by James Duncan
The first enemy splashed into the river, Ulf’s arrows not able to stop the flood of shielded warriors. One man nearly reached them as the ship started moving faster than he could manage in the waist-deep water, and as he was left behind he launched his spear with a howl of anger. The spear arced towards the rowers, and Leif threw out a hand and caught it, plucking it from the air like a hawk snatching a sparrow. The man’s howl of rage died in his throat at the remarkable sight, and then he ducked behind his shield as Leif returned his spear. But for all the skill of his catch, his throw, propelled by tired arms as it was, merely rattled off the side of the shield and splashed into the river.
And then they were gone. As suddenly as the enemy had arrived, they were left behind, shouting and cursing and calling them cowards from the receding riverbank. Ragnvald sat down heavily in the bottom of the boat as Ulf growled at the men to keep rowing lest they lose control and careen into a bank, dooming them all. But Ragnvald couldn’t move. He just sat in the bottom and tried to breathe. Leif took half the men off the oars to rest and then slumped down next to him.
‘Did you really catch that fucking spear?’ asked Ragnvald, looking at him incredulously. ‘Or am I so tired I am losing my mind?’
Leif laughed. ‘I am as surprised as you. I didn’t intend to – it just happened. One moment I saw the spear coming, and the next it was in my hand. I don’t think I made any decisions in between.’
‘Well, it was a feat for a skald song.’ Ragnvald closed his eyes and lay back against the hull of the boat, his entire body relaxing and a dozen burning aches flaring up in his mind.
‘Well, I hope the throw doesn’t make it into a song. A ten-year-old child could have done better.’
‘I have often thought that about you,’ quipped Ragnvald weakly.
Leif smiled, and they sat there for a while in silence. ‘So what do we do now, return home?’ Leif asked.
But Ragnvald had no reply. He had passed out, open mouth resting on his chest. Leif smiled to himself and looked out as the bank slid past them, river and reeds giving way to mudflats and, finally, the wide, cold sea.
Chapter 18
A Serpent in the Steel
After weeks of repetitive and simple work on basic axes and spearheads, at last Ordulf was called in by Dengir at the smithy to watch the final stage of the making of the mystery sword that had lain aside while other work was completed. The blade was sitting on a cloth in a cradle. It had been ground to shape and smoothed with stones but not yet fully sharpened or polished. One of the other smiths had cast a thick bronze cross guard and pommel, which he had spent weeks carving with wild shapes and figures, then inlaying with silver patterns, burnished to a high polish until they were utterly magnificent to behold and quite unlike anything Ordulf had seen before. They lay next to the sword, along with a dark, wooden hilt and its bronze bands, waiting to be fitted.
There was a stone trough in the corner of the room that Ordulf had never seen used before. Now, an apprentice was stirring a strange mixture in the trough, taking some crushed dark berries and a brown-grey powder and mixing them into the liquid. It smelled earthy and tangy. He stared at it in fascination; he had never seen such a thing before in a forge. The master smith took up the blade and washed it down with some sort of soap, carefully scrubbing it and then removing the mess with a clean cloth under clear running water from a jug. When the blade was clean, and touching only the tang, he carried it over to the trough and carefully placed the point at one end on the smooth stone under the liquid’s surface. He then laid the rest of the blade down into the mixture. Removing his fingers, he licked one and rolled the flavour around on his tongue, deep in concentration.
He grunted and held up four fingers to the apprentice who nodded and sat down beside the trough, arms crossed. Ordulf wondered at the purpose but still didn’t have the language to ask such a complex question. Not that Dengir would answer a question – he almost never did. In fact, Ordulf had rarely seen the man speak at all, even to the other smiths. The master smith left and Ordulf sat there, watching and waiting for something to happen. The apprentice was watching the trough intently, occasionally stirring it but being careful not to disturb or touch the blade. After a short time, the master smith returned with another apprentice carrying a jug of water and a clean sheepskin. Dengir went over to the dark trough, which the apprentice was still carefully stirring every now and then. He reached into the liquid and brought out the blade. Carrying it over to the apprentice, they cleaned it with the wool and the water while Ordulf craned his neck to get a better look.
