The Dream of the Iron Dragon: An Alternate History Viking Epic (Saga of the Iron Dragon Book 1)

by Robert Kroese

  “Sigurd’s right. The arrow pierced her carotid artery. If I remove it, she dies. There’s no way I can operate on her in these conditions.”

  “And if you leave the arrow in?”

  “She still dies. A little slower.”

  “There’s got to be something we can do,” O’Brien said.

  “I’ve got basic combat medic training, O’Brien. “I don’t think I could stitch together an artery even if we had an operating room. And even if I could, she’d need a transfusion. She’s lost at least two liters of blood already. You got any ideas how to hook up an IV under these conditions?”

  O’Brien said nothing.

  The Norsemen had returned to their seats and taken up their oars. Birgir gave the order to begin rowing, and Ísbátr began to creep away from the other ship. There was still no sign of any of Harald’s other ships. Shouted insults from the enemy ship faded in the distance as the ship disappeared in the fog.

  Reyes and Gabe did what they could to make Slater comfortable. She slipped in and out of consciousness for several minutes, and then finally succumbed. Her breathing stopped and her heartbeat faded to a faint flutter and then stopped completely.

  Two other crew members of Ísbátr had died in the fight; men had dragged their bodies to the bow, leaving them lying on the deck next to Slater. When Sigurd saw that she had passed, he found a tarp of oil-soaked wool cloth and covered the three bodies. He spoke briefly to the three of them what they assumed were words of comfort. O’Brien nodded, accepting the words numbly. Sigurd returned to his chest and resumed rowing. Not knowing what else to do, the three spacemen did the same. Gloom hung to Ísbátr like the fog.

  They rowed until mid-morning. Gradually the fog cleared, but there was no wind and the sky remained cloudy. Several times O’Brien caught Birgir consulting a piece of crystal stone similar to the one Skeggi had carried. Anxious for a distraction from his thoughts, O’Brien asked Birgir if he could see it. To his surprise, Birgir was more than happy to give a demonstration.

  The sun stone was a roughly square, nearly transparent crystal, small enough to fit in the palm of Birgir’s hand. O’Brien recognized it as crystallized calcium carbonate, once known as Iceland spar. First, Birgir pointed to a black mark that had been made on the top of the crystal. Then he held it up to the sky, looking at the mark from below. There now appeared to be two marks, less than a centimeter apart. This effect, O’Brien knew, was the result of the crystal polarizing the light. Birgir rotated the crystal until the two dots lined up, then pointed with his finger in the direction the stone’s top was facing. “Sól,” he said. O’Brien nodded. The sun rose east-southeast, which made it a simple matter to estimate the south-southwesterly course they would need to take to reach the Frisian coast.

  A little before noon, Birgir ordered half the men off the oars. For the rest of the day, they rowed in shifts of about an hour. O’Brien gathered that Sigurd and Birgir were fairly certain they’d lost Harald’s ships, so they’d shifted to a more sustainable pace. It simply wasn’t possible for a man to row all day at full speed.

  Their progress was slow. It was hard to tell without any landmarks, but O’Brien estimated they were traveling at about four knots. At that rate, it would take days to reach the mainland. There was no wind to speak of, so rowing was their only option. While the others took turns rowing, O’Brien stood at the bow, watching Ísbátr cut through the water and trying not to think about the dead woman lying next to two Vikings at his feet.

  He couldn’t help feeling responsible for Slater’s death. If he hadn’t said anything, the enemy ship may well have drifted away without anyone else knowing it was there. But he had to open his stupid mouth, and then the idiot Vikings had to attack rather than do the prudent thing and just row quietly away—not that there was any reason to think these people would act prudently. Viking was basically synonymous with impetuous and violent. It was little consolation that the attack had been a great success, tactically speaking. Slater was dead, and it was largely his fault.

  They rowed until just after sunset, when the sun stone could no longer guide them. The men ate their evening meal and then went to sleep. Not long after, the air pressure dropped and a breeze picked up. The men who didn’t already have their tents out rooted through their chests to get them. The tents were not glamorous affairs; essentially they were oil-soaked cloth or leather tarps that were propped up by a simple stick frame.

