Winter Song (11 page)

    Bera turned away, her fists balled.

    Hilda said, "It doesn't matter who said what. We've had a misunderstanding, now get back to work. Bera, a word."

    Bera noticed Karl amble away, and would have liked to run after him and tell him what she thought of his feebleness, but it would have to wait.

    "I don't expect to have to spend time leading the children back to the house to sort out your squabbles. Pappi's been good to you, first taking you in, then letting you stay, but you must repay his kindness, even if it's only stopping these attention-seeking stunts of yours. If I have to speak to you again, then I'll demand Pappi send you away."

    Demand? Bera thought. Who are you to demand that I be sent away? What Hilda meant of course was that she would wheedle at her father.

    She stormed back to the laundry, her eyes stinging.

    On the way, she saw Karl standing at the back, the less used end of the house, outside the sauna. He'd shed his shirt and stood with it in his hand, arms outstretched in the weak sunlight, as still as a statue.

    She marched toward him, head down, trudging furiously.

    All he'd had to do was to confirm her version of the conversation with Thorbjorg… He probably wants to tup her, Bera thought. She's permanently on heat, the dirty bitch.

    He was still staring. She followed his gaze and saw Yngi.

    Ragnar's son sat on a nearby bench, leg extended, a boot dropped nearby. Yngi also stared, enraptured by the great white feathered shape that hid his bare foot.

    "Come away!"

    "What's he doing?" Karl asked without looking at her.

    "He's feeding the snawk." Bera pulled at him, but he wouldn't budge. "It's private! No one's to disturb him while he's doing that. You may scare it away!"

    As if it heard them, the snawk reared its head, turned and screeched from a razor-billed beak that dripped blood.

    "They feed on their handler's blood, from a wound at the base of the big toe," Bera said. "It keeps them from preying on the sheep. In the wild they're vermin."

    "Fascinating." Karl followed her, falling behind as he gazed back over his shoulder. "You use it to hunt?"

    "In the winter." A spar obscured their view of Yngi and the snawk, so she stopped whispering. "And for pest control, all year round. It's about the only natural predator that seems to be able to feed on our genetic material without any ill effects – at least in small quantities – and we've bred for that trait. Yngi feeds it every day. There's something in the bird's spit so that the wound never fully heals, but has to be staunched with dressings. The handler develops a severe limp."

    "That's why he's lame?" Karl said. "You deliberately maim a man?"

    "We don't," Bera said. "He chose to, in the same way that people have always disfigured themselves with holes and objects embedded in their flesh in the name of fashion. At least Yngi's maiming is useful. There's an empathic bond between a tame snawk and its handler. The snawk feeds more often in the wild, so that captive snawks are dwarfs compared to the wild ones."

    He stood motionless, arms outstretched, his head tilted back.

    She stamped her foot. "What
are
you doing?"

    Karl straightened his head and gazed at her, his eyes dark again in the sunlight. He looked wholly inhuman then. "So it's a bonsai bird."

    "That one's about half-sized," she said, bemused at the strange phrase. "Wild snawks can have wingspans of several metres."

    Reluctantly, she walked toward him. His skin had darkened slightly, and she shuddered.

    "Even this weak sunlight helps," he said. "While I was in space, the lifegel blocked almost all the sunlight. It's a default setting – you can't customise the nanophytes in lifegel."

    "What are you talking about now?" Sometimes she longed for him to be ordinary.

    "My skin photosynthesises sunlight," he said. "It's only this morning that I remembered. It's like my own memories are hiding from me."

    Or Loki's hiding them, she almost said. "Is that good? Photo… photo thing?"

    "Photosynthesis means I need much less food," he said, smiling beatifically. "I eat as much as I do to be social, as for calories: I'm gengineered to synthesise sunlight. Most people are, apart from the Pures. It's about twenty times as efficient as eating food."

    They resumed their walk to the laundry.

