THE YNGLING AND THE CIRCLE OF POWER by John Dalmas

He recorded what he saw, and wished he could read the inscriptions; though weathered, they looked legible, but even the alphabet was unfamiliar to him. If he visual­ized the geography correctly, he told himself, this had been Russia long ago. The language would be in the Alpha’s onboard computer, with a translation program.

Crossing the river at the city, they hit a broad grassy trail. Baver recognized it as an ancient highway, its pave­ment long since fragmented by frost and roots, the frag­ments covered by blowing soil. It was recognizable from its cuts and fills, its mild and even grades attracting what few travelers there were.

As they rode eastward on it, the country became in­creasingly dry. Within two hundred kilometers, the grass was mostly less than knee high, the stands thin. Encoun­ters with other travelers were days apart, and uneasy. The strangers would see the giant Northman, and Baver’s jump suit, and pass in suspicious silence. The herds here were widely scattered, wild and usually untended, as if the local people found it easier to hunt their meat than herd it.

The travelers ate mostly marmots now, numerous and fat, victims of Hans’s seldom-erring arrows, or occasion­ally of Nils’s. It took only a minute or two to gut and skin one, and one was supper enough for the three of

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them, with some left over for breakfast. They’d dry and smoke a second for saddle rations the next day. Early on, Nils had taught Baver to gut and skin. The ethnologist had been squeamish at first, but soon was taking his turns at it like the others.

Nils pushed for as much speed as they could make without wearing down the horses. Nonetheless, they sometimes camped as early as midafternoon, where there was water. Then, while the horses grazed, Hans would withdraw to a distance and recite aloud to himself, com­posing and polishing verses for “The Järnhann Saga.” Now and then he’d try one on Nils, who’d sometimes correct or elaborate the story told. Baver was impressed with the boy’s skill. In the evenings, Hans got lessons in swordsmanship from Nils, though he hadn’t been chosen by his clan to be a sword apprentice.

Early one evening they camped a dozen meters off the road, on the lower slope of a hill. A spring flowed from a sandstone outcrop there, to form a rivulet that disap­peared into the ground at the foot of the hill. Someone had dug the spring out and lined the hole with rocks, to make it more easily used. Baver was checking his wrist-watch for the Earth date, when a thought occurred to him. Digging through his saddlebag, he took out a sheet of folded plastic.

On it, the previous winter he’d drawn the Neoviking calendar,* as used in their old homeland by the northern clans. It was a lunar calendar, and he’d charted it against the ancient solar calendar, the Gregorian.

Getting to his feet, he took it to the big Northman. “Nils,” he said, “I’ve wondered about something.” He showed him the chart. “You measure time by moons. Here’s the Moon of Iron Cold, supposedly beginning right after the shortest day, when they start getting longer. But the year measured that way is about five days

‘For a Neoviking calendar, see the appendix.

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longer than the solar year, the year by the sun. After twenty years the Moon of Iron Cold would come in spring. How do you get around that?”

Nils grinned. “Simply. Each clan has a post in an open place, or did in the homeland, and a stake to mark the longest noon shadow. The Moon of Iron Cold begins with the next quarter after the shadow is longest, whether that quarter is the full moon or the night of no moon, or the half moon with its back to the . . .”

“Nils!” It was Mager Hans. He stood on his horse’s back some fifty meters uphill, pointing toward the low­ering sun. “Someone is coming! A man with three horses!”

Nils stood as if peering westward with his strange glass eyes, Baver beside him. A man approached on horseback, followed by a packhorse and a remount. He didn’t slow as he came near; the road would take him well clear of them. On an impulse, Baver took out his recorder and began to record.

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