66.
66.
"Oh~ ho~ oooh~ echo of eternity~ oh~ ho~ oooh~ Valhalla, calling me~"
[ding- ding- diring-!]
[dung-! dung-! dung-! dung-!]
Snow-white fingers plucking the harp wove a melody, and the voice flowing from lips red as blood became a beautiful song that rang in my ears.
The exact decibel of voice suited to my taste.
Wearing a cloth garment where red ornaments stood out against snow-white skin, she sat perched on a nearby rock singing, while I diligently beat a drum made of beast hide, chiming in with what scattered lyrics I knew.
"Wind and wave shall guide me~ wind and wave shall set me free~"
Oh- ho- oooh-
As I sang the refrain with her, I felt all manner of stress dissolving away. Was this freedom of the soul? Was this the inspiration of Bragi, the god of art that Sigurd spoke of so often?
Listening to Inga's singing voice, which seemed at least a million times better than the tone-deaf minstrel Sigurd, I felt the urge to board a ship at once and sail away somewhere.
Of course, together with Inga.
[diring- diring- diring!]
[clap clap clap clap!]
"How on earth...! You're so good!"
"Whistle~! Whistle~!"
Time had passed, and it was already two weeks since the day the Sámi father and daughter who brought the meteoric iron had made their appearance.
867 AD. The sixth month of winter. Its first day. March 18th by the Julian calendar.
I was out on the grassland near Árós together with Inga, the girl who loved to sing. Having just finished one song, around us were my mother Asta, Inga's father Eret, as well as Refil and Stórolf with a handful of guards.
The rest of my retainers were each carrying out their assigned duties.
I had told Leon to devise a plan for the sewage problem—something he and Hrolf had been jointly planning for years now—alongside the redevelopment of Árós... but I heard that, because there were unexpectedly many undeveloped mines around Árós with no telling what lay dormant where, he was utterly excited and, rather than drawing up blueprints, was busy poking around this place and that.
Hrolf, who found himself tailing him, complained to me nearly every day.
Björn, who stayed in the hall at Uppsala, had taken it upon himself to keep watch over the split rock that people increasingly called the 'Proof of Helgi.' This was not a task I had asked of him, but something he did of his own liking, so it could hardly be called work.
Therefore, I had given my dependable brother an order to seize a suitable plot among the lands between Uppsala and Árós and raise a new, large building to be erected.
The moment he heard this, Björn put on a tired expression, but I knew well that this look was merely histrionics. How could the man who had managed the vast city of Árós without any trouble possibly...
The great building Björn would raise was planned with a maximum capacity of about 300 people, and was to serve as a sort of Great Library of the North. Because I had brought back all sorts of books from Constantinople, and would continue to bring more.
While creating a storage place, we Northmen had finally come into the time to possess a hall of knowledge...!
Since I could not establish a university when there were no teachers to instruct at once, I intended to open it without limit to those who thirsted for knowledge for now.
How many ages would it take to catch up with Constantinople this way... but does not the first shovel matter most in anything? Rome was not built in a day either.
In any case, construction and redevelopment ended at about that much for the present.
Erik, Björn's firstborn son whom I had made chief administrator of Árós, was a man of talent surpassing even my expectations.
This nephew of mine, who had originally been of frail body, had recovered much of his physical strength while convalescing in Árós.
As if seeking to vent the frustration of all the time he had been forced to spend on a sickbed, the young talent who had cast off his foul illness consumed lamp oil at a fearsome rate as he carried out the orders I gave.
First, the very first order I issued was to establish a roster of the Godi, that is, the priesthood.
I could not stand by forever watching the center be the center and the provinces be the provinces, this primitive administrative network. If a precedent existed, one must learn from it.
Having closely observed the roles of the central administration and the church in Constantinople, I had no choice but to acknowledge it. That I could not govern every corner of my domains right now as that Roman Empire did, down to the last nook.
Was even that Roman Empire itself not plagued by countless provincial revolts?
So, I would take it one step at a time.
First, to grasp the detailed rosters of the mid- to lower-ranking Jarls and Godi who practically governed the small villages that were too humble to even be called provinces, and likewise to have them grasp the current state of their village residents.
This was the utmost priority task. A household census, so to speak.
