Hans Gunnarsson, though no longer Skinny Hans, was not overfed. It was true that for the ten centimeters he’d grown since he’d left the ting, he’d gained more than twenty kilos, but the weight was sinew. He’d been living off the land, eating small birds, mainly, and an occasional hare. Which had sufficed, but mostly without satisfying.
Just now he watched something much larger moving through the treetops. He’d seen something like it a couple of days earlier, but hadn’t had a clear look, and didn’t know what it was. Now it seemed he might, for it had stopped moving, as if looking down at him through a thin screen of leaves. He stopped his horse, and without dismounting, carefully drew his bowstring, aimed and let go.
It thrummed, sending the arrow up and through the leaves. He heard a meaty “thunk,” and watched whatever it was plummet; it landed with a “whump” on the forest floor. By that time he had another arrow nocked. When the animal didn’t move, he slipped from the saddle and trotted toward it.
To stare dumbfounded. It looked like a sort of cross between man and dog, with coarse green-gray fur. It would, he thought, weigh about four tradestone—roughly twelve kilos. The arrow had entered its chest and thrust out its back.
It was, of course, a monkey, a macaque. They’d lived in those hills from ancient times, and increased with the return of extensive forest, despite a difficult climate. With the worsening winters of recent decades, they’d decreased again, the survivors tending to have the thickest fur and the greatest mass-to-surface ratio.
Kneeling, he examined it more closely. It had ears much like a man, and hands, and a gnome-like face, but its feet had thumbs. He wasn’t sure if he’d killed some kind of person or not. It wore no garment though, or belt or anything else, so he decided it wasn’t. He hobbled his horse, and within five or six minutes had gutted, skinned, and spitted the creature and constructed and lit a fire.
Even so, he didn’t watch it roast. Without the fur, it looked more human than ever, though the proportions were wrong—the legs were as much like a dog’s as a man’s, and the forearms were too long for the upper arms. The genitals, on the other hand, were almost miniatures of his own.
At the first bite he nearly got sick, but controlled it. To find the meat tough and a little dry, but sweet withal. He thought wryly that now he knew what a cannibal knew—how the flesh of a man tasted.
As he ate, he thought about his situation. He had no idea where Nils might be, or how to find him. And summer wouldn’t last forever. Nor did he care to winter alone in an unknown land, although if he had to . . . Perhaps he should turn back westward to the land of the Buriat and winter there. He didn’t doubt that Achikh would take him in. As for Baver—Hans shook his head. He’d seen the star man taken away, and there’d been nothing he could do for him.
He didn’t stop eating till one thighbone was bare. The sun was only midmorning high, but his belly was stuffed, so he lay down in a gap, to nap where the sun had warmed the ground.
His dream was confused and ugly, even frightening. He seemed to waken from his nap to see a creature like the one he’d eaten, but it was as big as Nils, carried a sword, and wore armor. “You have eaten my child,” it said. “Now you will have to live with my wife and me, be our son and tend our cattle.”
“Where do you live?” Hans asked.
“Up there.” The creature pointed into the treetops. Then, even bigger than it had been, it grasped Hans by the scruff as if he were a cat, and began to climb. He wanted to struggle, but it seemed hopeless. The creature’s knife was within his reach, and he considered drawing and striking with it. But clearly it was a human of some hairy sort, and he had killed its child. It seemed to him he owed it something. If it wanted him to herd its cattle, he’d just have to do it.
When they reached the treetops, a skyboat awaited them, with steps. A hairy woman stood in the door. “Is this the one that did it?’ she asked. Without waiting for an answer, she took Hans from the hairy man, and gripping him with both hands, began to roar, shaking him. She shook him hard and long, her roar seeming too great to come from any human throat. Terror swelled. Then she dropped him.
It seemed he fell and fell, so frightened that the scream stuck in his throat. When he landed, his eyes flew open, dispelling the dream. There had been no impact, and for a moment its absence changed terror to surprise, but he continued to shake, as if those great hairy hands still held him like a dice box. And the roaring continued, like the sound of an avalanche. The fist of fear gripped him hard again, for it seemed the world itself must break apart with such shaking. Yet when he looked upward, the treetops, which should have been lashing back and forth, stood quiet against the midday sky. With that, his terror faded to a large extent. Something like this had happened a few days earlier, he recalled, though not nearly so violently, and had stopped after a bit. This would no doubt stop, too.
He did not try to stand, though, until the sense of shaking died. Then gingerly he got up, testing his legs to see if they were broken, until he remembered that the fall had been a dream. He looked around. His horses had fled in panic. Belting on his shortsword and slinging bow and quiver, he found their hoof prints and set out tracking them. They hadn’t gone far, perhaps a hundred and fifty meters. He found them trembling in a coppice of young oaks and old blowdowns, and stroked and patted them for a while before removing their hobbles and swinging into the saddle.
As he rode off, he wondered about the sanity of the world. The shaking had felt so real, yet seemingly it had not been. The fear had been real enough though! Much worse than the first time. If there was a third time that much worse than the second, what might happen to him?
