One King's Way

alas, the magnificent model Shef had bought at the Gula, which had burnt with so much else. But a store of feathers had survived the fire, and everyone had a two-layer bag of some material, wool or skin, padded with the down of the seabirds. Mittens and hats, scrims to go round the neck and pull across the face in a blizzard. For each person, in a back-pack, ten day's food, mostly dried fish and seal-meat, or the strong cheese made from sheep or goat's milk. Not enough, but a person walking all day in the cold needs four pounds' weight of food a day. Carry more, travel less. “If you see anything living, eat it,” Brand said. “Spin out what you carry as long as you can. You will be hungry before you reach the other side.”

The party's weapons had been carefully selected as well, and not for war. The catapulteers carried their crossbows and their knives. Even Osmod had been made to abandon his halberd, too heavy and cumbersome. Thorvin had his smith's hammer, Hund was empty-handed. The others carried either wood-axes or spears, stout- shafted ones with cross-pieces, not javelins or harpoons. “For bear,” Brand explained. “You don't want one of them walking up the shaft at you.” Four short hunting bows were spread among the group as well, given to those who considered themselves good shots. Cuthred carried the sword they had taken from Vigdjarf, and his spiked shield. Shef had his lance as well as a broad sharp-pointed Rogaland knife taken from the Crane.

Finally, Brand had insisted on pressing upon them six pairs of the strange sticks the Norwegians slid on, the skis. “None of us can use them,” Shef protested.

“Thorvin can,” Brand replied.

“I learned too,” added Ceolwulf. “Learned the first winter.”

“You might need to send scouts out,” Brand urged. What he thought was that some might survive, even if all did not.

At dawn, some fourteen days after the battle and the burning, the party set out. They were carried over the first stretch in the first ship Brand's folk had managed to make from salvaged parts: planks from both the wrecked ships, keel made from one half of the Crane's originally riveted main timber. The ship was short, wide, and lacking in proportion, named by Brand in disgust the Duckling. Nevertheless she moved reasonably enough under sail, the party packed into her roomy waist with the six-man crew working round them. There had been some argument about where they should all be set down, Brand opting for a fjord which ran furthest into the tangled mass of mountains, and so cut down their marching distance as much as possible. But Cuthred vetoed the choice with total confidence. “Echegorgun said not,” he reported. “He said, go to the fjord that leads to the triple-horned mountain. Then head due east. That way we will strike a line that may lead us down to the great lake that runs across Kjolen, the Keel.”

“A line, or a path,” queried Shef.

“A line. There are no paths. Not even Hidden Folk paths. In the deep mountains, they need no paths.”

He had almost said “we,” Shef noted.

So, in a chill wind, twenty-three laden figures stood at the very end of a deep fjord. The sun had climbed high up the sky. Even so, it was only just high enough to clear the mountain-tops, and half the fjord still lay in deep shadow. On the other side the snow-capped peaks lay reflected in deep still water, stirred only by the faint ripples of the Duckling being poled out from shore. The humans seemed a mere scattering of forked twigs under the impassive gray bulks, their path a mere slash in the rock down which bright water bounded.

Brand called out across the water, “Thor aid you.”

Thorvin made the sign of the Hammer in reply.

“Lead on,” said Shef to Cuthred.

Twelve days later, Shef knew he had calculated wrong. He was cutting a twelfth notch in a stick he had carried tucked in his belt since the first few days, and the rest were watching him. They were watching him because he had a dry stick.

That was part of the miscalculation. The first day had been as bad as Shef had thought it would be, remembering the agony of the climb up the shore, where he had met Ekwetargun. The mountain-side had never been a vertical wall, to be scaled. Yet it had never flattened out enough to become a place where a person could walk, either. First the thigh muscles ached. Then the arms began to join in, as the weary climbers pulled themselves up more and more, pushed with their legs less and less. The breaks for rest became longer, more frequent, the pain worse at each restart.

All that Shef had predicted. After all, it was only a matter of climbing, say, five thousand feet. Five thousand steps would do it. We must have done three already, he told the others. Two thousand steps! We can count them. And though he had been wrong about the number, he had been right that there would be an end.

So, then, for a few days, high spirits. Cooped up in slave-quarters or on ship-board for so long, the English had revelled in the air, the sunlight, the immense distances they could see, the exhilarating bareness. The bareness. That was the trouble. Even Thorvin had confided to Shef that he had expected to meet what the Norwegians called barrskog, thickets of scrub. But they were far above the tree-line here. Each night, each fireless night—for they had carried no wood—the cold seemed to clamp down more fiercely. Food was rationed strictly. It never seemed enough. Maybe if they had had a fire to boil their meat in, they began to mutter to each other, the dried seal-meat might have felt as if it filled a belly. As it was, it seemed to be like chewing leather. An age to choke down, and only cramp in the guts once it was there. Night after night, Shef woke from his cold sleep, even in the down-lined bag, dreaming of bread. Bread with thick yellow butter on it. And honey! With beer, thick brown beer. His body cried out for it. None of them had had much fat on their bones to begin with, and their bodies were beginning to break down muscle for want of anything else to use.

So they stared at his stick, wanting him to shave it down, use it for tinder, light a fire and burn—burn the sere brown grass and moss that covered the rolling upland plateau. It was impossible. But they thought it.

At least they had made some distance, Shef reflected. Neither hills nor woods had detained them, though swamp and bog had. Yet they had not come upon the lake he had hoped for, and all Cuthred would say was that it must be further on. A lake, he said, with trees round it, with bark that would make light boats. So Echegorgun had assured him. Pity Echegorgun won't come and show us, Shef had felt like saying again and again, keeping silent in view of Cuthred's doubtful loyalties.

A few days ago he would have told himself that at least the party was staying united. The ability of the ex- slaves to endure hardship had been a great asset. Where proud warriors would have argued and fought and blamed each other, making something out of every blister or bellyache, Shef's party had behaved to each other like—well, like women, Shef had to say. When Martha got the gripes one morning and might have delayed their start, it was Wilfi who acted the fool and distracted attention. When Udd, the weakest of the party, began to limp and go whiter and whiter in the face trying to disguise it, afraid that he would be abandoned, it was Ceolwulf who halted the march, dressed Udd's sore heel with his own ration of sealfat, and walked by his side to encourage him.

Yet the strain was starting to tell, showing in bickerings. Cuthred, especially, was getting worse again. The day before Karli, still irrepressible when it came to women, had caught up with Edith as she walked ahead, and fondled her buttock for a moment. He and Edith had been bed-partners since Drottningsholm, when the chance came, and she had not protested. But Cuthred, walking behind, had said nothing, merely caught Karli a great sweeping blow on the ear. For a second Karli had squared off to him. Then he saw Cuthred's ostentatious openness to the punch, knew that the counter would be lethal, dropped his shoulders and turned away. Now Karli was humiliated. Not as much as Cuthred had been, but there was enmity there now, and spreading as people took sides.

Shef tucked the stick back in his belt, looked up at the stars coming out in the frosty air. “Sleep now,” he said. “March at dawn. We've nothing better to do. We'll find wood tomorrow, and Cuthred's lake.”

When the leader weakens, then the army is hindered, so goes the proverb. When the leader has to joke, then the army is weak already.

Somewhere above, a mind was watching. Looking down at the little comfortless party, nipped by the cold and by the belly-pinch, one of them at least sobbing silently with an internal pain. It watched with satisfaction, tempered only by caution.

He survived my whales, it thought. He survived my disciple's test. He carried my spear and he still bears my mark, but he does me no honor. Has never done me honor. But what is honor? The important thing is,