  O’Brien and the other spacemen had found their own tents in the chests Dag had provided, and had crawled into them to get out of the rain. The others quickly fell asleep, but O’Brien remained awake. It wasn’t just the pain in his ribs and the guilt about Slater’s death keeping him awake. Something else was bothering him: a steady wind was blowing now, but they were letting it go to waste. By tomorrow morning it might die down again, and the crew would be stuck rowing all day.

  He crawled slowly out of his tent and found Reyes. He shook her by the shoulder.

  “O’Brien? What the hell?”

  “The motor that runs the climate control system in the flight suits,” O’Brien said. “It has a magnet in it, right?”

  “Uh, I suppose so. A small one.”

  “Do you think you could take it out without wrecking the suit?”

  “Sure. But why…?”

  O’Brien’s eyes fell on one of the furs that Reyes was using as a blanket. “Never mind,” he said. “Can I borrow this?”

  “Will you let me go back to sleep?”

  “Yep.”

  Reyes waved at him. O’Brien grabbed the fur and wrapped it around his neck.

  Finding a wooden cup and water to fill it was easy enough, but he spent the better part of two hours trying to locate a needle. His first thought had been to use a pin from one of the Norsemen’s broaches, but found out after a few tense and confusing exchanges that the broaches were made almost entirely of bronze. Finally Birgir intervened, and O’Brien was able, with some effort, to make him understand that he was looking for a small piece of iron. When Birgir produced an iron needle from a chest near the stern, O’Brien nearly kissed him. Along with the needle, Birgir had spools of thread and folded pieces of wool cloth: it was Skeggi’s sail repair kit.

  O’Brien sat on the gunwale and brushed the fur against the needle rhythmically for a minute. He stuck the needle through a tiny fragment of rotted wood he’d pulled from the deck, so that half of the needle stuck out of either end. Then he gently placed the needle and wood in the wood cup, which he’d half-filled with water. He held the cup in his hand, shining the light from his cuff into it. After a moment, the needle began to move, but it was hard to tell whether it was magnetism of the movement of the boat. The needle moved to the side of the cup and stuck there, adhered by surface tension. He dislodged it and tried again, with the same results. What he really needed was some kind of gimble to hold the cup steady. Barring that, a larger cup might do. He went on another scavenger hunt, eventually finding a good-sized wooden bowl. He filled this with water and placed the needle and wood fragment in it. Standing and holding his hands away from his body so as to absorb as much of the motion of the boat as he could, he watched as the needle gradually oriented itself approximately perpendicular to Ísbátr’s keel. After waiting a few seconds to be sure the needle had settled, O’Brien gave it a push with his finger, causing it to spin about ninety degrees to the left. The needle slowly stopped and then reversed its spin, orienting itself as it had before. O’Brien stifled a cry of excitement.

  The question now was whether the needle pointed north or south. He could make a pretty good guess based on the orientation of the boat, as it was unlikely they’d drifted a hundred and eighty degrees, but a mistake would be costly. He had brushed the fur away from the point of the needle, which—he was fairly certain—would make the needle’s head the magnet’s north pole. He’d learned while studying Earth’s geology that its poles were named backwards: Earth’s “North Pole” was actually its magnetic south. That meant the he
ad of the needle would be pulled to face north; the sharp end of the needle would point south. Currently the needle was pointing toward the port side of the boat, which was roughly where O’Brien expected it to be, given their last known heading. Without knowing the location of the north pole in advance, O’Brien knew of no way to be more certain which way the needle was pointing.

  He returned to Reyes’s tent and woke her again.

  “Damn it, O’Brien,” Reyes growled, blinking at him in the dim light. “Now what?”

  “I made a compass,” O’Brien replied.

  “And?”

  “And… I know which direction north is.”

  “Go to sleep, O’Brien.”

  “Listen to me, Reyes. We’ve got a steady wind of about ten knots from the southeast right now. If we unfurl the sail, we could cover close to a hundred klicks before dawn.”

  “Or we could wait until morning.”

