One King's Way thatc-2

by Harry Harrison

  Valgrim was paying no attention. With a scowl for Brand, he reached out one hand, seized the spear in Shef's grip, and turned it so that he could read the runes on it. After a moment he released the spear, turned and walked wordlessly off.

  “He didn't like that,” muttered Brand. “What do the runes say?”

  “Gungnir. It's not my spear anyway, I took it from Sigurth Ragnarsson.”

  Most of the other priests of the Way had moved off after their leader, leaving Thorvin and Hund behind. As they departed, Shef saw the other group coming towards them under the blue and silver banner. He gaped up at it: a strange design, of a beast with snarling face, seemingly throttling itself with one paw while clutching its own ankle with another. He dropped his eyes, found himself face to face with the most striking woman he had ever seen.

  He would not have thought her beautiful if some one had described her. Since his childhood Shef had framed his ideas of beauty on Godive: tall but slight of figure, with brown hair, gray eyes, and the perfect complexion she had inherited from her Irish slave-concubine mother. This woman was tiger to Godive's sleek leopard: as tall as Shef, with broad cheekbones and great green eyes set wide apart. Her breasts swelled out the dark green gown she was wearing, and heavy hip-bones showed through as she walked. Two long plaits hung round her face and over her shoulders, held in place by a heavy gold band low over her forehead. She was not a young woman either, Shef realized belatedly, but double his age or Godive's. At her side walked a young boy, maybe ten years old.

  Confused, and unwilling to face the woman's stare, Shef dropped on one knee to the boy's level.

  “And who are you?”

  “I am Harald, son to King Halvdan and Queen Ragnhild. What happened to your eye?”

  “Someone put it out with a hot needle.”

  “Did it hurt?”

  “I fainted before it was finished.”

  The boy looked scornful. “That was not drengiligr. Warriors do not faint. Did you kill the man who did it?”

  “I killed the man who caused it. The one who did it is standing over there, and the one who held me. They are friends.”

  The boy looked nonplused. “How can they be friends if they blinded you?”

  “Sometimes you will take from your friends what you will not from your enemies.”

  Belatedly Shef realized the boy's mother's thigh was only inches from his blind side. He rose to his feet, conscious as he did so of the strong female warmth. There, on the jetty, with dozens of men all around, he could feel his manhood stirring as it had not for all the Ditmarsh girl's efforts. In another moment he would feel the urge to throw her down on the wooden deck—if he were strong enough, which he doubted.

  The queen looked scrutinizingly at him, seemingly aware of what he felt. “You will come when I call you, then,” she said, and turned away.

  “Most men do,” muttered Brand again in Shef's ear.

  Over his voice, as he watched the green gown retreating magnificently towards the snow, Shef heard a sound he would once have picked out through any distractions: the clink-clink, beat-beat of light and heavy hammers working at a forge. And other sounds too which he could not place.

  “We've a lot to show you,” said Thorvin, finally making his way up to his former apprentice.

  “Right,” said Brand. “But first, the bath-house. I can see the lice in his hair, and it puts me off even if Queen Ragnhild likes it.”

  “He came stalking ashore with one eye and a spear in his hand with the ‘Gungnir’ runes on it,” growled Valgrim. “What else has he to do to declare himself Othin? Ride an eight-legged horse? He is a blasphemer!”

  “Many men have one eye,” replied Thorvin. “And as for the ‘Gungnir’ runes, he did not have them cut. The only reason he has the spear is that Sigurth Snake-eye threw it at him. If there is a blasphemer, it is Sigurth.”

  “You have told us that when he first appeared to you out of nowhere two winters ago he said he came from the North.”

  “Yes, but all that he meant was that he came from the north of his kingdom.”

  “And yet you have presented this to us as if this accident were proof that he is the One we await. That he is the One who will come from the North to overthrow the Christians and put the world on its better path. If this aping of Othin is an accident, then what he said to you was an accident. But if what he said to you was a sign from the gods, then this too is a sign. He is setting himself up as Othin. And I, the priest of Othin in this college, I say that such as he cannot have Othin's favor. Did he not refuse the Othin-sacrifice when he had the Christian army at his mercy?”

