The Voyage of the Iron Dragon

by Robert Kroese

  O’Brien, firing his rifle from behind the stack of logs, watched the unfolding carnage in horror. The smoky haze that hung over the camp failed to conceal the reality of the situation: O’Brien had done everything wrong. The eastern wall, intended to give the settlers at least some minimal cover from an attack, now served to protect the attackers and conceal their numbers. He should have set a watchman as soon as it had begun to block their view, but he’d wagered that the lack of any report of hostilities in the area meant that the balance of power would hold long enough for them to finish the palisade. They could flee to the safety of Sjávarbotn, but that meant abandoning both the well and their oil supply. Retreating was not something they wanted to do unless they had no other choice—but thanks to the wall, there was no way to know if they faced forty attackers or four hundred.

  The decision was made a moment later, when another alarm went up from the south. Glancing to his right, O’Brien saw what had provoked the cry: twenty or more canoes, each manned by two Indians, were converging on the island from that direction. O’Brien’s view was blocked by riflemen and the well to his left, but he assumed more canoes were incoming from that direction. Another round of gunshots sounded, and several of the men advancing from the east fell. More continued to pour around both ends of the wall. If it were only the men attacking from the east, the defenders might have a chance to hold them off, but they couldn’t fight a battle on three fronts. Their only chance was to retreat to Sjávarbotn and hope that the Indians were more concerned with taking the fort than cutting off their escape route.

  O’Brien ordered the retreat, having to repeat the order three times to be heard over the ongoing gunfire. He had, at least, thought to drill the men on their escape plan: the riflemen would hold off the attackers while the others trudged across the swamp to Sjávarbotn. Once the first group was clear of the camp, the riflemen would retreat in two groups, those with cover following the men in the open. As the Mi’kmaq and Norsemen without rifles fled through the camp to the swamp, the riflemen continued to fire, cutting down the last of the visible attackers. By the time the next wave of attackers appeared, only the riflemen remained on the island. After another round of fire, O’Brien ordered the first group of riflemen to retreat. This element of the plan had worked better in their drills: faced with an actual attack, the Norsemen, even those standing on open ground, refused to flee.

  They might hold off the attackers to the east indefinitely, except that the Winchesters only held ten rounds. And if the Indians approaching in canoes cut them off from Sjávarbotn, it wouldn’t make any difference: they’d be surrounded by an overwhelming force, and their sacrifice would be for nothing: without rifles, the men on Sjávarbotn would be unable to hold the ship. They’d lose the island and then the ship, and they’d all be slaughtered. The nearest canoes were now only a hundred feet from the island. The attackers would hit land in a few seconds, and then it was just a short run up the hill. The only good news was that the Indians seemed to be focusing their attack on the island rather than those fleeing to Sjávarbotn.

  O’Brien slung his rifle over his shoulder and again shouted the order to retreat. He began naming men individually, ordering them to retreat. This was the problem with men who believed they’d go to Valhalla if they died in battle: they didn’t know when to quit. At last Asger obeyed, dropping his gun to his side and turning to run after the other men. Bjorn and several others followed. Those still standing continued to fire, dropping men as they came around the wall. The first canoes had hit ground and Indians were now running toward them from the south. When the eastern approach was clear, O’Brien sounded a general retreat and then turned to run toward Sjávarbotn. A cessation in gunfire told him the others followed.

  He splashed into the swamp, his boots sinking into the muddy floor. The water was about two feet deep most of the way to Sjávarbotn, making for slow and exhausting travel. Ahead of him, the first group of men were climbing over the gunwales into Sjávarbotn. To his left and right, canoes continued to race toward the island. He counted over forty of them. When he was about a third of the way to the ship, he heard shrill cries coming from behind him: the attackers had taken the island and were warning the men in the canoes to focus their attacks on the fleeing men. The canoes in the lead abruptly changed course, aiming to cut off the retreat. When he’d trudged another twenty feet, it had become clear they weren’t going to make it.