The smith finally turned around, the blade wrapped in the purple-stained wool, and ushered Ordulf outside into the dying light of the day. He held up the wrapped blade for Ordulf’s attention and then carefully peeled back the wool. Ordulf’s heart caught in his mouth. His eyes opened in wonder at the sight of the blade.
He had seen that blade go into the liquid with his own eyes, and it had been plain shining steel, stoned smooth but not polished. The blade now before him in the pale evening light, sparkling in the light of the setting sun, looked like one of the carved wooden arms of the jarl’s chair, but subtler, deeper, more convoluted, and yet breathtakingly beautiful.
In the centre of the blade, running down towards the tip, two alternating shades of metal twisted and writhed and wrapped around each other in three distinct strips, their paired strands crossing, re-crossing, splitting and entwining. It looked like twisted rope, but more complex, more alive, like a roiling mass of serpents frozen in time, wrestling in the heart of the steel. The edge was different. For two finger widths along each side of the blade, the steel looked like water rippling at a river’s edge. Lines and waves of dark and light steel ran along the sides, piling into each other, rising, falling, disappearing under new ones, before appearing again further down. Pools of circles like raindrops on water were scattered through these waves. It reminded Ordulf of wood grain in the way the lines flowed around these ringed areas.
It was utterly the most beautiful blade he had ever seen. He brought his gaze up to the Norse smith, who was smiling coyly. ‘Why?’ Ordulf asked, pointing at the patterns. Dengir cocked his head at Ordulf’s and for nearly the first time replied briefly, before dismissing Ordulf for the night. Ordulf couldn’t catch the whole meaning of the short reply, but he thought that the smith said it was for strength, and to give the blade ‘spirit’. He was puzzled by the meaning of both. He thought back to the repeated folding of the different metals and pondered the pattern it had left. He realised the cunning of the process. His own swords back in Minden were variable in quality simply because the material varied. This meant that, for anything but the best proved steel, they sometimes cracked or failed at weak points. It was something he had never really questioned. Some swords failed. He didn’t even see it as a problem; it was simply the way of it.
Dengir’s method was so simple. By mixing the metals the way a tailor might mix dyes for cloth, he was getting a more consistent result in the final blade. In the central twisted sections, any small failures or impurities in the steel would be limited in size and would not travel through the softer metal entwined around the harder, making bad cracks less likely. It was genius. Ordulf suddenly felt very ignorant. How could he not have known about this method? How could they not have used it back home? He thought through the process of making this serpent blade and realised that it had probably taken them two or three times as long to make as the fine blade he had made for the count’s son. Probably ten times as long as it took to make one from the batch of simple swords for the count’s men. And it wasn’t even finished yet. Perhaps this was simply too labour-intensive. Perhaps the art was lost?
Dengir rewrapped the blade and handed it to one of the junior smiths to store before dismissing them all for the day. Ordulf returned to the house with only one thought in his mind. He needed to make one of those blades. He lay awake for much of the night, imagining what he could do with those bands of steel now that the s
ecret was opened to him.
The next day, he asked to make his own sword in a mixture of gestures and basic Norse. Dengir flatly refused to let Ordulf make his own serpent blade. Ordulf was frustrated and miserable. Instead, Dengir let him work as part of the hammer team on a new blade he was starting, effectively making him a junior smith rather than simply an apprentice. Ordulf accepted this small advance with as little sulking as he could manage.
They forged the steel bars into a billet, and Ordulf and the junior smiths hammered it into shape at the direction of Dengir. Ordulf could see it was a lot less complex than the serpent blade, with fewer folds and twists and a core of pure iron, much like the swords he had made at home. Perhaps that was why he was trusted to help. He made a few mishits when he didn’t fully understand the sung forging directions, which earned him curses and scowls from the wizened master smith, but in general he thought it went well. The blade was finished, and they started another. These blades were clearly of lower quality and simpler design, but Ordulf revelled in it, finally hammering hot steel into the swords.