  Thorvin fell silent, unable to see a way round Valgrim's logic.

  “I can tell you that he is one who sees visions,” put in Hagbarth. “And not only in his sleep.”

  The listening priests, a score of them together, looked at him with interest. They had not formed their holy circle nor set up the holy cordon of rowan-berries round the spear and the bale-fire: what they said was still unprivileged, not done under the guidance of the gods. Still, they were not forbidden to speak of holy things.

  “How do you know?” grunted Valgrim.

  “I saw him in Hedeby. He sat on a mound outside the town, a grave-mound, an old king's howe. They told me he made his way there unprompted.”

  “Means nothing,” said Valgrim. He quoted derisively lines from one of the traditional poems of the past:

  “Then the bastard sat on the barrow,

  When the princes parted the spoil.“

  “Bastard or not,” Hagbarth went on. “I saw him with his eyes wide open, seeing nothing and replying to no-one. When the fit passed I asked him what he had seen and he replied, he saw things as they were.”

  “What did he look like when the fit was on him?” asked a priest with the sign of Ull the hunter-god round his neck.

  “Like him.” Hagbarth jerked a thumb at the most respected of the priests in the conclave, Vigleik of the visions, seated unspeaking at the end of the table.

  Slowly Vigleik stirred. “One other thing we must remember,” he offered. “The evidence of Farman priest of Frey, our brother still in England. He says that two winters ago he was in the camp of the Ragnarssons, searching for new knowledge, trying to see whether even among the Loki-brood there might be the One we await. He had seen Thorvin's apprentice whom they now call King Shef, but he knew nothing of him, thought him only an English runaway. Yet the day after the great battle with King Jatmund he too saw a vision, in daylight. A vision of the smithy of the gods. In it he saw Thorvin's apprentice in the shape and place of Völund, the lame smith. And he saw Othin speak to him. Farman told me, though, that Othin did not take him under his protection. So maybe Valgrim, as priest of Othin, is right to fear him. There may be other plans than Othin's.”

  Valgrim's chest swelled with rage, both at the challenge to Othin's plans and at the thought that he might be a prey to fear. He did not venture to defy Vigleik. Among the priests who had gathered to the College from the whole of Norway, and the other Scandinavian lands, there were more who knew of Vigleik the Seer than of Valgrim the Wise—wise in the ways of kings and the arts of government. One of the arts of government was to keep silent till the moment came.

  “Guidance may come to us,” he said pacifically.

  “Who from?” asked a priest from Ranrike to the north.

  “From our holy circle, when the time comes to form it.”

  “Also,” said Vigleik, “if we are fortunate, from King Olaf. He is the wisest of kings on the earth, though not the most lucky. I suggest we invite him to attend our conclave, to sit outside the circle. He is not the One, though once we thought he might be. Yet if anyone may recognize a true king, it is he.”

  “I thought Olaf Elf-of-Geirstath was dead,” muttered the Ranrike priest to one of his back-country fellows.

  Washed from head to foot in a great tub of heated water, his hair cut short and scrubbed again and again with lye, Shef stepped cautiously a
cross the old, hard-packed snow of the College's precinct. His clothes had been taken away and replaced with a hemp shirt and tight-fitting woolen drawers, a thick wool tunic and trousers over them. Brand had repossessed the bearskin cape, muttering that if he found lice in that he would send Shef out to hunt down another one, but he had replaced it with a mantle of homespun. His gold bracelets again shone on Shef's biceps, though he had refused to replace the gold circlet of kingship on his cropped head. He walked clumsily in a pair of thick winter boots borrowed from Guthmund, padded out with wound rags. In spite of the cold and the snow, he felt warm for the first time in days. Udd the undersized steelmaster kept pace with him. After the rough administrations of Brand, Shef had greeted Cwicca and the rest of his faithful gang, handed Karli over to them, scowling distrustfully, and told them to consider him a new and valued recruit, and then become aware that Udd was standing to one side, tongue-tied as ever. One only became aware of Udd when he had something to say or to show. It was certainly something to do with metal. Remembering the forge-noises he had heard from the jetty, Shef clapped Udd on the shoulder, added a final warning about good behavior to Karli, and followed Udd out into the open. Cwicca and the other English ex-slaves who had come to this unknown land in the north had promptly slammed the door, wedged every chink they could find, and returned to their normal habit of clustering round the fire in as much animal warmth as they could manage.

