The Voyage of the Iron Dragon

by Robert Kroese

  “Besides the men’s appearance and demeanor,” Theodora explained patiently, “it’s the quantity of the goods they purchase that raises interest. They buy only one thing, but they buy a lot of it. Usually all that’s available in the town. They load up a cart pulled by mules or oxen and are never seen again. One of my sources tells me that a year or so ago, these men bought so much linen in towns along the Rhine that none could be found at any price in the region for months.”

  “And you think the purchases of vast quantities of linen relates to the coal mine somehow?”

  “I think the modus operandi is the same. Men working in secret to acquire large quantities of some good or other, which then disappears to some unknown location.”

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “As far as I can figure, the first believable account of this sort dates from eight years ago.”

  Theo shook his head. “Not that I doubt your sources, but how is it this is the first we’re hearing of this? We have our own business dealings with the northern countries. Why have none of the merchants I work with mention these shortages or strange dealings? For that matter, I pay good money to the Norsemen to protect Rome from our enemies. Why haven’t I heard anything from Harald or his minions?”

  “I think you’ve answered your own question, love.”

  “You think Harald is behind all this?”

  Theodora shook her head. “It isn’t like Harald to work in secret. He certainly made no secret of his desire to unify Norway, nor of his intention to install Hrolfr as the Duke of Normandy. No, I think we’re dealing with another faction entirely, albeit working with Harald’s approval. The Dwarves’ appearances appear to occur in lands inside Harald’s sphere of influence.”

  “Harald’s loyalties are divided.”

  “More than that, I think we need to consider the possibility that Harald is deliberately keeping us in the dark. Not just us, of course: likely Edward and the King of Saxony as well, in all likelihood.”

  “A conspiracy among the Norsemen,” Theo mused. “What is Harald getting out of it?”

  “If I had to guess,” Theodora said, “I’d say silver. Take a look at this.” She pulled a gold coin from a pocket and handed it to Theo.

  Theo took the coin, holding it at arm’s length to get his eyes to focus on it. The front of the coin showed Basil, the prior emperor at Byzantium and father of the current emperor, Leo VI. The transverse depicted Leo’s mother, Empress Eudokia Ingerina. “A Byzantine solidus from the reign of Basil. What of it?”

  “No, this is a solidus from the reign of Basil,” Theodora said, handing him another coin. The metal of the second coin was slightly duller.

  “This one is a bit older,” Theo said.

  “Yes, by about forty years. But that isn’t the reason for the difference in appearance. I’ve washed them both in vinegar. The difference is in the metal, not the finish.”

  Theo shrugged. “There is going to be some variation in the metal used over time. It’s not unknown for Emperors having financial trouble to debase their coins.”

  “According to my moneylender friend, the composition and appearance of the solidus remained very consistent over Basil’s reign. I’ve looked at hundreds of them. None of them look like that.”

  “You’re saying it’s a counterfeit?”

  “Not only is it a counterfeit; it’s a counterfeit that uses more gold than the genuine article. Who would do that?”

  “Someone who doesn’t want to get caught.”

  “Exactly. As you say, coins tend to be debased over time. Emperors replace some of the gold with copper or tin, hoping no one will notice. Canny merchants, of course, are not fooled. They accept the coins as before, but when they come across the older, more valuable coins, they hoard them or melt them down to make jewelry or other wares. Over time, the good money goes out of circulation, replaced by the bad. Whoever made these coins is doing the opposite: they are deliberately spending coins that are more valuable than most of the coins of the same denomination across Christendom. The difference is subtle, mind you. As you see, they are virtually identical.”

  “Why not make them exactly identical?”

  “According to my moneychanger, it is very difficult to exactly match the composition of gold coins, unless you are using gold from the same mines. Byzantine gold is actually a precise mixture of ores from several different mines. Each mine contributes minute impurities which would be hard to match in the same proportions.”

  “Failing to make an exact copy, they made their copy better than the original.”

  Theodora nodded. “Only a careful observer seeing the two coins side-by-side would notice the difference. The point, though, is that the people who would notice will tend not to make an issue of it.”