    She remembered what she'd wanted to say to him. "Why didn't you tell Hilda that I wasn't lying? Now they think… oh, it doesn't matter!" Now it all seemed so petty compared to skin that purpled and turned sunlight to energy.

    "Because I wasn't paying attention," Karl said. "I didn't hear the conversation."

    "Why didn't you just back me up anyway – that's what friends do: I took care of you, and – and, you just left me arguing alone against them…" She wiped her nose on her sleeve with an angry cuff.

    "You wanted me to lie for you?" Karl said.

    "I – yes, dammit!"

    "I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't realise. I never meant to upset you. Next time I will." They re-entered the laundry in silence.

    Karl said, "For all that we spend most of the daylight hours out in the open, this place is a pressure cooker – too little outside stimuli in a small, isolated group of people."

    "You make us sound like specimens," Bera said.

    He shrugged. "I don't mean to… but I see you from an outsider's perspective." They unloaded some of the sodden clothes and he said, "Why do you loathe Thorbjorg?"

    "Why not?" Bera said. "Didn't you hate that Jakob boy?"

    "But we were children," Karl said. "We knew no better."

    "Gods, you're so civilised!" Bera pushed the first shirt through as he held the free end. "Don't you feel anything?" He blinked, and she regretted her outburst. "You must think that we're so primitive," she said.

    "Raw is the word," he said with a slight smile. "You're all… almost overpowering. It's so hard to deal with."

    "Get used to it," Bera said. "Isheimuri are Old Norse stock. We fight as much as breathe, and we're good at bearing grudges."

    They got back to work, and Bera considered his question. "Thorbjorg. Although she's only been married to Yngi for – I guess – six years, they have five children. It's important that we repopulate the planet, but it's not a competition. But she queens it over the other women. And the way she scolds poor Yngi, when Ragnar isn't around…"

    "Is she Ragnar's lover?" Karl chuckled at her shocked look. "I see from an outsider's perspective."

    "If she is," Bera said, "it's because both of them are using the other one; she thinks that she can control him through sex."

    "But you don't know?"

    "No," she said, folding a shirt and putting it on a pile. When she spoke next, she was still folding clothes, and didn't look up. "I have a question."

    "Yes?"

    "If a society… regresses, is that the word?" At his nod, Bera continued, "If a society regresses, do women always end up forced back into the home?" She looked up, and at his raised eyebrow chuckled. "Ragnar doesn't know half of what information is on the Oracle. If he did, his hair would be completely grey. But it's all based on Terra and a few early colonies. Nothing as strange as you are. I mean, as exotic as you are."

    "I don't know much about regressive societies," Karl said. "They're rare. But from what little I know, breastfeeding ties women to their children. Unless the society's truly nomadic, that pins women to the home. Once that happens, domestic chores aggregate. It doesn't have to happen, but just as water finds the quickest way downhill, so societies devolve into standard patterns, unless most of the populace are prepared to be brave with their thinking."

    Bera was silent for a time, thinking. When they finished, she handed him the pile of dried washing, and picked up a box of wooden pegs. They strode out into the daylight.

    On top of the hill above, sheep spilled over the skyline in a surging, boiling mass, flanked by dogs and farm hands. From her leash in the centre of the courtyard, Brynja began barking.

    Bera said, "Uh-oh."

    "What's the matter?"

    "Pappi. He's storming down that hill. Wotan, he looks in a foul mood." She turned to him. "Be very careful when he's in this sort of mood. Don't say anything to provoke him."

    As the Gothi came nearer and nearer, Bera could feel herself hunching smaller.

    "Don't be scared," Karl said.

    Ragnar stamped into the square, and at that moment, a small white shape shot toward him.

    "Brynja!" Bera shrieked.

    Ragnar stared down at the yapping puppy. He stepped toward Brynja, and something made the little dog snap at his boot. He straightened his walking stick so that it was under the dog's belly and lifted her up, so that she balanced precariously on it. Ragnar reached out with his gloved left hand and lifted the puppy off the stick by the scruff of her neck.

