Nils had pressed hard since he’d left the road. He’d swing into the saddle soon after sundown and continue till half light in the morning, following game trails. The horses, he’d found, saw little or no better at night than most humans, and where it was necessary to travel over windfall-littered or otherwise treacherous ground, he’d dismount and lead them.
At times he found himself near the Great Wall, which was buried in forest and somewhat meandering. It was unmanned. Once he explored a length of it, found a gateway with its gate long gone, and passed through.
He still didn’t know where he was going, but traveled on intuition. It would have been impossible for most men.
Mostly it was wild country, without sign of man except for the wall. He heard wolves one night, saw bear tracks along a stream, and again at a spring. Once on a mud bank he found tracks that made him think of the lion in the arena of Kazi the Undying. Seemingly they’d been made by some giant cat, for there were no marks of claws. Were there lions in this country? He knew no reason to doubt it.
One dawn as the sky paled, he was following the crest of a forest ridge, watching the slopes on both sides for suitable cover to spend the daylight hours. The righthand slope was too steep to be promising. He paused on a rocky overlook to gaze southward, and some five or six kilometers off saw a hill with large buildings on its upper slopes and crown.
He turned downslope there, and picketed his horses beneath a thickness of old maples, leaving them to browse the abundant maple seedlings. Then he hiked back upslope to the overlook, where he lay on his belly. He tried to project his spirit to the distant structure, but nothing happened. Perhaps if he knew someone there, and knew he knew . . . It seemed to him he was looking at the imperial palace; at any rate it attracted him strongly, and at the same time repelled him. It also seemed the place he was to go, but . . . Not yet.
He continued to stare. Usually—continuously these last weeks—he moved decisively, whether or not he had a rationale for it. But just now there was no impulse to follow.
The sun was scarce degrees below the horizon, four or five, and the sky approached daybright. His concentration was broken by a gr-r-rawp! in the sky above him, and without raising head or eyes he looked up. An early raven soared effortlessly, a very large raven. In that moment his viewpoint entered its mind, and he was looking down at himself. Like Svartvinge, it was a raven elemental. But unlike Svartvinge, this elemental had been imprinted to resist him; in a moment it had cast out his mind, violently, and Nils found his viewpoint back with his body again, about his head.
His intrusion, brief but intimate and deep, had shaken the bird, shaken it powerfully because of the injunction it lived with, and turning, it fled toward the palace.
Now Nils knew his next move, though not the one beyond it. He trotted downhill to his horses, untied them and mounted one, then rode away, although it was daytime. The raven’s master would soon know of his presence here, and Nils was not ready yet to meet him or the soldiers he might send.
He rode northward through the morning and into the afternoon, keeping mostly to heavy forest, putting distance between himself and the place where he’d been seen. For a while he waded his animals in a creek, leaving it when a blowdown blocked the way.
Finally he stopped in a stand of aspens, and hobbled his horses to graze the grass and wild pea vines that grew in their light shade. Then he trotted to a nearby group of young maples, in whose cover he lay down and quickly slept.
He awoke to the scream of a horse, and grabbing his sword, scrambled to his feet. There were other sounds, sounds he recognized at once: a bear roared hoarsely, and there was brief thrashing, as if a horse was down, struggling. Nils ran toward it. His packhorse passed him, hopping faster than one might think possible, given its hobbles. Its pack saddle was broken and hanging. A moment later he saw the bear, standing on a fallen saddle horse. He could not see the other.
The bear’s weak eyes spotted the moving man, and it reared to see better. Nils stopped. It was a large animal, a big boar-bear, and it made no sense to dispute a dead horse with it. Nils drew back and turned aside, circling. The bear never took its eyes off him. Twice it made short rushes, and each time Nils backed off. Then he saw the other saddle horse. It was down too; a fallen tree had hidden it before. Its neck and head lay loosely.
Nils turned away, leaving the bear to its kills, picked up his bow and quiver where he’d slept, and trotted off on the trail of his packhorse.
He caught up with it some three hundred meters off. It had stopped, but its eyes were wide and wild, its head tossing. Touching its mind with his, he stood calming it, then approached it slowly, talking to it.
