It took Shef a moment to realize that the figure was a little boy, a young child. Yet he was hardly little. He stood about five feet high, no shorter than Udd the metalworker, and a good deal broader. He could have been a small man. Yet something in the earnest innocence of his stance suggested youth.
And he did not look like any man at all. His arms hung low, his head slanted forward on an impossibly thick neck. Small eyes peered out under heavy eyebrows. He was dressed in—nothing. No, he had on a rough kilt made of some kind of skin. But it almost vanished against his own pelt. The child was covered from head to foot in long gray hair.
His eyes were fixed unmoving on the piece of cheese Shef was in the act of lifting to his mouth. His nostrils flared suddenly as he smelt it, and thin drool began to run from the side of his mouth. Slowly Shef took the cheese from the biscuit he had laid it on and passed it wordlessly to the strange boy.
Who hesitated, not wanting to come closer. Finally he came forward two paces, in a kind of awkward shamble, stretched out a long gray arm, and snatched the cheese from Shef's hand. He sniffed it, the nostrils flaring again, and then took it into his mouth with one sudden snap. He chewed, eyes closing in a kind of rapture, thin lips pulled back over what seemed to be massive canine teeth. His feet shuffled in an incongruous, involuntary dance of glee.
Finns can't turn down cheese or milk or butter, so Brand had said. He did not think this creature was a Finn. But maybe it felt the same way about food. Still moving gently, Shef handed over the crock with the remains of Cuthred's milk in it. Again the careful exploration with the nostrils, the sudden decision and the instant draft. As he—or it—drank, it bent its knees oddly so as to tilt its body back. It could not throw its head back to drink like a proper person, Shef realized.
Finished, it dropped the crock. The noise as it shattered on the stone seemed to startle it, it looked down, looked across at Shef. Then, there was no doubt, it said something, and the something had all the tone of "I'm sorry." But Shef could understand not a syllable of what it said.
And then it was gone, whisking away down the path for a couple of paces, and then just gone, vanished, gray pelt merging with the gray stone. Shef scrambled to his feet and ran stiffly to the point where it had disappeared, but there was nothing to be seen. It had vanished like his own dream.
One of the Huldu-folk, Shef thought. You have seen one of the Hidden People, the people who live in the mountain. He remembered Brand's tales of the things that pulled people underwater, the long gray arms stretching out to seize boats. And the tales Cwicca and his gang told, of men caught in the mountains by female trolls and forced to serve them. They had been telling one only the other night: of a great wizard, a wise man, who had made it his task to free some island in the Northlands from the trolls and the Hidden People. He had gone all over the island, saying the words of power and driving the creatures out so they could harm men and women no more. In the end he had had himself lowered down the last cliff on the island to finish the job. But as they let out the rope from above, a voice had come from the cliff itself. "Manling," it had said, "you must leave some place for even the hidden folk to be." And with that a gray arm had come from the cliff and plucked the man from his hold and hurled him on to the rocks below. It didn't make sense, Shef had told them. Who could have heard the words but the man on the rope, the man hurled to his death a moment later? Suddenly the story seemed to make much better sense.
Cuthred was still nowhere to be seen. Shef opened his mouth to shout, closed it. Who could tell what might hear? He picked up a stone flake from the ground, scratched an arrow on the lichen-covered stone, pointing in the direction he was taking, inland. He left the provision box lying and began to sidle along the rocky narrow path as fast as he could.
It twisted on along the side of the inlet, but far above it, for perhaps half a mile, often narrowing to a bare foothold, never quite vanishing entirely. One of Brand's bird's-nesters would have followed it without hesitation. Karli the flatlander would have frozen with terror. Shef, a flatlander too, hobbled on carefully, sweating with fear and exertion, trying not to look down.
And then there was a clearing in front of him. In the dim half-light Shef looked round cautiously. A clearing? At least a flat place with a thin poor covering of grass and weeds in the everlasting stone. Why had they not seen the green from the sea? Because the whole place was hidden, in a dip in the ground between sea and mountain. On the other side of it, a chink of light. A fire? A cabin?
Stepping very cautiously forward, Shef realized it was indeed a cabin. Stone walled, turf roofed, set against the further hillside as if it had grown there. Even at fifty yards Shef could hardly be sure he was seeing it, though a dim glow came from some chink or other in its wall.
As he thought that, Shef realized that his left hand was actually resting on another wall, right by him. He had walked up to another building and still not seen it. Yet a building it was, and a big one, a lean-to of stone slabs running forty feet from the point where the path came out to what might be a door at the other end. He could smell something too. Smoke, and a faint flavor of food.
Hand on knife, and moving as gently as a fowler creeping up on a nest, Shef ghosted up to the door. Not a door, a leather curtain pegged across. He slipped the thongs off the pegs and eased inside.
For twenty heartbeats he was unable to see. Then his eye adjusted. Dim light was coming in from cracks in the wall, and from an opening in the roof, under which a low fire glowed. A carcass hung over it. It was a smokehouse, Shef saw. All along the far side stood rack after rack of split, smoked and dried fish. All along the near side, tubs of more fish, salted, fish and meat. In front of him, hanging from a peg, a seal carcass, with more in rows down the length of the building. He stretched a hand up to feel. The peg was of stone, the hook that supported the split seal of wood, not carved but bent and allowed to grow into the correct shape. Nothing he could see was of metal. Only wood, and stone.
The carcasses grew bigger as he walked fascinated down the row. Seal. A walrus, so large it stretched from roof to floor. And then a bear. Not the brown bear of the forests in the south, common in Norway, still to be found in the deep woods of England. No, a creature as much bigger than that as an orca was bigger than a porpoise, far bigger than Shef as it hung there flitched and jointed. White fur still showed on it here and there. It was a great white bear like the one that had furnished Brand's best robe, an animal that had cost three lives to bring down, or so Brand said.
He was almost at the smoke now, where the fire glowed and the light came in from the roof. What was this creature that the mighty hunter of the mountains had brought down? Not a seal, not a walrus, not a porpoise nor a bear. Shef realized that there, turning gently in the smoke, hanging from a peg, was a man. Halved, stripped, gutted and chined, like a pig, but still certainly a man. Others too, racked behind him, men and women as well, hanging like so many flitches of bacon, some by the throat, some by the feet. The women's breasts drooped on their naked flanks.
Shef saw that there were other things piled carelessly in a corner. Clothes, mostly, thrown there in disorder. Glint of metal here and there, silver and enamel work and iron too. Whatever had caught and killed these people cared nothing for booty. It had all been tossed aside like horns or hooves or anything inedible. Was there a weapon there?
Two pegs on the wall supported between them a dozen long-shafted spears. Shef picked one up, realized immediately it was worm-eaten and bent from lying for years in the heat. He rummaged through them as silently as he could.
Junk, all of them. Split shafts, bent heads, metal thick with rust. He had to find something. He had only his tiny beltknife against a creature that could kill walruses and polar bears.
There. There was one. At the bottom of the pile Shef glimpsed a shaft that seemed to be sound. He picked it up, hefted it, felt relief sweep over him at the thought he was now not completely defenseless.
Somehow, as he hefted it, the idea of using it to strike and kill repelled him. It was as if a voice was telling him:
"No. This is not the tool for such a purpose. It would be like trying to pick hot metal from the forge with a hammer, or beating out iron with the haft of your tongs."
Puzzled, Shef looked for a moment at what he held, his eye continually glancing in fear towards the entrance. A strange weapon. Not the sort anyone made nowadays. A leaf-shaped blade unlike the massive triangular head of Sigurth's 'Gungnir,' a long iron spike below it set into an ash shaft. Traces of ornamentation on it. Someone had even cut into the iron and then set gold into the tracery. Once there had been two gold crosses at the base of the blade. The gold was gone now, betrayed only by a fleck of color, but the chiseled crosses remained. A war weapon, from the iron spike, and a javelin from its weight. But who would put gold on a javelin which you hurled at your enemy?
Someone had valued it, at any rate. Some one of the carcasses now hanging in the smoke. Shef hefted the weapon uncertainly once more. It was madness not to take any weapon that would give him a chance of survival in this deadly place. Why had he already put it back, laying it gently once more across its pegs?
Alarmed suddenly by some faint stir of air behind him, Shef span round. Someone, or something, coming. He crouched, looking along the floor beneath the rows of human and animal bodies.
Someone was walking towards him. With a flush of relief Shef recognized the cross-tied breeches of Cuthred. He stepped out into plain sight, beckoned his companion over, pointed wordlessly to the hanging corpses.
Cuthred nodded. His sword was bare in one hand, his shield ready in the other.
"I told you," he whispered hoarsely. "Trolls. In the mountains. Peered at me through the windows of the hut. Rattled the door in the night to try to get in. They smelt meat. Thick bars they have on the doors in those mountain villages. Not that all of them need them."
"What do we do?"
"Get them before they get us. The cabin opposite, you saw it? Let's go. Have you no weapon?"
Shef shook his head mutely.
Cuthred stepped behind him, picked the spear he had just laid down from its pegs, held it out to him. "Here," he said, "take this. Go on," he urged, seeing Shef's reluctance, "it doesn't belong to anyone any more."
Shef stretched out a hand, hesitated, gripped the weapon firmly. In the warm, smoky dark there came a faint ringing sound, as if the metal head had struck stone. Shef felt a kind of relief again. Not relief from defenselessness, rather relief that the weapon had been handed to him. It had passed from its owner to the master of the smokehouse, and then to Cuthred, the man who was not a man. It was right for him to hold it now. Maybe not to keep it, maybe not to strike with it. But hold it, yes. For now.
The two men made their way out into the suddenly sweet-smelling air.
They moved across the small open space like two ghosts, treading carefully round the weeds to prevent the faintest brush or rattle. One mistake here, Shef thought, and they too would be hanging in the smoke. Had the little boy run ahead to warn his people? His father? He had seemed grateful rather than fearful or hostile. Shef did not want to have to kill him.
The door of the cabin, like that of the smokehouse, was covered with a pegged leather curtain, seemingly of horsehide. Should they try to lift it gently, or slash it down and charge through? Cuthred had no doubts. He waved Shef silently to hold the top of the curtain, then took his sword and applied its razor-sharp edge to each of the retaining loops in turn. The curtain hung loose, held only by Shef's hand. Cuthred nodded.
As Shef dropped the curtain, Cuthred whisked inside, sword poised. Then stood motionless. Shef moved in after him. The cabin was empty of life, but not bare. To their left stood what must be the main room, a rough table in the center with stools round it made of driftwood. The stools were of immense size. Shef would have had to climb up to sit on one. In the far corner a black entrance seemed to lead into the rock. The whole scene was lit by a wick burning in a stone bowl of oil.
Perhaps the inhabitants were all asleep. It was midnight, certainly, even though the sky remained light. But Shef had noted that in midsummer the Norse-folk lost most sense of time, sleeping when they needed to, and sleeping very little, as if they saved that up for the appalling winters. The Huldu-folk could be the same.
To their right, though, that must be the sleeping-chamber, reached through another narrow opening. Shef braced himself for what might have to be a killing thrust, and slid through the doorway, javelin poised. Two beds, yes, like shelves in the rock, to conserve warmth, heaped with skins and furs. Shef moved closer to check that the furs were all animal furs, not the gray pelt of a troll. No, nothing there.
As he turned to sign to Cuthred a great crash sent his heart into his mouth. He sprang forward to see what had happened. In the middle of the other room, by the overturned table, Cuthred was grappling savagely with a troll.
A female troll. She too wore a kind of kilt round her waist, but breasts swelled beneath her gray pelt, long hair hung down her back like a horse's mane. She had hidden inside the larder in the rock, leapt out as Cuthred closed on it. With one hand she grasped the spike on his round targe, with the other the wrist of his sword-hand. The two swayed backwards and forwards, Cuthred trying to free a weapon, she trying to wrest them away. Her teeth flashed in a sudden snap at Cuthred's face.
Shef gaped, amazed for a moment at the woman's strength. Cuthred was putting out every ounce of effort that he had, grunting furiously as he heaved at her, the immense muscles straining in his arms. Twice he had her off the ground, lifting her two hundred pounds easily, but she clung on.
Then suddenly she was moving forward, Cuthred pushed back, and as she gained momentum she thrust a heel behind his ankle and tripped him. The two went over together, the troll on top, and Cuthred's sword and shield went sprawling. An instant later and she had whipped a stone knife from her belt, was driving it at Cuthred's throat. Cuthred caught her wrist with one hand, and again they were frozen in a desperate test of strength.
The javelin was a hindrance in the narrow doorway. As Shef stepped sideways to try to angle through the door of the sleeping chamber, the dim light from outside was blocked. The master of the house, the hunter of the mountains, had returned. He stepped soundlessly through the outer door like a moving slab of rock, turned towards the struggle.
Even stooping, his skull brushed the ceiling. His arms hung almost to the floor. His shoulders were round and sloping, not square like a man's, but even so the space between his shoulder-blades was wide enough to fit a sword-blade lengthwise. His back was turned to Shef, whom he had not noticed, his attention fixed on Cuthred and the female.
Shef poised the spear. He had one chance for a completely unprotected strike, at spine or kidneys or angling up under the ribs for the heart. Not even a giant could survive that. In front of him, he knew, was the man-eater.
As he poised for the strike, a sense filled Shef suddenly of the utter dreariness of the place. He had felt it before, sitting on the ledge of the mountain path, a sense of colorlessness, harshness, hostility. Then in the passing vision he had seen and felt the world begging for a rescue, for a release, and the sun-face granting it; granting what had not been granted to Hermoth, or to Balder. The iron lance-shaft by his cheek seemed to exude both warmth, and a kind of weariness, an urge to desist from slaughter. The world had seen too much of it. Time for a pause, a change.
