The Council of the Stick had adjourned, but the King's tent remained crowded.
Ragnar stood before a makeshift table covered in slate tablets. He looked at King Horik, whose mood had shifted from "manic joy" to "calculating warlord."
"Leif," Ragnar addressed the soot-covered smith who was standing awkwardly in the corner. "Calculate the structural requirements. To finish the three trebuchets and build the twenty Torsion Spikes the Princess requested... how much iron do we need?"
Leif scratched his beard with a pair of tongs. He closed one eye, doing the mental math of a man who usually measured things by 'handfuls'.
"For the brackets, the release pins, the heavy bolts, and the shoes for the throwing arms..." Leif grunted. "We need forty stone of good iron. Maybe fifty if Bjorn breaks things."
Ragnar frowned. Fifty stone. That was a massive amount of refined metal for a field army to scrounge up on a beach.
"Jarl Sigurd," Ragnar turned to the King's second-in-command, a man who guarded the army's supplies like a dragon guarding gold. "What do we have in the stores?"
Sigurd scoffed, crossing his arms. "We have spare spear tips. We have nails for the ships. Maybe ten stone. The rest is in the hands of the men."
"So we are short," Ragnar said, rubbing his temples. "We are short forty stone of iron. Without it, the machines will tear themselves apart after the first shot."
King Horik leaned forward, his eyes narrowing. "Then we raid for it. There are villages nearby."
"Mud huts and wooden fences," Ragnar shook his head. "We've burned them already. They have pots and pans, not high-grade iron. York has the iron. But to get the iron, we need the machines to break the walls. It's a paradox."
The tent went silent. The momentum of the "Builder's Corps" threatened to stall before it even began. "We have iron," Ragnar said slowly, a dangerous idea forming in his mind. "It's just... distributed inefficiently."
He looked at his father, Ulf. "Father, how many axes does the average warrior carry?"
"Two," Ulf answered promptly. "One for fighting, one for throwing. And a knife. And usually a backup sword he stole from a dead Saxon."
"Exactly," Ragnar nodded. "Liquid assets."
He turned to the King. "I have a proposal. It involves the Treasury."
Everyone looked confused. "The Treasury is on the ships," Sigurd grunted. "Chests of silver and gold."
"Not that treasury," Ragnar corrected. "The Iron Treasury. I propose we implement a mandatory 'Resource Loan' from the army."
The confusion in the room deepened. Even Gyda looked up from her apple, intrigued.
"Explain," the King commanded.
"Every warrior in this camp is carrying weight they don't need," Ragnar explained, his voice gaining confidence. "Broken chainmail they haven't fixed. Cracked axe-heads. Heavy iron buckles on belts that hold up nothing. I want to collect it. All of it."
"You want to disarm the army?" Sigurd shouted, standing up. His face turned a shade of purple usually reserved for dying plums. "You want to take their weapons before a siege? They will gut you, Engineer!"
"I don't want their primary weapons," Ragnar said calmly, raising a hand. "I want the scrap. The excess. The broken bits they hoard because they think 'maybe one day I'll fix this.' I want to melt it down to build the Wall-Breakers."
"They won't give it up," Ulf warned, shaking his head. "A Viking hoards iron like a dragon hoards gold. It is their life."
"They will," Ragnar smiled, "if we offer them a Return on Investment."
King Horik blinked. "Return on... what?"
"ROI," Ragnar said, using the English acronym before catching himself. "Profit, my King. I don't want them to give it. I want them to lend it."
Ragnar grabbed a piece of charcoal and drew a crude scale on the slate.
"We weigh what they give us. If a man gives me two pounds of scrap iron today, I promise him four pounds of prime Saxon steel when York falls. Or the equivalent in silver."
He looked around the room.
"We are asking them to bet on us. To bet on the machines. If the machines work, we take York, and everyone gets rich. If the machines fail, we all die anyway, so the debt doesn't matter."
King Horik sat back, a slow, predatory grin spreading across his face. He loved gambling.
"You want to turn the army into... moneylenders?" Horik asked.
"I want to turn them into shareholders," Ragnar corrected. "If they have iron in the machines, they will fight harder to protect them. It becomes their weapon, not just mine."
Sigurd looked like he wanted to argue, but the logic was suffocating him. He sat down, grumbling. "It is madness. But... it might work. Vikings love a wager."
"Good," King Horik slammed his hand on the table. "Do it. But Ragnar..."
The King's eyes turned cold.
"If you melt down their backup axes and the machine fails... you will not have to worry about the Saxons. My men will tear you apart with their bare hands."