Only after that would my voice reliably reach the people below.
Of course, it would be ideal if each region's Jarls and Godi cooperated willingly according to my plan, but since they might not...
The task linked to this was precisely the expansion of military force.
The previous winter, the number of men I had led out on the eastern expedition was roughly 1,000. Accordingly, I had left additional recruitment to Björn and Hrolf, and upon my return found that this number had become another 1,000.
A paltry figure compared to the Roman Empire's shocking standing army of 3,000 heavy infantry. Yet, considering it was drawn from a city estimated at a population of 30,000, it was an insane number—2,000 regular troops.
The reason this was possible was, first of all, Árós' tremendous productivity.
After that came the fact that the children born together with me, the so-called Helgi Generation, were gradually reaching the age of physical adulthood by 21st-century standards alongside me.
If you looked closely, the reason the medieval population did not grow was not that they did not bear many children. Rather, it was because the children died the very moment they were born.
There was no need to look far; was my own father Ragnar not precisely such a case? Amazingly enough, the man himself was the only son of Grandfather Sigurd, and Mother Áslaug was his second wife, while my mother Asta was the third wife.
The first wife and the two sons born from her had all died due to illness.
If this was the case for a Konungr ruling a region, what of the people beneath him?
This had been a truly grave problem.
However, with my coming, all of this situation had changed...
The children no longer died.
Therefore, the number of people knocking on the doors of Mother Asta and the temple of Goddess Hel had increased day by day, but it was no strange thing that the proportion of women—mothers with children—had especially risen among them.
Then, naturally, the spiritual inheritance of religion passed down from parents would also follow, the children would follow Goddess Hel, and...
People seemed to think of it as the death goddess gathering up all the deaths lurking around the children... but from my position, which advocated breaking down superstition, I could not bring myself to damage the authority of Goddess Hel whom I myself had exalted as the sole deity. I decided to take a step back here.
No matter how much reason and rationality one might blather on about, when it came to matters concerning one's child, even in the 21st century one felt compelled to thoroughly observe all kinds of superstition. Further than this... the scholars of later generations would sort it out on their own. I washed my hands of it now.
At any rate, for that reason, the children of my generation who had swelled so rapidly in number—especially the boys—seemed to carry an immense sense of purpose that they themselves had been born alongside this very 'Konungr Helgi'... and so additional recruitment posed no problem whatsoever.
Rather, it was Hrolf who sweated bullets trying to explain troop numbers and the city's capacity to support them to the hordes who had flocked in too eagerly.
'No wonder I've been seeing so many fellows training with shields whenever I walked the roads lately...' At least I wouldn't have to worry about the martial spirit, I thought.
Beyond that, Erik also took full charge of assigning residential quarters for the highly educated Muslim slaves who had come with us from Constantinople, as well as their linguistic and cultural re-education.
The slaves, who seemed more or less satisfied save for the bone-chilling weather of the North, appeared to attend upon me almost as though I were a god.
It might have been the result of thorough conditioning as slaves... but seeing them act that way after witnessing the boulder I had split, I suspected they were under some hard-headed misapprehension; still, I simply left them be.
Once their re-education was complete, I planned to throw all of them straight into the library at once. Such precious talents who knew Latin would be given hefty salaries... occasionally sent along aboard merchant ships... entrusted with manuscript copying as well...
First, I would have to free them from their slave status, of course. Since they had already converted once, from Islam to the Roman Church, the moment they were taken as slaves, converting once more to the Norse faith would pose no great problem. As for those who had stubbornly refused to convert to the death, well—since they were all dead already, I didn't need to worry overmuch about them.
These people would become the vanguard of my knowledge revolution project. After them, the priests they would instruct would carry the torch... and beneath those, children would be educated in turn... by forging such a tradition, I would absolutely reconstruct the Norse faith as a religion that placed human reason at the fore.
"What an exceedingly beautiful song again today, Inga, Helgi. Your voices harmonize so well together... do they not, Jarl Eret?"
"They do! Indeed they do, High Priestess Asta!"
Of course, all those weighty, monumental projects I had described... were, in truth, not what mattered to me at this very moment.
For I had set my subordinates to a great deal of work and was perhaps enjoying the happiest days of my entire life.
