Baver had learned to cook Northman style, sort of. In the village, he lived in a bachelor house with two young, still unmarried warriors. An old widow came in twice a day, morning and evening, to cook for them, and he’d watched what she did. Watching, listening, and recording were his principal activities. En route to the ting, a six-day trek on horseback from the principal village of the Salmon Clan, he’d not only had his first experience in all-day riding on horseback, a genuine ordeal, but his first experience in cooking, and in eating what he’d cooked. It hadn’t been so bad. By New Home standards, he’d never cared a whole lot what he ate, as long as he was decently nourished.
That night he dreamed of cooking. People kept appearing in his cook fire—which in the dream was much larger than ordinary—or over it in a big cauldron. The first time it wakened him, he’d been quite upset. After building up his fire a bit, and adding greenery to thicken the smoke, he’d gone out among the mosquitoes to one of the campground’s straddle-trenches, to relieve himself. Before he fell asleep again, the thought had come to him that in his dreams, the persons being cooked had all seemed to be there at their own insistence. And when he slept again, though the dreams recurred, they didn’t upset him as they had earlier.
It was the noise of boys playing that woke him to the day. When he got up, many of the adults had already eaten, and gone to the broad ting ground to talk or trade; wrestle or shoot or watch those who did; or watch the council. Baver relieved himself again; filled his waterskin at the stream; ate jerky, strong cheese, and hardtack; and tried once more to reach Matthew and Nikko, with no more success than the first time.
When he finished eating, his watch read 0806. He left his tent to go to Nils’s and ask when, that day, the Northman planned to leave.
Nils’s tent was gone, leaving the fire hole and a circle of pressed-down grass. While Baver stood staring, not knowing what to do, a boy came loping up, one he’d never seen before, tallish and gangling, with a narrow, hawk-like face and orange-red hair. He guessed his age at possibly fifteen years. On one shoulder the boy carried a bridle and light saddle; on his belt he wore a shortsword and knife. “Is he gone already then?!” the boy asked.
“It appears so.”
“Do you know where?”
“No. I wish I did. Were you going with him?”
The boy nodded absently, staring at the trampled grass of the tent site.
“Can you track him?” Baver asked.
“If the horse guards tell me what direction he started in.”
Abruptly the boy left, trotting briskly, and Baver followed him down grassy avenues separating clan camps, to the large rope corral of the Wolf Clan. It was guarded by a one-eyed old warrior with a rough scar bisecting his face, and by two boys about the age of Baver’s guide but somewhat huskier. The youth questioned the old man, who pointed down the stream. The Yngling, he said, had left an hour earlier with his horses: a single saddle mount and a pack horse. The Northmen were not rich in horses.
An hour, Baver thought. Not very explicit. To the Neovikings, an hour was only a concept, carried down through the centuries from pre-plague days when they’d had clocks; now it referred to an interval somewhat shorter than half a day, but somewhat longer than “a little while.”
The boy put down his saddle but kept his bridle. “What are you going to do?” Baver asked.
The question brought a stare before an answer. “Get my horse, of course.” Then bridle in hand, the boy strode in among the horses. Baver stood feeling foolish for a moment, then turned to the one-eyed horse tender. “Do you think he can? Catch up with Nils Järnhann?”
The old man grunted. “Probably. He will be hurrying, and the Yngling probably won’t be.”
“Why does he want to go with him?”
“Hans is apprenticed to Algott Skalden, and has undertaken to complete the Järnhann Saga. He composed a number of the existing kantos, and people agree they are virtually as good as his master’s. I suppose he feels he must follow Nils to know what happens with him. Though to follow the Yngling can easily mean he’ll never live to recite it in the longhouse.”
On this world, Baver realized, that was more than possible. “What’s his name?” he asked.
“The boy’s? He is Mager Hans Gunnarsson.”
Skinny Hans. It fitted. “Thank you,” Baver said, and waded in among the horses to where the poet’s apprentice was bridling a wiry roan. “Hans,” he said, “wait for me while I get some gear and my horse. I’ll go with you.”
