One thing that added to the gaiety was yet another of Udd’s experiments. He had never forgotten the total failure of his attempt to make winter ale by steaming water off rather than freezing it off. Winter ale could be had now for the trouble of putting a bucket outside, but Udd persevered. If the strength in the drink was not left in the heated ale, he reasoned, it must have flown off with the steam. Slowly he experimented. Catching the steam. Enclosing the heated pot. Running a pipe, a copper pipe for its ductility, out from the heat into the cold, to liquefy the steam more quickly. Catching the end product. Repeating the process with ever tighter seals and more careful catchment. In the end, Udd had something which he was prepared to offer to the others. They tasted gingerly, curiously, appreciatively.
“A good drink for a cold day,” said Osmod. “Not as good as mulled winter ale, I reckon, but that’s more natural, isn’t it. This has still some of the reek of the forge about it. ‘Burnt ale,’ we’ll call it.”
“It might be better to use wine,” said Udd, though he had tasted wine no more than twice in his life.
Cuthred said nothing, but took a flask with him next time he skied alone into the snow.
The day came at last when they were ready to roll the remade Aurvendill out of the boathouse into a backwater of the river, now beginning to flow stronger under the ice, and to show signs of break-up.
“Should we not put something on the rollers, for luck?” asked Shef.
Hagbarth looked at him sharply. “There are some who do that,” he said. “Blood usually, a sacrifice to Ran, the troll-goddess in the deeps.”
“I don’t mean that. Udd, have you a small keg of burnt ale? Put that under the keel. As she rolls forward, she’ll crush it.”
Hagbarth nodded. “And then you must give her a new name.” He patted the stem-post. “She is my Aurvendill no longer. That is a star, you know. Made from the frostbitten toe of a giant which Thor flung into the sky. A good name for a fast ship. She is that no more. What will you call her?”
Shef said nothing till the men were at the drag-ropes, ready to pull her out of the shed in which they had worked for so long. Then, as they heaved together and the strong brown liquid splashed on the keel, he called out, “I name you Fearnought!”
Fearnought slid slowly down the runway and crunched through the thinning ice, to lie at rest on her ropes.
She seemed a strange craft. They had cut, spliced and riveted her keel with the stoutest wood and steel they could contrive. On the extended keel they had fitted frames every few yards, and to these frames, against the usual practice, which was to use sinew, they had nailed the planking. The Aurvendill’s original planks now formed only the upper part of her sides. Stouter ones, split from pine-trunks, held her lower down. At prow and stern fighting platforms disfigured her previously clean lines, copies of the ones Shef had seen on Hedeby walls. Two new-built mules squatted on each. To balance their cumbrous weight the Fearnought was built deep and round, with heavy ballast in what was now a capacious hold. The fighting platforms had been extended to half-decking, giving some shelter for the crew underneath them, more than the skin awnings which were all Viking crews normally had, even for the Atlantic.
On two matters Hagbarth had had his way. The Fearnought remained a one-master, though with her greater bulk the sail had been extended outwards, though not upwards, giving her almost half as much sail area again. And the iron plates that were to armor her sides and the rotating mules were stored in the hold, to be fitted only as needed.
“I wouldn’t like to try the long open-sea passage to England in her,” said Hagbarth, careful to speak well away from the ship in case his words brought bad luck. “She makes the tubbiest knorr look graceful, and once you put the plates on she’s worse.”