The Outskirts of the Viking Encampment, England.
Erik sat on a barnacle-encrusted rock, staring at the grey horizon. At nineteen years old, he should have been in the shield wall. He should have been screaming for glory. Instead, he was peeling potatoes with a knife that was duller than his uncle's sense of humor.
Erik was a "Broken." During the landing at East Anglia, a horse had fallen on his leg. The bone had healed, but it had healed wrong. Now, he walked with a hitch that made him slower than the rest. In the Viking world, slow meant dead. Or worse it meant you were the potato guy.
"I used to have a future," Erik muttered to a Turnip. "Now I have starch."
He tossed the peeled tuber into a bucket of cold water. His hands were red and cracked from the wind. He was invisible here. The warriors walked past him without looking, their eyes fixed on the distant walls of York and the promise of gold. Erik knew his share of the loot would be whatever scraps fell off the wagon.
Suddenly, the ground shook.
"ERIK! ERIK THE LAME!"
Erik sighed. Only one person called him that with such enthusiastic lack of tact.
Running down the dune came Sven. Sven was strong as an ox and had a brain the size of a walnut. He was Erik's only friend, mostly because Erik was the only one who didn't throw rocks at him when he asked stupid questions.
"What is it, Sven?" Erik asked, not looking up. "Did you find a crab again?"
"No! Better!" Sven gasped, skidding to a halt and kicking sand into the potato bucket. "The Big Bear... the brother of the Builder... he is shouting!"
"Bjorn is always shouting," Erik pointed out.
"No, shouting specifically!" Sven waved his massive arms. "He says they want men! He says they want the Broken! He says... thirty pieces of silver!"
Erik froze. He looked up, squinting at Sven. "Thirty pieces of silver? For what? To use us as bait?"
"No! To join the... the..." Sven scratched his head, his face scrunching up in deep concentration. "The Order of the Sticks! No... The Builders! He says you don't need to run. You just need to be smart."
Sven grabbed Erik's tunic and hauled him up. "You are smart, Erik! You know how many beans are in the jar before we eat them! Go!"
Erik felt a strange flutter in his chest. It wasn't quite hope he had buried hope under a pile of potato skins weeks ago but it was curiosity. The Builder, Ragnar, had been making waves. The "Fat Ships" that didn't sink. The "Wall-Breakers" that threw trees.
"If this is a joke," Erik warned, grabbing his walking stick, "I will put a turnip in your nose while you sleep."
"Go!" Sven pushed him. "Get the silver!"
The Entrance to the Manufacturing Zone
Erik hobbled toward the designated area. He wasn't alone.
A line had formed. It was the saddest, most ragtag collection of Vikings Erik had ever seen. There were men with eyepatches, men with missing arms, old men with backs bent like question marks, and young men like him with ruined legs.
Usually, this group would be begging for scraps. Today, they were standing in a queue.
At the front of the line stood a tent. Above it, a hastily painted banner waved in the wind. It didn't depict a dragon or a raven. It depicted a square and a triangle.
"Next!" a voice boomed from inside.
Erik waited. The sun beat down. He watched as men went in looking terrified and came out looking... confused, but clutching a strip of yellow cloth.
Finally, it was Erik's turn.
He ducked inside the tent.
The interior was sparse. There was a table covered in slate tablets. Sitting behind it was not Ragnar the Builder, but Princess Gyda.
Erik nearly tripped over his own bad leg. A Princess? Conducting interviews with cripples?
"Name?" she asked, not looking up from her ledger. Her voice was cool, efficient.
"Erik," he stammered. "Son of... well, just Erik."
"Injury?"
"Crushed leg. Can't run. Can't hold the line."
Gyda looked up then. Her eyes were piercing blue, scanning him like she was reading a map.
"We don't need you to run," she said. "We need you to think."
She pointed to a pile of wooden blocks on the table. They were cut into strange shapes wedges, rectangles, and cylinders. "You have ten seconds," Gyda said. "Stack them as high as you can. If it falls, you leave."
Erik looked at the blocks. Most men would stack them flat-to-flat. But he saw the Cylinder. It was unstable on its side.
He grabbed the two largest rectangles and placed them flat. Then he placed the wedges, not pointing up, but interlocking to create a flat surface. He placed the cylinder upright in the center.
"Done," Erik said, pulling his hands away just as the ten seconds passed.
The tower stood. It was ugly, but it was solid.
Gyda poked it with a quill. It didn't wobble.
"Center of mass," she murmured, making a checkmark on her vellum. "Good."
She then pointed to a slate. On it was a drawing of a triangle and a square.
"Which one is stronger?" she asked.
