One King's Way

Shef wondered. Echegorgun had trailed them across the mountains to Piruusi's camp. Could he have followed further? The Hidden Folk seemed to be able to go where they pleased in the wastelands. Cuthred had said once that there were more of them than true people realized. Maybe he was meeting Echegorgun, or even Miltastaray, in the wasteland. The Hidden Folk liked him. Hardly anyone else did, though some among the women were sorry for him. At least he was a good protector for Hagbarth, and Hagbarth was not one of the men who were likeliest to offend him, unlike Karli, now paired with Edith, or Ceolwulf, who seemed to remind Cuthred of what he had once been.

Yule came, with roast pork and blood sausage to add to their usual fare, with tale-telling and songs from the Way-priests of their mythical stories. The deep winter came after it, with such howling winds that the mill-sails had to be taken down and stored for a while, and thick snow drifting. The small community, with ample food and fuel, blankets and down-lined bags, ignored it. Shef wondered again at the good cheer on every face, but not for long.

“It's cold up here, right enough,” said Cwicca. “But if you think what it was like back in Crowland in the fens, slaving for the black monks! Lucky to have a blanket at all, no food but porridge and not much of that, living in a hut with an earth floor and that soaked through from Michaelmas to Easter. And nothing to look forward to but Lent! No, I've never passed a happier winter.”

One thing that added to the gaiety was yet another of Udd's experiments. He had never forgotten the total failure of his attempt to make winter ale by steaming water off rather than freezing it off. Winter ale could be had now for the trouble of putting a bucket outside, but Udd persevered. If the strength in the drink was not left in the heated ale, he reasoned, it must have flown off with the steam. Slowly he experimented. Catching the steam. Enclosing the heated pot. Running a pipe, a copper pipe for its ductility, out from the heat into the cold, to liquefy the steam more quickly. Catching the end product. Repeating the process with ever tighter seals and more careful catchment. In the end, Udd had something which he was prepared to offer to the others. They tasted gingerly, curiously, appreciatively.

“A good drink for a cold day,” said Osmod. “Not as good as mulled winter ale, I reckon, but that's more natural, isn't it. This has still some of the reek of the forge about it. ‘Burnt ale,’ we'll call it.”

“It might be better to use wine,” said Udd, though he had tasted wine no more than twice in his life.

Cuthred said nothing, but took a flask with him next time he skied alone into the snow.

The day came at last when they were ready to roll the remade Aurvendill out of the boathouse into a backwater of the river, now beginning to flow stronger under the ice, and to show signs of break- up.

“Should we not put something on the rollers, for luck?” asked Shef.

Hagbarth looked at him sharply. “There are some who do that,” he said. “Blood usually, a sacrifice to Ran, the troll-goddess in the deeps.”

“I don't mean that. Udd, have you a small keg of burnt ale? Put that under the keel. As she rolls forward, she'll crush it.”

Hagbarth nodded. “And then you must give her a new name.” He patted the stem-post. “She is my Aurvendill no longer. That is a star, you know. Made from the frostbitten toe of a giant which Thor flung into the sky. A good name for a fast ship. She is that no more. What will you call her?”

Shef said nothing till the men were at the drag-ropes, ready to pull her out of the shed in which they had worked for so long. Then, as they heaved together and the strong brown liquid splashed on the keel, he called out, “I name you Fearnought!”

Fearnought slid slowly down the runway and crunched through the thinning ice, to lie at rest on her ropes.

She seemed a strange craft. They had cut, spliced and riveted her keel with the stoutest wood and steel they could contrive. On the extended keel they had fitted frames every few yards, and to these frames, against the usual practice, which was to use sinew, they had nailed the planking. The Aurvendill's original planks now formed only the upper part of her sides. Stouter ones, split from pine-trunks, held her lower down. At prow and stern fighting platforms disfigured her previously clean lines, copies of the ones Shef had seen on Hedeby walls. Two new-built mules squatted on each. To balance their cumbrous weight the Fearnought was built deep and round, with heavy ballast in what was now a capacious hold. The fighting platforms had been extended to half-decking, giving some shelter for the crew underneath them, more than the skin awnings which were all Viking crews normally had, even for the Atlantic.

On two matters Hagbarth had had his way. The Fearnought remained a one- master, though with her greater bulk the sail had been extended outwards, though not upwards, giving her almost half as much sail area again. And the iron plates that were to armor her sides and the rotating mules were stored in the hold, to be fitted only as needed.

“I wouldn't like to try the long open-sea passage to England in her,” said Hagbarth, careful to speak well away from the ship in case his words brought bad luck. “She makes the tubbiest knorr look graceful, and once you put the plates on she's worse.”

“She's not designed to reach England,” said Shef. “If she gets us through the narrows and round to the Frisian shore, she'll have done her job.”

Just past the Braethraborg will do, thought Hagbarth, but did not say the words. He himself had no intention of risking that dangerous passage. He had a draft on Shef and Alfred's treasury for the price of the Aurvendill, and hoped only to collect it.

Shef wondered, indeed, who he had the right to ask to share his dangers. The English men and women who had come so far with him would continue, hoping to reach home, as would Karli, eager to tell his tales of travel in the Ditmarsh. So would Hund. Thorvin too insisted on going. Hagbarth and his small crew would travel as far as Smaaland in the south of Sweden, showing the landlubbers how to sail the boat as they did so.

As the snow melted and people thought of departure, Cuthred came to see his master.

“Do you want me to travel south with you?” he asked.

Shef stared at him. “I thought we would take you home. To Northumbria.”

“There's no-one in Northumbria for me. My king is dead. I do not know if my wife is alive, but even if she is—I am no good to her now. I would rather live here in the waste. There are people here who would take me as I am. People who do not measure a man in only one way.”

The terrible bitterness was in his voice again, Shef heard. And yet—he did not dare to let Cuthred go. He was worth a catapult on his own, or a case-hardened breastplate. He would be needed before they won south, of that Shef was sure.

“Do you remember the mill?” he asked. “When I released you from that, you said you were my man.”

Cuthred had been a king's champion for much of his life. He understood loyalty and service, and accepted both as lasting to the death.

“See me through the Skagerrak and I will free you to return, to live in the waste, however you wish,” said Shef.

Cuthred stared down at the slush. “I will see you through the Skagerrak,” he agreed. “And past the Braethraborg. There will be someone waiting for me here.”

Chapter Twenty-nine

The new king of the Swedes, Kjallak, knew well that he had been chosen to succeed his murdered predecessor Orm for one thing only: to cope with the menace of the German Christians, and to a lesser degree the Way-folk now spreading through the country. To return the land of the Swedes, Sveariki, to the old ways and the old customs of the priests. Failure, and the priests of Uppsala-temple would choose again.

He laid his plans carefully. A sacrifice had been demanded. A sacrifice he would give them. And it would consist of men and women from all the groups that the Swedes hated and feared: Christians, Wayfolk, Finns and