The Brave New World - 146 The Glass Miracle

“Shit,” said Sven.

He examined the object in his hand once again. It was a crude, badly shaped small bottle. What had made him swear, what made him examine it so closely was the fact that it was made of glass. Thick glass containing plenty of faults and impurities – but undeniably glass.

He’d already taken a detailed tour of the captured village. It really was a great prize. There was a blacksmith, a small smelter, workshops for carpenters, potters, weavers – but there was nothing, not even a trace of the tools and rough materials needed to produce glass.

There was just no way the glass bottle could have been made in that village. The lake shore was rocky, with next to no sand, and Sven hadn’t seen any limestone either. That meant the glass bottle had been made somewhere else. Sven’s men had already explored the area around the settlement, and hadn’t found any hidden glass workshops.

Those fucking miners! They seemed so eager to tell him everything he wanted! That was why he’d decided not to torture them. They didn’t tell him about the band of hunters. And they didn’t tell him there was another settlement not far away, a highly developed settlement, a settlement that was capable of manufacturing glass.

There was a silver lining, though – there was always something fortunate in any misfortune. The mysterious glass-producing settlement had to be illegal. It was impossible to reach that level of development quickly. This meant Sven and his Vikings could take it over without fearing an outcry or risk of discovery that they too had been illegally colonizing the New World.

It all added up to a major change in plans.

Sven began by executing point one of his old plan: he sent messengers to Svenborg with the latest news, and a request for the immediate transfer of a dozen colonists to the newly captured village. Of course, he would inform Olaf of that need the moment he went back home. But the colonists needed guides to lead them to the village, guides and porters for all the stuff they had to take with them.

Following that, Sven treated himself to a major pigout, eating three smoked fish and six flat loaves of bread. It resembled wholewheat pita in size, shape, and texture, but the taste was truly unique. A variety of fillers had been used to make up for the scarcity of flour – there was plenty of bran, and a whole range of different ground wild roots that stained the round flatbread with green, yellow, grey.

But still, it was bread, no doubt about. A real luxury in the New World. It improved Sven’s mood, and he stopped snarling and snapping at people. He sounded almost serene when he said:

He’d nominated Lennart as the temporary commander of the village partly to make up for the bollocking he’d given him while Lennart led him around the settlement.

It was the right move. Lennart was very happy with his appointment. Grinning from ear to ear, he said:

“We’ll keep the place sewn up so tightly a mouse won’t be able to move unobserved. Thank you, Sven.”

Sven nodded and turned to Henrik and Lasse and said:

“We’ve still got a couple of hours of daylight left. Get ready and report back in a few moments. We’re setting out right away.”

They had luck: as the sun set, the sky cleared, giving them an extra hour before it got too dark to advance. They stopped for a moment at the fisherman’s hut – Sven wanted to inspect it, and being Sven found something that had been overlooked earlier: two fishing rods with lines of twine, wooden sinkers, and finely-wrought hooks. The hooks were weighed down with soft bands of pig iron hammered into place half an arm’s length from the hooks.

By nightfall, they’d covered at least another three kilometers along the shore: they could see where the lake narrowed down into a river, again. They moved some distance away from the water and found a gully that hid them from sight. Then they rested, one man on watch while the other two slept.

Sven took the last watch, the hours preceding the dawn. He needed to digest his visit home, that took place while he slept in the New World.

He had woken up in his bedroom with Henrik snoring loudly beside him on the big bed. He barely had time to wolf down a piece of cold mutton before he was buried under an avalanche of questions, demands, and arguments.

The mint guys were running out of metal. The kitchen was running out of both food and fuel. The people sleeping in the barn with the sheep, and in the dilapidated shed that had once housed cows and pigs – they’d had enough, they were close to mutiny. The warmer weather had made the stink inside absolutely intolerable.

Sven had intended to find Johan, and kick him out of the farm after removing his implant. But he had to give up on that plan: there was too much to do. He reminded the inhabitants of the smelly farm buildings that it was totally up to them how quickly they moved somewhere more pleasant. They had started constructing a big, barracks-like building a week earlier. It could be completed within another week if they really put in an effort. No building materials? Then get some, idiots! Use your brains, show some initiative!

He had to make half a dozen speeches like that and his voice got hoarse. Then he hunted down Olaf.

Olaf was busy supervising the slaughter of the sheep that was to become that day’s dinner.

“We’re going to run out of sheep soon if we go on like that,” he said mournfully. “And it’s such a waste. They mate in the spring, Sven. If we could stop killing them for a few weeks we could grow our flock. Can’t you persuade people to turn vegetarian for a while?”

