The Voyage of the Iron Dragon

by Robert Kroese

  “I can appreciate the need to project strength,” O’Brien said. “But this goes beyond that. You’ve got natives building Viking ships, and using tools like steel saws that even the Vikings didn’t have. At some point, you’re going to lose control over the technology.”

  “History argues otherwise.”

  “But that’s my point, Aengus! Knowledge transfer is a real phenomenon. If you put a low-tech civilization in contact with a high-tech civilization, knowledge is going to tend to flow from the latter to the former, as sure as heat moving from a hot griddle to an ice cube. The fact that historically the Mi’kmaq Indians did not know how to build ships capable of crossing the Atlantic indicates that at some point, your endeavor here is going to fail catastrophically. Probably sooner, rather than later. The bigger your footprint, the more natives you pull into your circle, the more you accelerate your operation’s demise.”

  “I question the premise,” Aengus said. “The more fully I integrate the natives into the culture of Camp Orville, the less contact they have with their tribesmen. Realistically, I can’t cut off their relations with other natives entirely, but I can make it attractive for them to stay close and reward them for their loyalty. In the end, it’s no different than the way you treat the Norsemen. Or did you fool yourself into thinking your goals and those of the Vikings are now fully aligned? I’m sorry to tell you this, O’Brien, but you are not a Viking and you never will be—just as I am not an Indian. I would wager, though, that you are in more danger from insurrection among the Norse than I am among the Mi’kmaq.”

  O’Brien, taking another swallow of his wine, did not reply. As much as he would like to deny it, Aengus was right: from the beginning, there had been tension between the motives of the spacemen and those of Sigurd and the Norsemen, and intermarriage and cross-breeding aside, the merging of the two groups into an artificial people called Eidejelans had not erased that demarcation. The spacemen’s destiny was to succeed or fail at putting a person into space; the Norsemen’s destiny was to alter the face of Europe through conquest. At some point, the two fates were likely to conflict.

  “Do not misunderstand me. I consider myself an honorary spaceman,” Aengus said, as if reading O’Brien’s thoughts. “I was born an Irishman, but I am at heart a man of the book—first the Bible and the Greeks, and then your library of science and history. I am a member of the tribe of mankind, and that places my loyalties solidly in the camp devoted to continuing the species. I assume there are others like me—Joseph, Helena, perhaps Alma, maybe others on the Operations Committee. I have been too long absent to know for certain. But you should understand that those of us who have knowingly chosen this path are strangers in a strange land, whether we are here in the New World or back in Iceland. The time has not yet come for those among us to choose their ultimate loyalty, but it is coming, perhaps sooner than you think. And when that time comes, I would have as many of the Mi’kmaq on our side as we can muster.”

  “You’ve told them what we are doing?”

  “Nothing specific, no. But I have told a few of the need to build a great ship to return to the land of Eidejel. They know that everything we do here is in service of building that ship, and they know that we are fighting against tremendous odds. They are a brave people who know not a little about persevering against a hostile world. I believe, when the time comes, at least some of them will be on our side.”

  O’Brien nodded thoughtfully. He was beginning to doubt the wisdom of his criticisms of Aengus. Perhaps it wasn’t so much that Aengus failed to see that his endeavor was doomed to destruction, but rather than Aengus saw it all too clearly. O’Brien was thinking in terms of keeping Orville and Wilbur running for a few more years; Aengus was already thinking ahead to Ragnarök.

  “But enough of such somber talk,” Aengus said. “My cooks are preparing a feast to celebrate your arrival. If we retire to the banquet hall now, we may get some blueberries before the locusts descend on them!”

  Chapter Fifteen

  O’Brien and his men stayed for three days at Camp Orville, resting and recovering from the voyage. They ate well, mostly thanks to Aengus’s Mi’kmaq allies, who hunted, fished, and collected fruits and berries throughout the region, as well as maintaining a few small farms. They traded the food to the settlers in exchange for tools, cloth, dyes, cookware, jewelry, and trinkets. When possible, the settlers traded in less durable items, hoping to minimize their temporal footprint as much as possible. Swords and other steel weapons were traded only in extreme circumstances, and the few guns the settlers possessed remained strictly in the hands of Aengus’s most trusted men. Beer and wine were occasionally shared at feasts, but not traded. This was part of Aengus’s strategy of keeping his Skraeling helpers close.

