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 closer 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?”
Echegorgun looked at the sun. “If they did not attack last sunset, they will attack this one. The two ships Brand has will not be ready to fight. He will have taken them up to the grind-beach and loaded them up with oil and meat. The strangers will catch everyone else asleep or tired. The grind makes much work.”
“Will you not warn them?”
Echegorgun looked surprised, as far as his flat hair-covered face would show it. “I would warn my cousin Brand. For the rest—the more Thin Ones kill each other, the better. I know you spared me when you could have struck me with the spear, so now I spare you, for True Folk keep their bargains, even if they have not been said. You fed my boy, my Ekwetargun as well. But I would be wiser to twist your head off your shoulders and hang you with the others.”
Shef ignored the threat. “I can tell you one thing you do not know,” he said. “I am a man who has authority. I am a king in my own land. Some say I am a sort of a king even here. And I speak for many people. Here is one sign of my authority.” He showed the Rig-token, the
“Well, I could do that,” said Echegorgun carefully. He rose to a strange squatting position, gripping his bare feet in his enormous hands.
“How? Would you warn Brand? Would you—fight on our side? You would be a mighty warrior if we gave you iron to use.”
Echegorgun shook his massive head. “I will do neither of those. But I could speak to the whales for you. They are worked up already. If they thought I had killed you, they might feel like listening to me. And these are stranger whales, of course. If they were my own folk I would not deceive them.”
Chapter Twenty-three
Bruno,
A roar came from the thousand throats of the men clustered at the center of the doom-ring of the Gautish peoples, a roar and a clashing of weapons on shields.
“What's that mean?” muttered a voice from the rear rank. “They've made a decision?”
“Silence in the ranks,” said Bruno, though without heat. The