The female troll squatting on Cuthred's chest suddenly shot head-first across the room and crashed into the legs of the male, sending him staggering backwards almost on to Shef's spear-point. Cuthred had forced her back so that all her strength was pushing forwards, then dropped his hands, seized her ankles and hurled her clean over his head. He twisted and came to his feet, sword once again in hand, confronting the male troll with a grin of reckless fury. A snarl like a bear's came from the male troll as he thrust the female out of the way.
Shef slammed his spear-butt on to the stone floor and shouted at the top of his voice, "Stop!"
Both trolls jumped round to face him, eyes swiveling between the threat in front and the threat to their rear. Shef shouted again, this time to Cuthred gliding forward, "Stop!"
At the same moment the small male troll he had seen on the path ran through the outer door, clutched the large male round the legs and pattered out a long stream of syllables. Shef stepped through the narrow doorway of the sleeping-chamber, spread his arms wide and carefully propped his spear in a corner. He waved imperiously at Cuthred, who hesitated, doubtfully lowered his sword.
What of the trolls? Shef looked at them in the light of the lamp, looked again, looked a third time at the great male, standing staring down at him with a puzzled expression. A familiar puzzled expression. Gray pelt, round skull, strange undershot jaw and massive teeth. But something—something in the eyebrows, the cheekbones, the square set of head on pillared neck. Gently, Shef walked forward, took the male's enormous hand, turned it over in his own. Yes. Huge fingers, a fist that if doubled would be the size of a quart-pot.
"You look like someone I know," said Shef, almost to himself.
To his surprise the troll grinned broadly, showing huge canines, and replied in halting but recognizable Norse.
"I think you meet my good cousin Brand."
According to Echegorgun—much of the substance of what he had to say was passed on in the end to Shef by Cuthred over many days and many campfires—the Hidden People had once lived much further to the south, in Norway and in other countries below what Echegorgun called the Shallow Sea, the Baltic. But as time went by and the climate changed they had followed the ice north, harried all the way and all the time by the Chinned Ones, the Thin People, the Beaters of Iron—Echegorgun had many names for them. Humans were not, of course, formidable—Echegorgun laughed at the very thought that they might be, making a strange harsh noise deep in his throat. But there were a lot of them. They breed as fast as the seals, he said, or as fast as the salmon spawn. And in groups they were dangerous, more so as they acquired metal. It seemed that the memories of the Hidden People went back to the days before humans had metal, when all the Walking Creatures, humans and Hidden Ones, had only stone. But once the humans had metal, first bronze—Echegorgun called it the brown iron—and then true iron, gray iron itself, the old equality between the species, if species they were, began to break down. Echegorgun would not admit or concede it, but Shef thought sometimes that the fast-breeding which Echegorgun so much despised and thought less than fully sapient, had something to do with the metal. Beating iron out of ore does not come naturally, is the result of learning based on trial and error based on initial lucky accident. Short-lived creatures with little to lose and strong reasons for wanting to distinguish themselves among their too-many competitors, they would be much more likely to waste time on mere experimentation than the longer-lived, slow-maturing, slow-breeding True Folk (as they called themselves).
Whether that were true or not, over the centuries the True Folk had become the Hidden People, keeping to the inaccessible mountains, developing the skills of hiding themselves away. It was not so difficult, Echegorgun said. There were more True Folk around than most of the Thin Ones realized. They did not inhabit the same ranges, or even the same times. The Norse in Halogaland, Echegorgun said, being specific, were almost entirely coastal. They went up and down the sea road, the North Way from which the country got its name, they built their huts in the fjords, they pastured their animals in the bits of summer grazing they could reach. Rarely did one find any of them more than a few miles inland. Especially as those who did penetrate inland, exploring or hunting, were not at all likely to return.
The Finns were more of a nuisance, for they roamed widely with their reindeer herds, their sledges and bows and traps. Yet their roaming was mostly in the summer and in the day. In the winter they kept to their tents and their cabins and their regular trap rounds, all easy to avoid. The snow and the ice, the dark and the high places, Echegorgun said, they belong to us. We are the People of the Dark.
And what about the dead men you hang in your smokehouse, Shef asked him on the afternoon of their first meeting. Echegorgun took the question seriously. It was the seal-skerries that caused the trouble, he said. The Thin Ones had to be kept off them, or at least off those of them he regarded as his own. Shef slowly realized that Echegorgun, like the rest of his people, was as near amphibious as a polar bear, which are often found swimming contentedly well out of sight of land. His pelt kept the cold out, and was as waterproof as a seal's. Any of the adults would think little of swimming a couple of miles in the freezing water to a skerry, there to club seals or harpoon walruses. Sea-mammals were a great part of their diet. They did not like the Thin Ones to go there, and discouraged them by ambush. The stories about gray arms turning boats over were true. As for smoking and eating their prey—Echegorgun shrugged. He could see no harm in eating your kill. The Thin Ones might not eat the Hidden People, but they would kill them for any reason or for none, not because the Hidden People ate their food. So which was worse?
In any case, there was no real need for ambushes and killings, if everyone kept to their side of known lines. Trouble might arise in times of famine. If the grain crop failed—Echegorgun thought it was bound to fail three years in ten—then the Thin Ones started to come out and hunt the skerries in desperation. Don't eat grain, that was the answer, don't breed so fast you have to rely on chancy foods. But real northerners, the real northerners among the humans, Echegorgun said, emphasizing this distinction, they did not let things get so far. They knew their place, and they knew his. The humans he killed, they were always visitors who did not respect the slowly-evolved boundaries.
"Like the man who left this?" said Shef, holding up the spear he had taken.
Echegorgun took it, felt it, snuffed at the metal in a considering way with his great flaring nostrils. "Yes," he said. "I remember him. A jarl of the Tronds, from Trondhjem. Foolish people. Always want to take over the Finn-tax and the Finn-trade, take it from Brand and his family. He came up here in a longship. I followed it till they camped on an island, he and two others went to hunt birds' eggs. After he had gone—he and some more—the rest lost heart and went home."
"How did you know he was a jarl?" asked Shef.
"The Huldu-folk know a lot. They are told some things. They see many more, in the dark, in the quiet."
Echegorgun would say no more at that point, but Shef was confident that he and Brand's family had ways of getting in touch with each other—sign left on a skerry maybe, rocks left a certain way till there was need of communication, and then altered to bring out an envoy. The Hidden Folk might have been an advantage to the Halogalanders, in getting rid of unwanted rivals from the south. Brand and his family in return kept pressure off certain fixed areas.
And besides, there was family feeling. Echegorgun smiled salaciously when Shef hinted at it. Years before, he said, the father of Brand's father Barn, a man named Bjarni, had been stranded on a skerry by a shipwreck. He had had food with him, good food, milk and whey, and had set it out as bait for the Hidden People. A girl of that race had seen it, taken the bait. He had not caught her, no, how could a Thin One catch even a girl of the True Folk? But he had shown her what he had got for her, and she had been enticed. You Thin Ones are thick in one place, Echegorgun said, his eyes rolling to Cuthred sitting close to the female he had wrestled.
Echegorgun went on to say that the girl, his own aunt, had kept the baby men called Barn till it was evident that it would be smooth-skinned, or too smooth-skinned to live like the True Folk. Then she had left it by its father's door. But first Bjarni, and then Barn, and then Brand, had remained conscious of their kinship at need.
Shef heard little of what was said then, for he had begun to worry about Cuthred. Thin Ones might be thick in one place, but Cuthred had no place at all. He had been behaving well up in the north, yet one thing Shef was sure of: any reminder of his mutilation, any sexual display by a male or provocation by a female, and Cuthred would revert to the berserker. And yet it was strange. He was sitting talking to the female Miltastaray, daughter of Echegorgun and sister of the little boy Ekwetargun, as if she were Martha or one of the least-challenging of the slave-women. Perhaps it was because he had overpowered her. Perhaps it was because she was female, but so different that there was no need or expectation of flirtatiousness between them. Either way, Cuthred seemed secure and safe, for the moment.
Shef turned his attention back to Echegorgun's story. By this time the five creatures—men and a woman? people? humans and not-humans?—had left the hut and were sitting out under a risen sun in the flat patch between hut and smokehouse. From where they were they could see a calm gray metallic sea, with islands rising from it, but were sheltered from closer observation. The Hidden Folk had a keen sense of "dead ground," Shef was to note. They kept always out of direct lines of sight, whatever else they seemed to be doing.
"So you see much, and are told more?" he said. "What do you know about me? About us?"
"About him," Echegorgun pointed with his underslung chin to Cuthred, "much. He was a thrall in the mountains south of here. Some of our people tried to get him out. Maybe they would have eaten him, maybe not. You people are hard on your own kind. I know what they did to him. It would not mean so much to us. We think of other things than mating.
"About you." Shef found deep brown eyes fixed on him. "There is no news of you. But people are following you."
Shef laughed. "That is no news to me."
"Other things are following you too. The killer whales that attacked you—sometimes they do that, I know, if they feel like sport or if something annoys them. But I have seen that school of them going up and down, and they are not from near here. They have come up from the south, like you. Maybe after you.
"Still, if you know people are following you, I need not tell you the rest."
Echegorgun stretched his enormous arms, over nine feet from finger-tip to finger-tip, with an air of complete indifference.
"What rest? Are other people following me now?"
"There is a ship hidden in the Vitazgjafi fjord half a day's swim south of Brand's farmsteads on Hrafnsey. I would have warned him but he is away with the grind—the grind, you understand, is within his rights. He was careful not to drive them ashore here or near here. But anyway, he is away, and the ship is down there waiting. A big ship. It has two... two sticks. Those things you put cloths on. A big fair-haired woman shouts orders at the menfolk." Echegorgun laughed. "She needs a winter with me to calm her."
Shef considered furiously. The woman was Ragnhild, the ship the one that had tried to sink them in the Gula-fjord. "What do you think they mean to do?"
Echegorgun looked at the sun. "If they did not attack last sunset, they will attack this one. The two ships Brand has will not be ready to fight. He will have taken them up to the grind-beach and loaded them up with oil and meat. The strangers will catch everyone else asleep or tired. The grind makes much work."
"Will you not warn them?"
Echegorgun looked surprised, as far as his flat hair-covered face would show it. "I would warn my cousin Brand. For the rest—the more Thin Ones kill each other, the better. I know you spared me when you could have struck me with the spear, so now I spare you, for True Folk keep their bargains, even if they have not been said. You fed my boy, my Ekwetargun as well. But I would be wiser to twist your head off your shoulders and hang you with the others."
Shef ignored the threat. "I can tell you one thing you do not know," he said. "I am a man who has authority. I am a king in my own land. Some say I am a sort of a king even here. And I speak for many people. Here is one sign of my authority." He showed the Rig-token, the kraki, round his neck, and pointed to the one he had made for Cuthred. "It may be I could do something for you. For you and your kind. Make the men stop hunting you. Let you live in a place less stony. But you would have to do something for me. Help me defeat those men from the south, and the woman with them, and their ship."
"Well, I could do that," said Echegorgun carefully. He rose to a strange squatting position, gripping his bare feet in his enormous hands.
"How? Would you warn Brand? Would you—fight on our side? You would be a mighty warrior if we gave you iron to use."
Echegorgun shook his massive head. "I will do neither of those. But I could speak to the whales for you. They are worked up already. If they thought I had killed you, they might feel like listening to me. And these are stranger whales, of course. If they were my own folk I would not deceive them."
Bruno, Hauptritter of the Lanzenorden, stood in front of a double rank of his armored knights, pikes sloped, standing immobile at attention as he had made their custom. All were looking at the ceremony taking place a hundred yards in front of them. They could have got a better view by marching closer, but one could not be sure how the natives would take interference in their sacred custom. Bruno had no objection to interfering with the barbaric customs of the natives, but this was not the time.
A roar came from the thousand throats of the men clustered at the center of the doom-ring of the Gautish peoples, a roar and a clashing of weapons on shields.
"What's that mean?" muttered a voice from the rear rank. "They've made a decision?"
"Silence in the ranks," said Bruno, though without heat. The Lanzenorden believed strongly in the theoretical equality of all its members, without the savage discipline that had to be imposed on armies of peasants. "Yes, look, they have a king. Habeunt regem," he added, parodying the formula for the election of a Pope.
A figure rose, swaying wildly, from the throng in front of them. A man lifted on a shield by a dozen eager supporters. Once he caught his balance, he looked round, drew his sword, shouted out his name and the traditional formula of proclamation. "I am the king of the Gauts. Who denies it?"
A moment's silence, then the clashing of weapons again. A week before, and a dozen chieftains would have denied it. Fighting it out hand to hand would have deprived the Gautish peoples of most of their ruling class, the rich and the god-born together. So for days the meeting, the Gautalagathing, the Thing of those bound by the Law of the Gauts, had been abuzz with messengers, rumors, offers of support and retractions, deals and promises. Now it was all settled. Till the next shift of power.
The crowd began to disperse towards the smell of roasted oxen and the great vats of beer which the new king would provide as part of the price of his election. The German Ritters watched them with a certain envy, a certain scorn. Bruno decided to hold them in their ranks a little longer, to make certain no-one went down to the party, got into a fight.
