Rise of Rurik - Chapter 726

[Chapter 727]

The Ross army didn’t stay for long, they continued to line up on the grassy plains by the lake and continued southward.

They quickly saw the intentionally moored fleet, and also saw the village suddenly rising up ahead.

Rurik was in a good mood, and asked his elder brother Arik again: “In the village ahead, where are the people who left the forest?”

“Yes. Just some of them… There must be more people yet to be discovered.”

“I get it. It depends on Medved’s future work.”

Unbeknownst to Rurik, the army led by Medved, who was ordered to handle this matter, was also on their way along the lakeside.

The Ross army was the first to arrive at the first village, and the people who were admiring at first glance gave Rurik the first impression of their poverty.

Even the young children in the team have an absolute advantage over the villagers in height.

The villagers resemble a group of dwarves, and the men among them are short and thin. Can such people be trained as qualified soldiers?

Rurik had some fantasies about them, and now the fantasies are half shattered.

The soldiers of the Slavic banner who stayed in the village saluted their princes, and immediately brought another man, pointing out that this person was the leader of the village.

leader?

Rurik raised his chin and looked down at the nodding short man: “Are you the village chief? Are you really from the forest?”

The village chief was speechless for a while because of his nervousness. He just kept staring at the completely uniform Ross army, feeling that it was the army of God.

“Ask you something!”

After a loud shout, the village chief hesitated to explain his identity and the situation of the whole village.

They also spoke the Ilmenslav dialect, which Rurik understood perfectly.

“Your name is Zajz (rabbit)? Your village is called Pig’s Tooth? Weird.”

The village chief just smiled and remained silent for a while.

If this group of people wants to be obedient citizens, their current performance is indeed somewhat obedient.

Rurik looked at the faces of men, women, old and children. He couldn’t see any anger, and everyone was looking at them with smiles and curiosity.

So Rurik ordered directly: “Let your people stand up! I will check it carefully.”

The village chief didn’t know why, so he had no choice but to do so under the absolute military power.

They were gathered into a group, and the curiosity just now turned into anxiety now.

Rurik looked at them in circles with his hands behind his back, looking for the most beautiful girl among them, just to satisfy his young warrior’s needs.

A group of “chaihuo girls” made him a little disappointed, but fortunately they were still young, and when the food was improved in the future, they would still have the beauties they should have.

In front of them Rurik suddenly stood still, with his legs spread out and his waist pinched, and he proclaimed in Slavic: “I! Rurik! Prince Ross! I am your greatest leader, and now you all Surrender to me! Your surrender is the most correct decision in your life! I promise you that you will not be slaves, as long as you give me tribute every year, I will guarantee your safety, and any enemy who hurts you will be killed Annihilated by me. However, if you betray me, you will be slaughtered mercilessly!”

Is he Prince Ross?

It was a young man, as the soldiers said.

But is he really a Varyag?

Why does a Varyag speak our language?

There are still many questions in the hearts of the people. At least everyone understands the words and believes the safety promise for simple reasons.

After finishing speaking, Rurik casually called the village head named Zajc to his side.

The village head immediately asked: “Your Majesty, as long as… we remain absolutely loyal, can we always have your safe shelter?”

“Of course. You will become more prosperous than ever before. Submit to me, and I will give you a better life in the future.”

“Oh! Then you must be the holy messenger sent by the gods to save us.”

This compliment Rurik shrugged: “I am the son of God, the spokesperson of God in the world. Now you have to make some gestures to prove your loyalty!”

The village head hesitated for a while, and then said: “It is up to you.”

“Okay. Let all the unmarried girls in your village stand up, and I will choose.”

“what?!”

“Have you hesitated?” Rurik’s eyes sharpened.

“This matter… a few days ago, those soldiers had already taken away several women. Could it be that your lord still wants to…”

“Of course.” Rurik was fully aware of the situation, and he himself fully supported it, so he deliberately asked: “I said before, the woman we took away cannot be a slave. Don’t you think the Ross warrior is not worthy of having it?” Your woman?”

With a powerful army in sight, although the village chief was reluctant, he had no choice but to hook his head and ask the villagers to hand over the girls first.

There are barely two hundred people in this village, and the number of girls gathered together is surprisingly small, only about twenty.

In contrast, their boys are more.

Rurik believed in good faith that the girls in the village had been plundered by young soldiers from White Tree Manor. In fact, he could also estimate that under the very poor living conditions, any family would give priority to raising their own sons. As for the future marriage of the son, it is too far away, far less important than the asset gain brought by a male labor force.

