One King's Way thatc-2

by Harry Harrison

  Finally, Brand had insisted on pressing upon them six pairs of the strange sticks the Norwegians slid on, the skis. “None of us can use them,” Shef protested.

  “Thorvin can,” Brand replied.

  “I learned too,” added Ceolwulf. “Learned the first winter.”

  “You might need to send scouts out,” Brand urged. What he thought was that some might survive, even if all did not.

  At dawn, some fourteen days after the battle and the burning, the party set out. They were carried over the first stretch in the first ship Brand's folk had managed to make from salvaged parts: planks from both the wrecked ships, keel made from one half of the Crane's originally riveted main timber. The ship was short, wide, and lacking in proportion, named by Brand in disgust the Duckling. Nevertheless she moved reasonably enough under sail, the party packed into her roomy waist with the six-man crew working round them. There had been some argument about where they should all be set down, Brand opting for a fjord which ran furthest into the tangled mass of mountains, and so cut down their marching distance as much as possible. But Cuthred vetoed the choice with total confidence. “Echegorgun said not,” he reported. “He said, go to the fjord that leads to the triple-horned mountain. Then head due east. That way we will strike a line that may lead us down to the great lake that runs across Kjolen, the Keel.”

  “A line, or a path,” queried Shef.

  “A line. There are no paths. Not even Hidden Folk paths. In the deep mountains, they need no paths.”

  He had almost said “we,” Shef noted.

  So, in a chill wind, twenty-three laden figures stood at the very end of a deep fjord. The sun had climbed high up the sky. Even so, it was only just high enough to clear the mountain-tops, and half the fjord still lay in deep shadow. On the other side the snow-capped peaks lay reflected in deep still water, stirred only by the faint ripples of the Duckling being poled out from shore. The humans seemed a mere scattering of forked twigs under the impassive gray bulks, their path a mere slash in the rock down which bright water bounded.

  Brand called out across the water, “Thor aid you.”

  Thorvin made the sign of the Hammer in reply.

  “Lead on,” said Shef to Cuthred.

  Twelve days later, Shef knew he had calculated wrong. He was cutting a twelfth notch in a stick he had carried tucked in his belt since the first few days, and the rest were watching him. They were watching him because he had a dry stick.

  That was part of the miscalculation. The first day had been as bad as Shef had thought it would be, remembering the agony of the climb up the shore, where he had met Ekwetargun. The mountain-side had never been a vertical wall, to be scaled. Yet it had never flattened out enough to become a place where a person could walk, either. First the thigh muscles ached. Then the arms began to join in, as the weary climbers pulled themselves up more and more, pushed with their legs less and less. The breaks for rest became longer, more frequent, the pain worse at each restart.

  All that Shef had predicted. After all, it was only a matter of climbing, say, five thousand feet. Five thousand steps would do it. We must have done three already, he told the others. Two thousand steps! We can count them. And though he had been wrong about the number, he had been right that there would be an end.

  So, then, for a few days, high spirits. Cooped up in slave-quarters or on ship-board for so long, the English had revelled in the air, the sunlight, the immense distances they could see, the exhilarating bareness. The bareness. That was the trouble. Even Thorvin had confided to Shef that he had expected to meet what the Norwegians called barrskog, thickets of scrub. But they were far above the tree-line here. Each night, each fireless night—for they had carried no wood—the cold seemed to clamp down more fiercely. Food was rationed strictly. It never seemed enough. Maybe if they had had a fire to boil their meat in, they began to mutter to each other, the dried seal-meat might have felt as if it filled a belly. As it was, it seemed to be like chewing leather. An age to choke down, and only cramp in the guts once it was there. Night after night, Shef woke from his cold sleep, even in the down-lined bag, dreaming of bread. Bread with thick yellow butter on it. And honey! With beer, thick brown beer. His body cried out for it. None of them had had much fat on their bones to begin with, and their bodies were beginning to break down muscle for want of anything else to use.

  So they stared at his stick, wanting him to shave it down, use it for tinder, light a fire and burn—burn the sere brown grass and moss that covered the rolling upland plateau. It was impossible. But they thought it.

