NINE

The day after they saw the pinnace, a cold rain fell without a break, blown at times by gusty winds. They sat it out in the woods along another stream. Nils had brought only a small piece of his leather tipi, enough for a lean-to that was too small for three. So they made a crude and leaky shelter of saplings, bundles of grass, and bark stripped from poplar trees. The leather shelter they used to protect their fire, and finished smoking the veal jerky to ensure it wouldn’t spoil.

Baver was glad not to travel. Despite the injections they’d gotten on the Phaeacia, and the booster received on schedule from Matthew, he’d come down with diarrhea the night before, and a runny nose. (The diarrhea would recur occasionally for weeks, but not so intensely.) The worst thing about it was squatting repeatedly in the chill rain, his hands blue with cold and his jumpsuit round his ankles.

More memorable, a bear came that day. They heard him snuff, and came out into the rain to stand him off. Big and hump-shouldered, attracted by the smell of meat, he was only twenty meters off, and reared up tall on his hind feet to see more clearly. Baver held his pistol in a frozen grip. Hans’s long fingers gripped two arrows with his bow hand, and had another nocked.

Nils didn’t even draw his sword. Instead he spoke to the bear, calmly, reassuringly, and after a long minute or so it dropped to all fours, turned and ambled off.

The next morning the three of them went on, and over the next week traveled north and east over hundreds of kilometers of not-quite sameness, mostly riding, but walking periodically to rest the horses. Twice they encountered the remains of ancient towns, recognizable by the change in vegetation. Patches of woods occupied the long-since broken pavements. Brush and scrub trees had overgrown the mounds of broken concrete that were ancient buildings, mounds some of which had been mined for the reinforcing rods, and more or less buried by windblown dirt. Clearly, during some recent century, there’d been a prolonged drought period with dust storms.

Once, at a river, they saw the remains of old bridge footings. Another time they encountered an ancient raised railroad bed, crossing a broad wetland like some improbably straight esker. A nearly continuous stringer of woods grew along it. The rails of course were gone, no doubt salvaged long before the plague.

During the four years of preparing for the expedition, the courses Baver had liked best were those on terran ecology, and he thought he saw the why of the woods on the roadbed. The dense stand of reeds and tall grass, so hostile to tree seedlings, would have been interrupted by the roadbed of crushed rock, even after dust storms had added soil to it. While tree seedlings had obviously been able to establish along its edges, probably migrating along it from the Carpathian foothills visible to the west. And the marsh would rarely be swept by fire—rarely enough that the young trees had time, between fires, to mature and grow thick protective bark.

His mental reconstruction of the process pleased him, and he began to pay closer attention to the country they passed through.

It had been swept and depopulated by the Orcs, and only once did they see people, five poorly dressed men on horseback following a river upstream. They’d seemed cautiously friendly, but the little Anglic they knew was a pidgin too strange for Baver’s understanding. He caught “Orcs” and “travel” and “good place.” Nils said they were fishermen from the Danube delta, looking for new land to colonize, drier land, now that the Orcs were gone. Their horses were Orc horses, left when Northman patrols had tracked down and killed Orc refugees who’d been terrorizing the fisherfolk.

It seemed to Baver that they’d said too little too brokenly to impart all that, and at any rate he doubted that Nils had understood their pidgin much better than he had. Perhaps he was as telepathic as Nikko said, as telepathic as the Northmen believed. Or perhaps he’d put the picture together logically from what he already knew and what he’d observed. Surely the fishermen’s horses were fine animals, Orc animals, not the nags you might expect delta fishermen to have, if they had horses at all.

They crossed the largest river they’d seen since the Danube, then turned eastward away from the Carpathians, and late that day camped in the woods along another wide river. Over the next week they left behind the last of the occasional oak groves. The grass remained luxuriant but less so, and the only trees were along the streams. The large rivers flowed more or less southward now.

As they rode, Baver, at Nils’s request, gave Hans lessons in Anglic. The boy showed impressive recall of new words and phrases. Baver suspected it was from training as a poet, in a culture which memorized far more than it wrote.

They began to see people again—hamlets near streams, with garden plots, small grain fields, and herds of cattle tended by men on horseback. They must be east of the country the Orcs had swept, Baver decided. But even there, there seemed to be few young male adults. They’d gone to the Orc War, he supposed, and been slaughtered. The people weren’t actively hostile, but the herdsmen—adolescents and old men—strung their bows and watched the three of them closely until they’d passed by.

Baver was tired of grassland and marshes, the saddle and mosquitoes. He began to daydream that the Phaeacia had returned, and that three pinnaces were hunting for him, to take him back with them to New Home.