  On their second day at the camp, Aengus gave O’Brien a tour of the entire operation, taking him through the mill, where the felled logs were turned into usable lumber. The mill was powered entirely by the huge waterwheel connected to the bridge, utilizing an ingenious system of flywheels and pulleys to produce the power required to debark the logs, cut them to length, split them into cants and planks, and conduct the other operations required to create finished lumber. The final product was so good, Aengus told him, that when the mill sent its first load of boards downstream on a barge to Camp Wilbur, the Viking shipbuilders complained that the lumber was unusable. The Vikings, used to shaping very long planks with their axes to create a tight fit, couldn’t figure out what to do with the perfectly straight, smooth, uniform boards the mill delivered. Aengus had tried to convince the Norsemen of the advantages of the milled lumber, but to no avail, and ultimately he had ceded the matter to their expertise. The shipbuilders worked out a compromise with the millworkers, where a certain number of planks were left long and rough-hewn. Given the prodigious output of Camp Wilbur since then, Aengus considered the matter settled.

  Dorian, who was feeling much better after a meal of fresh food and a night on solid ground, observed the waterwheel and other machinery with great interest. While Aengus’s resident engineer, a man named Kjeld, explained the workings of the machinery to Dorian, Aengus took O’Brien across the bridge to a site where men were felling maple and ash trees. O’Brien began to see the reason Aengus employed so many Indians: the lumber operation was much larger even than he had been led to believe.

  “You’ve been cooking your numbers,” O’Brien said, as they observed a team of men limbing a fallen maple.

  “It’s hard to say how many natives are working for us at any given moment,” Aengus said.

  “Horseshit,” O’Brien said, with a grin. “You know exactly how many men you have working out here.”

  Aengus reddened. “Aye,” he said. “I thought it necessary to… downplay my reliance on the natives. As I said, it’s different here. Didn’t think the Committee would understand.”

  “You didn’t think I’d understand,” O’Brien said. “And frankly, I’m still not certain I do. But I respect what you’re doing here, Aengus. It couldn’t have been easy to carve this out of the wilderness, even with Kjeld and the others to help you.”

  “That it was not,” Aengus said. “I know my reports were optimistic after the first couple of years, but we were on shaky footing for at least the first five.”

  “Well, things seem to be running smoothly now.”

  “Ah, you’re determined to jinx me, aren’t you, O’Brien? Truth is, though, some days I look forward to Ragnarök, or whatever cataclysm awaits us in this part of the world. Fighting against impossible odds is one thing, but as the years go by, it becomes clear to me that time itself is our greatest enemy.”

  O’Brien nodded, understanding. The worst trap they could fall into was forgetting that they were strangers on this planet, in this time. If they became too comfortable here, began to think that this place was their home, they would never get off Earth.

  While Aengus showed O’Brien around Camp Orville, Sjávarbotn and the recently constructed karve, Norðurvindur
, were loaded in preparation for their departure: bags of flour, dried fish and other foodstuffs were traded for the lumber that would be needed for the oil derrick. They kept on board several weeks of rations, supplemented by some dried fruit and salted meats from Aengus’s pantry. O’Brien was certain his party had taken far more than they’d given, but thanks to Aengus’s good relations with the Mi’kmaq, Orville and Wilbur had more than enough food stockpiled to last until the next supply ship arrived. Aengus even contributed a barrel of wine, the worse of his two vintages, explaining that it would be no great loss if the barrel was tossed into the sea. Most of the supplies would be carried by the smaller ship; the mules were loaded into the hold of Sjávarbotn.

