When the examinations ended, Vig summoned all sixteen shamans, Raven-Speaker among them. He did not speak at once, but sat silently behind his desk, waiting for them to offer their own explanations.
As high priest of the temple and headmaster of the school, Raven-Speaker was the first to step forward. No longer the eccentric figure of two years past, he now wore a plain black robe, much of the strange ink on his face had faded, and his long black hair hung loose over his shoulders. His presence radiated calm and compassion.
"My lord, we truly have worked diligently. But some of our brethren are newly arrived, and still struggle to grasp the material. I swear, in the name of the gods, that we shall devote ourselves fully to your instruction these next two months."
Having spoken his vow, he saw Vig wave his right hand impatiently. Relief flooded his face. Over the past two years, he had learned what this gesture meant: the lord would not pursue the matter further. If instead Vig had turned away, stony-faced, then someone's fate would have been grim indeed.
"Tell me, how do you propose to improve teaching quality?"
A woman shaman ventured, "Increase class hours. From six lessons a day to eight."
"That is unwise. A child's mind cannot endure so long. At best, five or six hours," Vig muttered, rubbing his eyes, and motioned for others to speak.
"Expand the supply of writing materials," suggested a young man named Kaimi Wildfire. His fiery red hair and sharp features bore a trace of Eastern blood.
"At present, the school owns but fifteen full sets of parchment textbooks. Not even the teachers can each have their own, let alone the pupils. I have seen perhaps a fifth of the children eager to learn, yet for want of books they copy onto fragile papyrus sheets. These tear and smudge easily."
Vig cut him off with a sharp wave.
"The treasury is strained. Do not expect me to squander more silver on parchment."
Parchment was ruinously costly. After slaughter, tanners scraped hides clean, soaked them in lime, stretched them taut, polished their surface—a three-week process. A calfskin might yield four to eight folio sheets, each side holding perhaps a thousand words. A sheepskin less: three to six sheets, only three to six thousand words in all. Double-sided writing risked the ink bleeding through.
Papyrus was cheaper, brought in by continental wool merchants. But it was brittle, easily ruined by careless children.
At that moment, Kaimi Wildfire produced a thin booklet from his cloak. He held it like a sacred relic.
"My lord, I spent my youth in Novgorod. There, shamans too poor for parchment used the inner bark of birch trees. They steamed and dried it, then stitched the sheets into little booklets. If one coats the surface with beeswax, it lasts far longer."
"Beeswax?"
At that word, Vig's bright eyes dimmed. Beeswax candles burned with steady light and sweet fragrance; they were treasures of court and church, always dear in price. Using beeswax to preserve birch bark would hardly be cheap.
He flipped a few pages of the booklet. To spare his man's zeal, he said at last, "Go to Mitcham. Take fifty silver pennies. If the cost and quality prove acceptable, we may attempt it on a larger scale. If not, the matter ends there."
By noon, Vig ate in the school refectory.
The fare was plain—fish soup, bread, vegetables from the garden. On lucky days there was a small cup of sheep's or cow's milk. He ate to seven-tenths full, then yawned and went to his office, drafting the new curriculum for secondary school.
There he added Latin, history, and the beginnings of economics.
This "economics" was a rough mixture of Keynesian ideas and Vig's own insight. His aim was simple: when these pupils served as officials, they should think in terms of trade and craft, not merely ever-higher taxes on peasants.
That afternoon, when Vig prepared to leave for supper, Raven-Speaker detained him.
"My lord, beyond books we do not forget our warrior heritage. We also train them in arms. Would you see?"
With permission, he mustered one hundred and fifty students. At command they locked shields and advanced, a wall of wood and iron moving across the yard. At a signal of arrows, they shrank into a tight ring, bristling like a hedgehog. The exercise ended, and at last Vig's grim face eased.
"Loyalty and Honor!"
The Raven-Speaker bellowed the motto. The children echoed it as one. Then he dismissed them, and personally escorted Vig to the gate.
For the next two months Vig poured himself into training the teachers. Meanwhile, the chaos that had plagued him for half a year ebbed. Raiding bands and streams of refugees dwindled as Norway itself quieted.
Word spread of King Erik's campaigns. He had crushed twenty settlements in the south, named four jarls and a hundred knights. Yet when he pressed west, Bergen and its lords united against him.
After months of stalemate, both sides, bloodied and weary, yielded to winter's bite. A treaty was struck:
Fifteen lords of Bergen and beyond swore fealty to Erik as High King of Norway. They would pay him a token tribute each year, but owed no military service, nor need they travel to Oslo to bow in person.
Thus the war ended, and with it Tynemouth's arms trade. Vig tallied his books: forty-seven pounds of silver profit, nearly all devoured by the fifty pounds he had spent housing refugees. A wash, more or less.
Yet there was one gain beyond measure: his people.
Within his walls, Norse settlers now numbered four thousand; the whole domain nearly fifteen thousand souls. When their two years' tax exemption expired, when the three-field system took root—then revenue would soar.
"Choosing Tynemouth was wise. It is the gate northward, the net that gathers endless settlers. They come ashore here before York, and I choose first. What York rejects trickles south, to Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield. In time, Tynemouth will eclipse Manchester utterly."
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