The Tales of Saint Anthony, The First Day

King Hakon of Norway - The First Day

King Hakon was alone in his council chamber. He was busy examining maps of his holdings in Europe and America where they lay in bas relief on top of modular tables.

He touched them lightly, his fingers brushed across the contours of the arctic circle, from Norway to Greenland and Iceland, from the Canadian Rockies to Alaska and the Aleutian Islands.

Hakon's people had been migrating into Alaska, which Hakon had purchased from the Russians in exchange for military support for the Romanoff Czar, in his war with the Bolsheviks.

The Norwegians and the Russians, the Vikings and the Rus, together they had squeezed Finland and Sweden. They had secured stability and independence for themselves, fomenting an age of ascendancy fueled by Alaskan Gold.

At the end of the Great War the German Kaiser had taken possession of Canada, and now Germans and Austrians, Poles and Czechs were flooding into Hudson Bay and settling the Canadian interior.

Seizing control of the Canadian provinces had been the Kaisers aim from the outset, and at the end of it, when the English and French finally sued for peace, the Kaiser demanded their holdings in the great northern frontier in exchange for a relative degree of autonomy in the government of their respective nations.

Hakon was not keen on these developments, but he had seen them coming for years, and he advocated policies that allowed his own people to push east into Canada, from Alaska to Winnipeg, across a vast landscape that was largely unexplored by Europeans.

Tall mountains, covered in glaciers, marked the border of his domain; but the Canadian interior was wide open and impossible to police or defend by ordinary means, and the Norwegians were eager to control as much of it as they could.

Hakon had received word from Winnipeg, concerning an old comrade of his from the war for independence. His friend Bjorn Elmquist had been smuggled across the border from Minnesota, he was in desperate condition.

Bjorn had received a blow to the head with an axe...from his wife. It should have killed him, but it didn't...yet the attending physician wrote that it almost certainly would, given time; meanwhile his friend was paralyzed and had lost the ability to speak.

Hakon was being asked to give Bjorn succor, believing that he would recover. The physician indicated that his old friend would remain in a permanent vegetative state.

Hakon believed that Bjorn's associates, the Magnusson sisters and Karl Thorrson, whom he knew and considered to be degenerates, though dangerous...were merely grifting.

Nevertheless, Hakon had written an order to provide for Bjorn in Winnipeg until his death from natural causes. Bjorn had sacrificed much for him during the war and he deserved to be taken care of. Thorrson had also fought in the wars and had been a capable soldier, but Hakon neither liked nor trusted him.

If Thorrson is grifting, the king thought, I will not begrudge him taking something for himself.

Hakon stared intently at the map of Minnesota and the border it shared with the Lakota Confederacy along the Minnesota and Red Rivers.

He stared so intently at the base relief he thought he could see his canal being dug between the two rivers, anticipating the trade that would be flow north from the Gulf of Mexico to Hudson Bay, into the great Cities he would build throughout the tundra, and he considered whether the Magnusson sister's might be of some use along the way.