Homecoming y-2 Page 5

  Inner Circle. Psi Alliance. I’m glad we’re getting this on tape, Matthew thought.

  The big Northman sat quietly for a moment, and Matthew felt the man’s gaze. Then Nils Jarnhann spoke again. “I have answered your questions. Now I will tell you things you have more need to know. You have left friends, people you love, a man and a woman, with the orcs. They are not safe. The orcs find their pleasure in giving pain, in breaking the body and mind. Especially tender minds. Your friends, if they are like you, must be very tempting to them.”

  Until then Matthew had affected a faint hauteur; it was replaced now by wary intentness. The Northman continued, his voice seeming to grow louder, driving the words into their minds like a hammer.

  “And how could that happen to the Star People? But you are few, and your weapons are not so powerful as you pretend. And you are not hard-minded: killing, violence, are foreign and unnatural to you, difficult to do or even to think about.

  “And the orcs know that. They have many telepaths. They know every thought your friends have had since they have been among them, every word they have said in privacy. They have heard with their ears and seen with their eyes and felt their feelings. And they have shared their rememberings.”

  A coldness washed through Matthew, a desolate sense of naked helplessness, a nightmare feeling of isolation hundreds of light years from the safe space of home. He was gripped by an urgent need to escape the Northman’s words and the mind that looked so relentlessly into theirs.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said to the others. “We need to think and talk.” Looking through the hull at Nils Jarnhann, he thumbed the microphone switch again. “We’ll be back in an hour-before the sun is much higher.” With that he deactivated and sent Alpha sharply upward, not stopping until they were above the troposphere. He parked on the encampment vector, eighteen kilometers above the surface, and for a long moment no one spoke.

  “Does anyone here have anything to say?” Matthew asked.

  “Maybe we’d better get Chan and Anne out of that city,” Mikhail suggested, “while they’re still ambassadors instead of hostages. It would be damned attractive to the orcs to trade them for a pinnace complete with automatic rifles and grenades. And consider what that would mean in ruthless hands like theirs!”

  Carlos Lao was a biologist who didn’t often say much. He spoke now. “We don’t actually know that the barbarian was telling the truth.”

  “He must have been,” Nikko replied. “It fits with what Chan and Anne told us about the orcs, and with the implications of their calling themselves orcs in the first place.”

  “You misunderstand me,” Carlos told her. “What I meant was, we don’t really know the orcs have telepaths.”

  “I’m accepting it as a working assumption,” Matthew said. “There’s no doubt the barbarian’s a telepath, so why not some orcs too? Now, accepting that the orcs have telepaths monitoring them, how do we get them out? We can’t let Chan or Anne know what we’re doing. Otherwise the orcs will know too.”

  They discussed the matter a little longer. “Okay,” Matthew said, “I think we know what we have to do. Now, in a few minutes we’ll be on the ground again, talking to the barbarian. We’re going to follow up this contact; as short as it was, it’s already been extremely valuable. But I don’t want to commit anyone else as an ambassador. What would you think of inviting them to send someone with us to the Phaeacia?”

  “As long as he leaves his sword at home,” Mikhail said. “And his scalping knife.”

  This time the meadow held hundreds of adults, both men and women. The children formed a loose ring outside them now, partly watching and partly chasing and tussling like two-legged puppies. In the middle of the throng an opening had been left perhaps twenty meters across, and Matthew landed there. A group of men, mostly middle-aged or older, moved in to form a semi-circle just outside the shield. Nikko assumed they were the Council of Chiefs. Three of them, presumably the principal chiefs, were uniquely dressed and stood together. One was a very tall old man wearing a long cloak of white bird skins, with the skin of a white wolf’s head as a headdress. His beard completed the theme of white. A second was nearly as tall, with a short cape of heavy white fur and a headpiece Nikko tentatively identified as from an arctic bear. He was missing a hand, but his exposed legs still were strongly muscled, his red beard only streaked with gray. The third too favored white, a short cape of white fur spotted with black, which Nikko recognized from old pictures as ermine. Instead of head fur, he wore a steel helmet onto which great curved steel horns had been fitted. He was shorter than the other two but still taller than average, his body thick with the muscles of a man of fifty who continues a hard and strenuous life.

