“You can count the turns you give to the cogwheels,” said Oswi, “so it don’t tighten too much.”
“And I put my head right down on the ropes every time and listen to ’em,” said one of his mates, “till I can hear they’re in tune like a harper’s harp-strings.”
“But she’ll still bloody well break one day when you don’t expect it; they always do. Break one or two of us for breakfast.”
A dozen heads nodded gloomily.
“What we need are stronger wooden arms,” said Oswi. “They’re what goes.”
“Wrap ’em with rope?”
“No, that would work loose.”
“I used to work in the forge at my village,” the newest member of the team said hesitatingly. “Maybe if they had iron supports…”
“No, those wooden arms bend a bit,” said Oswi firmly. “They have to. Anything iron would stop them doing that.”
“Depends on the iron. If you heat and reheat and hammer it the right way the iron turns into what my old master called steel. But it’s steel that bends a bit, not soft, like bad iron, but with spring in it. Now if we put a strip of that along the inside of each of the arms it would bend with the wood—and stop them flying apart if the wood broke.”
Thoughtful silence.
“What about the jarl?” asked a questioning voice.
“Yes, what about the jarl?” came another voice from behind the half-circle. Shef, strolling round the camp in response to Brand’s advice, had seen the cluster of intent faces and had walked silently up to overhear.
Consternation and alarm. Swiftly the group of catapulteers rearranged itself so that their newest member was left in the center, to face the unpredictable.
“Er, Udd here’s got an idea,” said Oswi, also shifting responsibility.
“Let’s hear it.”
As the new recruit, first hesitatingly, then fluently and with confidence, began to describe the procedure of making mild steel, Shef watched him. An insignificant little man, even smaller than the others, with weak eyes and a stoop. Any one of Brand’s Vikings would have dismissed him immediately as useless to an army, not worth his rations even as a latrine-digger. Yet he knew something. Was it new knowledge? Or was it old knowledge, something many smiths had always known, given the right conditions, but had been unable to pass on except to an apprentice?
“This steel bends, you say,” said Shef. “And springs back? Not like my sword”—tie drew from its sheath the fine Baltic sword Brand had given him, made like his own self-forged and long-lost weapon of mixed strips of soft iron and hard steel—”but made in one piece? Springy all the way through?”
Udd, the little man, nodded firmly.
“All right.” Shef thought a moment. “Oswi, tell the camp marshal you and your team are off all duties. Udd, tomorrow morning go to Thorvin’s forge with as many men as you need to help, and start making strips the way you say. Fit the first pair to ‘Dead Level’ and see if they work. If they do, fit them to all the machines.
“And Udd: When it’s done I want to see some of this new metal. Make some extra strips for me.”
Shef walked away as the horns blew to dowse fires and to mount the night-guard. Something there, he thought. Something he could use. And he needed something to use. For in spite of the newfound confidence of Thorvin and his friends, he knew that if they just repeated what they had done before, they would be destroyed. Every stroke teaches its own counter. And he had enemies everywhere, in the South and in the North, in the Church and among the pagans. Bishop Daniel. Ivar. Wulfgar and Alfgar. King Burgred. They would not stand up to be shot at a second time.
He did not know what would come, but it would be unpredictable. It was vital to be unpredictable in reply.
The dream, or vision, came this time almost as a relief. Shef felt himself surrounded by difficulties. He knew he did not know the way through them. If some greater agency did, he would welcome the knowledge. He did not think it was Othin in his guise as Bölverk, Bale-Worker, who was guiding him, for all that Thorvin continued to urge him to accept the spear-pendant, the sign of Othin. But who else would help him? If he knew, Shef reflected, he would wear that one’s sign.