The words were plain enough, but there was an undertone of longing. Glancing over his shoulder, Artos saw her head turned as well, with wisps of honey-colored hair escaping from her knit cap. Doubtless she was thinking that she might well never see it again, or the land where she’d been raised and had thought to live all her life and her children after her.
“Why didn’t you stay?” Edain asked, a little more bluntly than Artos would have phrased it.
“My oath,” she said flatly. “You were there when I swore it at the sumbel, master-bowman.”
Artos faced forward again; Mathilda glanced at him and winked.
Edain shook his head. “You swore to kill ten of the enemy to pay for your man,” he said. “Ten followers of the red-robes.”
Asgerd Karlsdottir’s intended husband had been killed by the Bekwa before the open war started, while he was on a trip to find salvage goods in the dead cities to the northwest; what her people called going in Viking.
“And I think you’ve killed the half-score you promised your God,” Edain went on; Asgerd had the three interlinked upright triangles that were Odin’s mark on a pendant around her neck. “Met it or bettered it at the Six-Hill Fight.”
“That’s not certain,” she said bleakly.
It wasn’t absolutely certain. Often in a pitched battle there was no way of knowing if your blow went home, the more so with arrows; everything was a whirling shifting chaos. But he’d be surprised if it wasn’t a moral certainty, given the way the pursuit and merciless slaughter had gone after the Bekwa broke.
“And. .”
She was silent for a long moment; when she spoke again it was hard to hear beneath the creak and rattle and hum of the pedal-cart. Then softly:
“That’s near where Sigurd and I were to make our homestead. I don’t care to live where we spent so much time planning our life together.”
Louder: “Besides, I made oath to Artos Mikesson too. He’s my lord until he releases me, and he hasn’t.”
“That I have not,” Artos said, hiding kindliness under the stern tone.
The rails stretched on ahead, rising and falling, winding through rolling hills and patches of forest that gradually grew larger; now along a small river still mostly frozen, then by a lake with black water showing between chunks of rotting ice. On a straight stretch he could see two teams before them toiling away in front, and a quick look over his shoulder showed five more behind. The woods grew thicker still, until they were traveling through a tunnel, green with pine and spruce or showing the writhing bare branches of hardwoods whose buds were putting out their first faint swelling. The air had an intense cleanliness that you got only at some distance from men’s dwellings-no dung or woodsmoke.
“Your folk don’t use this part of the country much?” he said.
“No, lord,” Asgerd answered. “The farmland’s better north and eastward, that’s the heart of Norrheim. All the folk in these parts who didn’t die in the Change Year moved up to join us. Ayuh, where there were enough people to help defend each other and do the work. And over there”-she pointed westward-“is land that was dedicated to the forest wights by a godhi of the old Maine-folk whose blood I share. He was a chieftain hight Baxter. There, nobody lived even before the Change. But the hunting’s very good-deer and boar and bear and moose. Wolf and catamount for their skins, and tiger too, but they’ve only become common these last few years.”
“Isn’t it a little far to pack out meat?” Edain asked with interest. “Or do you stop to smoke and salt it?”
“We wait for the frost so it’ll keep,” Asgerd said. “Or even later until first snowfall, when the beasts are still fat but we can sled it back home. Don’t you Mackenzies?”
The master-bowman shook his head. “Not near where we live. You can’t count on it staying cold there-chilly and wet, to be sure, but not freezing-cold; it’ll keep the flesh from spoiling a while, maybe, but not long. Up in the mountains, yes, but it’s too dangerous to go there much into snow season; you can get buried fifteen or twenty feet deep in a few hours with no more warning than the first flakes.”
He grinned. “The chief and I and Ingolf the Far-Traveler did get buried just like that, two years ago less about a fortnight, when we crossed the High Cascades going east.”
The smile faded a little. “Just away from home we were, and spring blooming hard around Dun Fairfax down in the valley.”
“How did you survive?” she asked.
“Built a quick hut of saplings and pine boughs against an overhang in the cliff face and waited out the storm, telling tales and sleeping,” Edain said. “ ’Twasn’t even very cold, once the snow blanket piled up, and we had plenty of food and firewood. And Garbh was warm!”
The dog lifted her broad head at the sound of her name, then laid it back on her paws.
“We had a chimney of bark to keep the air fresh, pushed up through to the surface, d’you see.”
She nodded; snow made good insulation, if you had something to keep it away from your skin, and plenty to eat to stoke the inner furnaces. But it could still be deadly in a dozen ways if it trapped you far from home or help.
“And how did you get out afterwards?”
“Tunneled out, then walked over the pass on snowshoes we’d made while we waited. The snow wasn’t near as deep once we were over the crestline; the peaks block the wet winds from the sea however much she blows. Not a comfortable pair of days, but no great danger.”
His tone was offhand, which was the most effective type of boasting.
“Well. . I’m glad to see that your rich warm land hasn’t made your folk soft,” Asgerd said.
Artos grinned to himself. Every word of what Edain had said was the truth. What his fellow clansman hadn’t mentioned was that it was Ingolf Vogeler who’d shown them what to do when the storm struck, with a trick from his Wisconsin home; they’d probably have died without him. The Kickapoo country around Readstown in the Free Republic of Richland was nearly as bleak in winter as Norrheim.
The Clan Mackenzie’s territories were not, not down in the valleys where their farms and duns lay and where they spent the Black Months in rain and fog with only occasional brief snow cover. You could pasture stock outside right through most winters, with only about thirty hard night frosts in all. His people dealt with the huge mountain snowfalls of the High Cascade range by simply not going there from Samhain to Beltane, for the most part. His own experience of mountain snows had been limited to downhill skiing at Timberline Lodge, a possession of Mathilda’s family on Mt. Hood, with great hearths and well-stocked pantries for stormy days.
I somehow doubt the kilt would have caught on in Norrheim the way it did among us, regardless of fashion!
Despite the mid-forties chill they were all sweating a little after an hour or two. Water bottles made the rounds occasionally, and cold pancakes rolled around jam fillings.
“This is a rest,” Artos murmured to Mathilda as Edain and the Norrheimer girl chatted behind him.
“Rest?” she said, wiping a dab of blueberry jam off her chin with her thumb and licking it. “Well, it’s not as hard as pushing sleds through snowdrifts on the shores of Superior and wondering if we’d have to eat the horses.”
“Rest it is, like a downy bed.”
And you beside me in it, he didn’t add aloud.