And the hairy thing like a little man! Had that been real? It had tasted real, and his stomach still felt full. He shook his head, and wished Nils were there to ask questions of. Surely the Yngling would know the answers.
Half an hour later he found something new to puzzle and impress him: large bones, fresh enough that there still were fragments of shaggy brown hide which the ravens had left. The skeleton was far from intact, but the great broad skull and clawed feet were those of a bear. A large boar-bear, he decided, for surely no sow would have so large a skull.
He tethered his horses and examined the bones more closely. From the teeth marks, it had been killed by some other large animal; at least one had fed on it. Another bear, he told himself—what else could it have been?—but felt uneasy with the appraisal. His mind went to the giant hairy people he’d dreamed of.
He scouted around a bit, but found no useful tracks.
An hour and a half eastward, in a half-dry seep, he found tracks of an unshod horse, and thought at once of Nils. After they’d left the Mongol lands, more and more of the prints they’d seen along the road had been of horses shod, whereas the Mongol horses weren’t. And the people of this land did not seem to travel the wilderness; these were the first horse tracks he’d seen since he’d fled the road.
The trail wasn’t fresh, but he followed it. Nils had had three horses; this was only one. And it meandered somewhat, as if it had no rider guiding it. The young Northman clenched his jaw and continued; he would learn what there was to know from this, good or bad.
For another hour he picked his way along game trails, along and over ridges, skirting thickets, dropping to brooks which gurgled between moss-grown banks and around rocks. Once he paused to drink. Then, as he rode up into a saddle, he smelled carrion. His neck hairs bristled, and he paused. His horses fidgeted, and he spoke quietly to them, patting his mount’s neck. Wetting a finger, he tested the air. The breeze was in his face.
He drew his bow from its saddle boot, nocked an arrow and rode on, staying with the tracks but giving much attention to the woods around him. The stench grew stronger. A little farther on he came to where the horse he tracked had begun to run, headlong, fleeing something. Ahead, ravens squabbled. Cautiously he went on until, near the top of the saddle, he saw the horse half eaten on the ground, forty meters distant. Several ravens were on it, feeding. They glanced at him, then ignored him. His horses almost danced with anxiety, but neither snorted nor nickered. It seemed to Hans that their silence was ominous.
Quietly he rode up to the carcass, the ravens staying till he was almost there, then flying to branches close at hand. Dirt and last year’s moldered leaves had been scratched over it, partly covering it; the sort of thing bears did. He dismounted to examine it, keeping hold on the reins. Flies droned. Bees and hornets gathered juices from the hide, which was steel gray; one of Nils’s animals had been steel gray. The head was obscured by leaves and dirt, and gingerly he brushed them away with a stick.
A cloud of flies rose up. The mouth and nostrils crawled with maggots, but the skin was white. Nils’s gray had had white lips and nose.
Then his mount reared screaming, jerking the reins from his hand, and both horses fled wildly. Hans’s head jerked up and around, to look in the opposite direction.
There, stalking toward him some fifty meters away, was an animal of a kind he’d never seen before, large and slab-sided. Its gaze was fixed on him, and he saw the face of death. Dropping his bow, he darted for the nearest tree, a pine with dead branches within leaping distance, and was there in an instant, leaping, scrambling, breaking branches in his haste, and didn’t pause till he was eight meters up. He’d shed his quiver with his bow.
The animal was right below, looking up at him. It had made no attempt to climb, or even jump after him. Perhaps the dead branch stubs had daunted it. It was longer than a bear, long and rangy with a long tail. Its fur was pale orange-tan, with black stripes across shoulders and back. A cat, he thought, a giant cat. Their eyes met, the cat’s golden and full of hate. Hans shivered. It seemed to him he knew what the cat’s last previous kill had been: the bear.
After a minute it hissed at him, a throaty hiss, then turned and started toward its kill. It paused to sniff the bow, took it in its jaws and shook it. One end caught in the carcass, irritating the cat. It put a big paw on the bow, and twisting with its neck, snapped the weapon. Then it lowered its face to the carcass and began another meal.
It fed, rested briefly, and fed again. Twice it remembered Hans and snarled up at him, showing yellowed knife-like teeth. Finally it left, sauntering slowly up the slope above the saddle. To sleep, Hans thought, and digest its meal. Presumably it could watch its kill from where it bedded, if it was awake, but he couldn’t see it. For half an hour he waited, giving it plenty of time to fall asleep.
Meanwhile he made certain decisions. The first and hardest was to salvage his quiver and arrows, which lay near the carcass. And his bowstring, while he was at it. He would need them to eat. He could make a bow of sorts from material at hand, but arrows and string were more difficult. He also plotted his course, down the saddle and away, the same direction his horses had fled, deciding in advance which trees to run to if the cat came charging down at him.
It didn’t. He wasn’t surprised. Even awake, it wouldn’t be interested in him as prey just now; it had a kill. Its enmity was over his trespass. He remembered the story Achikh had told, of Nils in the arena, fighting a lion. And what Nils had said of it. Perhaps Nils could kill this cat too, with his sword, but Hans had no illusions as to what would happen if the cat attacked him.
