The sea is frozen and the world is plunged into snowfields.
The sky was still gray and the world seemed to be in dead silence.
The snow began to loosen, and some people emerged from their snow nests.
Rurik finally pushed open the thick wooden door. He stayed in the cave for a long time like a rabbit. When he saw the outside world, he felt incredibly dreamy.
The hibernating Russians appeared one after another. They were trudging through the waist-deep snow. Once the two met, they yelled and praised the pile for surviving the blizzard.
"The snow accumulation this year is really amazing. Rurik, you'd better go inside first and put on your hat." Otto, with a stupefied face in the room, endured the cold wind that poured into the warm "cave" and called for his son to breathe.
Rurik immediately put on another layer of leather, and finally jumped up and was buried in the soft snow, disappearing without a trace.
Then he stuck his head out, his fair face was visible under the white velvet hat, and a snowball seemed to appear on the snow.
The Russians do not like snow. What they like is always warm land where they can grow wheat safely, and a good harbor that does not freeze all year round.
The world is frozen, and people must survive in the ice and snow world.
Fortunately, Rossburg's reserves of supplies for this winter are extremely sufficient, so everyone will not have to worry about eating safely, and there will be almost no worries about keeping warm.
Due to this exaggerated snow accumulation, people's winter life has encountered extremely rare and huge obstacles. Because compared to previous years, the snow cover is not as extreme as this winter.
Life still has to go on, especially winter hunting.
The gray world blew a sharp wind like a knife, and there was almost no snow attached to the frozen sea. All the snowflakes were blown to the shore, causing Roseburg to be filled with snow hills, and under the snow hills there were many buildings. houses.
The wooden ridges are sturdier than the longhouses of the past. People are still worried that if there is another snowstorm, their houses will be crushed by the snow, and everyone will still be turned into ice sculptures in the severe cold. Besides, the snow at the door and in the intricate streets has made people's lives difficult.
After being frozen for a while, Rurik's head completely sobered up.
Without him or Otto personally giving the order, the Rus who reluctantly went out were already clearing away the snow with wooden shovels.
If there are advanced large-scale snow removal equipment, the snow in Roseburg will be cleared quickly, at least ensuring that there will not be too much snow in people's living areas.
Mechanical equipment did not exist, and people could only rely on their own hands and simple shovels and rakes.
The native residents of the Ross tribe, various permanent immigrants from outside, and various powerful traders who live temporarily temporarily are the current residents of Rossburg. Its population has unexpectedly exceeded 9,000 people! Among them, there were three thousand captured Gotlanders and people from Lake Mälaren. The residents of Roseburg are forced to live a cramped life, and their lives are even more cramped after the snowstorm? Fortunately, this bad situation will change immediately with the return of spring.
Do more than 6,000 of these 9,000 people have sufficient labor capacity (including most children)? A snow clearing work officially ordered and spearheaded by the Duke of Ross started on the first day after the snow stopped. here we go.
On the roofs of the streets and alleys there are people clearing snow everywhere. They first cleared a large number of paths in Fort Ross? The road surface was made of hard-trampled snow, and a large number of reindeer sleds were running on the bloody road.
Just near the shore? A snow mountain is forming!
Reindeer sleighs pull loads of snow here, unload the snow and immediately haul new ones. The reindeer herds that Rurik ordered to be bred and cultivated once again played their huge strategic role. In this era, they were the "truck heads" of the Russians.
There are not only reindeer here, but also more than a hundred well-tamed ponies captured from Gotland. Carrying snow is just a side job for these livestock that pull carts and sleds full-time. Soon they will have to go to Ellenburg further north to do the most critical work.
How long will it take to clear the snow? In the first five days, the Ross men cleared most of the snow from Rossburg and nearby areas.
A workforce of more than 6,000 people continues to work, even in the dark even when daylight hours are brief. A huge snow hill about twenty meters high appeared. It was a complete behemoth and quickly turned into a play place for a group of children.
