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they were in the last moon of summer; his watch said September 5. The lengthening nights were no longer as warm as they had been. The shallow water felt warmer than the air now, and he waded back into it, squatting chest-deep near Nils, who was sitting cross-legged, soaking, and looking at the sky.
‘What are you thinking about?” Baver asked.
“I am wondering which star Ilse is on now,” Nils said. “Which star you came from.” He turned to look at Baver. “Can you show me?”
The star man shook his head. “I’m afraid not. It’s in the constellation Lupus. We can’t see it from here; we’d need to be farther south.” Baver remembered the girls in Nils’s tent that evening at the ting, whom presumably the Northman had later copulated with. “Do you miss Ilse sometimes?”
Nils’s answers, usually prompt, were slow this evening, coming after intervals of silence. “Sometimes,” he said. “And the baby, Alfhild. It will be her nameday soon.”
Baver wasn’t a father, but he thought he knew how Nils might feel. Nils went on: “Ilse is the only person I know who is as I am. It was good for both of us that we found each other.”
Baver recalled hearing a kanto of The Järnhann Saga that dealt with Ilse. She sounded quite heroic in it. And the Northmen referred to her as “den döjtsa häxen,” the German witch; supposedly then she had powers like Nils’s. More meaningful to him were comments he’d heard about Ilse from Nikko and Celia, aboard ship, though privately he’d rejected them at the time; they’d been impressed. Physically, on the other hand, the rangy, raw-boned Ilse had looked to him less exciting than either of the two girls in Nils’s tent at the ting. She might be called handsome, but not pretty.
“Does it bother you that Ilse went to New Home with the Phaeacia?” he asked.
Again the answer lagged, but without any sense of pondering or hesitation. Rather, it was as if mentally the Northman was operating in slow motion this evening.
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“No,” he said. “It does not bother me. Each person has things they must do. Hers included going to your world. As mine includes going east this summer.”
Baver looked at another question, and wondered if it would trouble Nils unduly. But if Nils could perceive the thoughts of others around him, perhaps he’d already perceived it.
As if in response, the Northman said, “It’s possible that I’ll be killed or die before they come back. Dying is the other side of living. But if one rejects his weird, he grows little. You could be in your own world now, but you chose to come here, and stay here a time, to do things and see things you would not have seen otherwise. Someday, dead or alive, you will know the reason. Someday, perhaps sooner, I will know more fully why I travel east now.”
Nils stood up then, water streaming from his naked body. “I’m going to stand by the fire and dry before I crawl into my sleeping robes.”
Baver followed him. Someday, dead or alive, you will know why! Examining Nils’s words, the chill Baver felt as he padded toward the fire had nothing to do with the evening air. Yet it wasn’t a matter of fear; Baver didn’t know what it was.
Achikh had seen them coming and laid more brushwood on the fire. Baver stood beside Nils with his back to it, hot behind, cold in front. The strange Northman had never seemed quite human to him until tonight, he realized. But now, having talked of personal things, he did. He still seemed very different than other men, but definitely human nonetheless.
FIFTEEN
They left the “road,” which had been angling southeast, and held eastward, pressing now at Achikh’s urging. One never knew, he said, how early the first heavy snow would come to the high mountains. Or if it came particularly early, whether it would melt or stay. Each day they broke camp at dawn and rode till dusk or dark. They walked infrequently, making good use of their remounts, and avoided herdsmen’s camps as much as they could without major sacrifice of time. So far the Kazakhs hadn’t been hostile, but the danger was there.