“We knew that,” Eyjan said, “since we inquired who the chief man is in these parts.” In about the same words as she had used to his daughter, she told of the quest up to yesterday-save for merely relating that Liri had become barren, not that the cause of the flight there from was an exorcism. Meanwhile the men of the household got courage to shuffle nigh, and the women and children to jam the doorway. Most were younger than Haakon, and stunted by a lifetime of ill feeding; some hobbled on bowed legs or in unmistakable pain from rheumatism and deformed bones. The night made them shiver in their patched garments. A stench welled from the house which the eye-smarting smoke could not altogether blanket, sourness of bathless bodies that must live packed in a narrow space.
“Can you tell us anything?” Eyjan finished. “’Ye will pay. . . not gold off these rings of ours, unless you wish it, but more fish and sea-game than I think you’d catch for yourselves.”
Haakon brooded. The wind moaned, the folk whispered and made signs in the air, not all of the Cross. At last he flung his head on high and snapped: “Where did you learn of me? From the Skraelings, no?”
“The what?”
“The Skraelings. Our ugly, stumpy heathen, who’ve been drift-
ing into Greenland from the west these past hundred years.” A snarl: “Drifting in together with frosty summers, smitten fields, God’s curse on us-that I think their own warlocks brought down!”
Tauno braced muscles and mind. “Aye,” he answered. “We met a party of them, and your daughter Bengta, Haakon. Will you trade your knowledge for news of how she is?”
An outcry lifted. Haakon showed teeth in his beard and sucked air in between them. Then he stamped spearbutt on earth and roared, “Enough! Be still, you whelps!” When he had his silence, he said quietly, “Come within and we’ll talk.” Eyjan plucked Tauno’s elbow. “Should we?” she questioned in the mer-language. “Outdoors, we can escape from an onset. Between walls, they can trap us.”
“A needful risk,” her brother decided. To Haakon: “Do you bid us be your guests? Will you hold us peace-holy while we are beneath your roof?”
H aakon traced the Cross. “By God and St. Olaf I swear that, if you plight your own hann1essness.”
“On our honor, we do,” they said, the nearest thing to an oath that Faerie folk knew. They had found that Christians took it as mockery if soulless beings like them called on the sacred.
Haakon led them over his threshold. Eyjan well-nigh gagged at the full stink, and Tauno wrinkled his nose. The Inuit were not dainty, but the ripeness in their quarters betokened health and abundance. Here—
A miserly peat fife, in a pit on the clay floor, gave the sole light until Haakon commanded that a few soapstone lamps be filled with blubber and kindled. Thereafter his poverty became clear. The house had but a single room. People had been readying for sleep; straw pallets were spread on the platform benches which lined the walls, in a shut-bed that must ,be the master’s, and on the ground for the lowly. The entire number was about thirty. So must they lie among each other’s snores, after listening to whatever hasty lovemaking any couple had strength for. An end of the chamber held a rude kitchen. Smoked meat and stockfish hung from the rafters, flatbread on poles in between, and were grue-somely little when the wind was blowing winter in.
And yet their forebears had not been badly off. There was a high seat for lord and lady, richly carved though the paint was gone, that had doubtless come from Norway. Above it gleamed a crucifix of gilt bronze. Well-wrought cedar chests stood about. However rotted and smoke-stained, tapestries had once been beau-tiful. Weapons and tools racked between them remained good to see. It was all more than these few dwellers could use. Tauno whispered to Eyjan, “I reckon the family and retainers used to live in a better house, a real hall, but moved out when it got too hard to keep warm for a handful, and built this hovel.”