Cuthred was still nowhere to be seen. Shef opened his mouth to shout, closed it. Who could tell what might hear? He picked up a stone flake from the ground, scratched an arrow on the lichen-covered stone, pointing in the direction he was taking, inland. He left the provision box lying and began to sidle along the rocky narrow path as fast as he could.
It twisted on along the side of the inlet, but far above it, for perhaps half a mile, often narrowing to a bare foothold, never quite vanishing entirely. One of Brand’s bird’s-nesters would have followed it without hesitation. Karli the flatlander would have frozen with terror. Shef, a flatlander too, hobbled on carefully, sweating with fear and exertion, trying not to look down.
And then there was a clearing in front of him. In the dim half-light Shef looked round cautiously. A clearing? At least a flat place with a thin poor covering of grass and weeds in the everlasting stone. Why had they not seen the green from the sea? Because the whole place was hidden, in a dip in the ground between sea and mountain. On the other side of it, a chink of light. A fire? A cabin?
Stepping very cautiously forward, Shef realized it was indeed a cabin. Stone walled, turf roofed, set against the further hillside as if it had grown there. Even at fifty yards Shef could hardly be sure he was seeing it, though a dim glow came from some chink or other in its wall.
As he thought that, Shef realized that his left hand was actually resting on another wall, right by him. He had walked up to another building and still not seen it. Yet a building it was, and a big one, a lean-to of stone slabs running forty feet from the point where the path came out to what might be a door at the other end. He could smell something too. Smoke, and a faint flavor of food.
Hand on knife, and moving as gently as a fowler creeping up on a nest, Shef ghosted up to the door. Not a door, a leather curtain pegged across. He slipped the thongs off the pegs and eased inside.
For twenty heartbeats he was unable to see. Then his eye adjusted. Dim light was coming in from cracks in the wall, and from an opening in the roof, under which a low fire glowed. A carcass hung over it. It was a smokehouse, Shef saw. All along the far side stood rack after rack of split, smoked and dried fish. All along the near side, tubs of more fish, salted, fish and meat. In front of him, hanging from a peg, a seal carcass, with more in rows down the length of the building. He stretched a hand up to feel. The peg was of stone, the hook that supported the split seal of wood, not carved but bent and allowed to grow into the correct shape. Nothing he could see was of metal. Only wood, and stone.
The carcasses grew bigger as he walked fascinated down the row. Seal. A walrus, so large it stretched from roof to floor. And then a bear. Not the brown bear of the forests in the south, common in Norway, still to be found in the deep woods of England. No, a creature as much bigger than that as an orca was bigger than a porpoise, far bigger than Shef as it hung there flitched and jointed. White fur still showed on it here and there. It was a great white bear like the one that had furnished Brand’s best robe, an animal that had cost three lives to bring down, or so Brand said.
He was almost at the smoke now, where the fire glowed and the light came in from the roof. What was this creature that the mighty hunter of the mountains had brought down? Not a seal, not a walrus, not a porpoise nor a bear. Shef realized that there, turning gently in the smoke, hanging from a peg, was a man. Halved, stripped, gutted and chined, like a pig, but still certainly a man. Others too, racked behind him, men and women as well, hanging like so many flitches of bacon, some by the throat, some by the feet. The women’s breasts drooped on their naked flanks.