The boy frowned at him. He didn’t know this man, except that he was obviously one of the star folk. “For a little while,” he said.
“Thank you. Thank you very much.” Then, as if to seal a bargain, Baver thrust out a hand. After a moment’s pause, the boy accepted it. The ethnologist was startled at the strength of the long fingers. Then he walked quickly out of the horse herd, and when he was outside the rope corral, speeded to a trot.
Baver didn’t strike his tent; he intended to be back before midday. But on the chance that he might not be back before night, he stuffed his saddlebags with things, such as his radio, that caught his eye or thoughts. His recorder was already clipped in a pocket of his jumpsuit, and his pistol in its built-in pocket holster. Then he rolled his sleeping bag in his poncho and tied it. Finally, with his light saddle and everything else on his shoulders, he hurried toward the horse corral of the Salmon Clan. The Salmon Clan! The thought struck him that here, far from any salmon, the clan might consider choosing a new totem.
One of the horse boys helped him catch his horse, and he bridled and saddled it. Then he climbed aboard and trotted off toward the corral of the Wolf Clan.
Mager Hans had left without him, but the one-eyed wrangler pointed the way. “He is young,” the old man said. Baver assumed he referred to Mager Hans’s impatience, but the ethnologist remained irked with the boy. True, Hans had only agreed to wait “a little while,” but he should have waited longer than he had. It seemed to Baver very important that he speak with Nils: learn where the Northman was going, so he could inform Matt and Nikko. And without help—Hans’s or someone’s—he had no hope of finding him.
The trail led down a creek bordered by aspen groves. The stream, mountain-born, here flowed through a lobe of prairie, flanked by dwindling, forest-clad ridges. Clans had passed that way en route to the ting, the Salmon Clan for one. Thus the grass had been heavily trampled, and hadn’t yet recovered. Baver wondered if it was possible to follow the trail of a solitary horse through this. A Northman could if anyone could, he supposed, but could anyone? Especially a teenaged poet!
The clan trails kept mostly to the prairie grass outside the aspens, but here and there were groves of pine as well, not restricted to the stream borders, and in places the trail wound between pine groves. After a brisk twenty-minute ride, he passed the last of them, and saw a slender, solitary rider, no doubt Mager Hans. The rider had crossed the stream and turned northward, where the ridges had shrunk to a pair of low, nearly treeless hills. He was climbing one of them. Baver shouted, and with his heels, nudged his horse carefully down the steep stream bank and started across, at the same time calling to the other to wait.
The other didn’t, so Baver kicked his horse into a brisk trot till he caught up. Obviously Mager Hans had ridden to his tent before starting out; he’d added saddlebags, bedroll, quiver and bow to his gear. Now he rode with eyes fixed on the grass just ahead. Here there was no trampled trail, but Baver could see the signs that someone had ridden ahead of them.
“Nils’s trail?” he asked.
The boy glanced briefly at him. “Ja Du.”
“How can you be sure?”
“It was made this morning by two horses, one behind the other. A saddle mount then, and a pack horse. And who would leave the ting early, especially alone?”
Baver nodded. “I see.” He adjusted his opinion of the skinny poet he rode with. From the top of the hill, he could look northeastward across kilometers of rolling, tall-grass prairie. Nowhere could he see a horseman ahead of them, but it seemed there had to be one; the trail was there. With Mager Hans’s eyes more or less intent on the tracks ahead, Baver decided he’d keep his own attention in the distance. If he should spot Nils, Hans wouldn’t have to watch the trail anymore, and they could speed up. Then he could question Nils and get back to his duties.
Baver wondered how a blind man could start out alone to travel—wherever it was Nils Järnhann was traveling to. And how he’d fought the warrior chief the night before: how he’d parried the chieftain’s savage strokes and won. He hadn’t allowed himself to wonder before. He’d been told of Nils’s blinding by the Orcs, and that he still functioned. He’d visualized a warrior grown gaunt from trauma, gaunt and enfeebled, moving around slowly with a guide. At the ting he’d seen instead a man who walked briskly, as if with two real eyes, a man who might well be the strongest he’d ever seen.