Another figure was coming towards them, the scrawny black-clad Englishman, Erkenbert. As he came closer Bruno saw a slight flush of excitement on his pale face, and felt his own heart thud in anticipation. The Englishman was holding one of his everlasting lists.
"Do you think you've found it?" said Bruno as soon as the other was in earshot.
"Yes. Down at the tents I found an old man. Too old to attend the election, but not so old that he had lost his memory. He was at the raid on Hamburg. More than that, he was among the men who sacked the cathedral. He remembers closely who was there—especially closely, for he feels still that he was cheated of some share of the loot. He gave me a complete list of the chieftains present, seven of them who led more than a dozen ships' crews, he says. Now, and this is the important thing. Six of those chieftains we have news of already, and we know they do not fit."
"So it must be the seventh?"
"So it would seem. His name is Bolli. He is jarl of the Tronds."
"And who in Hell are the Tronds? I've been in this God-forsaken country half a year, I've heard of more tribelets and kinglets than my father has pigs in sties, and I never heard of the Tronds."
"They live far in the north," said Erkenbert. "Far up the North Way, where they seek to control the fur-trade."
"Far in the north they may be," muttered Bruno, "but if there were a new king there, an emperor-in-being, we would still have heard about it. I begin to wonder if our method is wrong. Or could even the holy Rimbert have made some mistake? Perhaps there is no Holy Lance."
"Or perhaps it is lying in a treasury, unnoticed."
Bruno's face took on an expression quite unfamiliar to Erkenbert, one of depression and defeat. "I can't help thinking," he said, "you tell me the Lance is in Norway. We hear also that the great struggle for power in the North is going to take place where we left in the spring, at Hedeby in Denmark, everyone is full of it. And here we are, running round provincial gatherings in Sweden."
"Gautland," corrected Erkenbert.
"Same place. I have gone in the wrong direction."
Erkenbert reached up and patted the disconsolate knight on his enormous shoulder. "Whom God loves, he chastises," he said. "Think of King David in the wilderness. Think of Samson at the mill, and how in the end he brought down the great temple of the Philistines. God can bring forth a miracle at any time. Did He not deliver Joseph from Potiphar, and Daniel from the lions' den? I will tell you the holy text you must remember: Qui perseravabit usque ad finem, ille salvabitur. He who shall persevere to the end, he shall be saved. To the end, though. Not to near the end."
Bruno's face slowly cleared. He wrung Erkenbert's hand in a careful grip. "Thank you," he said. "Thank you. Wise words. We shall find out more about these Tronds. And meanwhile, I shall hope that God has some errand for me in sending me to these parts."
Hrorik, King in Hedeby, gnawed his beard as he listened to the reports of his scouts. "Definitely the Ragnarssons?" he queried.
"Definitely. We got close enough to see the Raven Banner."
"Flown only when all the bastards are together. Well, at least there's one bastard fewer of them now. And him the worst bastard of them all. A hundred and twenty ships, you say, and harbored on the mainland opposite Sylt?" Hrorik calculated thoughtfully. "Well, the Ragnarssons are always bad news, but that could be worse. They have to get through the marsh first, and then they have to get over our good wooden walls. I know all about their rams and the tricks they learned from their father. I think we ought to be able to see them off."
One of the scouts cleared his throat. "More bad news, lord, I'm afraid. Catapults. We saw them unloading them. Big jobs, weighing a ton, I would say. Three or four of them."
Hrorik's face regained its concerned expression. "Catapults! What sort were they? Were they the stone-throwers we've heard about, or the dart-throwers, or what?"
"We don't know. Never seen one work. We've just heard these stories, same as you. They all come from men who've been defeated by them."
"Thor help us. This is where we need some men who know about these things."
Hrorik's port-warden, sitting in on the conference, broke in. "I can help you there, lord. I got a report from a skipper yesterday. He was up at the Gula Thing. He said there had been a lot of excitement up there—I'll tell you another time. But at the end of it he said that one of our ships had recruited two Englishmen and was bringing them south. Englishmen," he added with emphasis. "Those are the real experts. These are guys who were there when Ivar got his, and the Frankish king too. Ship should be in in a couple of days."
"So. While Sigurth Snake-arse crawls through the marsh, we can have these men building machines to fight his machines. That's good. But let's do the obvious things too. If the Ragnarssons are there on the west coast, the east coast's clear. So let's get ships out to King Arnodd, and King Gamli, and ask them to send every ship and man they can spare. Clean out the Ragnarssons, and we'll all sleep easier."
"Clean out the Ragnarssons," said the port-warden, "and maybe it'll be time to have just one king in Denmark."
"Just don't say that anywhere else," agreed Hrorik.
Many days' sail to the north, far from the gathering war-storms that would determine the fate of many kingdoms, Shef and Cuthred crouched immobile in the shadow of a rock. Twice they had got into what they thought was good cover. Both times Echegorgun had moved them out, muttering in his own strange language. "You Thin Ones," he said finally. "You don't know how to hide. Or how to look. I could walk through one of your towns in broad daylight and you would never see me." Shef did not believe him, but he had to acknowledge the uncanny skill of the Hidden People in vanishing, in the day, at night, or in the pale twilight that had come again after another long day of sleep and waiting.
In front of them, Echegorgun stood knee deep in the water at the edge of the inlet. He had led them down to it by barely manageable paths, the men slipping and scrambling on the rock, propped up by Echegorgun or Miltastaray, sometimes lowered from one place to the next. Finally, once they were concealed to his satisfaction, Echegorgun had told them to sit motionless, and watch. Watch what a True Person could do. They would see something no Hairless One had seen for many a lifetime. How the True Folk called their kinfolk, the whales.
Now Echegorgun stood facing out to the open sea. High above, Miltastaray kept watch for any boats that might appear, ferrying men or meat between the place of the grind and Brand's threatened home on Hrafnsey.
In one hand Echegorgun held a long paddle, its blade curiously rounded, cut laboriously with stone tools from the trunk of a mountain-aspen. Strange curlicues ran around its inside face. Echegorgun held it up, high above his head, the grotesque length of his arm suddenly clear. Then he brought it down with all his strength on the calm water. The sound of the slap seemed to run from horizon to horizon, as the ripples ran out into the Atlantic swell. Again Echegorgun brought it down. And again. The two men crouched, wondering how far the sound would run above water. And how far below it.
After a dozen blows, Echegorgun turned and put the paddle carefully on a rock on the steep shore. He took another implement, a long tapering tube, made out of layers of coiled and glued birch-bark, and took another cautious step further out, waist-deep now, standing on some unseen projection. He put the thinner end of the tube in his mouth, the trumpet end deep in the water.
From where they crouched, and even in the dim light, Shef could see the prodigious back widening as Echegorgun took a deep breath, a deep breath like the indraft of a bellows. Then he blew.
No sound reached the men on the shore, but after a few moments the air seemed to buzz, to vibrate noiselessly. Was the surface of the sea shivering in sympathy? Shef could not tell, though he strained his one eye to see. He had no doubt that beneath the water some immense disturbance was taking place.
The blowing went on and on, Echegorgun breathing in continually and somehow blasting out at the same time. Shef was not sure, but he felt dimly that the "notes" Echegorgun was playing altered now and then, according to some unknown code. He remained motionless, feeling the chill of the high latitudes creeping up on him, feeling his muscles stiffen, the cold stone strike through his breeches. He did not dare to move. Echegorgun had said that at any disturbance he would break off. "Just one pebble rolling," he had warned. "If the whale-folk were to think I was playing with them, even foreign whale-folk... I could never swim safely again."
Beside him Cuthred too sat like a rock image. But then, barely perceptibly even from two feet, his eyes moved, his chin rose a trifle, pointing. Between the shore and the skerries, a fin rose. The straight-up, right-angle fin of the killer-whale, the orca. It was coming towards them, not quickly, deliberately. From time to time the head too rose, and a spout went up, white against the gray islands. The orca was taking a good look. Behind it, well behind it, the rest of the school followed.
Slowly the fin came closer. As it closed, Echegorgun's breathing seemed to slacken, as if he were cutting down the underwater noise. He seemed to be blowing with a shorter, more varied rhythm. Finally the fin closed right up, the orca swimming along parallel with the shore, turning, cruising slowly back. Every time it turned it kept its eye on the strange gray creature standing waist-deep in the water. Shef felt his skin contracting at the thought of what might happen. A lunge of the jaws, a sweep of the tail, and Echegorgun would be off his feet and off the rock. Even his mighty frame would be no more than a bull-seal to the killer. Nothing was safe with them in the water, not the tusked walrus, nor the polar bear, not even the great whales which they tore to pieces while they were still alive.
Echegorgun put his tube carefully down on the rock behind him. Then, slowly, he sank down, submerging shoulders and head in the water, and began to swim out. The killer watched, giving him room. The men on shore could see little, only what showed above water. Yet it began to seem, after a while, as if Echegorgun was acting out some kind of pantomime. Sometimes he seemed to mimic a whale's motion, sometimes a man swimming. Once it seemed to Shef as if he kicked his heels above the water, and rolled over violently: a boat turned upside down? The killer's movements began to synchronize with his own, they swam up and down together, both moving at a fantastic speed for a human, a bare stroll for a whale.
And then the fin swung away, a great tail slapped the water twice, as if in farewell. The other fins cruising up and down offshore swung too, in unison. All together the school began to race down the sound at top speed, the whales arcing in and out of the water in a complex ballet, as if in exultation. They raced away to the south, towards Hrafnsey.
Echegorgun remained in the water till they were out of sight, cruising up and down with an easy overarm stroke, only skull and arms showing, with a faint flurry where his heels touched the surface. At a distance, just another seal. Finally he turned, swam into shore, heaved himself out, shook himself easily like a dog.
"Well," he said in Norse. "Come out now, Thin Ones. I told them the one who wounded their leader was dead. They asked, and the one they followed? Dead too, I said. They were disappointed. It was easy to tell them there were more whale-foes in the ship. The great ship going into Hrafnsey now. They said they would find sport with it."
"Going into Hrafnsey now?" said Shef. "How are we to get there?"
"There is a way," said Echegorgun. "No Thin One would find it, but I can show you. One thing I had better tell you, though. The whale-folk are not good at telling Thin Ones apart. Nor do they care much. Anyone on the water is at risk tonight."
"Show us how to get across," said Shef. "I swear to repay you for all this. Even if I have to become king of this land to do it."
The men of the two-masted ship moving under light sail towards Hrafnsey harbor had had a long voyage up the Norwegian coast in which to get used to their unfamiliar weapons and sail-rig. For the most part they were men of Agdir, Queen Ragnhild's homeland. In the turmoil following the sudden death of Halvdan and the seizure of power by Olaf, one of the skippers of King Halvdan's fleet had decided his best interests lay with Ragnhild, and had placed his ship at her service. Most of his crew had not stayed with him, but had deserted, their places taken by Ragnhild's own men. With them had come Valgrim the Wise, defeated in his plan to control the College of the Way, and eager to take revenge on the one who had thwarted him. Not only him—but also to set the Way and his misguided colleagues back on the true path of Othin, the path that would lead to victory, not defeat, at Ragnarök. He and his backers had built the catapults and trained their users. They were eager, too, to redeem their failure in the Gula Fjord.
Yet the driving force behind them all, skipper, crew and Valgrim as well, was the hatred of Queen Ragnhild for the man who had killed her son, or caused him to be killed. The man who had stolen the luck to which she had pledged her life. Ragnhild had seen her mother-in-law Queen Asa go to the gallows without blinking, had poisoned her husband King Halvdan without a tremor. One day, maybe, she would breed a new race of kings from her own loins. But before that the beggar-Englishman she had seduced, hidden, and thought to use to clear the path for her son: he must go to Hel to serve her son and her for all eternity.
As the great warship closed on Hrafnsey, its goal, its crew had ceased to follow the coastline and had moved offshore, into the Atlantic rollers but out of sight of land, coming in again only a few miles from where they reckoned their quarry to be. There they had lain upon a deserted inlet, one of the thousands on that jagged coast, seen by no-one. Or at least, no human.
Yet they had not lacked for close information. After the butchery was over at the grind, the real work had started for the men of Halogaland. Vital to cut the carcasses up and salt as much meat as possible. Even more vital to rig the cauldrons on the beach itself, strip off the blubber, start the long job of rendering down the whale-oil, immensely valuable for lamps, for fuel and even for food through the long winter nights. Firing the cauldrons was not a problem. Once the oil had been cooked out of the blubber, the strips that were left became fuel for the next rendering. But every barrel the Halogaland coast possessed would hardly be enough for the sudden windfall of wealth that the grind brought. Boats were passing up and down in all directions, loading up barrels, towing strings of them, sending messages for urgent assistance. One whale-boat with two men in it passed by the fjord where Ragnhild's warship lay, to be snapped up immediately by its pinnace.
The Norsemen, mostly and with exceptions like Ivar the Boneless and his father Ragnar, were not torturers of each other, whatever they might do to slaves. Ragnhild had taken them on board and told them plainly that they had two choices: to be beheaded at once over the side of the ship, or to tell her the situation at Hrafnsey. The fishermen had decided to talk. Ragnhild knew the outline of the harbor, including its catapult defenses and its two longships. She knew, too, that half the men of the area were still boiling blubber at the grind-beach, and the rest were exhausted from hours of loading and unloading, making trip after trip between beach and harbor. What she did not know was that Shef and Cuthred were missing. Her prisoners had simply not noticed, preoccupied with other things.
