From—The Järhann Saga, Kumalo translation
The Buriat great council met again in mid-morning, and arguments continued. After a time, a clan chief stood and declared that whatever the final decision might be on alliance with the emperor or invasion of the Yakut-Russ, and whoever might end up as Great Khan, there was one matter about which they had only a single choice: union! They must unite! The only alternative was to remain as they were and be overwhelmed by the empire.
The only real questions before them, he went on, were whether to invade northward, or to ally themselves with the emperor. And with that settled, who would lead the united Buriat tribes: Kaidu Long Nose or Burhan Rides-the-Bear.
This gave rise to more than an hour of speeches, some terse, some florid. Finally, at noon, Kaidu stood and proposed that the great council adjourn for the day. Let the clan councils meet and discuss the matter of alliance or invasion. The great council could meet again tomorrow or the next day.
The council agreed, and the meeting adjourned.
With Hans and Baver following, Achikh and Nils walked through the dispersing crowd, speaking Anglic for privacy. “If you had a voice in it,” Achikh asked, “which would you vote for? Alliance or invasion?”
“Invasion northward,” Nils said. “I would not see your people leading another imperial army westward to attack my own.”
The answer dissatisfied Achikh. He’d wanted Nils to speak from the Buriat, not the Neoviking viewpoint. “And who would you vote for, for khan?”
“Burhan. Kaidu would make the best chief, for he is both wise and clever. But he has been spelled by Fong, or by the emperor through Fong, and on matters important to them, they will control his decisions.”
“Spelled!?”
“There is a means of controlling someone’s mind. It is not easily done, nor does it work on everyone. But it can be done. Given time, it can be done to almost anyone by certain wizards who can enter the mind undetected. Like Fong.”
Achikh looked worriedly at the big Northman. “And this has been done to my brother Kaidu? Are you sure?”
“To your brother and two others on the great council.” Nils named them, translating their surnames into Anglic so the people whom they walked among wouldn’t know who was being spoken of. Each was an influential clan chief within the Black Stallion tribe. “Fong is a powerful wizard; in the West he’d be called a psi. The emperor seems to be another. And between the two—the emperor and Fong—is a greater power I do not understand yet.”
By this time the crowd had thinned somewhat. Baver was wondering if Nils could do that sort of thing: enter a person’s mind and control it. And if the Northman had ever controlled him. As they walked, a bellowing voice called to Achikh by name. They stopped.
A huge, burly Buriat strode up to them, his eyes on Nils rather than Achikh. Four cronies were with the man, all hard-looking. “Foreigner!” he said arrogantly, and looked the Northman up and down. He was five or six centimeters shorter than Nils Järnhann, but outweighed him by twenty kilos, Baver judged.
The man nodded, as if he approved what he saw. “You speak Mongol, I am told.”
Nils nodded.
“Good! Good!” The Buriat grinned then, an unpleasant grin. “I have never, even as a boy, found anyone who could give me a real match in wrestling. Perhaps you can. I challenge you! You understand?”
Achikh broke in then, in Anglic. “This man is Kuduka. He has been famous as a wrestler since his childhood. Before he was grown, before hair grew on his face and only a little on his belly, he was famous for wrestling grown men. He has a hold with which he breaks their backs, he is so strong, and he is retained by the Mengetu family. I do not doubt he was sent by them. You can refuse to wrestle him; almost everyone does.”
The Northman pursed his lips. “Where is your horse?” Nils asked the big Mongol. “As large as you are, you must have a very large, strong horse.”
The Buriat frowned, puzzled. “Horse? What has my horse to do with our fighting?”
“Take me to it,” Nils said, “and I’ll show you.”
The man stood indecisive for just a moment, then wheeled. “Come,” he said, and strode off toward one of the paddocks, Nils and his companions following, Kuduka’s friends bringing up the rear. Baver’s right hand was in the holster pocket of his worn jumpsuit, gripping his pistol. In the paddock, Kuduka lead them toward a large horse, which came to him. It was a stallion about sixteen hands tall, enormous for a Mongol horse, and powerfully built.
“This is my favorite. It is he I ride for hunting.”
Nils nodded. “Before I answer your challenge, you must let me strike him with my fist.”