“We don’t have a lot of vegetables either,” Sven told him. Then he told him about the latest developments: the captured village, the mine, the workshops, the glass bottle.

“I need at least a dozen people there right away,” he said. “Six women, six men. Go hit the sack, and start organizing that. I’ve sent guides, they should reach Svenborg in six days’ time. Make sure everyone’s ready by then.”

Olaf instantly began bitching and complaining. They were short of hands in Svenborg as it was! Did Sven realize several important projects would be delayed if a fifth of Svenborg’s workforce was taken away?

“Do it anyway,” said Sven. He smiled at Olaf and grasped his arm and said:

“Olaf, I’m counting on you. Don’t let me down. If you run into an insurmountable problem, come and see me.”

Of course, he didn’t want Olaf to come and see him about a new problem. Basically, he just wanted everyone to fuck off so that he could escape back into the New World.

After a quick shit and wash and a hurried meal of cold meat and cold potatoes, he did exactly that.

Henrik was just coming awake when Sven re-entered his bedroom: evidently, Lasse had relieved him on watch in the New World, letting him rest.

“Anything new?” asked Sven, sitting down on the bed and kicking off his boots. The smell that rose told him it was time to change his socks. He grimaced, and decided: to hell with it. He wouldn’t smell a thing once he fell asleep on the silvery mat.

“Nothing new,” Henrik told him. “All quiet and peaceful. Wait, that’s wrong. Lasse told me he heard wolves.”

“Howling, or moving in to take a closer look at us?”

“Howling. It’s turned out to be a clear night and the moon’s nearly full over there.”

“There were no wolves at all over there at the beginning,” Sven mused. “They seem to be multiplying fast.”

“There were no wolves because there was nothing for them to eat, Sven. There was no game. It was months before we saw the first hare and another couple of months before we saw a mountain goat.”

“Vidar maintains it was a sheep, a ram to be precise.”

“Vidar’s full of shit. It was a goat. I looked at its tracks.”

“You could tell?”

“Of course. That’s almost like comparing a cat and a dog. Anyway, Sven, if you’ll excuse me – I’m fucking hungry.”

“There’s some cold mutton and potatoes,” Sven told him. “You could ask Ulla to warm it up for you.”

“Potatoes? I thought we were out.”

“They bought some.”

“What!?”

Sven laughed.

“The power of money,” he said. “Of the new money, to be exact. Erik bought a hundred kilos of potatoes with a single gold ten-krona coin.”

“Nice. Sven, I gotta go or I’ll take a bite out of your leg.”

“Go, then.”

The moment the door closed behind Henrik, Sven stretched out on the silvery mat atop the bed –

– and found himself shivering in almost total darkness, his nose filled with the aroma of the forest. He got up and stretched and tapped Lasse on the shoulder.

“Already?” Lasse said softly. “You’re a bit early.”

“Yeah. You know, it’s nicer here than there.”

“Yeah, I do know,” Lasse said. “I wish I didn’t have to go back every time I fall asleep. I wish I could tune out the signal the way I can back on Earth so I can sleep without being present here.”

“You tune out sometimes?”

“Are you kidding? I don’t want to miss a single minute.”

“I had to tune out a few times, a few weeks back,” Sven confessed. “I was close to going crazy. Of course, that was when the telepathic link still worked. It’s actually better without it. At least I like it better.”

“So do I,” said Lasse. He sighed.

“Okay,” he said. “See you later.”

“Later.”

Lasse lay down to sleep but didn’t succeed for quite some time: Sven heard him tossing and turning. It irritated him: a thick mist was rising, and he was depending on his ears to give him warning of an intruder. He was about to give Lasse a kick up the backside when Lasse finally stopped moving around.

It was so quiet, so peaceful in the forest – no frogs, no insects: it was already too cold for that. Sven could see his own breath smoking in spite of the fog, but he didn’t feel cold, even though his forearms and calves were completely bare. His heart was thumping steadily, sending warm blood into every nook and cranny of his body. The New World worked on him almost like a drug, injecting him with excitement and energy that were missing from his life back home.

He heard a bird call in the distance: dawn was approaching. It would be another magnificent day in the New World, beautiful and inspiring even if it rained all the time.

It would also be the day on which he would solve the riddle of the glass bottle. The settlement it came from couldn’t be more than a day’s travel away, he was sure. And it had to be close to the river shore, because glass required sand – fine sand.

Those fucking miners! Had he been less kind to them, he’d already know all about that mysterious settlement. He’d know where it was located, its size and population.

But he had to admit to himself it was more exciting this way. Exploring without an idea of what he might encounter, stepping out into the unknown…

Another bird gave voice, uttering a loud cheep quite close to where Sven was hidden.

“And good day to you,” he said softly.

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