Once, at a river, they saw the remains of old bridge footings. Another time they encountered an ancient raised railroad bed, crossing a broad wetland like some improbably straight esker. A nearly continuous stringer of woods grew along it. The rails of course were gone, no doubt salvaged long before the plague.
During the four years of preparing for the expedition, the courses Baver had liked best were those on terran ecology, and he thought he saw the why of the woods on the roadbed. The dense stand of reeds and tall grass, so hostile to tree seedlings, would have been interrupted by the roadbed of crushed rock, even after dust storms had added soil to it. While tree seedlings had obviously been able to establish along its edges, probably migrating along it from the Carpathian foothills visible to the west. And the marsh would rarely be swept by fire—rarely enough that the young trees had time, between fires, to mature and grow thick protective bark.
His mental reconstruction of the process pleased him, and he began to pay closer attention to the country they passed through.
It had been swept and depopulated by the Orcs, and only once did they see people, five poorly dressed men on horseback following a river upstream. They’d seemed cautiously friendly, but the little Anglic they knew was a pidgin too strange for Baver’s understanding. He caught “Orcs” and “travel” and “good place.” Nils said they were fishermen from the Danube delta, looking for new land to colonize, drier land, now that the Orcs were gone. Their horses were Orc horses, left when Northman pa-
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trols had tracked down and killed Orc refugees who’d been terrorizing the fisherfolk.
It seemed to Baver that they’d said too little too brokenly to impart all that, and at any rate he doubted that Nils had understood their pidgin much better than he had. Perhaps he was as telepathic as Nikko said, as telepathic as the Northmen believed. Or perhaps he’d put the picture together logically from what he already knew and what he’d observed. Surely the fishermen’s horses were fine animals, Orc animals, not the nags you might expect delta fishermen to have, if they had norses at all.
They crossed the largest river they’d seen since the Danube, then turned eastward away from the Carpathians, and late that day camped in the woods along another wide river. Over the next week they left behind the last of the occasional oak groves. The grass remained luxuriant but less so, and the only trees were along the streams. The large rivers flowed more or less southward now.
As they rode, Baver, at Nils’s request, gave Hans lessons in Anglic. The boy showed impressive recall of new words and phrases. Baver suspected it was from training as a poet, in a culture which memorized far more than it wrote.
They began to see people again—hamlets near streams, with garden plots, small grain fields, and herds of cattle tended by men on horseback. They must be east of the country the Orcs had swept, Baver decided. But even there, there seemed to be few young male adults. They’d gone to the Orc War, he supposed, and been slaughtered. The people weren’t actively hostile, but the herdsmen—adolescents and old men—strung their bows and watched the three of them closely until they’d passed by.
Baver was tired of grassland and marshes, the saddle and mosquitoes. He began to daydream that the Phaeacia had returned, and that three pinnaces were hunting for him, to take him back with them to New Home.
The country grew drier yet, and except in marshes and wet meadows, the grass notably shorter and less thick. Finally they came to the ruins of a great city by a broad
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river, with some massive buildings and large monuments still standing. Baver asked that they stay there a day, and Nils agreed.
The greatest monuments were on a hill, heroic structures with heroic sculptures, and they rode up there. The statues and wall reliefs all were huge, but one was far larger than the rest, standing sixty or seventy meters tall, Baver judged, including an upraised arm. It was of a robed woman, the hilt of a broken sword clenched in one monumental hand. The figures were mostly of soldiers though, of heroism and death, and to Baver the place felt haunted. It gave him actual chills. Clearly a terrible war had been fought there—a terrible battle at any rate—far more terrible than the Orc War.