Chapter 44: Seeds, Cattle and Iron VII

Eivind had been a slave for the better part of two years, he knew because he had kept count. Thing was, measured against a life, two years wasn't too much time.

And yet, at least subjectively, those years had felt like a great longer than that.

He was nineteen now.

At seventeen most of the boys he had grown up with had taken wife. Some of them would soon be fathers. Eivind had been robbed of all of that.

Which was why a great many ordinary things felt strange now.

For instance, he had survived months at sea. He had survived the sickness in the hold, the chains. Then he had survived a winter on an abandoned island at the edge of the world.

Then he had even made friends with a half dragon.

Now here he was, walking up a street in a foreign town with a bag full of gold under his shirt and a free man's boots on his feet. He had to stop himself a few times because the situation felt just so unreal.

He looked round at the crowd.

Nobody pushed him to keep walking. Nobody shoved him aside. Nobody tugged at his chains. In fact nobody so much as looked at him.

This... This is incredible.

He was all distracted when a girl his own age bumped into him. It was barely a glanced she sent his way as she muttered a curse. Their eyes caught. Only for a heartbeat, and then she was gone in the crowd.

She was gorgeous.

He stayed a second with his mouth hanging wide open. The Crowd still moving round him, he half turned after her, yet she was already gone.

Gods, I want a wife so bad.

The thought caught him off guard, somehow.

He had tried so hard not holding too many hopes about the future. When he was a slave. For years Yet now here it was.

It came to him then and there.

Ahh.

His hand had moved without meaning to, again he failed to find the weight of his chains there. Some part of him still expected the rattle of the chains-

THAWK

"Ugh!"

Fuck. Oddr elbowed him across the ribs, this fucking hurts. How is this ancient bastard so strong!

"You got distracted again."

The old man's grip had no business belonging to someone his age, how old is he. Seventy?

"Stop gawping about like a farm boy at a fair."

Eivind clutched his stomach and reluctantly nodded, still grunting from the blow, and then hurried to catch him up.

Hiccup did not speak much if any. He did not haggle. He did not go near any main street, or a doorway, a tavern, or anywhere a man might turn round too quickly.

He stayed hooded, and at the edge of things.

Listening. Carrying what was bought. Staying a tall, dull, uninteresting servant.

The other three did the business.

The division of labour settled itself fast, without any of them sitting down to arrange it.

Oddr judged the goods. He had an eye for seeing rot, he knew the smell of damp, he knew the exact shade a seed goes when it has sat a season too long.

Eivind judged the price. He carried the numbers in his head, he was a natural at it: What they had spent, what was left, what a mark bought here against what it had bought three streets back.

Emerald did most of the translating. That surprised everyone except Emerald.

Well, it shouldn't have been surprising.

She had argued her way onto the crew on the strength of her tongues, and the multiple foreign tongues turned out to be exactly what this town was made of.

Half the men selling there spoke the trade tongue with the fluency of a newborn lamb trying to walk. Meaning they knew enough to name prices and not much else.

So the moment Oddr pushed on anything they just shrugged and didn't follow.

Lucky she had insisted on coming.

Just the first day had her translating at least a dozen times, in about five different local dialects, one of them badly, and even badly seemed to work out.

Which was a mercy.

Because the folk back on the island had written them a list with everything they wanted.

Barley for the upper strips, because it does not mind wind.

Oats for the lower, because oats (They didn't give an explanation for this one).

Rye if there was any rye, because rye will grow in poor dirt.

Turnips and beans, because you cannot eat barley and expect to keep your teeth.

It hadn't been just the farmers, either.

In fact, everyone on the island had wanted something.

So it was an enormous list.

It was many pages of hide in Eivind's hand, written out of a full day of having everyone spell out what they needed without pause, and it had turned out as particular as a thing could get.

They started at a warehouse on the north side.

Oddr spent the better part of the hour in there before a single coin moved.

He walked each of the sacks.

