“As long as he leaves his sword at home,” Mikhail said. “And his scalping knife.”
This time the meadow held hundreds of adults, both men and women. The children formed a loose ring outside them now, partly watching and partly chasing and tussling like two-legged puppies. In the middle of the throng an opening had been left perhaps twenty meters across, and Matthew landed there. A group of men, mostly middle-aged or older, moved in to form a semi-circle just outside the shield. Nikko assumed they were the Council of Chiefs. Three of them, presumably the principal chiefs, were uniquely dressed and stood together. One was a very tall old man wearing a long cloak of white bird skins, with the skin of a white wolf’s head as a headdress. His beard completed the theme of white. A second was nearly as tall, with a short cape of heavy white fur and a headpiece Nikko tentatively identified as from an arctic bear. He was missing a hand, but his exposed legs still were strongly muscled, his red beard only streaked with gray. The third too favored white, a short cape of white fur spotted with black, which Nikko recognized from old pictures as ermine. Instead of head fur, he wore a steel helmet onto which great curved steel horns had been fitted. He was shorter than the other two but still taller than average, his body thick with the muscles of a man of fifty who continues a hard and strenuous life.
Nils Järnhann stood next to the tallest of the three, and about as tall. Järnhann. The name was easy for Nikko to remember because she knew its meaning—Ironhand. He spoke a few quiet words to the man in the feathered cloak. The old chief answered quietly, then turned his proud face to Alpha and spoke slowly and distinctly in Scandinavian.
“We are the Council of Chiefs. Nils Järnhann tells us one of you speaks our language, though not well. We hope you will speak it now so that all of us understand.”
Nikko held the microphone, phrasing as well as she could in twenty-first-century Swedish what the four of them had agreed upon before coming back down.
“We want to be friends with your people, and with all the people of Earth. This was the world of our forefathers. We come to you from a world called New Home, whose thousands of thousands of people sent us to see what had become of this world, which we call Earth.”
The old man’s sober expression had not changed. “We are pleased that you have come among us, the People. You chose well. We are not numerous, but we are first in honor and cunning and weapon skills.”
When Nikko had finished interpreting, Carlos grunted. “Every culture is honorable in its own eyes. What brand of honor goes with pride in cunning, I wonder?”
Nikko spoke again to the Northmen: “We wish to know all the people of Earth, to learn what they believe, what they honor, and how they live. We hope that one of you will come among us for a short while to tell us about yourselves and also to learn about us.”
“You should stay among us, instead,” the old man answered. “That is the way to learn how we live and act, observing as well as asking questions.”
“Perhaps we will, later on.”
The man with the horned helmet spoke this time, his tone surly and his words too quick for Nikko to follow until he repeated them. “How do we know you would treat that person honorably and send him back? You are not of the People. You are foreigners. We do not know whether you are honorable.”
“At least one of you can read our minds,” Nikko answered, “the one named Nils Järnhann. Let him say whether we are honorable.”
The chiefs looked at Nils, waiting for him to speak. A woman had stepped beside him, big with child, and he put an arm around her. “My wife says she would willingly go with you. But while I sense no treachery in you, who knows what may happen tomorrow that might take you away from our world, and her with you? I would not let her go unless one of you stays with us—the woman Nikko, who speaks our language.”