The cattle had run well, and their own horses had been tired. Thus they’d chased a calf for perhaps a tusen,* Nils said, before they’d ridden it down and shot it. Afterward, riding back, they’d seen the tracks of other horses on the other side of the river, shod horses. Some refugee Orcs had passed there perhaps two days earlier.
Baver’s hair crawled. Orcs! He recalled what Orcs had done to Chandra and Anne-Marie, when they’d held the two prisoner. “How many?” he asked.
“Nine, seven of them shod. Three orcs, three slaves, and three pack horses.”
“You could tell all that from the tracks?”
“Not entirely from the tracks.”
Baver sat chewing calf liver while he digested the information. The enigmatic “explanation” he let be. Suppose the Ores had come along while he’d slept, and seen him. Would they have killed him? Tortured him? Or
*The tusen is a Neoviking measure of distance: a thousand doubles—double strides—roughly, 1,700 meters, about 5,600 feet in the old system.
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simply ridden off with a fourth slave? Would Nils have tried to rescue him? He couldn’t picture it. Even Nils Järnhann was unlikely to attack three Orcs to save a foreigner.
This was definitely not a place he wanted to be. Taking the radio from his saddle bag, he tried again to reach the pinnace and call in a pickup, but got nothing.
FIVE
The sun was low above the side ridge when Nikko and Matthew Kumalo, in pinnace Alpha, lowered gently toward the ground, toward the low cabin built for them beside a clump of birches. The children of the village, used to seeing the spacecraft, made little of its arrival. A few called to friends that it was coming.
The Wolf Clan, or that part of it which dwelt at the village of Varjby, had arrived back from the ting that day about midday. Then there’d been gear to unpack and put away. And though a small detail including dogs and cats, had been left to look after the village when the rest were away, there were nonetheless birds and small animals to evict from cabins, and new weeds to hoe or grub from the vegetable gardens.
Ulf Varjsson was at the smithy, getting rings made to repair a pack saddle, when he heard a child call that the skyboat was coming. He excused himself and left at a jog, his burly, forty-six-year-old body moving easily, even lightly. He arrived at the Alpha while the Kumalos were unloading their travel gear.
“Go’ da!” he greeted.
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Both of them stopped what they were doing. The clan chieftain would not have come, surely not too soon, unless he had something important to tell them. “Hello to you,” Matthew answered. He didn’t ask what Ulf had come for. Courtesy required that they let him get to that in his own time.
“Was your trip a good one?” Ulf asked.
“Very good, thanks.”
“You found the people you looked for?”
“Yes. And learned more from them than we’d expected. Ilse’s brother was especially helpful.”
“Good. Good. I have something to tell you about Nils Järnhann.”
“Oh?”
“He has left to wander. He didn’t say where; perhaps he didn’t know.”
He told them then about Knut Jäävklo’s self-immolation—a strange business even among the Northmen— and Nils Järnhann’s announcement afterward. It was Nikko whose special project Nils was, and it was she who asked if Ulf had any idea when the Yngling might come back.
“My feeling is, he planned to travel far. He rode down the creek and turned north.”
North, Nikko thought. From here, the first leg to almost anywhere is north, unless he planned to follow the Orcs. A thought struck her: Could he be going to the Neoviking homeland? That would be twenty-jive hundred-kilometers or more by any practical route. Offhand she could think of nowhere else that might attract him. A few families had stayed behind, she’d heard, unwilling to leave, convinced that the worsening climate was an aberration, not a trend. If he was returning to see how they were, and tell them of the new land, would he follow the Danube west and north to Hungary, where he had friends? And thence through Germany and the Dane Land, finally to boat across the Kattegat to old Sweden? Or northeast, bypassing the mountains, then north through the Ukraine and west into Poland, to cross the Baltic?