The country grew drier yet, and except in marshes and wet meadows, the grass notably shorter and less thick. Finally they came to the ruins of a great city by a broad river, with some massive buildings and large monuments still standing. Baver asked that they stay there a day, and Nils agreed.

The greatest monuments were on a hill, heroic structures with heroic sculptures, and they rode up there. The statues and wall reliefs all were huge, but one was far larger than the rest, standing sixty or seventy meters tall, Baver judged, including an upraised arm. It was of a robed woman, the hilt of a broken sword clenched in one monumental hand. The figures were mostly of soldiers though, of heroism and death, and to Baver the place felt haunted. It gave him actual chills. Clearly a terrible war had been fought there—a terrible battle at any rate—far more terrible than the Orc War.

He recorded what he saw, and wished he could read the inscriptions; though weathered, they looked legible, but even the alphabet was unfamiliar to him. If he visualized the geography correctly, he told himself, this had been Russia long ago. The language would be in the Alpha’s onboard computer, with a translation program.

Crossing the river at the city, they hit a broad grassy trail. Baver recognized it as an ancient highway, its pavement long since fragmented by frost and roots, the fragments covered by blowing soil. It was recognizable from its cuts and fills, its mild and even grades attracting what few travelers there were.

As they rode eastward on it, the country became increasingly dry. Within two hundred kilometers, the grass was mostly less than knee high, the stands thin. Encounters with other travelers were days apart, and uneasy. The strangers would see the giant Northman, and Baver’s jump suit, and pass in suspicious silence. The herds here were widely scattered, wild and usually untended, as if the local people found it easier to hunt their meat than herd it.

The travelers ate mostly marmots now, numerous and fat, victims of Hans’s seldom-erring arrows, or occasionally of Nils’s. It took only a minute or two to gut and skin one, and one was supper enough for the three of them, with some left over for breakfast. They’d dry and smoke a second for saddle rations the next day. Early on, Nils had taught Baver to gut and skin. The ethnologist had been squeamish at first, but soon was taking his turns at it like the others.

Nils pushed for as much speed as they could make without wearing down the horses. Nonetheless, they sometimes camped as early as midafternoon, where there was water. Then, while the horses grazed, Hans would withdraw to a distance and recite aloud to himself, composing and polishing verses for “The Järnhann Saga.” Now and then he’d try one on Nils, who’d sometimes correct or elaborate the story told. Baver was impressed with the boy’s skill. In the evenings, Hans got lessons in swordsmanship from Nils, though he hadn’t been chosen by his clan to be a sword apprentice.

Early one evening they camped a dozen meters off the road, on the lower slope of a hill. A spring flowed from a sandstone outcrop there, to form a rivulet that disappeared into the ground at the foot of the hill. Someone had dug the spring out and lined the hole with rocks, to make it more easily used. Baver was checking his wrist-watch for the Earth date, when a thought occurred to him. Digging through his saddlebag, he took out a sheet of folded plastic.

On it, the previous winter he’d drawn the Neoviking calendar,^* as used in their old homeland by the northern clans. It was a lunar calendar, and he’d charted it against the ancient solar calendar, the Gregorian.

Getting to his feet, he took it to the big Northman. “Nils,” he said, “I’ve wondered about something.” He showed him the chart. “You measure time by moons. Here’s the Moon of Iron Cold, supposedly beginning right after the shortest day, when they start getting longer. But the year measured that way is about five days longer than the solar year, the year by the sun. After twenty years the Moon of Iron Cold would come in spring. How do you get around that?”

Nils grinned. “Simply. Each clan has a post in an open place, or did in the homeland, and a stake to mark the longest noon shadow. The Moon of Iron Cold begins with the next quarter after the shadow is longest, whether that quarter is the full moon or the night of no moon, or the half moon with its back to the . . . ”

“Nils!” It was Mager Hans. He stood on his horse’s back some fifty meters uphill, pointing toward the lowering sun. “Someone is coming! A man with three horses!”

Nils stood as if peering westward with his strange glass eyes, Baver beside him. A man approached on horseback, followed by a packhorse and a remount. He didn’t slow as he came near; the road would take him well clear of them. On an impulse, Baver took out his recorder and began to record.

When the man was about eighty meters away, Nils raised his right hand in a sort of salute. The rider returned it, riding on to the rivulet, where he and his horses drank. When they’d done drinking, the man walked to the little camp, leading his horses, his right hand raised again.

“Friend!” he said. In Anglic, as if taking them for Europeans.

“Friend,” Nils answered.

