245. Fools Think They Will Live Forever (3).
seuuu- huuuu-
[hwi-iiii-]
The wind danced in time with my breath.
Usually the opposite would have been the proper natural order. But my breath seized the wind by the scruff and led it. 'How in the world was this even possible? Had this passed beyond the realm of science?'
[huung- uung- wing- wing- hwiing-]
With the momentary voids I created by catching the wind here and there, my heavy greatsword moved, cutting through the air.
"Hup! Hup! Hup!"
[hwaak! hwaak! hwaak!]
The faster the downward strikes grew, the louder the sound of the blade destroying something became, and the shadows of the sword left in the air formed a single, complete plane, scattering a green light in all directions.
"Hup!"
[huuuu- hwiiii-]
When the one thousandth downward cut landed without a single misstep, the winds that had been bound to my breath and the ceaseless movement of the sword let out a collective shriek and fled hurriedly into the void.
'I felt like I would have to replace the hilt again.'
Whenever I struck blindly in a state of no-mind and no-thought, even the hardest wooden grips like this one became warped here and there, bore the imprints of my palms, and changed until they were no longer usable.
'Maybe there was no material left that could withstand my full power...! Kakarot, was this the loneliness you felt? Lonely. But I refused any sudden appearance of a green monster or a pink monster.'
"Hup-cha!"
[kkiiiik-]
Fortunately, or perhaps not, I had told the blacksmith Randi in advance, so there were several spare grips at home.
It turned out that the grip of this sword required winding some kind of wire around it, hammering, and a fairly delicate process, but my talent for quickly mastering anything done by hand meant I had learned all of Randi's blacksmithing skills just from watching over his shoulder.
If the angle and rhythm of the hammer, and where you held the blade against the anvil, were the skills a blacksmith needed, then the rest was simply a matter of how tenaciously one could keep hammering.
Perhaps, in terms of endurance, I was comparable to those animals that could run for a long time on the African savanna, like the gazelle, horse, dog, camel, or donkey.
I slung the sword grip—half-broken but not completely ruined—over my shoulder, and chose the largest of the four chairs I had carved myself for our family and sat down.
The pure white chair shrieked at me to get off the instant my weight settled onto it. But as I slowly leaned back against the backrest, it quickly became compliant, as if it had given up the ghost.
[kkiruk- kkiruk- jjaekjjaek- jjaek-!]
When the sun was slowly poking its head out from the east, the world belonged to the birds. They said the master of this city was the Fylkir, yet when I came out like this in the early dawn and sat alone, the sounds of birds fiercely fighting over territory were the loudest.
Anyone who didn't know would say the chirping of birds was truly beautiful, but my senses, which could see and hear more than others, told me that fierce battles were raging far off in the sky, among the branches, and on the masts of longships where no people were yet visible.
'Even those birds fought so fiercely. How much more so, then, we humans?'
Even as I limbered up my body by swinging my sword according to routine and drew in the clean dawn air to discipline my mind and body, my head was filled with thoughts of Árpád of the Magyars, the movements of the Eastern Roman Empire, letters sent by the brothers who ruled the two newly occupied lands of Rouen Fortress and Hamburg, and even the sudden letter from the north of Britain that declared a sea expedition.
Supporting Árpád, who had revealed his ambitions to me, and the Magyars was not really a difficult matter.
It wasn't as if they were rising up right now to overturn the northwestern Danube, where East Frankish influence was dominant. Ultimately, the Magyars too were building their strength and biding their time, so if they increased trade in the process, I would rather be grateful.
By now, the merchants of the North Sea moved on their own without having to be told. No matter how unprecedented a ruler Helgi Ragnarsson was to the North Sea, he could not control every human being; so if he moved the Marmaros Council, a kind of privileged merchant guild—merchants under the protection of the powerful—that sailed under the name of the Fylkir, it would be enough to stop a few longships that should have headed for the Eastern Roman Empire near the relay station managed by the Magyars.
As Árpád had proposed, and as if conducting hit-and-run with light cavalry, we would truly just exchange the necessary goods and then depart like the wind; they would gain quality horses, riders, and breeding methods, while they would get our food and iron.