  “We have no idea how long this wind will last.” When Reyes still looked skeptical, he added, “That’s a hundred klicks you don’t have to row.”

  Reyes groaned but nodded and began to climb out of her tent. Pulling her cloak around her, she said, “Let’s go talk to Sigurd.”

  Sigurd was unexpectedly receptive to the idea. Once O’Brien had demonstrated to Sigurd’s satisfaction that the needle would always orient itself in the same direction, he agreed that it would be prudent to use the wind while they could. He seemed to be concerned that Harald’s other ships might still find them. If they could travel a hundred klicks while the enemy ships drifted aimlessly at sea, that would be one less thing to worry about.

  Birgir was less enthusiastic, but Sigurd insisted. Birgir woke his riggers and they unfurled the sail, setting it at an angle that would propel them toward the southwest—assuming O’Brien’s educated guess about the compass’ orientation was correct.

  Once Ísbátr was underway, O’Brien lay down and tried to get back to sleep. He had already been second-guessing himself about getting Slater killed, and now he worried that he may have sent Ísbátr on a course back toward Norway. He finally fell asleep just before dawn.

  When he awoke, the rain had stopped but the sky was still cloudy. The sun was hidden, but judging by the light, it was mid-morning. He sat up and watched the rest of the crew as they lounged about the deck, eating, drinking, gambling with dice, or simply staring out to sea. After some time, he saw Birgir checking the position of the sun with his crystal. Seeming satisfied, he slipped it back into his pocket. O’Brien let out a sigh of relief. Apparently he’d made the right call; the sun stone had confirmed their heading. They were on their way toward the Frisian coast.

  The wind held for most of the day and into the night. O’Brien spotted land off the port bow on the afternoon of the fourth day. Cheers went up from the men. By the time they reached shore, it was too late to scout the area to make sure it was safe to make camp, so they spent the night on the boat. The next morning, they rowed some distance down the coast to the west, until they located a sandy beach where Ísbátr could be brought ashore. As they approached the shore, twenty or so men near the bow put away their oars and jumped into the water. They ran alongside Ísbátr’s stern, pushing her toward the shore. When she stopped, only the tip of her stern remained in the water. The rest of the crew got out, some of them pulling ropes, and hauled Ísbátr firmly onto the beach.

  Sigurd picked ten men to scout the area, leaving Birgir in charge of the rest to make camp at the shore. The men seemed to have accepted Sigurd as their leader, but O’Brien noticed that he left Brynjarr and Braggi behind, probably to make sure there was no talk of mutiny while he was gone. Sigurd informed the spacemen of his plans but didn’t ask if they wanted to come along on the scouting expedition. In O’Brien’s opinion, it was just as well. He was still too hurt to travel, and Reyes wouldn’t go for splitting up their party anyway.

  Those on the beach set up tents, built a fire, and dug graves for the three dead. The scouting party returned late in the afternoon. From what he was able to understand of Sigurd’s report, they hadn’t found much of interest: only a small farming community some distance inland. The Norsemen weren’t averse to stealing from farmers, but O’Brien gathered that these people didn’t have enough wealth to be worth the trouble. The good news was that they had a pretty good idea where they were: the villagers had told them the river Rotte was just to the west, which meant they were in Frisia, about three days travel by sea to Normandy. It was unclear to O’Brien why they had to travel all the way to Normandy, but he suspected that the Vikings had already picked over this area of Europe pretty well. They were hoping to find unspoiled cities farther to the west.

  At dusk, they had a quiet ceremony to honor their dead. After the Vikings had said their part about the two fallen men, the spacemen were invited to speak about Slater. Reyes couldn’t bring herself to deliver a eulogy, so she deferred to Gabe, who stood and gave a short but heartfelt speech about their fallen comrade and friend. The two Vikings were buried with their spears; the spacemen buried Slater with only her flight suit. They debated burying one of the pistols with her, but in the end decided it was a meaningless gesture. Slater wouldn’t want it, anyway. She was a scientist and pilot, not a warrior. They removed her cuff and earpiece, but left her flight suit. They filled the graves with sand and then sat around the fire with the Norsemen, eating and drinking until late in the evening.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Sigurd arose at dawn the next morning. Except for the man who was keeping watch, the rest of the crew was still asleep. Sigurd let them be, taking some time to warm himself by the fire. The crew had worked hard, and there was no hurry now that they’d escaped Harald’s fleet. They’d been up late celebrating the lives of the fallen, and they could use the rest.

