The Norseman

by Jason Born

  I stood alone watching my third father march back through the city. I shook my head at him. He never reacted the way I thought he would. I didn’t know how to build a ship. I had seen it done and knew the basic construction, but to lead men in building the biggest ship in the fleet was another matter altogether. I crumpled down to the shore to sit and think. Like Olaf, I gathered up several stones and began hurling them into the water. One after another they flew until I had cleared all of the pebbles from the area within my reach. I cupped my hands around my bent knees and stared at the relatively warm water of the river flowing into the icy fjord. Eddies and currents swirled around where the two temperatures met. The bird Olaf chased upstream floated on outstretched wings carrying a salmon in his bill. He landed at the edge of the stream near the underbrush and stood looking at me with the fish’s tail waving. I decided that I didn’t know how to build a boat, but I knew how to name them. Olaf’s new longboat would be called Crane.

  CHAPTER 10

  We walked in the forest, Thorberg Skaffhog, and me. We looked for a stand of tall, straight oaks for our keel and planks. Olaf told me to build him a ship, which I would call Crane, but I was fortunate to find Thorberg. He was a master shipwright and would lead the process while I planned to help him coordinate supplies to keep him working efficiently. Olaf left the fjord two days earlier and we would need to be well-organized if we were to complete the boat by the first snowfall. In the coming days, laborers would cut trees with axes and wedges then clean and split them in the forest, and haul them to the riverbank where the longboat would take form. On the bank skilled craftsmen would work for Thorberg framing the ship, shaping the wood into something that would someday help us defeat Sweyn Forkbeard.

  Along our walk Thorberg marked many trees with a wet chalk for the men to cut down. The One God, as Thor had in the past, provided everything we would need. Pine trees for oars, spars, yards, and masts. The low curving boughs of isolated field oaks for stem, stern, and ribs. The thick trunk of the field oak could be used for a rudder. A keelson with a vertical supporting rod would be fashioned from a trunk where a branch grew out. The carpenters, and anyone who tried to split firewood, knew the natural joint provided outstanding strength. Angular pieces of timber were manipulated into knees of varying sizes.

  Thorberg struggled through the thick underbrush and swore as a thorn bush swiped across his arm. He frequently complained that the king should plan these things ahead, as he would have preferred to traipse in the woods in early winter when the walk would be easier. The death brought on by the cold weather would make many of the forest tasks easier. Other than his current chore, Thorberg complained most often about two: he could identify the trees more easily without the obstruction and the workmen transporting the timbers to the river would not have to clear a path or struggle against the growth.

  Thorberg was brusque and constantly angry and I grew to love the man. He was some years older than Olaf and he was without a wife or family. Over time I learned that he took part in building his first ship when he was ten and as near as he could guess, had helped or led the building of forty-one boats in his life. He had built knarrs, big and small; fishing vessels; and longboats, but the Crane would be the largest by far. When he cackled about the great size of the vessel his nose whistled. One side of his face had been crushed some years earlier when a rope under tension snapped and carried a block and tackle straight into his cheek. He obviously survived, but his face never recovered its normal shape and his nose was badly disfigured, causing the frequent whistling. Otherwise he was healthy for his advanced age, with a broad chest and arms strengthened from the constant work with his hands. He kept his hair short for a Norseman and looked more like the English, but I never bothered to ask him why.

  I was pleased that after a mere three-quarter hour walk we found our stand of oaks. They grew on a gentle hillside facing southward. The tops of the trees were so thick with leaves that the underbrush in the area was rather thin, which made Thorberg grunt out a positive curse. He strutted around the grove, frequently stopping to look up the long trunks which stretched toward the cloudless sky. Whenever he found one that looked right, he would circle around its base once or twice looking for stray branches or blemishes that would mean knots, and therefore weakness, in the timber. Several times trees that appeared fine on his first inspection were disregarded after a closer look. When he had made his chalk mark on ten of the trees he plopped down on a fallen log and opened a small bag containing his mid-day meal. He bit off a large piece of smoked cheese and gnawed on it loudly. His nose whistled as he chewed. Seeing that I had forgotten my meal, he reached into his pack and threw me a hard piece of bread that had to be a day or two old. I caught it and thanked him genuinely. We sat there in the forest eating, without uttering a word, for several minutes. Except for the whistling, we were so quiet that a family of hedgehogs wandered past us without so much as noticing our presence.

  At last I asked the experienced craftsman, “How do you know how to build a ship?” He didn’t immediately answer, but instead still looked from tree to tree to see if there were more that were worthy of being included in the Crane. He produced a cloth full of blackberries and began munching them. I continued, “What I mean is, how do you know how wide to make it, how long to make it, how deep to make the keel?”

  He flashed a dark purple smile and used his tongue to pick some seeds from between his teeth while squinting with one eye. Eventually he said, “We’ve been building ships for generations. I learned from a master shipwright. Others have learned from me. I don’t know who figured it all out first; I never thought about it. But I suppose it was Odin shortly after the world was formed. For this ship we need to make the length seven times as large as the width. So if she ends up being over one hundred feet long, the width will be about fourteen feet. I don’t know why this is so, just that when I’ve seen men build a wider ship, they end up being slow. When I’ve seen men build a narrower ship, they are weaker and don’t hold enough warriors or cargo.” Frustrated, he found a piece of bark and broke it until it was narrow enough to pick at whatever was caught in his teeth.