  At least they had made some distance, Shef reflected. Neither hills nor woods had detained them, though swamp and bog had. Yet they had not come upon the lake he had hoped for, and all Cuthred would say was that it must be further on. A lake, he said, with trees round it, with bark that would make light boats. So Echegorgun had assured him. Pity Echegorgun won't come and show us, Shef had felt like saying again and again, keeping silent in view of Cuthred's doubtful loyalties.

  A few days ago he would have told himself that at least the party was staying united. The ability of the ex-slaves to endure hardship had been a great asset. Where proud warriors would have argued and fought and blamed each other, making something out of every blister or bellyache, Shef's party had behaved to each other like—well, like women, Shef had to say. When Martha got the gripes one morning and might have delayed their start, it was Wilfi who acted the fool and distracted attention. When Udd, the weakest of the party, began to limp and go whiter and whiter in the face trying to disguise it, afraid that he would be abandoned, it was Ceolwulf who halted the march, dressed Udd's sore heel with his own ration of sealfat, and walked by his side to encourage him.

  Yet the strain was starting to tell, showing in bickerings. Cuthred, especially, was getting worse again. The day before Karli, still irrepressible when it came to women, had caught up with Edith as she walked ahead, and fondled her buttock for a moment. He and Edith had been bed-partners since Drottningsholm, when the chance came, and she had not protested. But Cuthred, walking behind, had said nothing, merely caught Karli a great sweeping blow on the ear. For a second Karli had squared off to him. Then he saw Cuthred's ostentatious openness to the punch, knew that the counter would be lethal, dropped his shoulders and turned away. Now Karli was humiliated. Not as much as Cuthred had been, but there was enmity there now, and spreading as people took sides.

  Shef tucked the stick back in his belt, looked up at the stars coming out in the frosty air. “Sleep now,” he said. “March at dawn. We've nothing better to do. We'll find wood tomorrow, and Cuthred's lake.”

  When the leader weakens, then the army is hindered, so goes the proverb. When the leader has to joke, then the army is weak already.

  Somewhere above, a mind was watching. Looking down at the little comfortless party, nipped by the cold and by the belly-pinch, one of them at least sobbing silently with an internal pain. It watched with satisfaction, tempered only by caution.

  He survived my whales, it thought. He survived my disciple's test. He carried my spear and he still bears my mark, but he does me no honor. Has never done me honor. But what is honor? The important thing is, he weakens me and mine for the day of Ragnarök.

  Yes, thought the Othin-mind, I have slept little since the death of my son. Since they took Balder from me, and the best of my men, my Einheriar, failed to bring him back from Hel. Since then the world has been gray and dull, and so it will stay till the day of Ragnarök. And if we do not conquer on that day, what hope is there? But this creature, this manling born in a bed, wants to make the world better as it is, to give men happy lives before Ragnarök comes. If that belief spreads, where will my Einheriar come from?

  He must die here and his thoughts die with him. And his followers too. And yet there is a loss there, a loss there as well. For the creature with my one-eye has a kind of wisdom—I wonder who put it there? Sometimes he reminds me of one of my other sons. In any case, he sent me a grea
t champion for the day of Ragnarök, Ivar Slayer-of-Kings, who now fights daily in Valhalla with his fellows. And the one he takes with him, he is a great champion too, the mutilated one. There are no women in Valhalla to irk him, he would be welcome. Baptized to the White Christ he may have been, but there is no belief there now, he could be mine, come to me for my collection. But to do that he must die with weapon in hand.

  It would be a pity to lose him. Even the one-eye, he has a kind of cunning, and that is scarce enough in the fields round Valhalla. What shall I send them? Shall I send my wolves? No. If the wolves ate them, that might be well enough. But just now they would eat the wolves and find them tasty. No, the whales failed and Valgrim failed, and the old iötunn was never mine but rather the brood of Loki. The wolves would fail too. So I will send them snow. And in the snow, my Finns.

