67.
67.
The beautiful land of the island of Britain. Northumbria.
When its vast expanse was divided in two, the city that claimed overlordship of northern Bernicia, Bamburgh.
A messenger arrived from my brother, 'Snake-Eye' Sigurd, whom I had appointed as Jarl of that place.
I had been spending happy days with Inga for the past two weeks, but could there be a more unwelcome guest than this...?
But a Konungr's work was a Konungr's work.
Setting aside deep regret, I turned and headed first to the longhouse, where I soon received the letter Sigurd had sent by the messenger's hand.
As befitted Sigurd, who had refined tastes, the runic letters written in ink on parchment began with dazzling rhetoric and ended in a headache-inducing showiness.
That grand letter, surprisingly, contained only one piece of news.
[I have decided to marry Æthelthryth. I plan to go receive Mother's permission soon. Have composed many songs.]
'No...'
Æthelthryth was the only daughter of Ælla, the King of Northumbria who had died by my hand.
Another King of Northumbria who had died by my hand, Osberht, also had no children, as I understood it, which meant that in some way, Æthelthryth held a claim to the Northumbrian throne.
'How did that change things?'
First, I would have to meet this woman Æthelthryth. Sigurd, you always gave me a headache.
In truth, northern Northumbria, Bernicia, was not much different from Kiev in the east. Both were too far from Árós, and since I could not rule them directly, I had no choice but to appoint a proxy.
In that respect, just as I had already accepted Haskuldr of Kiev—who, though currently lying low, could grow strong at any time based on the fertile black soil of the Dnieper—as a kind of margrave or independent lord in my mind, it was not difficult to cut off Bamburgh and Bernicia for Sigurd.
They might want to stay under the great umbrella of Helgi Ragnarsson for now, but wouldn't gratitude and grudges both fade after a few generations when it came to the human heart? Loyalty and blood were nothing special.
That was something one believed only in pure fairy tales; in practice, what a king had to rely on was human desire and the interests of the state.
Therefore, I personally cared little whether Sigurd and Æthelthryth married or divorced...
But more than that, what chilled me was a strange feeling about Halfdan and the daughter of Jute Konungr Bagsecg, me and Inga, and Sigurd and Æthelthryth.
An uneasy premonition that these three marriages were somehow intertwined pierced my entire body.
'It was a happy event, but...'
I had said this before in the past, but if I were an ordinary farmer X from a Norse household, I would hardly have cared whether three brothers married at once or not. What were three brothers? If thirty brothers got married, then I might have been a little interested.
But I was a Konungr, a king who had practically swallowed all of Scandinavia except the Jutland beyond Zealand and the lands of the Geat friends dwelling in the western fjords.
Naturally, my marriage was not my own. People from all directions would flock in to calculate their gains and losses, and if my two brothers' weddings were heaped on top of that?
For all I knew, these jovial people who enjoyed feasting and idling might really hold a festival lasting an entire month. During that time, I would have to suffer all kinds of political machinations.
'...Ah, I don't know anymore.'
What could I do in front of a letter sent like a declaration of war saying 'I'm getting married'?
Since Father was no longer with us, Áslaug, the de facto highest elder of our household, would probably have a headache over this... But I resolved to leave this matter entirely to my stepmother.
'She would probably accept. If a son between Sigurd and Æthelthryth settled in Bernicia, depending on my handling, it could be even better...'
If things went wrong, I would grant independence; if not, we would go together. In any case, the time would someday come to re-establish relations with the Kingdom of Scotland to the north and the neighboring Kingdom of Strathclyde.
Ivar, who had settled in Dublin across the sea to the west of Northumbria, would handle the timing.
Whatever reason we might attach, we were the invaders of the island of Britain. It would be nice if we stopped here and everyone lived long and peacefully, but I had spent too much time in this cold-hearted world to believe in such fairy tales.
The old Rome had built massive walls and defensive strongholds, but I knew all too well that they were not enough. So if I waited a little longer, and when the time was ripe...
'I must bring the entire island of Britain under my banner. If that was impossible, at the very least, I had to make sure the thought of challenging me twice would never arise.'
The King of Scots, still sharpening his sword even now, the ambitious warlords of Ireland, and down below, the greatest threats: the kings of Mercia and Wessex. And the wounded Edmund of East Anglia.
In the end, we had no choice but to fight. Until one side submitted, down to the descendants of descendants, their descendants, it was a fate that forced us to fight each other for a very long time.
So if it had to be that way, wouldn't a clean unification under my hand be a good ending for all?
My hands and eyes took Sigurd's letter and scattered it, but my mind was looking toward the future beyond it.
*****
Still, perhaps because brothers were approachable and mothers were a little frightening, Sigurd sent the letter only to me.
Thus, informing Mother Áslaug of this fact fell to me.
Of course, since I also found it awkward to go and tell her face to face... another messenger was dispatched to Mother, who had gone to Roskilde on the southern island of Zealand to see Halfdan.
What sort of reaction would she show?
Would she be pleased that her immature and fickle son was finally marrying? Or would she be angry that he had decided such an important matter without any discussion with her?
...It would probably be half and half.
In any case, since the weddings were likely to succeed and to be held all at once, I endeavored to spend more time with Inga.
We rode horses and reindeer together (Inga rode reindeer very skillfully, and it seemed that most animals readily followed her lead), dipped our feet into the water of streams and meadows, and lay around idly.
In between, there was much conversation; Inga, who was curious about the course of my life until now, asked about things like the duels of Árós, the battles I had experienced on the island of Britain, and even the political machinations I had gone through in Constantinople.
She listened intently and focused on my condensed stories, ears perked.