  Around mid-morning, after they’d eaten breakfast, the crew packed up camp, and pushed Ísbátr back into the water. A breeze was once again blowing out of the southeast, and they rode it along the coast for the next two days. The morning of the third day, Ísbátr passed through the strait between England and Francia. The sight of the chalk-white Cliffs of Dover to the north excited the crew; it was a sign that they were less than a day’s travel from their goal, the mouth of the River Seine.

  The wind finally gave out later that morning, and the crew had to row hard to reach the Seine by dark. They slept on the boat, anchored in the cove just offshore. The next morning, they rowed up the Seine, where they hoped to make contact with some of the other Norsemen who had settled here. Expeditions from Denmark and the other Nordic lands had been raiding along this coast for nearly a century now, and settlements near the water had been pretty well picked over or demolished. The cathedrals, which had provided so much easy gold and silver in the early days, had mostly been abandoned or burned down. Those that remained had been fortified so much as to make unattractive targets. Most of the natives had fled to the cities inland, and they’d gradually been supplanted by settlements of Norsemen. Lately, the Vikings had begun moving farther inland themselves, particularly in the highly desirable region of the Seine Valley. Raiding was no longer the free-for-all it had been in the days of Sigurd’s grandfather; raiders coming to the area now had to deal with the established Norse chieftains in addition to the native powers. A hierarchy had been established, and woe to the adventurer who didn’t give the vanguard their due.

  The nexus of Norse power in Europe was in the Seine Valley, where several men from Denmark and Norway had set themselves up as petty chieftains. The amount of territory nominally under their control was small relative to the Frankish empire, but they owned much of the coast and had made it virtually impossible for ships to travel down the Seine to Rouen or Paris without paying a toll. From their bases in the valley, they also projected power by raiding throughout the countryside, as far away as Nantes in the southwest. The Frankish kings had done what they could to defend their territory, but they were scattered and disorganized. By the time they knew the Norsemen were on their way
to a village or cathedral, it was too late.

  Much opportunity still remained on the continent for determined raiders, but a party the size of Sigurd’s simply didn’t have the manpower to go it alone. If they set up camp anywhere within a hundred miles of the mouth of the Seine, they’d be under constant threat of attack from one of the competing chieftains. Even if all four of their boats had made it, they wouldn’t have had the numbers to resist such an attack. If they were able to get the backing of one of the local chieftains, though, they’d be relatively safe: the other chieftains would be unlikely to risk a war by attacking them.

  Its rolling hills blanketed with snow, the Seine valley was a breathtaking sight. This was a more gentle and fertile land than Norway, and it was not difficult to see why so many of his countrymen had come here in search of wealth and opportunity. Rich farmland broken by lush groves of maples and oaks gave way gradually to pine-covered hills. Already buds were forming on the trees; in a few weeks the entire regions would be awash with green and accented with pink and white blossoms of fruit trees.

  A few miles up the Seine, Ísbátr was hailed by a sentry on a tower on the south bank of the river. Looking up, Sigurd saw a dozen or so archers, their bows at the ready. Sigurd looked to Birgir, who gave him a nod and steered the boat toward a dock that extended out from the base of the tower twenty yards or so into the river. Birgir docked the boat and Sigurd leapt onto the dock, greeting the sentry, a young man named Alaric, who hailed from a village not far north of Sigurd’s. Sigurd explained their intentions, noting that he hoped to come to an understanding with one of the local chieftains.

  As it turned out, there was really only one chieftain they needed to concern themselves with. It had been several years since Sigurd or any of Ísbátr’s crew had ventured this far west, and since then an alliance had united most of the Norsemen in the valley under a Norwegian chieftain called Hrólfr. Sigurd was familiar with Hrólfr; he was a kinsman of Harald’s.