One King's Way thatc-2

by Harry Harrison

  Someone had valued it, at any rate. Some one of the carcasses now hanging in the smoke. Shef hefted the weapon uncertainly once more. It was madness not to take any weapon that would give him a chance of survival in this deadly place. Why had he already put it back, laying it gently once more across its pegs?

  Alarmed suddenly by some faint stir of air behind him, Shef span round. Someone, or something, coming. He crouched, looking along the floor beneath the rows of human and animal bodies.

  Someone was walking towards him. With a flush of relief Shef recognized the cross-tied breeches of Cuthred. He stepped out into plain sight, beckoned his companion over, pointed wordlessly to the hanging corpses.

  Cuthred nodded. His sword was bare in one hand, his shield ready in the other.

  “I told you,” he whispered hoarsely. “Trolls. In the mountains. Peered at me through the windows of the hut. Rattled the door in the night to try to get in. They smelt meat. Thick bars they have on the doors in those mountain villages. Not that all of them need them.”

  “What do we do?”

  “Get them before they get us. The cabin opposite, you saw it? Let's go. Have you no weapon?”

  Shef shook his head mutely.

  Cuthred stepped behind him, picked the spear he had just laid down from its pegs, held it out to him. “Here,” he said, “take this. Go on,” he urged, seeing Shef's reluctance, “it doesn't belong to anyone any more.”

  Shef stretched out a hand, hesitated, gripped the weapon firmly. In the warm, smoky dark there came a faint ringing sound, as if the metal head had struck stone. Shef felt a kind of relief again. Not relief from defenselessness, rather relief that the weapon had been handed to him. It had passed from its owner to the master of the smokehouse, and then to Cuthred, the man who was not a man. It was right for him to hold it now. Maybe not to keep it, maybe not to strike with it. But hold it, yes. For now.

  The two men made their way out into the suddenly sweet-smelling air.

  They moved across the small open space like two ghosts, treading carefully round the weeds to prevent the faintest brush or rattle. One mistake here, Shef thought, and they too would be hanging in the smoke. Had the little boy run ahead to warn his people? His father? He had seemed grateful rather than fearful or hostile. Shef did not want to have to kill him.

  The door of the cabin, like that of the smokehouse, was covered with a pegged leather curtain, seemingly of horsehide. Should they try to lift it gently, or slash it down and charge through? Cuthred had no doubts. He waved Shef silently to hold the top of the curtain, then took his sword and applied its razor-sharp edge to each of the retaining loops in turn. The curtain hung loose, held only by Shef's hand. Cuthred nodded.

  As Shef dropped the curtain, Cuthred whisked inside, sword poised. Then stood motionless. Shef moved in after him. The cabin was empty of life, but not bare. To their left stood what must be the main room, a rough table in the center with stools round it made of driftwood. The stools were of immense size. Shef would have had to climb up to sit on one. In the far corner a black entrance seemed to lead into the rock. The whole scene was lit by a wick burning in a stone bowl of oil.

  Perhaps the inhabitants were all asleep. It was midnight, certainly, even though the sky remained light. But Shef had noted that in midsummer the Norse-folk lost most sense of time, sleeping when they needed to, and sleeping very little, as if they saved that up for the appalling winters. The Huldu-folk could be the same.

  To their right, though, that must be the sleeping-chamber, reached through another narrow opening. Shef braced himself for what might have to be a killing thrust, and slid through the doorway, javelin poised. Two beds, yes, like shelves in the rock, to conserve warmth, heaped with skins and furs. Shef moved closer to check that the furs were all animal furs, not the gray pelt of a troll. No, nothing there.

  As he turned to sign to Cuthred a great crash sent his heart into his mouth. He sprang forward to see what had happened. In the middle of the other room, by the overturned table, Cuthred was grappling savagely with a troll.

  A female troll. She too wore a kind of kilt round her waist, but breasts swelled beneath her gray pelt, long hair hung down her back like a horse's mane. She had hidden inside the larder in the rock, leapt out as Cuthred closed on it. With one hand she grasped the spike on his round targe, with the other the wrist of his sword-hand. The two swayed backwards and forwards, Cuthred trying to free a weapon, she trying to wrest them away. Her teeth flashed in a sudden snap at Cuthred's face.