  “Will we be done by winter?” He already had told me in the days since we met that we would be done, but I was eager to make conversation that day.

  “We won’t be done if all you do is follow me around and chatter!” He liked his joke so much he shook as he laughed. The whistling gained a more musical tone as he breathed in and out heavily. Then Thorberg settled down and said, “You know we’ll be done. I’ll bring men here tomorrow and start to fell trees and supervise ripping them into boards. You need to get the smith in Kaupangen to begin making nails, roves, and rivets, thousands of them. When he gets a chance, he should make another set of tools so that we have spares; I’ve never seen a boat built without some tools turning up missing during the project. I want extra augers, bits, moulding irons, hammers, wedges, and tongs. He should know what else I need.”

  “You’ll have what you need at the riverbank when you are ready,” I said.

  “I’ll make a shipbuilder out of you yet, Berserker!” He slapped his knee and then stood, “Let’s get back to the village and prepare for tomorrow.” We walked back to the village and Thorberg took note of what would be the best path on which to bring the lumber to the river. Although his appearance usually caused people to disregard him, he was truly a master at his occupation. Experience had taught him to take advantage of every efficiency presented. And he used his mind, hidden behind and above that crumpled cheek, each second of the day.

  We parted ways in Kaupangen and I walked toward the sound of steel pounding on steel. I talked with the smith, giving him the details of what Thorberg wanted. He said he would start churning out the rivets and nails the next morning. His mold could make ten nails at a time and he could easily make several batches a day. He would have no trouble building the inventory of nails for Crane. When he had several small barrels of nails set aside, he would begin to build the tools T
horberg needed.

  Our conversation was short. When it was done I stopped by Gudrod’s farm; he raised more sheep than anyone in the city. He happily agreed to bring tar-soaked wool which would line the seams between strakes to waterproof the ship. After talking about the politics of the day and giving my approval of Olaf’s new bride, we said our goodbyes.

  With the rising sun of the next morning, I accompanied Thorberg and his party of laborers to the forest. We walked to the stand of tall oaks along the path the wise builder had selected for hauling the lumber back to the bank. Workers hacked underbrush with saexes and felled small trees to make the return trip less arduous. When we came to the grove Thorberg had all but two of us set down our axes and gather around the first tree. “I don’t care how many trees you’ve cut, I don’t care how many projects you’ve made out of wood, I’m going to teach you the proper way to fell a tree and the proper way to split it so the king’s ship won’t sink beneath him!” After some brief instruction as to where to strike and where to lay the tree, Aki Tree-Arm, the builder of my home, and I took turns chopping at the first tree creating a musical “clack, clack.” It was a great tree – straight, true, and old. Tree-Arm and I worked the axes rhythmically, he better than me. After just a short time we created a notch and Thorberg had us switch to the other side of the tree to finish the job. Fifteen minutes later the first creak came from the noble tree. I was sweating now, the ax handle wet in my hands. Another groan from the fine tree. Within five more strokes the tree let out an exhausted moan and began moving away from us, slowly at first then with increasing speed. The uppermost branches made rippling, rustling sounds as they brushed against the other trees. Then there was a fleeting silence as the tree fell free from all encumbrances, until it crashed into the ground. Twigs snapped and branches were stabbed deep into the dirt beneath the leaf-covered earth.

  The onlookers gave us a cheer, but Thorberg ignored the milestone as he selected men to pounce atop the tree to begin making it into useful lumber. The first job was to clean the tree. Small branches were hacked off and carried away to a pile. They would not be wasted, but would find their way into the new ship as trenails, rigging blocks, rakkes, clamps, or stringers. If they weren’t used for any of those, they would be burned in our fires to keep us warm through the coming winter. Two or three men climbing on a tree, swinging axes, had to be careful. The obvious concern was striking your co-worker, but less obvious was that a branch could support a part of the tree and when removed could cause a dangerous shift. Thorberg only had to point to his face as a warning on what can happen on a worksite when men became careless.

  The trunk of this tree was already clear of most branches because it grew tall in the middle of the forest, so the men made quick work. Next Thorberg crouched down at the bottom end of the tree and ran his hand over the cut section, pointing out landmarks to look for to make the first and most difficult split of the tree easier. He procured a metal wedge from his tool set and, using a large hammer, began driving it into the tree’s end. When it was buried about one inch he grabbed another wedge. He drove it in and repeated the process until he had a line of eight wedges bisecting the end of the tree. He worked his way down the line of wedges, striking each one time before moving to the next. Then he started at the top again and again. He paused to explain why we never used a saw to rip the tree. A saw would cut across different sections of grain, while splitting would follow any minor shifts in the grain. The strength of the timber would not be compromised, yet we could make thin, flexible planking. When he was just over halfway up the length of the tree, an invisible weakness caused the tree to break. He swore, but the shorter lumber would not be wasted; it could be used as part of the keel, stem, or stern by scarfing, or joining, it with another piece using a mortise and tenon joint.

