Nils didn’t pause. He pounced, plunging his blade into Kuduka’s body just below the breastbone, and the Mongol fell backward, blood spraying. For just a moment Baver stared at the fallen man, then his eyes moved to Nils. The Northman’s body streamed sweat, and his chest heaved. The skin on his left cheek had been split by the hilt of Kuduka’s thrown sword, and blood streamed from it. The cut in his belly seemed not deep; otherwise surely his guts would be bulging out through it.
The Northman looked around him and turned in the direction of the ger. It was also the direction of Kuduka’s four henchmen, and he glared them out of his way with a look unlike any that Baver had ever seen on Nils before. Achikh and Hans had fallen in behind him, and Baver hurried to catch up.
183
At the ger, Nils’s equanimity had returned, so totally it troubled Baver. Achikh examined the belly gash while Hans and Baver stood by. It was more than a centimeter deep, ugly but not critical. Tonus made it gape, but nowhere had it gone through the abdominal wall. Achikh bandaged it as well as he could. Scant minutes later an old woman arrived from Kaidu’s household, a woman known for her skill with wounds. Removing Achikh’s bandage, she ordered Nils to pinch the wound shut. From a skin she carried, she took long, strongly curved thorns, and with them fastened the gash closed, then put on a new bandage she’d brought. That done, she left, muttering to herself about men and sharp weapons. She’d ignored the injury to Nils’s cheek. No doubt there was nothing to be done about it. It was swelling badly, and the entire left side of his face had turned the color of port wine. Baver suspected the cheekbone was broken.
Yet anyone who’d seen the fight would say the Northman had come out marvelously whole.
Nils did not lie down, but sat upright with his legs folded under him in a way Baver had seen him sit before, a way seemingly impossible for such muscular legs. He ignored the others, and seemed to enter a trance. Some kind of healing trance, Baver suspected.
Twenty minutes later Kaidu arrived, and Nils aroused at once. The chief looked the Northman over. “Old Yesiii tells me it isn’t deadly,” he said. “If it was, someone besides you would die for it,” He turned to Achikh. “Tell me how it happened.”
Achikh’s recital of events was substantially as Baver recalled them. Kaidu nodded. “That agrees with what I’ve already been told.” He looked at Nils again. “Iron Hand, you have rid the tribe of a great nuisance, and before witnesses who say it was no fault of yours. I will have some people questioned, in case someone put Ku-duka up to this.”
Then Kaidu left.
184
Achikh’s lips pressed tightly. In Anglic he said, “Of course someone put Kuduka up to it. Barak. I’d bet a horse on it.”
Nils’s chuckle was brief and humorless. “Bet Kuduka’s horse then,” he said. “For I do not think it was Barak.”
“Who then?”
“I’m not sure. But not Barak I think. Perhaps—perhaps Fong, acting for the emperor.”
‘The emperor? Why would the emperor want you dead? How would he even know you exist?”
“It may have been a test, more than an attempt to kill me.” Earlier I said there is a power of some kind acting between Fong and the emperor. I was touched by that power two days before leaving the ting. Later I sensed it at times in Svartvinge. It is the power that created Svartvinge from the spirit of all ravens.”
Hans stared. “Svartvinge was the thing of some evil power?”
“Svartvinge was a raven as the hailstorm was a hailstorm: he was the great raven. But he was sent, as the hailstorm was sent. I knew that when we first communed.”
No one said anything to that for a moment. Then Achikh spoke. “When you communed, did he tell you about this power?”
“He knew nothing except that he was to find me. That was the purpose given him when he was created. He was unable to question it or even wonder about it. But I could see more deeply into him than he could.”