  Udd was not heading towards the place from which familiar forge-noises came, but to a small building separate from the main frequented halls and dormitories. As they walked a figure shot suddenly past them at a speed no man could match. Shef jumped to one side, fumbling for the sword at his belt, saw the figure sweep away down the slope to the township well below.

  “What was that?” he gasped. “Skates? On snow? Downhill?”

  “They call 'em skis,” said Udd. “Or ski-runners or something. Wooden boards you tie to your feet. They all use 'em up here. Strange folk. But now look at this.” He pushed the door open and led Shef into an empty shed.

  For a few moments Shef could see nothing in its dark interior. Then, as Udd fumbled open a shutter he saw a great stone wheel lying in the middle of the shed. As his eyes grew used to the dimness, Shef realized that there were actually two wheels, one over the other. A machine of some kind.

  “What do they do?” he asked.

  Udd lifted a trapdoor, pointed under the shed to a channel below. “When the snow melts there's a stream under here. See the wheel down there? With the paddles on it? Water flows, turns the paddles. Axle on that wheel turns these two above. The surfaces touching each other have channels cut in 'em. Pour grain in. Grinds the grain.”

  Shef nodded, remembering the monotonous noise of the old woman grinding corn in the Ditmarsh hut, the job that never ceased, the job that warriors hated.

  “Does it much faster than women with the old pestle and mortar,” Udd added. “Mind you, it's been frozen solid since we got here. They say when it's working it grinds as much corn as forty women working all day. The folk come up from the town and pay the priests to use it.”

  Shef nodded again, reflecting on how the monks of Saint John or Saint Peter would have appreciated such an addition to their income. He saw the potential of the device. But he could not understand Udd's interest: it was notorious that the little man cared for nothing but metal. Best not to rush him.

  Silently Udd led his king out and down the slope to a second shed. “This is like rung two,” he said, with a glance at Shef's ladder-emblem. “And this is down to us. See, ever since last year the priests here have been fascinated by what they heard of our catapults. Cwicca and his mates have already built a couple, to show 'em how we do it. But they'd already got the idea of the little wheels: the cog-wheels, you know. And the priest who was working with the mill, he got the idea of using real big cog-wheels not to wind a catapult but to make a different mill.”

  The pair approached the second building. On one wall of it, another big wooden wheel with paddles, exactly like the first one: but set vertically in the snow-choked ravine, not horizontally. Clearly the water would turn this even better, with a better purchase. But what use would an axle be turning two vertical millstones? The corn would run straight through them and never be ground at all. It was the weight of the stone that did the grinding.

  Still silently Udd led Shef in and pointed to the gearing. At the end of the millwheel-axle an immense iron cog-wheel stood vertical. Its teeth meshed into a matching horizontal cog, fitted over a stout oak axle. Below it, on the same axle, the two familiar stone wheels. Above them, a hopper showed where men could stand to pour in sacks of kernels.

  “Yes, lord, it's well-done. But what I wanted to say was there's something to do with this that these folk haven't thought of yet. See, lord,” Udd dropped his voice, though there was no-one near, no-one within a furlong of them. “What's our problem with iron? With making it, like?”

  “Beating it out,” said Shef.

  “How many days does it take a man to get fifty pound of iron out of, say, five times that amount of ore?”

  Shef whistled, remembering the hours he had spent pounding out the slag for his first home-made sword. “Ten,” he guessed. “Depends how strong the smith is.”

  “That's why smiths have to be strong,” agreed Udd, looking down at his own puny frame. “I couldn't ever be one. But then I thought, if this mill does the work of forty grinding-slaves, women that is, could it not do the work of, say, twenty smiths?”