  “You mean the authorities in Byzantium.”

  “And merchants, moneychangers and jewelers. Most won’t notice the difference, but those who do certainly won’t complain. This tells us a great deal about our Dwarves. For starters, they have, in addition to the technical expertise to make excellent forgeries, a ready supply of gold.”

  “So much that they don’t mind spending more than they need to in the interest of secrecy.”

  “Keeping their operations secret is more valuable to them than gold.”

  “Which explains why we’ve been unable to determine who they are or where they are bringing all of this stuff. Are you sending Sebastian back to the mine?”

  “No, they’ll be looking for his ship. I’ve got a spy in England who is on his way to the mine.”

  “Overland? What good will that do? We can’t find them unless we can follow their ships.”

  “We’re not going to be able to follow their ships. They’re careful, and the we can’t match their ships or their seamanship. It was only luck that Sebastian was able to tail them as far as he did in that tub of his. He’s a skilled sailor, but the Mediterranean is like a bathtub compared to the North Atlantic. Even if Harald isn’t directly assisting the Dwarves, it’s lucky he made it back alive. Norsemen don’t need an excuse to board a foreign ship in their home waters. I doubt Sebastian would go back even if I paid him what I did last time.”

  “You said I could afford it.”

  “You could. Once.”

  Theo winced. “Then we are out of options, unless your spy produces a miracle or Osric somehow finds his way back to us.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  While O’Brien’s party surveyed, the rest of the crew, led by Fritjof, hunted for game. With the loss of Norðurvindur’s supplies, they now had only enough food to last for about six weeks, and it was unclear at this point how much they could rely on the Indians for assistance. Chiggilli seemed willing to trade, but it was unlikely his people had enough food to feed twenty-six foreigners through the winter. Given the urgency of their situation, O’Brien okayed the use of the rifles for hunting, after providing a demonstration of the weapons to Chiggilli and the rest of the village. He’d have preferred to keep this technology under wraps, but it was better that they learned about the guns this way rather than from the sound of explosions echoing through the river valley. Besides, however friendly the Indians seemed, it didn’t hurt to let them know that the strangers were able to put up a formidable fight.

  O’Brien identified three potential drilling sites, ranked in order by their desirability. The most important features, to his thinking, were defensibility and proximity to the river. Being able to tap into the oil was crucial too, of course, but the petroleum reservoir under their feet was so vast that there was a good chance they’d hit oil anywhere they dug, if they went deep enough. As long as the reservoir wasn’t more than seventy feet down, the depth didn’t matter much. A deeper well would take a little longer to drill, but once it was drilled, the pressure of the earth above the reservoir would push the oil to the surface. In any case, they wouldn’t know how far they needed to drill until they tried it.

  The site first on O’Brien’s list was a l
ow hill arising from a wide, swampy area about a mile north of their current camp. It was free of trees and large enough to allow for the construction of the rig, a barracks and several other buildings, as necessary. The only access was by traversing the swamp, which was good and bad: the swamp was too shallow in places to allow a karve to pass, which meant Sjávarbotn had to be beached about two hundred yards upriver. On the plus side, the hill offered excellent visibility, and any attack by natives would require piloting canoes in plain sight or attempting to skulk through the swamp unseen. Of course, this would require the Norsemen to build additional, smaller boats to ferry men back and forth to the shore, as well as—with any luck—to transport barrels of oil.

  It took three days for O’Brien and Dorian, with the help of the others, to assemble the drilling rig. While they worked on this, a group of four other men—two Indians and two Norsemen—worked on a related task: they would run earth through a sieve at the riverbank to remove the sand and rocks, leaving only clay and fine silt. This would be their supply of drilling mud, which would be pumped through the drill shaft—called the “string”—to push the drilling debris to the surface.

