“That’s the hunter’s right,” Artos said, laughing, stripped to his kilt and with blood to his elbows, tossing the organs onto a bed of broadleaf plantain.
“By olden custom,” Bjarni agreed.
Asgerd kindled a small hot fire while they finished the work and washed in the creek, and whittled green sticks. That also gave them plenty of offal for Garbh. She waited anxiously with her nose following the business, but she was far too well-mannered a dog to feed on the kills until given leave.
Crouching with a string of smoking chunks of liver and kidney and heart on his stick, Artos bit into a flavorsome morsel and chewed blissfully, and started in on a second skewer. Then he caught Edain’s eye and used his own gaze as a pointer. The younger Mackenzie nodded slightly, gulped, wiped his hands and rose, strolling away with Garbh at heel as if to obey a call of nature.
Artos swallowed a mouthful and called mildly: “Come and join the feast, friend, and introduce yourself. We’re all the Mother’s children and should share Her bounty.”
A clump of blackberry canes not far away shook violently, and there was a choked-off cry and a low growling. Garbh came out, with her huge jaws clamped on the wrist of a stranger, pulling him along by walking backward—and perfectly capable of taking off the joint in one bite, as the captive seemed to realize. Edain followed with an arrow on his string.
“Nobbut the one, Chief,” he said casually. “He hid well, but not as well as Garbh and I looked.”
“Thought so,” Bjarni said, taking another pinch of gray sea salt from his pouch and sprinkling it on his meat. “Not much of a catch, hey? Not as much meat on his bones as these cattle!”
Asgerd gave a violent start of surprise when the intruder was revealed, and made a nearly successful attempt to disguise it by coughing as if she’d swallowed some meat juice wrongly. Mathilda waved her skewer through the air to cool it and looked the man up and down.
Artos considered their captive as well. He was young, his beard just a patchy orange-yellow fuzz, straggled dirt-and-sweat-crusted yellow hair falling to his shoulders, blue eyes wide with fear. He was about five-eight and lean but not too hungry-scrawny, his skin marked with a number of thick scars but no open sores or scrofula or scabies. His pants were patches of hide on a foundation of pre-Change denim, and his feet were bare and tough and calloused, but he had a pair of the crudest moccasins Artos had ever seen tucked into his belt, mere bags of skin fastened with hide laces. His upper body bore a sleeveless vest of small animal skins, rabbit and squirrel predominating, badly cured with piss and brains, from the smell.
The belt around his waist was braided from thongs of raw cowhide, fitted to a salvaged buckle, and bore a knife and a hatchet; a necklace of teeth adorned his chest, human and wolf or dog and punctuated by two boar’s-tusks. Edain returned his arrow to his quiver, slung his strung bow and drew his dirk. Touching the point of the ten-inch blade to the skin behind the man’s ear, he used his other hand to toss the weapons at his belt to the ground before Artos; they were pre-Change salvage too, but well cared for, sharp and shining with grease. The bowman ignored the crude buckler made from some sort of metal pot lid with a handle, which looked as if it had been hammered into a convex shape with a rock. Then he stepped back and picked up a bundle of spears, handing them to his chief.
Three were four-foot javelins balanced for throwing, with heads made from table knives ground down to points. The other was man-high and heavier, made for thrusting; the head looked like it had been fashioned from a strip of steel salvaged from a railing or something of that order, hammered and ground down by simple rubbing on rocks into a double-edged blade the length of Artos’ hand from wrist to fingertips. All the heads were secured by butting the tangs into a slot at the top of the ashwood shafts, then binding tightly with a layer of wet rawhide thongs that shrank as it dried to an unbreakable grip. Hoof glue had been poured over the join to set in a resinlike mass and keep the leather bindings tight. The wood was straight, carefully shaped by a knife to give good balance, and rubbed with a little oil of some sort.
Not too bad, Artos thought. Still, not what I’d use to hunt wild cattle by preference, much less a tiger. I’d say this lad’s folk have fewer arts than the Bekwa, but more than my Southside Freedom Fighters did when I encountered them in the Wild Lands of Illinois last year. Whether they were Eaters or no in the dying time, I doubt they are now. Not as a matter of course; he looks too healthy, and you can catch every disease there is by eating human meat.
