304
Some of the village buildings were of logs, others of baked mud. The street he rode on was dust like talcum powder; each hoof fall raised a puff of it. Somewhere, someone keened thinly, mindlessly, as if echoing the morning’s terror. Few people were on the street: a man pushing an empty wheelbarrow; two women wearing shoulder yokes, carrying buckets in pairs from a public well. They stared as they passed him.
Ahead, a small boy ran into a house, his yells not of fear but excitement. A man stepped out, wearing an apron and holding a drawshave in one hand, as if interrupted at his work. He spoke emphatically to Hans as the youth rode by. The words had no meaning for the Neoviking youth, but he reined in his horse.
The man pointed at him, then held fingers to his mouth and wiggled them as if he wanted Hans to speak, Hans did, in Mongol. “I am here looking for my friend,” he said.
The man nodded, quick bobs, and it seemed to Hans that he wanted him to continue. “He is very large and strong. And his eyes are strange; they have no darks to them.”
The man nodded more vigorously, and turning, spoke rapidly to the small boy who stood beside him. Then he turned to Hans again and pointed up the street. It seemed that he was to follow the child, who had started past him, looking expectantly up. How could it be, Hans wondered, that they seemed to understand him, while their words were a mystery? But he nudged his horse with his heels, and followed the child.
A hundred meters on, they approached a shop from which came the clang of steel on steel. The child turned in through the open door. Hans stopped and waited in the saddle. He could hear the child inside, talking excitedly in his high-pitched voice. A minute later another aproned man, thick-shouldered, stepped into the doorway, a heavy hammer in one hand, and looked up at him.
305
“Who are you?” the man asked, In Mongol! “What have you come here for?”
“I am Hans Gunnarsson, of the Wolf Clan of the Svear. I am looking for my friend.”
The man looked around quickly, then pointed. “Take your horses behind my shop, where they cannot be seen, and come in the back door.”
Hans did, and found himself in a smithy. “I am called Chen,” the man said. “I am the smith in this village, which is called Lui-Gu. This friend—what does he look like?”
“He is large.” Hans gestured the height, the shoulder width. “And his eyes are strange.”
“Ah-h!” The smith almost hissed it. “Nils of the Iron Hand!”
Hans nodded vigorously. “You know him! He has been here! I had almost given up looking for him.”
The smith’s grin was as much gaps as teeth. “He has been here. Indeed he has.”
The child too was grinning, though it understood none of it. The smith looked at him and spoke in Chinese. The child ran out. “His father is a good friend of mine,” the smith said. “He thought from your skin and height that you might be of Nils s people. And your hair: red! A color almost as outrageous as Nils’s. Then he recognized your tongue as Mongol.”
He paused. “I told the boy to say nothing of this. It’s not sale for you here. Nils killed the bailiff and most of his hired murderers.” Chen used the Chinese word for bailiff, but Hans understood the rest of it. “The emperor has sent an investigator with a troop of calvary, and he has questioned not only the bailiff’s surviving men, but certain of his neighbors as well. The investigator has left, with part of the troop, but there still are soldiers at the bailiffs stronghold. It’s the fort on the far side of town.
His words came more quietly now, almost secretively, although they were in Mongol. “I think I know where your friend is; at least I know where he was taken. His guide stopped on his way home, and told me. I cannot
306
take you, though, till later. How did you come into the village?”