What they had noticed and told her was that Brand, desperate for men, had taken the English catapulteers from their posts, and Guthmund's Swedes as well, and set them to work on the jetty, since they were all manifestly useless at anything to do with whales. Listening with half an ear to Cwicca and Osmod's protests, and their demands that something should be done to search for their master Shef, Brand had sent a sentry up to the harbor-point, with instructions to sound a horn for help if he saw any strange craft approaching. The sentry had sat down on the soft turf with his back against a stone and immediately fallen asleep.
Ragnhild's ship, the Crane, moved into Hrafnsey harbor a few moments before sunrise lit the pallid sky, meeting no challenge, its oversized crew of a hundred and twenty men ready for action. They nudged each other as they saw the bulks of the catapults against the sky, unmanned and untended. Brand, down at the jetty supervising the unloading of another cargo of barrels from his own Walrus, saw nothing till the first catapult-stone whirred across the water.
It was aimed with deadly skill. The men of the Crane had had time to practice, and no shortage of good round rocks to practice with. Coming from a bare two hundred yards, the distance between jetty and harbor-point, it struck the Walrus full on the prow. The prow kicked back, the planks that fitted into it all sprang loose. If the ship had been running under sail she would have gone to the bottom like a stone. As it was, she merely sprang apart and settled gently on to the rock ten feet beneath her keel, mast still jutting upwards.
Brand stared, gaping, unable to realize what had happened. The second stone shattered the jetty a few feet from him, sending half a dozen men into the water. At the same moment, light flared on the dark decks of the Crane. The dart-shooter's crew, anxious to try their fire-arrows once more. As they sighted, Ragnhild stepped behind them.
"There," she snapped. "There. Aim for that big barrel. Surely you can hit that this time."
The crew trained their weapon round a trifle, sighted again, released the retaining toggle. The fire-dart shot across the water, its flight indicated by a line of fire. Slammed into the barrel of whale-oil just unloaded from the ruined Walrus. Instantly a tongue of flame shot into the sky, burning with a pure and brilliant light. The men on the shore stood out immediately as dark shadows, shrieking and running in confusion, some to put the fire out, some to fetch their weapons, the English catapulteers beginning the long run round the harbor and the point behind it to reach their abandoned weapons.
Ragnhild's skipper, observing, grinned with satisfaction. His name was Kormak, son of an Irishwoman, with long experience in the never-ending Irish wars. He knew when his enemy had lost the initiative.
"Close up to the jetty," he ordered. "You with the stone-thrower, sink that other big ship there, the Swedish one. Dart-thrower, set light to the barrels and then the houses. Boatswain, pick twenty men, furl sail, and take the ship back out a hundred yards under oars once the rest of us are ashore. I don't want anyone trying to take the Crane while we're busy. The rest of you, we'll land on the jetty and go straight through the village."
"And remember," shouted Ragnhild over him, "the one-eyed man. Six gold arm-rings for the one-eyed man."
Beside her, Valgrim hefted the 'Gungnir' spear he had taken from Stein, and Stein from the shore where Shef had thrown it. A good weapon, he thought. To drink the blood of a heretic.
Not far away, but too far, Shef saw the flame suddenly light up the sky. He stood on the shore of the mainland a bare quarter of a mile from the edge of Hrafnsey island. But he had no boat. He would not have believed that they could even get so close so quickly. But Echegorgun, Miltastaray and Ekwetargun with him, had led them inland over paths not even a goat could find, and then over a surprisingly easy ridge-route to the coast close by where they stood. Though they had rowed for hours two days before, they must have walked only five miles, cutting across the base of a peninsula.
"How do we get across?" he asked.
"Swim?" suggested Echegorgun.
Shef hesitated. A quarter of a mile was not so far. But this water, he knew, was always bitter cold. And besides—he could not forget the threat of the whales.
Cuthred nudged him and pointed. Lit up now by the red glow in the sky, they could see the black dot of a whale-boat, with more behind it, pulling frantically down from the grind-beach. Men carrying a load down, or coming back for water.
"More Thin Ones," said Echegorgun. "We go now. Do not speak of us except to my cousin Brand. If you go on the water in a boat, you will speak to no-one again."
"Wait!" said Shef sharply. "Can you tell where the whales are?"
Echegorgun nodded. "Hear them in the water. I know already. They are outside the harbor, watch the strange ship. Unhappy. They want small boats to tip over, not big ship to ram. Don't go in boats."
"Can you tell us if they go into the harbor? If it's safe for a few minutes just to row across?"
Echegorgun sniffed doubtfully. "You hear a noise like a walrus sounding, you row across. Make it quick." An instant later he had vanished, his great bulk disappearing seemingly into a rock.
"Noise like a walrus sounding?" muttered Cuthred. "Might as well be an angel belching for all the good..."
Shef ignored him. He had stepped on to the highest point he could reach, waving the lance he had recovered in wide sweeps over his head. Moments later the leading whale-boat saw him, hesitated, pulled over.
"Stop the other boats," said Shef. "No, do as I say. I know the place is under attack. We have to go in together, not a few at a time."
Slowly the dories gathered, nine or ten of them, maybe forty or fifty men, fierce and skilled seamen, but unarmored and unarmed except for the long whale-lances some of them carried, their flensing-axes and grind-knives.
"You're going to have to listen very carefully to what I say," said Shef. "First, there is a school of killer whales out by the harbor, and we don't want to row into them. Second, we will know when they have gone into the harbor..."
As a buzz of incredulity greeted his words, he thumped his lance-butt on the rock and raised his voice commandingly over it.
Kormak was doing to the men of Hrafnsey much as they had done to the whales. Deliberately, he kept up the pressure to make them panic, though he knew their form of panic would be a headlong assault. As the Crane moved up to the jetty, stones whirred from her mule, each one smashing a house. Fire-arrows thumped into wood and oil, turning the whole settlement into a conflagration. Few were killed, few were hurt, the fighting strength of the defenders was hardly diminished. But they had no time to think. Besides, as Brand saw his beloved Walrus a wreck, saw his winter store and his warehouses going up in flames, his heart swelled till it seemed to burst his jerkin. No time to fetch his mail, no time to array the men. Between the flames he stood, his face working, clutching his axe 'Battle-troll' and waiting for the despoilers to set foot on land.
As the side of the Crane touched the jetty, the men Kormak had detailed off sprang ashore, forming an immediate armored front six wide. At the same time Kormak bent, said a quiet word to his boatswain. Two men slipped ashore, walking along the jetty's side struts, one each side. At the right place they heaved a rope across, made fast.
Kormak pushed forward to the center of the front rank, stepped on two more paces, arranged the men in the Viking wedge. Then they began to move forward, shouting in unison. Kormak waited for the furious charge he expected.
It came. Seeing the confident figure striding towards him, Brand, the doubts and fears that had afflicted him since the duel with Ivar entirely wiped out by fury and loss, ran forward, axe raised. Behind him, in a ragged wave, came the men of Hrafnsey with what weapons they could snatch up.
"A big fellow," remarked Kormak to his nearest shield-companions. He raised his shield to guard and shouted a taunt, unheard in the roar of flame.
As Brand charged forward, the boatswain, crouched in shadow, raised the rope. Brand's feet went from under him and he hurtled sprawling forward, full-length, his weight shaking the jetty. 'Battle-troll' skidded out of his hand. With a roar, Brand started to scramble to his feet, but at the same moment Kormak slammed him mercilessly, with every ounce of force he could summon, on the side of the head. Brand shook his head, continued to struggle upwards. Disbelievingly, Kormak swung his lead-shot loaded sandbag again. This time the giant went down on all fours.
The charging men behind him hesitated, some also brought down by the rope. Two ran on, were met by a concentrated volley of javelins, fell bristling. The rest wavered, then ran in ones and twos back into the blazing village.
"Tie him up," said Kormak briefly. He waved his troop forward, aiming to drive out the stragglers, establish a perimeter, and take control of boats, food and weapons. Hunting down the fugitives would be the job after that. He wished the one-eyed man had charged with Brand. It would have kept Ragnhild off his back.
The English catapulteers being employed as unskilled labor down at the jetty had run at the first stone. They had no weapons, and no impulse to fight in defense of the settlement. In the dark beyond the firelight, they rallied, gasping, round Cwicca.
"Shouldn't never have taken us away from the mule," said a voice in the darkness. "We knew they were coming, we told him, but no, he would have..."
"Shut up," said Cwicca. "Thing is, if we get up there now we can train round and shoot up that ship of theirs, no bother. That'll get them back aboard her in a hurry."
"No good," said Osmod. "Look."
He pointed to the Crane's pinnace, loaded with armed men, now pulling across the harbor in the direction of the two untended catapults. Kormak had thought of that too.
Kormak had not thought of the whales. The orcas had been shadowing the Crane all the way in, eager to attack. Yet the bull leader had held off. He had an accurate sense of the Crane's bulk, knew she was the biggest man-thing he had ever come across. Maybe if he rammed her head on, she would fill and sink. Maybe not. The scratch he had received from Cuthred irritated him, but at the same time gave him caution. The sport he wanted was to tip a boat like an ice-floe, to snap up the men inside like unwary seals. So he hesitated, and his school with him, cruising up and down at the harbor-mouth, half an eye on the Crane and the commotion, half an eye on the interesting but shore-sheltered whale-boats he had sensed lying under cover of the mainland a quarter of a mile away.
Then he heard the regular thumping oars of the pinnace, and hesitated no longer. Filled with the cruel urge, more than hunger, of the fox in the hen-roost, he swept down the harbor channel, with his school behind him.
"No good," said Osmod again. "Great holy suffering Christ." Driven back to childhood, he made instinctively the sign of the Cross to ward him from evil, over the hammer still slung round his neck. No-one corrected him. Staring at the pinnace, they saw all together the great fin that rose man-height behind the boat, the black-and-white body that reared beneath it.
Boat and men went over with hardly a cry. For an instant, bobbing heads. Then fin after fin cutting through the water as the killers went into their established ritual for striking at a great whale, a blue or a sperm or a finner, swinging in in turn, snapping with the great jaws and swinging out of the way of the next. But where a bite from a full-grown orca would merely wound a sixty-foot blue, it snapped a man in half. The flurry was over in seconds, the whales sounding again to hide their presence.
"I met one of those things out on the water," muttered Karli, his face white. "I told you it could have turned me over as easy as winking. The fin's as tall as I am. What are its teeth like?"
Cwicca roused the others from their paralysis. "Well, Thor help them, but look. The road's clear to the mules. Let's get up there."
Still gaping at the threatening fire-lit water, the catapulteers started to run round the harbor to their machines.
On board the Crane, all attention was concentrated on the charge and fall of Brand. No-one saw the pinnace go under except the two fishermen, still prisoner and lashed to the outer gunwale. They looked down at the water under them, trying to estimate its depth. Slowly, looking over their shoulders, they started with new determination to work their hands free.
On the mainland coast, Shef saw the flames leaping again. The men in the boats were grumbling, reluctant to believe in a threat from orcas, desperate to see what was happening at their homes. Behind him came a strange sound, a kind of long violent blowing snuffle, followed by a slap like a tail striking water.
"What was that?" he asked.
"Sounded like a walrus going down," said one of the men in the boats. "But it can't be, not..."
"All right," snapped Shef. He raised his lance high and called out to all the boats. "It's safe now, maybe just for a few moments. Row right across as fast as you can go, beach on the shore right opposite and get out. Don't go into the harbor. Do you hear, don't go into the harbor. Now row."
He sat down in the prow of the lead boat, Cuthred in the stern. The whale-men bent to their oars, sent the boat skimming over the calm sea. Shef twisted from side to side, fearing at any moment to see the fins racing again towards him. The boats reached the mid-point of their passage, raced on. As they closed on the island shore, outside the harbor entrance, maybe half a mile still from the main settlement and hidden from it by a hill, Shef felt the speed slacken.
"Why don't we just push on in?" called one of the oarsmen.
"Believe me," said Shef. "You wouldn't like it."
His boat grounded her prow on shingle, followed by most of the others. The men scrambled out, heaving their boats higher, snatching out their makeshift weapons. One boat ignored Shef's shouts, skimmed on towards the harbor entrance, disappeared from sight round the point. Shef shook his head in disgust.
"I still don't see why..." began another dissident. Cuthred, patience exhausted, clubbed him on the side of the head with a sword-pommel, seized him by the throat, dragged him again on to his feet.
"Do what he says and obey your orders," he snarled. "Got it?"
Shef waved the fifty men he had into a double extended line and led them off in a broad arrow formation. He kept them at a swift walk, curbing any impulse to run. They would need their breath if they had to fight armored men. His plan was to swing wide round the hill at the harbor mouth, and come out of its cover down the stream on which the main settlement stood, to drive the invaders back into the water. Maybe by then they would have dispersed to rape and loot. He hoped so. Surprise was his only chance now.
The catapulteers reached the first mule and paused for a moment. Man one, or man them both? Even with Karli added, they had less than two full teams.
"Just the first one for now," Cwicca decided briefly. "Get winding."
They had slacked the twisted ropes off before leaving. It was never good to keep them under torsion for too long. The winding levers were still stacked in their place, though, and the men sprang to it. At the same time Cwicca called Karli to assist him. One improvement they had made in the weeks of waiting. They had never before been able to train their machine round more than a few inches. On a ship, one had to aim the ship rather than the mule. However, by trial and error Udd had solved the problem. They had put the heavy machine on small iron-rimmed wheels of its own, not so that it could be drawn overland like the lighter dart-throwers, but so that those small wheels could rest on a larger one, placed flat on the ground and flanged to keep the smaller ones in place. Two strong men could tip the whole ton-and-a-quarter forward on its unmoving axle and train it round by a balancing trail.