The bear had smashed the pack saddle, and the horse, snorting, flinched with pain when Nils touched its barrel. Ribs seemed broken. He soothed it further, stroking its mind and nose. Then he cut the packs off, cut the straps and removed the pack saddle, took off bridle and hobbles, and left the animal. It couldn’t be ridden as it was, and with luck it might survive. Meanwhile a Northman afoot was not greatly hampered.
He’d jogged and walked for perhaps three hours when he came to an oblong opening in the forest, a clearing of perhaps a dozen hectares. It held grain stubble, a hay meadow, and a sizeable patch of what appeared from a distance to be potatoes; the upper end was blue with flax in bloom. Two children stood bent among the potato plants, perhaps picking off beetles. On the far side stood a hut, sheds, and a small barn, all made of poles fitted at the corners and roofed with thatch. A woman was working in the yard, at what he couldn’t tell. He slipped back out of sight among the trees, and circled the little field to the side with the buildings, at one point splashing through a brook. There was a dog he hadn t noticed—it had been sleeping—and spotting Nils, it began to bark. Abandoning stealth, Nils strode openly toward the hut, though staying beneath the trees. He left his sword sheathed despite the dog, which charged raging at him, to pull up two meters off, barking with fangs bared.
The woman peered around the corner of the hut, saw Nils coming, and disappeared. Nils touched the dog’s mind, and while it continued barking, it no longer sounded savage.
A well-grown boy ran from the barn and disappeared into the nut. Nils watched telepathically through the boy’s eyes, saw hands reach and take a bow from the wall, string it, and grasp three arrows. Then the boy raced outside again.
He appeared to be about sixteen, lean and wiry, work-toughened. Nocking an arrow, he drew it partly back, and shouted something in a language Nils had never heard. The thought behind it was clear though—stop or I’ll kill you! Followed by shock and fear when the youth saw the blank, pupil-less eyes.
Smiling, Nils stopped, spread his long thick arms, palms forward, then slowly reached and unbuckled the harness that held his sword and quiver, and lowered it to the ground. His bow still rode on one shoulder, but unstrung.
The boy shouted something more, and there was an exchange with a younger child. Then a girl of about ten or eleven years ran fleetingly into sight around a corner of the hut, thin legs flying, and disappeared into the forest to fetch their father.
Nils tapped his chest and spoke in Mongol, to indicate he didn’t speak the local language. Then he held his hands in front of him and pretended to ride a horse. The boy watched scowling. Nils raised his hands high, made a sound like a bear roaring, and pretended to strike with one of them. Next he whinnied, and fell to the ground.
The boy’s scowl dissolved in laughter. Nils, grinning, got to his feet, and the boy’s gaze sharpened again.
“I am lost,” Nils said, first in Mongol, then in Anglic, and finally in Swedish. The boy shook his head at each. Nils wasn’t surprised; he’d only done it to pass time till the father came, and to establish a willingness and desire to communicate. Next he pulled his belly in, and with a pained look pressed a big hand against it, then pantomined eating. He wasn’t acutely hungry—he’d killed and eaten a grouse a few hours earlier—but again he established communication, and a sense of this huge foreigner as a human being who was less dangerous than he looked.
Without taking his eyes off Nils, the boy shouted that the stranger was hungry. A woman’s voice answered, and a minute later another child, a boy of five or six, peered around the corner. He drew back out of sight and wailed that he was afraid. His big brother shouted back sharply that he should come out “right now.” Nils grinned. The woman’s voice spoke firmly through a window, but the child did not reappear. After another minute the mother came around the corner with a thick heel of bread and a small chunk of cheese on a wooden plate.
She paused, staring, and spoke in rapid Chinese: she’d never seen so large and terrible a man. Her eldest son answered. The content of it was that the foreigner seemed friendly, and that something was wrong with his eyes. He kept his bow half drawn though, and his own eyes on the Northman. The woman approached Nils by circling around to one side, her eyes on his. She put the plate on the ground three meters away, and backed off.
Nils could sense the father coming now. Bowing, he thanked her, then went to the plate, squatted down on his haunches and began to eat. The little boy’s curiosity had overcome his fear, and he was watching around the corner, “That’s not enough for someone that big!” he shouted. “That’s only enough for me!”
