"No, I am a wayfarer. I was bound for there, wanting shelter tonight, but spied you and thought I would hear your tale first. It should be better than aught that any homefast hinds can tell. I hight Maring."
Ordinarily the Patrolman would just have said, "Everard," which sounded like a name in some other patois. But he'd be using it uptime when he met Heidhin, whom he hoped to buttonhole this day. He couldn't afford recognition then—another shift in reality, with unguessable consequences. Floris had suggested this monicker, authentically southern German. She had also assisted him with a flowing blond wig and false beard, plus a Jimmy Durante nose that would keep attention off the rest of him. Given the fading of memory with years, that should serve.
A grin creased and crinkled the mariner's face. "And I am Vagnio Thuthevar's son, from Hariu thorp in the land of the Alvarings. Whence come you?"
"From afar." The Patrolman jerked a thumb at the settlement. "They're staying within their walls, hey? Afraid of you?"
Vagnio shrugged. "We could be reavers, for aught they know. This is nobody's port of call. It's merely the landfall we made—"
Everard already realized that. On timecycles aloft, he and Floris had observed the ship, once scanning revealed that she, among all they had checked, carried a woman. A jump into the future showed where she would halt; a jump back into the past deposited him close by. Floris stayed above the clouds. Explaining her presence away would have been too much trouble.
"—where we'll camp the night," Vagnio went on, "and fill our water casks in the morning. But then we coast west to the Anglii, with goods for a great market they hold this time of year. If yon folk like, they can call on us, else we'll leave them be. Their kind has naught worth robbing."
"Not even themselves, to sell for thralls?" The question was foul in Everard's mouth, but natural in this age.
"No, they'd run off as soon as they saw us bound for them, and scatter what livestock they have. That's why they built where they did." Vagnio squinted. "You must be a landlubber not to ken that."
"Yes, of the Marcomanni." The tribe was safely remote, about where western Czechoslovakia would lie. "You are, uh, from Scania?"
"No. The Alvarings hold half of an island off the Geatish coast. Stay the night with us, Mating, and we'll swap yarns—What're you peering at?"
Sailors had crowded around, eager to hear. They were mostly tall blonds, who blocked the Patrolman's view of their vessel. A couple of them had shifted, restless, and he got a clear look. A slender youth had just sprung out of the prow to the beach. He lifted his arms and helped the woman follow. Veleda.
No mistaking her. I'd know that face, those eyes, at the bottom of her goddess's ocean. But how young she was today, a girl in her teens, withy-thin. The wind tossed loose brown tresses and flapped skirt around ankles. Across the ten or fifteen yards between, Everard thought he saw—what? A look that sought something beyond this place, lips that would suddenly quiver and maybe whisper, a grief, a lostness, a dream, he couldn't say.
Certainly she showed none of the interest in him he had counted on. He wondered if she had so much as cast him a glance. The pale countenance turned away. She spoke briefly with her dark-haired companion. They walked off together, down the strand from the ship.
"Ah, her," Vagnio deduced. Unease touched him. "An uncanny twain, those."
"Who are they?" Everard asked. That too was a natural question, when women crossing the sea other than as captives were well-nigh unheard of. Eventually invaders from the Frisian and Jutish shores would bring their families along to Britain, but that wouldn't happen for centuries.
Unless Scandinavian women occasionally took ship at this early date? His information didn't say. Those lands in those years were little studied. It hadn't seemed they would make much difference to the rest of the world until the Völkerwanderung. Surprise, surprise.
"Edh Hlavagast's daughter and Heidhin Viduhada's son," Vagnio said. Everard noticed that he named her first. "They bought aboard, but not to trade alongside us. Indeed, she'd not seek the market at all, but wants we let her—them—off somewhere else, she has not yet said where."
"Best we make ready for night, skipper," growled a man. A mutter of agreement went among others. Darkness was hours off, and it wasn't likely the rain would come this way. They'd rather not have talk about her, Everard realized. They've nothing against her, I'm sure, but she is, yes, uncanny. Vagnio was quick to assent.
Everard offered to lend a hand with setting up. Bluffly polite, for a guest was sacred, the captain expressed doubt that a landlubber could expedite matters. Everard strolled off, the way Edh and Heidhin had gone.
He saw them stop, well ahead of him. They appeared to argue. She made a gesture strangely imperious for such a slip of a lass. Heidhin wheeled about and started back with long stiff strides. Edh went onward.
"This may be my chance," Everard subvocalized. "I'll see if I can get the boy into conversation."
"Have a care," Floris replied. "I think he is upset."
"Yeah. I've got to try, though, don't I?"
It was the reason for making this rendezvous, instead of simply tracing the ship across the water, backward through time. They dared not charge blind into what might well be the source of the instability, the obscure and easily annulled event from which an entire future could spring. Here, they hoped, was an opportunity to learn something beforehand at minimal risk.
Heidhin jarred to a halt, glowering, before the foreigner. He also was in his teens, perhaps a year or two older than Edh. In this milieu that made him an adult, but he was still gangly, not quite filled out, the sharp countenance darkened by no more than fuzz. He wore wadmal, odorous in the damp air, and salt-stained boots. A sword hung at his flank.
"Hail," said Everard amiably. That was on the surface. Cold prickles went over his scalp.
"Hail," grunted Heidhin. The surliness would have been considered appropriate to his years in twentieth-century America. Here it meant real trouble. "What would you?" He paused before adding roughly, "Follow not the woman. She wants to be alone."
"Is that safe for her?" Everard asked: another natural question.
"She'll not go too far, and will return ere nightfall. Besides—" Again Heidhin fell mute. He seemed to be wrestling with himself. Everard guessed that a youthful desire to be important and mysterious won out over discretion. Yet he heard an almost frightening sincerity: "Whoso offends her shall suffer worse than death. She is the chosen of a goddess."
Did the wind really blow keener all at once? "You know her well, then?"
"I . . . fare at her side."
"Whither?"
"Why would you know?" flared Heidhin. "Let me be!"
"Easy, friend, easy," Everard said. It helped being large and mature. "I do but ask, I, an outlander. Gladly would I hear more about—Edh, did the shipmaster call her? And you Heidhin, I think."
Curiosity awoke. The boy relaxed a bit. "What of you? We wondered as we drew nigh."
"I am a wayfarer, Maring of the Marcomanni, a folk you may never have heard of. You'll get my tale this evening."
"Where are you bound?"
"Wherever my luck may lead me."
Heidhin stood still a moment. The small surf mumbled. A gull mewed. "Could you be sent?" he breathed.
Everard's pulse raced. He forced his tone to stay casual. "Who might have sent me, and why?"
"See you," Heidhin blurted, "Edh is going whither Niaerdh bids her, by dreams or signs. She's now had a thought that this is where we should leave the ship and wend overland. I tried to tell her it's a niggard country, dwellings wide-scattered, maybe outlaws running free. But she—" He gulped. The goddess was supposed to protect her. Faith struggled with common sense and found a compromise. "If a second warrior fared along—"