Baver said nothing, simply looked, thumbing off the video switch on his recorder, letting it hang from his neck like a large amulet, to function unobtrusively on audio only. The man frightened him, looked tough and lethal, and the ethnologist didn’t want to offend him. About Baver’s height—175 cm—he was barrel-chested and thick shouldered, his legs short for his height, and notably bowed. His head was large, and his face broad and flat. A raised scar crossed one side, while on the other an ear was partly missing. His wide-set eyes were lustrous black, and peered through slits that slanted up and out. The skin on face and hands looked thick and leathery. Baver guessed his weight at near a hard hundred kilos.

The horse barbarian looked only briefly at Baver, despite the jump suit. His primary attention was on Nils, whom he examined for long seconds. When at last he spoke, his Anglic was accented like an Orc’s. “I’ve seen you before,” he said, “but not close up. Have your eyes always been like that?”

Nils smiled. “That was two summers ago. My eyes were different then.”

Baver giggled, an act that surprised and dismayed him, and he covered it awkwardly with a cough. He’d had the briefest vision of Nils taking his glass eyes from his head and presenting them to their visitor. The man scowled at him for a moment, then spoke to Nils again.

“I give you power over me: my name is Achikh, son of Korchi, of Bilga’s clan, of the Black Stallions. My people are the Buriat.”

“I give back the power, with more. I am Nils, called Ironhand, Hammar’s son, of the Wolf Clan. My tribe is the Svear, my people the Northmen. I hope you make camp with us.”

“And I,” said Hans, “am Hans the Slim, Gunnar’s son, of the Wolf Clan of the Svear.”

Their eyes turned to Baver then, and with a start he realized he was expected to follow suit. “I’m, umm, Ted, uh, the ethnologist, son of Carlos, of, uh, the Starship Phaeacia, of the planet New Home.”

Achikh, son of Korchi, stared at Baver, who realized he couldn’t read the man’s face at all. It turned away then, releasing him, paused at Hans and stopped at Nils. “I thank you,” he said, then turned and led his animals a short distance off. Within a few minutes he’d set up a sizeable shelter tent, large enough for the man, his gear, and a small cooking fire. He worked swiftly, pegging and lashing things securely. When he’d finished, he came over to Nils and his party.

“Will you sleep in the open?” he asked.

Nils nodded, a slight smile on his lips. “It will not rain tonight.”

Achikh gestured toward the east. “There will be a moon later.”

“The moon does not affect our peoples.”

The man shrugged. Meanwhile Hans had cut some low, brittle shrubs and started a fire. “Where are you traveling to?” Nils asked.

“Home.”

“Is that far?”

“It is unlikely I can get there before winter. Where are you going?’

“Toward the rising sun.”

The scarred face grinned, surprising Baver. “How will you know you’ve arrived?”

Nils laughed. “When I find something interesting enough to stop for.”

They talked for hours. Achikh had left home nine summers earlier, one of a band of nearly sixty youths driven by a hunger for sights and adventures. They’d wandered mostly westward, fighting occasionally, finally allying themselves with a vagrant band of Turks—Kazakhs, actually—youths adventuring as they were, and learned something of their language. The Kazakhs had heard of a great ruler called Kazi the Undying, who hired horsemen like themselves. Deciding to look into it, they’d continued west together to find him.

In the army of Kazi was a band of warriors mostly of the Kalmul people, whose language and customs were close to Achikh’s. The orcs joined the two bands into a short century.

Achikh had a knack for language—he’d learned more Turkic than any other man in his band—and rapidly grew conversant in Anglic, the language of the Orcs and command. For that reason he became “the speaker”—the interpreter and liaison for his century, which was part of a cohort of horse barbarians, the rest of which were Turkic.

He’d been in the crowd in the arena when the captive Nils had been sent in to fight first a lion, and then, unarmed, an Orc swordsman.

“I still don’t understand what happened,” Achikh said. “You killed the Orc, and the next thing I knew, I woke up with a headache. All around me, men lay unconscious or stunned, or like myself, newly wakened and confused. And you were gone.”

He paused as if giving Nils a chance to explain, but the Northman only nodded. Achikh continued. Then, he said, Kazi had sent his army to conquer Europe. In a northern country with forest, marsh, and prairie intermixed, they’d met the Neovikings. His centurion had been killed, and he himself had taken command. Then the Orcs had turned back; the rumor was that Kazi was no longer the Undying, that he’d been killed.

“Killed by you,” Achikh added, his eyes fixed on Nils. “That’s what was said.”

Though the Orcs withdrew then, the horse barbarians didn’t. Most of them rampaged westward into a country of forests, cultivated land, walled towns and stone castles, a country where the people spoke an unfamiliar tongue, though most could speak Anglic, more or less.