Under the snow hills, the Russians set up some large pottery urns, in which porridge made of oats and various vegetables was always being cooked.
The people saw that the generous Duke of Ross gave a comfortable meal to all who dumped the new snow on the snow hills. Should clearing snow be part of the job? Once it becomes profitable, people's enthusiasm reaches its peak.
Finally, the Russians can walk freely in their home port, but it is a pity that all the ships are sealed by ice. The sails of the great Avora have also been removed, and she is embedded in the thick ice of the dock, like a prison. Fairy in the ice and snow. The coast is dotted with purposefully beached longships arranged in a dense matrix. No one is worried about them slipping from their fixed positions anymore, because they are also sealed by the frozen snow.
The winter life of the Russians has begun, and the strongest and most ambitious men are ready to take action.
Thinking back to the winter hunts of the past few years, every hunt has essentially evolved into an expedition. Hunters work together as a group to kill wild deer, bears, wolves, white foxes, ferrets and other animals, and they also actively discover other human strongholds. Discovery means war, war means getting rich, and it also means glorious fighting.
A group of men were once imprisoned in their own homes. In addition to desperately planting seeds for their women, they also relied on the soft light of oil lamps to constantly and carefully repair their weapons. It seems to the women that their husbands are going on an expedition in the winter!
The captured women of Gotland who were forced to marry the Rus were already shocked by the shocking scale of the legendary Fort Rus, but now they saw the behavior of their new men, and they were puzzled and worried at the same time. Life has been like this, and most women have acknowledged the reality. They rely on their new men extremely pragmatically, fearing that the man sharpening his sword will accidentally die outside during the winter expedition. In the final analysis, they are worried about losing their asylum.
The sun has finally returned, sweeping away the world's haze and making this world of ice and snow extremely dazzling.
The intense light caused Rurik to collapse, but times have changed after all!
The blacksmith shop in Clavarson once again showed a lively scene, and all five blacksmith shops in Roseburg had their chimneys spewing thick smoke.
It stands to reason that blacksmiths like them have accumulated a lot of wealth in the past few years, so they don't need to continue to work hard.
However, the Duke issued an order that work must be done, and one order after another from the tribe forced everyone to be very busy.
Among all the blacksmiths, the elderly Klavason is the most versatile. Now he is no longer a simple blacksmith, but a master of more than twenty apprentices.
He is indeed not a blacksmith, but he is the first Russian "engineering master" recognized by Rurik. Even if this person does not have many technical abilities, he has integrated a series of abilities of Nordic craftsmen of this era.
Rurik provided creative design and process drawings, and the Klavasen family was responsible for turning the drawings into physical objects. The cooperation between the two parties has been very smooth over the past few years.
Rurik took several followers to place Klavason. He came here to inspect, and secondly, he asked the blacksmith to solve a small object immediately. However, this small object did not require Klavasen to do it himself. Rurik thought that his little buddy Kamne could do it himself.
The heat of the blast furnace quickly melted all the surrounding snow, so the blacksmith's mansion appeared to be very hanging. While other people's houses were still covered with some snow, only the various houses of the Klavasen family always exposed the herringbone shape. 's roof.
The blast furnace has resumed operation, and the large amount of carbon blocks, mountains of ore, and piles of clay molds stored in it are enough for smelting and casting to last for a long time.
Kawei is already like an engineer. He stood on a high ground and shouted at the hired workers to serve this magical giant furnace. At the time of Rurik's inspection, the second pot of molten iron in winter had been emptied of slag, and the casting of pottery molds was in progress.
Kawei is supervising the casting of a large number of axes. This wave of casting will consume the entire furnace of molten iron and eventually turn into as many as 200 axes. Such crazy efficiency was something that no one would have dared to imagine in the past. But this batch of axes has a blade on one end and a hammer on the other. Although tools cast from pig iron are not suitable for making swords, they are just right for making axes.
