Or followed you up, he thought but did not say. The English ex-slaves had told him many strange stories of their master, whom they both venerated and felt at home with. He had believed few of them. Now, he was beginning to wonder. Was there a penalty, he thought, for a man who had greeted the son of a god by knocking him down. There had not seemed to be one so far.
“Well, if we don’t do something we’ll all starve to death,” said Shef.
The ex-slaves considered the prospect. Not an unfamiliar one. Many slaves, and as many poor folk, died in the winter, from cold or hunger or both. They had all known it to happen.
“I had an idea,” said Udd, and then stopped, with his usual shyness in front of a group.
“Was it about iron?” asked Shef.
Udd nodded vigorously, recovering his nerve. “Yes, lord. You know that ore we saw down at the College at Kaupang? The sort that took so little working, because there’s so much metal in the stone? It comes from Jarnberaland. Iron-bearing Land.”
Shef nodded encouragingly, with no idea where this thought was leading. They couldn’t eat iron, but sarcasm would cut Udd off completely.
“There’s a place called Kopparberg too. Copper Mountain. Well, the thing is, they’re both over there.” Udd pointed across the harbor to the mountainous shore opposite. “On the other side of the mountains, I mean. I thought, if we can’t sail, we could walk. It’s not as if there’s nowhere the other side.”
Shef looked at the jagged forbidding shore, thought of the terrible cramping struggle up the side of Echegorgun’s inlet. The path they had come upon. The easy ridge route Echegorgun had taken to bring them out opposite the island.
“Thank you, Udd,” he said. “I’ll think about that.”
He walked on till he found Guthmund the Swede. Guthmund was in unexpectedly good spirits. He had lost his ship, and there was every chance of dying of starvation. On the other hand, the loot from the Crane had been surprisingly good. Ragnhild had taken half her ancestral treasure with her, to buy men and revenge, and it had been recovered from the wreck. Deaths in the attack had meant fewer people to share it with, too. Guthmund greeted his young leader with a smile. They called him Guthmund the Greedy. His ambition was to become Gull-Guthmund, or Gold-Guthmund in English.
The smile vanished as Shef asked him about what Udd had said. “Oh, it’s up there somewhere all right,” he agreed. “But I wouldn’t know where exactly. You folk don’t realize. Sweden is a thousand miles long from end to end, all the way from Skaane to the Lapp-mark. If Skaane is Swedish,” he added. “I am from Soderrnanland myself, I am a true Swede. But I guess, I guess this is about as far north as Jarnberaland.”
“How can you tell?”
“By the way the shadows fall. If you measure a shadow at noon, and you know how far it is from midsummer, you can tell how far north you are. It is one of the crafts of the Way, Skaldfinn Njörth’s priest once showed me.”
“So if we went up there and walked due east we would come to Jarnberaland in the country of the Swedes.”
“You might not have to walk all the way,” said Guthmund. “I have heard it said that there are lakes up there in the Keel, the central range, and they run east and west. Brand told me that when the Finns on this side raid the Finns on the other—Kvens they call them—they take bark boats and paddle along them.”
“Thank you, Guthmund,” said Shef, and walked on again.
Brand looked incredulous when Shef reported the results of his conversations to him and Thorvin, still sitting together. “Can’t be done,” he said flatly.
“Why not?”
“It’s too late in the year.”
“A month after midsummer?”
Brand sighed. “You don’t realize. Up here summer doesn’t last long. On the coast, all right, the sea seems to keep the snow and ice off for a while. But just think. Remember what it was like in Hedeby, like spring, you said. Get to Kaupang and it’s still ice-bound. And how far is that? Three hundred miles north? Here you’re another six hundred. A few miles in from the coast—and that’s as far as I’ve ever been, even chasing Finns—and there’s snow on the ground more than half the year. The higher you go, the worse it gets. The high mountains never melt at all.”