THE YNGLING AND THE CIRCLE OF POWER by John Dalmas

27

could speed up. Then he could question Nils and get back to his duties.

Baver wondered how a blind man could start out alone to travel—wherever it was Nils Järnhann was traveling to. And how he’d fought the warrior chief the night be­fore: how he’d parried the chieftain’s savage strokes and won. He hadn’t allowed himself to wonder before. He’d been told of Nils’s blinding by the Ores, and that he still functioned. He’d visualized a warrior grown gaunt from trauma, gaunt and enfeebled, moving around slowly with a guide. At the ting he’d seen instead a man who walked briskly, as if with two real eyes, a man who might well be the strongest he’d ever seen.

And then there’d been the fight! Nikko Kumalo had said the man saw psychically, but Baver hadn’t accepted that. Nikko was highly intelligent, and usually very pro­fessional, but she was a woman, he’d told himself, and therefore given to irrationalities.

He’d been thinking about these and other things when Mager Hans’s horse quickened to a trot. Baver’s head jerked up. Perhaps two kilometers ahead, he saw a horse and rider climbing a hill with pack horse trailing. They’d been concealed by the terrain till then, he told himself, but beneath the thought was the realization that his own attention had been poor. He thumped heels to his horse’s ribs, and speeded after Hans.

As they drew nearer, Baver might have called out to Nils, but Mager Hans didn’t, so the ethnologist kept quiet too. His primary task, after all, was to watch, listen, and record. The observer shouldn’t inject himself more than necessary into the things he observed. As they drew near, Nils must have heard them—he was blind, not deaf—but he didn’t slow. As they drew alongside the pack horse and slowed to a walk, the Northman spoke.

“Good morning, Hans Gunnarsson,” he said. Good morning, Ted Baver. Have you been listening to the larks?”

Baver stared, slack-jawed. The man hadn’t even turned his head, yet spoke to them by name. “Ja visst,” Mager

28

Hans answered. “They’ve been talking to the horses, those larks, telling them to be careful and not step on their nests. They have sharp tongues, those larks! Like my mother sometimes!”

The boy laughed, then sobered. “You left without me. That was not well done. How can I continue your saga if I don’t know what happens?”

“I would tell you when I got back.”

The Northman said it as soberly as a judge, Baver thought, yet there seemed to be playfulness beneath the words.

“You talked to me about the earlier things,” Mager Hans countered. “But the best stuff I got from others: the Finn, Kuusta Suomalainen; and Sten Vannaren; and Leif Trollsverd; and Ilse; and the star man, Matts. But especially Ilse.

“But this time you’ve gone off alone, and who knows whether there’ll be anyone else to talk with me about what happens. So now I’ve caught up with you,” he fin­ished defiantly, “and you cannot drive me away.”

Nils laughed. “Well then, I guess I’ll have to make the best of it.’ He turned his face to Baver. His gaze was not uncomfortable, unless one was troubled by his eyes. “And you, star man,” Nils said. “Why are you here?”

“Nikko and Matt will want to know where you’re going, and you didn’t tell me last night.”

“I did tell you. I am going east. North just now, be­cause the Sea is in the way, but when I’ve gone north far enough, I expect to turn east.”

“East! All of Asia is east of here! You need to be more explicit! They’ll want to find you from time to time … contact you, you know.”

Nils Järnhann’s unnatural eyes were steady on him— how else could they be?—his expression mild and non-evaluative. Yet Baver squirmed beneath it, recognizing how arrogant his motive was. Basically he was complain­ing because the Northman was plotting his own course in life, following his own interests, not living according

29

to the wishes and purposes of the expedition from New Home.

“East is all there is to tell you now,” said Nils. “I not only don’t know where I’m going; I don’t know what places there are to go.”

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *