While cleaning up Father’s bloodstained clothes, the muddy garments, the bloodied needle, and the wooden plate used to mix the medicine, my stomach let out a loud growl.

Hearing it, Father and Mother looked at each other and burst into laughter.

“Let’s eat first while we talk.”

“Yes. We went to all the trouble of preparing dinner.”

That’s right!

Tonight was stone-grilled cod steak night!

Since touching the stone slabs with bare hands would cause burns, Mother put on fur gloves and used wooden tongs to rearrange them over the hearth so they could heat up again.

Part of me wanted to say, “Let’s just cook the fish over the open fire. It’ll be faster.”

The other part insisted, “No way. Stone-grilled tastes so much better.”

Apparently, enough heat still remained in the stones.

Before long, each slab was taken from the hearth with a heavy thud and placed in front of one of us.

We didn’t have a dining table, but during meals a long wooden board was laid across the floor to hold the food, so there was no danger of the glowing stone slabs scorching the furs beneath us.

“Here you go.”

Then came a stone-grilled cod fillet for each of us.

I honestly believed fatty North Sea cod was the most delicious thing in the world.

Since we didn’t have forks, I cut off bite-sized pieces with a small knife, pressed them against the still-hot stone to give them a nice sear, then ate them together with slices of onion.

The onion refreshed my mouth while letting the rich flavor of the fish shine through.

Mmm…

There were plenty of inconveniences about life here, but the seafood in this village was beyond criticism.

The cattle, sheep, pigs, and vegetables hadn’t undergone centuries of selective breeding, so their flavors were rather mediocre.

Fish and shellfish, on the other hand, had tasted the same since ancient times.

Seafood.

I needed to pursue the bounty of the sea even further.

I was silently stuffing my mouth with the delicious flavors of the North Sea when I suddenly realized I’d completely forgotten to ask Father what had happened.

Well, it couldn’t be helped.

Stone-grilled food had to be eaten before the stone cooled.

“…So, Father.”

“Weren’t you supposed to be reporting about the salt?”

“How did you end up getting hurt?”

“Did the people from the neighboring fjord village attack again and start a fight?”

Once our stomachs had settled a little, I finally asked.

The village beyond the mountains wasn’t exactly on bad terms with us.

Some families were connected through marriage, and when launching raids farther away, our longships often sailed together.

Even so, fights between the villages were common.

Sometimes people even died.

Apparently, that counted as normal relations between neighbors around here.

Honestly, the local mindset was just too barbaric for me to understand.

“No.”

“We were at Chief Jarl’s longhouse discussing whether we should sail to trade with the Northern Angles or demand tribute from the Southern Angles at the village assembly.”

“…Demand tribute?”

“After raiding the villages and towns around them, we surround the settlement.”

“Eventually, they lose heart and pay us silver and woolen cloth as tribute.”

“…Isn’t that extortion?”

“It’s tribute.”

Well…

If they insisted on calling it tribute, I supposed that was simply the proper term here.

It felt strangely similar to calling extortion a “gesture of goodwill.”

“Still…”

“You were discussing this from early in the morning?”

“That was quick.”

“No.”

“We’ve been discussing it for several days.”

“The people who live far away have been staying at the longhouse while we worked everything out.”

“If we’re going to demand tribute, our village alone doesn’t have enough longships or warriors.”

“We’ll have to call on the villages across the mountains and throughout the neighboring fjords.”

“We’ll need at least ten ships and three hundred men.”

“Three hundred!?”

Three hundred people was almost the entire population of our village.

I’d counted once before while talking with Father and Mother.

Roughly half the villagers were male.

Of those, probably fewer than half were old enough to fight.

There were far more children than in the modern world, and many of the elderly were no longer physically capable.

Perhaps around thirty percent of the population were fighting-age adults.

Even then, it was impossible to send every able-bodied man away.

Someone still had to fish.

Someone had to farm.

Someone had to protect the women, children, and livestock from attacks.

If a storm sank a longship and everyone aboard drowned…

The village itself might never recover.

Taking all that into account, a village our size could probably spare only ten to twenty percent of its adult men.

That meant around fifteen to thirty warriors.

Thirty elite warriors and a single longship.

That was about the maximum military strength our village could contribute.

Three hundred elite warriors…

That was a force ten times larger.

I couldn’t help feeling sorry for whichever town they intended to attack.

“But that still doesn’t explain your injury.”

“You wouldn’t get hurt just by discussing whether or not to go… extort… I mean, collect tribute.”

“Did the argument get out of hand?”

The adults in this village loved holding discussions.

Even more than that, though, they loved settling disputes with brute force.

At their core, they really were barbarians.

Not enough food?

Let’s take it from fertile farmland.

Not enough silver?

Let’s steal it from a wealthy town.

Not enough people?

Let’s capture some slaves.

That was basically how they thought.

So it wasn’t unusual for a meeting to end with someone saying, “Talking isn’t getting us anywhere. Let’s settle this with our fists.”

Still, I’d never seen Father come home injured like this before.

“No.”

“It looks like we probably won’t be demanding tribute this year.”

“My injury has nothing to do with that.”

“I see.”

That was a relief.

Even if Father came home smiling with silver tableware he’d looted, imagining how he’d gotten it made it difficult to smile back.

“I got this wound during Knattleikr.”

“Some fool was swinging around a broken stick with a sharpened end.”

“…Knattleikr?”

“You mean that barbaric sport?”

“Honestly…”

“Father…”

Father…

You got injured playing sports?

Even Mother and Erin looked exasperated.

This was a problem.

Our family’s entire supply of firewood depended on Father being healthy enough to chop it.

I understood that grown men had their own hobbies and friendships.

But those hobbies shouldn’t interfere with keeping the family alive.

Knattleikr was an incredibly popular sport among the men of the village.

You could honestly say that every man capable of moving took part.

The rules were simple enough.

The players divided into two teams and used sticks to drive a wooden ball between a pair of trees or other markers serving as goals.

If I had to compare it to something, it was like mixing rugby, soccer, and hockey together…

Without actually watering any of them down.

The reason I could only say “something like that” was because this barbaric sport had no real rules.

There were no fouls.

No penalties.

No time limit.

Kicking the ball instead of using the stick was the least of it.

Tripping opponents who weren’t even near the ball was perfectly normal.

So was punching them.

Kicking them.

Some people even applied joint locks or smashed others over the head with their sticks.

Every year, bones were broken.

I’d even heard that people had died.

The match continued with no time limit, everyone participating at once, chasing the wooden ball across the field while beating each other senseless until they were physically incapable of continuing.

It was difficult to imagine just how unbelievably brutal the sport really was.

Even so, the grown men of the village absolutely loved Knattleikr.

They were fanatical about it.

During the winter, when they couldn’t go out fishing, they’d gather at the longhouse, drink ale and mead, spend the day playing Knattleikr outside in the falling snow until darkness came, then return to the longhouse and drink some more.

You could compare it to modern office workers playing amateur soccer on the weekend before heading to the pub afterward…

Except taken to a completely insane extreme.

Apparently, soccer itself had once been an all-day festival where entire towns kicked around a leather ball.

Knattleikr was probably one of those ancient predecessors.

“Don’t look at me like that.”

“I absolutely had to win this game of Knattleikr.”

“For Thor’s sake.”

“…Knattleikr was for my sake?”

What did that barbaric sport possibly have to do with me?