but which directly contradicted much of their life-times' collective experience. At first Shef had asked Thorvin to direct the site, but he had refused, saying he must be free to leave at any time if the demands of his faith required it. Then he had thought of Udd, the ex-slave who had, almost single-handed, invented the crossbow and made safe the torsion catapult. Thus—to some eyes—defeating both Ivar Ragnarsson, Champion of the North, and weeks later Charles the Bald, King of the Franks, at what men were coming to call the Battle of Hastings, 866.
Udd had been a disaster, soon replaced. Left to himself it transpired that the little man was only capable of taking an interest in things made of metal. He also could not direct so much as the boy who blew the bellows, from constitutional shyness. He had been removed and set to the much more congenial task of finding out everything that could be discovered about steel.
As confusion grew, Shef had had to think over his true needs: a man used to the sea and ships, used to organizing the work of others, but not so independent as to alter Shef's orders or so conservative as to fail to understand them. Shef knew few people. The only one of those who seemed even possible was the fisherman-reeve of Bridlington, Ordlaf, whose capture of Ragnar Hairy-Breeks two summers before had unleashed the fury on England. He it was, now, who turned to greet Shef's party.
Shef waited for him to kneel and rise. Early attempts to do away with the formal code of respect had foundered on the looks of hurt and uncertainty of Shef's thanes.
“I brought someone to see the work, Ordlaf. This is my friend and one-time captain, Viga-Brand. He comes from Halogaland, far, far in the North, and has sailed more miles than most men. I want his opinion of the new ships.”
Ordlaf grinned. “He'll see much to stretch his eyes at, lord, however far he's sailed. Things no one has seen before.”
“Truth—right there is a thing that I have not seen before,” said Brand. He waved at a pit a few yards off. Inside it was a man pulling one end of a six-foot saw. Another stood on the huge log above pulling on the other. Ready hands held the plank as they sawed it from the log.
“How does it work? I have only ever seen planks hewed out with adzes.”
“Me too, till I came here,” said Ordlaf. “The secret lies in two things. Better teeth on the saws—that is the work of Master Udd. And teaching these blockheads here”—the men looked up grinning—“not to push the saw, just
“But that's nothing, sir,” Ordlaf went on to Brand. “What the king really wants you to see are his pride and joy, the ten ships we're building to his design. And one of them, lord, now ready for your inspection, finished while you were in Winchester. Come and see.”
He led them through the gate of a stout palisade to a ring of jetties projecting out into a still backwater of the river. There in front of them lay ten ships, men working on all of them, but one, the nearest, evidently complete.
“Now, sir Brand. Did you ever see anything like that this side of Halogaland?”
Brand stared, considering. Slowly he shook his head. “It is a big one, right enough. They say the biggest oceangoing ship in the world is Sigurth Snake-eye's own
Doubt clouded his eyes. “What are the keels made of? Have you taken two trunks and joined them? If you have, well, maybe on a river or off the coast in fair weather, but for deep sea or long voyage—”
“All single trunks,” said Ordlaf. “What you may be forgetting, sir, if you don't mind me saying so, is that up there in the North where you come from you have to work with the wood you can get. And while I can see men grow big enough up there, it isn't the same for trees. What we got here is English oak. And say what they like, I've never seen better wood or bigger wood.”
Brand stared again, shook his head again. “Well and good. But what in Hel have you done to the mast? You've—you've put it in the wrong place. And raked forward like a—like an eighteen-year-old's prick! How is that going to shift a ship that size?” Honest pain filled his voice. Both Shef and Ordlaf grinned broadly. This time Shef took up the tale.
“The whole idea of these ships, Brand, is that they have only one purpose. Not crossing the ocean, not carrying men with spears and swords, not carrying cargo.
“These are ships for battle. Ships to battle other ships. Not by coming alongside and having their crews board each other. Not even by doing what Father Boniface tells me the ancient Rome-folk did, by ramming. No: by sinking the other ship and its crew along with it, and doing it from a distance. Now there's only one thing we know that can do that.
“You remember the pull-throwers I first made at Crowland that winter? What do you think of them?”
Brand shrugged. “Good against people. Wouldn't like to have one of those rocks fall into my ship. But as you know, you have to be the right distance to get a hit. Two ships, both moving…”
“Right, no chance. Now what of the twist-shooters we used against King Charles's lancers?”
“Might kill the crew, one man at a time. Couldn't sink a ship. The arrow they shoot would plug its own hole.”
“That leaves us with the last weapon, the one that Erkenbert the deacon made for Ivar. Guthmund used them to knock down the palisade at the camp above Hastings. The thing the Rome-folk called the
At a signal deck-hands dragged tarred canvas away from a squat, square object mounted in the exact center of the nearest ship's undecked hull.
“What do you say to a hit from one of those?”
Brand shook his head slowly. He had seen the onagers shoot only once, and then from a distance, but he remembered seeing carts fly in pieces, whole files of oxen smashed to the ground. “No ship in the world could survive it. One hit, and the whole frame would go to pieces. But the reason you call it the mule is…”
“Because of the kick. Come and see what we've done.”
The men walked up the gangplank to stare at the new weapon close up. “See,” Shef explained. “These weigh a ton and a quarter. They have to. You see how it works? Stout rope down at the base, with two handles. You twist the rope both sides. It holds this bar”—he patted a five-foot beam standing upright, a heavy leather sling dangling from a peg at its top. “You force the bar down on to the deck, held by an iron clamp, and keep twisting. When it's at greatest strain you release the clamp. Bar shoots up with a rock in the sling, sling whirls round…”
“Bar hits the crosspiece.” Ordlaf patted a thick beam on a massive frame, padded both sides with heavy sandbags.
“The bar stops, the sling releases, the rock keeps going. It throws flat and hard, anything up to half a mile. But you see the problem. We have to build it heavy, to take the kick. We have to have it dead over the center-line, so we can fix the frame down on to the keel. And because it weighs so much, we have to have it centered fore and aft as well.”
“But that's where the mast should be,” objected Brand.
“So we had to move the mast. That's where Ordlaf showed us something.”
“You see, sir Brand,” Ordlaf explained, “where I come from we have boats like yours, double-ended and clinker-built and all. But because we're in it for fish, not for far voyaging, we rig them different. We step the mast forward of center, and we rake it forward too. And then, you can see, we cut the sail different. Not square, like yours, but on a slant.”
Brand grunted. “I know. So if you take your hands off the steering oar she turns head into wind and rides the waves. Fisherman's trick. Safe enough. But slow. Especially with all this weight to shift. How fast is she?”
Shef and Ordlaf exchanged glances. “Not fast at all,” Shef conceded. “Guthmund ran a trial against one of his boats before we put the mule in this one, and even without that weight, well—Guthmund sailed rings round her.
“But you see, Brand, we aren't trying to catch anyone! If we meet a fleet in the open sea, and they come to fight us, we'll sink them! If they sail away, the coastline has been defended. If they get past us, we'll follow and sink them wherever they go. This isn't a transport, Brand. It's a ship for battle.”
“A battleship,” added Ordlaf approvingly.