Kuduka stared uncomprehendingly. “Strike him?” He frowned, then nodded. “Strike!” he said.
Nils struck the horse on the nose, and it fell like a rock. Instantly Kuduka was on his knees beside it, lifted an eyelid, then seemed to sniff, to smell, as if for the horse’s breath. Finally he got to his feet, face writhing. “He is dead!” he said.
“That’s why I’m called Ironhand,” Nils replied calmly, then made his point. “Among my people, the man who is challenged has the right to name the form or weapons of the fight. If I accept your challenge, then the fight must be with fists. No grappling permitted.”
Kuduka paled, and shook his head. “I challenged you to wrestle. Wrestling it must be!”
Nils shrugged. “Fists or nothing!” he said. For a long moment Kuduka stood confounded, then Nils turned his back and began to walk away. Several voices called out in warning, Hans’s first. Nils, instead of turning to look, dove low to his left, hit the ground rolling and came up onto his feet with sword in hand, somehow not getting tangled up with his scabbard as he did so. It was a move Baver had seen him drill repeatedly with Hans, and made none to soon, for Kuduka’s sword stroke was close. The big Mongol adjusted quickly, sword hacking, clanging against Nils’s. Baver’s attention left Nils then. Gun in fist, he watched Kuduka’s henchmen. Achikh and Hans too had drawn weapons, but Kuduka’s companions, though with swords in hand, seemed content for the moment to watch the two giants fight.
Kuduka was remarkably fast for his size, and skilled, and just now had the energy and savage commitment of a berserker. Yet despite the ferocity of his attack, technique was there to, too thoroughly drilled to be lost in the heat of his bloodlust. Nils, on the other hand, seemed fully occupied with avoiding or fending the blows that rained on him, though he did it most skillfully. Meanwhile men came running to watch, and quickly the fighters were ringed by a small but growing crowd.
At the first brief pause, each man had drawn his knife with his left hand, but first blood was let by Nils’s sword, which partially fended, hacked Kuduka’s left deltoid deeply. Yet the Mongol did not falter. Instead his frenzy increased. His face was contorted, his eyes wide and red, and he snapped and foamed at the mouth like a raging boar. Once he stumbled, yet recovered so quickly, so nimbly, that he took only a modest cut on the back, a gash by the sword tip. Someone was bellowing at him in Mongol to stop. The one shouting was Jaghatai, who did not, however, move to interfere.
Nils’s defense had awed Baver; despite the onslaught he’d endured, the Northman seemed to have only a single cut, though it was long, a knife slash across his belly. Blood welled from it. Now he altered his tactics, took the offensive and drove Kuduka back. The Mongol began to tire, his breath hoarse gasps. He was bleeding profusely from a thigh cut that it seemed to Baver should have put him down. Suddenly he sprang backward and threw his sword spinning at Nils. As the Northman dodged, the hilt struck his face, then the weapon wheeled on into the ring of men behind, scattering them.
Nils didn’t pause. He pounced, plunging his blade into Kuduka’s body just below the breastbone, and the Mongol fell backward, blood spraying. For just a moment Baver stared at the fallen man, then his eyes moved to Nils. The Northman’s body streamed sweat, and his chest heaved. The skin on his left cheek had been split by the hilt of Kuduka’s thrown sword, and blood streamed from it. The cut in his belly seemed not deep; otherwise surely his guts would be bulging out through it.
The Northman looked around him and turned in the direction of the ger. It was also the direction of Kuduka’s four henchmen, and he glared them out of his way with a look unlike any that Baver had ever seen on Nils before. Achikh and Hans had fallen in behind him, and Baver hurried to catch up.
At the ger, Nils’s equanimity had returned, so totally it troubled Baver. Achikh examined the belly gash while Hans and Baver stood by. It was more than a centimeter deep, ugly but not critical. Tonus made it gape, but nowhere had it gone through the abdominal wall. Achikh bandaged it as well as he could. Scant minutes later an old woman arrived from Kaidu’s household, a woman known for her skill with wounds. Removing Achikh’s bandage, she ordered Nils to pinch the wound shut. From a skin she carried, she took long, strongly curved thorns, and with them fastened the gash closed, then put on a new bandage she’d brought. That done, she left, muttering to herself about men and sharp weapons. She’d ignored the injury to Nils’s cheek. No doubt there was nothing to be done about it. It was swelling badly, and the entire left side of his face had turned the color of port wine. Baver suspected the cheekbone was broken.