  Nils Jarnhann stood next to the tallest of the three, and about as tall. Jarnhann. The name was easy for Nikko to remember because she knew its meaning-Ironhand. He spoke a few quiet words to the man in the feathered cloak. The old chief answered quietly, then turned his proud face to Alpha and spoke slowly and distinctly in Scandinavian.

  “We are the Council of Chiefs. Nils Jarnhann tells us one of you speaks our language, though not well. We hope you will speak it now so that all of us understand.”

  Nikko held the microphone, phrasing as well as she could in twenty-first-century Swedish what the four of them had agreed upon before coming back down.

  “We want to be friends with your people, and with all the people of Earth. This was the world of our forefathers. We come to you from a world called New Home, whose thousands of thousands of people sent us to see what had become of this world, which we call Earth.”

  The old man’s sober expression had not changed. “We are pleased that you have come among us, the People. You chose well. We are not numerous, but we are first in honor and cunning and weapon skills.”

  When Nikko had finished interpreting, Carlos grunted. “Every culture is honorable in its own eyes. What brand of honor goes with pride in cunning, I wonder?”

  Nikko spoke again to the Northmen: “We wish to know all the people of Earth, to learn what they believe, what they honor, and how they live. We hope that one of you will come among us for a short while to tell us about yourselves and also to learn about us.”

  “You should stay among us, instead,” the old man answered. “That is the way to learn how we live and act, observing as well as asking questions.”

  “Perhaps we will, later on.”

  The man with the horned helmet spoke this time, his tone surly and his words too quick for Nikko to follow until he repeated them. “How do we know you would treat that person honorably and send him back? You are not of the People. You are foreigners. We do not know whether you are honorable.”

  “At least one of you can read our minds,” Nikko answered, “the one named Nils Jarnhann. Let him say whether we are honorable.”

  The chiefs looked at Nils, waiting for him to speak. A woman had stepped beside him, big with child, and he put an arm around her. “My wife says she would willingly go with you. But while I sense no treachery in you, who knows what may happen tomorrow that might take you away from our world, and her with you? I would not let her go unless one of you stays with us-the woman Nikko, who speaks our language.”

  Matthew stared at him as Nikko finished translating. The bastard! Cunning, they’d said. What was the man up to? Nikko’s hand was on his arm, and he looked at her. She wanted to go; her earnest eyes left no doubt. “I can’t let you,” he said. “It could be dangerous.”

  “She’s willing to put herself in our hands, and he’s willing to let her. On this world we’ll never have better insurance than that.”

  Matthew groped mentally for a reason to refuse. “If you stayed here, who on Phaeacia could talk to her?”

  From the audio pickup a woman’s voice interrupted them in Anglic. “I volunteered because I would like to learn from you also. And I speak your language. I must tell you first, however, that I did not grow up among the Northmen. I am German.”

/>   Matthew eyed her carefully. Big-boned, young, and very very pregnant. The man was risking his wife and his child too.

  “But I have come to know these people well,” she continued, “and understand them, because I am a telepath. I can also tell you about my homeland and its people, and about the Psi Alliance, for I am of the Kinfolk. It is the Kinfolk who have kept alive the stories of the past.”

  “Careful, Matt,” Carlos warned softly. “She’s a telepath. Why should she push the exchange like that unless they’re up to something? She may not even be his wife!”

  Nikko turned sharply to the biologist. “Don’t get paranoid on us, Carl! Remember, Ram’s a telepath too, if only now and then! And as for pushing it-she wants to know, to learn. That’s what we’re supposed to be doing; that’s what this expedition is all about!” She looked back to Matthew. “Remember what the chidren called his wife before? The Dojtsa Haxen-the German witch! Only I didn’t recognize their word for German because instead of the old Swedish word, tyska, they used an approximation of the German word, deutsche. Matt, she’ll be a treasure chest of information!”

