Three of them recorded the terms of the pact on birchbark: Kres, the jarl's scribe and Milava. The clan wanted one of its own to speak in its name, and chose the herb-woman who had treated people from both sides throughout the siege.
The pact was brief. Tribute on the river was abolished. From then on, the mire folk would set the price of their iron and the jarl the price of his wares, while both sides would keep watch over the honesty of the scales at the fort gates. The hostages were released. Tverdyata and his companion returned a day later, well fed and furious with idleness. Passage up and down the river was to be free. In autumn, before the river froze, the jarl was to come not with a war band but with goods.
"Come with goods, not fire," said Kres.
Gunnvald thought for a moment, then ordered the scribe to enter those exact words into the pact. The merchant in him liked them.
At the gangplank, after all the reckoning was done, the jarl lingered and looked across the river at the fort and the rows of straight chimney smoke. More had been built here in a year than he had expected.
"My father taught me never to spare fire on the defiant," he said to no one in particular. "And I shall bring him iron. Let him learn to trade now."
Kres realised the jarl was not joking. For twenty years Gunnvald had proved himself right to his father with other men's burning homes. Now, for the first time, he was taking a different answer home.
Before leaving, Gunnvald drew Ari's bronze stamp from inside his tunic and laid it beside the birchbark. It was the same pattern stamp with a bird's wing that had marked the hulls of the finest longships in the north.
"A dead master is no use to anyone," said the jarl. "This winter, on this river, I finally understood that. The stamp is yours, daughter of Ari. I release your brothers from their oath. In spring they may choose for themselves whose side they will serve. Build for whomever you please. But the first order is mine: two longships at whatever price you set."
Jorunn carefully took the stamp in both palms and said nothing. She only clenched her fingers around it and drew several deep breaths. Everyone, even the jarl, understood what it cost her to remain calm.
The first weighing on the new scales became almost a celebration. Blooms were laid on the pan one after another, Vyun called out the weight in the tongue of the mire folk, Orm repeated it in the northern tongue and the jarl's scribe cut the notches. The boys tried so hard not to make a mistake in front of each other that neither faltered once. Gunnvald watched the weights for a long time.
"Those are good scales at your gates, smith," he said at last. "They cost me dearly. But now I know exactly how much iron I am buying."
Ten heavily laden longships went downriver on the high water. Gunnvald carried away forty poods of iron from the mire, blooms and forged pieces, bought at the price set by their makers. His men sang at the oars again. Ketil stood in the prow of the last longship and kept one hand raised until they reached the bend. That was how the North said farewell to those they expected to meet again.
Orm stayed. He came to Kres with his drum beneath his arm and asked with a scowl whether the mire had any need of drummers.
"Here every man is his own drummer," Kres answered. "But we could use someone who knows how to keep count. Will you learn your letters from Vyun?"
Orm agreed. By autumn he and Vyun were already quarrelling over tally sticks like old scribes. Each spoke his own language, but they understood each other better all the time.
Building continued on the mire. Axes rang all spring and summer as the clan returned to the ashes and rebuilt the hamlet. The houses now stretched towards the fort, and little by little the hamlet grew into a township. Between them, across what had once been the Bane Mire, ran the causeway and the bridge. People travelled both ways and no longer asked where anyone had come from. After the ice broke, they tightened every bridge brace as Koren had told them, and Vyun tarred the piers himself. As he worked, he grumbled exactly like the old man and never noticed it.
Beside the scales at the gates, they set up the town's first written law, several lines on an oak board. Whoever cheats at the scales must carry water for the whole township for three days. Whoever lies at the assembly loses his voice there for a year. Whoever raises a hand against an unarmed person is banished from the mire for ever. The board was read aloud to every new settler. The law was brief, clear and the same for strong and weak.
On the high rise they built the first two-storey log house, with a storeroom and tower chamber. Whenever Kres passed it, he slowed his step. The house looked like one he had seen in a dream. Only the dream house had been stone and climbed into the sky, while this one was built of oak and stood just two storeys high. Kres was no longer afraid to wake. What he saw in dreams was now being built in the waking world, more slowly and, for now, still in wood.
They launched the longship on the day of the summer solstice, exactly a year after that Kupala Night. Vyun drove the thousandth rivet before everyone. He had forged it himself from start to finish, and Kres never even touched the hammer. With her own hand, Jorunn set the stamp on the stem: a bird's wing, now hers alone. Beneath it she burned in the name she had kept secret all winter.
"Kri-lo," Vyun sounded out. "What does that mean?"
"The word sounds the same in her father's tongue and ours," said Kres. "Wing. It took her a long time to find it."
That same evening, Kres took his father's hammer from the wall and held it out to Vyun. The forge of the new smithy roared before them. A year ago, this fire had been no more than an ember glowing faintly in an exile's birchbark box.
"Take it, copyist. An apprentice should have a hammer of his own. That is what my father said. His name was Zhdan. Remember it: Zhdan."
"I remember," said Vyun, taking the hammer in both hands and feeling its weight.
In autumn, when the grain had been stored in the pits, Milava sat down to sew a long wedding cloth with circles of the sun along its edges. Such patterns had never been embroidered on the mire before. She did not say whom the cloth was for, but neither did she hide her work. People by the common fire chuckled good-naturedly and asked no needless questions. Everyone knew the answer already. One day Jorunn stopped beside her, studied the circles of the sun for a long time and asked, "What do your people sew this for?"
"For when the grain is gathered," Milava answered without looking up. "When I finish it, you will know."
That same autumn, a visitor came to the mire from the south, a weary wandering gusli player who had found passage on a boat. At the common cauldron he ate porridge and studied the palisade, the bridge, the landing with its longship and the smoke above the township. At last he asked the question every traveller now asked:
"So what is this city of yours called, masters?"
Everyone by the cauldron looked at Kres. He stirred the porridge, thought for a moment and gave the same answer he had been giving for a whole year:
"Nothing yet. Let it earn a name first."
The gusli player nodded, finished his porridge and by evening was already picking out a song about a lame smith, a mire and a chain across the river. The song did not come together very well and lied with every other word. But it was easy to remember, and soon it had spread the length of the river.
Kres stood above the mire at dusk and remembered the words he had heard at the dawn judgement only a year before: the Forest does not suffer the proud.
"It does not," he agreed with the dead priest, watching the straight, warm trails of smoke rise towards the first stars above the Bane Mire, above the city without a name. "It does not suffer the proud. But it raises the stubborn."
Far downriver, merchants were already passing on tales of a stone city in the south, beside a warm sea. It could be reached by this very river, if you built a longship strong enough. And far in the north, beyond the cold sea, an old king listened to the son who had returned without tribute and tapped one finger on the table. He had not yet decided whether his son had brought him nothing but losses or opened a new source of profit.
The river knew. But the river tells no one before the time.
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