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.
But Guthroth persevered. In the end his first wife Thurith, daughter of the king of Rogaland, died, worn out with vexation at her husband's infidelities and the trouble and expense they caused, and Guthroth thought at once of replacing her. His eye fell on the daughter of the king of the tiny kingdom of Agdir, no more than a town and a handful of villages: Asa, daughter of Hunthjof the Strong, a virgin of unmatched beauty. To Guthroth it seemed that her charms might stir again in him the youth that seemed to be passing. But Hunthjof the Strong refused Guthroth's offers, saying that his daughter would not need to go sniffing other women's beds to see who had been in them. Stung by the insult and the rejection, Guthroth did his only great deed beyond the normal expected from kings of a warlike people: he gathered his men and came down on Agdir on skis on a dark winter's night, just after Yule, when men were still sleeping off the Yule-ale. He killed Hunthjof the Strong in fair fight at the door of his bedchamber, though it is true that Guthroth was fully awake and fully armored, while Hunthjof was half-drunk and wholly naked; then seized Asa, bundled her into a sleigh and dragged her back to the Westfold roped to the sleigh-posts. There Guthroth's own priests declared the wedding, and Asa was dragged off willy-nilly to the bedchamber.
Her beauty fulfilled Guthroth's expectations, and nine months later she gave birth to her son Halvdan, later called the Black from his hair and his rages. Guthroth slowly let out the breath he had been holding, and forbore to tie Asa's wrists to the bedposts every night when he slept, knowing that women with a child to defend would become more sensible and less grudge-bearing than before. He still made sure even the knife she used to pare an apple with was pointless and no sharper than would serve to cut soft cheese.
Yet he had forgotten that a woman can work through other men as easily as in her own right. One dark evening, just after Yule the year after Asa's father's death, Guthroth emptied the great aurochs-horn of beer which he kept on his table without a stand, so that it had to be drained in one draught, and shortly staggered out to piss on the snow. As he did so, while his hands were occupied with his breeches, and before he had begun to empty his bladder, a young lad stepped round the corner of the royal hall and thrust a broad-bladed spear through his belly, fleeing instantly on skis. Guthroth lived long enough to say that the killer had said only, “Those who kill drunken men should always stay sober,” and then died, trying still to complete his piss.
Guthroth had an acknowledged and legitimate son by his first wife Thurith, a strong lad of eighteen winters called Olaf. Men expected that he would appease his father's ghost by sending Queen Asa into the howe with him, and make a clean sweep by leaving the child Halvdan, his half-brother, out in the forest for the wolves. He did not do so. And when asked why not—it was a sign that men did not fear him as much as a king should be feared that they were able to ask—he said that he had dreamed a dream. In it he saw a great tree spring from his step- mother's womb, a tree with blood-red roots, a white trunk, and green leaves that spread all over Norway and even further across the world. So he knew that a great destiny waited for Asa's children, and would not thwart the gods and bring down bad luck by trying to avert it.
Olaf, then, spared his stepmother and protected his half-brother, but from that time he himself had little good fortune, and men said that he had thrown away his own luck. In the years to come he was overshadowed in battle by his half-brother, Asa's son, who won himself a kingdom across the fjord in the Eastfold. And Olaf's own only son, Rognvald, whom men called the Magnificent for his courage and his gifts to poets, died when a trifling scratch in a mere skirmish swelled and went bad and defied the leeches even of the Way.
By contrast Halvdan won himself not only the new kingdom of the Eastfold, which he loyally shared with his one-time protector, and his grandfather's kingdom of Agdir, but also a wife whom even the imperious Queen Asa could not despise, as she did all other women. This was Ragnhild, daughter of King Sigurth the Hart of Ringerike. Like Asa, she too had been carried off from her father, but not by Halvdan. While her father was traveling through the mountains, he was ambushed by a mountain-chieftain, a wild man and a berserk called Haki. For all his berserkergang, Sigurth wounded Haki three times before he was killed, and cut off his left arm, so that Haki lay abed for a long winter, unable to enjoy his virgin bride. Just about the time he might be calculated to have recovered enough to do the deed, Halvdan struck first like his father. He took fifty picked men into the mountains