  As he took a breath to order his men to stand their ground and fire, O’Brien’s boot struck a rock. He lost his balance and fell headlong into the swamp, clutching his rifle in front of him. By the time he got to his knees, the canoes were almost on them. Fortunately, the Norsemen had not waited for his orders: standing in a ragged line across the swamp, the men opened fire. The canoes to the north were closer, so the men concentrated their fire in that direction. Several of the Indians were hit, and they slumped back in their canoes or fell overboard. A bullet struck the lead man in a canoe headed straight for O’Brien, but the second man was unscathed. With a grin on his face, the man threw aside his oar as the canoe’s momentum carried it toward O’Brien. He gripped a picked up a tomahawk.

  O’Brien, on his knees in the muck, with only his upper body out of the water, leveled the rifle at the Indian. The gun was covered with muck, and dirty water poured out of the barrel. If he were armed with a musket, he’d be as good as dead, but Gabe had claimed the rifle cartridges were waterproof. Assuming he was right, the only question was whether the gun was too gummed up with muck to fire. As the Indian pulled back his tomahawk to take a swing, O’Brien pulled the trigger. A hole appeared in the man’s cheek and he fell to the side, capsizing the canoe. His body slammed into O’Brien and he was pushed underwater. For several seconds, the Indian’s body jerked and flailed on top of him, knocking his rifle out of his hands and thwarting his efforts to get his head above water. At last the man was still, and O’Brien shoved him aside. Forcing himself to remain calm, O’Brien raised his head enough to take a breath, using the dead man’s body as camouflage. He vainly raked the floor of the swamp looking for his rifle while all around him Norsemen continued to fire. A few had run out of ammo and were standing ready to attack with the butts of their rifles. As the firing wound down, though, O’Brien saw that the immediate threat had been dealt with: the canoes to the north were capsized, empty, or manned by the wounded and the dead.

  The bad news was that more attackers were now splashing toward them from the direction of the island, and at least twenty canoes were still bearing down on them from the south. After altering their course to intercept the Norsemen, this group had disappeared behind a small island overgrown with bushes, but the first few canoes had now appeared on the far side, heading toward Sjávarbotn. They were less than a hundred yards away, and the Norsemen were out of bullets.

  “Run!” O’Brien cried, and this time the Norsemen needed no encouragement. They ran as quickly as they could through the swamp, but Asger was still twenty feet from Sjávarbotn when the canoes were on them. With no weapon to defend himself, O’Brien could do nothing but press on toward Sjávarbotn.

  Fortunately, the swamp this close to Sjávarbotn was too shallow even to allow a canoe to pass, so the Indians ran aground before they could attack. As their boats slid to a halt, the Indians leaped out and began splashing through the water toward the Norsemen. Asger, in the lead, had just put his hands on the gunwale. O’Brien, the oldest and slowest of the men, had fallen behind all but one of the Norsemen, a stocky man named Stigr. From behind him, he heard a whoop followed by a groan and then a splash as the Stigr’s body hit the water.

  His lungs burning, O’Brien forced himself to keep putting one foot in front of the other in the vain hope that he’d reach Sjávarbotn before he too was cut down by a tomahawk. It didn’t matter, he told himself. Pleiades would go on without him. They’d lost the well, but they’d proven they could do it. They’d inflicted enough casualties that he didn’t think the Indians would risk trying to take Sjáv
arbotn, and enough of the crew had escaped to bring her back to Höfn. Reyes and the Committee would try again, with someone else in charge—someone who wouldn’t make so many stupid mistakes.

  All of these thoughts ran through his head as arrows began to zip through the air around him. Yelps and screams sounded from behind him, followed by the sound of men falling into the water. As men ahead of him continued to vault over the gunwales, those who had fled earlier had lined up on the deck to fire arrows at the attackers. O’Brien allowed himself the hope that he might make it after all. Another Norseman, to his left, stumbled, falling onto his hands and knees. This was Karfi, one of the men who had joined them at Svartalfheim. His curses were cut short as his neck was cleaved. O’Brien heard at least three men splashing through the water behind him. More arrows flew, and more men fell. A hand reached down to him from the deck and he grabbed it. Fritjof hauled him over the gunwale and they fell together to the deck. As O’Brien lay gasping for breath, Fritjof scrambled to his feet, grabbing his bow from the deck.