"I work best under pressure," Ragnar lied smoothly.
He turned to his team. "Bjorn, take the wheelbarrows. Go to every campfire. Tell them the King demands 'The Iron Tithe.' But tell them about the double-back promise."
"Gyda," Ragnar looked at the Princess.
"I know," she said, standing up and brushing off her dress. "You need a clerk. Someone to write down who gave what, so they don't claim they gave you a magic sword when they actually gave you a rusty spoon."
"Precisely," Ragnar smiled. "You are the Head of the Audit Committee."
"I prefer 'Mistress of the Ledger'," she said coolly. "It sounds more threatening."
- The Camp, One Hour Later -
The news spread through the camp faster than dysentery. "Bring out your scrap!" Bjorn bellowed, pushing a wheelbarrow through the muddy rows of tents. "Ragnar the Builder offers a trade! Old iron for new gold!"
At first, the warriors were suspicious. They clutched their battered shields and broken daggers. "Why does he want my cracked axe?" a one-eyed veteran asked, spitting on the ground. "Is he making a soup?"
"He is making a giant hammer to smash York!" Bjorn shouted, improvising. "Give him two pounds of rust, get four pounds of silver when the walls fall! It is the King's Guarantee!"
The mention of "Silver" and "King's Guarantee" changed the mood instantly.
Vikings were simple economists. They understood risk and reward. The risk: losing a broken piece of junk. The reward: double value.
"I have a helmet that squishes my ears!" one warrior shouted, running out of his tent. "It weighs three pounds!"
"Toss it in!" Bjorn commanded.
Gyda stood by the wagon, holding a roll of vellum and a quill. She looked entirely out of place among the dirty warriors, which made her terrifying.
"Name?" she asked the warrior.
"Sven the Flatulent," he replied proudly.
"Three pounds of scrap iron recorded for Sven," Gyda wrote elegantly. "Next."
It became a frenzy. Men were digging through their packs, pulling out bent nails, snapped sword hilts, and rusted chainmail links. They ran to the wheelbarrows, treating the scrap metal like betting chips in a casino.
"I have a cooking pot that leaks!"
"Accepted!"
"I have a spear that is crooked!"
"Accepted!"
Ragnar stood by the field forge, watching the pile of scrap grow. It was a mountain of rusted potential.
Leif the Smith was already at work. The bellows were pumping, the fire roaring white-hot.
"It's terrible quality," Leif yelled over the hammering, holding up a melted lump of metal that used to be a bucket. "Full of impurities!"
"Fold it!" Ragnar shouted back. "Fold it twice. We don't need it to hold an edge; we need it to hold weight. Quantity over quality, Leif!"
"You are a slave driver!" Leif laughed, sweating rivers, but he swung his hammer with renewed purpose.
By sunset, the "Iron Shortfall" was gone...
In its place was a massive pile of ugly, recycled iron bars, cooling in the sand. And next to the forge, three completed trebuchets stood tall, their critical stress points reinforced with the newly forged brackets.
Ragnar walked the line of machines. He ran his hand over the iron plating on the counterweight box. It was rough. It was ugly. It was made of Snorri's old helmet and Erik's broken shield.
But it was solid. King Horik walked up to him, holding a chicken leg. He looked at the machines, then at the ledger Gyda was holding.
"How much do we owe them?" the King asked.
"If we win," Gyda said, checking the totals, "the Royal Treasury owes the army about two hundred pounds of silver."
The King whistled. "That is expensive."
"Cheaper than losing," Ragnar pointed out.
"True," Horik took a bite of the chicken. "And if they die in the assault, we don't have to pay them."
"That is... one way to look at it," Ragnar said, trying to ignore the ruthless pragmatism.
The King slapped Ragnar on the back.
"You have your iron, Builder. You have your wood. You have your army of cripples and debt-collectors."
King Horik pointed his chicken bone toward the south, where the dark silhouette of York's walls could be seen against the moonlit sky.
"Tomorrow, we knock. Make sure they hear us."
Ragnar looked at the trebuchets. They were loaded. The counterweights were filled with rocks. The slings were prepped.
He felt a vibration in the air. Not from magic, but from the collective anticipation of five thousand men who had literally invested their own gear into this siege.
"They'll hear us," Ragnar promised.
He turned to Bjorn.
"Bjorn, tell the Academy to sleep. Tomorrow is graduation day."
"And the test?" Bjorn asked, grinning in the dark.
"The test," Ragnar said, "is knocking down a Roman wall!"
The camp quieted down, but the forge fire kept burning, casting long, dancing shadows of the great machines against the dunes.