  Matthew looked around at the others. “She’s right; it’s what we came here for. It’s a rare opportunity, and she’ll be as much security for Nikko as Nikko is for her.”

  At least I hope so, he added somberly to himself.

  X

  Stor tidragen han t’ flikkor, ofta kjikt i ham pa solstig blikkor folte ham pa midda, nog drod nar en mo i sjymning, viskte bjaali t’ va ellen.

  [Fascinating he to women, often glanced at him by morning, followed him their eyes at midday, lingered near sometimes at twilight, whispered to him in the firelight.]

  From THE JARNHANN SAGA, Kumalo translation

  Each low hovel of small unsquared logs had two doors through which one passed crouching, and sod roofs with a central smoke hole. Inside they reeked of wood smoke.

  Women moved about the camp carrying wood or water or simply going somewhere, often accompanied by small children or older girls. Other children followed Nils and Nikko, and she tested her Swedish on them, turning to Nils for help when she failed to understand or be understood. Already she was beginning to see patterns in the language changes; as she learned them she’d communicate more effectively.

  Her pocket video camera was often in her hands.

  She looked up at Nils. “Why did you make a temporary camp if you expect to drive the orcs out of the country?”

  “Because the orcs will probably come and destroy it. It wouldn’t be realistic to defend it. And when they leave the country we’ll spread out by clans, perhaps one clan to a valley. We’re too many to live so close very long, but for now we stay together so we can gather forces quickly when we want to. Would you like to see some of our men training?”

  She said she would, and they left the proximity of the huts for an open grassy field where sweating boys and men with wooden swords and leather shields thrust and parried. They ranged from early adolescence to middle age. Drill masters moved among them, stopping individuals, talking to them, demonstrating, occasionally berating. Nearby were irregular groups of little boys with sticks and small shields, frequently watching, often sparring or shadow-sparring, and sometimes racing or wrestling. She realized now why these people were so strong.

  “Why are some of the instructors younger than so many of the men they’re training?” Nikko asked.

  “The instructors are warriors, some as young as nineteen. The older men in training are freeholders-farmers not trained before to fight. Warriors learn their skills from boyhood by training long days, until every act, every move and response, comes quickly and correctly without thought. These farmers will never equal warriors, but they are strong and proud, and the best will be as good as most orcs. Until they are thirteen or fourteen, most of them spent a lot of time practicing with sticks, like those little fellows out there, earning lots of sore spots. And as bowmen they’re already very good. All their lives they’ve shot at marks, and hunted game to help feed themselves and their families.

  “In the past the bans protected them from war, but the bans mean nothing to orcs. And while the warriors will protect them as much as they can, the freeholders must be ready to protect themselves if they need to.”

  “Freeholders,” Nikko said. “Do you have slaves then?”

  “We used to-warriors taken prisoner from other clans in raids. But after we united, the thralls returned to their own clans. Now all men are freeholders.”

  “Don’t you mean all men are either freeholders or warriors?”

  “In a sense. Warriors are freeholders too, but a warrior is special. In the homeland he worked his own land, but had the help of slaves to give him time to practice with weapons.”

  “And I suppose warriors consider themselves better than other freeholders.”

  Nils nodded. “To be chosen by the clan as a sword apprentice, to become a warrior, was a great honor. And a warrior is proud of being a warrior. But a warrior’s father often is simply a farmer, yet the son honors him. Also, a warrior’s sons often will not be chosen, will simply be farmers, yet they are his sons and he will love and respect them. And a warrior will have been simply a farmer in past lives, and perhaps a slave in one to come.”

  That startled Nikko Kumalo. “Do your people believe in rebirth then?”

  “Of course.”

