One King's Way thatc-2 Page 3

  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 take turns pulling it. Saves a lot of wood and a lot of work,” he added in a normal voice. The plank eased to the ground, caught by helpers and the two sawyers changed places, the one beneath shaking dust and shavings from his hair. Shef noticed as they changed over that one wore round his neck the Hammer of Thor, as did most of the workmen on the site, the other an almost indistinguishable Christian cross.

  “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 Frani Ormr, the Shining Worm, that rows fifty oars. This is as big. All these ships are as big.”

  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 onager—the wild ass. We call it the mule.”

  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.

  “Can you train it round?” asked Brand. “The mule, I mean. Can you point it different directions? You could with your dart-throwers.”

  “We're working on it,” said Shef. “We tried putting the whole thing on a cartwheel, putting the cartwheel on an axle, and bedding the other end of
the axle in a hole bored in the keel. But it was all too heavy to turn, and the kick kept breaking the axle. Udd has some idea of putting the whole thing on an iron ball, but… No. It will only shoot directly on the beam. But what we have done is fit two bars, two ropes, two sets of handles and so on, one either side. Only one crosspiece, naturally. But that means we can shoot to either beam.”

  Brand shook his head again. As they stood he had been feeling the ship heave gently beneath him, even in the Thames backwater, trying to estimate how she would feel in the open sea. A ton and a quarter of weight, much of it high up so that the machine stood higher than the gunwales. Sail pressure way off center-line. A wide yard so they could spread plenty of sail, he noticed. But tricky to handle. He had no doubt the fisherman knew his business. And there was no question what a hit from one of those rocks would do. Remembering the fragile frame of every boat he had ever sailed, their planks not even nailed to the ribs, but lashed with sinew, Brand could see the whole construction springing apart in a moment, leaving an entire crew struggling in the sea. And not even Sigurth Snake-eye's own fifty champions could fight against that.

  “What are you going to call her,” he asked suddenly. “For luck.” His hand shot automatically to the hammer pendant on his chest. Ordlaf copied his gesture, fishing from under his tunic the silver boat of Njörth.

  “We've got ten of the battleships,” said Shef. “I wanted to call them after the gods of the Way, Thor, Frey, Rig, and so on, but Thorvin would not allow it. He said it would be bad luck if we had to say ‘Heimdall is aground,’ or ‘Thor is stuck on the sandbank.’ So we changed our minds. We decided to call each ship after one of the counties in my realm, and as far as we can we will crew her from that county. So this is the Norfolk, over there the Suffolk, the Lincoln, the Isle of Ely, the Buckingham, and all the others. What do you think?”

  Brand hesitated. Like all sailors, he had deep respect for luck, and no wish to say the ill word that might bring down bad luck on the enterprise of his friend. “I think that once again you have brought a new thing to the world. It may be that your ‘Counties’ will sweep the seas. Certainly I would not care to encounter one, and men do not call me the timidest of the Norsemen. It may be that the kings of England will be the sea-kings in the future, and not the kings of the North.

  “Tell me,” he went on, “where do you mean to make your first cruise?”

  “Across to the Dutch shore,” said Shef. “Then up along the coast past the Frisian islands and into Danish waters. That is the main route the pirates come. We will sink every pirate ship we see. From then on any who wish to invade us must take the long sea-crossing from Denmark. But in the end we will destroy their bases, seek them out in their own home-ports.”

  “The Frisian islands,” muttered Brand. “The mouths of the Rhine, the Ems, the Elbe, the Eider. Well, I will tell you one thing, young man. All that is pilot water. You understand what I mean? You will need a pilot who knows the channels and the landmarks, so he can find his way by smell and hearing if he needs to.”

  Ordlaf looked stubborn. “I've found my way all my life with no more than lead, lookout and log-line. Nor do I feel my luck has got any the worse since I left the monks who were my masters and found the gods of the Way.”

  Brand grunted. “I say nothing against the gods of the Way.” Again, both he and Ordlaf touched their protecting pendants, and this time Shef, with a self-conscious gesture, reached also to pull out his strange ladder-like charm, the token of his patron Rig. “No, the gods may be well enough. But as for lead, lookout and log-line—you'll need more than that off Bremen! I say it, I, Brand, Champion of the men of Halogaland.”

  The listening workmen shifted and muttered. Some of those new to the yards nudged each other, pointing at the unfamiliar pendant of Rig.

  Sun slanted through the high windows of the great library in the cathedral of Cologne, to fall on the open pages of several books spread across the massive lectern. Erkenbert the deacon, his short frame barely able to see its upper edges, stood lost in thought. He was alone. The librarius, knowing he had the archbishop's favor, and approving the intentness of his research, had left him to himself, even with the great and precious Bible, written on the skins of eighty calves.