When the serpent-patterned blade was fitted and finished with its glorious inlaid guard and hilt, the master smith brought it out into the courtyard to inspect one final time in the light. He spent a long time going over the edges and inspecting the fit of the handle and the detail and integrity of the fabulous inlay work in the fittings. The lobed bronze pommel burst with lines of silver, twisting and writhing around and across the domed surfaces and then collecting down into the valleys between them until all were combined at the tip of the pommel where a large bronze cap hid the peened head of the tang. The silver was worked in so that it looked like a landscape of rivers or the roots of a tree. It was breathtakingly beautiful.
The cross guard held a runic inscription that Ordulf could not read. He had not learned Norse script at all, as Otto said he had no need of it as a slave and a smith. However, the pattern was quite beautiful and drew the eye further into its intricacies the more you looked at it. The dark, wooden hilt was uncovered except for bronze ribbing laid into grooves cut into the wooden surface.
The edges of the blade had been sharpened at a shallow angle, which removed the very outside of the rippled pattern but also smoothed the edge so that it did not have the slight peaks and troughs of the patterned surface. This made the outside line of the blade shine like a rim of light around the darker etched flats. The body of the sword itself had been lightly polished so that the lighter areas shone more brightly and the darker areas were slightly more pronounced. It was entrancing, and Ordulf could not take his eyes off it.
Ordulf had seen the scabbard being made. It was constructed from two shaped wooden halves, coated on the inside with wool, trimmed short and snugly holding the blade. The wooden shell was coated in tough leather on the outside, dark brown and reinforced with engraved bronze fittings at the tip and throat. Ordulf had been curious about the sheepskin inner surface and asked the smith why it was there. In Minden, they had used linen linings or no lining at all. The smith had taken part of the sheepskin and wiped it on the blade, leaving an oily smear. Ordulf nodded in understanding. The wool was naturally slightly oily but had also been impregnated with some sort of plant oil; the sword would be well protected from rust in that scabbard. On the side of the scabbard, on the side facing outwards as it was worn, a carved bone dragon lay. The tail started half way down the scabbard and it thickened as it reached the body of the beast, which sat snarling with its open mouth at the throat of the scabbard, a single blazing eye of red gemstone meeting his gaze.
All in all, it was quite the most beautiful sword Ordulf had ever seen, and he was spellbound. ‘Who is it for?’ he asked Dengir.
‘It’s for me,’ said a voice behind him. Ordulf turned and saw that Jarl Ragnvald was behind him, standing in the entrance to the forge with a pair of his huscarls, Leif and Sebbi, and Otto alongside them. He was dressed in fine clothes, and his men were wearing their swords with shields slung over their backs. He was smiling at Dengir, who slid the sword into its elaborate scabbard and placed it on a trestle table for the jarl to inspect.
Jarl Ragnvald strode across the packed earth of the yard to the table. He removed his own sword from its scabbard, drab and tattered by comparison. He examined it with a strange expression, running his thumb over some jagged, unrepaired damage along the centre of one edge of the blade. Ordulf almost winced at the state of it. No wonder the jarl needed a new sword – that one was ruined.
Ragnvald laid the old sword down on the table and then moved his hands to the new one. He picked up the scabbarded blade, holding it out in one hand, running the other over the tight, dark-brown leather, fingers moving up to explore the shape of the beautiful dragon’s head. The dragon with a sword sheathed in its throat.
He brought the hilt up to inspect it in the light, eyes wondering at the inlay of silver and the carved runes in the bronze cross guard and the pommel. His eyes were alight with pleasure, and he finally seized the hilt and slowly drew the blade from the serpent’s throat, the rippled, twisted steel coming out into the sunlight with the quietest rustling of wool, the deathly whisper of a sword being freed from a scabbard.
Ragnvald pulled the tip of the sword free with an uncontrolled sigh of pure delight and raised it into the air, watching how the light played over the pattern. Finally, coming out of his personal trance, he looked over at Dengir. ‘Magnificent.’
