King Hakon, the seventh of his name, was alone in his council chamber.
He was busy
examining maps of his holdings in Europe and America, the fine details their
topography as they had been etched in bass relief and positioned on modular
tables that he could configure at will.
The king ran his
fingers lightly over their surfaces, brushing the contours of the arctic
circle, from Norway to Greenland and Iceland, from the Canadian Rockies to
Alaska and the Aleutian Islands.
His holdings were
vast, greater than any king in the history of the Scandinavian people, and he
knew that if he wanted to keep them for his heirs, if he was to establish a
dynasty that would endure, there was much work to do…and it fell to him to see
it done.
Hakon’s people had
been migrating into Alaska, which he had purchased from the Russians in
exchange for military support for the Nicholas the Second, the last Romanoff Czar,
in his war with the Bolsheviks.
The Norwegians and
the Russians, the Vikings and the Rus, were natural allies, and together they
had squeezed Finland and Sweden, securing stability and independence for
themselves even while Hakon fomented an age of Norwegian ascendancy that was fueled
by Alaskan Gold.
At the end of the
Great War, with the help Hakon and Nicholas, the German Kaiser had taken
possession of Canada; 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 of the war in
France, and at the end of it, when the English and French had 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 had been largely ignored 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, before any
conflict arose with Kaiser Wilhem the Second, who had seized the mantle of the
Hapsburg monarchy, and now, though a Lutheran, was the titular head of the Holy
Roman Empire, along with all of their vassal states, which now included Great
Britan and France.
Today, Hakon had received
word from Winnipeg concerning an old comrade of his from the war for independence
he had waged against Seden in his youth. The message concerned his friend Bjorn
Elmquist, who had been smuggled across the border of the United States, from
Minnesota into Canada, and he was in desperate condition.
Bjorn had received a
blow to the head with an axe…delivered by 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.
The message included
the request that Hakon give his friend succor; the party making the request believed
that Bjorn would recover, even though the physician indicated that the man would
remain in a permanent vegetative state...at best.
Hakon believed that Bjorn’s
associates, the Magnusson sisters and Karl Thorrson, whom he knew and
considered to be degenerates, though dangerous people…were merely grifting;
Thorrson had also fought in the wars, alongside Hakon and Bjorn, and had been a
capable soldier, but he neither liked nor trusted him the giant-man.
Nevertheless, he wrote
an order to the doctor, instructing him to provide for Bjorn in Winnipeg until
his death from natural causes. Bjorn had sacrificed much for me during the
war and he deserves to be taken care of, the King thought. If Thorrson
is grifting, 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 flowing north from the
Gulf of Mexico to Hudson Bay, into the great cities he intended to build throughout
the tundra, it was then that it first occurred to him that the Magnusson
sister’s might be of some use along the way.
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