  By the time O’Brien crawled to the gunwale, the battle was over. Someone had dragged the crate of spare ammunition up from the hold, but it wasn’t needed. The attackers, their numbers significantly decreased, did not try to take Sjávarbotn. Asger took aim at an Indian tending to a wounded man, but O’Brien ordered him to stand down. The Indians were allowed to drag away their dead and wounded unmolested. The Indians had lost at least thirty men, and many more were wounded. The Norse had lost three. Only one other man, the Indian who had been shot in the shoulder, had been seriously wounded. Bjorn, who had received medic training at Svartalfheim, tended to the wound, using sterile bandages and alcohol from the ship’s hold.

  Most of the Indians had already retreated to the island, where they jeered and taunted the men on Sjávarbotn. They hacked at the oil barrels with their tomahawks and axes that had been left behind until the ground was covered with the thick, black goo. After tearing apart the derrick, they beat on the spigot for some time before discovering they could open the flow by turning the wheel on top. At some point, probably from an unintentional spark, the oil caught fire. This provoked yelps of fear and then joy from the natives, as the store of oil barrels erupted into an inferno. The fire spread quickly across the oil-slicked ground to the palisade wall. The lumber was still green, so it did not burn readily, but as the flaming oil continued to run across the ground and pool around the logs, the wall eventually succumbed. After a couple of hours, the Indians grew tired of the choking black smoke that hung in the still air and they boarded their canoes to row back upriver. O’Brien and his men watched helplessly as everything they had worked for went up in smoke.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  After his immediate panic subsided, Osric quickly grew into the role of teacher. Höfn still felt like an uncomfortable mixture of a strange culture and a stage play, but in the classroom at least, he felt he understood what he was doing. The recruits were, for the most part, eager students: they had been pre-selected for aptitude from among the population at Höfn, and education was offered in part as a reward for hard work. He was even able to teach his students some of the Gospel: among the few books in the school’s library were Frankish translations of Genesis and several of the books of the New Testament. The hardest part was dealing with the constantly changing student population: in addition to the work around Höfn that often pulled students away, there was frequent turnover. New students appeared almost weekly, while others—generally the more advanced students—mysteriously vanished, presumably recruited to fill some position Beyond the Pass. Despite this, after three months Höfn began to feel almost like home.

  Almost from the beginning, Osric was called upon at times to be a counselor and surrogate parent to the recruits. Unlike the other recruits, who cycled through the longhouse dorms on their way to a semi-permanent “family,” Osric remained permanently assigned to the same longhouse where he’d started out. New arrivals tended to be traumatized and asked a lot of questions, which put Osric in the awkward position of having to explain that certain things were not talked about at Höfn. It was one thing to explain taboo subjects to an adult; it was quite another to explain the concept to a ten-year-old child who would never see his parents again.

  “I hate them,” fumed one little boy named Stephen, sitting on a bench in the longhouse next to Osric. Stephen had arrived three days earlier from Frankia. Osric gathered that Stephen’s family had been killed in a Viking raid of a village north of Paris. Stephen had hidden out in a barn for two days after the raid, where he was found by men in Eirik’s employ. It wasn’t clear to Osric that Eirik’s men were involved in the raid, but such distinctions were lost on Stephen. “They are wicked, wicked men,” he seethed through clenched teeth, tears running down his cheeks. “I will hate them forever.”

