Erkenbert shrugged, picked up once more his mounting pile of vellum. “I have told over to you the kings of Denmark and Norway,” he said. “Now in Sweden and Gautland between them there may be as many as twenty more. From the north, King Vikar of Roslagen, aged fifty, elected at the Ros-Thing twenty years ago, said to be rich but peaceful, takes tribute from the Finns and never comes south.”
Bruno shook his head.
“How about King Orm of Uppland, controls the great Kingdom Oak and the temple-sacrifices at Uppsala, said to be powerful but disinclined to personal combat, took the kingdom by force twenty years ago?”
“He sounds a bit more likely, but not much. We’ll keep an eye on him. You know,” Bruno reflected, “for all their recent defeats, I wonder if Sigurth Ragnarsson or one of his brothers couldn’t be our man. After all, even Charles the Great had some setbacks, against the Saxons.”
Erkenbert was unable to repress an involuntary shudder.
“I think we may have to get a little closer to the action to find out for sure…” Bruno went on.
In the hut to which they had been assigned in the college precinct at Kaupang, the English ex-slaves and Karli the Ditmarsher were exchanging stories of the Hidden Folk. There was a companionable mood in the warm tight-closed room. Hama, one of the catapulteers, had a split lip. Cwicca had an eye swollen shut. Karli was nursing a bitten ear, and had a lump on the side of his head where Osmod, seeing man after man knocked down by Karli’s fists, had hit him over the head with a billet of firewood. The group had ceased to mock each other’s accents, and were trying to find common ground in explaining the strange world around them.
“We believe in things called thurses,” said Karli.
“Us too,” agreed Cwicca the fen-man. “They live in holes in the marsh. If you’re out in a punt after wild duck, you don’t want to go putting your pole into any old thurs-nest. Fowler who does that, he don’t come back.”
“Where do these creatures come from?” asked one of the men.
“They don’t come from anywhere, they’ve always been here.”
“What I heard,” said Cwicca, “is this. You know we’re supposed to be descended from Adam and Eve. Well, one day the Lord God came down and asked Eve to show him her children. Well, she showed him some of them, but some of them weren’t washed, ’cause she was an idle slut, so she told them to hide. And at the end the Lord God said Those children you hid from me, let them remain hidden.’ And since then those of us who come from Eve’s children who were seen, we’re human, but those who come from the others, they’re the Hidden Folk, who live in the marshes and on the moors.”
The story was considered, but not much liked. Every man there but Karli had been a slave of the Church, first recruited and then freed by Shef and the army of the Way. Christian doctrine was familiar to them, but they associated it with slavery.
“I can’t see that has anything to do with what they’ve got up here,” said another voice. “No thurses up here, ’cause there’s no marshes. What they’ve got up here is nixes. In the water. Only there’s no water ’cause it’s all frozen.”
“And trolls,” put in another.
“I never heard that word,” said Osmod, “what’s a troll?”
“Great gray things what live in the rocks. And they call ’em trolls because they trundle down the hill at you.”
“One of the locals told me this,” said the split-lipped Hama. “There was a man lived up in the mountains, called Lafi. And one day when he was hunting, two troll-wives caught him and dragged him off to their lair in the mountains, and used him as a stud. They wore nothing but raw horse-hides, and they lived on nothing but meat and fish. Sometimes the meat was horse or sheep, but sometimes they wouldn’t show him where it had come from, but he had to eat it just the same. After a while he pretended to fall ill, and while the young troll-wife was out hunting, the other one asked him what would cure him. And he said, nothing but rotten meat that had been buried for five years. So she said she knew where there was some of that, and off she went. But because she thought he was too sick to get out of bed, she didn’t roll the stone quite shut in front of the cave. And he got out and ran for it. They picked up his scent and came after him, but he smelt wood-smoke and ran till he got to a camp of charcoal-burners, and they got their weapons and faced out and kept the troll-wives off. And then they all went down the mountain and got to safety.