usual practice, which was to use sinew, they had nailed the planking. The Aurvendill's original planks now formed only the upper part of her sides. Stouter ones, split from pine-trunks, held her lower down. At prow and stern fighting platforms disfigured her previously clean lines, copies of the ones Shef had seen on Hedeby walls. Two new-built mules squatted on each. To balance their cumbrous weight the Fearnought was built deep and round, with heavy ballast in what was now a capacious hold. The fighting platforms had been extended to half-decking, giving some shelter for the crew underneath them, more than the skin awnings which were all Viking crews normally had, even for the Atlantic.

On two matters Hagbarth had had his way. The Fearnought remained a one-master, though with her greater bulk the sail had been extended outwards, though not upwards, giving her almost half as much sail area again. And the iron plates that were to armor her sides and the rotating mules were stored in the hold, to be fitted only as needed.

“I wouldn't like to try the long open-sea passage to England in her,” said Hagbarth, careful to speak well away from the ship in case his words brought bad luck. “She makes the tubbiest knorr look graceful, and once you put the plates on she's worse.”

“She's not designed to reach England,” said Shef. “If she gets us through the narrows and round to the Frisian shore, she'll have done her job.”

Just past the Braethraborg will do, thought Hagbarth, but did not say the words. He himself had no intention of risking that dangerous passage. He had a draft on Shef and Alfred's treasury for the price of the Aurvendill, and hoped only to collect it.

Shef wondered, indeed, who he had the right to ask to share his dangers. The English men and women who had come so far with him would continue, hoping to reach home, as would Karli, eager to tell his tales of travel in the Ditmarsh. So would Hund. Thorvin too insisted on going. Hagbarth and his small crew would travel as far as Smaaland in the south of Sweden, showing the landlubbers how to sail the boat as they did so.

As the snow melted and people thought of departure, Cuthred came to see his master.

“Do you want me to travel south with you?” he asked.

Shef stared at him. “I thought we would take you home. To Northumbria.”

“There's no-one in Northumbria for me. My king is dead. I do not know if my wife is alive, but even if she is—I am no good to her now. I would rather live here in the waste. There are people here who would take me as I am. People who do not measure a man in only one way.”

The terrible bitterness was in his voice again, Shef heard. And yet—he did not dare to let Cuthred go. He was worth a catapult on his own, or a case-hardened breastplate. He would be needed before they won south, of that Shef was sure.

“Do you remember the mill?” he asked. “When I released you from that, you said you were my man.”

Cuthred had been a king's champion for much of his life. He understood loyalty and service, and accepted both as lasting to the death.

“See me through the Skagerrak and I will free you to return, to live in the waste, however you wish,” said Shef.

Cuthred stared down at the slush. “I will see you through the Skagerrak,” he agreed. “And past the Braethraborg. There will be someone waiting for me here.”