Among the Eidejelans were three individuals who were treated with special deference, almost as if they were dukes or bishops. Their accents were curious as well; they spoke Frankish tinged with hints of another, vaguely Germanic language, that the three of them sometimes used with each other. Their names were Gabe, O’Brien, and Reyes. Reyes was nominally in charge of Svartalfheim and apparently the rest of the Eidejelan operations, although she often deferred to Gabe, O’Brien, or one of the other members of a group called the Operations Committee.
Osric saw little of Reyes; she was nearly always in her office in the largest administrative building. She always seemed tired and anxious to him, as if she were bearing a great weight. She never spoke to Osric, but from the way he occasionally saw her interacting with others, he grew to like her. Despite not knowing the nature of the Eidejelans’ project, he often found himself praying that God would grant her strength for her task.
O’Brien was something of a mystery to Osric; he was good-natured but always seemed a bit ill at ease with himself. Osric gathered that he had sacrificed much during the early years of their project, and these days he spent most of his time with his wife, Helena, and their son.
Osric was not fond of Gabe, Reyes’s second-in-command, who was in charge of Svartalfheim’s weapons and defense. Osric had met men like Gabe, who were more comfortable in wartime than in peace. Such men, he thought, had a cruel streak that would find its way to the surface if it were left dormant too long. Behind Gabe’s sardonic smile was a desire to cause pain.
The next year year at Svartalfheim was much like Osric’s three years at Höfn. He spent his days teaching and his nights reading. He was excited to learn when he arrived that Svartalfheim had a library containing, among many other books, the complete works of Aristotle and Augustine. Many of the other books were in languages he didn’t recognize, much less understand. He hoped someday he would be able to read them.
He did start a small church his second year at Svartalfheim, with the blessing of the Committee, which seemed to have been swayed by Helena’s argument that a little religion was a good thing. He later learned from a candid conversation with Helena that some of the Committee members hoped that indoctrination into Christianity would make the Norsemen less susceptible to superstition, which at times conflicted with their responsibilities.
The church never grew beyond twenty people, due more to the all-consuming nature of Pleiades than any competition from the Norse religion or any of the dozen other pagan sects that were represented at Svartalfheim. One of his first converts was Nikolai, the young man who had been convinced of the wickedness of the Dvergar. Nikolai’s attitude had softened since arriving at Svartalfheim; he now worked as an engineer in Hell.
Osric got along well with the others at Svartalfheim, but he never quite felt at home. To his students and churchgoers, he was an authority figure; among the engineers and other teachers, he was an oddball. Most of those who came to Svartalfheim left their previous lives behind to become Eidejelans, but Osric clung to his religion and the authority of Rome. He missed his brethren in the priesthood, and he was wracked with guilt that he’d not given a confession in ten years. He was, like Abraham, a stranger in a strange land.
The person he felt closest to was, oddly enough, Nikolai. The two of them often went for long walks in the hills north of Svartalfheim. But toward the end of Osric’s tenth year in Iceland, Nikolai grew increasingly withdrawn. He lost interest in walks and philosophical discussions, spending more and more of his time in the cave, working on whatever it was that he did. Warm weather was precious in Iceland, but Nikolai spent almost the entire summer of the year 918 underground. When he missed Osric’s Sunday service two weeks in a row, Osric went to see him in his dormitory.
“What is troubling you, Nikolai?” he asked.
“I can’t talk about it, Father,” Nikolai replied. “My work….”
“I know, it’s a secret. I’m not asking you to break your vow. But surely you can speak in general terms? Are they making you work on something that violates your conscience?” He knew that Gabe had been working on new weapons—horrible bombs that would splatter flaming goo on men, burning their flesh and sucking the air out of their lungs. He had seen them testing them in the hills.
“What if I was, Father? What should I do?”
“You must stop.”
“And then what? They’ll kill me, and someone will fill my place. It will make no difference at all.”
He assumed Nikolai’s talk of killing was hyperbole: Executions were rare at Svartalfheim, and they were reserved for those who committed serious crimes, such as murder or treason. He knew of one man who, after getting drunk and speaking too freely in a tavern in Portsmouth, was hauled back to Svartalfheim to be disemboweled while he was still alive. The Eidejel took betrayal seriously, but they would not kill a man simply for refusing to do his job. “They will find another job for you. You are a talented engineer.”
“What if I was the only one who could do it?” Nikolai said? “What if Pleiades would fail without me?”
Osric thought for a moment. He had to admit, the question made him uncomfortable. He believed Reyes was a good person, but she’d given the order to have that traitor tortured to death, because she had believed it necessary for the survival of the project. If traitors weren’t deal with harshly, it would only be a matter of time before someone found them out. What would Reyes do to Nikolai if his work were critical to the success of Pleiades, and he refused to do it?
“Things can’t be that dire,” Osric said, aware that he was ducking the question.
Nikolai was silent for some time. At last, he said, “Who do you confess to, Father?”
“I pray to God and to Mary to intercede for me,” Osric said. “I have no one else to confess to.”
“For four years?”
“That’s right.”
