“So how would you make a boat like Cwicca said?” asked Shef, ignoring the complaint about sea-language.
“I’ve been thinking,” said Hagbarth, scratching lines in the table with his dagger. “What you want, I think—it’s what they did with the Crane, but they only did it half way—is a rigid frame for the ship, much more solid than the way we build.”
Remembering the way the Aurvendill had flexed on her passage from Hedeby to Kaupang, both Shef and Karli nodded.
“Then you would want to build up the sides, like this.” Hagbarth drew on.
Studying the plan on the table, Shef said thoughtfully, “What you have there looks to me, in a way, like one of your own ships with a second one built over it.”
Hagbarth nodded. “Yes, you could do that. A conversion.”
“So we could convert, for instance, your Aurvendill, out there in the boathouse. Extend the keel and rivet it—we have plenty of hard steel—put in a frame, build up the freeboard, as you call it, ballast her heavy and put mules on fighting platforms bow and stern.”
Hagbarth cried out in honest pain. “Not the Aurvendill! The most beautiful sailer in the north!”
“Though not as fast as the Frani Ormr,” Shef pointed out.
“If you did all that,” said the unnoticed Edtheow, who had been staring grimly at Hagbarth’s dagger marks on the polished table, “you could put iron plates all over it and really weigh it down.”
Shef stared at her open-mouthed.
“The words of fate will be spoken by someone,” remarked Thorvin, yet again.
In the end Hagbarth was sent out on skis while work started on Aurvendill. He had been reconciled to the idea, and confessed that he would have been fascinated to see it tried on anyone else’s ship. He could not bear, though, to watch them slice into his own. After the main sawing was done, he promised, he would watch and assist. Till then, he would stay away.
Cuthred volunteered to escort him. Of all the men and women there he had played least part: refusing even to look at the mills being erected, taking little interest in the forge. He lay abed a long time with his leg-wound open, as if his body were taking revenge for the way he had overridden its demands during the berserk fit. When it healed, he took to skiing alone, quickly becoming expert, often staying out all day. When Shef asked him once whether he felt hungry or thirsty out in the waste, he replied, “There is food out there, if you know how to get it.”
Shef wondered. Echegorgun had trailed them across the mountains to Piruusi’s camp. Could he have followed further? The Hidden Folk seemed to be able to go where they pleased in the wastelands. Cuthred had said once that there were more of them than true people realized. Maybe he was meeting Echegorgun, or even Miltastaray, in the wasteland. The Hidden Folk liked him. Hardly anyone else did, though some among the women were sorry for him. At least he was a good protector for Hagbarth, and Hagbarth was not one of the men who were likeliest to offend him, unlike Karli, now paired with Edith, or Ceolwulf, who seemed to remind Cuthred of what he had once been.
Yule came, with roast pork and blood sausage to add to their usual fare, with tale-telling and songs from the Way-priests of their mythical stories. The deep winter came after it, with such howling winds that the mill-sails had to be taken down and stored for a while, and thick snow drifting. The small community, with ample food and fuel, blankets and down-lined bags, ignored it. Shef wondered again at the good cheer on every face, but not for long.
“It’s cold up here, right enough,” said Cwicca. “But if you think what it was like back in Crowland in the fens, slaving for the black monks! Lucky to have a blanket at all, no food but porridge and not much of that, living in a hut with an earth floor and that soaked through from Michaelmas to Easter. And nothing to look forward to but Lent! No, I’ve never passed a happier winter.”