A picture in which both sides gained was hard to come by in this world, but Árpád and I had achieved that difficult thing!
Of course, trade never went exactly as I envisioned, so I would have to watch how it unfolded, but for now, the sheer volume of Magyar trade could not compare with the scale of our North Sea, so I was not overly concerned.
Therefore, if I divided matters by importance into high, middle, and low tiers, the matter related to my Magyar friends was surprisingly low-tier.
What could be called middle-tier was the New World expedition that the seasoned Rognvald of Orkney was subtly pushing to me via Harald of Kaupang.
'The biggest problem, of course, was the size of the ships.'
Under my reign, the North Sea had already changed a great deal, and far more would change yet. But what I had to watch in particular was that the military system had transformed to the point where it could be said to have been created anew.
The traditional hit-and-run, the strike-and-fade tactics that made use of rivers, which were far more vicious and efficient than the steppe nomads represented by the Magyars, could not be surpassed in small-scale engagements.
On top of that, there was the image of Northmen: warriors with round shields, axes, chainmail, and face-covering helmets forming a sturdy shield wall by pressing their bodies together.
In truth, though the tradition seemed well preserved, my North Sea army, in contrast to those Norse ancestors, had first seen the use of cavalry rise to become the core of battle among its commanders, and had begun to deploy longbowmen like mad.
To handle a solid wooden bow as tall as a man required a great deal of time and budget, and as it happened, our North Sea could comfortably provide both.
Thus, while we had failed to raise the fearsome troop type of universal heavy-infantry-longbowmen, at least if we had ten thousand soldiers, half of them possessed the ability to roughly send an arrow within fifty meters of the target area.
And the important thing was that the project for universal heavy-infantry-longbowmen was still ongoing.
Judging by the friendly posture of our Magyar friends, things would likely be quiet for a few years, but pillagers by nature were those who could laugh and chat merrily when they met in the morning, and unhesitatingly hold a dagger to each other's throat by night.
Of course, there was no way we North Sea people—who plundered everything from culture to economy, society, politics, everything good—and their leader, myself, could forget that fact.
In truth, the way to thrash horse-riding bastards was with extreme patience, abundant supply, and archers who outnumbered them by far, with longer range and greater stability than those fellows. Adding a few siege weapons to the mix made it all the sweeter.
Whether I liked it or not, from Novgorod down to Kiyiu they had already declared their submission to me, so I could not be the one to abandon them first. For now, I had moved our North Sea heavy infantry warbands and the Garmr Brotherhood to establish relay stations, but later I would continue reinforcing the defenses and turn the entire Dnieper River basin into a successful Maginot Line. I would fuse Scandinavia's hard granite with the concrete culture plundered from Rome, and at every rapid of the Dnieper, at every crucial bend, I would lay down hellish fortresses comparable to the proud mountain fortresses of the Korean Peninsula built by the ancestors of my soul.
I had already stirred up no small wind, so the future was unknowable, but if in some distant age when I was gone, some insane horse-fucking—great generals like Genghis Khan, Jebe, or Subutai were to appear, I meant to make it so they would never even dare entertain the thought of crossing the Dnieper.
Of course, this was nothing more than my ambition. No matter how stout the walls I raised or how much trench hell I created, if the internal politics fell into disarray or the commander turned out to be someone unhinged, it would all collapse in the end. Still, I had to do everything within my power.
I had let my thoughts wander too far while discussing the reorganization of the North Sea military. If the army's changes were trending toward ever heavier and longer-range striking power, the navy's changes were aimed at becoming more flexible and faster-moving.
From Britain to West Frankia to East Frankia, our forces' ability to move and fight like madmen owed a great deal to faithfully inheriting our ancestors' hit-and-run spirit.
From longships, naturally, to the somewhat plumper merchant vessels—fundamentally, all North Sea ships were long and sleek in form.
Starting with my own flagship, which was considered a monster in this age, it was becoming fashionable to gradually increase the size of ships, but compared to the famously named galleons and other sailing ships to come, the difference in scale was akin to a living Tyrannosaurus versus a child's toy.
