The Price of Usury

“Tolruk, you truly are getting old.” Anna cast a disdainful sidelong glance at Tolruk.

The carpenter leaned back in his wooden chair, his arm bound in a sling around his neck. “Old, I’m old, you’re old, Svein is old, everyone is getting old…”

At that moment, Freya was weeping inconsolably in Noren’s arms. Beside them, on the grassy patch, a large, mounded pile of earth marked the grave of over a dozen corpses from the previous night.

Having soothed Freya, Noren hurried back to the blacksmith’s cottage. Upon seeing that Svein was unharmed, both Noren and Anna breathed a simultaneous sigh of relief.

The other soldiers had already been dispatched back to Hradec, with instructions to inform Tolke to return to O Village with the draft horses, carriage, and luggage.

Svein sat by the table, drinking glass after glass, his face flushed crimson. This had become his habit since the surgery, using alcohol to numb himself.

Noren cut straight to the chase: “Where is that fat man?”

“The cellar.”

The young woman vanished like a gust of wind, and before long, the cellar echoed with agonizing screams.

She soon reappeared, a mirthless smile playing on her lips. “I forgot to close the door.”

“Bang!” The wooden door between the hall and the storeroom slammed shut, and a heavy iron bolt was drawn.

For the Norse, who adhered to their polytheistic beliefs, torture was not just commonplace but an expected part of life; such acts never diminished their piety.

It was worth noting that their conversion was merely a pretense: they never observed fasts, participated in festivals only symbolically, prayers were a mere show, and Mass attendance was just a formality.

Furthermore, Opava had yet to be touched by the long beard of Alexander II, and the local priests were still marrying, so there was no hope of these Norsemen possessing any genuine faith.

Except for Lady Anna, whose status demanded a semblance of proper conduct, the other Norsemen never took their conversion seriously. The mayor, for his part, always turned a blind eye, for to him:

‘Faith (×) Capable Norsemen (√)’

A bearded black man, millennia away, couldn’t help but give a thumbs-up to this arrangement.

Svein set down his wine cup. “What happened?”

Anna replied succinctly: “That fat man impersonated someone else and swindled Noren out of a considerable sum. Why was he caught by you? What else did he do to provoke your wrath?”

Upon inquiry, Anna generally understood the sequence of events.

The fake Ogmund, driven by lust and a desire to steal all the village’s gold and silver, had crept into the carpenter’s home in the dead of night with three guards. The wounded carpenter managed to kill three of them, and a blood-crazed Freya knocked the fat man unconscious with a single blow of a club.

The remaining soldiers who had been looting the village met their end one by one beneath Svein’s axe; the iron axe’s power rendered their bodies difficult to reassemble, so they were all buried together in a large pit.

Eight of the village’s freemen, all farmers, had died and were buried. One thatched cottage was burned down, but thanks to timely fire control, the flames only spread to a neighbor’s yard.

“Are you hurt, Svein?” Anna’s eyes brimmed with worry and profound affection.

The blacksmith withdrew his hand from her grasp, ignored her, and then picked up a pottery jug, filled a cup with grape wine, and tilted his head back, draining it completely.

Anna frowned, her expression darkening with indignation. “How long has it been since you last came to Hradec to see me!”

“Not long.” The man’s vocal cords rumbled, producing a voice like an old ox’s lowing.

Suddenly, Anna cupped the man’s face, her hands brushing over his large beard, carefully scrutinizing his old face etched with wrinkles, before meeting his emerald green eyes.

The man averted his gaze, unwilling to meet her eyes.

Time flowed by, second by agonizing second.

“Guess what I found out!”

Noren suddenly pushed open the wooden door to the storeroom, shouting excitedly.

However, her excitement quickly turned to confusion. “Why are you two standing so far apart?”

Upon hearing Noren’s approach, they had quickly stood up and moved apart, looking exactly like a pair of lovers caught in a clandestine affair.

The young woman dismissed this trivial detail, as she was currently brimming with excitement, and the stress from her earlier horse purchase had completely dissipated.

She first went to the bathroom, turned on the oak tap of her homemade filter, and filled half a basin with clean water. As she washed away the bloodstains, she spoke: “That fat man isn’t called Ogmund; he’s an impostor. He came from Venice, following Doge Domenico’s decree, lending money to people along the way—in Carinthia, Styria, and Austria. The fat man claimed their Doge was benevolent, unable to bear human suffering, and so he was dispatched to act as an angel on earth.”

No sooner had the young woman finished speaking than Svein, for the first time, let out a strange scoff. She shook the water from her hands, then turned around, blinking in confusion.

Svein retrieved a large chest from his bedroom, lifted it onto the table, and opened it to reveal a trove of parchment scrolls.

Anna, taking the nearest scroll, untied its binding and quickly scanned it, immediately concluding: “‘Usury’.”

The young woman frowned, a new word she hadn’t heard before. “‘Usury’? What is that?”

The woman closed the parchment scroll and explained, “It means if I lend you one denier, you must repay me ten, or even dozens. That’s the gist of it.”

‘Usury!’ A flash of insight struck Noren’s mind, and she immediately made another connection. “Jews?!”

“I’m afraid so.” Anna picked up another stack of parchments to examine, then looked at the man. “Have you estimated how much he’s lent out?”

Svein reached his right hand to his forehead, finding it bare, then ran it over his full beard, plucking a few curly hairs. “Never mind. If all the loans can be recovered, it would be at least ten pounds beyond the principal.”

“Of silver?”

“Of gold.”

Noren then noticed another overlooked detail. “How is it that I’ve never encountered Jewish moneylenders in Hradec, or even rarely seen any Jews there?”

“It’s simple, because they are fond of committing crimes.”

“What kind of crimes?”

“Counterfeiting currency, debasing coinage, and on top of that, their usurious practices led them to seize much land and control Hradec’s grain prices. A few years ago, Sithi found a way to purge them. Now, any Jew who comes to Hradec is much more restrained. When you were a child and visited Hradec, you must have seen someone with a hand chopped off; that was for counterfeiting. As for other misdeeds, Sithi, as mayor, couldn’t directly intervene, so he left it to the ‘bandits’ to resolve.”

Anna recounted this leisurely, and Noren listened with keen interest, feeling an unusual sense of satisfaction. The Jews’ crimes, in her view, were beyond enumeration, akin to the Sima clan (TL Note: A Chinese historical reference to a family notorious for treachery and usurpation, implying extreme villainy), and she cared not how many perished; after all, it wasn’t just her, but all Christians who thought this way.

“Oh, right, what else were you going to say just now?” Anna, having finished reviewing the thick stack of usury records on parchment, suddenly turned to Noren and asked.

“Nothing much. That fat man partnered with horse thieves, stealing over a dozen horses along the way, then dragging them to the next city to sell. In the city of Kroměříž, he learned of a horse merchant who resembled him, and so he impersonated him—you already know all this.”

“What I want to know,” Noren burst forward, propping her arms on the wooden table, her emerald eyes wide and gleaming with the phantom images of countless silver coins, “Father, where is their money?!”

Svein pondered for a moment. “Hmm… the shop.”

Noren, having received her answer, bolted away, only to return a few breaths later. “And the horses?”

“They’re all in the livestock shed.”

The young woman strode away with her long legs, vanishing instantly.

Seeing this, Anna shook her head with a resigned smile.