"The triangle," Erik answered immediately.
"Why?"
"Because..." Erik frowned, trying to find the words. "Because a square can be squashed into a diamond if you push the corner. A triangle... a triangle fights back. It pushes against itself."
Gyda stopped writing. She looked at him with a genuine smile that made Erik's knees feel weaker than his bad leg.
"A triangle fights back," she repeated. "I like that."
She reached into a box and pulled out a simple wooden stick. It had notches carved into it.
"Do you know what this is?" she asked.
"A stick," Erik said.
"It is a Ruler," she corrected. "It is the law. Take it. Do not lose it. If you lose it, Bjorn will be very upset."
She handed him the stick and a yellow strip of cloth.
"Welcome to the Academy, Erik. You are no longer a cripple. You are a Level One Apprentice."
Erik took the stick. It felt light, but in his hand, it felt weightless. He walked out of the tent, his limp still there, but his head held high.
The Barracks - Day 1
The "Barracks" was a massive, open-sided tent near the trebuchets. Erik was sleeping on a pile of straw, clutching his stick like a weapon. He was dreaming of building a tower that touched the moon.
The sound of metal on metal shattered the dream.
"WAKE UP, SAWDUST BRAINS!"
Erik bolted upright, nearly taking out the eye of the one-armed man sleeping next to him.
Standing at the entrance of the tent was Bjorn. He was holding a large metal shield and beating it with the flat of his axe. He looked like a bear that had drunk too much coffee.
"Rise and shine!" Bjorn bellowed, grinning maniacally. "The sun is up! The wood is waiting! Why are you sleeping?"
"It... it's dawn," a sleepy old man complained. "We usually sleep until noon."
Bjorn marched over to the man. "That was when you were useless! Now you are Builders! Builders beat the sun!"
He stood in the center of the tent, hands on his hips.
"Get up! Line up! Outside! Now!"
The recruits scrambled. It was a chaotic mess of limps, hops, and shuffles. Erik grabbed his stick and hobbled out into the cold morning mist.
They formed a ragged line in front of a pile of heavy logs.
Bjorn walked back and forth, inspecting them. He stopped in front of Sven, who had somehow also been recruited (probably for heavy lifting).
"Sven!" Bjorn barked. "What is the first rule of the Builder?"
"Uh..." Sven looked panicked. "Don't eat the sawdust?"
"Close!" Bjorn patted Sven's cheek hard. "The first rule is: SAFETY!"
Bjorn turned to the group.
"You think you are weak," Bjorn shouted. "You think because your legs are bad, you cannot fight. But the Builder does not fight with his body. He fights with Leverage!"
He pointed to the logs.
"Drop your sticks! We start with the Squat!"
"The what?" Erik whispered to the man next to him.
"Squat!" Bjorn demonstrated. He kept his back straight, feet wide, and lowered his massive hips until his thighs were parallel to the ground, then exploded up. "Like you are taking a shit in the woods, but with dignity!"
"Give me twenty!" Bjorn ordered. "If your back bends, you are wrong! If your knees cave in, you are wrong! Build the triangle with your legs!"
The group of "Broken Men" hesitated.
"NOW!" Bjorn roared, veins popping in his neck.
Erik gritted his teeth. He planted his good leg and his bad leg. He lowered himself. His bad knee screamed in protest, but he remembered the triangle. Structure. Support.
He pushed back up. One.
Around him, men were groaning, creaking, and falling over.
"Lower!" Bjorn yelled at the one-armed man. "Your ass must touch the grass!"
Erik did another. And another. His legs burned, but for the first time in months, it wasn't the pain of injury. It was the pain of work.
After twenty agonizing reps, they collapsed onto the wet grass.
Bjorn stood over them, looking surprisingly pleased.
"Good," the giant nodded. "You are weak. You are soft. You look like wet bread."
He grabbed a log and tossed it effortlessly onto his shoulder.
"But," Bjorn grinned, "Ragnar says we can turn wet bread into stone. Get up! Breakfast is in one hour. But first... we measure!"
Erik pulled himself up using his stick. He looked at his fellow recruits. They were panting, covered in mud, and looking at Bjorn with a mixture of terror and awe.
"What have we gotten ourselves into?" the one-armed man wheezed.
Erik looked at the Ruler in his hand. He looked at the massive trebuchets towering over the camp in the distance.
"We're building an empire," Erik said, a smile cracking his dirt-streaked face. "And I think my leg just stopped hurting."
"Less talking! More measuring!" Bjorn shouted. "If that log is not ten Ragnar-Units long, you are doing squats until England sinks!"
Erik limped toward the wood pile, ready to build.