Chapter 38: Seeds, Cattle and Iron I

The coffer had sunk with the galleon on the very night Toothless's fires burned it, and had been sitting on the shallow bottom ever since.

Those first few moons nobody had a thought to spare for it.

So when Eivind hauled it up out of the sea, it came as a surprise to every soul on the island.

A surprise, to be sure.

But a welcome one.

It was a generous amount of slaver gold.

Coin, mostly, with a few gems here and there and some pretty jewellery. They had to shoo off a crowd of young women who were all too quick with their hands.

The coin came from about six different countries. There were a double handful of rings. A few silver dishes, a candlestick, and a small ugly statue of someone's Gods.

All of it had come off a galleon full of slavers. Which meant every piece of it had been taken off somebody else first.

Which didn't matter, because no one cared too much about its origins.

"Two hundred and eleven marks, give or take," Eivind announced, holding up a scrap of hide with rows of tally marks on it. "If a mark is still worth what it was worth fifty moons ago."

Haaland couldn't help but look at him with something close to admiration.

Eivind was an impressive young lad, in many ways. Not only had he had the guts to risk his neck testifying on Torvalds's murder when no one else would, but the young man really went out of his way to be useful to everyone.

Sort of like Hiccup.

He shelved those thoughts for now, he had an eye for gold, back from his days as a sellsword, so he picked up a ring and examined it, turning it over, biting it. "It's the real deal." He nodded.

"How long have you been counting this?"

"Since yesterday." Eivind chuckled casually. "It took me a few tries to dive the sea deep enough to reach the cabins where they kept these, but somebody had to."

Hiccup's brows went up slightly.

"Great, so we have gold now?" Dwarf strolled in.

"We are rich," chuckled Oddr, "on an island with nothing whatsoever to spend it on. What a shame, no grain to spend our precious useless gold around..."

Hiccup caught the old man's eyes across the cookfire.

Gods. Thank you, Oddr.

The old man had been deliberately steering the subject of the grain for days.

Which was fair, he reluctantly admitted.

Gold was useless because they had absolutely no trade with the outside. They had absolutely no trade with the outside because Hiccup had made it perfectly clear that nobody would be sailing in or out of this island.

So actually, the fault was his.

Most people had quietly worked that through and were looking at him expectantly.

I had that coming.

As said, it had been quite a few days since Hiccup explicitly promised to find an answer to the seed problem.

He understood the urgency of it.

The frost was melting faster than they expected, the weather was warming the island toward something almost tropical, nothing like the frozen, northern fortress it should have been.

The last of the frost was melting faster than they expected, the island was heating up at the rate of a tropical paradise island and not of the northern frozen block of ice it was supposed to be, every farmer there knew that the sooner seed went into the ground the better it would come up.

It pained him to admit they were right to be wary of the good weather. In fact, if this season was like the last one then the warming wouldn't be stopping anytime soon.

He let out a long sigh in surrender.

"Fine."

There is no other way. It has to happen.

He rolled his eyes.

"There is a port a short few days south. It is a trading town of sorts. With a few thousand people at most, it has a harbour, hills behind it with some sheep on them..."

He shrugged.

"It's nothing special. They fish, mostly, but they buy from everybody up and down that coast. Grain is not rare there. They will sell it to anyone with gold."

"How do you know all that?" somebody blurted.

"I have flown over it." He turned to look at them. "At night, high up, more than once, and I listen. You would be amazed at what people say out loud when they think there is nobody listening."

If we want to live through the next winter, this has to happen.

One way or the other.

So he shook his head, arms crossed.

"Normally I would just fly in with Toothless and fetch the seed and grain myself. However, seed is not the only thing we are short of, and there is only so much Toothless can carry."

He let out a long tired breath, and glanced at the growing pile of broken tools on the corner of the yard.

Tools that they could not melt down or repair without proper coal, which they had just run out of.

That is the smallest of it too. He pinched the bridge of his nose.

They needed a great deal of things. Sacks upon sacks of barley, and oats on top of that, and cuttings, and livestock, and every scrap of iron they could afford, and the coal to make it into something useful.

Which meant, at the end of all of it, that they needed a ship.

Lucky how they all knew about the ship.

The vessel had come in on the night tide perhaps half a moon ago. A merchant ship with a pair of masts, broad and with a deep hold, that sailed low in the water. The ship had run aground on the pale shallows of the sand, and it was still stuck there. Empty.

There was no crew, no bodies, no cargo, not even a rowing boat left hanging off her side.

There was some standing water down in the bottom of the hull, some stink in the hold, and everything it carried had been ransacked clean.

Still. It was a free ship. Somehow.

It was a lucky coincidence that he hadn't felt the need to burn her.

He would have, if not for the fact that Hiccup expected they'd eventually need to go on a supply run and the ship would come in handy, and because everyone had promised to not betray his trust and flee.

Either way, Hiccup had Toothless watch over it at all times.

So Toothless slept on the beach now. Curled in the sand some dozen paces off her stern with one eye half open, every night, for half a moon.

Just in case.

If only to send the subtle message that this is not a prison, however, nobody is leaving on my ship.

The whole thing was a stupid miracle.

What were the odds of a merchant ship just sailing to you and your local demon not burning it to a crisp? They had to be almost zero.

In any case, they were going to need her to carry all the grain, the iron and the coal and the hundred other things this rock did not have and would never make on its own.

Needless to say, he was not looking forward to one single part of it.

The argument about who went for the grain, with its whys, whens, ifs, and buts, took the better part of a whole gods damned day to settle.

How are they still at it.

Hiccup facepalmed as he strolled around, mostly doing odd jobs.

We aren't doing this for the pleasure of it. This isn't some vacation.