Straining, Karli and Cwicca lifted the trail, walked the machine round from its first position covering the harbor entrance to bear on the Crane now slowly sweeping away from the jetty.
"Round half a pace more," grunted Cwicca. "Back a hand's breadth. Right. Tip her forward, hammer in two wedges, no, three."
They tipped the machine forward so it pointed, now, down at the water. The ropes were wound, the throwing bar straining at its retaining bolt. Cwicca fitted a thirty-pound rock into the sling, drooping from the bar, checked the very precise angle of the hook from which the sling's catch had, at the right moment, to fly free.
"Ready. Stand clear. Shoot."
The bolt was pulled back, the bar shot up with inconceivable force, the sling whirred round, adding its own vector to the force of the twisted ropes. The boulder shot across the water in a flat hard line.
And missed. The crew had wedged the machine down as far as it would go. But it was a hard business altering for range downwards. The rock skimmed narrowly over the decks of the Crane and splashed into the water in the center of the widening gap between ship and jetty. The plume it threw up hurled spray into Kormak's face, as he turned back from the won skirmish on the jetty.
"Thor aid me," he said. "What happened to the pinnace? They were supposed to secure that machine." Then he began to bark orders. A threat to his ship was the most serious thing, everything else trivial, winning the battle, securing prisoners, even appeasing Ragnhild.
As the queen realized Kormak meant to turn back from sacking the settlement, the settlement she was sure contained her son's bane, skulking somewhere away from the fighting, she flew at him with teeth and nails. He shook her off as she clung to his arm, shrieking her demands.
The important thing to do, he saw straight away, was to get the Crane over on the other side of the harbor, where the catapults could not train down far enough to shoot. The ship needed more men, and in a hurry. There were still a dozen skiffs and dories lying round the jetty and the shingle by it. Quickly Kormak detached fifty men to hold the foot of the jetty, ordered the rest into the boats, jamming in as many as they could carry. At the last moment he stopped, ordered two men out of the nearest, replaced them with the still groggy Brand, hands lashed firmly behind his back.
"Let's get him safely stowed," he remarked, stepping into the same boat. He thrust a furious Ragnhild away from him again. "Lady, we'll come back for you. If the man you want is anywhere, he's on the shore. I suggest you go look for him yourself. Give way," he added to the oarsmen.
As a second stone thumped into the sea, aimed this time at the first boats creeping out, and missing once more, fifty men set out to cross the intervening hundred yards of water.
Shef brought his group hurdling over the stream and into the blazing village by the landward end of its one muddy street. As they moved down it, jogging now, men moved out of the flames and shadows to join him, adding themselves to the line, eager to support the first sign of concerted resistance. Shef felt the wolfish force of their anger sweeping him along. There was no way to halt them now. They were going to hurl themselves on the invaders whatever he said or did.
Yet the Halogalanders had no armor, and the only shield in the party was Cuthred's. The enemy were fully equipped, Shef could see them standing in a solid rank across the base of the jetty, unshaken and unafraid. In seconds he would have to lead the charge. What chance had he of surviving it? Standing in the center of the front rank, a target for every spear? This was the way of the world. Shef poised his lance. There was no way he could see of altering it. He tried to call up within himself the fighting urge he had felt when he killed Hrani the Viking on the sandbank. There was no response. The lance in his hand seemed to drink it, to send out an urge instead to delay. To pity, not to strike. The men on his right and left were looking sideways at him, expecting the word to charge. Something made Shef sweep the lance out sideways, holding them back.
Behind the shield-wall on the jetty, the rising sun cleared the surrounding hills and shone for the first time that day full on the water. It caught the fins and bodies of the killers as they swept in for the second time from the deep water, confident of what they had to do, emboldened by their first success. A great cry went up from the water as the men in the dories realized what was coming towards them.
Brave men, some of them struck out with spears and swords as the black-and-white bodies rushed in. Valgrim the Wise, standing disbelieving in the prow of his boat, swung back the 'Gungnir' lance to use as a harpoon. Too weak, too slow. The boats were taken from underneath. A blow from a snout, propelled at thirty miles an hour by a body tons in weight, and each boat disintegrated. The heavily-armed men splashed or sank in the water, and as they did so the jaws tore at them, into them, the killers sweeping backwards and forwards in the pattern they used for hunting seals or porpoise. In seconds the bay ran as red as the cove of the grind. But this time with man-blood, not with whale's, crewmen's mixed with that of their skipper, and that of Valgrim the Wise, priest of Othin, now sacrificed to Othin's own creatures. Unnoticed by any, the spear with the 'Gungnir' runes drifted gently to the bottom: it had brought its last owner no luck.
Shef's charging line faltered as the men took in what was happening, a thing no-one had ever seen before. Seeing their enemies stare and hesitate, Kormak's detachment turned as well. Both sides stood, struck with horror. There was no way for anyone to intervene.
After a time, Shef stepped forward, spoke to what seemed to be the leader of the men on the jetty. "Put your weapons down," he said. "We will give you life and limb, and passage home when we can. There is no way for you to escape now. And there has been bloodshed enough."
Lips pale, the leader looked at his men, saw their shaken and horrified expressions, the fight drained out of them. He nodded, slowly laid down sword and shield. Cuthred moved forward, shouldered a path through the others for Shef, walked with him to the end of the jetty to see the end of the story.
As he did so, a figure rose from the planking, shrieking recognition. Ragnhild, knife in hand, unmoved by the slaughter, desperate for revenge. She came at Shef like a fury, knife low for the thrust. Shef saw her come, recognized the green eyes he had kissed, the hair he had clenched in climax. The lance drooped disregarded in his hand, he groped for words of apology. She was shrieking something as she ran in, he caught only the words "...killed my son!" He stood, arms wide, paralyzed, hoping for a word of explanation, another miracle.
Cuthred stepped between them, the knife-thrust screeching off the hard surface of his shield. Automatically he lifted it to thrust her off. Ragnhild's eyes widened with sudden shock. Then she fell backwards, dragging Cuthred's targe with her. The targe with the foot-long spike Shef had welded on himself. It had driven through her heart below her breasts.
"As God's my judge," said Cuthred, "that was an accident. I never killed a woman in my life."
"Too many killings," said Shef. He stooped, searching for signs of life. Her lips were still moving, still cursing him. Then they ceased, and he saw her eyes roll upwards. As he stepped away, Cuthred walked forward, put a foot on Ragnhild's outstretched arm, and jerked his shield free. He shook his head in self-reproach, looked to see if his leader had noticed what he had done.
But Shef's eyes had turned from the corpse on the jetty to the bloodstained, fin-slashed water. Then, disbelievingly, he looked again across the bay. There, in the shallows opposite, two figures were sitting, visible in the growing daylight. Behind him a murmur of amazement arose as more and more men saw the astonishing sight. The second thing they had seen that morning that no living man had ever seen before. One of the Hidden People.
Echegorgun, gauging the whales' mood exactly, had swum easily and confidently across the narrow strait after the whale-boats. He had seen Shef take the men on shore, had seen the one over-confident boat sweep on into the harbor, to be met and butchered by the whales. He had kept well back, but had followed the whales on into the harbor, sure that he would hear if they turned towards him. He had cruised along the shore, only the tip of his skull showing, and that looking like yet another gray rock. He had watched the doings of the men with interest, but without concern—till he had seen two men load an unmistakable figure into a boat. Brand son of Barn son of Bjarni. His own aunt's grandson.
Echegorgun knew exactly what would happen next. He had a couple of minutes only in which to avert it, alter it. Like a seal he had launched himself across the water, clung for a moment to the stern of the Crane, gauged the distance between himself and the lead boat with Kormak in it, felt the swarm and flurry of whale-flukes only yards away. He submerged, striking out like an otter.
Brand, bound helpless in the bottom of the boat, Kormak's foot resting firmly on his chest, saw only a great gray hand seize the gunwale. Then the boat tipped. Tipped towards Echegorgun, tipped a fraction before the first whale struck. As the men shouted and raised their weapons, an irresistible clutch seized his tunic, dragged him over the side and down deep, deep, away from the splintering planks and thrashing limbs on the surface.
For a second Brand felt all the superstitious horror of his race. Seized by the marbendill, dragged down to the monster's dinner at the bottom of the sea. And yet, in that flash, he had half-recognized the hand. He lay motionless, not resisting, holding his one deep-drawn breath.
Slowly the grip dragged him through the water, powered by the great muscles of the not-man. Under the Crane's keel. Across the bay. Into the shallows. As they both came up, releasing their breath in a final gasp, Brand stared into the face next his own. The face staring back. As Echegorgun produced a flint knife and began to cut free the ropes that held Brand's arms, they explored each other silently, for similarity, for family resemblance.
Finally Brand spoke, sitting in the shallow water. "I have left messages for you and your folk in our secret place," he said, "and I have always kept to our compact. Yet I never expected to see you here in the daylight. You are of the race that grandfather Bjarni met."
Echegorgun smiled, showing his massive teeth. "And you must be my good cousin Brand."
It is an expensive business finding you shelter," said Brand wearily.
Shef said nothing. He might have replied that it had sometimes been profitable too, but allowances had to be made for Brand's state of mind. He was not sure how many days had gone by since the battle—in the high latitudes it was hard to tell. Everyone seemed to have been furiously at work for longer than they could bear, stopping only when they fell asleep. And yet—it was an ominous sign—dark was returning to the sky. Summer was past, winter coming on. It came on very fast in Halogaland.
However many days it had been, the settlement still looked barely survivable. All three of the ships in the harbor were sunk or unserviceable. By sheer bad luck Cwicca and his crew had found the range and managed to depress their machine just as the battle was won, and put a rock neatly through the base of the Crane's mast. Driven by terror of the whales her crew had managed to pole her over and beach her, but she would never sail again. The Walrus still sat at the bottom of the harbor, her mast poking forlornly above the surface. The Seamew had caught fire and burnt. Though there were small craft of all kinds available, there was no ship big enough to sail south for Trondhjem, the nearest port, and return with provisions. In time, one would be made from the salvaged planks and timbers—for of course there was little large wood readily available on the barren coast or the wind-swept islands. For the same reason rebuilding the burnt huts would be hard, for all the local skill in using stone and turf. Much of the precious windfall of the grind had gone up in flame, and with it the storehouses and warehouses where Brand kept not only the furs and feathers and skins of the Finn-tax, which he traded, but also the meat and cheese and butter on which he lived.
And besides Shef's train, and Guthmund's crew, there were maybe seventy survivors off the Crane. They had been promised their lives, and no-one had suggested breaking the promise. But they all ate. There was no way everyone on the island could live through the coming winter, however hard they fished and sealed. Many of the Halogalanders had quietly slipped back to their homesteads, making it clear they wanted no part of Brand's problem. They would live. It would be the strangers, and their hosts, if they were fool enough to share, who would die.
"At least we have gold and silver," Brand went on. "That doesn't burn. The best thing we can do is put a boat together, a makeshift, load it with every man we can squeeze in, and send it off south. If it hugs the shore it might get to somewhere with food to spare. Then turn Ragnhild's Westfolders out, buy as much as we can, and head north again."
Again Shef forbore to say anything. If Brand were not so tired he would have seen the faults in the scheme. The Westfolders would be many enough to overpower their guards, take the money, and leave the settlement as foodless as ever. As it was, guarding them was taking far too much of everyone's resources. They would have to be sent off on their own. If they could be brought ever to venture out to sea again, with their new terror of the whales.
"I am sorry," said Brand, shaking his massive head. "I have experienced too much to make any sensible plan. A marbendill for a cousin! I knew, but now everyone does. What will folk say?"
"They will say you are fortunate," broke in Thorvin. "There is a priest of the Way in Sweden, whose special devotion is to the goddess Freyja. His craft is the breeding of animals, the way you must cross-breed or in-breed to get the best-yielding cows or the woolliest sheep. He has spoken to me often of mules, and the breeding of dog and wolf, and such things. As soon as he knows, he will come here. For it seems to me that we and the sea-men are more like dog and wolf than we are horse and donkey. For your grandfather Bjarni bred with one of their females, and she had a child, your father Barn. But Barn too had a child, and that was you, and your ancestry is plain if we see you together. If Barn had been a mule, a human mule, that could not have happened. So we and the marbendills are not so far apart. Maybe there is more marbendill blood in the race than we knew before."
Shef nodded. The thought had come to him before as he looked at the northerners, with their massive frames, their eyebrow-ridges, their hairy skins and bushy beards. But he had not aired the thought. He noticed that the word "troll" was being used more sparingly around the settlement, replaced by "sea-folk" or "marbendill," as if others were also reckoning their ancestry.
"Well, be that as it may," said Brand, looking slightly more cheerful. "I do not know what we are to do. I wish, I don't mind saying it, I wish I had the good advice of my cousin."
But Echegorgun had slipped away very soon after dragging Brand to the shore. He had seemed for a short time pleased with the attention he received, and certainly pleased by Brand's gratitude. Then the noise seemed to irk him, and he had vanished as only the Hidden Folk could. He had also taken Cuthred with him, both of them apparently swimming the firth back to the mainland. Echegorgun was impressed by Cuthred.
"Not quite a Thin One," he had said. "Stronger than Miltastaray, anyway. And look at the hair on his back! Grease him well, he could swim with the seals too. Miltastaray likes him. He could be a good mate for her."