“That’s all his arms,” Edain said. “Though if we could train up his stink, it’d be a weapon of power to match your Sword, right enough.”
Artos nodded; the man had a hard dry smell about him as if he’d never washed except by accident, and it had been awakened by the fear-sweat pouring off his face and flanks. He pointed to the other side of the little fire.
“Sit,” he said.
The captive obeyed, or at least squatted on his hams. Garbh released his wrist, backed three paces, and stood staring at him, slightly crouched, her yellow-gold wolf eyes fixed on his throat. Her lips were drawn back over her long yellow teeth; she was at least the man’s weight, and the mouth in her massive head was broad as his palm. He glanced at her out of the corners of his eyes and visibly decided to stay very still.
“Here,” Artos said. “I’m Artos of the Mackenzies.”
He pulled one of the sticks of organ meat from where it rested over the fire on Y-shaped twigs, sprinkled it with salt and handed it to the man. Their prisoner relaxed very slightly as he took it. Then he gobbled with a roynish lack of concern for manners, juices running down his chin and dripping onto his chest. When he finished he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, licked his fingers to get the last of the salty liquid, and then smeared his hands across his vest and belched.
“Dik Tomskid,” he said, and jerked a thumb towards his breast. “Lunnunbunh.”
Repetition made the syllables clear: Dick Tom’s kid, of the London Bunch.
“This dialect’s even thicker than the Southsiders’,” Artos said aside to his companions. “Fortunately we don’t have to learn it.”
“It’s amazing how fast the tongue can change its ways in these little wild-man tribes,” Mathilda observed. “The smaller, the worse, it seems. It’s only been one generation and I can hardly understand him at all—perhaps they were feral children, too.”
“Easier for changes to spread when there are few speakers,” Artos guessed.
The captive had been examining them more closely, now that he wasn’t in a blind funk and expecting to be put over the fire himself.
“Yuh nuh Bekwa,” he said. “Buh godda cuns widt.”
“Yes, we have women with us, and indeed we’re not Bekwa,” Artos said. “We just killed a many of the Bekwa tribes and left them dead on the field.”
That took more repetition to get across; Dik’s smile showed an intact if discolored set of teeth.
“Yuh fukr dedum!” he said enthusiastically. Then, scowling slightly: “Nuh bunh ettin a-un Lunnunbuhn lan.”
No other tribe eats . . . or does he mean hunt? . . . on London Bunch land, Artos translated; the Sword seemed to make that easier, though he’d always had a good ear. Or it might just be keep off my tribe’s territory. He’s a brave man, to tell us so when he’s in our power.
“We go tomorrow,” he said. “Go. Keep going. Go far away.”
He pointed to himself and his companions, then traversed his arm from the east until it was aimed southwestward, which brought a nod of approval. Then he went on:
“You can have that one,” he said, pointing to one of the yearlings hanging a good distance away. “We’ll leave the hides of the others, and the horns and bones. Tell your folk that we come in peace, but it would be a very foolish thing to get in our way.”
He stood and hefted one of the wild-man’s javelins. Then he moved with a sudden skipping half-step, and his long arm whipped forward. The captive fell backward to follow the flashin
g streak that ended with a thunk and a quivering hum as the point stood in a tree trunk fifty paces away.
Then Artos nodded to Edain. The Mackenzie wheeled, drew and shot three times in the space as many breaths would take, aiming for the most distant of the beef carcasses. There was a meaty thwack-thwack-thwack sound, and the big animal’s body twisted and swung under the impact. All the shafts transfixed the beast’s chest, all within a space the size of a man’s palm. Dik’s eyes went wider still, though presumably he’d seen at least part of their hunt. This close you could see how the arrows made nothing of thick flesh and cracked through the heavy bone of the beef ribs.
“Stay!” Edain said to Garbh, and dropped the wild-man’s weapons near his feet. “And you’d best be going.”
