“So: we took thick oak blocks. We cut slots for the metal near the front and slid the strips through, wedged ’em tight. We fitted triggers like we got already on the big shooters.
“And then we put these iron hoops, like, on the front of the wood. Try it, lord. Put your foot through the hoop.”
Shef did so.
“Grip the string with both hands and pull back against your own leg. Pull till the string goes over the top of the trigger.”
Shef heaved, felt the string coming back against strong resistance—but not impossibly strong. The puny Udd and his undersized colleagues had underestimated the force a big man trained in the forge could exert. The string clicked over the trigger. He was holding, Shef realized, a bow of sorts—but one that lay crosswise to the shooter, not up and down like a wooden handbow.
A grinning face from the crowd handed Shef a short arrow: short because the steel bow flexed only a few inches, not the half-arm’s-length of a wooden bow. He fitted it in the rough gouge in the top of the wooden block. The circle parted in front of him, indicating a tree twenty yards off.
Shef leveled the bow, aimed automatically between the arrow-feathers, as he would have with a twist-shooter, squeezed the trigger. There was no violent thump of recoil as there would have been with the full-sized machine, no black streak rising and falling. Yet the bolt sped away, struck fair in the center of the oak-trunk.
Shef walked over, grasped the embedded arrow, worked it backward and forward. After a dozen tugs, it came free. He looked at it speculatively.
“Not bad,” he said. “But not good, either. Although the bow is steel, I do not think in the end it strikes harder than the hunting bows we use already. And they are not strong enough for war.”
Udd’s face fell, he started automatically to make the excuses of the slave with a hard master. Shef held up a hand to stop him.
“Never mind, Udd. We are all learning something here. This is a new thing that the world has never seen before, but who made it? Saxa, for remembering that legs are stronger than arms? You, for remembering how your master made the steel? I, for telling you to make a bow? Or the Rome-folk of old, for showing me how to make the twist-shooters that started all this?
“None of us. What we have here is a new thing, but not new knowledge. Just old knowledge put together, old knowledge from many minds. Now, we need to make this stronger. Not the bow, for that is strong enough. The pull. How can we make it so that my pull up is double the strength of what I can do now?”
The silence was broken by Oswi, leader of the catapult-team.
“Well, if you put it like that, lord, answer’s obvious. How do you double a pull?
“You use a pulley. Or a windlass. A little one, not a great big one like the Norse-folk use on their ships. Fix it to your belt, wind on one end of the rope, hook the other end of the rope over the bowstring, pull it up as far as you like.”
Shef handed the primitive crossbow back to Udd. “There’s the answer, Udd. Set the trigger further back, so the bow can flex as far as the steel will let it. Make a winding gear with a rope and a hook to go with every bow. And make a bow out of every strip of steel you have. Take all the men you need.”
The Viking shouldering his way through the crowd looked suspiciously at the jarl surrounded by a throng of midgets. He had arrived only that summer, called from Denmark by incredible stories of success, wealth and profit, and of the Ragnarssons defeated. All he had seen so far was an army drawn up to fight that had then suddenly stopped in its tracks. And now here was the jarl himself, talking like a common man to a crowd of thralls. The Viking was six feet tall, weighed two hundred pounds, and could lift a Winchester bushel with either hand. What sort of a jarl is this? he wondered. Why does he talk to them and not to the warriors? Skraelingjar such as these will never win a battle.