Winter Song

by Colin Harvey

  Thorunn shrugged. "Whatever he is, Bera seems happy, now she has someone to nurse."

  Ragnar didn't answer, but walked away. "Time for dinner," he called over his shoulder, belatedly remembering to say goodbye. Striding back to the courtyard, he saw Brynja again tied to the water-tap in the centre. The puppy yapped at him, but he ignored it, though he noted that it was bulking up, and he wondered what Bera was feeding it on. As long as it came out of her share of the food and she kept it out of his way, he wasn't too bothered.

  He descended into the lobby, and removed his boots.

  "Bera's obviously attracted to him," he heard Thorbjorg say, her voice arch. "Aren't you, Bera? Does he make your heart beat quicker, girl?"

  Bera muttered something which Ragnar couldn't make out.

  "Oh, really?" Asgerd said, sounding as if she were trying not to laugh.

  "What's amusing my daughters-in-law?" Ragnar said, as he entered the communal kitchen. Greeted by silence and a mix of sheepish looks, he sniffed at the aromas and tilted his head quizzically. "Horse? What's the occasion?"

  "Berti died last night," Hilda said. "We're pickling and freezing as much as we can, but there's enough left over for a few meals." She gave him a little smile. "It won't spoil, after all, in this weather."

  "True." He picked at a piece and dodged the knife's flat that Hilda aimed at his hand. Chewing, he said around the meat. "Are you including our guest in the meal?"

  Hilda's smile faded, and he could feel the tension in the room. He could almost read their minds: do we say yes or no? What sort of mood is he in? Good. It wouldn't hurt to keep them on their toes.

  Bera said, "I was, um, I was going to take a few pieces out after we'd eaten." She didn't look up once. "I wasn't sure whether to or not after the last time he had horse."

  Ragnar remembered the vomit-eating and winced. It probably hadn't thawed properly. Nonetheless… "Take him some," Ragnar said, and felt the mood in the room lighten. "I'll come with you, shall I?"

  Bera said, head still down, "As you wish, Gothi." She hadn't called him Pappi since he'd accused her of overfamiliarity. She'd refused to name the father, and worse, been cheeky. He'd hit her so hard, the slap had left her nose bleeding.

  He sat and tucked into the meat, using bread freshly baked from their precious harvest to mop it up with.

  Afterward he let Bera carry the meat down, and stayed sitting while the others cleared the table of leftovers and dirty dishes. He waited until they were alone, and asked Asgerd, "Should I be worried about leaving her alone with the stranger?"

  Hilda would be pissed off that he'd asked his elder daughter-in-law instead of his daughter, but he would get a more honest answer from Asgerd, who, as wife to his heir had less reason to tell him what he wanted to hear, would instead tell him what he needed to hear.

  "I don't think so," Asgerd said. "I think she's learned her lesson."

  "To keep her legs together? Or not to get knocked up if she does lie with him?"

  "I think that he's a long way from lying with anyone," Asgerd said. She fell silent as Hilda returned to the room from the scullery, and shot them a questioning look.

  "I think I'll visit our guest," Ragnar said.

  Out in the barn, the stranger was already finishing the pile of meat that Bera had taken out at Ragnar's insistence. "Surely he'll be ill if he eats that much?" Hilda had protested, falling silent at his look.

  Clearly the stranger was slightly better again, although only physically. Mentally… he gazed into space as he ate with almost unbelievably pale blue eyes, ignoring Bera's idle chit-chat, her recounting of the latest gossip. But when he saw Ragnar a cunning look crossed his features.

  "What's your name, fellow?" Ragnar said.

  The fellow gazed away, his eyes following a wagtail as it flitted through the rafters, his head and body swaying slightly to some internal rhythm.