  Shef began to feel a familiar warning itch in his brain. Many minds were working here, as they had worked to make the catapults, the pulley-wound crossbow. Some priest of the Way had thought of the water-mill. Some long-dead Roman had left behind the cog-wheels. Shef and his crewmen had rebuilt the catapults. And from hearing about that alone, some other priest had worked out how to transfer the force in the flow of a river to the task he needed in a different dimension. Now Udd had returned that thought to his own obsession. It was as if people too were cog-wheels, the one fitting into the other, one brain turning the next.

  “How could stone wheels grind iron?” he asked cautiously.

  “Well, lord, what came to me was this.” Udd dropped his voice even further. “What everyone's always thought in this line is, a wheel drives a wheel. But I thought, what if it doesn't? What if it drives something a different shape? And much, much bigger? See, axle turns here. Turns a shape like this. The shape turns, and all the time it's turning, it's lifting a heavy weight, as heavy as a millwheel. Only not a millwheel, a hammer. But when it gets to this point here—it stops lifting. The hammer drops instead. A really heavy hammer, a hammer six smiths couldn't lift, not even if they were as strong as Brand! And hammering as fast as the axle on this millwheel turns. How long would it take to beat out fifty pounds of iron then? Five hundred pounds?”

  The little man's pale face shone with excitement, the thrill of the inventor. Shef caught the feeling, felt his palms itch to start the work.

  “Listen, Udd,” he said, trying to keep a cool head. “I don't see what you mean about the shape to lift and to drop.”

  Udd nodded energetically. “That's what I've been thinking about every night in my bunk. What we need, I reckon, is something like this…”

  On the floor of the hut, planks overlaid with a thin layer of drifted snow from under the warped door, Udd began to draw a cross-section of a reciprocating cam. After a few moments Shef seized his own straw and began to draw as well. “If it turns like this,” he said, “you'd have to have a groove on the handle of the hammer, to stop it flying off. But does it have to have a hammer-shape?”

  An hour later Thorvin the smith-priest, coming from his doubtful meeting, saw the tall king and the puny freedman walking down the snowy path, their arms waving wildly as they designed imaginary machines. For an instant he understood Valgrim's doubts. Farman and Vigleik might see the One King in their visions. No vision or prophecy had ever included a word, he was sure, about
scrawny foreign thrallborn assistants.

  Chapter Ten

  In the Scandinavian lands, in the year of Our Lord 867, the peoples were much the same, but the lands themselves greatly different. In spite of centuries of bickering, jealousy and war, the Danes, Swedes and Norwegians were all much more like each other than anyone else. There is every difference, though, between the fertile pastures of the Danish islands and the Jutland peninsula, or the long coastline of Sweden in the sheltered tideless Baltic, and the fjord-splintered Atlantic-facing stretch of Norway, with its immense and almost pathless spine of mountains, the Keel. The Norwegians said even then of the Danes that only Danes could have an eighteen-hundred foot hillock as the highest spot in all their kingdoms, and call it Himinbjerg, Sky Mountain. The Danes said of the Norwegians that if you put ten Norwegians together, eleven would call themselves kings and lead fifteen armies to war against each other. The jokes had a basis in fact, in geography and history. Travel for the Norwegians was not impossibly difficult, for there were passages all the way up the coast with its thousands of islands, and in the long winter ski-runners could travel over the snow faster than any horse could gallop. Yet it might take two days to go round by sea rather than cross a ten-thousand-foot sheer-rising mountain mass. It was easier in Norway to divide than to unite. Easy too, in a land where there was a boatyard on every one of a thousand fjords, to raise a fleet and crew it with the younger sons who counted their fathers' farmlands in fractions of an acre.

  In this land of little kingdoms and brief alliances, forty years before, there had been a king called Guthroth. He was king of the Westfold, the land to the west of the great fjord that runs up to Oslo and divides the main Norwegian mass from the borders with Sweden. He was a king not much better, or much worse, than his neighbors and rivals the kings of the Eastfold, of Ranrike, Raumrike, Hedemark, Hedeland, Toten, Akershus and all the others. His subjects, a few score thousand, maybe enough to make the population of a decent English shire, called him the Huntsman because of his hobby, which was hunting women—a dangerous and difficult hobby, even for a king, in a land where every cot-carl had spear, axe and half-a-dozen Viking expeditions behind him.