By the end of summer axes rang all day in the mire. They could be heard even beyond the channel.
The stockade grew along the rise in a horseshoe, its back to the quagmire. An oak palisade one and a half times a man's height, gates hung on forged hinges: the first iron hinges in the Great Forest. Old Koren spent the whole day opening and closing one of the leaves like a child given a new toy. "It creaks," he said with delight. "Listen to it, smith. Listen how it creaks. Wood is talking to iron."
The causeway lengthened towards firm ground. Across one place that was especially deep and treacherous they built the first span of a true bridge: oak piles in iron shoes, joined with clamps. Koren no longer said, "It cannot be." Now he said, "While it stands," and from him that was the highest praise in the world.
Everyone joined in building the palisade, according to Old Koren's craft. The thick ends of the oak trunks were charred black in the fires: rot does not take burned wood. The post holes were dug to a line. Kres demanded that everything be counted and marked out beforehand, and the others gradually took up the same order. Women carted clay, children carried wood chips for kindling, and the axes never fell silent all day.
And under the shelter by the water, a ship was growing.
Jorunn laid a keel of bog oak that she, Kres and Koren had spent two days raising from a black backwater. They bent the planks with steam: a pit, hot stones, water, a hissing cloud, and within that cloud Jorunn felt with her hands where the wood consented and where it was about to split. She placed Kres's palm on a plank, laid her own over it and guided it along the grain.
"You hear? Here it wants to bend. Here it does not. Man who breaks wood when it says no feeds fish later."
Kres tried to feel the bend in the plank, but thought more about Jorunn's palm over his. Their faces were very close in the hot steam, and neither was in a hurry to move their hands.
"The water has boiled away!" Vyun yelled from beyond the shelter. They both started and ran to him.
Kres forged the rivets in the evenings, by the hundred. The work was all alike, fiddling and endless. Vyun kept count on a tally stick and announced solemnly each evening, "Three hundred and forty-one." Everyone in the mire knew of the bargain for a thousand rivets and repeated it: live to see the thousandth, and we shall have our own ship, and the ship will have a road of its own.
People kept arriving. By the end of summer six dozen souls lived behind the palisade, and Kres no longer remembered all their names. That was what undid him.
An apprentice nicknamed Soroka came down from the upper reaches with an empty pack and clever hands. His work was clean, he learned quickly, and he asked questions quicker still: how many blooms came from one smelt, how many smelts in a moon, where the ore came from, how many men lived in the mire and how many boats they had. The questions were ordinary ones: newcomers always asked.
Soroka was quickly liked in the mire. He knew how to make himself useful: he took up other people's work before they asked, made the weary laugh, remembered whose name day it was and whose child was ill. Kres himself favoured the quick apprentice. Later he understood Torop's calculation: an unpleasant stranger would not have been allowed beyond the yard, but people freely told a well-loved worker everything they knew.
Only Vyun, who had learned from childhood to notice falsehood in others, watched Soroka and one night saw him cutting notches on a small stick beside the far channel, then hiding it in the hollow of an old willow. Vyun spent three nights in the wet sedge and was very proud of having uncovered a spy.
Kres retrieved the stick the next morning. The notches were a count: blooms, people, boats, watchtowers. Every figure matched. Soroka was counting the mire for Torop.
The men proposed a simple answer: put the spy in the water and let the mire take the blame. Kres forbade it.
"Let him count," he said. "But he will see only what I show him."
From that day, half the blooms were secretly carried to a cache in the Forest, while lumps of slag were stacked beside the forge as decoys. When Soroka was there, the sentries were posted in one place, though in truth they held three. The boats were moved around so that he counted five instead of eleven. Soroka had been watching the mire for Torop for a month. Now he saw only what Kres showed him and sent a carefully prepared lie downriver.
Kres could not hide the slipway. The oak skeleton of the ship already stood beneath the shelter, its ribs in place. Ari's black, fire-scarred chain hung there too, the only thing the river had returned to Jorunn after her father's death.
Soroka reported the chain in his very first week.
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