“Keep pumping,” he ordered.
Shef felt the warmth coming now not from the burning match beneath but from the dome itself. As the heat increased the Greek writhed in fear. The barbarians had no fear because they had no understanding! In the end he could not control himself. He seized up a rag, leaped forward and turned the valve on top of the tank. A shrill whistle sounded from the slotted length of pipe.
“The valve! You must open the valve at once!” he called, in suddenly-discovered English, backing the words with a frantic gesture.
Shef shouted “Turn!”
The last of Steffi’s three-man gang turned firmly on the valve that led from the bottom of the copper dome—the valve that led to the nozzle. Shef felt an instant wave of something jetting through the brass nozzle in his hand, a reek of something stinging and acrid. He drew the lit slow-match from behind his back and at arm’s length held it to the nozzle.
The dragon’s breath flared out, belching flame fifty feet out over the sea, landing on it and blazing with clouds of black smoke even on the water itself. For long moments the sea itself seemed to be ablaze, Shef and the valve-hand stepped back, cringing automatically from the fierce heat.
Shef collected himself, shouted “Turn!” once again. The valve closed, the flame stopped. Instantly Steffi ceased to pump, the bellows-man pulled his bellows away, the brazier-hand pulled the charcoal flame away from under the dome. All five men fell back from the dome to the very edge of the ship’s tiny deck and stared tensely at it. Had they pumped it too strongly? Would the flame come back from the sea and ignite some stray spill? After a while Shef felt them all releasing their breath together.
“It’s a kind of oil,” he said.
“Not olive oil,” said Steffi. “I’ve tried lighting that and it doesn’t work at all, hardly.”
“Might be whale-oil,” ventured Shef, remembering the way Queen Ragnhild’s fire-arrows had lit up the harvest of the grind in far Halogaland.
“Doesn’t smell like it,” said the valve-hand, once a fisherman in Ordlaf’s village of Bridlington.
“I don’t know what in Hel it is,” said Steffi. “But I bet we can’t get no more of it once this is used up. But at least we know now when to open the valve. That whistle on top, it sounds the warning.”
“You may know how this work,” the Greek shouted angrily, still in the broken English he had till then refused to admit. “But there is one place on earth for naphtha and you never find it. Nor I tell you, no matter how you torture me.”
Shef looked down at him coldly. “There is no need of torture, and now I have the machine I know where to get the fuel. It is found best on a winter’s morning, is that not so?”
The Greek’s heart sank within him. They had mastered the siphon with ease. Now it seemed they had the oil as well. After all, in the barbarian West, who could say that there was no Tmutorakan, as there was in the barbarian East? And if they had both halves of the secret, how might Byzantium stand? And he could be sure he would find no welcome in Byzantium once it was known the secret was out. Any Greek should know there was a time to change sides, and this was it.
“Listen to me, one-eye,” he mumbled, “that for a price I correct your errors.”
Shef nodded calmly, as though he had expected this response, and fumbled for a moment in the pocket of his breeches. He had had these things made by a silversmith in Septimania, made secretly and paid for from his own purse.
“Steffi,” he said, “I want you and your men here to wear these.” He produced the silver pendants from his pocket.
“What, and give up what we got already?” asked Steffi, putting a hand up to the Thor-hammer round his neck.
“Yes. You have Thor, and so does one of your mates, and the other two have a Frey-phallus and a Rig-ladder like me. But they are just the signs that took your fancy, or that you copied from others. I must stay with my own kraki, for it is the mark of my father, but you should wear the signs of your trade, now you have a trade. It is a sign of honor too, for your courage.”