by John Dalmas
Nils left the castle in the dry haze of an October day, alone.
"After two months you still dislike him, Signe," Raadgiver thought. "Shall I tell you why?"
"He has no sensitivities," Signe answered aloud.
Raadgiver continued as if she hadn't spoken. "Because he doesn't think as we do nor feel the same emotions. I sensed that in him when I first saw him, at his audience with the greve. He didn't think discursively except when he spoke. His mind receives, correlates and decides, but it does not 'think to itself.'
"Because of that difference you dislike him; yet if we weren't so different ourselves, we wouldn't know it. Everyone else at the castle likes him because he is so mild and pleasant.
"Signe, we are told that before the Great Death, when psi was not secret, many people disliked or even hated psis. And not because of the ways they acted or the things they said, but because psis were so different and, in a way, superior.
"Nils is still another kind of human, different and, in an important way, superior to us. It bothers you to hear me say it, yet you sensed that superiority at once, and watched it grow.
"Yet we have our part in it, for without us it would not have matured. His mind was impressive from the first, but its scope has broadened and deepened greatly during his weeks with us, and as he absorbs experiences through psi… "
Signe's thought interrupted his angrily. "And he isn't even grateful!" she flared.
"True. He knows what happened, what we did, and accepts it as a matter of fact. That's his nature. And it seems to be yours to dislike him for it. But remember this while you're enjoying the questionable pleasure of indignation. At our request he is going to probable death without question or hesitation. And who else would have a significant chance of success?"
8.
During his training under Raadgiver, Nils worked out for a time each morning, mostly giving Kuusta lessons in the use of sword and shield. The Finn already knew the basics and was strong for his size. Also, he had grown up in a relentless wilderness environment, as a hunter, with hunger or a full belly as the stakes. His senses were sharp and his reflexes excellent. By late September Kuusta had more than thickened in the arms and shoulders; he had become one of the best swordsmen among the men-at-arms, and afoot could have held his own against some of the knights.
Generally, however, the life of a man-at-arms had palled on Kuusta Suomalainen. First, it was dull. Under the gentle influence of his chief counselor, the Greve of Slesvig had been sufficiently impressed by the mobilization of Jylland forces to offer homage to Jorgen Stennaeve as King of Denmark. So there was no war. Second, Kuusta was homesick. He had compared the wide world with his memories of Finland and was beginning to find the wide world lacking.
Jens Holgersen had appreciated his woods cunning and assigned him to night patrol for poachers, which had been pleasant enough until the evening they had caught a peasant with a deer.
His main satisfaction was in training with Nils, sweating, aching, feeling the growth of skill and strength. So when Nils told him that he soon would be leaving, alone, Kuusta also began to think about leaving, and with Raadgiver's influence he was released from his service.
On the evening before Kuusta was to leave, he sat with Nils outside the castle, by the moat. "Why have you decided to go home instead of searching for the esper crystal?" Nils asked. He knew Kuusta's mind, but asked by way of conversation.
"The esper crystal?" Kuusta grunted. "It seemed real and desirable enough to me once, but now I'd rather see Suomi again. I want to hunt, sweat in the sauna, and speak my own language in a land where men are not hanged up with their eyes bulging and their tongue swelling while they slowly choke to death. And all because they wanted some meat with their porridge."
"And how will you get there?" Nils asked.
"I've seen a map showing that if I ride eastward far enough, I'll come to the end of the sea, and if I go around the end, I'll come to Suomi."
"And do you know what the people are like in the lands you'll pass through?"
Kuusta shrugged. "Like the people in most lands, I suppose. But being obviously poor and riding a horse somewhat past his prime, I won't be overly tempting to them. And since you've treated me so mercilessly on the drill ground, I'll be less susceptible to them. Actually, if the truth was known, I'm leaving to escape those morning sessions with you, but I wouldn't tell you that straight-out because even the ignorant have feelings."