It is already a top product sold by the Russian people, and the price closely follows the market price.
Rurik certainly knew that the Glan tribe in the kingdom was also producing and selling their own iron tools, but they were still using extremely primitive methods to make them, and their production capacity was really low-level. They are not worthy to be the competitors of the Ross people, or the iron production capacity of the Viking tribes in the entire Nordic world cannot compare with the earthen blast furnace in Rossburg.
The Russians had upgraded their iron smelting technology to the steel frying method, and now Rurik saw the blacksmith apprentices he had ordered to train, and they were working completely like blacksmiths.
More than twenty people gathered in a shed. Under the shed were a large number of small stoves. They worked in pairs, with one person responsible for turning over the pig iron, and the other responsible for continuously pumping air with a leather bag blower. Although they are all children around ten years old, Rurik has rewarded them with excellent meals by name in the past two years or so. These Slavic boys were destined to live a hungry childhood. In Roseburg, they did have meat every meal, and now there was a constant supply of wheat porridge and barbecue.
After all, they are Europeans, and a ten-year-old child who receives such good food already shows that he is unusually strong.
In other words, all the children who received the benefits from Rurik became stronger. This remarkable feature made people of Roseburg's age praise them full of praise.
Klavasen himself was not idle either. The workers he hired continued to turn a wooden turbine blower, and the small stove in front of him was blazing with flames. He was still doing his job, making the carbon steel sword embryo into a good sword.
Rurik is a distinguished guest!
Klavason paused the work at hand, recalled Kawei who was overseeing the work, and Kamne who was frying steel, and invited Rurik to a comfortable mansion.
The warm wood carvings were illuminated by a bright matrix of oil lamps. Klavasen and his old wife sat cross-legged on the wooden floor, while his daughter-in-law Lilia held her son Kuzneslav, who had just learned to walk. Kawei smiled like a fool, and Kamne was very reserved for a while when he saw his master Rurik again.
Rurik highly praised the blacksmith for resuming work immediately after the snowstorm, which reflected the strong support of the Klavassen family for the development of the strength of the Principality of Rus and was a manifestation of loyalty. He was highly concerned about the future production of all types of metal implements and gave verbal praise to all apprentice blacksmiths.
These are all correct polite words, but seriously, the scene of them actively working is not an act, they are indeed actively producing, and Rurik takes a reassurance.
"I'm so happy now! I think you all know what's going to happen in the future."
Clavarson proudly shouted: "Go hunting in the north! Many guys who ordered steel swords said that the Duke planned to hunt a group of white bears and let a group of elite warriors use the bears' tusked heads as helmets. Such a gathering The pile will definitely scare the enemy, haha!"
"Sure, but I ran into a little problem."
"Oh? What problem do you have?" Klavasen poked his head, "You are recognized as a hero by everyone. It is my honor to solve your problem."
"It's not a troublesome thing." Rurik shrugged: "I need some special stained glass."
Ultimately, what Rurik needs is sunglasses.
After his dancing-like explanation, the three of them, Klavasen, Kawei and Kamne, understood. Because these three people have long been supporters of Rurik's "atomistic theory", they believe that this is Odin's wisdom. With the help of "atomistic" thinking, they not only have a new look at the various minerals at hand. ideas, and began to consciously "make things happen".
They had bypassed alchemy and gone straight to chemistry.
Adding ruby to the glass liquid will eventually turn the glass into a light red color. Following this routine, the Klavassen family, the only designated glass manufacturer in the Principality of Rus, accepted Rurik's new task, and this time it was no longer to make simple colored glass.
It's actually a pair of black lenses for the eyes of travelers in the land of ice and snow!
Klavasen had actually considered this idea after he first discovered stained glass. After all, glass with a large amount of lead added turned black overall, and it seemed that the more lead was added, the darker the color became.
If the glass continues to darken, wouldn't it mean that the sunlight on the snow will no longer be dazzling?