  Once the drill was constructed, the difficult part began. Since they no longer had mules to power the drill, they would have to rely on human power. To get through the layer of sandy earth on top of the bedrock, they would us percussive force, lifting and dropping the shaft of the drill—called the “string”—to ram it deeper into the ground. A tapered iron bit was attached to the end of the string for this purpose. The men pushed at the spokes of a large, horizontal wheel, which was connected by pulleys to a mechanism that ratcheted the string up while lowering a counterweight composed of sandbags. At a height of eight feet, a switch would flip and the counterweight would be released, allowing the string to fall down the hole under its own weight. This would trigger the switch to flip back into its original position and the process would start over. As the string went deeper into the earth, segments of iron pipe were slid into the hole around the string to form a casing that would keep the hole from collapsing on itself.

  It took four men to power the apparatus. Lamochattee soon lost interest in the project and returned to his village, which meant that only one man could rest while the others worked. They rammed the string through the ground about an inch at a time until they reached bedrock about twenty feet down. It was nearly sundown on their first day of drilling.

  They disassembled the drill in the fading light and then carried the steel drill string segments and the forty-pound drill bit across the swamp to Sjávarbotn, where Fritjof and the rest of the crew had already retired. They didn’t have the manpower to set a guard at the rig every night, and in any case O’Brien judged the risk of attack from hostile Indians was low. Under the worst-case scenario, the rig could be rebuilt from pine lumber. The important thing was to hold onto the bit and the string segments. Replacing those would require a trip back to Iceland.

  After a meal of roasted boar, thanks to the efforts of the hunting parties, the crew slept the night on the deck of Sjávarbotn. The next morning, O’Brien selected four more men from the crew—three Mi’kmaq and one burly Norseman—for drill duty. Tests in Iceland had showed that drilling through bedrock was going to be significantly more difficult.

  O’Brien and Dorian spent the morning convert the rig drill through bedrock, which entailed swapping the percussion mechanism for a simple pulley system that would spin the drill string clockwise. Pulleys could be adjusted to control the speed and the amount of torque. While they worked on this, the others toiled at making drilling mud. The wet clay was delivered by wheelbarrow up a ramp to a two-hundred-gallon hopper, next to which was a water trough of about the same size. The water and clay would flow down chutes into a mixing vat to ensure the proper viscosity of the mud, and the mud, propelled by gravity, would flow down through the drill string.

  They began drilling just after noon. As it turned out, O’Brien underestimated the difficulty: after an hour grinding away at the wheel, the bit had sunk less than an inch. Dorian had calibrated the weight of the shaft to provide sufficient pressure to drill through the hardest rock; the problem was simply that the drill was turning too slowly. With humans rather than mules pushing the wheel, they’d had to set the speed to its lowest level just to get the wheel to turn. They were going to need more horsepower. The problem was that the wheel was designed for four mules, one harnessed to each of the four spokes, walking in tight circles. Two men could fit in the space allotted for a mule, but the man on the inside would have little leverage and would grow tired quickly.

  O’Brien called a halt to the operation, ordering two of the Norsemen to go to Sjávarbotn to fetch axes. When the men returned, the group trekked across the swamp to a stand of pines. They felled two pines that were each about ten inches in diameter at the base, chopped off the lower branches, and then trimmed the logs to about forty feet. They dragged the logs through the swamp and, after carving notches in middle to allow the two logs to fit together crosswise, lashed them together and then set the whole thing on top of the wheel. The arms of the cross were lashed to the four existing spokes, lengthening them by about five feet on each end. This would provide more leverage as well as more for more men to push at once. While they were working on this, Asger located one of the hunting parties, summoning the men to help with the well. The men were not happy to be called away from hunting to push at a wheel all day, but there was no help for it. Everyone in the crew would get their turn eventually.

  It took twelve men, three on each spoke, to drill three inches in an hour. By the time the sun set, they had drilled a little less than two feet into the bedrock—and they were running low on mud, because O’Brien had ordered the mud-making crew to assist with turning the wheel. They retired to Sjávarbotn for the evening, and the next day O’Brien’s core crew of five men returned with still more Norsemen, who had not yet enjoyed their turn at playing mule. Half of the crew was now working full-time on the drilling operation, either making mud or propelling the drill. This went on for a week, with crew members alternating between drill duty and hunting, as O’Brien grew increasingly worried that not only were they not going to ever hit oil, they were probably going to starve to death because half of their men were making mud or walking in circles all day rather than gathering food. If they didn’t hit soon, they would have to start over in another location.

