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.
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