“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.”