149 The Gentle Persuader

Throughout the interrogation, he kept working on a thin, straight branch with his knife. He stripped off the bark, and whittled down one end to a blunt, rounded point. He cut a long, slanted barb a thumb's length below the point. He made the barb very sharp.

The women quickly told him the basics: their names, when the village they'd called Edefors was founded - within a few days of the catastrophe! They'd entered the New World simultaneously with Sven's Vikings.

They were equally forthcoming on all the specifics concerning their village, and the life they led in the New World. Most importantly, they told Sven that they'd met colonists from another settlement just days into their New World foray, and set up a primitive trade route.

"We meet the day before full moon," the woman with the braid told Sven. "We sell them stuff from our village for silver and glass goods."

"Silver?"

"We haven't found any gold or silver in the area around Edefors. We found a lot of iron, but just a little bit of copper. We have a mint registered back home and need gold and silver."

This was exactly what Sven wanted to find out about: their home back on good old Earth. He intended to pay them a visit once he'd learned where they lived. He wanted to make sure the Clan of the Brown Bear would restart their colony far, far away from Viking land. Nothing more than that, just a single very reasonable request.

But before he asked the women about their location back home, he instructed Henrik to check again the contents of the three big satchels the group had carried. A cursory check earlier had revealed food, and a few crude glass bottles.

Waiting for Henrik to complete his search, he asked a few questions about the settlement Edefors had been trading with. He was greatly surprised to learn no one from Edefors had ever visited the other settlement, and vice versa.

"We met them while exploring, and they were doing the same thing. We agreed that the best way to keep our settlements safe was to keep them secret."

"Safe from whom?"

"From each other."

Sven laughed. It made sense! It made perfect sense. That was exactly what he'd have done on a first visit: see whether an attack was feasible, and start planning one if it was.

"So you don't know where they are located? Except that it's far away?"

The woman he asked was silent, and he was about to slap her when she said:

"Sven?" said Henrik. He bent down and dropped a few small silver ingots on the ground in front of his leader.

Sven picked one up. It was approximately the size and shape of his thumb, only thinner. The silver was dull in some spots and shiny in others and flecked with many impurities. Vikings smelted much better ingots than that, from the silver they'd found along with copper in Rikruva.

"Okay, so they pay you with glass products and silver. What exactly do you sell them?"

"Mainly pottery and food - flour, and smoked fish. Some hides, and pig iron in ingots. They can never get enough iron, they pay half its weight in silver. We would sell them more if we could but we need plenty of iron, too."

That sounded very promising. If the mysterious settlement didn't have a good source of iron ore, its ability to make arms and armor was significantly weakened. Sven reached out and patted the woman's head and said:

"You've been very cooperative. In reward, we'll now remove your blindfolds."

He signaled for Henrik and Lasse to move behind the women.

"Remove their blindfolds, and stay there," he told them, a little unnecessarily. Henrik and Lasse weren't eager to show their faces to the captured women. Every single Viking had it drummed into his head that avoiding recognition by anyone back home was of utmost importance.

Sven didn't care about seeing his face seen by the women. He intended to visit all of them back home, anyway. It would actually be good if they instantly knew who they were talking to. He said:

"And now, I'd like to know where all of you live, back home on good old Earth."

They instantly guessed why he wanted to know that, and they didn't answer. A glassy look of obstinacy appeared in their eyes. Sven sighed and held up the pointed, barbed stick he'd made and said:

"Do you know what this is? Forgive me, that's a stupid question, of course you don't: this tool does not have a name. I call it my gentle persuader. When you want someone to be honest and they're not, you push it into the liar's asshole and keep pushing until the tip is buried deep inside his gut. Then you jerk it back, and pull his intestines out, piece by piece. It takes a long time, the average adult has four meters of intestines coiled inside their belly. It's also very unpleasant, very painful in fact.

"You can tell me what I want to know right away. Or you can tell me after I've pulled you inside out, and hung your own guts from your necks. You."

