You need at least 12 steel pieces when you enter the village. Unfortunately, I had none, having deposited it all at the vault. So, I had remove a character (via the main menu), add a new one, grab his money, remove him, and re-add my original character.

I could have left the village and gone to the vault, but I suspect the NPC would have stayed behind and been lost forever.

There's always the random encounters in Turef itself - though you might really want to reload from before entering anyway ... random encounters in Turef suck.

Actually, Turef itself pretty much sucks anyway; you might as well leave once you have the +4 shield and the cloak of displacement, neither of which you need the money to acquire :)