  Osric did his best to comfort Stephen but did not attempt to dissuade him of these sentiments. Young children were adaptable, and Osric knew that even now the boy was trying in vain to convince himself that his anger would last. Stephen was put to work repairing the roofs of the longhouses, and although he was surly for the first few days, he found that if he worked hard and did a good job, he was rewarded with food and time to play with the other boys. His occasional tantrums were ignored by the foreman and gradually less frequent. After eight weeks, he was allowed to attend Osric’s classes in the afternoon, which he enjoyed greatly. At times, though, Osric would find the boy sitting alone, staring into space with tears on his cheeks, speaking quietly to himself. Sometimes Stephen would pound on his own legs or chest with his fists, as if trying to remember the pain of seeing his family killed.

  One day, Stephen didn’t show up to class, and none of the other students would say where he was. A few days earlier, Stephen had threatened to run away to Hella, a village about twenty miles down the coast to the west. Osric had informed him that Hella was populated by Norsemen as well, and in any case it was well-known that the people of Hella did not welcome runaways from Höfn. Stephen had responded that he would head east, but Osric had not taken him seriously: there were no settlements to the east. After a five mile walk along the coast, he would come to an impassible cove, and the only thing to the north was a rugged, desolate mountain range that extended many miles inland. Worried that Stephen did not realize the futility of the task he’d set for himself, Osric set his class to practicing their letters and went after the boy.

  This was a violation of security protocol: he was supposed to alert Ake or one of the men on guard duty at the docks, but Osric knew what they would do: nothing. Runaways were expected to learn the hard way just how dependent they were on the community at Höfn. Unless Stephen traveled into the valley Beyond the Pass, no one would bother him until he returned to Höfn—at which point an appropriate punishment would be meted it.

  Osric had hoped to catch the boy before anyone realized either of them was missing, but Stephen had a head start of over an hour. Osric traveled east along the coast and then turned north at the cove, as he assumed Stephen must have done. It was now mid-October, and the days were growing very short. If he didn’t find Stephen in the next two hours, he would be forced to stumble home over the rocks in the dark or risk freezing to death. He’d had no time to gather food or water, nor even a torch to light his way back to Höfn.

  As the sun sank below the mountains, he caught sight of a distant light in the hills to the north. Had Stephen lit a fire? If so, he was better prepared for this journey than his would-be rescuer. Night came more quickly than Osric expected; he was not yet accustomed to the way darkness swept over this land like a shroud. Realizing the way behind him was as arduous as that ahead, Osric pressed on, using the light as a guide.

  He spent the next several hours clawing his way over rocks, frequently stumbling and banging his knees and elbows. His progress was so slow as to be nearly imperceptible, and he might have given up entirely if the movement of his limbs weren’t the only thing staving off the chill. Slowly, the light grew clos
er. Eventually the rocky terrain gave way to a gently sloping plateau, but Osric’s hopes of traveling more quickly were dashed the first time his toe hit a boulder jutting out of the ground, sending him sprawling onto his face. He spent another hour picking his way across the plateau, sometimes on his hands and knees, before he could make out the source of the light. It was a torch wedged into a cleft in a rock wall at the far end of the plateau, obviously put there as a signal: someone was expecting him.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  The fire burned all night, illuminating the river and the woods for a mile around with a surreal orange glow. Black smoke blotted out the stars and filled the crew’s sinuses with an acrid, sulfurous taint. Fritjof had wanted to row Sjávarbotn downstream to escape the smoke, but O’Brien held out some hope that they might be able to salvage some supplies from the camp once the oil on the surface had burned off.

  By morning, the flames had subsided considerably. Puddles of oil still burned, and plume of fire some six feet tall roared at the top of the well shaft. At some point during the night, the heat had ruptured the well head, so oil gushed directly from the vertical pipe.

  No supplies of any value remained. Most of the food stores remained on board Sjávarbotn, but nearly everything else had been at the camp. Axes, shovels, picks, saws, and hammers had all disappeared, along with copper cookware and every other sort of tool. The tents and bedrolls that hadn’t been taken were burned beyond any possibility of use. The unfinished wall had burned down to nothing. About the only thing that remained was the pile of pine logs, which had been stacked on higher ground where the oil hadn’t flowed. It was all O’Brien could do not to fall to his knees in despair.