  Thorberg then turned us loose on the forest while he made his way back to the riverbank to set up stocks and props on which to build and secure the keel. Men finished splitting the one felled tree into quarters, eighths, and then sixteenths while others went about bringing down more of the trees Thorberg marked. We sang songs, old songs that would bring us trouble if Olaf found out, but he wouldn’t, and so we sang. We told jokes too. Tree-Arm asked why I did not have a baby in my house yet. It had been nearly a year since I wed Kenna and he asked if the diminutive woman had scared my big seed away. This caused a great laugh and the men took to calling me Frightened Seed that day. It was just one of many nicknames we all gave each other as we worked on the ship that year.

  The women, including Kenna and her sister Thordis, with her two children, brought us a modest meal at mid-day with pots of ale to share. Men and women plopped themselves down all over the grove, on rocks, trees, stumps, and the ground. Some of the other children came along with their mothers including Tree-Arm’s two boys. They climbed like squirrels on their father. They fought over food. They played and tormented their mother. Thordis and Einar’s oldest was a girl who toddled on unstable legs about the woods. She spent more time on her soggy bottom, stuffing handfuls of dirt into her mouth, than she did standing. Their second child was a baby boy who gurgled in his mother’s arms. I smiled to Kenna and she smiled back. She knew what I was thinking because we had talked about it before. We both wanted children and were happy to keep trying until God blessed us with our first. Kenna felt like speaking in Gaelic and so I practiced my own while she shared some of the gossip from the women of the village. We didn’t have to worry about being overheard since no one on the work crew spoke the language. We giggled when she said that one of the women was pregnant with a neighbor’s child, but told her husband it was his.

  When our break was done the women packed up the leftovers and children, then made their way back to town. I kicked any of the men who had dozed off after their meal and we went back to work bringing down trees, cleaning them of branches, and splitting them. I would work with the men in the forest all day to get them moving and to be sure they had an understanding of what Thorberg wanted. The next day I would begin bringing the lumber to the river with another set of laborers and their carts. And that’s how the first several days of work on the Crane went. Chopping, hauling, and singing with the men and then home at the end of the work day to make love and read my book. These days, and the year that followed, would prove to be the happiest of my life.

  Back at the riverbank Thorberg clamped the first strake, called the garboard, to the keel. It had taken three days to build the keel, prow, and stern to the shipwright’s specifications, but now we had a straight and sturdy naked spine of the ship, ready to receive a covering. Thorberg called this “hull-first” construction. We started at the bottom and added strakes one by one until we reached the top of the gunwale. In this way we built the hull first and added the supporting structures inside the ship afterwards.

  The placement of each of the strakes was important, but the garboard would be subject to many stresses and prone to leaks. Thorberg taught us how to use a moulding iron to form a groove on the internal, lower edge of the garboard to receive the tar-soaked wool rope brought to the worksite by Gudrod, the sheep farmer. After over two hours of fiddling with the garboard clamps, he allowed us to begin to plunge the smith’s iron nails into the board. Nailing and riveting it only took a few minutes. Thorberg then waved us out of his way and began clamping the second strake. As we moved higher he made sure the hull took on the shape he desired, prescribed by generations of shipwrights. We busied ourselves forming more grooves on the other strakes and stuffing them with the wool caulking while Thorberg performed the skilled tasks.

  After one week we had the hull shell completed and it was clear that she was going to be a beautiful boat, long and graceful. We finished the shell on Saturday and so we attended mass on Sunday at the church Tree-Arm built over the previous year. Crevan sailed with Olaf from Thing to Thing to continue to build support for his reign against Sweyn so Fenris, a priest who had traveled to be a part of Olaf’s Christian Norway, led the service. He was not nearly a
s friendly as Crevan and we were all quite bored. I took the time to wonder where my Berserkers were and what they were doing. Kenna stood next to her sister holding Tambar, the baby boy. She bobbed slightly while patting his back.

  Sunday afternoon, Kenna and I walked with a picnic lunch into the forest. We ate smoked fish and bread made from wheat flour that our first thrall had baked that morning. Today she practiced Latin with me. We talked and talked and I wondered if we could have understood what the past great Romans would have said in their massive stone buildings. I had seen some of their structures while we lay siege to London and they were amazing, like they had been built by the giants. Our wood and thatch houses looked like cave dwellings in comparison. How did we let civilization, such as it was, decline so? How is it that such a great society allows barbarians, and they would have considered me a barbarian, to overtake them? Was it ineptitude? Laziness? Complacency? Or was it the sword? We barbarians, especially we Vikings and raiders and Berserkers, killed. That is what we did. Maybe with civilization comes a willful veil that covers the eyes of the civilized from seeing the horror that existed in the world. Kenna and I talked about these things and more. I marveled at her mind, her wit and how she had taken me from a lover of only profit to a lover of a books, a lover of language, a lover of life, and a lover of a woman.