Entering through the wooden door, Baldur stepped into a small reception room. To one side, a staircase led to a second floor; to another side, a door led to a kitchen and dining area, while the last side, in front of it, an archway opened into an adjacent chamber.
A man with the unmistakable look of a cutthroat bandit sat inside. He was like one of those thugs you'd cross the street to avoid if you met them on the road. The man was wearing a brigandine over his padded tunic while a sword hung from his hip, and he lounged lazily, drinking ale and gnawing on dried fish from a bowl beside a crackling brazier in the corner. He seemed bored as he reached for the mug, the motion revealing a raven tattoo on his wrist. Slumped in his chair, he barely moved until the door creaked open. Then, his posture snapped alert.
As soon as he recognized the newcomer, he relaxed and called out, "Chief!"
Baldur met his gaze with a nod. "Baug."
Baug rose and greeted him with a forearm shake. "Chief, let me go, I'm bored to death here."
"It's an important job what you're doing here, Baug," Baldur replied with a shrug. "Besides, I'm not the one who decides the guard rotations for Gunic."
"But you could put in a word, boss. Get me out of this."
"Come now," Baldur chuckled. "You're eating, drinking, living an easy and good life. Well dressed with good clothes and fine armor." he knocked him on his chest, producing a soft *tuck* sound as he hit the metal plates riveted under the leather. "It wasn't like this before you joined me."
Baug grunted at the hit, trying to steady himself from falling down from the force as he shuddered, a cold memory flickering across his spine. His smile twisted, forced into something gentle. "Right, boss, maybe I was a little hasty in becoming impatient, after all, tonight someone else would take over my post."
"Back to guarding the overseer, then."
"Good man." Baldur grinned. "Is he in the next room?"
Baug nodded before slumping back into his seat. Baldur strode past him through the archway into the adjoining chamber that currently sported the view of a mix of a study and showroom. Tables lined the walls, displaying bowls of crops and processed flour, small kegs of beer, and stacks of iron bars.
"My lord!" A man—shorter than Baldur and slender, with little muscle to speak of—rushed toward him. He had the look of an honest man, the kind who'd never set foot on a battlefield but would work diligently from the comfort of his office, do his job, and then go home. He hurried as if Baldur were his savior.
"You came just in time."
"What is it, Gunic?" Baldur greeted him with a forearm shake. Gunic returned the greeting before calming down and ordering his thoughts.
"We have two visitors currently in the facilities who need your attention. They arrived yesterday, but the snowstorm delayed the matter until today. I left them staying in one of the barns where we store the barrels of ale, along with their men and their things."
"I was about to send someone to look for you. It's good that you're already here."
"Alright, calm down and let's talk," Baldur said as he sat on a chair beside his working desk. The desk was filled with wooden tables carved with information, piled around. As there was no paper or papyrus in Scandinavia at this time, wood was used out of desperation.
"First, let's talk about our business at hand. How are the smelting furnaces doing?"
Gunic grabbed two cups and served them with mead from a jug. In the process, his right wrist was revealed under his fine and warm tunic, showing a raven tattoo identical to Baug's—same design, same place.
"Lord, the furnaces are working and holding fine. They haven't broken or exploded apart as in previous trials, and the process seems to be running smoothly. The iron produced from them appears to have a similar quality after pouring the molten iron into the desired molds, or that's what the blacksmiths say."
"But, as you may know, from our tests with every iron available for purchase in Kattegat, the best ore for making swords and axes that work well in these smelting furnaces comes from Sweden."
"I have investigated further. The ore comes more precisely from Svealand, and there are only two places to obtain it. One is from the lands controlled by the old Earl Olof Trätälja in Värmland, and the other is from Earl Bjarni, who rules from Uppsala over the rest of Svealand."
"We need to establish contact with someone from there as soon as possible to acquire ore in large quantities, or we will have to stop everything you've planned for iron production," Gunic urged, his voice stressed.
"We are already out of stock from what little we obtained from Kattegat, my lord." He slumped tiredly into his chair. "We are currently only making wrought iron with the ores from other places."
Baldur nodded pensively. "Mhm." He didn't know anything about this Olof, nor did he know anything about Värmland or where it was. He barely recognized the name Bjarni and Uppsala from the TV show, having no idea what Svealand represented or what territories it encompassed. After all, he wasn't from this place at all in his previous life.
"And... that's not all!" Gunic continued after wetting his lips.
"I had to stop the production of more beer. We've reached our storage capacity. One of the local merchants with whom we have deals in Kattegat will come by with ten carts of his to pick up the ale directly from here, as we accorded, which would help solve some logistical trouble and leave the transport to him."
"But the amount is meager compared to all those other barrels piling around. We need new buyers, local or traveler merchants, from anywhere, rather than just those we encounter by luck in Kattegat; we need to find someone who can sell the surplus in other places."
"And that's not all! We don't have anywhere to pour the newly brewed ale because we don't have enough barrels to store it."
"We only had twenty carpenters. Those twenty who worked on making barrels with the blacksmith left under your instruction to work on your house over the last three months. After they finished, they started constructing furniture for the interior, as you requested. We looked for new people as we talked to continue producing barrels for the ale, but we're barely making five a day with the new guys, as they are new to the craft. That's far from enough!"
Gunic panted in distress. The workload had been piling up for him over the past year, and he could feel the weight of the tasks growing harder. It was nothing like the early days when he first arrived.
"And that's only the brewery's production! We must do something fast with all that distilled mead and ale awaiting sale, piling up in the warehouses."
"Relax, Gunic," Baldur tried to calm him, fearing he was on the verge of a breakdown. "You can handle this. That's why I hired you in the first place."
Thinking about it, he met Gunic in the first place in Kattegat when he was selling for the first time, distilled mead after meeting with a merchant. Gunic was freezing his ass off in the snow; he was a vagrant man coming from Sweden without anything.
Seeing him so pitiful, freezing like that, he offered him dried fish he had with him as a snack. At that time, he was in urgent need of manpower for his emerging project, so he asked him who he was and why he was like that.
Surprisingly, he wasn't a slave but a free man; he was alone and came to Kattegat in search of a living, but the man was useless; he was no warrior, and he had no strength with his emancipated looks, so he was useless even for hard labor. But surprisingly the man had a good head over his shoulders, he was a somewhat 'learned' man as he could do simple mathematical operations after having been helper in a farm he was attached supervising daily operations but after having problems with a son of a farmer that was a warrior because of a slave woman he needed to run away from the place as he dont want to be killed.