The savage snatched up his possessions, but he was careful to keep his movements unthreatening. He sidled over to retrieve his throwing-spear, grunted in surprise as he had to work it back and forth to free it, turned and raised it towards Artos. Then he ducked his head and trotted away to the northward. Edain retrieved his arrows before he and Garbh followed at a leisurely springy trot.
Bjarni finished his second skewer of meat. Then he took out the long single-edge seax-knife he wore horizontally across the small of his back and used it to cut a circle of turf. Artos drowned the coals in a hiss and sputter with the contents of his canteen, then pushed dirt over them with one boot and tamped it down and wet the results. Bjarni dropped the circle of turf in place and walked on it.
“You know,” he said thoughtfully as he wiped the patterned steel of his seax on a twist of grass, polished it on his sleeve and sheathed it. “This is good land.”
He dug up a handful from the space where he’d taken the grass, squeezed it to show the open, resilient crumb structure, tasted, spat and dusted off his hands.
“Very good land,” he said, washing his mouth out with a swig from his water bottle and spitting again. “It tastes sweet. Not too heavy with clay, not too sandy, not sour either; there’s plenty of wild clover—that means there’s lime in the soil.”
Artos signed agreement. “I’ve not seen much better. Iowa, yes, but this is more varied. I’d still prefer the Willamette country, but this is fine and no dispute. And there’s a very great deal of it since we left your homeland.”
Bjarni had a hungry look on his face as he considered the disheveled richness around:
“Good wheat and barley land, good for spuds and pasture and hay, and the weather’s better than ours. You can see how much further along the spring is, and there are all those fruits we can’t grow at all. Good hunting, enough timber, fishing in the big lakes, and we could ship cargo on those too. Plenty of fast-moving rivers for mills and forges. Good land all the way from Royal Mountain to here . . . and beyond, you say?”
“It’s hundreds of miles from here to the Midwestern realms,” Artos agreed. “The most of them are on the far side of the Mississippi. Nor are they crowded within themselves, and they have empty lands nearer them south of the lakes at need, or downriver. It will likely be a goodish long time before they come here in strength.”
The Norrheimer went on: “The English claim the coast south from the Aetheling’s Isle—”
That took a moment to translate; it turned out he meant what the old maps called Prince Edward Island. Artos remembered hearing from his stepfather, Sir Nigel, that it had come through the Change very well, better than most of Montival, without famine or plague. And it had reforged its links with its ancient homeland. England was thinly peopled itself these days, with fewer inhabitants than Iowa; most of the survivors had ridden out the first Change Year on Wight and the other offshore isles. But Greater Britain was growing fast under William the Great, made broad claims, and had the ships to enforce many of them.
“—and the Empire men are rich and have much might. Let them have those lands along the coast I say, and fight the Moors for them; there are many old cities there, but not so much farmland like this, and there’s enough salvage here too. That city with the great Bifrost tower alone would yield enough for a dozen generations.”
Bjarni’s smile grew worthy of Garbh. “And the wild-men here are so few, and so backward. Even more than the Bekwa tribes we beat! No armor, and none who know how to fight in a well-ordered array! Yes, it could be that in my son’s great-grandson’s time this will be the heart of Norrheim.”
“The savages are thinly spread, but they’re fairly numerous in total,” Mathilda said shrewdly. “You’re speaking of a big stretch of land, Bjarni King. Many times what your people hold now. There are what, seventy or eighty thousand of you? The Bekwa were as many, judging from the host they could raise.”
“Not anymore,” he said grimly. “And still less when their remnants have finished fighting among themselves; we saw that south of Royal Mountain.”
Mathilda spread her hands: “But this land west of Montreal and north of the lake probably has as many again.”
“You met some of the Bekwa north and west of here,” Bjarni pointed out. “These wild-men are even more backward.”
Artos shrugged. “They’ll fight for their homes. The Bekwa we met in the North Woods on the Superior shores went around them, not through them, and they didn’t try to settle here—though this is much better land for hunters as well as farmers.”
The Norrheimer nodded. “A few families on their own wouldn’t be safe. It would have to be carefully planned, with a chief and his followers as a core, as well as yeomen, all settled close enough to help each other and overmaster any little bands within reach of them. Starting near Royal Mountain directly west of Norrheim, and then west along the lines of rail and water as our numbers grew, and maybe east down the Great River too. The Bekwa and these other savages would have to flee, north into the pine forests, maybe.”