And then there’d been the fight! Nikko Kumalo had said the man saw psychically, but Baver hadn’t accepted that. Nikko was highly intelligent, and usually very professional, but she was a woman, he’d told himself, and therefore given to irrationalities.
He’d been thinking about these and other things when Mager Hans’s horse quickened to a trot. Baver’s head jerked up. Perhaps two kilometers ahead, he saw a horse and rider climbing a hill with pack horse trailing. They’d been concealed by the terrain till then, he told himself, but beneath the thought was the realization that his own attention had been poor. He thumped heels to his horse’s ribs, and speeded after Hans.
As they drew nearer, Baver might have called out to Nils, but Mager Hans didn’t, so the ethnologist kept quiet too. His primary task, after all, was to watch, listen, and record. The observer shouldn’t inject himself more than necessary into the things he observed. As they drew near, Nils must have heard them—he was blind, not deaf—but he didn’t slow. As they drew alongside the pack horse and slowed to a walk, the Northman spoke.
“Good morning, Hans Gunnarsson,” he said. “Good morning, Ted Baver. Have you been listening to the larks?”
Baver stared, slack-jawed. The man hadn’t even turned his head, yet spoke to them by name. “Ja visst,” Mager Hans answered. “They’ve been talking to the horses, those larks, telling them to be careful and not step on their nests. They have sharp tongues, those larks! Like my mother sometimes!”
The boy laughed, then sobered. “You left without me. That was not well done. How can I continue your saga if I don’t know what happens?”
“I would tell you when I got back.”
The Northman said it as soberly as a judge, Baver thought, yet there seemed to be playfulness beneath the words.
“You talked to me about the earlier things,” Mager Hans countered. “But the best stuff I got from others: the Finn, Kuusta Suomalainen; and Sten Vannaren; and Leif Trollsverd; and Ilse; and the star man, Matts. But especially Ilse.
“But this time you’ve gone off alone, and who knows whether there’ll be anyone else to talk with me about what happens. So now I’ve caught up with you,” he finished defiantly, “and you cannot drive me away.”
Nils laughed. “Well then, I guess I’ll have to make the best of it.” He turned his face to Baver. His gaze was not uncomfortable, unless one was troubled by his eyes. “And you, star man,” Nils said. “Why are you here?”
“Nikko and Matt will want to know where you’re going, and you didn’t tell me last night.”
“I did tell you. I am going east. North just now, because the Sea is in the way, but when I’ve gone north far enough, I expect to turn east.”
“East! All of Asia is east of here! You need to be more explicit! They’ll want to find you from time to time . . . contact you, you know.”
Nils Järnhann’s unnatural eyes were steady on him—how else could they be?—his expression mild and non-evaluative. Yet Baver squirmed beneath it, recognizing how arrogant his motive was. Basically he was complaining because the Northman was plotting his own course in life, following his own interests, not living according to the wishes and purposes of the expedition from New Home.
“East is all there is to tell you now,” said Nils. “I not only don’t know where I’m going; I don’t know what places there are to go.”
“Ah!” Baver grasped the opportunity. “There I can help! I can get maps for you! I should even be able to get them printed in your own language. The computer—The—An implement on the skyboat, can make them quickly for you.” Baver’s mind raced, and with it his words, in Anglic now, which the Yngling knew, though not every word. “I know something of the country off east. We studied it on my world, with the old library computer brought to New Home from Earth, eight hundred years ago. And I’ve seen something of it from the air, when we first got back here. There are great mountains—some of them eight kilometers above the sea—partly covered with glaciers, jöklar, that stretch for days. And there are vast scorching deserts; one of them, the Dasht-e-Khavir, is little more than a thick crust of salt on top of soft salty bogs. There are places where a horse can break through.” Well, he amended mentally, a loaded truck at least. Maybe a horse, in places. “There are places where, if a traveler misses the crossing, the mountains crowd you southward to a vast sea, and to go between the mountains and the sea, you have to cross more deserts, or vast dangerous marshes. While the people . . . ”
He became aware that the Northman was grinning at him—the look boyish despite the eyes—and Baver left his sentence unfinished.