  Shef gaped, amazed for a moment at the woman's strength. Cuthred was putting out every ounce of effort that he had, grunting furiously as he heaved at her, the immense muscles straining in his arms. Twice he had her off the ground, lifting her two hundred pounds easily, but she clung on.

  Then suddenly she was moving forward, Cuthred pushed back, and as she gained momentum she thrust a heel behind his ankle and tripped him. The two went over together, the troll on top, and Cuthred's sword and shield went sprawling. An instant later and she had whipped a stone knife from her belt, was driving it at Cuthred's throat. Cuthred caught her wrist with one hand, and again they were frozen in a desperate test of strength.

  The javelin was a hindrance in the narrow doorway. As Shef stepped sideways to try to angle through the door of the sleeping chamber, the dim light from outside was blocked. The master of the house, the hunter of the mountains, had returned. He stepped soundlessly through the outer door like a moving slab of rock, turned towards the struggle.

  Even stooping, his skull brushed the ceiling. His arms hung almost to the floor. His shoulders were round and sloping, not square like a man's, but even so the space between his shoulder-blades was wide enough to fit a sword-blade lengthwise. His back was turned to Shef, whom he had not noticed, his attention fixed on Cuthred and the female.

  Shef poised the spear. He had one chance for a completely unprotected strike, at spine or kidneys or angling up under the ribs for the heart. Not even a giant could survive that. In front of him, he knew, was the man-eater.

  As he poised for the strike, a sense filled Shef suddenly of the utter dreariness of the place. He had felt it before, sitting on the ledge of the mountain path, a sense of colorlessness, harshness, hostility. Then in the passing vision he had seen and felt the world begging for a rescue, for a release, and the sun-face granting it; granting what had not been granted to Hermoth, or to Balder. The iron lance-shaft by his cheek seemed to exude both warmth, and a kind of weariness, an urge to desist from slaughter. The world had seen too much of it. Time for a pause, a change.

  The female troll squatting on Cuthred's chest suddenly shot head-first across the room and crashed into the legs of the male, sending him staggering backwards almost on to Shef's spear-point. Cuthred had forced her back so that all her strength was pushing forwards, then dropped his hands, seized her ankles and hurled her clean over his head. He twisted and came to his feet, sword once again in hand, confronting the male troll with a grin of reckless fury. A snarl like a bear's came from the male troll as he thrust the female out of the way.

  Shef slammed his spear-butt on to the stone floor and shouted at the top of his voice, “Stop!”

  Both trolls jumped round to face him, eyes swiveling between the threat in front and the threat to their rear. Shef shouted again, this time to Cuthred gliding forward, “Stop!”

  At the same moment the small male troll he had seen on the path ran through the outer door, clutched the large male round the legs and pattered out a long stream of syllables. Shef stepped through the narrow doorway of the sleeping-chamber, spread his arms wide and carefully propped his spear in a corner. He waved imperiously at Cuthred, who hesitated, doubtfully lowered his sword.

  What of the trolls? Shef looked at them in the light of the lamp, looked again, looked a third time at the great male, standing staring down at him with a puzzled expression. A familiar puzzled expression. Gray pelt, round skull, strange undershot jaw and massive teeth. But som
ething—something in the eyebrows, the cheekbones, the square set of head on pillared neck. Gently, Shef walked forward, took the male's enormous hand, turned it over in his own. Yes. Huge fingers, a fist that if doubled would be the size of a quart-pot.

  “You look like someone I know,” said Shef, almost to himself.

  To his surprise the troll grinned broadly, showing huge canines, and replied in halting but recognizable Norse.

  “I think you meet my good cousin Brand.”