  The flakes began to whisper down out of the sky shortly after dusk, at first just one or two, seeming to crystallize rather than fall. Then bigger flakes, and bigger, and a wind rising out of the north to drive them on. Around midnight the two sentries, seeing the snow starting to drift around and over the humped sleeping bags on the bare ground, decided to wake people up and make them shake themselves clear. The camp turned into a slow shuffle of exhausted men and women struggling out into the cold air, shaking their bags down, moving to a new spot, lying down, feeling the hard ground beneath them turn to slush under their own escaped body heat. They began to shuffle unconsciously to get into the lee of each other, the camp moving slowly piece by piece downwind.

  Some time before dawn Shef, realizing what was happening, made a line of backpacks and raked snow over them to create a makeshift wall, putting the party behind that in ranks, the weakest in the middle and the strongest on the edges. Few people slept much for all that. Dawn broke on people tired, hungry, and still fireless.

  There was no moving till the snow stopped, as it did after a few hours. They looked out then on a featureless white plain, the sun hidden behind clouds. Shef felt a momentary stab of doubt. During the night he had lost all sense of direction. With the sun hidden… He had heard that there was a kind of clear rock that so concentrated the rays that you could see the sun even through cloud, but there was none of it in this group.

  He controlled his fear. Which way they went was no longer material. They had to find wood and shelter, and any way that led to that was good. Salvaging the skis from under the snow, he told Thorvin and Ceolwulf, their only skilled users, to go in different directions as far as was visible, to look for a break in the plateau.

  Only after they had left did he think to count heads. They were one short. The missing woman was Godsibb, a fair, silent, sad girl, who had trudged along without complaint ever since they had taken her from Drottningsholm. Even Karli had not bothered to try his luck with her. She had never responded even to his good cheer. They found her body, a hump in the snow surprisingly far away, showing how much they had moved in the night.

  “What did she die of?” asked Shef after they had swept the snow off the body with their hands.

  “Cold. Exhaustion. Hunger,” said Hund. “People have different levels of resistance. She was a thin girl. Maybe her bag got damp. Nobody noticed her in the night and she fell into the snow-sleep. It is a peaceful way to go—better than the fate Queen Asa would have given her,” he added, trying to deflect Shef's self-criticism.

  Shef looked at the worn face, too tired for a young girl's. “She came a long way to die here,” he said.

  And in dying she had caused him a problem, too. Impossible to bury her in the frozen ground. Could they leave her in the snow, under the snow? It would look all right as they marched away, but no-one could avoid thinking of what would happen when the snow melted and left her exposed.

  Hund touched Shef's arm and pointed silently. On a knoll a hundred yards away, a four-legged shape looked at them, then sat down to wait, tongue lolling. Others drifted up behind it, took in the situation, and sat or lay down.

  There were different views about wolves. Some of the English were quite used to them, said they were hardly dangerous at all. Brand had contradicted that with his usual finality. “They'll pull you down,” he said. “Not frightened of people at all. Of course they won't attack a score of you, armed and together. Two men off in the forest, that's another story.”

  The wolves meant they could not possibly leave Godsibb, not till they could find earth to lay her in, fire to soften it, and stones to pile on her grave. Carrying her would just weaken the carriers further. If they ended up with another corpse to carry, and another…

  Shef called two men over, told them to tie her in her bag, attach ropes to it and drag her through the snow when they moved on. He waved aside Fritha's eager offer to shoot a wolf with his crossbow. Waste of a bolt. There would come a time when their need would be greater. Meanwhile the hunting bows had been lost in the night, put down on the ground and buried in the snow. Shef organized the party into a line and made them move back over the whole area they had covered in the night, back to where he thought was their original campsite, probing with feet and gloved hands. They found two of the four bows but only one quiver of arrows, also a set of skis and someone's discarded backpack. By then it might have been noon, and not a step advanced on their journey. A poor start for the first day of bad weather. Shef scowled at the man who had lost his pack, and rubbed the lesson home with harsh words.

  “Keep everything by you. Or on you. Don't leave anything ever till the morning. Or there won't be a morning. And remember, your mother isn't with us!”