  “And do you remember, uh, past lives?”

  “No. To die is to forget. Sometimes a little child remembers, and occasionally an old person, but it is usually a little glimpse, unclear and often uncertain.”

  So, she thought, they may not be afraid to die. “How do you decide who will be a warrior?”

  “In their thirteenth or fourteenth summer, boys were selected for size and strength, and skill in war-play, to become sword apprentices. In their nineteenth summer they became warriors. But that is changing now.”

  “Why haven’t your people killed each other off over the years?”

  “The bans set limits and rules for fighting between clans and tribes. Few but warriors were killed.”

  “But then, warriors must be more likely to die young. If you select the strongest and quickest to become warriors, in the course of time your people will become weaker.”

  He shook his head, smiling. “Warriors can have several wives, other men but one. And it isn’t unusual for women to seek the attention of a warrior. Among our women, warriors are considered desirable lovers.”

  “And what do their husbands do if they find out?”

  “Beat them.”

  “Beat the wife, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “But why the wife?”

  “The wife has insulted him by turning to another man, so he beats her.”

  “And nothing is done to the warrior?”

  “No. He has honored the woman’s husband by finding his wife desirable.”

  “But… ” Nikko started to protest, then realized the futility ot it and asked instead, “What if an unmarried girl gets pregnant by a warrior?”

  “Unless the warrior marries her, the child is taken from her and grows up in the warrior’s family as his child. Then, because she was desirable to a warrior, other men will want to marry her.”

  “How many wives do you have, Nils?”

  “One.”

  “Only one?”

  “There mav be others later. Ilse will remain the principal wife.”

  They had left the training field, wandering along the river to a high cutbank where children were swimming.

  “The orcs looked very tough and disciplined, and there are a lot of them. Do you really expect to beat them?”

  Nils nodded. “We beat them badly in every fight. Partly it was weapons skills and partly endurance; fighting is very hard work and to become too tired can be fatal. But without cunning we’d have been destroyed. It’s important to fight at an advantage. In the Ukraine we were careful always to fight them in the forest; we were no match for them on horseback. No
w we are correcting that. Would you like to see warriors train on horseback?”

  “Oh, yes!” Nikko answered. “I love horses and riding.”

  “I’ll have someone take you tomorrow morning then. But now I’ll show you your tent. It should be built by now, and I have things to do before the sun sets.”

  The tent frame had been set up-long saplings cut, bent, and lashed into the form of a tortoise. Several women and girls were covering it with hides. Temporary-looking and small, she thought, for someone who was temporary and alone.

  “You will take your meals at the hut of Ulf Vargson,” Nils told her. “Ulf is chief of the Wolf Clan. He has two daughters still at home, helping his wives, and they will be pleased to ask questions and answer yours.”

  She looked up at his strong well-balanced face. He couldn’t be older than his mid-twenties, she decided, much younger than her own thirty-four years, yet somehow she reacted to him as her senior. There was something compelling about him, some inner difference beyond the telepathy and the sometimes disconcertingly direct intelligence.

  “When will I talk to you again?” she asked. “There are so many things I’d like to know: about your travels, and the Psi Alliance, and Kazi.”

  Nils grinned at her, taking her by surprise, and in that moment he seemed like any large good-looking athletic youth. “I’ll be back before dark. Ilse and I have a tent too, the cone-shaped one by the birch grove.” He pointed. “I copied its form from the horse-barbarians. Come. I’ll introduce you to Ulf’s family.”

  Horse barbarians. That’s another I’ll have to ask about, she thought.

  She felt impatient for the evening.

  The broiled meat required strong chewing, and Nikko stopped eating not because she was full but because her jaws and cheeks could chew no more. No wonder these people have such strong faces, she thought; they develop a bite like a dire bear’s. A congealed reddish pudding had also been served, which she decided not to ask about; if it was made with blood she preferred not to know yet. Her palate insisted it was partly curdled milk.