"It's nice to have a friend so thoughtful of me," Nils responded. "We fully grown people are as sensitive as you midgets."
Kuusta aimed a fist to miss the blond head next to him, and Nils dodged exaggeratedly, rolling away to one side. Then they got up, went back into the castle, and shook hands in parting.
Early the next morning Kuusta Suomalainen rode across the drawbridge on the aging horse his soldier's pay had bought him, with a sword at his side, a small saddle bag tied behind him, and a safe-pass signed by Oskar Tunghand.
It was an October day on a forested plain in northern Poland, sunny but cool, with a fair breeze rattling the yellow leaves in the aspens and sending flurries of them fluttering down to carpet the narrow road. But Kuusta was not enjoying the beauty. Periodically he broke into coughing that bent him over the horse's withers and left him so weak he didn't see the man standing in the road facing him until the horse drew up nervously. The man wore a cowled jacket of faded dark-green homespun and carried a staff over one shoulder. His face approached the brown of a ripe horse chestnut, darker than the shock of light brown hair that looked to have been cut under a bowl.
"Good morning," the man said cheerfully in Anglic. "You sound terrible."
Kuusta looked at him, too sick to be surprised at having been greeted in other than Polish.
"Where are you going in such poor shape?" the man asked.
"To Finland," Kuusta answered dully.
"Let me put it another way," the man said. "Where are you going today? Because wherever it is, unless it's very nearby, you'll never make it. I've just come from a shelter of the Brethren very near here, and if you're willing, I'll take you there." He paused. "My name is Brother Jozef."
Kuusta simply nodded acquiescence while staring at the horse's neck.
The shelter was out of sight of the road, the path leading there being marked by a cross hacked in the bark of a roadside pine. It was built of un-squared logs chinked with clay, and had two rooms, a small one for occupancy and a smaller one for storage and dry firewood.
Jozef helped Kuusta from the horse and through the door. Inside it was dark, for he had closed the shutters earlier before leaving, but he knew his way around and led Kuusta to a shelflike bed with a grass-filled ticking on it, built against the wall. Then he disappeared outside. As Kuusta's eyes adjusted to the gloom, he raised himself on one elbow to look around. A fit of coughing seized him, deep and painful, and he fell back gasping. He began to shiver violently, and when Jozef came back in, he put down his armload of firewood and covered Kuusta with the sleeping robe from the saddlebag and then with another ticking from the storeroom.
In the night Kuusta's moans wakened the Pole. The Finn's body tossed and twisted feverishly in the darkness, his mind watching a battle. Jozef could see hundreds of knights on a prairie, fleeing in broken groups toward a forest. Pursuing them was a horde of wild horsemen wearing mail shirts and black pigtails, cutting down stragglers. Then a phalanx of knights appeared from the forest, led by the banner of Casimir, King of Poland. They launched themselves at the strung-out body of pig-tailed horsemen, who abandoned their pursuit and tried to form themselves against the challenge. In moments the charging knights struck, sweeping many of them away, and they broke into groups of battling horsemen, chopping and sweating and dying on the grassland.
Kuusta sat up with a hoarse cry, and the scene was gone. Slowly he lay back, his mind settling again into feverish sleep, only ripples and twitches remaining of the violent disturbance of a moment before.
But Brother Jozef sat awake, star
ing unseeingly at the glow that showed through the joints of the box stove. To his trained psi mind, the difference between the pickup of a dream and that of a quasi-optical premonition was definite and unmistakable. This traveler was an undeveloped psi.
9.
The weather had been almost continuously pleasant during Nil's journey, but on this late October day the sky was threatening. Earlier in the morning he had left a broad valley of farms and small woods for wild rocky hills, following a canyon that narrowed to pinch the road between steep, fir-clad slopes.
The first pickup he had of the ambush was the faint mental response of the robbers when they heard his horse's hooves clop over a cobbly stretch where the brook turned across the road.