  Aengus also provided fourteen men to supplement O’Brien’s crew. The karve required at least fourteen men to row it, and as Sjávarbotn had already been running lean with a crew of twenty-six, including O’Brien, there were no men to spare. The new crewmen were all volunteers, although it was unclear to O’Brien how much they knew about what they were volunteering for. Seven were Norsemen and seven were Indians. O’Brien was not thrilled with the idea of adding natives to his party, but Aengus insisted that the men were trustworthy, spoke passing Frankish, and had enough experience rowing canoes down the coast that they were, at the very least, not prone to seasickness. In any case, Aengus said, he couldn’t spare any more Norsemen without crippling his shipbuilding operation.

  The day before the expedition was supposed to embark, Aengus held a great feast in the main hall of the lodge, inviting all the Norsemen and Indians who worked for him. The Norsemen, not including the twenty-four-man crew of the Sjávarbotn, numbered thirty-five. O’Brien estimated there were at least a hundred natives in the hall, among them the local chief, named Makkapitew, and his four wives. In all, there were nearly forty women present.

  O’Brien had noted that among the Committee’s strictures that had gone by the wayside was the no-fraternization rule: many of the Vikings had taken Mi’kmaq wives. O’Brien had seen several children around the lodge over the past days, many of whom seemed to be of mixed ethnicity. He tried not to think about the ramifications of this: steel could rust and technology could be lost, but genes had a way of sticking around. A thousand years from now, when DNA tests became commonplace, someone would make a remarkable discovery: a tribe of Indians with traces of Nordic DNA.

  It was well-known by the end of the twentieth century that Norsemen had set foot on North America, probably around the tenth century, but it was generally believed that their stay was short and inconsequential: they had left behind the remnants of a few longhouses and tools in Nova Scotia, but not much more. A strand of Nordic DNA running through a tribe of Indians would bely that notion, suggesting the Vikings had been around for some time, integrating their settlement with the native culture. A discovery like that would make a lot of people very curious, and prompt more research, looking for evidence of such a settlement. Neither Nordic DNA among the Mi’kmaq nor a long-term Viking settlement on Nova Scotia had ever been found, which put Camp Orville hard up against the Limits Of Known Information.

  Like most native tribes, the Mi’kmaq would be nearly wiped out after the arrival of European settlers half a millennium from now, mostly by the inadvertent spread of pathogens against which the natives had no natural resistance. It was possible, but unlikely, that the Nordic DNA would be lost in the genocide: after twenty or so generations, the genes would be spread widely among the population. A more likely explanation was an earlier extermination: all the mixed-race children O’Brien had seen running around the settlement in loin cloths, climbing trees and chasing squirrels, would be rounded up and killed. He didn’t know when, or by whom, but the known history of the Mi’kmaq left no other likely possibility. Unless there had been some widespread conspiracy in the twentieth century to cover up the presence of Nordic DNA, those genes had not survived to propagate.

  As Aengus stood at the head of the table to O’Brien’s right, toasting the expedition with the last of the good wine, O’Brien wondered if the old Irishman knew this. He had to, O’Brien decided. Aengus was too smart not to understand the ramifications of LOKI. He had allowed his men to marry and have children, knowing they were doomed. But what choice did he have? As Aengus had said, there was no room for half-measures. They had sent him to this untamed continent, charging him with providing lumber and ships, and he had put his all into it. He might have tried to keep Camp Orville small and run it surreptitiously, the way O’Brien had managed Camp Yeager, but Aengus had understood that caution in his endeavor would lead to failure.

  Besides, it was hard to muster anger at Aengus for keeping his men in the dark about their impending doom, considering the overarching secrecy of Pleiades. In a sense, they were all doomed: in O’Brien’s time, ninety-nine percent of humanity would be wiped out, and they had only a sliver of a chance of preventing total extermination. And that was to say nothing of the genocide of the Mi’kmaq and the other Indian tribes. So many dark clouds hung over Camp Orville that simply going to work every morning was an act of defiance. How could he be angry with Aengus for allowing his men a little bit of hope?