The advantage of such longships was, first of all, that they were optimized for Europe's spiderweb-like geography.
They were fast enough that, with a good wind, Britain to Kaupang could be done in a single day, and they possessed enough tactical flexibility that in an emergency you could pick up the ship and overcome rough terrain.
How flexible, you ask? In the absolute worst case, flexible enough to grab hold of and use as a shield!
Of course, no one but me would ever commit such a mad act, but the point was that these longships, with their graceful curves, were fast, sturdy, and flexible.
Yet for sailing the open sea, that alone was insufficient.
You could manage to reach land somehow. By carefully reckoning north-south-east-west using the constellations or a clever raven, you would eventually reach new land. It was not some random event but something that was simply there. Sailing north from the Orkney Islands north of Britain, you were bound to discover something.
If your luck was truly foul, you would encounter an unseasonable storm or rough waves and go to Njord's embrace, but still.
What if we could make the ships a little larger?
At least until ironclad ships appeared, was not the correct answer for wooden ships simply to be large and strong? A larger ship meant more supplies and, at the same time, greater durability. This was a truth of nature guaranteed by me, who was far larger than the average man.
The problem, as ever, was how to build it.
First I would summon the carpenters and give them orders, but there was no way they would know how to pull it off just like that.
My head was indeed filled with all sorts of miscellaneous knowledge, but the bits that flickered by in passing during a documentary would be sorely inadequate for building a sailing ship.
In any case, even with the current longships, we would be able to discover Iceland and Greenland lying beyond those seas, and even further beyond, the trillion-defense-budget land with the potential for a trillion-strong nation would surely be sitting there in plain view.
Since possibilities only grew better the more you left them open, it was well worth starting to research larger ships even now.
Jarl Rognvald's spirit of adventure was something that brought me fresh vigor, so I would encourage and encourage him further—there was not a single reason anywhere to forcibly stop him.
I would summon him to Árós to commend him, and since he was close friends with Harald of Kaupang and my brother Halfdan in Ribe, arranging some time for old friends to reunite would be good as well.
Then I would make him the vanguard commander of the unknown expedition. Given how fond he seemed of adventure, I would turn you into our North Sea's Amundsen and Kim Jeong-ho!
I knew that Gosanja Kim Jeong-ho had not actually traveled around in person, but since I had already drawn all the North Sea's maps myself, there was no pressing need to produce maps right away. Rognvald, you would have to become my Konungr of adventure.
That left the matter of the top rank.
Björn at Rouen Castle and Sigurdr at Hamburg had both written letters describing their vigilance against the Franks on the border.
I had expected they would not let things pass easily, but their far more overt movements actually put my mind at ease.
Those whom I would inevitably have to face once more someday.
For now, we stood and held the line, but those who opposed me would do well to be careful. If even the smallest gap opened, there was no telling how far I would devour them.
[... ...]
While I was lost in these and other thoughts, the beads of sweat cooled and the fiercely battling birds ceased their fight.
Below Fylkir's Hill, the sounds of people stirring one by one could be heard, and beyond the purple sky, the sun rose.
[Kiiiiik-]
I leaned the broken hilt against the chair, rose from my seat, and settled into a horse stance.
[Pak-! Pak-! Pak-!]
One punch, one stray thought cast away.
As if to burst the empty air, my thrusting fists heralded the start of a vigorous day.
*****
At the same hour, on a somewhat smaller island lying across from Britain.
Dublin, the city of the Northmen that occupied the eastern coastline of Eire.
Just as the surrounding lords were left dumbfounded by the sudden change of the city's master to the Fylkir of the North Sea, a rare spectacle was unfolding on the shore below.
"Hahaha! Áli is great! Give up all that you possess! Heathens!"
"Charge! Charge! Get closer still! Áli despises cowards!"
"Arrrrr-! Howl, heathens! The wrath of Áli is upon you!"
"Áli is great! Áli is great!"
With the Northmen's sudden change in slave policy, a band of Muslim pirates, seeking to directly procure(?) slaves, had gone beyond raiding Frankish lands and even reached the seas of Eire, renowned as a prime hunting ground.