They came on the ninth night after the assembly: two longships without lights, thirty warriors in iron and Captain Ketil at their head. His orders were simple: take the smith alive, burn the shipyard and deal with the rest as circumstances required.
But the watchmen spotted them before the Northmen saw the mire.
The fishermen on watch sat along the channels in aspen dugouts indistinguishable from deadwood. They relayed the warning to the stockade with signal fires: two flames, then one – the enemy was coming by the main channel. No alarm was raised. On the mire they put out every unnecessary light and waited, each at his post, as Kres had taught them: do not play the hero, do your part.
The waiting was worst of all. In the darkness, sixty people listened to the night. The watch-boys shivered with cold and fear. The women sat with the children in the dugouts, while Milava went from one family to the next, bringing water and calming people. Kres stood by the gates and checked the plan one last time: the causeway, the count, the ropes, the fires. If he had made a mistake anywhere, they would all pay for it.
The Northmen landed at the start of the causeway, formed ranks and marched towards the distant fires, where they believed the sorcerer's hamlet lay sleeping. In truth, these were pots of coals set out the evening before on empty hummocks. Their formation stretched along the causeway, and the first warriors began to fall through.
Every other plank in the decking had been removed, following a set count. Their own people followed the notches; the strangers walked in darkness. The first warrior plunged through a gap between the piles up to his chest. A second stepped over to help and sank to his waist. Their heavy armour dragged them both down. Ropes strung with little bone weights had been stretched beneath the water. When the Northmen struck them with their feet, bones began clacking on every side in the mist. Then a bittern cried. It was really Vyun blowing into a shepherd's call, but the sound came out so mournful that even seasoned warriors grew uneasy.
"These are not spirits!" Ketil roared somewhere in the mist. "These are men! Hold formation!" He was right, but his warriors could not obey: there was nowhere to plant their feet firmly.
The mire fought for itself. The people only helped.
They took the Northmen with boat hooks and lassos, like catfish: hard, wet work without glory. Ketil understood sooner than the rest, gathered several warriors around him and fought his way onto a firm rise. In the fighting he maimed two mire-dwellers, who wore splints until the harvest. They stopped the captain only by throwing a fishing net over him and piling onto him four at a time. The other Northmen, if they had not become mired, retreated to the longships and fled downstream, abandoning their comrades in the quagmire.
At dawn they counted their losses.
Eleven Northmen had been captured, including the captain. No one on the mire had died by their weapons, but they had not escaped without loss. Nekras, the man burned out of his home, the same one who had wept over the ploughshare, went to pull out a drowning Northman, and both vanished beneath the living bottom: the bog does not ask which man is its own. In the confusion someone overturned a pot of coals beside the bloomery. By morning half the furnace was gone, and a month's store of charcoal smouldered away in a black pit.
They searched for Nekras with boat hooks until midday and found him beside the Northman he had tried to save. They buried the burned-out man according to custom, with lamentation. His widow did not wail aloud: she had already wept herself dry over the ashes of the Bobrichi. With his own hands, Kres drove Nekras's first ploughshare, the one that had once made him weep, into a pile beneath the first span of the bridge. Let the bridge remember who paid for it.
One other person nearly died. A scrawny drummer boy of twelve had gone with the warriors to beat the rowing rhythm, and he was the first to plunge through a gap in the decking. He had stopped crying out and merely slapped his palms against the duckweed. Kres himself crawled towards him over the treacherous ground, lay flat on the wooden matting and spread his weight as men were taught to do when crossing a living bottom. He hauled the boy out by the collar just as the mire was drawing him under.
"Breathe," Kres ordered him on the bank. The boy breathed and stared at the lame sorcerer who, for some reason, had not let him drown.
Jorunn walked along the prisoners seated on a log and stopped before Ketil when she noticed the bronze buckle on his chest. A bird's wing was stamped upon it – the mark of Ari, her father.
She crouched, looked closer and went white. Year marks ran along the edge of the wing: her father marked everything that came from his hands that way. The mark was recent. The buckle had been forged two winters after the night the jarl sent Ari to the bottom with his shipyard.
Either the dead master had been robbed down to his final maker's mark. Or the dead master was alive.
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