Yet anyone who’d seen the fight would say the Northman had come out marvelously whole.
Nils did not lie down, but sat upright with his legs folded under him in a way Baver had seen him sit before, a way seemingly impossible for such muscular legs. He ignored the others, and seemed to enter a trance. Some kind of healing trance, Baver suspected.
Twenty minutes later Kaidu arrived, and Nils aroused at once. The chief looked the Northman over. “Old Yesiii tells me it isn’t deadly,” he said. “If it was, someone besides you would die for it,” He turned to Achikh. “Tell me how it happened.”
Achikh’s recital of events was substantially as Baver recalled them. Kaidu nodded. “That agrees with what I’ve already been told.” He looked at Nils again. “Iron Hand, you have rid the tribe of a great nuisance, and before witnesses who say it was no fault of yours. I will have some people questioned, in case someone put Kuduka up to this.”
Then Kaidu left.
Achikh’s lips pressed tightly. In Anglic he said, “Of course someone put Kuduka up to it. Barak. I’d bet a horse on it.”
Nils’s chuckle was brief and humorless. “Bet Kuduka’s horse then,” he said. “For I do not think it was Barak.”
“Who then?”
“I’m not sure. But not Barak I think. Perhaps—perhaps Fong, acting for the emperor.”
‘The emperor? Why would the emperor want you dead? How would he even know you exist?”
“It may have been a test, more than an attempt to kill me. Earlier I said there is a power of some kind acting between Fong and the emperor. I was touched by that power two days before leaving the ting. Later I sensed it at times in Svartvinge. It is the power that created Svartvinge from the spirit of all ravens.”
Hans stared. “Svartvinge was the thing of some evil power?”
“Svartvinge was a raven as the hailstorm was a hailstorm: he was the great raven. But he was sent, as the hailstorm was sent. I knew that when we first communed.”
No one said anything to that for a moment. Then Achikh spoke. “When you communed, did he tell you about this power?”
“He knew nothing except that he was to find me. That was the purpose given him when he was created. He was unable to question it or even wonder about it. But I could see more deeply into him than he could.”
It was Baver who spoke next. “What—what did you commune about, those nights in the cabin?”
“We simply communed. Experienced each other. Now his beingness has dispersed back among his people, and through him, all of the raven folk know mankind more deeply than before. While I—I know ravens now as few ever have. I know what it is to circle high, and to feel afar the beingness of other ravens. While he learned to screen his mind from whatever, or whoever, created him. Thus it, or they, could only observe what he saw and the sounds he heard, not what he sensed inwardly.
“When I first met Fong, I felt the same power behind him. I know no more about it.”
He fell silent then, but Hans had more questions. “Is Fong like Svartvinge? Created and sent by that power?”
“Fong was sent by the emperor, but he is a natural man, not created by the power. More I cannot say. I do not know.”
He spoke no more to them after that, but returned to his trance. Achikh discovered that guards had been set around the place; they told him that Kaidu had ordered them there. They were to let no one enter the ger, or approach it closely. Yes, they said, if any of the occupants left, they would be free to reenter, and their cook would be allowed in, and Kaidu himself of course, if he chose, but no others.
After a bit, Achikh and Baver left together, got their horses and rode off northward, downstream along the Tola. Achikh had never previously spoken to Baver as a personal friend. Now he pointed out places he’d known as a boy and youth, when Kokchü’s clan had camped nearby. With Achikh’s agreement, Baver recorded it all. The cubes in the grip of his recorder would last for years, as would the power tap.
They were back at the ger in time for supper. Hans told them that Nils hadn’t moved. The swelling in his face had gone down. The discoloration had turned to purple-black, and thence to a shading of greens, yellows, and purple. It seemed to Baver that that was an unusually rapid progression, but he wasn’t sure. His personal experience with bruises had been limited, and restricted largely to childhood.
