Piruusi, watching, scowled again. The fire the Norse-folk had lit silhouetted them, would make them good targets in the night. But that was his own grandmother they had cut from her rest! What might they do? Not burn her? A burnt ghost lost its body in the other world, would come back to haunt its careless relatives. His grandmother had been trouble enough while she was alive.
Time, Piruusi thought, for trickery. He skied away from the reindeer sleigh they had brought up to carry off their dead, broke off a branch with leaves still on it, waved it in token of parley, alert all the time for any sign of one of the strange weapons being brought to bear on him.
Shef saw the man in the skin coat and trousers waving a bough, noting with envy even at that moment the beautifully supple leather—Piruusi’s wives had spent many a day chewing the skin to that grade of softness. He saw his alert readiness to dodge, pushed aside Fritha’s crossbow, broke off a bough himself and walked forward a little way.
The Finn stopped maybe ten yards off. As Shef wondered what language he might speak, the Finn solved matters for him by calling out in fair if fractured Norse.
“You,” he shouted. “Why fire? Why cut down trees, take down old people? You burn them? They do you no harm.”
“Why you shoot arrows at us?” retorted Shef in the same style. “We do you no harm. You kill my friends.”
“You kill my friends,” replied the Finn. Shef noted a flicker of motion out of the corner of one eye, something moving from tree to tree to his left. And to his right. The Finn was calling out again, trying to fix his attention—while the others came in on him from either side. He was trying to take a prisoner, not make a parley. It might be a good idea if they did try. If Shef could embroil two or three of them Cuthred would charge to his rescue. And that might frighten them enough to ensure free passage. Of course he, Shef, might not survive it.
There was something else moving in the forest. Not to either side, but behind the parleying Finn. He had left his sleigh and the two reindeer that pulled it behind him. The animals were standing quietly trying to grub lichen of some kind off the ground. But there was something definitely there behind them.
With incredulity Shef saw the towering bulk of Echegorgun step out from behind a dwarf birch tree. He could not have been behind the tree. The tree’s bole was at most a foot thick, barely thicker than one of Echegorgun’s arms. Yet there he was in plain sight, looking at Shef, evidently meaning to be seen. A moment before he had not been there. In any case Shef pondered, baffled, they had just spent days and weeks crossing an open moor where you could see every bird and blade of grass. How could Echegorgun have tracked them? Even the reindeer did not seem to have noticed him. They ate on, unalarmed.
The Finn had noticed Shef’s fixed stare. “Ho, ho,” he hooted. “That old game. ‘See behind you, Piruusi, something there.’ Then I look, your men shoot, shoot.”
Echegorgun stepped carefully up to one of the grazing reindeer, took its head in his massive hands, turned it with a kind of delicacy. The reindeer’s legs crumpled immediately, it fell forward, held up for an instant by Echegorgun. He moved to the other, still unmoving, snapped its neck with the same care and lack of haste.
And then he had gone, faded into the birch-shade as if he had never been, leaving only two dead animals to mark his passing.
Piruusi realized suddenly that Shef was ignoring him, whipped round like an adder. Saw his dead beasts unmoving on the ground. His eyes widened, his jaw dropped, he turned back to Shef with fear and disbelief on his face.
Shef turned and looked deliberately at the Finns creeping up from each side, yelled back to Fritha and his mates to mark them. Pointed warningly at the crossbows coming up. Then walked over to where Piruusi now stood by his dead reindeer.