  He was still thinking about this when, as the feast wound down, a little boy about ten years of age ran to Aengus’s side and tugged on his sleeve. Aengus first tried to ignore the boy, and when this didn’t work, spoke crossly to him. But the boy continued to tug at him, pleading to him in Mi’kmaq. Aengus, his face turning red, shot a sheepish glance at O’Brien and then picked the boy up and set him on his lap. He spoke quietly to the boy for a moment, and the boy nodded. He set the boy on the floor and he ran off, apparently mollified. The boy had the sharp features and bronze skin of a native, but his hair was light brown, like Aengus’s.

  “Running an operation like this,” Aengus said to O’Brien, “is different on paper than in reality. Things become… complicated.”

  “Congratulations, Aengus,” O’Brien said. “Are there more?”

  Aengus shook his head. “I will not claim to have hewed closely to the vow of chastity I took so many years ago, but after his mother died, I….”

  “It’s all right, Aengus. You didn’t need to hide him from me. What’s the boy’s name?”

  “He is called Sunow,” Aengus replied. “It means ‘sugar maple.’ I met his mother, Watseka, when she interfered with a crew felling maples. She was collecting sap to make syrup, and she wouldn’t let my men cut down her trees. I ended up giving in to her and ordering the men to move on to another stand of trees. I was helpless before her. We married three months later. She died less than three months after that, not long after Sunow was born. Tuberculosis. Supposedly all my men were vaccinated before they left Höfn, but one of them must have carried it. We vaccinate the Indians who frequent the camp as well, but we ran short on supplies. By the time the next shipment arrived, it was too late.”

  “I’m sorry, Aengus.” Manufacturing vaccines for common diseases—smallpox, measles, and tuberculosis, among others—had been an early priority for Pleiades. A plague sweeping through one of their sites could cause major setbacks and, given the interconnectedness of all the sites, would likely spread to other locations as well. Outbreaks were of particular concern in North America, where the natives had no antigens to diseases that were endemic to Europe. Camp Orville likely ran out of vaccines because Aengus hadn’t been forthright about how many Indians were working for him.

  “I knew what I was getting into when I volunteered for this job,” Aengus said. “You know the story of Jonah?”

  “In the Bible? Sure. He was thrown overboard and swallowed by a whale. Not the story I want to be thinking about on the eve of a sea voyage, to be honest.”

  “Jonah survives his ordeal, though. Giving in to the Lord’s commands, he prophesizes the destruction of the city of Nineveh. While he waits in the desert for God to destroy the city, God causes a vine to grow up over Jonah’s head, giving him shelter. But then God sends a worm to eat the root of the vine, and
it withers. Jonah becomes angry at the loss of his shelter, but God reminds him that the vine was a gift, and that Jonah therefore has no cause to be angry. You see, O’Brien, Sunow is my vine.”

  O’Brien did not speak for some time. At last he said, “Didn’t God spare the city of Nineveh?”

  “The Lord had pity on the city, yes,” said Aengus. “I am afraid LOKI is not so forgiving. I understand that I am living here, quite literally, on borrowed time. Do you?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Eirik went immediately from Höfn to the administration building at Camp Yeager. It was well past dark, but Reyes was still in her office. He knocked, and she bade him come in.

  “You’re early, Eirik,” she said. “I didn’t expect to see you until tomorrow at the earliest.”

  “We made good time from Denmark, thanks to a strong southern wind.”

  “Still, you don’t need to brief me tonight. Unless there was some trouble with the ship…?”

  “No trouble. Some unexpected cargo, though. A priest. Thought you would want to know.”

  “I don’t need to remind you we have a rule about abducting priests. They tend to be missed.”

  “This one wasn’t an abduction. As I understand it, he’s a volunteer, though I’m not sure how much choice Ivar gave him.”

  Reyes groaned. “This is the priest who’s been haunting Camp Yeager? I’m sorry, Eirik. Ivar was supposed to deal with him.”

  “Ivar doesn’t have the resources to hold a prisoner indefinitely,” Eirik replied.

  “That wasn’t the only option.”

  “Respectfully, Chief, if you had wanted someone to dispose of the priest, I could have had someone handle it. But Ivar’s not a killer.”