“And how am I to get such maps,” Nils said, “without turning back and waiting till someone brings them to me?” His face was serious now. “Shall I govern my life by a wish for gifts?”
Not only the Northman but the boy was staring curiously at Baver, and the ethnologist flushed. “Matt or Nikko can bring them to you. Possibly today. I have a radio.” He patted his saddlebag. “I’ll stay with you till I get in touch with them. Then one of them can”—he groped for a word—“can aim the skyboat at my radio and fly out with the maps.” At which time, he added silently, the responsibility becomes theirs, and I can get back to my own work.
Nils nodded. “You’re welcome to come along.” He paused. “But now it’s time to walk.”
Baver knew what he meant. The Northmen, who mostly were too poor in horses to have remounts, made a practice of walking from time to time, or running, leading their horses to rest them. Nils swung from his primitive saddle, Hans following his example.
There was no question who was leader here. Baver too got down, then they started off through grass belly deep and deeper. And thick. It was not easy walking. They hiked for eighteen minutes by Baver’s watch, then rode again. Shortly they intersected the broad trail of the clans which had come to the ting from the north, and the way became easier. They rode and walked by turns, the time in the saddle about twice as long as the time on foot. Just at sunset they rode down a mild slope to the bottomland above the Danube flood plain. It was sporadically wooded, here mostly with poplars. The woods were much browsed and rubbed by cattle, for this had been Orcish grazing land for years. The three men hobbled their horses and made camp.
There was a small axe in the gear on the pack horse, and by twilight a leather lean-to was set up, a fire burning before it. They were squatted down by it, laboriously chewing jerky, when Nils paused, and seemed to listen. Seeing this, Mager Hans listened too. After a minute the apprentice poet got smoothly to his feet and moved to his bow as if to string it.
Nils shook his head. “Let be,” he said. “This regards me, not you.”
Baver still had heard nothing. After a minute though, he heard a horse snort—a horse or something—some distance off. “What is it?” he whispered.
“The family of Jäävklo. They hold me to blame for his death, and intend to avenge it.”
Baver stared into the darkness, feeling the hair bristle on his neck. If they killed the Yngling, surely they’d leave no witness. His hand slipped into a pocket and found his pistol. Despite Nils’s comment, Mager Hans had finished stringing his bow, and had two arrows in the hand that held it. Nils still squatted, staring into the deep twilight.
Now Baver heard hooves, soft on soft earth, and at the same time saw horses and riders approaching in the near night. Slowly he knelt, and without lowering his eyes, took out his recorder. A moment later one of the intruders was within the firelight’s edge. He stopped and dismounted, a burly man, perhaps 180 centimeters tall, Baver thought, and 100 kilos, with massive shoulders. He was dressed for serious fighting, with a semi-conical steel cap of Neoviking design, and short chain mail scavenged after fights with horse barbarians in the Orc War. Behind him, others dismounted too. For a moment no one spoke.
“So you’ve come,” Nils said, “women, children, and all.”
“We have no place,” the man answered. “We can’t leave my brother’s death unavenged. And when we’ve taken our vengeance, and it becomes known, we’ll be outlawed.”
Nils still squatted. “What is your name? You’ll want me to know.”
“I am Olof Three-Fingers, Olof’s son.” He held up his right hand; the little finger was gone.
“Ah.” Nils bit another piece from a strip of jerky. For a long moment he chewed without speaking. The newcomer waited.
“What form is this vengeance to take?” Nils asked it as mildly and calmly as if talking about some stranger.
“A fight to the death. Your death. You know that, if you hear men’s thoughts as they claim. We are not ambushers.”