Shef had gaped at the last thought, and then said cautiously, unsure how to put it. "I thought you said, Echegorgun, that you knew what had happened to him. Well, what happened was that some of the other Thin Ones, they cut off, well, not what makes him a man, but what..."
Echegorgun cut him off. "I know. It means less to us than to you. You know why you live such short lives? Because you mate all the time, not just in season. Every time you do it, more of your life gone. A thousand times for every child, I have listened at many windows! Hah. Miltastaray would look for something else in a man."
And with that they had gone. Shef had had time only to speak to Cuthred and ask him to ask Echegorgun to bury his human kills, like a civilized person, instead of smoking them like a—like a marbendill. "Tell him we'll pay him in pigs," he had said.
"You haven't got any pigs," Cuthred had replied. "Anyway, I prefer pigs to people."
Perhaps they would all have larders like Echegorgun's before the winter was out, Shef thought. As the circular discussion between Thorvin, Brand, Guthmund and the others continued, he got up, brooding, and walked away. He carried with him the lance he had taken from the smokehouse: it felt more comfortable than the 'Gungnir' spear, or the expensive swords he had acquired and lost. The best thing to do when you were faced with an insoluble problem, he had found, was to ask everyone about it till you met the one who knew the answer.
He found Cwicca and the gang sharing a scanty meal in a break from their work of trying to recover planking from the wrecked ships. As he approached, they stood up respectfully. Shef wondered for a moment. They did that sometimes. Sometimes, misled by his accent when he was speaking English, they forgot and treated him as one of themselves. They seemed to be doing that less often.
"Sit," he said, but remained standing himself, leaning on the lance. "Not much to eat, I see."
"And there's going to be less," agreed Cwicca.
"There's talk of sending the prisoners away in a ship, when we've built it. If we could build two we could trust someone to go south for food."
"If we could build two," demurred Wilfi.
"If we can get anyone to sail it," added Osmod. "Right now everyone's so scared of whales they'd run aground if they saw a spout."
"Dead right too," put in Karli fervently. "I mean to say one thing, lord. You know I saw one of those things when I poled across from Drottningsholm? Right out on the water, close up? Well, one of those here was the same one. I saw a bite-mark on his fin. Same thing here. It looks as if—well, as if they followed us up."
Or followed you up, he thought but did not say. The English ex-slaves had told him many strange stories of their master, whom they both venerated and felt at home with. He had believed few of them. Now, he was beginning to wonder. Was there a penalty, he thought, for a man who had greeted the son of a god by knocking him down. There had not seemed to be one so far.
"Well, if we don't do something we'll all starve to death," said Shef.
The ex-slaves considered the prospect. Not an unfamiliar one. Many slaves, and as many poor folk, died in the winter, from cold or hunger or both. They had all known it to happen.
"I had an idea," said Udd, and then stopped, with his usual shyness in front of a group.
"Was it about iron?" asked Shef.
Udd nodded vigorously, recovering his nerve. "Yes, lord. You know that ore we saw down at the College at Kaupang? The sort that took so little working, because there's so much metal in the stone? It comes from Jarnberaland. Iron-bearing Land."
Shef nodded encouragingly, with no idea where this thought was leading. They couldn't eat iron, but sarcasm would cut Udd off completely.
"There's a place called Kopparberg too. Copper Mountain. Well, the thing is, they're both over there." Udd pointed across the harbor to the mountainous shore opposite. "On the other side of the mountains, I mean. I thought, if we can't sail, we could walk. It's not as if there's nowhere the other side."
Shef looked at the jagged forbidding shore, thought of the terrible cramping struggle up the side of Echegorgun's inlet. The path they had come upon. The easy ridge route Echegorgun had taken to bring them out opposite the island.
"Thank you, Udd," he said. "I'll think about that."
He walked on till he found Guthmund the Swede. Guthmund was in unexpectedly good spirits. He had lost his ship, and there was every chance of dying of starvation. On the other hand, the loot from the Crane had been surprisingly good. Ragnhild had taken half her ancestral treasure with her, to buy men and revenge, and it had been recovered from the wreck. Deaths in the attack had meant fewer people to share it with, too. Guthmund greeted his young leader with a smile. They called him Guthmund the Greedy. His ambition was to become Gull-Guthmund, or Gold-Guthmund in English.
The smile vanished as Shef asked him about what Udd had said. "Oh, it's up there somewhere all right," he agreed. "But I wouldn't know where exactly. You folk don't realize. Sweden is a thousand miles long from end to end, all the way from Skaane to the Lapp-mark. If Skaane is Swedish," he added. "I am from Soderrnanland myself, I am a true Swede. But I guess, I guess this is about as far north as Jarnberaland."
"How can you tell?"
"By the way the shadows fall. If you measure a shadow at noon, and you know how far it is from midsummer, you can tell how far north you are. It is one of the crafts of the Way, Skaldfinn Njörth's priest once showed me."
"So if we went up there and walked due east we would come to Jarnberaland in the country of the Swedes."
"You might not have to walk all the way," said Guthmund. "I have heard it said that there are lakes up there in the Keel, the central range, and they run east and west. Brand told me that when the Finns on this side raid the Finns on the other—Kvens they call them—they take bark boats and paddle along them."
"Thank you, Guthmund," said Shef, and walked on again.
Brand looked incredulous when Shef reported the results of his conversations to him and Thorvin, still sitting together. "Can't be done," he said flatly.
"Why not?"
"It's too late in the year."
"A month after midsummer?"
Brand sighed. "You don't realize. Up here summer doesn't last long. On the coast, all right, the sea seems to keep the snow and ice off for a while. But just think. Remember what it was like in Hedeby, like spring, you said. Get to Kaupang and it's still ice-bound. And how far is that? Three hundred miles north? Here you're another six hundred. A few miles in from the coast—and that's as far as I've ever been, even chasing Finns—and there's snow on the ground more than half the year. The higher you go, the worse it gets. The high mountains never melt at all."
"So cold is the problem. But Udd's right, is he, it is Jarnberaland on the other side, maybe two hundred miles off? Ten days' travel."
"Twenty days' travel. If you're very very lucky. In some of the country I've seen three miles is a hard day. If you don't get turned round and die walking in a circle."
"Still," Thorvin put in, pulling at his beard, "there is something few people know. And that is that the Way is strong in Jarnberaland. Naturally, for we are craftsmen and smiths. And smiths go to iron. There are priests of the Way there, working with the folk who mine the iron. Some say it is as good as a second College. Valgrim was against it. He said there could only be one College."
And he the head of it, Shef thought. Valgrim's errors had finally caught up with him. He had been in the boats that rowed back to the Crane, and only two of the men in them had survived, Brand and a young man who had remained hunched into a ball ever since they pulled him on shore, making small noises of fear. Ragnhild could have died that way too, Shef told himself. Just an accident. Another of the ones that surrounded him. Part of his luck, Olaf Elf-of-Geirstath would say, and King Alfred with him.
"So if we crossed the mountains," Shef went on, "we might even find help the other side."
"But you can't cross the mountains," Brand repeated, exasperated. "The mountains are full of Finns and—"
"And the Hidden Folk," Shef completed for him. "Thank you, Brand." He rose to his feet and walked off yet again, the lance marking his paces.
The final word came from a man whose name he did not know, one of the Crane's crew, sweating in the pale sunlight as he and his mates heaved rocks on to a sled, to drag to the settlement to make a few more winter shelters. Halogalanders watched them from a distance, carrying bundles of seal-harpoons. Shef, still unsure of his proper course, paused to watch them for a moment. One of them looked up. A relative of Kormak, he spoke bitterly. "Today we sweat, you watch. We were defeated—but not by men, by whales! That cannot happen twice. Next time you will find no protectors. The Rogalanders are still looking out for you, and Ragnhild's kin will pay her bounty. And behind them, the Ragnarssons. Sigurth Snake-eye will pay as much for you as Ragnhild would have. If you go south, you will meet someone. You will never see England again, one-eye. The only man who could get through what waits for you would need an iron skin. Like Sigurth Fafnirsbane. And even he left a weak spot!"
Shef looked down reflectively. He knew the story of Sigurth who killed the dragon Fafnir—he had seen a part of it himself, in vision, seen the dragon-mask. He knew too that Sigurth had been betrayed by his lover, and killed by her husband and his kin, once they found out that the dragon's blood that had made his skin impenetrable had been checked at one spot by a leaf that stuck to it, and left him vulnerable only in the back. He, Shef, had had an angry lover as well, though she was dead, and her husband too. And he had killed a dragon, if Ivar Boneless might be considered as such.
The parallels were too close for comfort. And it was true enough that the North Way down the coast was also the one way south, and all too easily blocked.
"I hear what you say," he answered. "And I thank you for your warning. But you meant it in malice. If you have nothing better to say, do not speak next time." He reached out, carefully, and tapped the angry Viking on the very throat-ball with the point of his lance.
The human mind is strange. Nose-bleeds start from fear. A stammer is cured by a shock, feeble old women start from their beds in a crisis and lift great timbers from their sons' bodies. Kormak's relative knew he had spoken too freely. Knew that if the one-eyed man ran him through with the lance, there would be no complaint against him. As the point touched his throat, his gullet froze with fear. And remained frozen.
As Shef walked away one of his mates said to him in an undertone, "You chanced it there, Svipdag."
Svipdag turned to him, eyes wide. Tried to speak. Tried again, and again. Nothing came out but a low gargling. Men saw the terror in Svipdag's eyes as he realized that he meant to speak, but had been robbed of the ability as if a cord had been tied round his windpipe.
The other prisoners looked after Shef's retreating back. They had heard stories of him, of the death of Ivar, of Halvdan, of how King Olaf had handed over all his luck and his family's into this man's keeping. They knew he bore the sign of some unknown god round his neck, his father, some had heard.
"He said, 'do not speak'," one of the Vikings muttered. "And now he can't!"
"I'm telling you, he called the whales in too," said another.
"And the Hidden Folk come to his help."
"If I'd known all that, Ragnhild could have whistled herself hoarse before I came on this gods-forsaken trip."
"You don't have to do this, you know," said Brand when Shef told him of his decision. "We'll think of something. Get those greedy louts from the Crane out of the way, things'll look better. We can send some lads south in the dories, maybe buy a boatload of food in Trondhjem, and a boat to put it in. You don't have to walk off into the snow, even if someone else does."
"That's what I'm going to do anyway," said Shef.
Brand hesitated, embarrassed. He felt he had spoken too gloomily earlier, provoked this insane decision. He remembered when he had first taken Shef under his protection, after they had put his eye out. He had taught him Norse, taught him how to use a sword properly, taught him the way of the drengr, the professional marching warrior. And Shef had taught him much too. Raised him to glory, and to riches—for the crisis now was one of food and fuel and ships, not of money.
"Look, no-one I know of has ever been deep into those mountains and come back, let alone come out the other side, Maybe the Finns do, but they're different. It's wolves and bears and cold. And where are you if you get through? Sweden! Or Swedish Finnmark, or somewhere. I can't see why you're doing this."
Shef thought for a few moments before replying. "I think I have two reasons," he said. "One is this. Ever since I went to the cathedral this spring, saw Alfred and—and Godive marry, I've felt that things were getting out of my hand. People pushed me, and I went along. I did what I had to. From the sandbank to the slave-market to Kaupang to the queen. Across the Upland and up to here. Chased by the Ragnarssons and Ragnhild and even by the whales. Now I think I've retreated as far as I mean to. From now on I'm going to go back. I have been deep into the darkness, into the smokehouse of the Hidden Folk, even. Now I have to get into the light. And I don't mean to go back the way I came."
Brand waited. Like most of the men of the North, he believed deeply in luck. What Shef was saying was that he meant to change his luck. Or maybe that his luck had turned. Some people would say that the young man had luck and to spare. But no man could judge of another's luck, that was clear. "The other reason?" he prompted. Shef pulled his pole-ladder pendant forward from his chest. "I don't know if you think this means anything," he said. "Do you think I have a god for a father?"
Brand did not reply. "Well," Shef went on, "I keep seeing things, as you know. Sometimes asleep, sometimes awake. I know someone is trying to tell me things. Sometimes it's very easy. When we found Cuthred, I had been shown to look for a man turning a great mill. Or had I heard the mill-wheel creaking already? I don't know. But then, and the time when Cwicca broke down the wall of the queen's house to get me out, I had a warning. A warning about something that was happening right then. All that's easy enough. But I have seen other things that are not so easy. I saw a hero dying, and an old woman. I saw the sun turn into a chariot pursued by wolves, and into a father-god's face. I saw a hero ride to rescue Balder from Hel, and I saw the White Christ killed by soldiers of the Rome-folk who spoke our own tongue. I saw the heroes in Valhalla, and I saw how those who are not heroes are received there.
"Now all those sights were trying to tell me something. Not something easy. Not only from one side, from the pagans or the Christians. What I think they were trying to tell me—or maybe I am telling myself—is that there is something wrong. Something wrong with the way we all live. We are sliding into the Skuld-world, Thorvin would say. Virtue has gone out of us, out of us all, Christians and pagans. If this pendant means anything, it means that I must try to put it back. One step at a time, as you mount a ladder."
Brand sighed. "I see your mind is made up. Who will go with you?"
"You?"
Brand shook his head. "I have too much to do here. I cannot leave my own kin unfed and unsheltered."
"Cwicca and his gang will come, I think, and Karli. He came with me for adventures. If he gets back to the Ditmarsh he will be the greatest story-teller they ever had. Udd for sure, maybe Hund, maybe Thorvin. I have to speak again to Cuthred, and to your cousin."