He put his hand into every one of them up to the wrist, let it run out through his fingers and watched how it felt. He bit grains out of three different sacks. He asked where it had been grown, and then asked about the same field again a few questions later to see whether the answer had changed.

Eivind, learned more about buying in that one hour than in the whole of his life. The old man had not been boasting.

Oddr barely haggled at all.

What he did was complain, actually.

Complain about the weather, his knees, the state of the harbour, and the poor quality of grain generally in these times. Somewhere in the middle of all that he mentioned in passing that the seed wheat on one of the bins must had been mixed with barley, and how 'any fool could see it'.

He voiced his complains loud enough that the line which formed behind them began stealing glances at one another with the look of people wondering whether it really was that bad this year.

Cunning old goat. Eivind deadpanned.

The trader must have been thinking something similar, because the veins on his forehead was bulging and it was clear he would not be putting up with them much longer.

Which was when Oddr just switched up and asked for the purse.

They traded a look, he passed the purse. Oddr put four gold coins on the table.

The trader's face changed in the bat of an eye.

It was one thing to have an old man speaking ill of what he sold. It was another to realize he had gold on him, and had just told half the street, at the top of his voice, that the seed in all those bags was mixed.

Chairs were immediately found. The errand boy was sent for ale. The good sacks, the ones kept at the back of the shop, all came out at once.

So that is how it is done.

Eivind deadpanned.

"How much did that cost us?" Eivind blanked quietly, not because he didn't know, he just wanted confirmation.

"Five marks."

"Five."

"Just five."

He looked at the mountain of sacks being counted out behind them, at nine hundred pounds of barley, he had to work very hard indeed to keep his face still.

All of that, for just five small pieces of gold.

He had come here worried about whether they could afford everything that was on the list. Yet it turned out they could afford the list several times over.

The math worked. He checked it a couple times.

Still, some part of him remained privately convinced that they had just cheated a decent man out of all his grain.

The better rye cellar, according to the locals, was down by the eastern docks.

The man who kept it had a boy of about ten who did most of the fetching, and both of them were southern. Emerald knew it at a glance, off the eye painted over the cellar door.

The seller seemed pleasant.

He had a thick accent, and he agreed a price with Oddr for eleven sacks of rye out of the back of the cellar. He put his hand out to shake on it, then turned his head and said something to his son.

'Kid, not the ones on the back. Give them the back-left, that one has been down here since before the floods last year. If that still grows at all, I will eat my own boot-'

Emerald did not wait for him to finish.

"He has told the lad to fill us out of the back-left stack," she told Oddr, unhurried. "It has been down there for years. He does not believe it will come up at all."

The cellar went quiet.

The poor boy just froze halfway to the back wall with a sack in his arms and his father went the color of cheese.

Oddr's looked at the seller. What spread on his face must had been some sort of sadistic delight, "Ohhh," Oddr got her out of the way.

The seller started to mumble an apology.

"No, no no no no. Please, please do go on. I would love to hear what you've got to say, you damned scoundrel!"

What followed took a full quarter of an hour, with Emerald translating every word of it, vulgarities and curses and all.

By the time the sacks of the good rye had been counted onto the barrow the deal had settled at a measly half of what they first agreed on.

It was on the way back down to the docks that they passed those three southern hulls again.

There were men on the middle one, this time around. Sitting on the hatch in the last of the light with their boots off, eating something out of a shared pot and arguing.

They were arguing in her language.

Hers.

It was fast, slurred, distantly familiar, full of some ugly private words nobody teaches foreigners.

Emerald had to stop walking.

This was not the first time she had heard her own tongue since she was taken slave.

Plenty of slaves spoke it.

It was just, this was the first time in years she had heard it spoken so carelessly.

By free men.

They went from warehouse to warehouse with the list and crossed things off. Barley and oats off the north side, rye out of the cellar by the eastern docks, and turnip and beans and some sacks of peas out of the last warehouse on the east side.

They walked uphill in the rain.

While they walked the town, the ship filled.

Every purchase ended the same way, with Oddr pointing back down the hill to the far end of the docks, where a tall hooded shape stood among another nine northerners and put the barrows into the hold single handed as they came down.