Nils grunted. “It’s difficult to ambush someone who hears thoughts.” He chewed for a few more seconds. “And I’m to fight just the three warriors. Well. Tell the others to let my companions be then. If you kill the star man, his friends will hunt you down with their skyboat and wipe you out, root and seed, women and children. And the young one with me is a poet’s apprentice; he’s protected by the law of every tribe. Take them with you, and let them go when you’re well out of the country.”
Baver tried to picture Matthew and Nikko hunting down the murderers. It would never happen.
“Am I to fight you one at a time?” Nils asked. “Or all at once?”
Olof Three-Fingers regarded Nils darkly. “All at once. We are here for vengeance, not glory. Now. Are you going to stand up? Or must I kill you squatting on your haunches?”
Nils bit off another bite. “You have with you fifteen women, am I right? Plus children, and seven freemen. Let me advise you. Instead of simply killing me, let me challenge you to a duel. Hans Gunnarsson here, and the star man, will witness that I challenged the three of you at once. It will make no difference to the outcome, but your family will not be outlaw, and it will save them the blood penalty.”
One of the other warriors spoke then, angrily. “Do not agree to it!” he said. “He is trying to shame us!”
Olof Olofsson answered without turning to face the man. “Shut up. If he wishes to make that small amend before he dies, we will honor it.”
Nils paused in his deliberate chewing, his weird glass eyes directed upward at the warrior who stood in the firelight. “Good. Then I will challenge you, all three. As soon as I’ve finished my supper.”
“No!” said the one who’d complained before. “Finish his supper! Can’t you see? He’s stalling!”
Nils half laughed, half barked. “Stalling? To what effect? I am enjoying what may be my last meal. Have you eaten? Here! It will be your last, too.”
He tossed a piece of jerky toward the man, who stepped forward angrily, drawing his sword. Olof Three-Fingers barked him to a standstill, hand raised as if to strike him. Then Nils spoke again, to Mager Hans this time. “And you, Hans Gunnarsson, unnock your arrow. I intend to keep the killing between warriors. A poet is not to be wasted.”
Then a voice called from the rear of the family of Jäävklo. “Olof! Someone is coming! More than one!’
Looking back, the warrior swore. Nils got smoothly to his feet, his sword in his hand now. “Two of them,” he said. “One is Leif Trollsverd. You know of him. The other is my kinsman, Sten Vannaren.”
He is telepathic then! Baver told himself. How else could he know? Or had he staged the whole thing? Had he known or suspected that he’d be followed by these kinsmen of Jäävklo’s, and arranged with his friends to follow? Leif Trollsverd would be an ideal choice for such a plan. Even Baver knew his reputation, a Norske warrior-hero famed as a swordsman, with his own saga from the Orc War. Even the warrior name given him, Trollsverd, implied someone dangerous, for trolleri meant magic, and in Neoviking tales, trolls were often savage as well as tricksters and magicians, with far more than human strength. By extension, a trollsverd—troll sword—would be terrible to face—powerful, magical, and savage.
It occurred to Baver that he should have his pistol, not his recorder, in his hands. For surely, with such a prospect, Olof and his kinsmen would attack Nils together now, cut him down and reduce the odds against them before Nils’s friends arrived. Olof had said that vengeance was their motive, and Nils their target, and their prospects would be poor when the newcomers arrived.
But they waited, backed into the circle of light, facing the coming horsemen. Mager Hans threw more dry branchwood on the fire, as if to better light the fight to come. As if he wanted to see every detail for the Järnhann Saga he was preparing. Now Baver could hear the dull thudding of hoofbeats at an easy trot, surely more than two horses. They slowed, and Nils called out:
“Leif! Sten! Well come! Knut Jäävklo’s kinsmen have come to visit, seeking vengeance!”
The newcomers rode into the edge of the firelight, or the first two did. Behind them were more. Two more, Baver thought, probably sword apprentices brought along for the camp chores and adventure, being forbidden by the Bans to take part in fighting among Northmen. Four men then, with pack horses. Leif Trollsverd and Sten Vannaren swung easily off their mounts, and as their feet touched down, their swords were in their hands, not flourished but ready. They too wore steel caps and hauberks.
