Homecoming

IX

Sags d’ forste a en pojke da d’ svavte uppi himlen jussom orn or lunna vannen nar d’ stirra ned p a jedden simne upp t’ jamna ytan.

Ropte hod a pekte uppe.

«Da jussom kjampnar talte om, som dojtsa haxen sejte barar gamlarna fra sjaanor.»

[It was first a child that saw it, saw it hovering in the morning like an eagle over water watching ready for the salmon rising to the quiet surface.

Called aloud and pointed upward.

“ ’tis the thing the warriors spoke of, that the German seeress told us carries ancients from the stars.”]

From THE JARNHANN SAGA, Kumalo translation

It settled slowly like a polished silver bowl, oblong, inverted, and with stubby legs, while children of all sizes ran toward it through the meadow, looking upward. The audio pickup brought calling voices and the barking of a few dogs. Three meters from the ground, Matthew had to stop descent; there wasn’t enough room to set down and activate the shield without trapping children inside.

“How about that!” Mikhail said. “They’re not a bit afraid. You’d think space craft landed here every week and passed out candy.”

Matthew picked up the microphone and, with the volume turned high, ordered them to clear room for landing. The only effect was to increase the volume of shrill voices.

A number of men and women were approaching now on foot and horseback, most of them moving casually, neither hurrying nor hanging back. As they reached the vicinity they formed small groups behind the children, watching with apparent interest and talking easily among themselves.

“Should I transvise?” Mikhail asked.

“Sure, go ahead,” said Matthew, and the hubbub swelled as the mob of children could suddenly see through the hull.

More adults and children were arriving. A very large man on horseback picked his way through the children, who opened a path for him. When he reached the center he raised both arms overhead and the tumult subsided a bit.

“T’baka Du!” he called. “Go klar for skybaten!”

“I understood that!” Nikko said excitedly. “He told them to move back and give us room. It’s something like Swedish; I’ll bet I can talk to them!”

The children were backing away, with some of the older boys taking charge, giving orders and gesturing. When the loose throng had become a circle, Matthew put the Alpha down and instantly activated the shield. Then they sat without speaking, watching the children discover the shield and test it with curious hands.

“All right,” Matthew said at last. “Try your Swedish on them and see how it goes. Say we wish them no harm and do not like to use our great weapons which can kill large numbers from a distance.”

Nikko pressed the microphone switch and an “Ah-h-h” ran through the crowd as she began speaking slowly in a tonal cadence. When she had finished, the man who’d moved the children signalled the crowd to quiet once more. He hadn’t taken time to saddle his mount, but sat it bareback, sideways now. His left foot dangled; his right leg was cocked up on the animal’s back. It would have been hard to look more nonchalant.

“We are pleased you speak our language,” he said, speaking it himself for the crowd. “It is very rare to find a foreigner who does. But it will be better if I talk in Anglic; then we need not wait while the woman translates for you. I will tell my people afterward what was said. They are glad you have come. We want to be friends with the star people.”

There was a murmur of assent from the crowd while Nikko translated.

“Ask him how he knows we are star people,” Matthew instructed. Nikko spoke, still in Swedish, and many of the children looked back toward the nearby huts, pointing and calling out.

“I’m not getting all that,” Nikko told the others.

“Something about a witch, apparently, a dojtsa witch, whatever that is.”

Again the big man spoke, in Anglic this time. “Who but the star people would come out of the sky? Besides, my wife foretold your coming; it is she the children called a witch. And also, your force shield does not stop thoughts.”

“Let me have the microphone,” Matthew said. Nikko handed it to him and he thumbed the switch. “What do you know about force shields?” he demanded.

“Only the little your thoughts have told me, and what I observe in the children.”

“Damn it, Matt!” Mikhail said. “Don’t you see what he’s saying? The man’s a telepath! He even knew that Nikko is the only one of us that speaks Swedish!”

Matthew digested that for a few seconds, then set it aside for the time. “Who is your ruler?” he asked. “We want to talk to him.”

“The Council of Chiefs has been sent for and should be here after a while. But I am the only one of them who speaks Anglic. My name is Nils Jarnhann.”

The man sat his horse no more than six meters away, just outside the shield, and Matthew looked him over carefully. He’d stand at least 195 centimeters and mass 110 kilos. Even relaxed he gave an impression of great strength and virility, like a jungle cat. He wore soft leather breeches wrapped around his calves with strips. Short blond braids reached his burly shoulders. The thinness of his mustache and beard suggested youth, despite his physique and presence and apparent rank.

“How did you come to learn Anglic when your people don’t speak it?” Matthew asked.

“When we still lived in the north I was cast out for a killing, and wandered in countries where Anglic was spoken between those of different tongues.”

“How did you live in exile?”

“As a soldier and assassin.”

“And why did your people take you back again?”

“When they left our homeland they had need of an Yngling.”

Matthew turned to Nikko. “What’s an Ingling?”

She shrugged. “It used to mean a youth, a youngling, but that doesn’t fit the context here. It must have picked up a different meaning along the line, or a special connotation.”

Matthew switched on the microphone again. “What brings your people to this land which is claimed by the orcs?”

“Our homeland grows colder and wetter year by year. It was harder and harder to make a crop. The turnips rotted in the field and the rye molded in the shocks. People of middle age remember when cattle could graze for five or six months of the year. In recent years it was necessary to feed hay for eight months, while the hay crops grew poorer. In the north among the reindeer and glutton clans, things were even worse. Finally, a year ago, the ground was still snow-covered in June. The tribes made peace, united, and left-left a land that had been their mother but could no longer feed them.”

A land they knew and loved, thought Matthew. No doubt the only land most of them had been able to imagine. That must have been a hard decision.

“The People crossed the sea in boats,” the man continued. “We allied ourselves with the Poles and others and defeated the armies of Kazi that had come to conquer Europe. After a winter of hunger, the People came to this place. We like it here. It is rich in grass and cattle. There is timber for fuel and building. We will stay and drive the orcs away.”

“Are these your entire people, camped along this valley?”

“Yes.”

“There are many more orcs than there are of you. What makes you think you can drive them out?”

“The orcs are strong and dangerous, but not as strong as you think. They are like a great spruce tree, mighty, darkening much ground and shading out what takes root beneath them, but rotten and hollow inside. For outlanders they are skilled fighters, but now that Kazi is dead, there is nothing they live for and nothing they are willing to die for. They have pride, but even that is shallow. They obey because they hardly know how to disobey and they are afraid to disobey, but they find no savor in risking life, only in taking it.”

“How do you know so much about the orcs?”

“I have been in their city, been their prisoner, talked with Kazi himself and fought in their arena. Their language is strange to me, but I could see their pictures and look through their eyes and know their feelings. And of course, we have met them in war.”

Matthew changed direction. “And you were an assassin? How many men did you kill?”

“As an assassin, none. I was sent by the Inner Circle of the Kinfolk, the Psi Alliance, to assassinate Kazi, but I failed. It was in war I killed him.”

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.