Baver listened, enthralled. The man was a marvelous storyteller, the better for his accent. His cohort had left that country behind, entering one with a different-sounding tongue, and been part of a great and terrible battle by a river. When it was over, the horse barbarians had been defeated, scattered.

He’d led his own century, what was left of it, still westward, no longer an army but a plague of raiders, living off the land, living for the fights they found and the women they captured. At length, in a country of low mountains and heavy forests, his century, numbering less than thirty warriors by then, had been ambushed on a forest road by a force of knights and bowmen. They’d been backed against a mountain river, and Achikh had jumped in, to strip off harness and hauberk while the current had swept him along the bottom. When at last he’d surfaced, gasping, a score of arrows had flown at him. Quickly he’d dived, still desperate for air, and every time he’d surfaced to gulp a breath, there’d been arrows. It was, he said, the most difficult thing he’d ever done, diving back under three times, four, while his lungs shrieked for air. He still dreamed of it now and then. Finally, half blacked out, he’d reached swifter water and been carried away out of sight.

That was as far as Achikh told it, that night, for he realized the moon was rising. For a moment he looked at it, sitting yellow on the rim of a rise to eastward. “I will sleep now,” he said, and trotted off to his tent.

Baver didn’t often initiate a conversation with Nils anymore, while to Hans he spoke mainly in the context of Anglic lessons. He rarely had anything to say once he crawled into his sleeping bag. Often, as he waited for sleep, he’d lie staring at the stars or moon, scarcely thinking, until he drifted off. Or at the dying coals, if it was cloudy. And on those nights, it seemed he slept the best, commonly with dreams that, while usually unremembered, left an impression of having been pleasant or at least innocuous. Since he’d become aware of this, he’d made a practice of watching the stars or coals. Occasionally, though, he’d fantasize rescue or women till sleep came.

Sometimes he listened in on short conversations between Nils and Hans, invariably started by Hans. Some of these, now, were partly in Anglic, as Hans learned more of it.

On the evening of Achikh’s arrival though, after the newcomer had gone to his tent, and Nils and Hans had lain down in their sleeping robes, Baver turned his face toward Nils.

“Why did Achikh say that about the moon?” he asked.

The Northman, who lay on his back, face up, didn’t turn.

“His people believe that moonlight will give evil spirits power over them. They avoid it when they can; especially they avoid sleeping in it.”

“What utter nonsense!” The words were out before Baver could stop them. They were a major professional malfeasance: he was not to correct or disagree, or evaluate aloud in any way. He was only to collect, record. Well, he thought, it’s too late now. And anyway it’s the Northmen I’m studying, not Achikh’s people. But still he was uncomfortable over having said it. “Do—” he began tentatively, “do your people believe in evil spirits?”

“No. My people do not.”

Baver felt relief; he had not offended. “How do you suppose such beliefs get started?”

“Because evil spirits do sometimes trouble people’s thoughts and dreams,” Nils replied. Then after a moment he added: “But my people aren’t aware of this. To them, dreams are dreams, though some may be prophetic.”

Baver stared at him in the darkness. Nils went on: “Evil spirits don’t have power of their own, as his people think. They have only the power that people give them. My people, not knowing of evil spirits, give them none. Achikh’s people, knowing of them and believing them dangerous, sometimes find they are.

“In the war, Achikh rode beneath the moon more than once, and sometimes slept beneath it. Nothing bad having happened, his belief has weakened, but he prefers not to take the risk.”

Remarkable, Baver thought, and wondered how Nils came to believe in evil spirits when his people didn’t. “Before Achikh gave you his name, he said he was giving you power over him. What did he mean by that?”

“His people believe that if a shaman, or someone with the powers of a shaman, knows your name, especially your full name, they can work spells on you. So they’re careful about giving their name to strangers.”

“And can they? Work spells?”

“They can cast a spell. So far as I know, it’s the victim though, not the shaman, that makes the spell work.”

“You said you gave him back the power with more. What did that mean?”

“I gave him my cognomen, Ironhand. The cognomen is thought to contain something of the person’s soul; holding it is supposed to give the shaman particular power over you.’

Baver lay a long minute examining what Nils had said. “Have you been around Achikh’s people much before?” he asked. “You know so much about them.”

“Only this evening, with Achikh. When he speaks, it opens his mind to me, or those parts of it which lie beneath his words.”

The answer sent a wave of chills over Baver. Telepathy again! He still doubted, but suddenly he was uncomfortable being there with Nils.

In the morning, Achikh squatted down with them, to breakfast on marmot and talk with Nils. When they’d finished, an agreement had been made. They’d travel together until such time as one or the other chose to separate.

For a Neoviking calendar, see the appendix. Back