One King's Way

Shef nodded encouragingly, with no idea where this thought was leading. They couldn't eat iron, but sarcasm would cut Udd off completely.

“There's a place called Kopparberg too. Copper Mountain. Well, the thing is, they're both over there.” Udd pointed across the harbor to the mountainous shore opposite. “On the other side of the mountains, I mean. I thought, if we can't sail, we could walk. It's not as if there's nowhere the other side.”

Shef looked at the jagged forbidding shore, thought of the terrible cramping struggle up the side of Echegorgun's inlet. The path they had come upon. The easy ridge route Echegorgun had taken to bring them out opposite the island.

“Thank you, Udd,” he said. “I'll think about that.”

He walked on till he found Guthmund the Swede. Guthmund was in unexpectedly good spirits. He had lost his ship, and there was every chance of dying of starvation. On the other hand, the loot from the Crane had been surprisingly good. Ragnhild had taken half her ancestral treasure with her, to buy men and revenge, and it had been recovered from the wreck. Deaths in the attack had meant fewer people to share it with, too. Guthmund greeted his young leader with a smile. They called him Guthmund the Greedy. His ambition was to become Gull-Guthmund, or Gold-Guthmund in English.

The smile vanished as Shef asked him about what Udd had said. “Oh, it's up there somewhere all right,” he agreed. “But I wouldn't know where exactly. You folk don't realize. Sweden is a thousand miles long from end to end, all the way from Skaane to the Lapp-mark. If Skaane is Swedish,” he added. “I am from Soderrnanland myself, I am a true Swede. But I guess, I guess this is about as far north as Jarnberaland.”

“How can you tell?”

“By the way the shadows fall. If you measure a shadow at noon, and you know how far it is from midsummer, you can tell how far north you are. It is one of the crafts of the Way, Skaldfinn Njorth's priest once showed me.”

“So if we went up there and walked due east we would come to Jarnberaland in the country of the Swedes.”

“You might not have to walk all the way,” said Guthmund. “I have heard it said that there are lakes up there in the Keel, the central range, and they run east and west. Brand told me that when the Finns on this side raid the Finns on the other—Kvens they call them—they take bark boats and paddle along them.”

“Thank you, Guthmund,” said Shef, and walked on again.

Brand looked incredulous when Shef reported the results of his conversations to him and Thorvin, still sitting together. “Can't be done,” he said flatly.

“Why not?”

“It's too late in the year.”

“A month after midsummer?”

Brand sighed. “You don't realize. Up here summer doesn't last long. On the coast, all right, the sea seems to keep the snow and ice off for a while. But just think. Remember what it was like in Hedeby, like spring, you said. Get to Kaupang and it's still ice-bound. And how far is that? Three hundred miles north? Here you're another six hundred. A few miles in from the coast—and that's as far as I've ever been, even chasing Finns—and there's snow on the ground more than half the year. The higher you go, the worse it gets. The high mountains never melt at all.”

“So cold is the problem. But Udd's right, is he, it is Jarnberaland on the other side, maybe two hundred miles off? Ten days' travel.”

“Twenty days' travel. If you're very very lucky. In some of the country I've seen three miles is a hard day. If you don't get turned round and die walking in a circle.”

“Still,” Thorvin put in, pulling at his beard, “there is something few people know. And that is that the Way is strong in Jarnberaland. Naturally, for we are craftsmen and smiths. And smiths go to iron. There are priests of the Way there, working with the folk who mine the iron. Some say it is as good as a second College. Valgrim was against it. He said there could only be one College.”

And he the head of it, Shef thought. Valgrim's errors had finally caught up with him. He had been in the boats that rowed back to the Crane, and only two of the men in them had survived, Brand and a young man who had remained hunched into a ball ever since they pulled him on shore, making small noises of fear. Ragnhild could have died that way too, Shef told himself. Just an accident. Another of the ones that surrounded him. Part of his luck, Olaf Elf-of-Geirstath would say, and King Alfred with him.

“So if we crossed the mountains,” Shef went on, “we might even find help the other side.”

“But you can't cross the mountains,” Brand repeated, exasperated. “The mountains are full of Finns and —”

“And the Hidden Folk,” Shef completed for him. “Thank you, Brand.” He rose to his feet and walked off yet again, the lance marking his paces.

The final word came from a man whose name he did not know, one of the Crane's crew, sweating in the pale sunlight as he and his mates heaved rocks on to a sled, to drag to the settlement to make a few more winter shelters. Halogalanders watched them from a distance, carrying bundles of seal-harpoons. Shef, still unsure of his proper course, paused to watch them for a moment. One of them looked up. A relative of Kormak, he spoke bitterly. “Today we sweat, you watch. We were defeated—but not by men, by whales! That cannot happen twice. Next time you will find no protectors. The Rogalanders are still looking out for you, and Ragnhild's kin will pay her bounty. And behind them, the Ragnarssons. Sigurth Snake-eye will pay as much for you as Ragnhild would have. If you go south, you will meet someone. You will never see England again, one-eye. The only man who could get through what waits for you would need an iron skin. Like Sigurth Fafnirsbane. And even he left a weak spot!”

Shef looked down reflectively. He knew the story of Sigurth who killed the dragon Fafnir—he had seen a part of it himself, in vision, seen the dragon-mask. He knew too that Sigurth had been betrayed by his lover, and killed by her husband and his kin, once they found out that the dragon's blood that had made his skin impenetrable had been checked at one spot by a leaf that stuck to it, and left him vulnerable only in the back. He, Shef, had had an angry lover as well, though she was dead, and her husband too. And he had killed a dragon, if Ivar Boneless might be considered as such.

The parallels were too close for comfort. And it was true enough that the North Way down the coast was also the one way south, and all too easily blocked.

“I hear what you say,” he answered. “And I thank you for your warning. But you meant it in malice. If you have nothing better to say, do not speak next time.” He reached out, carefully, and tapped the angry Viking on the very throat-ball with the point of his lance.

The human mind is strange. Nose-bleeds start from fear. A stammer is cured by a shock, feeble old women start from their beds in a crisis and lift great timbers from their sons' bodies. Kormak's relative knew he had spoken too freely. Knew that if the one-eyed man ran him through with the lance, there would be no complaint against him. As the point touched his throat, his gullet froze with fear. And remained frozen.

As Shef walked away one of his mates said to him in an undertone, “You chanced it there, Svipdag.”

Svipdag turned to him, eyes wide. Tried to speak. Tried again, and again. Nothing came out but a low gargling. Men saw the terror in Svipdag's eyes as he realized that he meant to speak, but had been robbed of the ability as if a cord had been tied round his windpipe.

The other prisoners looked after Shef's retreating back. They had heard stories of him, of the death of Ivar, of Halvdan, of how King Olaf had handed over all his luck and his family's into this man's keeping. They knew he bore the sign of some unknown god round his neck, his father, some had heard.

“He said, ‘do not speak’,” one of the Vikings muttered. “And now he can't!”

“I'm telling you, he called the whales in too,” said another.

“And the Hidden Folk come to his help.”

“If I'd known all that, Ragnhild could have whistled herself hoarse before I came on this gods-forsaken trip.”