They reached the hamlet in the grey hour before dawn: a dozen men with axes and boat hooks, two boats dragged overland between the channels, Kres at their head. His leg burned from hip to heel, but he did not notice the pain.
He had prepared himself to see a fire. All the way there he pictured black rafters, heard screams, saw the bodies of the hamlet folk on the wet sand. He drove the men through the Forest by night and counted from habit in his head: how many axes he had, how many shields the Northmen had, how many paces from the edge of the Forest to the first wattle fences.
The Forest by night does not like men running through it. The paths tangled under the moon, familiar patches of burned ground led the wrong way, and twice the men in front stopped: they thought someone was standing ahead among the trunks. Kres led them by the stars and the river, as his father had taught him, and promised aloud, for the whole Forest to hear, that he would bow to the master of these paths with an offering of rye if he led them out. He did. By the grey hour they had covered in one night what should have been half a day's journey.
But below the edge of the Forest there was no fire at all.
Three longships lay on the sand, drawn up neatly as fish on a stall. Fires burned, but they were quiet campfires. Tents of striped sailcloth stood between them, and beside the outermost tent a warrior in iron was hanging a steelyard from a stand on a flat stone and setting out weights.
Scales. Kres lay in the bracken at the Forest's edge and for a moment could not believe it: they had brought scales.
He knew Gunnvald without being told. Not by the gold or the sword, but by the silence around him. A broad man with grey in his beard walked along the bank without a helmet and without haste, touched the sides of his longships with one finger, spoke quietly, and was obeyed at the first word. He carried himself not like a warrior in a strange land, but like a master who had already inspected and valued a new yard.
Kres counted too. Three longships: thirty oars apiece, and baggage crews besides. More than a hundred warriors, and that was only here, at one hamlet, only today.
By midday it was clear what the scales were for. The Northmen did not rob. They weighed. The clan hauled wax and furs down to the bank, bundles of squirrel skins, birchbark tubs of honey: the summer's arrears. The jarl's scribe cut notches on a stick, the weigher shifted the weights, and all of it was done quietly and as part of the day's work, which made it more frightening than any shouting. People remember robbery and hate it. They gradually grow used to trade where one side has the scales and the other has fear.
Only once during the whole trade did the jarl give a sign, and that was enough. His own weigher, taking in wax, held the pan down with one finger: an old trick used to catch dishonest money changers. They prised open the weigher's hand, weighed the short measure back to the clan before everyone, then led the man himself away to the longships. He was not seen on the bank again. The clan began whispering, almost gratefully. Kres clenched his teeth in the bracken. The jarl had made a show of punishing a petty deceit so that all the rest of the unequal trade would look honest.
Then smoke rose beyond the distant woods. Thick, black and unhurried: something large was burning, and all of it at once.
"The Turovichi," breathed one of the men lying beside him. "It is the Turovichi, the ones beyond the bog. They hid tribute in the spring."
The jarl did not even ride out to look. A third of his men had gone there in the night, done the work and returned by midday, and Gunnvald heard their leader's report as calmly as he had dealt with the weigher. One hamlet burns, ten pay. Kres lay in the bracken and understood that he was looking not at a raid, but at a well-made foreign order backed by ships, silver and patience.
Against that order he had only a mire, a bloomery and six dozen fugitive souls.
The worst thing was watching the bread. The clan brought the jarl bread and salt: the same bread with which they welcomed their own in the mire. Hort held the loaf on an embroidered cloth, and the old man's hands did not tremble, though Kres wanted them to. Gunnvald broke off a piece, dipped it in the salt and ate. Every honour observed. A guest.
Milava found him at dusk: she came to the edge of the Forest as though gathering brushwood and sat beside him on a fallen trunk.
"Hort knows you have come," she said without preamble. "He told me to say: take your men away before daylight. Do not anger the guests. That is what he said: guests."
"Does he mean it?"
"He meant it when he saved three souls last night, smith. The jarl asked why the hamlet had so few men of fighting age. Hort said there had been a plague. The jarl wrote down: plague." Milava was silent for a moment. "He is an old man bargaining with what remains. It is not for you to judge him. It is for you to outlive him."
She left, and before daylight Kres's men withdrew as well: quietly, without disturbing the guests. At the first halt, one of the young men whose home had burned could bear it no longer. "There were a dozen of us, smith. We had axes. Why did we lie there?" Kres answered without offence and listed everything he had seen: a hundred Northmen in armour against a dozen men with boat hooks, the river at the enemy's back, the hamlet under their knives. "We cannot fight now," he finished. "First we need walls, stores for winter and an exact count of our people. The wolf is strong in the open field. So we must not meet him in the open field."
Vyun was already waiting for them in the mire. Of course he had not stayed put: he had slipped into the hamlet, spent the night with an old woman he knew and overheard everything said around the great fire.
"The jarl hardly asked about the amber or the furs," he whispered, proud and terrified at once. "He called Torop over to the fire and asked so quietly I barely heard: where is the place where the water is red? Smith, he was not asking about the hamlet. He was asking about you."
"And Torop?"
"Torop smiled," said Vyun. "You know how a man smiles when someone asks him the way to his own hoard."
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