"There is a skerry where I can leave a message," Brand conceded reluctantly. "Your chances would go up a great deal if he would accompany you. But maybe he thinks he has done enough."
"What about provisions? What can you spare us?"
"Not much. But you will have the best of what we still own." Brand pointed. "One thing. Why are you still carrying that old weapon? All right, you picked it up in the smokehouse when you had nothing else, but look at it. It's old, the gold inlay is worn off, the blade is thin, it has no cross-piece. Not half the weapon Sigurth's 'Gungnir' was. Give it to me, I'll find you a better one."
Shef hefted the weapon thoughtfully. "I call it a good spear that conquers," he said. "I'll keep it."
In the end the group that Shef led to the foot of the mountains numbered twenty-three, all but three of them English speakers by birth. Cwicca, Osmod, Udd and their three remaining mates Fritha, Hama and Wilfi had joined him without question, as had Karli. So had Hund, saying that he had a feeling they would have need of a leech. More to Shef's surprise, Thorvin had agreed to make the trip, giving as his excuse that as a smith he wanted to see Jarnberaland and the College's outpost there. Once the news of the attempt spread, Shef had been much more surprised to find a deputation come to him, headed by Martha, the woman from Frisia, once a slave of Queen Ragnhild, and by Ceolwulf, the rescued slave whom the others suspected of having been a thane.
"We don't want to be left here," they said. "We have been too much among the Norse-folk, and want to find our way home. Our best chance is with you."
"Not a good chance," Shef told them.
"Better than the one we had a while ago," said Ceolwulf grimly.
So the party was expanded by four women and eight men. Shef had wondered whether to argue that the women would not have the strength to make the journey, but the words died as he thought them. He had traveled from Kaupang to the Gula with them, and they kept up as well as the men, certainly better than the puny Udd or the short-legged Osmod. As for the male ex-slaves, all of them wearing still their Rig pendants, Shef had not the heart to leave them. They might be an asset. Certainly some of them, like the formidable Ceolwulf, had talents of their own. They had fought well if briefly in the skirmishes against the crew of the Crane: some had died, over-anxious to get in a blow against the race that had enslaved and tormented them.
The last member of the party was Cuthred. Brand had gone off one evening in the growing dark, making it clear that he was not to be watched or followed. As had been the custom of his family, he had left a message in a secret spot that his Hidden Folk relations knew. In some private code he had passed the news that he needed a meeting. But Echegorgun had not replied, or appeared. Instead Cuthred had walked in two mornings later. His clothes were dry and he was carrying his sword and shield, so he had not swum the narrow firth from the mainland. Echegorgun must have had some kind of boat or water-craft, but Cuthred was as close-mouthed about that as if he had already become a Hidden One himself.
Told what was intended, he listened, nodded, sat silent during the day, and disappeared again in the dark. When he returned a second time he brought discouraging word.
"Echegorgun won't accompany you," he said. "He says he has been seen too often already. He says I am to come with you instead."
Shef raised an eyebrow. Cuthred spoke as if he had a better alternative—maybe to join the Hidden Folk for good, as a kind of exchange for the child Barn many years ago.
"He says he will keep an eye on you, or on us," Cuthred went on. "And he will pass the word to his relatives not to interfere with us. That is a great threat removed. You know why most hunters from here have never come back. They ended up smoked like stock-fish. But that still leaves the bears and the wolves. And cold and hunger. And the Finns. We will have to take our chances with them."
Shef had agreed, having no choice, and turned to his preparations. In the end Brand had paraded every single member of the party in front of him, and gone through their equipment minutely. All had stout and well-greased boots that reached up to the calf. Thick leggings and thick wool trousers over them, for women as well as men. Wool tunics, skin mantles, hemp shirts. "Sweat is a danger," Brand told them. "Freezes on you. Hemp soaks up the sweat better than wool. Better not to sweat. Just do everything at an even pace, but never stop unless you have a fire. That is the way to keep warm, but not too warm." He had made sure that everyone had a bag to sleep in. Not, alas, the magnificent model Shef had bought at the Gula, which had burnt with so much else. But a store of feathers had survived the fire, and everyone had a two-layer bag of some material, wool or skin, padded with the down of the seabirds. Mittens and hats, scrims to go round the neck and pull across the face in a blizzard. For each person, in a back-pack, ten day's food, mostly dried fish and seal-meat, or the strong cheese made from sheep or goat's milk. Not enough, but a person walking all day in the cold needs four pounds' weight of food a day. Carry more, travel less. "If you see anything living, eat it," Brand said. "Spin out what you carry as long as you can. You will be hungry before you reach the other side."
The party's weapons had been carefully selected as well, and not for war. The catapulteers carried their crossbows and their knives. Even Osmod had been made to abandon his halberd, too heavy and cumbersome. Thorvin had his smith's hammer, Hund was empty-handed. The others carried either wood-axes or spears, stout-shafted ones with cross-pieces, not javelins or harpoons. "For bear," Brand explained. "You don't want one of them walking up the shaft at you." Four short hunting bows were spread among the group as well, given to those who considered themselves good shots. Cuthred carried the sword they had taken from Vigdjarf, and his spiked shield. Shef had his lance as well as a broad sharp-pointed Rogaland knife taken from the Crane.
Finally, Brand had insisted on pressing upon them six pairs of the strange sticks the Norwegians slid on, the skis. "None of us can use them," Shef protested.
"Thorvin can," Brand replied.
"I learned too," added Ceolwulf. "Learned the first winter."
"You might need to send scouts out," Brand urged. What he thought was that some might survive, even if all did not.
At dawn, some fourteen days after the battle and the burning, the party set out. They were carried over the first stretch in the first ship Brand's folk had managed to make from salvaged parts: planks from both the wrecked ships, keel made from one half of the Crane's originally riveted main timber. The ship was short, wide, and lacking in proportion, named by Brand in disgust the Duckling. Nevertheless she moved reasonably enough under sail, the party packed into her roomy waist with the six-man crew working round them. There had been some argument about where they should all be set down, Brand opting for a fjord which ran furthest into the tangled mass of mountains, and so cut down their marching distance as much as possible. But Cuthred vetoed the choice with total confidence. "Echegorgun said not," he reported. "He said, go to the fjord that leads to the triple-horned mountain. Then head due east. That way we will strike a line that may lead us down to the great lake that runs across Kjolen, the Keel."
"A line, or a path," queried Shef.
"A line. There are no paths. Not even Hidden Folk paths. In the deep mountains, they need no paths."
He had almost said "we," Shef noted.
So, in a chill wind, twenty-three laden figures stood at the very end of a deep fjord. The sun had climbed high up the sky. Even so, it was only just high enough to clear the mountain-tops, and half the fjord still lay in deep shadow. On the other side the snow-capped peaks lay reflected in deep still water, stirred only by the faint ripples of the Duckling being poled out from shore. The humans seemed a mere scattering of forked twigs under the impassive gray bulks, their path a mere slash in the rock down which bright water bounded.
Brand called out across the water, "Thor aid you."
Thorvin made the sign of the Hammer in reply.
"Lead on," said Shef to Cuthred.
Twelve days later, Shef knew he had calculated wrong. He was cutting a twelfth notch in a stick he had carried tucked in his belt since the first few days, and the rest were watching him. They were watching him because he had a dry stick.
That was part of the miscalculation. The first day had been as bad as Shef had thought it would be, remembering the agony of the climb up the shore, where he had met Ekwetargun. The mountain-side had never been a vertical wall, to be scaled. Yet it had never flattened out enough to become a place where a person could walk, either. First the thigh muscles ached. Then the arms began to join in, as the weary climbers pulled themselves up more and more, pushed with their legs less and less. The breaks for rest became longer, more frequent, the pain worse at each restart.
All that Shef had predicted. After all, it was only a matter of climbing, say, five thousand feet. Five thousand steps would do it. We must have done three already, he told the others. Two thousand steps! We can count them. And though he had been wrong about the number, he had been right that there would be an end.
So, then, for a few days, high spirits. Cooped up in slave-quarters or on ship-board for so long, the English had revelled in the air, the sunlight, the immense distances they could see, the exhilarating bareness. The bareness. That was the trouble. Even Thorvin had confided to Shef that he had expected to meet what the Norwegians called barrskog, thickets of scrub. But they were far above the tree-line here. Each night, each fireless night—for they had carried no wood—the cold seemed to clamp down more fiercely. Food was rationed strictly. It never seemed enough. Maybe if they had had a fire to boil their meat in, they began to mutter to each other, the dried seal-meat might have felt as if it filled a belly. As it was, it seemed to be like chewing leather. An age to choke down, and only cramp in the guts once it was there. Night after night, Shef woke from his cold sleep, even in the down-lined bag, dreaming of bread. Bread with thick yellow butter on it. And honey! With beer, thick brown beer. His body cried out for it. None of them had had much fat on their bones to begin with, and their bodies were beginning to break down muscle for want of anything else to use.
So they stared at his stick, wanting him to shave it down, use it for tinder, light a fire and burn—burn the sere brown grass and moss that covered the rolling upland plateau. It was impossible. But they thought it.
At least they had made some distance, Shef reflected. Neither hills nor woods had detained them, though swamp and bog had. Yet they had not come upon the lake he had hoped for, and all Cuthred would say was that it must be further on. A lake, he said, with trees round it, with bark that would make light boats. So Echegorgun had assured him. Pity Echegorgun won't come and show us, Shef had felt like saying again and again, keeping silent in view of Cuthred's doubtful loyalties.
A few days ago he would have told himself that at least the party was staying united. The ability of the ex-slaves to endure hardship had been a great asset. Where proud warriors would have argued and fought and blamed each other, making something out of every blister or bellyache, Shef's party had behaved to each other like—well, like women, Shef had to say. When Martha got the gripes one morning and might have delayed their start, it was Wilfi who acted the fool and distracted attention. When Udd, the weakest of the party, began to limp and go whiter and whiter in the face trying to disguise it, afraid that he would be abandoned, it was Ceolwulf who halted the march, dressed Udd's sore heel with his own ration of sealfat, and walked by his side to encourage him.
Yet the strain was starting to tell, showing in bickerings. Cuthred, especially, was getting worse again. The day before Karli, still irrepressible when it came to women, had caught up with Edith as she walked ahead, and fondled her buttock for a moment. He and Edith had been bed-partners since Drottningsholm, when the chance came, and she had not protested. But Cuthred, walking behind, had said nothing, merely caught Karli a great sweeping blow on the ear. For a second Karli had squared off to him. Then he saw Cuthred's ostentatious openness to the punch, knew that the counter would be lethal, dropped his shoulders and turned away. Now Karli was humiliated. Not as much as Cuthred had been, but there was enmity there now, and spreading as people took sides.
Shef tucked the stick back in his belt, looked up at the stars coming out in the frosty air. "Sleep now," he said. "March at dawn. We've nothing better to do. We'll find wood tomorrow, and Cuthred's lake."
When the leader weakens, then the army is hindered, so goes the proverb. When the leader has to joke, then the army is weak already.
Somewhere above, a mind was watching. Looking down at the little comfortless party, nipped by the cold and by the belly-pinch, one of them at least sobbing silently with an internal pain. It watched with satisfaction, tempered only by caution.
He survived my whales, it thought. He survived my disciple's test. He carried my spear and he still bears my mark, but he does me no honor. Has never done me honor. But what is honor? The important thing is, he weakens me and mine for the day of Ragnarök.
Yes, thought the Othin-mind, I have slept little since the death of my son. Since they took Balder from me, and the best of my men, my Einheriar, failed to bring him back from Hel. Since then the world has been gray and dull, and so it will stay till the day of Ragnarök. And if we do not conquer on that day, what hope is there? But this creature, this manling born in a bed, wants to make the world better as it is, to give men happy lives before Ragnarök comes. If that belief spreads, where will my Einheriar come from?
He must die here and his thoughts die with him. And his followers too. And yet there is a loss there, a loss there as well. For the creature with my one-eye has a kind of wisdom—I wonder who put it there? Sometimes he reminds me of one of my other sons. In any case, he sent me a great champion for the day of Ragnarök, Ivar Slayer-of-Kings, who now fights daily in Valhalla with his fellows. And the one he takes with him, he is a great champion too, the mutilated one. There are no women in Valhalla to irk him, he would be welcome. Baptized to the White Christ he may have been, but there is no belief there now, he could be mine, come to me for my collection. But to do that he must die with weapon in hand.
It would be a pity to lose him. Even the one-eye, he has a kind of cunning, and that is scarce enough in the fields round Valhalla. What shall I send them? Shall I send my wolves? No. If the wolves ate them, that might be well enough. But just now they would eat the wolves and find them tasty. No, the whales failed and Valgrim failed, and the old iötunn was never mine but rather the brood of Loki. The wolves would fail too. So I will send them snow. And in the snow, my Finns.
The flakes began to whisper down out of the sky shortly after dusk, at first just one or two, seeming to crystallize rather than fall. Then bigger flakes, and bigger, and a wind rising out of the north to drive them on. Around midnight the two sentries, seeing the snow starting to drift around and over the humped sleeping bags on the bare ground, decided to wake people up and make them shake themselves clear. The camp turned into a slow shuffle of exhausted men and women struggling out into the cold air, shaking their bags down, moving to a new spot, lying down, feeling the hard ground beneath them turn to slush under their own escaped body heat. They began to shuffle unconsciously to get into the lee of each other, the camp moving slowly piece by piece downwind.