The horses had run farther than he’d expected, but eventually their tracks were the tracks of a trot, and finally a walk. He found where they’d paused to browse on maple leaves, and not much farther on he saw them. They let him approach, and he patted them, talking to them for a bit, then swung into the saddle and rode off. He kept to the same general direction, for the sole reason that it put the cat farther behind him.
It was late afternoon when Hans came to a valley of farms. People wearing broad, somewhat bowl-shaped hats, bent at their work beneath the sun. Not far away was a sizeable village. He examined the situation for a minute, then rode out of the forest, keeping to a path between fields. As he approached, a nearby farmer looked up and called. Hans s lips thinned in disappointment; the language wasn’t Mongol. Others within hearing looked up too. He ignored them and rode on. Perhaps someone in the village would be able to speak with him.
Some of the village buildings were of logs, others of baked mud. The street he rode on was dust like talcum powder; each hoof fall raised a puff of it. Somewhere, someone keened thinly, mindlessly, as if echoing the morning’s terror. Few people were on the street: a man pushing an empty wheelbarrow; two women wearing shoulder yokes, carrying buckets in pairs from a public well. They stared as they passed him.
Ahead, a small boy ran into a house, his yells not of fear but excitement. A man stepped out, wearing an apron and holding a drawshave in one hand, as if interrupted at his work. He spoke emphatically to Hans as the youth rode by. The words had no meaning for the Neoviking youth, but he reined in his horse.
The man pointed at him, then held fingers to his mouth and wiggled them as if he wanted Hans to speak, Hans did, in Mongol. “I am here looking for my friend,” he said.
The man nodded, quick bobs, and it seemed to Hans that he wanted him to continue. “He is very large and strong. And his eyes are strange; they have no darks to them.”
The man nodded more vigorously, and turning, spoke rapidly to the small boy who stood beside him. Then he turned to Hans again and pointed up the street. It seemed that he was to follow the child, who had started past him, looking expectantly up. How could it be, Hans wondered, that they seemed to understand him, while their words were a mystery? But he nudged his horse with his heels, and followed the child.
A hundred meters on, they approached a shop from which came the clang of steel on steel. The child turned in through the open door. Hans stopped and waited in the saddle. He could hear the child inside, talking excitedly in his high-pitched voice. A minute later another aproned man, thick-shouldered, stepped into the doorway, a heavy hammer in one hand, and looked up at him.
“Who are you?” the man asked. In Mongol! “What have you come here for?”
“I am Hans Gunnarsson, of the Wolf Clan of the Svear. I am looking for my friend.”
The man looked around quickly, then pointed. “Take your horses behind my shop, where they cannot be seen, and come in the back door.”
Hans did, and found himself in a smithy. “I am called Chen,” the man said. “I am the smith in this village, which is called Lui-Gu. This friend—what does he look like?”
“He is large.” Hans gestured the height, the shoulder width. “And his eyes are strange.”
“Ah-h!” The smith almost hissed it. “Nils of the Iron Hand!”
Hans nodded vigorously. “You know him! He has been here! I had almost given up looking for him.”
The smith’s grin was as much gaps as teeth. “He has been here. Indeed he has.”
The child too was grinning, though it understood none of it. The smith looked at him and spoke in Chinese. The child ran out. “His father is a good friend of mine,” the smith said. “He thought from your skin and height that you might be of Nils’s people. And your hair: red! A color almost as outrageous as Nils’s. Then he recognized your tongue as Mongol.”
He paused. “I told the boy to say nothing of this. It’s not safe for you here. Nils killed the bailiff and most of his hired murderers.” Chen used the Chinese word for bailiff, but Hans understood the rest of it. “The emperor has sent an investigator with a troop of calvary, and he has questioned not only the bailiff’s surviving men, but certain of his neighbors as well. The investigator has left, with part of the troop, but there still are soldiers at the bailiff’s stronghold. It’s the fort on the far side of town.”
His words came more quietly now, almost secretively, although they were in Mongol. “I think I know where your friend is; at least I know where he was taken. His guide stopped on his way home, and told me. I cannot take you, though, till later. How did you come into the village?”
Hans described his route. Chen told him to leave the same way, to circle the village through the forest and hide in the woods below town. He’d come to him as soon as he could get away.
“It’s too dangerous to be seen with you on the street. The investigator is one of the emperor’s wizards who can look into someone’s mind and see his thoughts and memories. He must know what Nils looks like, and have told the soldiers. And you—you are not as large, but still you are much taller than we are, and have the skin and other strangenesses.”
The smith remembered something then, and his face took on a worried look. “Tell me. Where were you this morning?”
“Half a day’s ride that way.” Hans gestured.
“Did—did anything happen? Anything strange and terrible?”
Hans nodded. “It felt as if the world was trying to shake itself apart. I was greatly afraid.”
The man’s face relaxed. “Ah! I was afraid it might be something God had visited just on our village here.
“Well.” He pursed his lips in thought. “People come in here from time to time. It’s time for you to leave.”
Before he left, Hans asked for a bow. Chen said he’d bring one when he went out to meet him.