The Yngling y-1

by John Dalmas

  Nils. Someday the big psi-warrior would die, probably violently, but somehow he didn't believe he was dead yet.

  Zuhtu Hakki lay on his side on the straw-filled tick, staring through the darkness at the dim form of the woman on the heap of hay across the room. She lay still, but her mind was awake, her thoughts an unintelligible mental murmuring in German. From somewhere outside he heard coarse laughter. Drunk, every mother's son of them probably. Probably even the paddock guards. All but Mustafa and his detail. It's a good thing the enemy are all bottled up inside the castle, he thought. Old Mustafa will keep his boys sober and in the saddle, and the dogs in the castle won't try to sally out past that pack of wolves. Mustafa never drinks. The older men say he never did. Wonder why? Almost unheard of, a man who doesn't drink. Besides Mustafa I'm probably the only man here who's voluntarily sober, and I've had a pull or two. Funny that since my psi was trained, I've had no desire to get drunk. Other desires, but not to get drunk. He opened his eyes again and looked toward the woman. There were prettier women; plump ones. But I'll stick with this one. You can get tired of a pretty woman, but this one has a mind. Funny. Until my psi was trained, I never cared if a woman had a mind. And tonight she'd been different. No wonder I'm tired. Very tired. Loose and relaxed and very, very tired. And safe here. Very safe here. Very safe and very secure. My eyes are heavy. Very, very heavy. They keep wanting to close. Can't keep them open any more. No need to. Now they're closed. And I can't open them. Couldn't open them if I tried. Don't want to try. Sleepy. Very sleepy. Very, very sleepy. I'm falling asleep. Falling deeply asleep. Deeply asleep. It feels so good to fall deeply, deeply asleep.

  Ilse kept the thoughts running through her/his mind, surrounding them with full, soft inner feelings and pictures of sinking through clouds. She took him deeper and deeper. And now I can't move, her mind murmured. Don't want to move. Can't move. Very peaceful here, and I refuse to move, or see, or hear, or feel.

  She continued this briefly. Then she rose quietly, rolled the comatose chieftain off the straw tick and pulled his war harness from under it. And usually, she thought, he sleeps as lightly as a cat. The curved sword was not heavy and her arms were strong. There was light enough from the dying fire. She kept her eyes on the neck and swung hard, then, with a shudder, threw the blade on the tick and wiped her hands on her greasy homespun skirt, although there was no blood on them. Her mind shifted outside where it found a drunken guard sleeping on the cold doorstone. Fumbling in the gloom, she got the knife sheath off the harness and fastened it to the strip of homespun that served her as a belt.

  Then she opened the shutters on a side window and climbed out. A peasant body lay beneath it, where it had fallen from the roof during the brief afternoon battle, and she stumbled on it. A ladder still leaned against the thatched eaves. She climbed it and huddled grimly against the stone chimney.

  A few men could be heard, or sensed, still wandering or staggering between the huts or down the village street. She heard the sound of violent vomiting, followed by roars of laughter. But most of them were inside now, out of the cold, sleeping. She could barely sense their sleeping minds through the log walls.

  It wouldn't do to be here when the sun rises, she thought. If nothing happens by the time the moon is halfway to the meridian, I'll have to try to get away by myself.

  Two of the horse guards had fallen asleep and the other two squatted murmuring and laughing. They were too dulled to hear the bowstrings. One slumped to his side. The other rose unsteadily to his knees, looking stupidly at the arrow in his belly, then fell forward.

  When they had finished with them, the northmen pulled down the top rails from a section of fence, throwing them out of the way. Then they mounted three of the guards' horses and rode them into the paddock. The animals there were conditioned to the smell of blood and sounds of death, and for a while they didn't take alarm as the warriors quietly walked their mounts around, casually killing horses with their swords. After a little they spooked, however, milling in the darkness, and the northmen worked faster. Some found the place where the fence had been lowered, and Erik stationed himself there as guard and executioner. It didn't take them long to panic then, hopping clumsily in their hobbles and whinnying in the light of the half-risen moon.

