And besides, there was family feeling. Echegorgun smiled salaciously when Shef hinted at it. Years before, he said, the father of Brand’s father Barn, a man named Bjarni, had been stranded on a skerry by a shipwreck. He had had food with him, good food, milk and whey, and had set it out as bait for the Hidden People. A girl of that race had seen it, taken the bait. He had not caught her, no, how could a Thin One catch even a girl of the True Folk? But he had shown her what he had got for her, and she had been enticed. You Thin Ones are thick in one place, Echegorgun said, his eyes rolling to Cuthred sitting close to the female he had wrestled.
Echegorgun went on to say that the girl, his own aunt, had kept the baby men called Barn till it was evident that it would be smooth-skinned, or too smooth-skinned to live like the True Folk. Then she had left it by its father’s door. But first Bjarni, and then Barn, and then Brand, had remained conscious of their kinship at need.
Shef heard little of what was said then, for he had begun to worry about Cuthred. Thin Ones might be thick in one place, but Cuthred had no place at all. He had been behaving well up in the north, yet one thing Shef was sure of: any reminder of his mutilation, any sexual display by a male or provocation by a female, and Cuthred would revert to the berserker. And yet it was strange. He was sitting talking to the female Miltastaray, daughter of Echegorgun and sister of the little boy Ekwetargun, as if she were Martha or one of the least-challenging of the slave-women. Perhaps it was because he had overpowered her. Perhaps it was because she was female, but so different that there was no need or expectation of flirtatiousness between them. Either way, Cuthred seemed secure and safe, for the moment.
Shef turned his attention back to Echegorgun’s story. By this time the five creatures—men and a woman? people? humans and not-humans?—had left the hut and were sitting out under a risen sun in the flat patch between hut and smokehouse. From where they were they could see a calm gray metallic sea, with islands rising from it, but were sheltered from closer observation. The Hidden Folk had a keen sense of “dead ground,” Shef was to note. They kept always out of direct lines of sight, whatever else they seemed to be doing.
“So you see much, and are told more?” he said. “What do you know about me? About us?”
“About him,” Echegorgun pointed with his underslung chin to Cuthred, “much. He was a thrall in the mountains south of here. Some of our people tried to get him out. Maybe they would have eaten him, maybe not. You people are hard on your own kind. I know what they did to him. It would not mean so much to us. We think of other things than mating.
“About you.” Shef found deep brown eyes fixed on him. “There is no news of you. But people are following you.”
Shef laughed. “That is no news to me.”
“Other things are following you too. The killer whales that attacked you—sometimes they do that, I know, if they feel like sport or if something annoys them. But I have seen that school of them going up and down, and they are not from near here. They have come up from the south, like you. Maybe after you.
“Still, if you know people are following you, I need not tell you the rest.”
Echegorgun stretched his enormous arms, over nine feet from finger-tip to finger-tip, with an air of complete indifference.
“What rest? Are other people following me now?”
“There is a ship hidden in the Vitazgjafi fjord half a day’s swim south of Brand’s farmsteads on Hrafnsey. I would have warned him but he is away with the grind—the grind, you understand, is within his rights. He was careful not to drive them ashore here or near here. But anyway, he is away, and the ship is down there waiting. A big ship. It has two… two sticks. Those things you put cloths on. A big fair-haired woman shouts orders at the menfolk.” Echegorgun laughed. “She needs a winter with me to calm her.”