The little man’s pale face shone with excitement, the thrill of the inventor. Shef caught the feeling, felt his palms itch to start the work.
“Listen, Udd,” he said, trying to keep a cool head. “I don’t see what you mean about the shape to lift and to drop.”
Udd nodded energetically. “That’s what I’ve been thinking about every night in my bunk. What we need, I reckon, is something like this…”
On the floor of the hut, planks overlaid with a thin layer of drifted snow from under the warped door, Udd began to draw a cross-section of a reciprocating cam. After a few moments Shef seized his own straw and began to draw as well. “If it turns like this,” he said, “you’d have to have a groove on the handle of the hammer, to stop it flying off. But does it have to have a hammer-shape?”
An hour later Thorvin the smith-priest, coming from his doubtful meeting, saw the tall king and the puny freedman walking down the snowy path, their arms waving wildly as they designed imaginary machines. For an instant he understood Valgrim’s doubts. Farman and Vigleik might see the One King in their visions. No vision or prophecy had ever included a word, he was sure, about scrawny foreign thrallborn assistants.