The one who spoke first had a clipped reddish beard, and his accent came from Svealand. “We wondered,” he said. “We were told they’d left the encampment and turned north, and decided to follow. As for vengeance—Knut Jäävklo wrote his fate with his actions in life, and the manner of death he chose was part of his penance. His clan still has the price of his dishonesty to pay, but that’s just: It was they who made him chief.”
“His kinsmen see it differently,” Nils answered. “They blame me for his death.”
Sten Vannaren nodded. “Has a challenge been made?”
“Not formally. Nothing has been said that cannot easily be passed over. Perhaps killing can be avoided.”
Olof Three-Fingers shook his head. “We have decided. Perhaps it was ill done, in the heat of loss and anger, but we have told others what we intended; we cannot go back now.”
“I understand.”
Baver was surprised that Sten Vannaren was spokesman here, instead of one of the two heroes, and wondered if this was some obscure protocol in action.
“Well then,” Sten went on, “challenge if you must.”
Olof Three-Fingers gestured toward Nils. “He said he would challenge.”
Nils shook his head. “That was to save your kin from outlawry or the blood price, and yourself the karma. Now it’s no longer three on one, so you won’t be labeled murderers, and if I challenge with equal numbers, I could be charged before the Council for an unsanctioned feud.” He paused, looking intently at Olofsson. “Men before you nave retracted words said in anger. And while some have looked ill at them for it, that passes, while others speak of them as grown in wisdom.”
The Glutton warrior stared at Nils. “That may be,” he said slowly, “but the cost of such wisdom is pride, and that is a price I will not pay. I challenge you, Nils Järnhann, Hammarsson, to pay with your blood for the death of my brother. Just you and I.” He gestured at his two warrior kinsman. “These can challenge or not, as they please.”
“I stand by my cousin!” said one of them, and the other, after a moment’s lag, declared himself as well.
Leif Trollsverd spoke now in quick, clipped Norse. “I stand by my friend, the Yngling of the People,” he declared. “It is not right that he fight alone against three.”
“And I,” said Sten Vannaren. “He is my kinsman and my friend.” He paused. “It would be well if you spoke to your own kinsmen that you brought with you, who are not warriors, and told them what you want them to do when it is over. For it will be too late then.”
The hotheaded of Jäävklo’s cousins stepped forward with an oath, and once more Olof Three-Fingers restrained him. “I am headman here,” he warned. “I say when we fight.” He turned to Sten. “I will speak with those who are not warriors, and advise them. I will tell them to return to the clan, and that the feud ends here.”
Baver stared as the three Glutton warriors went out to counsel their people. Surely at least three men would die here tonight, as he understood these matters. And even in a culture which believed in rebirth for the dead, how could they act so matter-of-factly? Surely such belief could be no more than a veneer, overlying the deep biological realization that dead was dead. And for the survivors, what of lost limbs?
He could hear them talking, but not what was said. It seemed that Olof Three-Fingers did almost all of it. After two or three minutes they came back into the circle of firelight, and Baver realized that Hans had moved back out of the way. Quickly he followed, and recorder in hand, stood to one side, staring through the viewing frame at the six warriors lining up in two facing rows of three, well spread out. There’d been a bit of jockeying between Olof and the hothead over who would face Nils Järnhann. Olof, with his seniority, prevailed, and sullenly the hothead faced off with Leif Trollsverd instead.
Baver realized with some dismay that his fascination substantially outweighed his disgust. Nils had donned his own steel cap and hauberk, and stood half a head taller than any of the others. But these men were all formidable looking, their hands large and thick with muscle on their sword hilts, their forearms bulging and corded. Leif Trollsverd was the smallest, an average-sized Northman who gave an impression of coiled-spring energy.
