Shef nodded. The thought had come to him before as he looked at the northerners, with their massive frames, their eyebrow-ridges, their hairy skins and bushy beards. But he had not aired the thought. He noticed that the word “troll” was being used more sparingly around the settlement, replaced by “sea-folk” or “marbendill,” as if others were also reckoning their ancestry.
“Well, be that as it may,” said Brand, looking slightly more cheerful. “I do not know what we are to do. I wish, I don’t mind saying it, I wish I had the good advice of my cousin.”
But Echegorgun had slipped away very soon after dragging Brand to the shore. He had seemed for a short time pleased with the attention he received, and certainly pleased by Brand’s gratitude. Then the noise seemed to irk him, and he had vanished as only the Hidden Folk could. He had also taken Cuthred with him, both of them apparently swimming the firth back to the mainland. Echegorgun was impressed by Cuthred.
“Not quite a Thin One,” he had said. “Stronger than Miltastaray, anyway. And look at the hair on his back! Grease him well, he could swim with the seals too. Miltastaray likes him. He could be a good mate for her.”
Shef had gaped at the last thought, and then said cautiously, unsure how to put it. “I thought you said, Echegorgun, that you knew what had happened to him. Well, what happened was that some of the other Thin Ones, they cut off, well, not what makes him a man, but what…”
Echegorgun cut him off. “I know. It means less to us than to you. You know why you live such short lives? Because you mate all the time, not just in season. Every time you do it, more of your life gone. A thousand times for every child, I have listened at many windows! Hah. Miltastaray would look for something else in a man.”
And with that they had gone. Shef had had time only to speak to Cuthred and ask him to ask Echegorgun to bury his human kills, like a civilized person, instead of smoking them like a—like a marbendill. “Tell him we’ll pay him in pigs,” he had said.
“You haven’t got any pigs,” Cuthred had replied. “Anyway, I prefer pigs to people.”
Perhaps they would all have larders like Echegorgun’s before the winter was out, Shef thought. As the circular discussion between Thorvin, Brand, Guthmund and the others continued, he got up, brooding, and walked away. He carried with him the lance he had taken from the smokehouse: it felt more comfortable than the ‘Gungnir’ spear, or the expensive swords he had acquired and lost. The best thing to do when you were faced with an insoluble problem, he had found, was to ask everyone about it till you met the one who knew the answer.
He found Cwicca and the gang sharing a scanty meal in a break from their work of trying to recover planking from the wrecked ships. As he approached, they stood up respectfully. Shef wondered for a moment. They did that sometimes. Sometimes, misled by his accent when he was speaking English, they forgot and treated him as one of themselves. They seemed to be doing that less often.
“Sit,” he said, but remained standing himself, leaning on the lance. “Not much to eat, I see.”
“And there’s going to be less,” agreed Cwicca.
“There’s talk of sending the prisoners away in a ship, when we’ve built it. If we could build two we could trust someone to go south for food.”
“If we could build two,” demurred Wilfi.
“If we can get anyone to sail it,” added Osmod. “Right now everyone’s so scared of whales they’d run aground if they saw a spout.”
“Dead right too,” put in Karli fervently. “I mean to say one thing, lord. You know I saw one of those things when I poled across from Drottningsholm? Right out on the water, close up? Well, one of those here was the same one. I saw a bite-mark on his fin. Same thing here. It looks as if—well, as if they followed us up.”