  Erkenbert was comparing texts. Could the fantastic tale that the archbishop Rimbert had told them days before possibly be true? It had convinced everyone else at the meeting, archbishops and counselors alike. But then it had flattered their pride, appealed to their sense of themselves as a nation, and as a nation continually rejected and undervalued by the power of Rome. Erkenbert did not share that feeling—or at least not yet. The English nation, remembering its conversion by the blessed Pope Gregory, had long boasted its loyalty to the Popes and to Rome. But what had Rome sent in return? If what Rimbert said was true, then maybe it was time to be loyal… elsewhere.

  The texts, now. First among them was one that Erkenbert knew well, could have recited in his sleep. Nevertheless, important to look again. The four gospellers' accounts of the crucifixion of Christ all told slightly different tales—proof of their truth, of course, for who does not know that four men seeing the same thing will pick different parts of it to repeat? But John—John said more than the others. Turning the great, stiff pages, Erkenbert found the passage he wanted and read it, whispering the Latin words softly to himself and mentally translating them into his native English.

  “…sed unus militum lancea latus eius aperuit. But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a lance.” With a lance, thought Erkenbert. With a Roman soldier's lance.

  Erkenbert knew better than most men what Roman soldiers' weapons looked like. At what had once been his home at the great Minster of York, there had still remained standing much of what was formerly the headquarters building of the Sixth Legion of Eboracum. The legion had left York and Britain four hundred years before, called away to fight a civil war on mainland Europe, but much of its arsenal had remained behind, and much of what had not been stolen or used still lay in the vaults. The imperishable bronze fittings for the catapults Erkenbert had made for the heathen Ivar had been genuine old work, as good as the day they were made. Iron rusted, but for all that Erkenbert had seen on its stand, kept cleaned and polished as a trophy, the full panoply of a Roman legionary, helmet, cuirass, short-sword, greaves, shield and of course the iron-shafted Roman javelin, the pilum. Also called a lancea.

  Yes, thought Erkenbert, that could have happened. And no question but that the lance, the Holy Lance, the lance that had pierced the side of the Son of God himself, could have survived physically. He had himself seen and handled weapons that might be as old.

  But who might have thought to preserve such a thing? It would have had to be someone who recognized its importance at the very moment of its use. Otherwise the weapon would have gone back to the barracks, been mixed with a thousand others. Who could have set aside such a weapon? Not, thought Erkenbert, for all the archbishop had said, the pious Jew Joseph of Arimathea, whom John the gospeller mentioned four verses later. Such a man, if a disciple of Jesus, might well have been able to beg the body from Pilate, and to preserve the holy chalice in which Jesus had celebrated the Last Supper—though John said nothing of that. He would not have been able to gain possession of an infantry issue weapon from the Romans.

  But the centurion, now. Erkenbert turned the pages of the Bible thoughtfully, moving from one Gospel account to the next. The centurion was mentioned in three out of four, and in all three he said almost the same words: Luke, “truly this was a righteous man,” Mark, “truly this man was the Son of God,” Matthew, “truly this was the Son of God.” And in the fourth, in John, might the writer not have meant the centurion by “one of the soldiers”? If the centurion pierced the side of Jesus, as was his duty, and had seen or felt the miracle—what easier than for him to keep and treasure his own lance?

  Now where did the centurion go after the Crucifixion? Erkenbert turned to another book, small, shabby, untitled, a book
it seemed of letters, one after another, prattling of land and loans and debts, written by many authors, the kind of thing many efficient librarii would have sent to be scraped and re-used. Erkenbert fixed on the one of which Rimbert had told him. It seemed plain enough. A letter from Roman times, written in Latin—not good Latin, Erkenbert noted with interest, the Latin of a man who knew only the words of command, and to whom grammar was a mystery—and said at the top to be from one Gaius Cassius Longinus, centurion of Legio XXX Victrix. Describing in admiring terms the crucifixion at Jerusalem of a troublemaker, and now sent to the centurion's home at—Erkenbert could not read the name, but certainly something German, Bingen or Zobingen maybe.

  Erkenbert pulled at his lower lip. A forgery? The letter had clearly been copied several times, but that was natural over the centuries. If the copier had been concerned to stress its importance, would he have made such a shabby copy, with such inferior penmanship? As for the tale itself, Erkenbert had no doubt that a centurion in Jerusalem in the Year of Our Lord 33 might well have been from the Rhineland. Or from England for that matter. Had the great Constantine, who had made Christianity the religion of the Empire, not himself been proclaimed Emperor on the very site of Erkenbert's own Minster at York?

  The critical text was the third, a modern work, written no more than thirty years before, or so Erkenbert judged from its style. It was an account of the life and the death of the great Emperor Charlemagne, whose degenerate descendants, in Archbishop Gunther's view, now incompetently ruled the West. Much of it was familiar to Erkenbert already—the Emperor's campaigns, his fostering of learning. As Erkenbert never for a moment forgot, Charlemagne had called Alcuin, another man of York, another humble deacon like himself, from the English minster to control the destiny and the scholarship of the whole of Europe. Alcuin had been a man of great learning, true. But in literature, not in the practical arts. He was not an arithmeticus, as Erkenbert was. There was nothing to say an arithmeticus might not be as great a man as a poet.