“Karli wasn’t snoring, he was out after women.”
“Shut up, Fritha. It is a plate made like the spike, by cooling, and then quenching, and reheating, so it was strong and springy. Then I heated it again and kept it in the fire. And all the time it was in the fire, I kept piling the charcoal round it. Now lord, when it has cooled, I want you to thrust it with your spear, with the great spear you took from the Snake-eye.”
Shef raised an eyebrow. The ‘Gungnir’ spear’s massive head was made of the best steel he had ever seen. The plate Udd had been working on was perhaps an eighth of an inch thick, the thickness of the metal guard that protected a warrior’s hand in the center of a shield. Much thicker and the shield would be too heavy to move easily. But Shef had no doubt the steel spear-head would punch straight through.
As the plate cooled, Udd set it up directly against the wooden logs of the forge wall. “Strike now, master.”
Shef stepped back, balanced the shaft, imagined he had in front of him a deadly enemy. He stepped forward onto the left foot, swung body, arm and shoulder, trying to strike through plate and wall to a space a foot behind both, as Brand had often taught him.
The shaft jarred in his hands, sprang back. Incredulously, Shef looked at the thin plate. Unmarked. Undented. He looked again at the needle-point of ‘Gungnir’. For half an inch the triangular point had been punched flat.
“That’s hardened steel,” said Udd flatly. “I thought it would be good stuff for mail. But I found you can’t work it. It’s unbendable. But if you made the mail, and then hardened it…”
“Or if you made thin plates like this and then just sewed them on…”
In the considering silence one of the catapulteers remarked, “What I don’t see is how it all comes from the same stuff. Some’s hard and brittle, some’s soft and bendy, some’s springy, some’s so hard you can’t scratch it. What makes the difference? Is it something in the water?”
“Some of the Vikings think that,” said Udd: “They believe it’s best to use a slave’s blood for the final temper.”
The ex-slaves looked at each other, reflecting on fates they had missed.
“Or some try oil. There may be some sense in that. All this steam. You’ve seen sweat jump off a hot blade? Well, water tries to get away from hot metal, and when you’re quenching you don’t want it to get away. So oil might be better.
“But I don’t think it’s that. It’s the heating and cooling that do it. And I think it’s something to do with the charcoal as well. If you can keep the metal touching the coal, something passes between them. That’s my belief.”
Shef walked to the door, stared out across the snow to the fjord and the islands lying in it, still trapped in thick ice. Out there on one of the furthest islands, he knew, was the queen he had seen on his first arrival, Queen Ragnhild, with her son, her husband away seeing to his taxes in the Eastfold. Out there on the island they called Drottningsholm, Queen Island. He watched his breath condensing in the frosty air, and wondered about sweat on iron, iron sizzling in the water-bucket, men blowing on their hands to warm them, steam rising from hot bodies in cold air. What was steam, he wondered?
Two men were carrying a bucket towards him across the snow, slung between them on a pole. There was something strange about that. You would expect slaves to be given a task of that kind, but those men were not slaves: too tall, too well-dressed, swords at their belts. Behind him Shef could hear Cwicca ordering Karli to the bellows and taking a turn at following Udd’s instructions. Through the inexpert beating of the hammer he could hear the faint squeak of leather shoes on snow.
The men reached the forge door, set their bucket down carefully. Shef found himself, as so often with these Norwegians, looking up to meet their eyes.