These people live in the forest, and it is very likely that some girls and unsound babies will be selectively disappeared. If the living conditions are improved, this situation will disappear in an instant.

What happened to the Ross people will definitely happen again to these people.

Rurik must first satisfy his own lifelong affairs, considering that in Fisk’s sixth banner team, even if boys and girls are freely combined, there are still 100 people who cannot get wives for the time being.

According to the tradition of the Slavs, girls who are twelve years old will be betrothed by their parents, so the so-called girls that Rurik can examine are all too young.

After asking and asking, only five of them are basically of age, but their short stature is a bit unconvincing on the surface.

Rurik pointed with a big hand: “These are the five girls, marry my soldiers now.” Then he shook his head and asked the young boys in the army: “Come out five people and claim your regular wives.”

At the beginning, the boys of the Sixth Banner team were busy laughing, and finally they pushed and shoved, and five of them were probably pushed out as a prank.

On the other hand, those girls who are like commodities, they have no right to choose their own marriages according to tradition, and they can only stand dumbly when they learn about the situation.

Even if those boys came out because of the pranks of their companions, they can solve their life-long affairs today, and they accept the current situation instantly and readily.

Those girls don’t have to be pretty, they might even look a little dirty and short, that’s not a problem at all.

The prince is fulfilling his promise. If he doesn’t follow up with such a great gift, wouldn’t he be disloyal to the prince?

The five boys hurriedly grabbed the arms of the girl they liked, and pulled them to their side and then to the army formation.

Rurik nodded in satisfaction, indicating that the boy who got his new wife immediately took out his dry food.

There are two kinds of prefabricated staple foods commonly used by the Ross Army today: hard bread and flatbread.

In terms of carrying capacity and portability, everyone prefers to stuff pancakes into backpacks.

For the weak woman who belongs to him, the man’s love is fully awakened.

They took out a pancake from their bags and handed it to their women. It was obvious that the five girls were timid at first, but after they realized that it was food, they bit it desperately like little wolves.

“What’s going on…” The village chief and the villagers were dumbfounded.

Rurik smiled and said, “As I said, they are soldiers married to me, and they are not slaves, so they deserve to eat delicious food.” Then he pointed at the village chief, “I’ll give you some more treasure.”

After a while, a small cloth bag was stuffed into the village chief’s hand, and the whole village was shocked when the hemp rope was opened.

“White particles? Could this be the legendary salt?”

“It’s salt. Those of you who surrender to me, you probably won’t get this kind of treasure in the forest.”

The village head, Zajz, was already crying while holding the cloth bag, but he knelt on the muddy ground, faltering and fumbling a lot of incomprehensible words, which seemed to be praises.

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Although there are many ways for people to obtain sodium ions, even if they do not get salt in their daily life, they can still obtain it from natural food.

It’s just that the efficiency of obtaining salt from food is too slow compared to directly supplementing white mineral salts.

These villagers are passively isolated from the world. In the past, the area around Lake Ilmen was monopolized by large farms. The lakeside farms took the lead in buying salt at high prices from Varyag merchants and Krivich merchants from Smolensk. For their own consumption, there is no surplus salt to sell to the forest people.

The source of the salt they could obtain came entirely from the shores of the Black Sea.

Today Crimea is still firmly controlled by the Eastern Roman Empire, and Odessa, a military stronghold, is also in its hands.

Local merchants boil seawater in pottery pots. After a simple separation operation, most of the bittern is removed, and the remaining salt is mainly sodium chloride and a small amount of potassium chloride.

The salt was transshipped layer by layer, and the price of transporting it to Lake Ilmen had become high. Large farms had to exchange it with a large amount of leather, and this transaction was not stable at all.

The situation of the people in the large farms is slightly better. On the other hand, in the forest farms with a larger number and extremely scattered distribution, their people generally suffer from hyponatremia and hypokalemia. If they do some high-intensity physical labor, they will definitely faint. For a while, he even died directly from lung asphyxia caused by hypokalemia.

They don’t know the reason, and they can only appeal to their beliefs. The so-called dead were punished by the forest god.

Rurik is still arrogant, and it is his arrogance that makes poor people only feel respectable.

“This is the reward for the loyal, and the salt will be given to you! Besides…”

Then ten mass-produced cast iron axes were placed on the ground: “These axes are also given to you.”

What else can the villagers say?

If they ask for the bride price for the girl to marry, these axes and salt are already huge wealth in everyone’s view of wealth.