    "I told you before," Ragnar said, his eyes boring into Bera, "to keep this bitch under control."

    Bera felt Karl's arm go around her, for protection, and shrank into his warmth.

    She saw Ragnar's eyes widen, and thought, For I am a jealous Gothi. She cried, "It's not what you think–"

    "You wasted no time, then," Ragnar said. He tossed Brynja, who had turned from barking to whimpering, from left hand to right hand. Then with a grunt of effort he hurled Brynja against the nearest wall, the sound of the impact slapping loud in the near-silent square.

SEVEN

You assume that it was the smell of burning that triggered your reawakening – perhaps the Other shrank from the memories it evoked.

    Sense began to inch its way into the maelstrom of voices.

    "
Medieval Iceland was both stratified and not a state,"
shouted one voice.

    That raged, raged against the dying of your light if the Other were ever to completely reclaim his kingdom of flesh and blood and bone.

    "
Isheimur is so cold and its air so thin that the colony's sur
vival should be considered marginal,
" said another.

    The smell of burning dust as the brazier grew hotter and hotter, until it would be the right temperature for the Thralls to brand the new foals, was simply too redolent of Ship's last few minutes. The stink of horseflesh wouldn't have had the same effect, so had the Other walked this way only a few minutes earlier or later.

    "
On Avalon, a man can reason aloud without it being con
sidered a challenge; such is the process of civilised democracy
."

    It would have never triggered your return, muscling your way into the synapses of consciousness as the Other whimpered out.

    The voices clamoured their cacophony of seemingly random facts, but now you understood that among what seemed like an avalanche, every one of them had meaning.

    Among the fact-rocks hurtling past your consciousness, something about one caught your attention. Quicker than light you reached out a mental hand, juggled, then caught and held it.

    Ship knows that it is doomed but even as the plasma bolt homes in, it carries on its diligent checking of the Mizar B system for signs of civilisation. There! Something on Mizar B Gamma, a faintest glimmer, there and gone in a micro-second.

    Any vessel less diligent than Ship would have missed the electronic equivalent of a
meep!
But it was looking for something, anything, and there was the acknowledgement of its Mayday.

    It checked its memories, bigger than some planetary cities.
Mizar B Gamma was settled: Isheimur, they
called it.
Ship noted the co-ordinates, and included them in the download that was to mutate, to evolve into Loki.

    Your electronic consciousness was never designed to co-exist with a meat brain, you finally realise, as Ship would have always known. You're incompatible – the meat and your semi-Aye processes – but it was a mark of Ship's desperation, to survive and to pass its knowledge along to Karl–

    Stop daydreaming: this is a meat habit. You needed to find maps.

    The Bera-Jocasta-Mother woman would know where they were. Good, a pretext to find her.

    She has an effect on this meat-box that the Other would rather not think about. He is conditioned not to dream of sinking into her warm wetness. You have no such conditioning. Mother though she was to your suckling consciousness, she is not your birth-mother in the meat sense and you sense her own reciprocal attraction, buried beneath her own constraints.

    But now you had another reason to find her, to have her show you maps and work out how you would get to the beacon.

    Finally: purpose to your restlessness.

Up past the ballista that had lain unused these last two years, she was with the other women among the heathers, picking the edible parts.

    Ragnar stood over her. They did not notice you.

    He stood with his hands clasped behind his back and leaned forward slightly, bending from the waist. "You know that there's been bad blood between Steinar Onundsson and me for years," Ragnar said. "Just one of those things: he's jealous of me, I suppose."

    Bera gave no sign that she was listening, but something about her posture told even you, with your limited understanding of meat-minds, that she was listening intently.

    Ragnar said, "About the puppy…" He looked up at the sky, and scratched his head. When he continued, you thought that he had changed the subject: "All summer Steinar over at Reykholt's given me a wide berth, since he let his cattle wander onto the water meadows last spring. I told him then that I'd smack his arse with the flat of my blade if he tried that stunt again."