Of course, I had not been merely idle during that process. I had learned that her brown eyes held a hint of blue when you looked closely, that the dimple on her left cheek was slightly deeper when she smiled, and that even the fine down on her face, along with her thick eyebrows, had a faint golden hue.
And also that she was an excellent minstrel and a 'listener of stories'.
This woman brimming with talent was constantly turning my stories into songs, and whenever she did, I felt as though only Inga and I remained alone in the whole world.
We grew more familiar with each other, laughed more often, became more comfortable. We drew closer.
In truth, while such courtship was partly owing to my own intentions, still colored by a 21st-century sensibility, the influence of a mother who genuinely wished for her son's happiness weighed far more heavily.
Marriages in this age were not ordinarily formed through such courtship. Take my own brother Halfdan—was his marriage not a rather more calculated affair?
It was no accident that kings the world over, regardless of era or place, kept so many mistresses and concubines.
Marriage was a pact between families, and that could not be helped, but no one prevented taking a mistress or having an affair by mutual consent.
Of course, this was no unfamiliar reality in the world I was living in right now, either...
'...You have only to look at Michael right now, and it's plain to see.'
I did not even need to look far; the answer was plain enough if I recalled what I had experienced in Constantinople a mere two months ago, was it not?
So Inga's and my situation was unusual, but I wanted to make it the tradition of my household.
'What's a little less profit, a few fewer titles? As long as the children are happy, that's enough.'
It was a thought that ranged too far for a clumsy couple that had not even kissed yet, but such were my thoughts all the same.
At any rate, my birth mother Asta was also very positive about the joint wedding of the three brothers, and so, having finished my morning walk with Inga, I made my way toward the workshop of the master swordsmith whom I had specially summoned to work with the meteoric iron.
Settled far to the north in the mountains, Randi had spent his life thinking of nothing but surpassing the famed Frankish sword-smithing group 'Ulfberht'. He was a striking man with a bristly beard, rough hair, and a reddish skin that could only be gained from facing intense heat for long years.
The Sword of Courage that the Uppsala Thing had offered me was also this man's work.
When I sought a smith to forge a weapon from the meteoric iron, Björn had recommended this craftsman, who proved to be every bit as eccentric as his appearance suggested. I still vividly remembered the sight of him dashing over at full gallop the moment he heard the meteoric iron was in my hands.
"Konungr Helgi Ragnarsson...! Son of the great Ragnar, Great Warrior of the Goddess Hel. I am Randi, called simply Randi because I do not know my father's name. I have heard that iron fallen from the heavens lies here—may this humble smith see it once?"
He was not slighting me; it was simply the rough speech of a smith who mixed little with people.
In that tone, which held sincerity in place of courtesy, I rather found something pleasing, and so I personally guided this craftsman whose eyes had turned wild from excessive absorption in a single pursuit. Before long, the man had fallen in love with the meteoric iron.
About the size of three small children. Randi had laid out a spot right beside the otherworldly iron, whose gray and blue hues shifted with the viewing angle. He sometimes embraced the iron, even ate and slept beside it...
After roughly three days of such extraordinary behavior, he abruptly asked where the iron deposit was in Árós, and having moved his place right next to that site, he immediately began building his forge.
Of course, during the move, he insisted that he absolutely had to preserve the 'originality' of his process, which led to a heated argument with Eret over commandeering two healthy, well-fed reindeer and a cart. But I later heard that the two craftsmen, each a master in his own field, soon hit it off and became drinking companions.
Thus a week and a half had already passed since Randi set to work.
Originally, in Scandinavia and Northumbria, iron ore came from bogs, and by my own theory, the only possible explanation was that the iron content dissolved in water underwent some mysterious natural process and formed iron ore in the marshlands... but in any case, if you probed the bogs and wetlands here and there, iron ore would pop out as if by magic!
It was hard to believe, yet an undeniable fact.
The iron ore found in Árós in particular was, like everything else, abundant in quantity and excellent in quality. The elders said that ordinarily it took twenty years for new ore to form in the same spot, but in Árós, for some unknown reason, dig out one deposit and new ore appeared the very next year. So the ever-increasing demand for iron posed no problem at all.
In any case, he carefully built up earthen walls to raise a smelting furnace, and within it kindled a great fire.
After that, he mixed various substances into the ore he had prepared to make it harder and more flexible... but even if I asked on the sly, he would not tell me, saying it was a smith's secret.
'As if I wouldn't know.'
Of course, my superb senses and brain already knew from the smell and the glimpses I caught that those substances were things like pitch-black lumps of stone and charcoal from burnt wood, but I made a show of being hurt.
Seeing me like that, Randi wore a terribly sorry expression, but in reality he was desperately trying to keep the corners of his mouth from turning up.
What a perverse old man.
We could not go on producing iron by hand, piece by piece, forever; systematic management would be needed. I intended to make good use of that when the time came.
[Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang!]
From far off, Randi's forge already threw out fierce heat. Thanks to my unstinting support, this workshop, which occupied a sizable plot of land, had even quietly diverted a little of the water that flowed toward Árós's farmlands for its own use.
These mad craftsmen. It was a blessing that water was plentiful; in any other region, blood would have been drawn at once.
Farmers staked their lives on water, after all.
[Clang! Clang! Clang!]
The master smith Randi, who had thrown off his tunic himself, swung his hammer in a ceaseless, steady rhythm, while the dozen or so smiths who appeared to be his disciples carried on with their own tasks in wordless, disciplined motion.
Each time the hammer, swung by well-muscled arms, struck the iron that glowed red-hot, sparks flew up and the meteoric iron beneath the point of contact gradually stilled its breath.
[Clang! Clang!]
Beneath the ringing of the hammer that only seemed to grow more ferocious,
an enormous blade, as tall as a full-grown man, was slowly revealing itself.