He stopped for a brief moment. There seemed to be five of them, perhaps seventy or eighty meters ahead, but they couldn't see him yet. He slid from the saddle with bow, sword and shield, slapped the horse on the rump, and moved into the thick forest, slipping quietly along the slope above the road while the horse jogged toward the ambush.
He heard shouts ahead and moved on until, through a screen of trees, he could see what had happened. Apparently the horse had shied and tried to avoid capture, for they had shot it and were tying his gear onto one of the three horses that the five of them shared. Quickly he drew his bow and shot an arrow, and another, and another, two of the robbers falling while the other three scrambled onto the horses and galloped away. His third arrow had glanced from a sapling branch.
His horse lay still alive, four arrows in its body. He knelt beside the outstretched neck, cut its throat, and caught his steel cap full of the gushing blood. After he had had his fill, he washed the cap in the brook.
Then he searched the bodies. It was clear that robbers were not prospering in Bavaria. These two didn't even have the flint and steel he was looking for. He cut a long strip of flesh from his horse's flank, put it inside his jacket, and started walking down the road. A few big, wet snowflakes started to drift down. In less than half a kilometer they were falling so thickly that the ground's warmth couldn't melt them as fast as they landed, and it began to whiten. Within a kilometer visibility had dropped to a few score meters. The temperature was falling too, and soon the snow was no longer wet and sticky. By the time Nils had crossed a low pass and started into the next forested canyon, the snow was almost halfway to his knees.
These wild hills were extensive, and not a narrow range between two settled districts; by late afternoon he still had not come to shelter. The snow was thigh-deep and showed no sign of slowing, while the temperature still was edging downward. Under the denser groves of old firs the snow was much less deep, piling thickly on the branches. His sword striking rapidly, Nils cut a number of shaggy fir saplings and dragged them under a dense group of veterans, building a ridge-roofed shelter hardly waist-high. Next he stripped a number of others, stuffing the shelter almost full of their boughs and piling more at the entrance. Then, with his shield, he threw a thick layer of snow over it. Finally he burrowed into the bough-filled interior feet first, stuffed the entrance full of boughs in front of him, and soon was dozing, chilled and fitful.
By dark the entrance, too, was buried under snow.
Through the night he was dimly aware of time and of being cold, never deeply asleep, never wide awake. Later he was aware of dim light diffusing through the snow, marking the coming of day, but with the instinct of a boar bear he knew it still was storming. Twice he wakened enough to eat some of the raw horsemeat, and later he knew that darkness had returned, and still later that again it was daylight.
Nils sensed now that the storm was over, and he was stiff with cold. Burrowing out of the shelter, he stood erect. The snow was chest-deep under the old firs and deeper elsewhere. The sky was clear and the hairs of his nostrils stiffened at once with the frost. With his sword he cut two fir saplings, trimmed them on two sides and, with fingers clumsy from cold, tied them to his boots with leather strips from his jacket. On these makeshift snowshoes he started up the road again.
Moisture from his breath formed frost beads on his lashes and caked his fledgling mustache and beard. Although it was awkward, he walked with his gloveless hands inside his jacket, his fingers under his arms. His thighs soon ached with cold.
He was dressed only for a raw autumn day, not for an arctic air mass.
Hours passed, hours that would have killed most men.
Nils felt the cold as a physical-physiological phenomenon and knew that after a time it would damage his body severely, even lethally, if he did not find shelter soon enough. The cold would be much less severe if he sheltered under the snow again, but the constant chill would deplete his remaining energy reserves without bringing him nearer to safety. Dressed as he was, to hole up again might delay death, but it would also assure it.
With each step he had to raise his feet high to clear the clumsy snowshoes from the deep, fluffy snow, and as the kilometers passed, his strides became gradually slower and shorter. His feet were like wood despite the exertion, his hands numb and useless, and his body had stopped feeling the cold. The sun had set, and he crossed another ridge in growing darkness. He was not consciously aware of it when night fell.