  "Hey, I'm talking to you!" Ragnar seized the man's arm. For all that Allman looked wasted, his arm was corded muscle. Ragnar felt a twitch deep in the arm, as if the man had suffered a spasm. Was he disabled? A lunatic who'd escaped his confines? But there were no dwellings between here and Althfjord, which was the nearest farmhouse in the general direction that Ragnar's people had found him, so how had he got there?

  Ragnar resented asking himself such questions too often – he didn't like the answers he kept coming up with. He had no problem with being proven wrong, if the Formers were to return. If they came properly that is, not represented by a drooling half-wit.

  Before he could speak further, though, Allman had lurched to his feet and stood swaying in a non-existent breeze, a look of agony etched into his face. Then he started babbling. It took Ragnar a few seconds to identify the words.

  "That's not Isheimuri," Bera cried, as Allman fell again, trying to catch him.

  "It's High Isheimuri," Ragnar said. "Common Tongue we speak is corrupted English with a little Icelandic, as it was spoken when the settlers left Nytt Ragnarok. That wasn't much different from how it was spoken before the Diaspora. This is proper Old Norse from Earth's Middle Ages – he's reciting Egil's Saga."

  Hearing Old Norse spoken with such fluency dispelled any thoughts that the man was an offworlder. Nytt Ragnarok had been reduced to a smouldering ruin a year before the funds ran out, in one of the first raids of what had soon escalated into all-out war.

  The man's eyes focused on Ragnar.

  "I wonder," Ragnar said. "Are you some wandering seer, traveller? If you are, I can hardly put you to work for me, except asking you to labour enough to pay for your food and lodging." As a seer, the man was legally outside of the law, rather than a criminal. Ragnar couldn't hold him as a Thrall, an indentured servant – or slave, as some namby-pamby reformers dubbed them.

  The man fainted.

  Ragnar shook his head in disbelief.

  Allman's eyes snapped open; he said, "You? Dislike sunset?"

  Ragnar felt a chill beyond the weather. All his life he'd known what to do, and when he didn't he'd bluffed. But this was like nothing he'd ever known. The man was either mad or acting the part. Ragnar stood up, and dealt with fear – rarely though he felt it – as he usually did, by getting angry and shouting. "Pull yourself together!"

  The man's eyes suddenly focused and he recoiled with an exclamation. "Who the bloody hell are you?"

  FIVE

  Karl

  Karl gazed down at the other man, thinking, Ooops, maybe I shouldn't have said that. The man, Ragnar – how did I know his name? – was formidably ugly. Black hair streaked with grey sprouted from his head, nose and even his ears, which appeared to have been broken or torn at some point. Beneath bushy eyebrows a bulbous nose separated raisin-like eyes. The eyes were shrewd, though, missing nothing.

  Ragnar released his grip on Karl's smock. He drew himself up to his full one-metre eighty height and puffed out his chest. Karl was braced for an onslaught of selfimportance, but Ragnar visibly gathered himself in. "I'm the man who could have left you to die in the snow."

  Karl made himself look contrite. "Of course. I'm sorry."

  "Ragnar Helgrimsson." He thrust out his hand.

  "Karl Allman." Karl gazed at the hand, at the flush rising Ragnar's face, and realised that in his confusion he was insulting Ragnar again. On instinct, Karl offered his hand, and the man seized the inside of his elbow in a grip strong enough to crush walnuts, before releasing him.

  Ragnar said, "You'll come to my chamber," and stalked out of the barn.

  Karl realised that Bera was staring at him, openmouthed. He noted absently that she slouched, but apart from a slight squint she could have been pretty, beneath the tangle of hair, cold sore and the dirt. "Have I grown another head?"

  He smiled to show that he was joking, but the silence and her stare were making him uncomfortable.

  She fled.

  "Ah… OK." He rubbed his head then scratched where the rough sheepskin smock that they'd dressed him in chafed.

  His companion
– the micro version of Ship's Aye – must have assimilated data while he recovered, so that nothing was wholly familiar nor completely strange, but somewhere in-between.