The cheapest material for dyeing lenses black is black copper oxide. Rurik thought of a set of chemical methods for preparing copper oxide in relatively large quantities using current materials and equipment. The core copper material was a large number of captured copper coins.
Although the steps were a little more complicated, it still took Klavasen a day to make a very black substance like toner that was enough to fill a small cloth bag. It had a strange metallic smell and was essentially It's a special kind of patina. Indeed, in terms of coloring materials, copper oxide is the glass coloring agent that the Russians can now produce efficiently, and it is less toxic than lead.
They started working, Klavason was responsible for mixing the ingredients, and Lilia and Kamne had taken on all the remaining work.
The viscous glass liquid was poured onto an extremely polished iron ingot. The hot red color dissipated, and the dark glass piece showed his clues. It's darker than the previous stained glass!
Rurik didn't even need to experiment further. He took the cooled irregular glass piece outdoors and saw the dark world of ice and snow, and the sunlight was no longer dazzling.
Not only that, Rurik's mind also thought of huge business opportunities.
It is not troublesome to polish the lens into two square pieces of glass of similar size, and it is also not troublesome to create the wooden bracket and hanging ears to carry the glass pieces.
Two days later, Rurik came to Klavasen's house again. Not only did he get the sunglasses he requested, but he also brought another news to the blacksmith.
"Do you like it?" Klavasen asked knowingly.
"It's really wonderful." Although Rurik felt that the sunglasses were a bit heavy, he was completely relieved after considering how wonderful their actual use was.
A group of people gathered at the blacksmith's house again, and everyone was in a very happy mood.
Wearing sunglasses, Rurik has completely changed his temperament. Viewers feel from the bottom of their hearts that he is made more heroic by the sunglasses. It seems that for anyone who wears them, men become handsome and women become heroic.
Facing her future brother-in-law, Lilia was generous, but the dark circles under her eyes revealed many things: "I am already a woman who is good at making glass. I have been working during the long night, and now I have made a batch of black glass." Glass. Rurik, I can guess what you are going to do."
"That's great. Don't force yourself." Rurik nodded and looked at Klavasen: "Yesterday, my father had a discussion with some people in the tribe. This year, everyone must go to the north for hunting. Let's set out The day is not far away. I also went to the Huotra family's shipbuilding workshop to have a look, and you are very aware of the situation there. The two large ships are in urgent need of new masts, and the materials must be transported from the north!"
"So, you need me to make a batch of eye protection sunglasses with excellent performance before people go out?" Klavasen asked with a smile.
"Exactly! This is a request of mine."
"Oh, don't be like this. Your order is very important. I will complete it no matter what." Klavason slapped his chest again, as if he was determined to win.
"That's great. Making the frames requires carving wood, which is a bit of a delicate job. The winter hunt is scheduled for the twentieth of November, and I'm ordering at least a hundred pairs of sunglasses. Mark my words , is to order.”
"Really?" Klavasen fully understood Rurik's intention: "So the buyers are the people from Beishou? How do you decide to price it?"
"This...I thought about it, a pair of sunglasses costs twenty silver coins."
"Ah?" Klavasen was a little surprised, "Is it..."
"Did I set the price too high? I think it's already a huge favor. It's still the old rule, your family will get a corresponding proportion of the money, and the share I got will be put in the big money box of our Russian people. After all, mine The mission is to lead the people of Russia to become bigger and stronger, and what I care about is not the money, all the money will eventually be used for everyone."
"Oh, you are such a great person."
Rurik curled his lips: "This sounds a bit like a question."
"I can not."
"Then do it quickly. Soon I will go to Ironburg in person. Kawei, you will go with me. And you. Rurik pointed his little hand again: "Kamne, you will also go with me. We rush back before the Hanukkah sacrifice on the winter solstice, and we have to bring back a large amount of shipbuilding wood and a large amount of chromite! Let's make sunglasses, so people who own them will no longer have to squint during the long journey across the ice. "