Some time before dawn Shef, realizing what was happening, made a line of backpacks and raked snow over them to create a makeshift wall, putting the party behind that in ranks, the weakest in the middle and the strongest on the edges. Few people slept much for all that. Dawn broke on people tired, hungry, and still fireless.
There was no moving till the snow stopped, as it did after a few hours. They looked out then on a featureless white plain, the sun hidden behind clouds. Shef felt a momentary stab of doubt. During the night he had lost all sense of direction. With the sun hidden... He had heard that there was a kind of clear rock that so concentrated the rays that you could see the sun even through cloud, but there was none of it in this group.
He controlled his fear. Which way they went was no longer material. They had to find wood and shelter, and any way that led to that was good. Salvaging the skis from under the snow, he told Thorvin and Ceolwulf, their only skilled users, to go in different directions as far as was visible, to look for a break in the plateau.
Only after they had left did he think to count heads. They were one short. The missing woman was Godsibb, a fair, silent, sad girl, who had trudged along without complaint ever since they had taken her from Drottningsholm. Even Karli had not bothered to try his luck with her. She had never responded even to his good cheer. They found her body, a hump in the snow surprisingly far away, showing how much they had moved in the night.
"What did she die of?" asked Shef after they had swept the snow off the body with their hands.
"Cold. Exhaustion. Hunger," said Hund. "People have different levels of resistance. She was a thin girl. Maybe her bag got damp. Nobody noticed her in the night and she fell into the snow-sleep. It is a peaceful way to go—better than the fate Queen Asa would have given her," he added, trying to deflect Shef's self-criticism.
Shef looked at the worn face, too tired for a young girl's. "She came a long way to die here," he said.
And in dying she had caused him a problem, too. Impossible to bury her in the frozen ground. Could they leave her in the snow, under the snow? It would look all right as they marched away, but no-one could avoid thinking of what would happen when the snow melted and left her exposed.
Hund touched Shef's arm and pointed silently. On a knoll a hundred yards away, a four-legged shape looked at them, then sat down to wait, tongue lolling. Others drifted up behind it, took in the situation, and sat or lay down.
There were different views about wolves. Some of the English were quite used to them, said they were hardly dangerous at all. Brand had contradicted that with his usual finality. "They'll pull you down," he said. "Not frightened of people at all. Of course they won't attack a score of you, armed and together. Two men off in the forest, that's another story."
The wolves meant they could not possibly leave Godsibb, not till they could find earth to lay her in, fire to soften it, and stones to pile on her grave. Carrying her would just weaken the carriers further. If they ended up with another corpse to carry, and another...
Shef called two men over, told them to tie her in her bag, attach ropes to it and drag her through the snow when they moved on. He waved aside Fritha's eager offer to shoot a wolf with his crossbow. Waste of a bolt. There would come a time when their need would be greater. Meanwhile the hunting bows had been lost in the night, put down on the ground and buried in the snow. Shef organized the party into a line and made them move back over the whole area they had covered in the night, back to where he thought was their original campsite, probing with feet and gloved hands. They found two of the four bows but only one quiver of arrows, also a set of skis and someone's discarded backpack. By then it might have been noon, and not a step advanced on their journey. A poor start for the first day of bad weather. Shef scowled at the man who had lost his pack, and rubbed the lesson home with harsh words.
"Keep everything by you. Or on you. Don't leave anything ever till the morning. Or there won't be a morning. And remember, your mother isn't with us!"
Thorvin and Ceolwulf were back, looking annoyingly warm and cheerful from hours of positive action.
"Head that way," said Ceolwulf, pointing. "There's a dip, a valley going down, and what looks like trees a few miles off."
Shef reflected. "All right," he said. "Look. Just two of you might not be safe, with our new escorts. Pick four of the youngest and show them how to use these skis. Then take them forward, ahead of us. Even your beginners will be faster than people floundering in snow. When you get to the trees, break wood and bring back as much as you can carry. A fire will put heart into people, and make it easier for them to walk on. I will bring everyone on as fast as I can. Take care not to lose sight of us, and come back at once if the snow begins again."
The skiers went ahead of them, Thorvin and Ceolwulf calling advice and helping fallers to their feet. Shef and the rest, sixteen of them towing one body, kept on trudging forward, occasionally stumbling into drifts. The snow crept down boots and inside mittens.
Piruusi the Finn reveled in the snow, the first fall of the year, early and welcome. He had left his snug skin tent at dawn, watered the bone runners of his sleigh and left them to ice, wiped his face and his skis with yellow reindeer-fat, and skimmed away, bow in hand. He hoped for ptarmigan or Arctic hare, but anything would be welcome, even nothing. Winter was the time of release for the Finns, and if it came early, then their ancestral spirits looked kindly on them.
As he swept up to and past the tent of old Pehto, the shaman, Pehto came out and hailed him. Piruusi stopped, frowning. Pehto was too powerful with the spirits to vex, but he called always for attention, respect, food and fermented milk.
Not this time. Capering professionally and shaking his rattle, Pehto nevertheless for once spoke sense. "To the west, Piruusi great hunter, lord of the reindeer. To the west, something comes. Something with power, Piruusi, and a god's disfavor. Aiiee!" And he began a manic stamping dance, which Piruusi ignored.
Nevertheless he swung out of the low birch wood, its leaves already turning brown from the first frost, and pushed up the gentle slope to the west. His skis hissed smoothly across the snow, Piruusi moving without thought and without effort. Ski-poles were slung across his back, but on anything less than a full slope he had no need of them. More important to hold the bow and arrow, ready for a shot at any moment. One lived in the winter wild by preying on every opportunity. Never turning down a chance.
There was something there, sure enough. Had the old fraud really seen them with his mystic vision? Perhaps he had risen early to look, for they were plain enough, a straggle across the snow. First, men on skis. Men! They fell over every hundred paces, worse than boys, as if they were babies. And behind those, clear enough to Piruusi's long-sighted eyes, a herd of them, moving like oxen, floundering along, kicking up snow with every step. They dragged a makeshift sled or travois with them.
Piruusi had never paid a Finn-tax, but those of his cousins who lived nearer the shore did so. It was worth it not to have their summer fisheries and fowling-trips cut short by the murderous seamen. Time, Piruusi thought, for someone to pay a Norse-tax in return. He skimmed back to the cluster of tents, men and women inside the flaps cooking over their hot fires of dried reindeer dung, called the menfolk to their skis and bows.
Shef's party regained their strength as they reached the first clump of trees, mere dwarf birch, but desperately welcome. Shef called the skiers back to join the marchers, anxious that no-one should be lost sight of.
"We'll get into the trees, find shelter," he called. "Then we can have a fire and cook. At least we'll be off the moor."
As if in answer, an arrow from behind a tree struck Wiferth, struggling with his skis, in the base of the skull. He fell instantly, dead as a herring before he struck ground. Moments later the air was full of the zip of arrows, the trees full of figures flitting from one trunk to another, never showing for more than an instant, calling encouragement to each other in some unknown language.
Many of Shef's party were veterans. They crouched immediately, shook out into a rough circle, moved behind what cover there was. But the arrows came from all sides. Not shot with much force—Shef saw Ceolwulf grimace and pull an arrow from the brawn of his thigh, seemingly with little effort—but deadly to throat or eye. The shooters were quite close in.
"Fritha," Shef called, "use your crossbow. The rest of you with bows, shoot if you're sure, not otherwise. If you don't have a bow, lie down."
The crossbow clicked as Fritha cocked it. Cuthred, using his initiative, stepped over to behind Fritha, batted an arrow away with his shield, stood over him to guard his back. Fritha sighted on a tree-trunk with a Finn behind it, waited for the man to bob out for his shot. As the Finn emerged, Fritha squeezed the trigger.
Hit in the center of the chest at thirty yards, the Finn flew backwards, the bolt buried up to its feathers. Piruusi, ten yards away, looked over in surprise. The Norse were not bowmen! Nor had he seen a bow. He had no martial tradition, no urge for glory. He fought like a wolf, like a predator. If the prey offered resistance, withdraw, wait. The Finns drew back, still shouting and releasing arrows.
"Well, that seemed easy enough," muttered Shef, rising to his feet.
"Wait till we try and move," answered Cuthred.
A few hours later, with still time left before the dark came down, the position was clear enough. Shef's party had lost two dead—they now had three corpses to drag—and half a dozen with minor arrow wounds. Crossbows or the threat of them kept the Finns at a distance, but Shef believed only a couple of the dozen bolts shot had taken effect. They had not top many left, and the Finns were growing adept at creeping up, shooting, and skimming away in the trees. They were deep in the wood now, and the shelter they had looked forward to so eagerly was proving a menace. On the open moor they had left, their longer-range weapons would have been decisive. It was a bad prospect for the night. Time to fell trees, make a barricade. At least they could have their promised fire.
As the first axeman struck at a birch tree, Shef noticed a bundle wedged in its branches. He stared up. A long bundle. An ominous long bundle.
He pointed it out to Thorvin, both men crouching for fear of the flying arrow. "What is that?"
Thorvin pulled his beard. "I have heard that up here, where the ground is often frozen too hard to bury their dead, they place them in trees instead."
"We are in the Finns' churchyard?"
"Hardly a church. But a burial place, yes."
Shef waved the axeman on, looked round for other tree-bundles. "Get a fire lit," he called. "A big one. Maybe they will pay a ransom for their dead."
Piruusi, watching, scowled again. The fire the Norse-folk had lit silhouetted them, would make them good targets in the night. But that was his own grandmother they had cut from her rest! What might they do? Not burn her? A burnt ghost lost its body in the other world, would come back to haunt its careless relatives. His grandmother had been trouble enough while she was alive.
Time, Piruusi thought, for trickery. He skied away from the reindeer sleigh they had brought up to carry off their dead, broke off a branch with leaves still on it, waved it in token of parley, alert all the time for any sign of one of the strange weapons being brought to bear on him.
Shef saw the man in the skin coat and trousers waving a bough, noting with envy even at that moment the beautifully supple leather—Piruusi's wives had spent many a day chewing the skin to that grade of softness. He saw his alert readiness to dodge, pushed aside Fritha's crossbow, broke off a bough himself and walked forward a little way.
The Finn stopped maybe ten yards off. As Shef wondered what language he might speak, the Finn solved matters for him by calling out in fair if fractured Norse.
"You," he shouted. "Why fire? Why cut down trees, take down old people? You burn them? They do you no harm."
"Why you shoot arrows at us?" retorted Shef in the same style. "We do you no harm. You kill my friends."
"You kill my friends," replied the Finn. Shef noted a flicker of motion out of the corner of one eye, something moving from tree to tree to his left. And to his right. The Finn was calling out again, trying to fix his attention—while the others came in on him from either side. He was trying to take a prisoner, not make a parley. It might be a good idea if they did try. If Shef could embroil two or three of them Cuthred would charge to his rescue. And that might frighten them enough to ensure free passage. Of course he, Shef, might not survive it.
There was something else moving in the forest. Not to either side, but behind the parleying Finn. He had left his sleigh and the two reindeer that pulled it behind him. The animals were standing quietly trying to grub lichen of some kind off the ground. But there was something definitely there behind them.
With incredulity Shef saw the towering bulk of Echegorgun step out from behind a dwarf birch tree. He could not have been behind the tree. The tree's bole was at most a foot thick, barely thicker than one of Echegorgun's arms. Yet there he was in plain sight, looking at Shef, evidently meaning to be seen. A moment before he had not been there. In any case Shef pondered, baffled, they had just spent days and weeks crossing an open moor where you could see every bird and blade of grass. How could Echegorgun have tracked them? Even the reindeer did not seem to have noticed him. They ate on, unalarmed.
The Finn had noticed Shef's fixed stare. "Ho, ho," he hooted. "That old game. 'See behind you, Piruusi, something there.' Then I look, your men shoot, shoot."
Echegorgun stepped carefully up to one of the grazing reindeer, took its head in his massive hands, turned it with a kind of delicacy. The reindeer's legs crumpled immediately, it fell forward, held up for an instant by Echegorgun. He moved to the other, still unmoving, snapped its neck with the same care and lack of haste.
And then he had gone, faded into the birch-shade as if he had never been, leaving only two dead animals to mark his passing.
Piruusi realized suddenly that Shef was ignoring him, whipped round like an adder. Saw his dead beasts unmoving on the ground. His eyes widened, his jaw dropped, he turned back to Shef with fear and disbelief on his face.
Shef turned and looked deliberately at the Finns creeping up from each side, yelled back to Fritha and his mates to mark them. Pointed warningly at the crossbows coming up. Then walked over to where Piruusi now stood by his dead reindeer.
"How you do that?" asked Piruusi. Could Pehto have been right, old fraud or no? Was there some kind of power in this odd man with the one eye and the old spear?
He felt the broken necks of his darlings, his treasured speed beasts, and asked again, "How you do that?"
"I did not do that," said Shef. "But you see, I have friends in these woods. Friends you cannot see, friends you do not want to meet. Have you heard of such things?"
Evidently the Finn had, for he was looking round nervously now as if at any moment some creature might appear behind him and put fingers round his neck. Shef reached over and tapped him with the butt of his lance.
"No more shooting," he said. "No more tricks. We want fire, food. Give gold, silver. Go on to Jarnberaland. You know Jarnberaland?"
There was recognition in the man's eyes, as well as doubt. "I show you Jarnberaland," he agreed. "First we drink together. Drink of..." he seemed to have trouble finding a word. "Drink seeing-drink together. You, me, Pehto."
Not understanding, Shef nodded agreement.