  Thorvin and Ceolwulf were back, looking annoyingly warm and cheerful from hours of positive action.

  “Head that way,” said Ceolwulf, pointing. “There's a dip, a valley going down, and what looks like trees a few miles off.”

  Shef reflected. “All right,” he said. “Look. Just two of you might not be safe, with our new escorts. Pick four of the youngest and show them how to use these skis. Then take them forward, ahead of us. Even your beginners will be faster than people floundering in snow. When you get to the trees, break wood and bring back as much as you can carry. A fire will put heart into people, and make it easier for them to walk on. I will bring everyone on as fast as I can. Take care not to lose sight of us, and come back at once if the snow begins again.”

  The skiers went ahead of them, Thorvin and Ceolwulf calling advice and helping fallers to their feet. Shef and the rest, sixteen of them towing one body, kept on trudging forward, occasionally stumbling into drifts. The snow crept down boots and inside mittens.

  Piruusi the Finn reveled in the snow, the first fall of the year, early and welcome. He had left his snug skin tent at dawn, watered the bone runners of his sleigh and left them to ice, wiped his face and his skis with yellow reindeer-fat, and skimmed away, bow in hand. He hoped for ptarmigan or Arctic hare, but anything would be welcome, even nothing. Winter was the time of release for the Finns, and if it came early, then their ancestral spirits looked kindly on them.

  As he swept up to and past the tent of old Pehto, the shaman, Pehto came out and hailed him. Piruusi stopped, frowning. Pehto was too powerful with the spirits to vex, but he called always for attention, respect, food and fermented milk.

  Not this time. Capering professionally and shaking his rattle, Pehto nevertheless for once spoke sense. “To the west, Piruusi great hunter, lord of the reindeer. To the west, something comes. Something with power, Piruusi, and a god's disfavor. Aiiee!” And he began a manic stamping dance, which Piruusi ignored.

  Nevertheless he swung out of the low birch wood, its leaves already turning brown from the first frost, and pushed up the gentle slope to the west. His skis hissed smoothly across the snow, Piruusi moving without thought and without effort. Ski-poles were slung across his back, but on anything less than a full slope he had no need of them. More important to hold the bow and arrow, ready for a shot at any moment. One lived in the winter wild by preying on every opportunity. Never turning down a chance.

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nbsp; There was something there, sure enough. Had the old fraud really seen them with his mystic vision? Perhaps he had risen early to look, for they were plain enough, a straggle across the snow. First, men on skis. Men! They fell over every hundred paces, worse than boys, as if they were babies. And behind those, clear enough to Piruusi's long-sighted eyes, a herd of them, moving like oxen, floundering along, kicking up snow with every step. They dragged a makeshift sled or travois with them.

  Piruusi had never paid a Finn-tax, but those of his cousins who lived nearer the shore did so. It was worth it not to have their summer fisheries and fowling-trips cut short by the murderous seamen. Time, Piruusi thought, for someone to pay a Norse-tax in return. He skimmed back to the cluster of tents, men and women inside the flaps cooking over their hot fires of dried reindeer dung, called the menfolk to their skis and bows.

  Shef's party regained their strength as they reached the first clump of trees, mere dwarf birch, but desperately welcome. Shef called the skiers back to join the marchers, anxious that no-one should be lost sight of.

  “We'll get into the trees, find shelter,” he called. “Then we can have a fire and cook. At least we'll be off the moor.”

  As if in answer, an arrow from behind a tree struck Wiferth, struggling with his skis, in the base of the skull. He fell instantly, dead as a herring before he struck ground. Moments later the air was full of the zip of arrows, the trees full of figures flitting from one trunk to another, never showing for more than an instant, calling encouragement to each other in some unknown language.

  Many of Shef's party were veterans. They crouched immediately, shook out into a rough circle, moved behind what cover there was. But the arrows came from all sides. Not shot with much force—Shef saw Ceolwulf grimace and pull an arrow from the brawn of his thigh, seemingly with little effort—but deadly to throat or eye. The shooters were quite close in.