[Fascinating he to women,
often glanced at him by morning,
followed him their eyes at midday,
lingered near sometimes at twilight,
whispered to him in the firelight.]
From—The Järnhann Saga,
Kumalo translation
The Wu farm was at the end of a valley, at the end of a cart track nine kilometers from Lü-Gu, the district’s principal village. More than a kilometer up the road was the next clearing, where several farms centered around a hamlet of ten or a dozen farm homes. From there to Lü-Gu, the valley land was mostly cleared and cultivated,
247
248
the farmers living in a series of tiny hamlets. Their houses, like Wu’s, were log huts.
It was unlikely that Wu would ever have close neighbors. Above the last hamlet, the valley narrowed to little more than a ravine, at its end widening into the small bowl where Wu had built; there was only land for one farm there.
In country at the edge of a wilderness, Wu’s choosing to farm where he did, out by himself, verified for Nils what reading the man’s aura and mind had already indicated: that he was independent, self-reliant, and not much given to pampering his fears. Seemingly }ik was growing up to be the same.
The brook meandered, and to avoid repeated fords, the cart road followed along one edge of the valley bottom, where forest overhung it. Nils and the two Chinese met no one on the road, nor overtook anyone. Late and early were the times for that, not afternoon. The people in the fields paid little or no attention to them. Their attention was on their work, which would either feed them through the winter or fail to.
The road skirted one final wooded hill, low and flinty, a point that intruded somewhat into the valley. When they’d rounded it, Nils could see the village a kilometer and a half ahead. It might have held five hundred people.
He stopped and shook his head emphatically. “I cannot go there,’ he said in Mongol.
Wu frowned; the barbarian’s meaning was plain. Actually he’d already thought of stopping where they were. Beyond this point the road left the shelter of the forest’s eaves; it was the last best place to hide the barbarian. And to be seen in the village with him would be risky. But would Chen come so far to talk with him?
“Chen here!” Nils said, and pointed to the ground where they stood. “Chen! Chen here!” he repeated.
“He is saying Chen, father!”
“I heard! I heard! I’m not deaf!” Wu pursed his lips. “But what is the rest of it?”
249
“I think he wants us to bring Chen here. I think he doesn’t want to go into town.”
“Huh!” And the giant barbarian had already said something about the emperor, or had seemed to. He must indeed be a fugitive, Wu decided, and afraid of being recognized.
Nils pointed at himself, and then at the woods beside the road. He walked his fingers in that direction, then squatted down for a moment.
“He wants to go in the woods and wait for us! He wants us to bring Chen here! He must know him!”
Wu nodded. If the barbarian knew anyone here at all, it would be Chen. Fugitives were rumored to come to the old blacksmith for the things they needed: an ax, arrowheads, even swords.
Chen’s beautiful but headstrong daughter had married the bailiff, Lo Pu-Pang. People said she’d agreed not because she was afraid of Lo, but because he was the only man in the district who could buy her the nice things she wanted. And her aging father being so willful and unruly—increasingly so with age—it was no doubt her influence that had kept him from prison or worse.
Wu didn’t intend to involve himself in such matters. He’d leave things to Chen. Chen had been a smith with the army on the frontier when he was young. Had hobnobbed with Mongol mercenaries, learned their language, and even now would sometimes speak it at one and all when he’d been drinking. Sounding much like the big barbarian. And it seemed to him . . .
He nodded. “Stay with him. I will go into the village and talk to Chen.”