They all knelt down and cheered, praising the prince as a good man.

Eating salt can keep you alive, and the new ax will improve your production and life.

Rurik was buying people’s hearts with things that he thought were not expensive, and it seemed that it had indeed worked.

The name “Pigtooth Village” always makes Rurik feel a little indecent.

He quickly understood the origin of the village’s name. The large pig’s tusks were used as spearheads, and the small tusks were polished into arrow clusters.

Obviously, in the Valdai Plain in Eastern Europe, which lacks stones, it is natural for animal teeth to replace stones as weapons.

Rurik gave them a very simple and even boring name “Xinyi Village”, which is abbreviated as Novotin in Slavic.

Prince Ross has fully demonstrated his authority in this village, and it seems that he has gained a group of new fans.

The group didn’t stay any longer in Xinyi Village, and the five selected lucky girls also followed the team after eating the pie, to be precise, they followed her man closely.

The flag signal came from the lake, and the fleet, which had rested for a while, immediately unanchored, and the sailors basking in the sun resumed their boats and continued to head south.

It didn’t take long for the team to reach the second village. Rurik repeated his old tricks, preaching, asking for girls, and bestowing salt and iron tools.

Everything is going well, and the village name feels cheap and is willing to believe in a bright future.

The second village was given the name “New Second Village”, pronounced Novotva in Slavic.

Then there are “New Three Villages” and “New Fourth Villages”…

Rurik was inspecting his new subjects, and the prepared salt and ironware were being given away, and his young boys were also constantly getting women, causing the number of the entire team to keep expanding.

After all, those girls were still weak, and they were allowed to sit on horse-drawn carriages and deer carts, and the girls saw this mighty team clearly from a new perspective.

They saw many girls carrying bows and quivering pots, with pretty faces and blond hair, just like fairies in the forest.

Those female warriors were also Varyags!

From what they could see, the Slavic girls who had left the forest felt that the Varyag conquerors were not at all as terrible as their parents had said they were.

They even heard the saying: Marry us, you are us.

After Rurik finished his inspection, the whole team could stop to rest.

Just when I met the seventh village, a wonderful encounter happened!

The two armies marching towards each other carried the Ross banner, and the armies of Rurik and Medved collided.

What a wonderful chance to see the prince leading an army to inspect outdoors?

!

For this reason, both armies paused and shared information with each other.

When he learned that the prince was going on a parade around the lake before the autumn harvest, Medved wanted to report it.

He proudly claimed that he had pulled out eleven villages from the forest at once, and this work will be expanded by the beginning of next spring.

The army rested on the spot, and a team of a thousand people occupied the seventh village. The villagers here were both curious and fearful.

“One thousand”, this number is a very large number in the villagers’ conception, and the army in front of them is clearly invincible!

Medved also understood the prince’s policy towards the new subjects by the way, and he was a little surprised. They were obviously a group of poor people, why did the prince reward them with salt and axes?

The prince has his own purpose, but his stupid head still doesn’t understand!

“Are you going back to prepare for the autumn harvest?” Rurik asked knowingly at the last moment.

Medved nodded: “Exactly. I still have a lot of information to report to you, but…”

“You don’t need to say more. There is nothing more important than preparing for the autumn harvest. Your people should go back quickly. After the autumn harvest, I will collect food taxes around the lake according to the list. I will need your assistance then.”

“As ordered.”

The two teams had a face-to-face meeting, rested for a while, and then parted ways. Through the brief report from the other party, Rurik had a better understanding of all the new subjects.

The team advancing both by water and land rushed to the eleventh village, which was only two days and nights away from the forest.

The house was just beginning to be built, and the raft was just being built.

The strong village head lamented the fertility of this land, and thanked Prince Ross, whom he had never met, for his permission to live by the lake.

They never imagined that in just two days, the army of the Principality of Ross had been killed!

At first, the people fled into the village subconsciously, until the village chief saw the flying flags and believed that it did not mean danger.

The fleeing villagers came back one after another, and Rurik just happened to enter this huge building and a large wasteland construction site.

“Why are you running away? Are you afraid that we will bring about slaughter?” Rurik’s words were very straightforward. The village chief was strong and wise, and honestly explained his concerns.

“It is true that our army has killed many enemies. But for those who submit to me, this army is the most trustworthy backer…”

That’s all, Rurik repeated the move ten times.

So far, there are no new villages ahead, and the parade is over?

This is but the end of the parade of newly surrendered populace.

[End of this Chapter]