The father strode from the woods, an axe in one hand. After pausing to size up the situation, he approached to within half a dozen meters of the Northman. Nils was aware that his strange glass eyes were troubling the farmer. “Who are you?!” the man asked. “What do you want?!”
Nils didn’t answer, only looked at him. He couldn’t have said what he wanted in any language; he didn’t know. Then a distant raven croaked. It couldn’t see them from where it was, but Nils spoke urgently in Mongol and pointed toward the sky, backwards toward where the raven had called from. And mimicked the raven’s call, though quietly. He flapped big arms, then with his fingers signed the raven looking down at him, and shook his head vehemently. With that, disregarding the boy and his bow, he strode to the hut and went inside. An old man was there, in a chair made of withes. He looked at the Northman in alarm, and began to yammer.
Nils grinned at him and knelt down beside the door as the others followed him in, the farmer bringing his harness with its sword and quiver; things of value were not left lying about outside, to be rained on and get rusty or moldy. The eldest son had relaxed his bow, though he carried it still with an arrow nocked.
Nils spoke to the farmer in Mongol: “The emperor has a shaman who has spelled the ravens to watch for me.”
The farmer frowned and shook his head, but in his mind was the beginning of a thought. For even with Nils’s accent, which wasn’t heavy, he thought he recognized the language. “He sounds like old Chen at the festivals,” the farmer said.
His wife nodded, worried to have this giant barbarian in her house.
“I’ll take him to Chen and see what I can learn about him. I think he said emperor. He may be a wanted man.”
The wife at once looked frightened; she was very afraid of the authorities, Nils realized. But she answered on another tack. “Take him to old Chen? That will cost time! There is too much work to do!”
The farmer scowled at her. “I will take him.”
“But Wu! He is dangerous!”
“He does not seem hostile. And there may be a reward. Jik will come with us. He will walk behind us with his bow, and shoot the foreigner if he does something wrong.”
She felt uncertain that an arrow would kill so large and powerful a man. “When will you go?” she asked.
“Pack food for us. We will go right away.’
Thwarted but still upset, Mrs. Wu wrapped several round, pancake-like pieces of flatbread around two slices from the end of a cheese like a large salami, and put them in a linen sack. Nils grinned inwardly; she’d packed nothing for him. She would not waste more of her family’s sustenance on this dangerous-looking foreigner.
Farmer Wu looked down at the squatting Northman and spoke to Jik, who half bent his bow in response. Then Wu beckoned Nils to stand. Nils did, and Wu handed him his harness and gear, which Nils buckled on.
Next the farmer gestured at himself and Jik and Nils, and made walking motions with his fingers. Finally he gestured toward the door. Nils in turn made the raven sound, and gestured downward with forked fingers from his eyes. He then pointed at the woman’s large field hat, some sixty centimeters in diameter, and at a straw rain-cape that hung on the wall, also hers. He pantomined putting them on.
“He’s afraid the raven will recognize him,” the boy said. “Perhaps it’s a magical raven, sent to do him harm.’
The father snorted. “The cape will hardly cover his shoulders. Take the cover from your bed and put it over him.”
The woman was stricken. Blankets were dear, and if one was lost, they’d have to pay to replace it, for here in the forest they kept no sheep. Sheep were noisy and stupid, enticing bears and wolves and the infrequent tiger.
Nils draped the blanket over his big shoulders, tying it at the throat, then adjusted his gear so his sword was covered and his quiver did not lump conspicuously. That done, he tied the wide straw hat on his blond head and grinned widely, partly in amusement but also as part of the role he was acting. Then, in response to the farmer’s gesture, he went out the door, the man and his son following.
It wasn’t a reward Wu was interested in; he’d mentioned that only to quiet his wife. He was looking at survival. Nor did he feel strong misgivings as they left, although this whole action was drastically foreign to the don’t-do-it-till-you’ve-worked-it-all-out style characteristic of peasants. A style grown out of the slim margin for error within which they survived.
Because Lo Pu-Pang had been narrowing that margin, and too many had lost their land and daughters when they couldn’t meet the bailiff’s demands.
And it seemed to Wu that this giant barbarian was an opportunity of some kind, a possible solution to their problems. One he couldn’t afford to let pass. As for a plan, he would leave that to Chen. The blacksmith had led an adventurous youth, had seen much and known the roughest kind of men.