Hiccup rolled his eyes as he made his way down to the plaza.

Truly, he regretted it: Going alone would still have been the clean answer. Just him and Toothless, in and out, nothing said to anybody and nothing left behind. However, the last few times he had shown his face in front of strangers, it had ended... not well.

So he understood their reasoning.

In the end the party was kept as small as the ship allowed.

Oddr was coming because he knew ports, no one doubted it, the old man had manifested an alarming amount of specific knowledge on haggling and cunning.

His boasting aside, Oddr had a genuinely good eye to tell good stock from bad, so he was in.

Eivind was coming too. Mostly because he could read, count and haggle, and because he had a head for numbers that nobody on that island matched except maybe Hiccup.

Of course, Hiccup was going himself.

Hooded, obviously.

Nobody raised arguments about that. If things went wrong ashore, he was perhaps the only person strong enough to guarantee everyone's safety.

Additionally that would allow him to make sure nobody thought about turning cloak.

So that was that.

Three of them. Three was a good number to take care of the buying.

Hiccup had already opened his mouth to move on to the crew they would need to actually sail the massive merchant ship to port.

Then a hand went up in the third row.

It went up the way a hand goes up when the person has been holding it a while and has finally run out of reasons not to.

"I volunteer too," said Emerald.

Of course.

Hiccup's mouth was still open.

"You are going to a port," she said. "How many tongues does Oddr speak?"

"The only one that matters," chuckled Oddr, comfortably. "Trade tongue."

She shook her head, opening her way through the crowd to the front.

"This far north, trade tongue won't be enough, I can speak the common dialects fluently, and I can understand the less common ones properly."

She looked round the lot of them.

"So I'm coming!"

What.

Was she? Was she just inviting herself here? Onto a crew that was already settled. In front of everyone.

Hiccup drew breath to say no, "N-"

"Perfect! Sounds like a plan," clapped Haaland, nodding.

What is happening.

All of a sudden there was a murmur around the crowd, it was the approving sort, it seemed the matter was settled. What the- Hiccup turned and brazenly stared at Haaland.

What is he thinking?

This is not some shopping spree, this is dangerous, that crossing could go very bad for her.

"No," Hiccup raised his voice so everyone could hear.

It came out faster and meaner than he meant it to. He shook his head for emphasis, which did not help either.

"The party was already settled. Three ashore is already two more than ideal." He frowned and gestured vaguely at her, "and it may be unwise, you were-, not that long ago-"

He stopped.

He had been about to say it in front of every person there. He heard himself stop so hard the sentence fell over.

Emerald finished it for him.

She did it flatly, without lifting her voice at all, her arms crossed and one eyebrow raised, her body language made it clear she wouldn't budge. This blockhead.

"Yeah, I was sold. Sold out of a port like that one."

"Yes."

"I know what I was."

She leaned in, slowly and keeping eye contact through it.

"That is rather the point, Hiccup. I know what those places are. I know what the men in them look like when they are lying. How many times have you been inside a port, exactly?"

Hiccup opened his mouth. Shit.

"Twice," Oddr supplied, with relish. "By his own telling, both went magnificently."

For the love of the gods. Thank you, Oddr.

"It is not safe," Hiccup insisted.

"No," Emerald agreed. "It is not."

She shrugged.

"But you are coming along to save me if something happens. Aren't you?"

Her eyes stayed perfectly level for a second, before slipping up and down him. The teasing was all in her voice, this harpy! She was kind enough to let him hear every bit of it.

Fine. Out of arguments.

He looked at Haaland, because Haaland was the one who was supposed to be backing him.

Haaland was just smiling.

Not a large smile. It sat in one corner of his mouth and went nowhere near his eyes.

"She is right about the tongues," he admitted, as though that settled everything, which somehow it did.

"You cannot-" Hiccup gestured shaking his head. At Haaland. At Emerald. At the general situation. "You, of all people."

"Me, of all people."

Haaland's smile did not move. He glanced at Emerald. Then back at Hiccup.

Then, once more, at Emerald, in a way that could not possibly have been an accident.

"Look, she can hold a sword better than most of the men you are taking, which I know, because I taught her. She has spent more time on those harbours than any of us, which of course none of us enjoys, but there it is."

"That is not-"

"It is exactly the reason." Haaland folded his arms. "Just take her. She will not cause trouble."

Hiccup looked from one of them to the other, frowning, smelling something off. The minute flinches and side glances told him there was something else at play here.

Yet he could not for the life of him work out what.

"Fine."

He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand.

After that they moved on to the rest of the crew.

Sailing a ship is not a thing one can just decide to do of a morning. They needed people who had some experience. People who could hold a heading on open water by the stars.

They settled on nine. Two of the fishing brothers, four who had crewed something at some point in their lives, and three strong backs who could be taught to haul on a line inside a day.

All of them were given one simple rule.

They would not set foot off that ship.

Not without Hiccup's word. Not on the docks, not to stroll into a tavern, not for a minute.

They would stay aboard, they would keep their mouths shut, and if anybody in that harbour asked where they were from, they would say the north and nothing else.

None of them argued.

They had all been sold once. They understood exactly what a careless word in a port is worth.

Haaland stayed back.

He was not happy about it either. Hiccup half suspected the entire business with Emerald had been the sellsword's way of getting back at him.

"You are the only one who can hold this place together if pirates come while we are gone," Hiccup chuckled.

"With what?"

Haaland's voice was flat.

"A couple of swords, most of them notched? Some few people who have never held a blade?"

Haaland scoffed.

"I am sorry, Hiccup. I'm happy you hold me in such high esteem, but if a big crew comes ashore here while you are south, I will probably just die."

"Tssk. You are missing the point."