He pointed the stick at the woman with the long braid.

"Your full real name, full address back home. Now."

"I'm, I'm, my real name is what I told you earlier. Kristina."

"Second name?"

He saw her eyes go blank for a split second and knew that she was going to lie.

"You'd better not lie to me," he said.

She didn't. She died instead. She had been sitting on the ground, and she just toppled over as if pushed by an invisible force. Sven leaned forward and pressed the tips of his fingers into her neck: no pulse. Her controller had pulled the plug. Her controller knew what was going on, her controller was going to warn the controllers of the other two women.

"Fuck!" shouted Sven. He grabbed the next woman by the throat and put the point of his gentle persuader into the corner of her eye. There wasn't enough time to fuck around with her insides.

"Real name and home address," he snapped. "I'll count to three, then you lose your eye and it's going to fucking hurt. One. Two - "

He felt her go limp and released his hold and she fell to the ground.

He turned to have a go at the third woman and found her looking straight into his eyes. She said:

"I'll remember you."

And she flopped to the ground and lay still, as dead as one could get.

"Fuck!" shouted Sven again. He felt like cutting the three corpses to pieces with his sword, but restrained himself. He wasn't going to lose control in front of his men. Correction: he wasn't going to lose control, ever.

Henrik and Lasse were looking at him like two obedient dogs waiting for orders. He said:

"That's that. We haven't done badly, all things considered. We've learned a lot, and killed the last of those Edefors guys. And we've even got a bit of silver."

He grinned at them, and they grinned back. Lasse said:

"It sounded to me as if that mysterious place they were trading with might be easy to take."

"Yeah, I got that impression too," said Henrik. "We shouldn't get our knickers in a twist just because they've got a few horses."

"They can make glass bottles," said Sven. "That has implications."

He explained the implications to them. Henrik shrugged.

"So we have to move fast, before they arm themselves with guns," he said. "No big deal. It would be actually good if we let them make a few prototypes. Save us the trouble, and a few primitive guns won't make much of a difference in a fight."

"It's nice to hear you're using this brain of yours for other things than thinking about sex," said Sven. "I was fully prepared to hear you moan and groan you'd been counting on a good fuck, and now this."

He gestured at the three dead women lying on the ground. Henrik sighed sadly.

"I liked the one with the braid," he said. "Too bad. What now?"

"We've got to clean up things here," said Sven. "Just in case those horse guys decide to break the agreement, and cross that invisible border. We don't want anyone to find anything. We'll put all of them into that pit to the side of the path, next to the cliff. Dig a shallow grave and cover them with dead branches and shit. Get going on that grave, I'll run through all of their things and assemble the stuff we want to take."

Lasse and Henrik departed for the pit, sulking slightly, and Sven examined closely the belongings of the last inhabitants of Edefors. They'd been carrying several kilos of silver! There were extra ingots hidden in pockets and stuck inside loops sewn into the inside of their satchels.

There also were eight bottles of varying shapes and sizes; two even had glass stoppers. And there was quite a lot of good clothing. Sven was particularly impressed by the footwear. No sandals for this crowd: they all wore boots with tops reaching past the ankle, with soles made of several layers of tough leather.

It was going to take a bit of effort to carry all that back to the former Edefors. Sven reminded himself that he still had to think of a new name for the captured village. He'd intended to move his capital there and call it Kronborg, but maybe that was a bit premature. He would be capturing plenty of new settlements in the near future, starting with the one that traded with Edefors. One of those future conquests could be a better choice for a new capital than Edefors.

That was the kind of problem he liked to have: how to name a newly captured settlement. He finished stripping the corpse with Lasse's arrow buried in its neck. He looked at it for a while, listening to the soft thwacks and thumps coming from where his men were working on the common grave.

Lasse was already working hard. He'd do him a good turn.

He bent down again to cut the arrow out of the corpse's neck.

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