Suddenly he became alert, smelling faint smoke, sensing the direction of the air movement. Moving slowly, he turned from the road, plowing a deep furrow as he went. Dimly he sensed a mind, felt it sense his.
The hut was half a kilometer from the road-a hump in the snow with the door partly cleared. Other eyes saw the door through his, and as he dragged toward it, it opened. A tall woman stepped out with a long knife, cut the snowshoes from his feet, and helped him inside.
Nils awoke rested and utterly famished. The woman turned to him, pulled back the covers and let him look at himself through her eyes. He knew his hands and feet should have been swollen and split and painful, but they weren't. The skin was peeling from them, and from his face and the front of his thighs, but they didn't seem really damaged.
"My name is Nils," he thought to her. "What is yours?"
"Ilse," she answered, adding, "you have been here three nights and two days."
"How did you do it?" he asked, thinking of the hands and feet that should have been in much worse condition and might well have been gangrenous.
"Through your sleeping mind."
"How?"
"I spoke to it, leading it, and your mind led your flesh to make new flesh in the layers that were dying. My father taught me how."
Ilse's father had been one of the merchant Kinfolk, she explained, and had sensed power in himself that the Kinfolk did not know about. So he had taken his wife and small daughter into the quiet of the wilderness to meditate and explore himself, while his eldest son took his place as a merchant and subtle force in the free town of Neudorf am Donau. Another son had joined the Wandering Kin.
Ilse had grown up in the forest curious and aware, free of the psi static that most psi children grew up with in towns. So she sensed the minds of animals. In most of them there was little enough to read-anxiety, desire, curiosity, anger, comfort and discomfort, all transient. It was a background to her days, like the breeze in the tree tops.
"And then," she thought to Nils, "one day I reached out and touched the mind of an old he-wolf, and he felt the touch. For in these hills the wolves have psi. If one is born without it, they kill it so that it will not suffer the handicap. They confer silently, using their voices only as an accompaniment. Next to man they are by far the most intelligent animals in the hills, and they compensate for the still narrow limits of their minds by their rationality and their psi.
"They experience emotions, in a sense, but the emotion simply happens, without building on itself. They feel fondness but never sentiment. When a wolf fears, it is a fear of something real and present, a response to an immediate danger, and he looks at it as he looks at hunger or a tree or a rabbit. It is there, and he acts accordingly, without confusion." Ilse looked at Nils in the dim light filtering through the scraped deerski
ns stretched over the windows. "In many ways," she added slowly, "the minds of wolves are like yours.
"I am the first human the wolves had ever shared minds with, at least in this forest, and we have done so many times. We communicate by mind pictures, to which we give emotional content when we want to, and we've developed considerable subtlety. It's pleasant for them, and for me, too. Through them I have run through the snow with starlight glittering it, and I've felt their joy in a warm scent. From me they sense new ideas, unthought-of concepts, and while they understand them only vaguely, it gives them a sense of mind-filling, like the feeling they get when they look at a clear night sky and sense a universe beyond understanding.
"So I've always been safe when wolves are about, and if possible they would protect me if I was threatened."
Ilse rose from the bench and took furs from a box-clothing and a sleeping bag, all large. "These are yours when you leave. Your skis are outside."
Nils's mind questioned.
"Yes, I had a premonition a year ago. After a great storm you woud come here, unless you were killed earlier. You would come here weak and frozen and unequipped for winter. And there was more. You will go to the great town called Pest and serve Janos, King of the Magyars."
Nils stayed with Ilse for several days, resting and learning.
10.
During the days since he had left Ilse the arctic cold had eased a great deal, but winter still held strong. The snow had settled some, but there had been no thawing. He had passed through inhabited districts again. Peasants were out on skis, with their oxen and sleighs, hauling firewood or the bodies of cattle that had died in the storm. In Anglic they told him glumly that the surviving cattle would be on short rations by spring, for they were usually able to forage in the woods until near the solstice, but now they were eating their hay already. And the cold they had had was rare even in the middle of winter.