  The reddish moon, shaved to slightly less than half a disk, had risen almost entirely above the hills, throwing a pale light over the valley. The sentry atop the gate tower strained his eyes northward. Something was going on over there with the enemy's horses, but it was much too far to see by moonlight. The swine outside heard it, too, he thought. One of them was shouting orders, and three trotted their horses down the road in that direction.

  When the first limb of the moon had shown, he had hissed the news down to the courtyard, and the knights had mounted their horses. The sounds of their low voices had stopped, and they sat in hard and silent readiness. All he could hear now was the occasional impatient sound of a hoof stamping on the packed ground or a creak of leather.

  Suddenly there was another sound, startling him, distant shouts and whoops, as of horsemen riding into the village from the east. The enemy outside turned, staring in that direction but unable to see a thing except the buildings standing dimly in the moonlight across the fields. Their captain trotted his horse a few tentative steps in that direction, stopped for a brief moment, then spoke a command. The whole body of them broke into a gallop toward the village.

  The sentry called down quietly and heard the dull sound of well-greased chains as the portcullis was raised. The gates opened and the knights trotted out, then spurred their horses forward.

  Sten led the peasant charge, and just outside the village his whoop signalled theirs to begin. Briefly they stormed through the village, chopping at the occasional enemy caught outside, before those inside roused and began to stumble out of doorways. Sten knew there was nothing like danger to clear the fumes from a drunken brain, but still, the enemy was afoot, confused, and slow of reflexes, and the clumsy hate-filled peasants rode hewing among the huts.

  Then, more quickly than he'd expected, the angry, sober troop that had stood watch outside the castle were on them, and he shouted and heard Hannes shout to ride, ride for the forest. Peasant blood-lust turned to panic before the onslaught, and they fled, or tried to, streaming out into the field with clots of horse barbarians cutting them out of their saddles. Wishing he were the horseman the enemy were, Sten drew alongside Hannes, guarding him because the man was something to Nils.

  The knights had bypassed the village to the east. There were only twelve of them, but they were strong and battle-hardened and they hit as a solid wave, unexpectedly, rolling up the flank of the already occupied enemy. The remaining peasants rode on in unmolested terror as their pursuers turned to face the assault. As the horse barbarians rallied, the knights began to give back toward the castle.

  And from a roof, a huddled half-frozen girl cried out with her mind, "Nils, Nils, come and get me."

  6.

  This gray dawn was the coldest yet, and the horses' hooves sounded sharply on the frozen ground. There were no clouds. To the east the sky shone yellow along the line of hills as they rode southward down the road. Ilse was draped with a sleeping robe dropped at a door by a horse barbarian and snatched up by Nils as the three warriors had galloped through the village to get her. Now Sten, having circled eastward, caught up with them.

  Hannes, he said, had stayed with his surviving peasants, leading them into the forest.

  "And what will happen to them?" Ilse asked. "Will the enemy hunt them down?"

  Nils smiled. "The first thing the enemy will do is see what horses he can find. It won't be many; mostly peasant plow horses." He turned to Sten. "How many horse barbarians died, do you think?"

  Sten answered in Swedish so that Leif and Erik could understand. "I'd guess maybe twenty were killed this afternoon with arrows from the roofs, but that's just a guess. I watched from a hedgerow, but not very close. And tonight Hannes' peasants must
have tallied twenty or more killed. Killed or maimed, that is. Their strokes weren't too accurate, and I kept worrying they'd fall off their horses. But even peasants can be effective with an advantage like that.

  "The knights must have killed ten or a dozen when they hit, and maybe a few more getting back to the castle. And the archers at the castle might have gotten lucky in the moonlight and knocked off a few more if they followed too close to the walls. How many does that come to?"

  "Fifty or sixty," Nils answered. "And we killed four paddock guards and maybe half a dozen in the village when we rode in to get Ilse. And we killed horses until my sword arm got so tired I had to switch hands."

  He turned to Ilse. "We'll have to teach you Swedish now. Our people don't know Anglic."

  "Perhaps we should teach Leif and Erik Anglic, too." She smiled when she said it, but Nils sensed something behind the words. "I had a precognition weeks ago," she went on. "Men will come out of the sky in a starship, men like the ancients, speaking Anglic, and they will come among your people."

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