The stone-faced Dengir gave the slightest hint of a smile and a faint nod of his head. ‘What will you name it, my lord?’ asked Leif, standing at Ragnvald’s side, marvelling at the blade along with the rest of them.
Ragnvald looked thoughtful for a moment and then brought the tip of the blade back to the scabbard, pushing it gently back into the dragon’s mouth, then sheathing it, running it all the way home. ‘Drekitunga,’ he said, rubbing the white horn teeth of the fantastical beast that had swallowed the sword.
Ordulf looked around, puzzled. Otto tried to mouth something at him from across the yard, but Ordulf couldn’t make it out. Ragnvald caught the look and smiled, saying something to Otto, who nodded.
‘It means “dragon tongue”,’ he said, not needing to explain it further. Ordulf smiled. It was a good name. The idea of naming a sword was alien to him, but seeing the gleaming red eye of the dragon on the scabbard made it seem almost alive. It seemed right that it should have a name. Ragnvald was speaking to Otto again, and Ordulf was trying to follow, picking out words he knew but missing the flow of meaning.
‘The jarl wants to know what you think of his sword,’ said Otto with disinterest. He was the only one in the yard who had not been captivated by the sword’s unveiling.
Ordulf smiled unashamedly. ‘It is the finest sword I have ever seen.’
Ragnvald laughed heartily at the translation. Then he said something that made Dengir grunt and give Ordulf a filthy look. ‘So do you still think your pointy swords are better?’ Otto asked. Ordulf winced, trying not to meet the eye of his incredulous master smith. Why had Otto told Ragnvald of that conversation?
‘I don’t know,’ he finally replied, honestly.
Ragnvald put the magnificent sword on the table and spoke briefly to Leif, who nodded and left the smithy at a jog. The jarl picked up his old sword and twirled it around in his wrist, loosening and stretching. The remaining warrior took up his shield and moved into the empty space in the centre of the yard, facing the jarl.
‘The jarl says we should find out,’ drawled Otto, who was failing to disguise his boredom but still working his way through the back-and-forth translation.
‘This was my father’s sword, Bjóðr. The best sword I have ever owned.’ Ragnvald picked it up and gazed at it reverently for a moment. ‘But its days of fighting are over. This last damage…’ Ragnvald paused, and for a moment his face held a deep sadness. ‘This last damage cannot be repaired.’ The fleeting look passed, and he looked up again at Ordulf, regaining his composure. ‘So I have brought it here so that Dengir c
an cut it down, remake it as a seax and forge a spearhead from the tip.’ Otto shrugged under Ordulf’s curious gaze and did not elaborate further.
As he was looking at the old sword, Leif came back, breathing hard and carrying one of the captured Minden blades and a Saxon shield. ‘Ah, good,’ said Ragnvald, and he directed Sebbi, who was standing in the centre of the yard, to take the Christian weapons. Then Ragnvald took up Bjóðr and his own shield, and the two men faced each other in the slight crouch of a combat stance.
They faced each other for a few moments, exchanging words, and then the huscarl attacked, slowly and deliberately. He closed to striking range with a step and thrust, Ragnvald easily fouling the attack with his outstretched shield, knocking it to one side. Again, the man attacked, trying to bash Ragnvald’s shield out of the way with a charge to get into position to thrust at the body. Ragnvald fended the charge off and danced to the side, the thrust clattering harmlessly from the edge of the shield.
Ordulf could see clearly what the problem was. Ragnvald’s outstretched shield was making it impossible for Sebbi to get control, or get close enough for a thrust, not without exposing himself to a counter. His own shield, strapped to his forearm, could not reach out nearly as far from his body to cover himself. As soon as Ordulf saw it, it seemed obvious.
Sebbi became frustrated and started swinging at the jarl’s shield, hoping to force it out of position with rapid cuts. Ragnvald bounced and moved, shield recoiling from the blows without much damage. Then, as one heavy swing came in, he turned the top of the shield into the swing and let the sword bite into the edge of it. The sword stuck fast in the end of the grain and Ragnvald twisted violently, ripping the sword from his opponent’s grip. He had never even made an attack.