“Lord,” Asgerd said.
He looked up at her, startled out of his dream, and she went on, flushing a little but dogged and earnest:
“Don’t the old tales say that sometimes the Gods walk among us in disguise, as homeless wanderers, beggars with nothing to bargain with, like that poor gangrel just now? Nerthus does, and Odin too. And they judge us by how we treat them. Also, didn’t your father, Erik the Strong, make us one folk out of many, in the land-taking? Not only when he overfell foemen with his might, but by his wise words at the folkmoots as well, and by holding out a helping hand. That’s how my father won bride and land, as Erik’s follower; and my brothers and sisters are part of Norrheim’s might now, ready to pay you scot and fight in your levy.”
“In numbers is power,” Mathilda observed. “Hands and backs to work and fight. Faster to school the ones that are already there rather than just wait for natural increase alone.”
“A lot of these are unclean,” Bjarni grumbled. “Eaters. Or their parents were ...”
Then he nodded at Asgerd and quirked a smile.
“But you’re no fool, girl; no shrinking flower, either. Yes, that’s something to think on too. It would be a seemly deed if some of these could be lifted from being like beasts to a life as true folk, tilling the soil and following the Gods. Their children at least. I’ll think on it.”
A whistle brought Artos’ head up. Edain eeled out of the brush, with Garbh following at heel.
“Our friend Dickie went straight home on his own back trail,” the younger clansman said. “Didn’t stop and didn’t cast to either side. I saw some other man-tracks, but nothing very fresh.”
“We’ll warn the watch we set, but I don’t think they’ll be paying us a visit,” Artos said.
They started back towards camp; walking directly it was only a half hour, and nothing would interfere too badly with the strung-up carcasses in the time it took for a working party to reach them. Eleven slaughter-cattle would yield enough to give everyone several good meals of fresh meat and they could finish it before it went bad. Beef would be a welcome change, and it would help conserve their supplies. He noticed that some of the wild plant foods were coming on no
w; nettles, Jerusalem artichokes, wild leeks and some of the other spring greens he recognized. Those would be welcome, and healthful—and would help with constipation, which was always a problem when you were living mostly off trail foods.
“The Histories of the Dúnedain talk a good deal about food,” he said aside to Mathilda. “Which is more than many of the old tales do; the Táin, for example, save for royal feasts. There are fights over the hero’s portion, but never any binding of the bowels.”
She laughed, but briefly. He watched her brown brows knot in thought.
“Yes?” he prompted gently.
“I was thinking of all the things we’ve done on this trip,” she said. “And . . . and the consequences, even the ones we haven’t thought of. The way our friend Bjarni was talking, for example. Would he have had any of these ideas if we hadn’t met him and brought him on this trip with us? And that may affect the lives of whole kingdoms, for generations into the future.”
“He might not have had the same thoughts; but then again, he might. And—”
He set his hand on the Sword. “—I can see what comes of them.”
Vision flickered. For a moment he saw the wilderness, but overlaid. This pathway was a rutted dirt road, flanked by poplars and oaks. A girl in Norrheimer garb was walking along holding up the ends of her apron to make a pouch full of berries, laughing with a youth who had a bow across his shoulder, a brace of ducks dangling from his free hand and a dog grinning-panting at his heel. A brown plowed field stood behind them, and beyond it a building whose rafter ends were carved into the heads of dragons and gilded, and beyond that, tall forest. Another, and men in nose-guarded helms and mail byrnies tramped down the road; another—
She looked a little alarmed, and he shook his head to clear it.
“Nothing overpowering. I was granted the Sword for a purpose, and Bjarni’s dreams bear on that only indirectly. A . . . blurred vision, as if I was seeing many might-be futures. In the most of them, steadings built of logs and broad tilled fields here, folk at work, and mead-halls and hof-temples such as we saw in Norrheim. Bjarni thinks to some purpose, it seems.”
The High King of Montival: A Novel of the Change Page 24