One King's Way

was dangerous because you might put a hand on it without realizing, to red-hot, when it was soft enough to work. Only rarely had they seen iron white-hot, beginning to melt. Though cast-iron had been made, usually by accident and under especially lucky circumstances, the forced-draught bellows made molten iron for castings a possibility.

Underlying all the activity was the threat and fear, or certainty, of war. Shef had consulted Hagbarth and Narfi the priest of Tyr, and following his custom, tried to make a map of where he and his fellows had been. From all that they said, and from his own experience, he was in what looked very much like a trap, more of a trap even than the coast of Norway. From there, if he had had a ship, he could have sailed out into the open sea and tried to make the long passage to the Scottish shore, and then down the east coast to England. Where he was, even if he had free passage in Hagbarth's Aurvendill, he would have to make his way out of the gulf between Sweden and the far shore of the Eastern Sea, where the Baits lived, then round Skaane and through the narrows between it and Danish Sjaelland to make his way home.

“How wide is the gap there?” he asked.

“Three miles,” said Hagbarth. “That's how old King Kolfinn got rich. Levying tolls. Last I heard, he wasn't likely to be there much longer. If you're right about the Ragnarssons getting rid of Hrorik, there wouldn't be too much left to stop them.”

“And where is their famous Braethraborg, the Stronghold of the Brothers?”

“There,” said Hagbarth, tapping the map at a spot on the north shore of Sjaelland maybe fifty miles from the narrows. Half a day's sail.

The only other way back to England that Shef could see was to go back to Hedeby and walk across the marshes to the Ditmarsh, and so be back where he started. He would be once more without a ship. And anyway, if his vision was true, and it was confirmed by Hagbarth's definite knowledge that the siege had started, then Hedeby was in enemy hands. Ragnarsson hands. Nothing anyone could imagine was worse than falling into Sigurth Ragnarsson's hands. Shef would rather have died and been hung up in Echegorgun's smokehouse.

So the iron-workers made not only ingots of pig-iron and easily-traded goods like axe-heads. They also, following Udd's direction, made bow after bow of spring-steel, cocking-handles, iron quarrels. Men and women carved wooden parts, set them in piles. Every few days they would turn from that task and assemble them. Shef noted how much quicker it was, say, to make a dozen sets of parts and then assemble them all the same way, instead of following the time-honored procedure of working on one implement till it was done, and then starting the next one. The pile of crossbows grew, well beyond the numbers they had to use them.

“We can always sell them,” said Herjolf cheerfully.

“That is looking on the bright side,” said Shef.

Of all the innovations Udd had brought, though, none interested Thorvin and the other smiths more than the case-hardened steel. They had borrowed Cuthred's shield repeatedly, testing its powers, and been amazed. Ideas sprang up quickly. Make mail of the strange hard metal. It proved impossible to work, too hard to bend, too hard to fit together. An attempt to take a mail-shirt and case-harden it as one unit produced only an extremely expensive lump of rings half-welded together, the waste of a month's work for a skilled smith, as Herjolf pointed out. Flat plates were relatively easy to make, but useless once made. People did not have flat surfaces to fit them over. The metal seemed to have no use in war except for shields, and even then it had disadvantages. Shields were convex both because missiles tended to fly off such a surface, and—no trivial consideration—because a rounded shield could be carried on the shoulder. No-one, not even Brand or Cuthred, could march all day holding a shield up on his arm alone. Most deaths in battle went to the side whose shield-arms tired first.

The hardened metal, while fascinating, seemed to be practically useless in war. Yet Shef could not shake off the words that Svipdag the prisoner had hurled at him. “The only man who could get through what waits for you would need an iron skin.” He knew who would be waiting for him at the Braethraborg, Where was his iron skin? And how to carry it?

Shef found himself talking, often, to Hagbarth. Hagbarth was interested especially in the details of the various new types of ship that Shef had sailed or had encountered. He had nodded consideringly over Ordlaf's design for the English mule-armed “battleships,” and pressed Shef again and again for details of the short action with the Frani Ormr, a famous craft in her own right, the greatest warship of the North, of the traditional ocean-going type.

“It's no wonder you were outsailed by her,” he remarked. “I am not sure even my own Aurvendill would have done better. Faster by sail, I dare say. But the more oars you have for foot of keel, the faster you are rowing. In enclosed waters, Frani Ormr might be better.”

He was interested also in the design of the two-masted Crane, about which Shef could tell him a good deal, having helped to dismantle her for planks and parts. King Halvdan's coastal patrol ships were familiar to Hagbarth in any event. He could make a good guess at how one would have been strengthened to take catapult shock. It was the sailing qualities of the two masts that puzzled him. Yet, Shef assured him, the Crane had sailed, and sailed well. The Norfolk, on the other hand, had been something of a tub.

“Now we've got the idea of putting the mules on wheels, to rotate them,” Cwicca said one meal-time. “What we'd really like would be a mule at each end, front and back, high up. But I suppose all that weight high up would make the boat tip over, like, if the wind came from one side. Even the Norfolk wasn't very high out of the water.”

Hagbarth, listening, snorted beer through his nostrils. “ ‘Make the boat tip over, like,’ ” he gasped. “ ‘Each end, front and back.’ It's well for you you're not at sea and the sea-trolls listening. They punish sailors who do not use the proper haf words, the words to be said at sea.”

“So how would you make a boat like Cwicca said?” asked Shef, ignoring the complaint about sea- language.

“I've been thinking,” said Hagbarth, scratching lines in the table with his dagger. “What you want, I think—it's what they did with the Crane, but they only did it half way—is a rigid frame for the ship, much more solid than the way we build.”

Remembering the way the Aurvendill had flexed on her passage from Hedeby to Kaupang, both Shef and Karli nodded.

“Then you would want to build up the sides, like this.” Hagbarth drew on.

Studying the plan on the table, Shef said thoughtfully, “What you have there looks to me, in a way, like one of your own ships with a second one built over it.”

Hagbarth nodded. “Yes, you could do that. A conversion.”

“So we could convert, for instance, your Aurvendill, out there in the boathouse. Extend the keel and rivet it—we have plenty of hard steel—put in a frame, build up the freeboard, as you call it, ballast her heavy and put mules on fighting platforms bow and stern.”

Hagbarth cried out in honest pain. “Not the Aurvendill! The most beautiful sailer in the north!”

“Though not as fast as the Frani Ormr,” Shef pointed out.

“If you did all that,” said the unnoticed Edtheow, who had been staring grimly at Hagbarth's dagger marks on the polished table, “you could put iron plates all over it and really weigh it down.”

Shef stared at her open-mouthed.

“The words of fate will be spoken by someone,” remarked Thorvin, yet again.

In the end Hagbarth was sent out on skis while work started on Aurvendill. He had been reconciled to the idea, and confessed that he would have been fascinated to see it tried on anyone else's ship. He could not bear, though, to watch them slice into his own. After the main sawing was done, he promised, he would watch and assist. Till then, he would stay away.

Cuthred volunteered to escort him. Of all the men and women there he had played least part: refusing even to look at the mills being erected, taking little interest in the forge. He lay abed a long time with his leg-wound open, as if his body were taking revenge for the way he had overridden its demands during the berserk fit. When it healed, he took to skiing alone, quickly becoming expert, often staying out all day. When Shef asked him once whether he felt hungry or thirsty out in the waste, he replied, “There is food out there, if you know how to get it.”