After supper, Achikh and Hans went out together to drill with swords, leaving Baver behind. Nils, who’d eaten nothing, said nothing, nor showed any sign of awareness of his surroundings. He simply sat there, legs folded, back straight. Baver fell asleep before the others returned.
It was Hans who woke first in the morning, with half-light showing dimly beneath the door and through the smoke hole. Enough that he could see Nils was gone.
Hans needed to go to the latrine, and assumed that that was where Nils had gone. But outside he saw no sign of him. It was raining, an unusual rain. Not the typical summer shower, this was more like an autumn rain that can fall for hours, or even from one day to the next. He ducked back in, leaving the door wide for added light. Nils’s things were gone!—saddle, sleeping robe, weapons . . .
“Wake up!” he called. “Nils has disappeared!”
At the urgency in his voice, the others rolled out of their robes and got up. “He is at the latrine,” Achikh grunted. “That’s all.”
“No! He’s not! I looked! And see?” He pointed to where Nils’s gear had been.
Achikh went frowning to the door and peered out. Nearby, guards were still on post, squatting glumly in the rain. No, they said, they hadn’t seen the giant. They thought he was still inside.
Trotting, Achikh hurried to Kaidu’s ger, where the chief’s doorguard, after a brief conversation, let him in. Kaidu, alarmed and angry at what Achikh told him, sent for the commander of the arban assigned to guard the Northman. While they waited, Kaidu told Achikh what the healing woman had said: that the Northman’s wound had gone nearly through the belly wall. That it might burst open and the guts bulge through if he did anything strenuous.
It turned out that the evening watch had seen the giant leave with his sleeping robe draped over him. He was carrying things under it, but what was impossible to see. Yes, it had seemed strange, but he was a foreigner. Who could tell why foreigners did the things they did?
Besides, it hadn’t started raining yet. And wounded as he was, they assumed he’d be back.
No, they hadn’t thought to follow him; they’d been posted to keep anyone from entering the ger, not to keep him from going anywhere. Besides, he was a foreigner; you couldn’t guess what he was doing. Half an hour later they’d been relieved, and hadn’t mentioned it to their replacements—it hadn’t seemed necessary, and besides, it was raining then.
Nils’s horses were gone from the paddock, the one that Shakir had given him, and the two that Kaidu had gifted him with. The horse guards on duty, who were slaves, knew nothing about it. Kaidu, angry now, had the horse guards of the earlier watch brought to him. Yes, the giant had come and gotten his horses well before midnight. They thought it was all right. They were his horses.
What way had he gone? They hadn’t noticed; it had been very dark. It hadn’t started to rain yet, but the overcast had been heavy, and one could see only a few paces.
Kaidu’s anger died. “He is a wizard,” the chief said thoughtfully. ‘Who can understand the comings and goings of a wizard? A foreign wizard, especially. And if, in the afternoon, his wound was dangerous, what might his wizardry have accomplished with it since? I’d hoped to recruit him as the shaman of my house. He is wiser and more honest than Teb-Tengri, and more able. But . . . ” He shrugged.
Achikh jogged back to the ger where his companions waited. Hans and Baver had already bundled their things; Hans would follow Nils, and Baver intended to go with him. “Hurry,” Hans said to Achikh. “We will wait while you get ready.”
Achikh shook his head. “No,” he said, “I’ll let him go. It is not my place to tell him to come back, or to follow him when he refuses. And I believe my brother needs me. But if you’ll wait a little, I’ll see that you have a pack horse and supplies, that you need not slow down to hunt along the way. You’ll be slowed enough by tracking.”
It galled Hans to delay, but he was a Northman, and trailwise beyond his years. Besides, the cook had just arrived. So they waited, he and Baver, and ate.
Meanwhile Kaidu sent horsemen spiralling out from the encampment, under orders to continue till they found tracks that they thought were the Northman’s. They were not to follow them, but to mark the place and bring back word. Hans and Baver should stay till then.
It was afternoon before the two left. By then a cool wind was breaking up the clouds. Briefly, Baver thought Achikh was going to change his mind and go with them, but he didn’t. They left alone, with supplies and a small banner of Kaidu’s house that had a safe-conduct rolled up in it.