  He was clearly in an empty area for animals: a barn, about forty metres long by fifteen wide. Lurching across to a ladder, he looked up at second story; both floors were together six, maybe seven metres high.

  Staggering across to the doorway on still-wobbly legs, he looked up the slope to a low grass-roofed building that crouched half-buried in the side of a rock-strewn hill. Beyond another house at a right angle to the first, people were crawling among the heather. Bera loped toward them. He thought it the bleakest landscape he'd ever seen, bar none, and almost wished he'd passed Isheimur by and died in space. No, that's foolish.

  Gazing up at a cloudy grey sky tinged with pink, Karl felt a sudden vertiginous wave. "Been cooped up for too long." His environment shouldn't have so affected him but his companion's information-gathering while he convalesced had complicated his mental state. He shivered in the intense cold; in a couple of days, the

  nanophytes would adjust his reactions.

  He ambled across the square, taking deep breaths of the scrawny, tasteless air. His companion indicated that it was about as thick as Earth's atmosphere in Tibet, but that meant nothing to him. He'd long complained to Ship that all its systems were calibrated against Earthnorms, but it had done no good.

  A couple of women who looked deep in conversation fell silent. One of them was a voluptuous strawberryblonde who shot him a dazzling smile. "Up and about, I see."

  "Yes." Karl struggled not to gasp out the answer.

  Bera appeared by his side. "You shouldn't walk around on your own. It's not safe." Karl stopped and she took his arm. "Lean on me."

  He nodded thanks. They resumed. "Looks. Safe," he panted.

  "Things aren't always as they seem. Like Thorbjorg." She jerked her head at the strawberry-blonde. Before he could ask what she meant, Bera changed the subject. "Why were you so rude to Ragnar?"

  "Long. Story."

  Bera stopped him. "We have time."

  How much could he tell her? If she did tell Ragnar, would it matter? Karl decided on the truth. "When I was ten my parents moved from one Clade to another. It was compulsory, to avoid incest." She looked puzzled. "Small gene pool," he explained. "Jakob Attlee was a year older than me. We loathed each other. I was small for my age – I grew thirty centimetres during adolescence, but then I was a shrimp – and Jakob was big, nanophyte injections converting his fat to muscle." He wondered whether to explain nanophytes but she nodded, so he pressed on. "When Jakob learned that I'd had my first injections, the bullying got nasty."

  She tilted her head to one side as something caught her interest. "A big man like you? Hard to imagine anyone bullying you."

  "People change," he said.

  "These injections," she prompted.

  He resumed, "Nanophytes repair injuries, build muscles and make other improvements. When they learned I'd had my first injections, Jakob's gang cornered me away from the main trees. Jakob had stolen a bottle of household bleach." Bera looked puzzled again. "They held me down while he poured it down my throat. Before I'd had my nanophyte injections, it would have burned my throat out, maybe killed me. It was still the worst pain I've ever felt. The nanophytes began repairing me straight away, which was as painful as the burns. Jakob's gang wouldn't let me go, but watched what happened." He paused. "An hour later, they did it again; and again. When they finally let me go that evening, they threatened to kill me if I told anyone. I believed them."

  Bera said, "That's sad. But what's it to do with Ragnar?"

  Karl said, "I'd just been dreaming about Jakob. Ragnar looked exactly like an older version of him." Maybe, he thought, that was the companion's way of assimilating Ragnar's image? "The same piggy eyes, and bushy eyebrows… waking up and seeing that face again…" He saw her nod of comprehension, and said, "Is it significant?"

  She pushed out her lips, thinking. "He was offended. Think of it. He's an important man, and you react as if he's a troll."

  A troll? He thought. Ah, they're Icelanders. Trolls are part of Icelandic culture. I'm surprised that they quote old Icelandic tales, though. "So I should make a big fuss when I next see him? Thank him for his hospitality?"

  "I would," Bera said. "It may work."

  "May?"

  "Ragnar bears a grudge," she said. "He might forgive you."