  According to Echegorgun—much of the substance of what he had to say was passed on in the end to Shef by Cuthred over many days and many campfires—the Hidden People had once lived much further to the south, in Norway and in other countries below what Echegorgun called the Shallow Sea, the Baltic. But as time went by and the climate changed they had followed the ice north, harried all the way and all the time by the Chinned Ones, the Thin People, the Beaters of Iron—Echegorgun had many names for them. Humans were not, of course, formidable—Echegorgun laughed at the very thought that they might be, making a strange harsh noise deep in his throat. But there were a lot of them. They breed as fast as the seals, he said, or as fast as the salmon spawn. And in groups they were dangerous, more so as they acquired metal. It seemed that the memories of the Hidden People went back to the days before humans had metal, when all the Walking Creatures, humans and Hidden Ones, had only stone. But once the humans had metal, first bronze—Echegorgun called it the brown iron—and then true iron, gray iron itself, the old equality between the species, if species they were, began to break down. Echegorgun would not admit or concede it, but Shef thought sometimes that the fast-breeding which Echegorgun so much despised and thought less than fully sapient, had something to do with the metal. Beating iron out of ore does not come naturally, is the result of learning based on trial and error based on initial lucky accident. Short-lived creatures with little to lose and strong reasons for wanting to distinguish themselves among their too-many competitors, they would be much more likely to waste time on mere experimentation than the longer-lived, slow-maturing, slow-breeding True Folk (as they called themselves).

  Whether that were true or not, over the centuries the True Folk had become the Hidden People, keeping to the inaccessible mountains, developing the skills of hiding themselves away. It was not so difficult, Echegorgun said. There were more True Folk around than most of the Thin Ones realized. They did not inhabit the same ranges, or even the same times. The Norse in Halogaland, Echegorgun said, being specific, were almost entirely coastal. They went up and down the sea road, the North Way from which the country got its name, they built their huts in the fjords, they pastured their animals in the bits of summer grazing they could reach. Rarely did one find any of them more than a few miles inland. Especially as those who did penetrate inland, exploring or hunting, were not at all likely to return.

  The Finns were more of a nuisance, for they roamed widely with their reindeer herds, their sledges and bows and traps. Yet their roaming was mostly in the summer and in the day. In the winter they kept to their tents and their cabins and their regular trap rounds, all easy to avoid. The snow and the ice, the dark and the high places, Echegorgun said, they belong to us. We are the People of the Dark.

  And what about the dead men you hang in your smokehouse, Shef asked him on the afternoon of their first meeting. Echegorgun took the question seriously. It was the seal-skerries that caused the trouble, he said. The Thin Ones had to be kept off them, or at least off those of them he regarded as his own. Shef slowly realized that Echegorgun, like the rest of his people, was as near amphibious as a polar bear, which are often found swimming contentedly well out of sight of land. His pelt kept the cold out, and was as waterproof as a seal's. Any of the adults would think little of swimming a couple of miles in the freezing water to a skerry, there to club seals or harpoon walruses. Sea-mammals were a great part of their diet. They did not like the Thin Ones to go there, and discouraged them by ambush. The stories about gray arms turning boats over were true. As for smoking and eating their prey—Echegorgun shrugged. He could see no harm in eating your kill. The Thin Ones might not eat the Hidden People, but they would kill them for any reason or for none, not because the Hidden People ate their food. So which was worse?

  In any case, there was no real need for ambushes and killings, if everyone kept to their side of known lines. Trouble might arise in times of famine. If the grain crop failed—Echegorgun thought it was bound to fail three years in ten—then the Thin Ones started to come out and hunt the skerries in desperation. Don't eat grain, that was the answer, don't breed so fast you have to rely on chancy foods. But real northerners, the real northerners among the humans, Echegorgun said, emphasizing this distinction, they did not let things get so far. They knew their place, and they knew his. The humans he killed, they were always visitors who did not respect the slowly-evolved boundaries.

  “Like the man who left this?” said Shef, holding up the spear he had taken.

  Echegorgun took it, felt it, snuffed at the metal in a considering way with his great flaring nostrils. “Yes,” he said. “I remember him. A jarl of the Tronds, from Trondhjem. Foolish people. Always want to take over the Finn-tax and the Finn-trade, take it from Brand and his family. He came up here in a longship. I followed it till they camped on an island, he and two others went to hunt birds' eggs. After he had gone—he and some more—the rest lost heart and went home.”