They raised their swords, each man with his dagger in the other hand. Then, with an oath, Olof Three-Fingers made his opening move, his blade rotating beneath Nils’s, pushing it aside and thrusting toward the Yngling’s belly. At once they were all in action, blades clashing, bodies and weapons in constant motion, feet in a balanced dance, forward and back, their breathing a cadence of grunted exhalations. Within seconds, Leif Trollsverd’s sword cut a gaping wound in his opponent’s thigh. Blood poured. The wounded man, the hothead, doubled his efforts then, in a frenzy, but the Norske fended him off seemingly without effort, and cut the man’s sword arm so deeply that his sword dropped from nerveless fingers. With a shrill cry, the man lunged with his knife, and Trollsverd’s sword struck his neck, cutting through the chain collette and driving him to earth, half beheaded.
Trollsverd stepped aside to watch the others, and Baver’s attention went to Nils. The giant fought with an easy nonchalance that seemed almost slow but wasn’t. Olof Three-Fingers, by contrast, fought furiously. Then Nils’s blade cleft the man’s helmet, and the Glutton warrior fell, eyes wide and bulging, mouth agape, brains oozing through the rent.
Of the three, only Sten Vannaren still fought, and it seemed to Baver that Sten’s opponent might be the best of the three Gluttons. Blood flowed from cuts on arms and thighs, and each man had rents in his hauberk from strokes only partially fended. But neither seemed weakened yet. Baver waited in near agony for Nils or Leif to step in, but they seemed content or constrained to simply watch. For a moment the two swords seemed to lock overhead, and the Glutton warrior swept low with his knife. At that instant, Sten spun out of the sword lock, his blade sweeping down and across, driving through mail, shoulder, scapula, and into his opponent’s chest, even as the knife sliced the side of his own leg.
For a moment the scene was still, without movement or sound. Then a burly freeman from Olofsson’s retinue stepped into the firelight. Bending, he took Olof Three-Fingers’ body under the arms, lifted, and began pulling it away. Almost at once, other men stepped up and dragged the others after him. Without a word that Baver could hear, the entire group of Gluttons began to leave, and within a minute or so he could see none of them.
Of the three victors, only Sten Vannaren had been wounded. He stripped off shirt and breeches, and the others bound his wounds with strips cut from them. Bound them tightly, that the scars might not be wide. On the left side, the Northman’s chest was discolored and bloody; Baver wondered if any ribs had been cracked. The man must have a high pain threshold, he thought, or perhaps adrenaline made the difference. Surely he’d be sore in the morning.
Soon the three warriors rolled up in their sleeping robes and lay talking not far from the fire, their voices a murmur. No one had bedded in the lean-to, which had only room for one, or two lying close. Hans and the two sword apprentices lay somewhat apart from them on the other side, also murmuring. Baver, unwilling to intrude on the warriors but wanting the security of the fire, unrolled his sleeping bag near Hans. And found it wet! It had been tied behind the saddle, and must have gotten wet when he’d crossed the stream below the ting ground; being wrapped in his poncho hadn’t protected it. His saddle bags were wet too.
Dismayed, he opened the sleeping bag and crawled in. It felt cold; cold and wretched. As usual the mosquitoes were numerous and hungry, and there was little smoke to drive them off; from time to time he mashed some of them bloody on his face. He eavesdropped on the boys’ conversation to take his mind off his discomfort somewhat.
After a bit, their conversation died, and Baver spoke quietly. “Hans, what will the others, the Glutton clansmen, do with the bodies of their dead? They’ll bloat and stink before they can get them home.”
“Get them home? What good would there be in that? They will burn them. Tonight. Talk to their souls, then burn their bodies.”
Talk to the killed? Baver thought. Barbarians indeed! At least they’ll get no argument from them.
Getting an arm out of his sleeping bag, Baver felt through a wet saddlebag for his radio, and working one-handed, tried to contact Matthew. Perhaps they’d returned; perhaps they could still come out and rescue him from the mosquitoes tonight, and the wet sleeping bag.
But no one answered. Swearing silently, he returned the radio, drew his arm back in, and set his mind grimly to getting through the night. When he got back to New Home, he’d look up the fool who’d failed to provide waterproof bags with mosquito hoods.