The livestock took a little longer to settle. The trouble was the coin: the farmer outside the eastern gate dealt in silver and in barter, he had no way on earth to make change for a whole gold piece, so the haggling turned into the man hunting for enough animals to be worth a full gold coin.

Some hours later they were walking back to the ship with sixteen sheep, a ram, ten goats, two of them pregnant, five hairy pigs, and, in the end, every duck he had.

There was no room left for the two cows Oddr had his eye on. He stood on the dock a while looking at them.

"Next time," he shrugged.

And then they had to buy hay to feed them, half a dozen cartloads of it, off a farm on the slope above the town, at a price that was frankly ludicrous.

There were also the herbs.

That one was Emerald's responsibility, she brought it up on the last evening, out on the rain, in the lee of a wall.

"I need to buy something," she paused, "so I would rather you did not argue with me about the price this time around."

Oddr looked up from the hide.

"Go on."

"There are sixteen women on that island carrying children. Most will come to term between now and autumn. There is no midwife. There is nobody who has delivered a child, except by luck."

He paused, setting the hide down.

"So. How much."

"Enough that none of them dies the way my mother did." She shrugged. "I know the names of what I need. I know what they should cost. I am telling you this so that when the seller doubles the price, you do not open your mouth."

The old man studied her a long moment. Then, with a long sigh he reached under his cloak.

"Don't spend all of it, girl."

Oddr repeated yet another time as he passed the purse across.

Emerald took it without a word.

To be honest, knowing Oddr, she expected the old man to spew out some joke.

Oddr must have noticed her funny look.

"Don't look at me like that. It's Women's business," he shrugged. "I was married once, some very long time ago. The one useful thing I learned out of it was when to shut my mouth."

Eivind just nodded.

"Well then, how much do you need, girl?"

"I do not know yet. I will know when I see it."

"Well then take it all and go and see to it. I'll be around."

She hitched, her bright green eyes slipping to the invaluable purse sitting on her hands, then to Oddr, and then back to the purse.

It was heavier, it felt heavier than it looked.

She had never held gold before.

Not truly. Not in her own hand, without another hand around it counting on her behalf. Her even master had held it few times in his life, she knew.

So a purse this fat was not a thing a she was ever meant to know the weight of.

This was hers to spend, the difference walked itself all the way up her arm before she quite knew what to do about it. Then she frowned.

"Yo- You aren't coming, Oddr really?"

The old man frankly didn't seem to care. "Girl, if you come back and tell me it cost fifty, I will assume you had a reason." He was already walking away. "Eivind. Go with her and help carry things."

So the purse settled into her hands.

She tucked the purse under her arm and followed Eivind out into the crowded streets.

They spent the whole of the morning at it.

It began at a stall on the upper market and ended in a herbwife's back room with the door shut, it took a very long time, because Emerald wanted to make sure she was buying the right thing.

The old woman found this insulting for about the first hour.

It didn't last much though.

By the end Emerald was pulling bundles down off her shelves as if it was her home and the woman had taken the reluctant role of her personal encyclopedia.

She was going to make a hell of a sale.

So it wasn't as if she could complain.

They came out with a full crate, which wasn't unexpected.

Seed and cuttings and dried roots. Wormwood, yarrow, comfrey, half a dozen more, each bundle tied and labelled in a script with some arguably difficult-to-read handwriting.

Hiccup came in close once that afternoon as they roamed the last few establishments, to point out the island would be much warmer in summer.

By that, he meant they would be warmer than the north usually warm.

That he never worked out why. The point was that things would grow up there that should not, and that they should buy some crops that resist heat better, just in case.

So they went and bought a small amount of everything southern.

Vine cuttings wrapped in wet sacking. Southern beans. A few kinds of onion. A sack of a bulb the seller swore was garlic.

Then some dozen iron cooking pots and another dozen cooking pans because Oddr insisted and he may have had a point.

Emerald translated when they needed her and did not otherwise open her mouth.