On the birchbark, his father called the smelting furnace a bloomery: a clay shaft as tall as a child, with a tuyere at ground level and a mouth at the top. Kres built it in nine days. He kneaded the clay with sand and chopped grass, dried it with fires and patched the cracks. He sewed the bellows from wolfskins. At the end of the month he had snared two lean wolves grown bold with hunger.
The first smelt was a disgrace. He worked the bellows until morning and burnt through his entire store of charcoal, but when he broke open the cooled furnace, he drew out a pitted lump of slag, black and dead as a charred log. Not a drop of iron. He sat on the ground among the shards and said aloud everything he thought about the furnace, the bog and himself. It made him feel better, but produced no more iron.
He read the birchbark again by rushlight. His father's hand was spare: "birch charcoal. blow without cease. burn ore first." Burn ore first. Roast the ore beforehand, before it went into the furnace. That was what he had failed to do.
He began again, with the charcoal. Smelting required hot-burning birch charcoal. Kres felled birches on a distant rise, split them, stacked the billets in a pit, covered them with turf and fired them for three days in thick smoke, making sure they smouldered rather than burnt. The charcoal came out light and ringing. Now he roasted the ore beforehand over an open fire, as the birchbark instructed: the nodules cracked, gave off rusty vapour and turned dry and brittle. The mire reeked of smoke and scorched stone, and the birds began giving it a wide berth.
He began the second smelt in a thunderstorm because he did not know how to wait. Thunder rolled over the mire, lightning struck the distant rises and rain fell in a solid wall, while Kres worked the bellows without pause. He did not leave them even when lightning struck close by and the smell of burnt alder filled the air. For the rest of his life he told the younger ones: iron does not care whether you are afraid. Only one thing matters to it: whether you stopped blowing or did not.
At dawn he broke open the bloomery with trembling hands. In the ashes, amid the fused slag, lay a bloom: grey, pitted and heavy. Alive.
He worked it for two days, hammering out the slag and welding the iron into a solid body, then forged an axe. The axe came out ugly: a humped poll, a rough blade. Kres felled an alder with it in four strokes and stroked the blade as a man strokes a dog.
"Ugly. But mean."
And that same day, a strange dugout boat drew up at the hamlet landing, and three men walked down the street: two northmen in iron caps and, with them, a man without a clan named Torop.
Everyone in the Forest knew Torop, and no one liked him. Interpreter, go-between, river man: one of their own among strangers, a stranger among his own. He interpreted for the northmen when they traded and for the clans when they paid. People said Torop had two tongues and both of them lied. They said it quietly: without him no bargain could be struck.
At the gathering, Torop announced what he had come to say. Jarl Gunnvald, master of the striped sails, laid tribute and a deadline upon the clans of the Great Forest: by the month of falling leaves they were to gather a child's weight in amber and forty forties of pelts. Or ten heads: five male, five maiden. Those who paid, the jarl would leave untouched and suffer no one else to touch. Those who did not would hear from their neighbours what happened next.
The hamlet was silent. Hort stood leaning on his staff, and Kres would not have recognised him: the old man seemed to have withered in the course of one summer. The priest listened, nodded and said only, "The clan will pay." Then, when the northmen were already walking back to their boat, he added softly, whether to Torop or himself, "One trouble after another. Now there is a sorcerer on the mire as well, fanning a strange fire."
Torop stopped. He asked again in the gentle voice that only he could use: "A sorcerer? On the Rust Mire?"
Hort should not have said that.
Three days later Vyun, who could slip through any wattle fence, came running to the mire: breathless and proud, with half a flatbread tucked inside his shirt as a gift. He poured out everything: the tribute, the ten heads and how Torop had questioned the fishermen at the landing about the sorcerer who lived on the bog and whether it was true his knives never grew blunt.
"He kept saying the same word," Vyun recalled with care. "I-ron. What is that, Kres?"
Kres looked over the boy's head, towards the great river flowing beyond the rises and the mist.
"It is what they will come for now," he said.
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