The grain ripened all at once, as it does after a cruel summer: in a single week the fields beside the rise and the new slash-and-burn clearing both turned yellow.
They began the harvest according to custom: Milava, the eldest of the women, bound the first sheaf and set it out for Grandfather Field, as had been done from time immemorial, so the earth would know it had been thanked. The reapers moved in rows, and a song rose over the field: old and lingering, one of those songs sung not with the voice but with memory. Jorunn did not know how to reap, but she bound sheaves as though they were ships' tackle: nothing could shift them. Laughing, the women showed her that a sheaf was not a sail and need not be tied so tight. By the end of the harvest she managed without guidance, and no one glanced twice at the Northwoman in the field: she was one of their own, that was all.
There the old custom ended and the new began: iron sickles. A harvest that had once taken two weeks was finished by the whole mire in eight days. Women who had cut grain with stone and bone sickles all their lives straightened their backs while it was still light and could not believe it themselves.
Kres considered winter a greater enemy than the jarl. By his reckoning, sixty-four people had to be fed for two hundred cold days. They dried fish and mushrooms on racks, soaked cranberries in tubs, chopped cabbage and set it to sour. The grain went into three pits, following his old rule: never keep everything in one place. They laid in a third more firewood and charcoal than they needed. Stores, Kres said, were more dependable than any divination.
The stockade was nearly finished: the gates hung on forged hinges, two watchtowers stood at the corners of its horseshoe and the palisade was promised closed before the first snow. Vyun completed a census and announced proudly by the evening fire: sixty-four people, eight cows, two horses, eleven boats and one ship. Unfinished, but their own.
The clans of the Forest feared the mire but needed its iron. By day they cursed it at their assemblies: a place of sorcery, angering the gods and drawing the jarl down on them. By night, dugouts came from those same clans. People traded grain, honey and flax for ploughshares and sickles, asking for everything to be done quietly so their elders would not learn of it. Kres traded with everyone at the same price, making no distinction between his own and outsiders.
"They curse us by day and sail here by night," Old Koren laughed. "That means they respect us."
The whole mire baked the first bread of the new harvest, and Milava carried a round loaf to the common fire on an embroidered cloth. Kres cut it. He gave the first piece to Old Koren, the eldest on the mire, then served the children and everyone else around the circle. He took the last heel for himself. That was how his father had done it: first he fed others, then he ate.
When Jorunn received her piece, she did not eat at once. She broke off half and silently laid it back on the cloth: in her land, that was done for those at sea. For those who had not returned, or had not yet returned. No one asked whom she had set it aside for, her father or her home. On the mire they had already learned not to ask her such things.
The ship beneath the shelter was almost ready. The planking had reached the upper strake, and rivets ran along the sides in even rows. At the autumn fire, Vyun solemnly announced in a cracking voice, "Nine hundred and eighty-three." Seventeen remained before a thousand. People on the mire were already arguing over what to name the ship, while Jorunn stayed out of the quarrels and merely smiled.
They proposed a dozen names every day. Old Koren favoured 'Pike': a river fish, full of teeth and their own. Vyun demanded something fearsome, such as 'Thunder'. Milava advised them not to argue: a ship, she said, was like a child and would tell them its own name once it learned to walk. Jorunn listened in silence. She alone knew what name she would carve into the stem, and guarded it as the last link of her father's chain was guarded.
The autumn was clear and still. In the mornings the mire turned grey with frost, mist smoked over the channels and the solitary knock of an axe carried from the causeway to the gates. Everyone knew the deadline for the tribute had passed. Every new day without sails brought relief, but no one deceived themselves: the jarl was bound to come.
The next morning, on the first day of leaf-fall, the watchman shouted from the tower. It was a grown man shouting, not Vyun, and that made it more frightening still:
"Sails on the river! Ten! Ten sails!"
Kres climbed the tower and counted in silence, as was his habit. Ten longships were coming upstream in even formation, their oars keeping time, and from the mast of the leading ship hung a shield painted white: the sign of peace, the sign of trade.
Gunnvald had come at the tribute deadline, as he had promised. He was not coming to burn. He was coming to buy: with hundreds of warriors at his back and a white shield on his mast.
In a single summer, Kres had learned which was more frightening.
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