“Could you have asked for forgiveness before you left? For any sins that you might commit while you’re here, I mean.”
Osric thought of the lies the Pope had instructed him to tell. “Grace is not a treasure that can be accumulated in advance, I’m afraid.”
Nikolai nodded slowly. After a moment, he said, “I have done terrible things. I am afraid I will do more.”
“I can offer you absolution for the things you have done,” Osric said, “but your confession must be sincere. You cannot confess while harboring the intention to sin again.”
Osric nodded again, a somber look on his face. “I have to go, Father. I have work to do.”
Chapter Thirty-three
Camp Jemison, Jutland (Denmark): September 8, 908 A.D. (25 years after the lander crash)
Camp Jemison, near the east coast of the southern part of the Jutland peninsula, was the smallest of all of the Eidejelans’ operations. It consisted of twelve men who lived in a single timber frame building near a gravel pit. On any given day, eight of these men would be digging in the gravel with shovels. Two more would be pushing wheelbarrows up a path to a covered shelter near a creek, where the gravel would be dumped into a hopper and mixed with water from the creek. The mixture would fall into a centrifuge powered by a small waterwheel in the creek. The water, gravel and sand would spill out of the centrifuge and slide down a chute away from the site. Gold, which was heavier than the gravel, remained in the bottom of the centrifuge. The gold—mostly fine particles smaller than a grain of sand—was scooped out periodically and put in cloth bags. These were deposited in a heavy wooden chest, to which only the foreman, named Lars, held the key. Once a month or so, a karve would arrive, and men from the ship would travel the twenty miles overland to pick up the bags of gold and carry them to the karve. The karve, which was usually already loaded with wheat flour, cotton, flax, or some other good, would then return to Höfn, or sometimes one of the satellite locations along the coast, usually by a circuitous route to avoid being tracked.
The men at the mine were armed with swords or spears, but there was no other secu
rity, the idea being to leave as little a temporal footprint as possible. Gold would not officially be discovered in this area until the twentieth century, and then it would only be trace deposits, barely worth panning for. After poring over mining records and geological data for several weeks, O’Brien had picked this spot for surveying. He had deliberately passed over several larger, more concentrated deposits of gold partly in eastern Europe because those sites were too obvious: whether the Cho-ta’an knew what they were up to was unclear, but the Cho-ta’an knew the value of gold, and they had access to the same historical records as the Eidejelans. If there were any Cho-ta’an left alive on Earth, it would only be a matter of time before they located the Eidejelan mine.
O’Brien’s hunch had paid off: there was more gold in this area than the historical record indicated—perhaps because the Eidejelans had exhausted it before anyone else thought to look for it. Camp Jemison had been their primary source of gold for three years now. The gold from this site was the chief ingredient in the counterfeit coins that came from the mint Eckart had created: they produced better-than-real versions of Saxon, Frankish and Byzantine currency.
There was little chance of local interference: the farmland in this area was poor, so it was sparsely populated. The few shepherds and fishermen in the area were well aware that the gold mining operation was under the protection of Harald Fairhair and, by extension, his erstwhile ally, King Olof of Denmark. So while each bag of gold extracted at Camp Jemison was worth more than one of the local peasants would earn in a lifetime, the miners did not worry much about thieves or brigands. Stationing another twenty men to guard the operation would only have drawn attention. That had been the reasoning of the Committee, anyway, but the Committee had not anticipated the Cho-ta’an’s own hunger for gold.
The three Cho-ta’an who had survived the crash thirteen years earlier had used gold from the beginning to buy the loyalty of human allies. Gold was used in many components in Cho-ta’an spacecraft, and, knowing the value of gold in medieval Europe, they had salvaged as much of it as they could. It was enough to buy them a contingent of mercenaries who were willing to overlook their benefactors’ strange appearance and behavior in exchange for more money than they had seen in their lives. After the Viking siege of Paris ended and Kulchirran was killed in Scotland, Gurryek and Tharres, worried that the authorities in Paris had learned of the presence of the aliens in Frankia, had fled south to the same estate where they had engineered the plague. Having lost contact with their own ship, they were now blind to the spacemen’s movements and could do little but wait and ponder their next move.
The gold soon ran out, and their human minions deserted them. One of them evidently decided he could keep the money flowing a little longer by alerting the local authorities to the aliens’ presence. Tharres and Gurryek were forced to flee the estate on foot. They were separated, and Gurryek was captured by a Burgundian mob who, Tharres learned later, turned him over to the bishop at Toulouse.
Gurryek was apprehended two days later by the retinue of a knight named Bruno, who had been summoned by the Duke of Burgundy to defend the duchy against Viking invaders whom the King of France had allowed to pass down the Seine. The Duke was in some financial difficulty at the time, and as a result, Bruno’s retinue—fourteen men in all—had not been paid for some time. Tharres convinced them he had a secret cache of gold near Toulouse with which he could make them all rich men if they let him live. Bruno, unsure why he should risk his life and that of his men to save Burgundy when the King himself couldn’t be bothered to defend the country, agreed to follow Tharres to the gold. Bruno’s men located a steed for the alien, giving him a long cloak with a hood to hide his appearance.