  On the morning of the eighth day after hitting bedrock, while the men were taking a break so he could adjust the pulleys, he noticed an iridescent sheen on top of the water in the trench that directed the mud away from the will. His heart quickening, he knelt over the trench and dragged his fingers across the surface. When he rubbed his fingers together, they felt oily, and a familiar acrid scent hit his nostrils.

  Not wanting to jinx the operation, he quickly finished adjusting the pulleys and ordered the men back to work. Soon the string began to move with less resistance, and the mud flowing away from the well slowly turned from brown to black. O’Brien ordered the men to halt, and soon a thick black fluid began to bubble out of the top of the casing and onto the muddy ground.

  Camp Hughes was in business.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  The drill string was removed from the hole, and bags of cement were brought from Sjávarbotn’s hold. The cement was mixed into the mud and pumped down the shaft until it began to bubble up around the casing. The cement would harden, forming a barrier that would keep the oil from leaking out at the surface. More mud was pumped into the shaft to clear it of cement, and then water to clear the mud. Finally, the shaft was capped at the top.

  While O’Brien and his crew were working on the well, Fritjof and Chegaoo had successfully negotiated with Chief Chiggilli for two hundred pounds of corn flour to supplement their supplies. It was still questionable whether they would make it through the winter, but the riflemen had seen moderate success in their hunting, bagging several boars and deer, an alligator, and many smaller animals su
ch as rabbits and raccoons. They couldn’t afford to be picky in their choice of meat. Chiggilli’s tribe didn’t mind, as they did little hunting; they got their meat from fishing along the river and in the bay.

  A spigot was attached to the well and O’Brien put a crew to work filling barrels with oil. They had a supply of nearly two hundred oak barrels, which had held freshwater, beer, or other supplies on the voyage to North America. The barrels were lined with pitch-infused felt to protect the wood from the corrosive petroleum. Sjávarbotn’s hold also contained two thousand linear feet of steel band that could be used for making more barrels, provided the men could find suitable wood. O’Brien’s hope was to return to Höfn with some 400 barrels of crude oil.

  Now that they had established the location of the oil well, the men were free to set about making a more permanent camp. They had grown restless sleeping on the deck of Sjávarbotn and were anxious to start felling lumber for buildings. O’Brien was torn: his goal was to get Sjávarbotn loaded with oil and transport it to Höfn as quickly as possible. The sooner he could offer proof of the viability of their mission to the Committee, the sooner they could begin sending more ships and begin the process of converting Svartalfheim over from coal to petroleum. Thanks to the loss of Norðurvindur, though, they had only a skeleton crew. It would take at least twenty of their twenty-six men to crew Sjávarbotn for its return voyage, leaving only six men to defend the camp. Even with rifles, they wouldn’t stand a chance if they were attacked by one of the rival tribes in the area. He feared that if they abandoned the camp entirely, one of the tribes might claim the land, if for no other reason than to ransom it back to the foreigners. The price to get the land back probably would not be unreasonable, but O’Brien didn’t want to take the risk.

  The obvious solution was to rely on the Capinobi for protection, but Chegaoo cautioned against this. Chiggilli’s people certainly seemed friendly, but Chegaoo believed they remained suspicious of the newcomers and would not hesitate to turn on them if they thought it was to their advantage. He had gathered that the Capinobi existed in a delicate balance with the other tribes in the area, and that alliances were frequently formed to punish a tribe that was thought to be disrupting the balance. An alliance with the Capinobi would offer some security, assuming the Capinobi could be trusted, but it would also make the camp a target for the other tribes. O’Brien hoped they could avoid getting embroiled in intertribal politics at least until they were in a better position to bargain.