  "Ah," he said. "Understood. I'll hope that I do a good enough job of convincing him how grateful I am."

  "I would," she said. "And if I were you, I'd hope that it's enough." Though she smiled, the fear in her eyes didn't fool him. He could understand fear, but there was hope as well. Why?

  "Come on," she said. "We mustn't keep him waiting too long."

  "Ragnar's house?"

  She nodded.

  Like the barn, it was about forty metres long, perhaps twenty metres wide. Karl looked back at the barn; all the buildings were dug into the hillside, and covered over with turf. Smoke issued from a vent on one of the roofs. Bera said, "His family sleep here, in the winter, his labourers too. They're up with the flocks now." She helped him descend steps into a half-lobby that stank of furs and boots ingrained with body odour, and through into a long room lit along each wall. Except for one, which was all window, looking down over the barn, onto the lake. "Strengthened glass," Bera said. "Two centuries old."

  This room stank too, of bodies crowded together for too long, but now it was nearly empty of people, though boxes and piled possessions were strewn everywhere. "The main hall, where the children and Thralls – the indentured labourers – sleep," Bera said. At the far end was a five metre-long table, around which two women bustled, setting out jugs and plates: "Hilda and Asgerd, Ragnar's daughter and older daughter-in-law."

  "Good morning," Asgerd said with a shy smile. She was another blonde, but subtle to Thorbjorg's voluptuous.

  Hilda was as dark as her father, and her mouth was down-turned; she looked as if life perpetually disappointed her. "My father," she faintly emphasised the first word, "will see you now. You can leave us, Bera."

  "Why can't Bera stay with me?" Karl said. "I couldn't have got here without her help."

  Hilda stiffened, but before she could answer, Bera said, "I'll go and find you a walking stick, Karl, then go help in the kitchen."

  Hilda dipped her head a centimetre in acknowledgement, or dismissal.

  "She knows her place," Hilda said. The rebuke to Karl was clear: so should he.

  "Is she a servant?" Karl said, refusing to be intimidated.

  Hilda looked offended. "She is fostered here. Farms that cannot support their people often place children with other farmsteads, and the children work for their keep, as does everyone else. Everyone," she emphasised, then added, "but Bera's family were killed when their farm was buried beneath lava. So sad. So unusual, that a volcano blows, but they knew the risk. Lush farmland often means volcanoes. Come!"

  She led Karl into a large chamber in which Ragnar sat gazing at some papers, his shoulders draped with a white fur lined with coloured ribbons. Karl wondered if he was supposed to be impressed.

  Ragnar looked up. "You're here. Good." He noted Karl's trembling right leg: "Do I scare you so much?" He grinned.

  "Muscle spasm," Karl said. "Being on my feet. Still recovering." He did feel a little weak.

  "Then sit. Hilda, fetch him some warm sweet water."

  Hilda departed.

  Ragnar gazed at Karl, who stared back. Ragnar said abruptly, "Where are you from? And what were you doing naked on a hillside at night?"

  "I – uh, I fell from the sky." Karl felt foolish saying it, but his companion hadn't gained enough vocabulary while he'd been unconscious for anything but simple concepts, although his lexicon was expanding hourly.

  "Why?"

  "My ship was attacked. I was forced to… leave it. It was destroyed. I had no time to take any possessions."

  "A starship?
Not a sailing ship?" Ragnar's tone hinted at scepticism.

  "A starship, yes." Keep it simple, caution urged. Karl wasn't sure whether this man was friend or enemy, although his instincts suggested more the latter.

  "Who attacked you?"

  Karl said cagily, "They're people who assumed that I was hostile. It's complicated. There are a lot of factions in a big sky."

  "Were they Shapers?" Luckily, Karl saw Ragnar's lips shape "Formers" so ignored his idiot companion's urge to translate words even when they were common to both languages.

  "Terraformers? No."

  "Are you?"