Smiling, Nils stopped, spread his long thick arms, palms forward, then slowly reached and unbuckled the harness that held his sword and quiver, and lowered it to the ground. His bow still rode on one shoulder, but unstrung.
The boy shouted something more, and there was an exchange with a younger child. Then a girl of about ten or eleven years ran fleetingly into sight around a corner of the hut, thin legs flying, and disappeared into the forest to fetch their father.
Nils tapped his chest and spoke in Mongol, to indicate he didn’t speak the local language. Then he held his hands in front of him and pretended to ride a horse. The boy watched scowling. Nils raised his hands high, made a sound like a bear roaring, and pretended to strike with one of them. Next he whinnied, and fell to the ground.
The boy’s scowl dissolved in laughter. Nils, grinning, got to his feet, and the boy’s gaze sharpened again.
“I am lost,” Nils said, first in Mongol, then in Anglic, and finally in Swedish. The boy shook his head at each. Nils wasn’t surprised; he’d only done it to pass time till the father came, and to establish a willingness and desire to communicate. Next he pulled his belly in, and with a pained look pressed a big hand against it, then pantomined eating. He wasn’t acutely hungry—he’d killed and eaten a grouse a few hours earlier—but again he established communication, and a sense of this huge foreigner as a human being who was less dangerous than he looked.
Without taking his eyes off Nils, the boy shouted that the stranger was hungry. A woman’s voice answered, and a minute later another child, a boy of five or six, peered around the corner. He drew back out of sight and wailed that he was afraid. His big brother shouted back sharply that he should come out ‘right now.” Nils grinned. The
243
woman’s voice spoke firmly through a window, but the child did not reappear. After another minute the mother came around the corner with a thick heel of bread and a small chunk of cheese on a wooden plate.
She paused, staring, and spoke in rapid Chinese: she’d never seen so large and terrible a man. Her eldest son answered. The content of it was that the foreigner seemed friendly, and that something was wrong with his eyes. He kept his bow half drawn though, and his own eyes on the Northman. The woman approached Nils by circling around to one side, her eyes on his. She put the plate on the ground three meters away, and backed off.
Nils could sense the father coming now. Bowing, he thanked her, then went to the plate, squatted down on his haunches and began to eat. The little boy’s curiosity had overcome his fear, and he was watching around the corner, “That’s not enough for someone that big!” he shouted. “That’s only enough for me!”
The father strode from the woods, an axe in one hand. After pausing to size up the situation, he approached to within half a dozen meters of the Northman. Nils was aware that his strange glass eyes were troubling the farmer. “Who are you?!” the man asked. “What do you want?!”
Nils didn’t answer, only looked at him. He couldn’t have said what he wanted in any language; he didn’t know. Then a distant raven croaked. It couldn’t see them from where it was, but Nils spoke urgently in Mongol and pointed toward the sky, backwards toward where the raven had called from. And mimicked the raven’s call, though quietly. He flapped big arms, then with his fingers signed the raven looking down at him, and shook his head vehemently. With that, disregarding the boy and his bow, he strode to the hut and went inside. An old man was there, in a chair made of withes. He looked at the Northman in alarm, and began to yammer.
Nils grinned at him and knelt down beside the door as the others followed him in, the farmer bringing his
244
harness with its sword and quiver; things of value were not left lying about outside, to be rained on and get rusty or moldy. The eldest son had relaxed his bow, though he carried it still with an arrow nocked.