  “How did you know he was a jarl?” asked Shef.

  “The Huldu-folk know a lot. They are told some things. They see many more, in the dark, in the quiet.”

  Echegorgun would say no more at that point, but Shef was confident that he and Brand's family had ways of getting in touch with each other—sign left on a skerry maybe, rocks left a certain way till there was need of communication, and then altered to bring out an envoy. The Hidden Folk might have been an advantage to the Halogalanders, in getting rid of unwanted rivals from the south. Brand and his family in return kept pressure off certain fixed areas.

  And besides, there was family feeling. Echegorgun smiled salaciously when Shef hinted at it. Years before, he said, the father of Brand's father Barn, a man named Bjarni, had been stranded on a skerry by a shipwreck. He had had food with him, good food, milk and whey, and had set it out as bait for the Hidden People. A girl of that race had seen it, taken the bait. He had not caught her, no, how could a Thin One catch even a girl of the True Folk? But he had shown her what he had got for her, and she had been enticed. You Thin Ones are thick in one place, Echegorgun said, his eyes rolling to Cuthred sitting close to the female he had wrestled.

  Echegorgun went on to say that the girl, his own aunt, had kept the baby men called Barn till it was evident that it would be smooth-skinned, or too smooth-skinned to live like the True Folk. Then she had left it by its father's door. But first Bjarni, and then Barn, and then Brand, had remained conscious of their kinship at need.

  Shef heard little of what was said then, for he had begun to worry about Cuthred. Thin Ones might be thick in one place, but Cuthred had no place at all. He had been behaving well up in the north, yet one thing Shef was sure of: any reminder of his mutilation, any sexual display by a male or provocation by a female, and Cuthred would revert to the berserker. And yet it was strange. He was sitting talking to the female Miltastaray, daughter of Echegorgun and sister of the little boy Ekwetargun, as if she were Martha or one of the least-challenging of the slave-women. Perhaps it was because he had overpowered her. Perhaps it was because she was female, but so different that there was no need or expectation of flirtatiousness between them. Either way, Cuthred seemed secure and safe, for the moment.

  Shef turned his attention back to Echegorgun's story. By this time the five creatures—men and a woman? people? humans and not-humans?—had left the hut and were sitting out under a risen sun in the flat patch between hut and smokehouse. From where they were they could see a calm gray metallic sea, with islands rising from it, but were sheltered from c
loser observation. The Hidden Folk had a keen sense of “dead ground,” Shef was to note. They kept always out of direct lines of sight, whatever else they seemed to be doing.

  “So you see much, and are told more?” he said. “What do you know about me? About us?”

  “About him,” Echegorgun pointed with his underslung chin to Cuthred, “much. He was a thrall in the mountains south of here. Some of our people tried to get him out. Maybe they would have eaten him, maybe not. You people are hard on your own kind. I know what they did to him. It would not mean so much to us. We think of other things than mating.

  “About you.” Shef found deep brown eyes fixed on him. “There is no news of you. But people are following you.”

  Shef laughed. “That is no news to me.”

  “Other things are following you too. The killer whales that attacked you—sometimes they do that, I know, if they feel like sport or if something annoys them. But I have seen that school of them going up and down, and they are not from near here. They have come up from the south, like you. Maybe after you.

  “Still, if you know people are following you, I need not tell you the rest.”

  Echegorgun stretched his enormous arms, over nine feet from finger-tip to finger-tip, with an air of complete indifference.

  “What rest? Are other people following me now?”

  “There is a ship hidden in the Vitazgjafi fjord half a day's swim south of Brand's farmsteads on Hrafnsey. I would have warned him but he is away with the grind—the grind, you understand, is within his rights. He was careful not to drive them ashore here or near here. But anyway, he is away, and the ship is down there waiting. A big ship. It has two… two sticks. Those things you put cloths on. A big fair-haired woman shouts orders at the menfolk.” Echegorgun laughed. “She needs a winter with me to calm her.”

  Shef considered furiously. The woman was Ragnhild, the ship the one that had tried to sink them in the Gula-fjord. “What do you think they mean to do?”