There had, in fact, been a gold mine in Salsigne, near Toulouse, which Tharres had hoped to exploit in the future. Although the ancient Romans had mined iron at the site, gold would not officially be discovered there until the late nineteenth century. Tharres had promised the knight a hidden cache of gold, not a mine, but this misrepresentation might have been forgiven if the gold were easily accessible. Unfortunately, the ore was mixed with pyrite and other minerals, making it difficult to extract. Tharres demonstrated that the gold could be extracted with some effort, but Bruno’s men were not interested in becoming minors. Worse, they would be thieves, as the mine was in territory that was technically the property of the Duke of Burgundy.
By this time, though, Bruno and his men were already facing the Duke’s wrath for deserting, and their options were limited. Tharres begged their forgiveness, claiming that he would make it up to them by bringing them to a place where silver could be picked up from the ground. This claim had some truth to it: Tharres knew the locations of several future silver mines in Saxony. But the Bruno’s men, who had been promised gold, demanded that Tharres make good on his promise. Unfortunately, the Salsigne site had been their best bet for gold; he knew of no other substantial gold deposits in Europe that were not already being mined. Desperate to save his skin, Tharres promised the men he knew of a remote area in Jutland where gold was plentiful. He knew trace amounts of gold had been found there in the twenty-first century place in Jutland, and he hoped it would be enough to convince the men of his worth. Bruno, now nearly as desperate as Tharres, agreed. The men traveled overland across Frankia and Saxony, explaining to anyone along the way that they were escorting an elderly priest who suffered from leprosy. Finally they arrived in Jutland, where Bruno, reconnoitering the area Tharres specified, found a gold extraction operation already underway.
Tharres, deducing that men at the mine worked for the survivors of the crash, found himself in the position to solve two problems at once: his men would kill the miners and steal the gold, leaving the foreman alive so Tharres could interrogate him about the location of the spacemen’s stronghold. To assuage the Bruno’s conscience and ensure him there would be no undesirable repercussions, Tharres informed him that these men were outlaws trespassing on land owned by the King of Denmark. That Bruno and his men were trespassing as well was left unmentioned.
The battle was over in a few minutes. One man slit the throat of the man standing watch, and another doused the miner’s quarters with oil and set it on fire. The rest of the miners, save the foreman, were killed as they ran out of the building. The foreman had been identified the previous day and was easily identified by his blazing red hair and thick beard. Despite this, Bruno’s men had nearly murdered him in their enthusiasm: he lost his left eye and his right hand before Tharres managed to put a stop to the fracas. Bruno’s men suffered no losses and were overjoyed to find a fortune in gold in a chest hidden under the floor of the miner’s quarters. Bruno, the fifth son of a minor nobleman whose estate had been lost to Norse advances a few years earlier, decided a career as an outlaw was more promising than an attempt to secure some pittance by risking his life for the Duke of Burgundy. Tharres assured Bruno he knew of many more caches of gold and silver.
Bruno and his men spent the next three days at the miner’s quarters, drinking the miners’ beer and making plans for spending their gold. Tharres had them tie the foreman to a tree. While Bruno’s men caroused, he interrogated the foreman until he finally confessed that he knew of a place called Höfn, in southeastern Iceland, which was a façade hiding a clandestine operation of some sort. The man had told some version of this story several times over the past three days, with the location changing from the Shetlands to Ireland to the Orkneys to Norway, but the Höfn version rang true to him. He cut the foreman’s throat and informed Bruno and his men that their next destination was in Iceland.
Chapter Thirty-four
One day in early Autumn, one of the other teachers, a woman named Ingrid, burst into Osric’s classroom and told him to come with her immediately. Ingrid had been working with some of the more advanced students on a sort of mathematics that was foreign to Osric. He suspected these students were working on the machines called rockets, which were vertical tubes with a rounded cone at the top and fins like
a fish’s on the bottom. The rockets would soar into the air on a plume of fire and then fall back to the Earth a minute or two later. Osric had never seen one up close, but he gathered that some of them were as tall as a man. The rockets had no practical purpose that he could discern, but these days he saw one about once a week. There was no telling where the rockets would launch from: sometimes he saw them in the east, sometimes in the west, sometimes far in the north. Occasionally he would even see one at night, far out to sea. Knowing the Dvergar’s obsession with secrecy, he was at first confused by their willingness to draw attention to themselves in this way, but eventually he understood their strategy: they launched so many rockets, from so many different locations, that it would be impossible for anyone to determine where they originated. Osric hoped Ingrid was inviting him to see one of the rocket launches up close.
“Might my students come as well?” Osric asked.
“Of course!” Ingrid cried excitedly. “All of you! Come!”
“All right, that’s enough for today,” Osric said. “Let’s see what Ingrid has to show us.”
By the time Osric was out the door, Ingrid was halfway across the campus, running toward the northwest. Fearing that he’d lose her, Osric ran, trusting that his mostly younger and more spry students would keep up.
The Voyage of the Iron Dragon Page 23