Shef nodded. Beneath the relief, a kind of excitement was growing. Time to think. Time to try things out without the frantic, driving, battle-in-the-morning haste that had always been his fate so far. Time to plan. A chance to move when he was ready and the other side was not, instead of the other way round. Of course they would have a winter to prepare and grow strong too. But then they might not know he was coming.
He remembered the words of Svipdag the prisoner. What were they? “The only man who could get through what waits for you would need an iron skin.” They had been spoken in malice and to frighten him, he knew, but there was a proverb in Norse that Thorvin often quoted. “The words of fate will be spoken by someone.” Maybe Svipdag had been the emissary of fate. An iron skin. He would see.
Chewing carefully with loose teeth on the whole green pea-pods that Hund had forced upon him, Shef swallowed, nodded again. “We will stay, Herjolf, and I thank you for your offer. And I promise you, no-one here will be idle. Many things will be different in the spring.”
Soon chimneys smoked, clangor rang out over the snow, men skied out to cut wood and raise new huts, sledged out iron to pay for food and beer. The passing Finns, wondering, saw unceasing activity when the Norse-folk usually slept.
Far in the south the Ragnarssons, with the head of King Hrorik on a pole as a reminder, marched their army from kingdom to kingdom, demanding the surrender of all the little kings of Denmark, Gamli of Fyn and Arnodd of Aalborg, Kolfinn of Sjaelland and Kari of Skaane.
In Sweden King Kjallak the Strong, brought to the throne by discontent with his peaceful predecessor Orm, consulted with his priests and heard continual reports of the insolence of the German missionaries and their protectors. We cannot defeat them, said village after village. What do we pay our herring-tax for? Come and defend us! And Kjallak agreed, but found it hard to pick a champion who was prepared to meet the Germans’ awe-inspiring leader. The time would come to crush them in battle, and also in the spirit, so he told the impatient priests of the great temple at Uppsala.
And in Hamburg the fierce and saintly Archbishop Rimbert heard the same reports with pleasure, and circulated them to his brother prelates, the archbishops of the German lands, sure that destiny lay in the West, not as the fool Pope Adrian thought through some accommodation with the Greekling Emperor and his Popelet. In all the German lands the stories of the bold Ritters of the Lanzenorden spread among the landless younger sons of aristocratic families, and the recruiting tables were never free of applicants.
In Norway King Olaf Elf-of-Geirstath, whom men were now beginning to call “the Victorious,” as they had never done all the days his brother was alive, looked at his retinue of under-kings, of Ringeriki and Ranriki, Hedemark and Uppland and Agdir, and at the newly-cautious embassies from the West, the fierce Rogalanders and the men of the fjords, and wondered where the man was whose luck had so changed his own.
And Godive, now swollen with child, wondered occasionally what had become of the boy she had once known, her first man and her foster-brother.
But far in the North the land lay hidden and peaceful under snow.
Chapter Twenty-eight
The scurvy lifted quickly as Hund forced his patients to eat onions and leeks, peas and beans, some dried, some still relatively fresh from the recent harvest. Hund made careful notes in runic script, saying that he would give the answers to other Ithun-priests. Certainly the answer to this disease lay in food, not in air or light.
With the disappearance of the scurvy went the feelings of gloom and weariness which had beset so many of the party, replaced as if by contrast by a mood of energy and excitement: all necessarily turned inwards, for the wind and the cold increasingly contrived to isolate the little community, except for the muffled sleigh-drivers trading for supplies or bringing back wood from the forest.