B jarni Eriksson, King in Norrheim and often called Ironrede by his people, laughed with delight as he put his new horse through its paces in the warm late-afternoon sunlight. It was dry in this part of Montival, in the rain- shadow of the Cascades, and dust puffed up around its highstepping feet with a peppery scent that mingled with horse and man sweat. The mount was a six-year-old stallion, seventeen hands high and glossy black, long-legged, deep-chested, arched of neck, with nostrils like redrimmed pits. He almost expected it to breathe fire.
Bjarni had ridden as far back as his memories stretched, and he’d been six at the Change. He could just barely recall bits and pieces of his father’s trek with his followers from Springfield to Aroostook in northern Maine, and the founding of Norrheim, and sitting before his father in the saddle with one powerful arm around him. After that he’d been the son of a great chieftain with a big farm and scot paid by his followers besides, and able to keep a number of horses. He had thought he knew what there was to know, apart from a few specialist tricks.
He’d never in all his life put foot to stirrup on anything like this, though. Riding the superbly trained animal was as much like dancing as anything he’d experienced before.
He leaned his weight slightly to the front and clamped his thighs tighter, and the horse started forward as if sensing his very thought. Then there was a rushing speed, and it seemed to float upward over the white board fence. The landing was without breaking stride, and it was scarcely necessary to touch the reins to bring a halt once more.
It made nothing of his weight, though he was a broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, thick-armed man of medium height, near two hundred pounds of tough muscle and heavy bones, with the large strong hands of a swordsman and woodsman and farmer. The brick-colored hair bound back from his face with a headband stuck to the sweat on his neck, and more ran into his short beard; his skin was reddened too, by long exposure to wind and weather and now by the fierce sun of cloudless summer in this part of Montival. The little blue eyes in his snub- nosed, high-cheeked face were calm and steady, a net of wrinkles at their corners even though he had just thirty- one years.
He looked at the beast’s ears and grinned. It was sweating freely, but an hour spent at everything from galloping to jumping had barely scratched the surface of its energy.
“You want to run, don’t you, boy?” he said. “Ayuh, you do! Soon, soon.”
He swung down from the saddle, and ran a hand down its neck; then he reached into a pocket of his breeks and pulled out an apple. The horse plucked it from his palm and crunched it with slobbering pleasure. One of his followers who was horse-wise came to remove the tooled, silver-studded saddle and lead it away for grooming and watering.
Bjarni was shaking his head as he turned away to the waiting knot of folk at the gate of the paddock. A rolling plain stretched away in all directions. Reaped grain was straw-blond, alfalfa a dusty green, with here and there the darker shade trees and orchards and vineyards around a village, the church steeples and whirling wind- pumps rising above. The fields still under harvest were bright burnished gold that shone with an almost metallic luster as horses or mules hauled the turning creels of the reaping machines through, laying the cut grain in bands lighter-colored than the stubble. Workers followed binding the sheaves and stooking them into pyramids.
It is a golden land hereabout this time of the year, he thought. Perhaps that’s why they named this shire so.
Looking at it in August you wouldn’t think there was enough rain to produce a crop, but the ears were heavy in the fields of wheat and barley; for a moment he simply smiled at the comforting beauty of the sight. It made him itch a little too; it seemed unnatural not to pitch in. Many of his men had, from the same feeling and because it was a chance to meet the local women, but he was too busy with the mustering.
There were pine-clad hills to the north, just visible beyond the walls and towers of Goldendale town and castle. To the north and west a great white peak floated in the distance. Mount Adams, they called it; another like it lay south and west, Mt. Hood, the two framing that side of the world. Even after the long journey from Norrheim in what the old world had called northern Maine he still found his breath taken away sometimes by the scale of the landscapes here in the High West. You’d hardly credit that many days’ travel separated this spot from those high snowfields, or that Hood was on the other shore of the great Columbia itself, in green rainy forest country. Behind Adams was another, even greater.
The world is wider and more full of wonders than I knew before Artos Mikesson and his questers rode into my garth last Yule, he thought. More dangerous, much stranger, and more beautiful. Yet I would give it all to sit by my own fire again, with Hallberga beside me and our son in my lap while we watched our daughter play.
He picked a towel off the fence and wiped his face and neck; it was also hot here, though the dryness made it easier to tolerate than a like day back home.
Not that we have many days like this! And we could use some, come harvest-time.
“That horse puts my horsemanship to shame. What shall I do with him, Lady Signe?” he asked the woman who’d given it to him. “We Norrheimers aren’t fighters on horseback, like you Bearkillers. We plant our feet with Earth, Thor’s mother, when we make the shield-wall.”
“Take him home with you after the war, and put him to your mares, Bjarni King,” she said. “And when you see the foals he gets, remember us here. Your folk may need warhorses, someday.”
She was a tall fair woman a little more than a decade older than him, with the Valknut of Odin around her neck and a set of rough dark clothing; man’s boots and breeches and jacket, though there was certainly a good- looking woman beneath them, and her face was still handsome. He judged that she could use the long single- edged, basket-hilted sword at her belt with some skill.
This one is a she-wolf, he thought. Shrewd, brave, loyal to her own, but very hard and used to rule, I would say; her man fell and she has striven to take his place while her sons grew. Still, she’s guested and gifted us well, and her people… or some of them… are true folk who follow the Aesir as we do. Well, not exactly as we do, but close enough. And they have many arts I want for Norrheim, and they’re fell fighters, as dangerous as any I’ve seen.
“I shall name him Vakr,” he said.
She smiled. “Ah, Hawk, for the horse of Morn who rides out to bring the dawn,” she said. “A good choice.”
He inclined his head. “You know the ancient tales well, gythja,” he said, giving her the title of Godwoman.
That could mean either chieftainess or priestess, since either made sacrifice to the Mighty Ones. He had been a godhi himself, when he was merely chief of the Bjornings, his own tribe, and before he became the first king of Norrheim. A chief made offerings; just as he led his folk in war and presided over the folk-moot, the thing, so he stood before the Mighty Ones for them. A king most of all, who must be father to all the land.
“I’ll breed Vakr to my mares and the colts will be the envy of Norrheim. And others will think it a favor indeed if I let them do likewise.”
Her nod told him she’d thought of that too; the network of favor and obligation was one a leader had to know how to weave and tug on at need.
“Those of my folk who are true to the Aesir will hold a blot soon,” she said. “We will give cattle to the Gods for luck and victory in this war, and feast, and drink sumbel to hail the Gods, remember the dead and make boast and oath. You and yours are welcome to share the rite. And the beef!”
“Many thanks, if you will let me send cattle we find ourselves to be given with yours. It is fitting that you Bearkillers should lead the rite; this is your land, and you know the holy wights who ward it under the high Gods.”
She smiled, looking much younger for a moment. “This here”-she tapped a boot on the sparse grass beneath them, and a little dust puffed up-“is not ours, exactly. For various values of us and ours. ”
“Ah, yes,” Bjarni said. “Your pardon if this hard head of mine hasn’t gotten all the details of this realm hammered into it yet.”
Signe’s smile grew into a grin, a remarkably predatory expression. “The details of who owned what resulted in a lot of skulls getting hammered in my youth, the years after the Change,” she said. “And we’ve yet to pound home the lesson these boundaries are not for our enemies to rearrange now, either.”
Bjarni gave her the same wolf-grin back, and so did several of his countrymen. The play on words appealed to their sense of humor and his. The world was a place of strife; no less than a wolf pack, a tribe or kingdom had to be ready to fight for its hunting grounds, or to take what its people needed from others, though no man could guarantee triumph in every fight.