[Swish-]
I set down my drumstick and waited quietly; Inga, having likewise set down her harp, came to my side and carefully entwined her hand softly around my own.
A warmth both cool and tender crept up my fingers, and my left and right brain alike, unable to withstand the stimulation that seemed about to set them ablaze, laid out all manner of fantasies before me.
The wedding, the first night, the names of the children to be born, growing old together with an undying love, the names of grandchildren, a death met side by side.
'Twelve sons, ten daughters.'
Perhaps finding the sight of me grinning with my mouth agape amusing, Inga gave a small smile and, with buoyant steps, led me toward the long table where her father and my mother sat; I, unable to resist that faint strength, tottered along in pursuit.
Inga, like a deer leaping and bounding, and I, like some bear lumbering along, were engaged in a kind of formal courtship under the supervision of both families' elders.
Of course, this had not been spearheaded by Björn, my brother who was practically a bumpkin in matters such as this... but by my mother Asta, who had driven it forward with the momentum of a bulldozer.
On account of that, I was temporarily excused from all duties. No one dared to challenge the High Priestess of Hel, whose two eyes blazed with a vivid, blue-tinged fire...
In that sense, after we had become an official couple, Inga had rather proactively drawn closer to me. She would take my hand first like this, and sometimes, even while singing, she would come and wrap herself around my waist.
Though, truth be told, we were still a pitiful couple who hadn't even managed a proper kiss. Yet, every single moment was pure happiness for me.
"Heh— it strikes me anew each time I see you together, but Konungr Helgi, you are truly so tall...! My daughter too is tall, but standing beside the Konungr, I find myself thinking what a perfectly matched pair the two of you make!"
"Everyone who saw my son for the first time used to say just that. I still cannot forget the words Jarl Hestein, Jarl Björn's friend, uttered when he first laid eyes on my son."
Ah—. When Hásteinn returned from the great western expedition with Björn, he saw me and asked if I was my father's newly hired bodyguard, hadn't he. I was eleven years old then, was I...
Gazing at the two of us standing side by side, Eret—who, as it turned out, was the owner of a large-scale reindeer farm—let out an exclamation of admiration.
Just as he said, not only I, but Inga too was exceedingly tall. Tall enough to reach near my chest, she was shorter than Stórolf but on a level similar to Refil.
For that reason, it was said that few people had ever discussed marriage with Inga, who had already long passed the proper age for wedlock despite being the same age as me. Considering the wealth of Eret, a great ranch owner, one might think her height would be no flaw whatsoever, yet if a woman were too tall, it surely was a burden.
Moreover, Eret, who cherished his daughter to the utmost, had personally weeded out every last scoundrel who came sniffing around after nothing but money. And since Eret himself was a local magnate who could throw his strength around in that region, he had even harbored thoughts of bequeathing the ranch to his daughter should the need arise.
Eret's Svíar wife, Inga's mother, had regrettably already departed this world.
Having never remarried since and living solely with his daughter, Eret had gladly consented to the courtship between Inga and me that my mother proposed, and had even insisted on holding the wedding at once... but my mother had dissuaded him.
As she spoke, asking that the children be given a little time, a small pain seemed to flicker across my mother's face, as though she recalled her own image of having fallen in love too young, too hastily, without even holding a ceremony with my father Ragnar; I alone noticed it pass.
I quietly held my mother's hand.
Thus the passage of two weeks' time was the outcome now before us.
The four faces filled with happiness, the two hands clasped together.
Across the table brimming with laughter, just as my mother was saying she would ask my stepmother Áslaug about the date of Halfdan's wedding, a voice calling for me sounded from afar.
"Konungr! A man has come from Árós!"
The appearance of Stórolf, who came running up breathless and in a state of agitation, was far from ordinary; still gripping Inga's hand tightly, I shouted out.
"What is it! Stórolf!"
"Bamburgh! A man has come from Bamburgh in Northumbria! He says a messenger from Jarl Sigurd has arrived!"
From Sigurd in Northumbria? What could this be about?
☆☆☆☆☆Reference☆☆☆☆☆
The song that Inga and Helgi sang is the song Valhalla Calling from Assassin's Creed Valhalla...!
The moment we hear that song, we are all Vikings...!