The sun was low above the side ridge when Nikko and Matthew Kumalo, in pinnace Alpha, lowered gently toward the ground, toward the low cabin built for them beside a clump of birches. The children of the village, used to seeing the spacecraft, made little of its arrival. A few called to friends that it was coming.
The Wolf Clan, or that part of it which dwelt at the village of Varjby, had arrived back from the ting that day about midday. Then there’d been gear to unpack and put away. And though a small detail including dogs and cats had been left to look after the village when the rest were away, there were nonetheless birds and small animals to evict from cabins, and new weeds to hoe or grub from the vegetable gardens.
Ulf Varjsson was at the smithy, getting rings made to repair a pack saddle, when he heard a child call that the skyboat was coming. He excused himself and left at a jog, his burly, forty-six-year-old body moving easily, even lightly. He arrived at the Alpha while the Kumalos were unloading their travel gear.
“Go’ da!” he greeted.
Both of them stopped what they were doing. The clan chieftain would not have come, surely not so soon, unless he had something important to tell them. “Hello to you,” Matthew answered. He didn’t ask what Ulf had come for. Courtesy required that they let him get to that in his own time.
“Was your trip a good one?” Ulf asked.
“Very good, thanks.”
“You found the people you looked for?”
“Yes. And learned more from them than we’d expected. Ilse’s brother was especially helpful.”
“Good. Good. I have something to tell you about Nils Järnhann.”
“Oh?”
“He has left to wander. He didn’t say where; perhaps he didn’t know.”
He told them then about Knut Jäävklo’s self-immolation—a strange business even among the Northmen—and Nils Järnhann’s announcement afterward. It was Nikko whose special project Nils was, and it was she who asked if Ulf had any idea when the Yngling might come back.
“My feeling is, he planned to travel far. He rode down the creek and turned north.”
North, Nikko thought. From here, the first leg to almost anywhere is north, unless he planned to follow the Orcs. A thought struck her: Could he be going to the Neoviking homeland? That would be twenty-five hundred-kilometers or more by any practical route. Offhand she could think of nowhere else that might attract him. A few families had stayed behind, she’d heard, unwilling to leave, convinced that the worsening climate was an aberration, not a trend. If he was returning to see how they were, and tell them of the new land, would he follow the Danube west and north to Hungary, where he had friends? And thence through Germany and the Dane Land, finally to boat across the Kattegat to old Sweden? Or northeast, bypassing the mountains, then north through the Ukraine and west into Poland, to cross the Baltic?
“How many days has he been gone?” she asked.
The chieftain counted on his fingers. “Five,” he answered. “And he is not alone. A boy, Hans Gunnarsson, is with him, and your own tribesman, the one that lives with the salmon people.”
Startled, Nikko turned to her husband. As a woman, she should let him do most of the talking in such matters, or risk their reputations among these people.
“Ted went with him?” Matthew asked.
“That’s what One-Eye Björnsson said. And Sten Vannaren saw them camped with Nils on the Danube.” Then Ulf told about the fight there, with Olof Three-Fingers and his kinsmen. “It seems that Nils plans to ride east somewhere,” the chief finished, “though where . . . ” He shrugged.
“We need to find Sten,” Matthew said. “There may be more he can tell us.”
“He didn’t come home with us,” Ulf told him. “He’s never been one to spend time in his home village; that’s how he got his name. He planned to rest a few days with the people of the Ice Bear, and heal his wounds. They might be there yet, though I doubt it. Then he and Leif Trollsverd would go awandering, exploring.”
“Thank you,” Matthew answered. “We’ll leave right away. Perhaps we’ll catch them there.”
They took off at once, Matthew at the controls, and as they lifted, Nikko tried to raise Baver on the radio. She got nothing. It took only minutes to reach Isbjørnaby. There they were told that the two warriors had left early that morning, not saying where they were going. Next they flew to Laxaby, the principal village of the Salmon Clan, in case Baver had returned there. He hadn’t. The Salmon chief invited them to supper with his family, where they ate roast beef, and a pungent stew made with wild millet, wild peas, unidentified roots or tubers, and potent wild onions. Afterward, breath reeking, they got back in the Alpha and took off in the dusk. Instead of flying directly back to Varjby, they rode a gravitic vector straight upward to 280 kilometers, from where they could see the sunlit crescent of Europe to the west. To the east, across the Black Sea, lay 9,000 nightbound kilometers of the Eurasian continent, stretching to the Pacific.
“I’m surprised that Ted hasn’t radioed us,” Nikko said.
“There were times he couldn’t have reached us,” Matthew answered.
“But a lot more that he could have. Anytime the last couple of days. Do you think his radio could be malfunctioning?”
“Unlikely. It should last a decade or longer. The power tap too. Unless he’s damaged it somehow.”
Nikko examined the situation. “It’s very unlike him to even have left.”
Matt nodded. Ted Baver had been a surprise to them, a disappointment. Back on New Home, there’d been considerable competition to be part of the expedition to Earth. Baver had applied, passed the exams with high grades, impressed the interviewers, and been accepted. He’d opted for a post as junior ethnologist, studied hard, and come to Earth with them* as a second stringer. For the first weeks, given their involuntary involvement in the Orc War and its demands on the pinnaces, he’d had no ground duties whatever. When the time came to choose a third person to stay behind and work with them, Baver had been one of the volunteers, and they’d chosen him.
He’d been great on exams, and enthusiastic when dealing with hypothetical situations. But on the ground, among the Northmen, he’d become a different person, fearful and wooden, unable to relate. By the time they realized this, the Phaeacia had left. So they’d given him a job he could do: recording, getting everything possible on cubes. They’d hoped he might adjust after awhile, loosen up. And he had, a bit, but still . . .
Yet now he’d left with Nils Järnhann, for where one could only guess.
“I’ll record a message loop,” Matthew said, “set the computer to signal when he calls, and sleep aboard Alpha tonight. We’ll see what he has to say.”
“What if he doesn’t? Call, that is?”
Matthew Kumalo pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Then I supposed we’d better go out and see if we can find him.” He shook his head. “It’s the least we can do. And the most we can do. And if that doesn’t work—” He shrugged. “We’ll just have to hope he knows what he’s doing, and that he’ll get back okay. He is with Nils, after all.”
*Their ancestors had migrated from Earth more than seven terran centuries earlier. When the colony was less than a decade old, ships stopped arriving, suddenly and inexplicably. The colonists had no jump ship of their own, and there were none at all on the landing grid when the possibility gradually dawned that they might have been abandoned.
They didn’t know about the burning plague which reduced the population of Earth to about 10-4 of its pre-plague level. Fortunately it had never reached their world. They’d only known that ships had stopped coming.
They had little attention to give the mystery. The New Home colony was the first sent out from Earth after development of the Patel jump drive, but at the time of New Home’s isolation, it was little more than the agrarian base for a planned, self-sufficient human world of the future. It took all the colonists’ hard work and resourcefulness to establish a viable economy that included a significant, if shrunken, technological base. Back