Winter Song (14 page)

    Sod him. The bastard was going to stay and pay for that food and shelter the only way that he could, by working. There was always more work than there were hands available, and Allman's presence might make the difference between the community prospering or just surviving.

    Ragnar put away the file he'd started on Steinar Onundsson, having already left a few messages with the other Gothis, asking if they'd had any trouble with Steinar. Ragnar would start gently, but over the winter he'd step up the whispering campaign and in the spring, he'd rally support and challenge Steinar to a duel at the Spring Fair to settle the dispute – one way or another.

    He heard laughter and shouts outside, and saw Allman wiping his hands on a cloth while Orn clapped him on the shoulder.

    Ragnar's spirits lifted when he saw Allman talking to Arnbjorn, who had returned with more sheep from the fells. Walking outside he said mock-sternly, "Arnbjorn Ragnarsson, what are you doing chatting like a washerwoman when there's work to be done?"

    Arnbjorn hesitated. Ragnar realised with a pang that his son was checking the older man's mood and grinned to show he was happy. Arnbjorn relaxed. "I've been taking lessons from you in how to spend my days," he said, hugging his father. As they separated, Arnbjorn jerked his thumb at Allman. "I hear our new hand has helped Orn fix the turbine."

    "Indeed." Ragnar raised his eyebrows.

    "Orn fixed it, I just helped." Allman's unmanly humility made Ragnar want to slap him, even as the Gothi assessed whether the alien's downplaying his help played into Ragnar's hands.

    "Piece of metal had rusted off and fallen into the cog," Orn said. "But to actually get to it, we needed to lift the whole damned motor. Two or three men could have done it, but two or three couldn't have climbed into that little space, stood there and lifted it up. No, Karl made the difference. Come on, Ragnar'll give you the rest of the afternoon off – won't you, Gothi?"

    Arnbjorn muttered in Ragnar's ear, "And we can have a couple of beers to celebrate getting the big flock off Klanting Fell. We made good time."

    "You did," Ragnar said. "I wasn't expecting you back until tomorrow. What did you do, fly them down here?"

    Arnbjorn chuckled. "Yeah, we drove the sheep hard. Having the extra man helped. I'm glad you talked Orn into lending him to us."

    "That's why I'm not bothered by Orn borrowing the utlander." Ragnar jerked his thumb at Allman. Though Orn needn't have praised him
quite
so much.

The afternoon grew hazier with each beer they downed.

    Ragnar thought afterward that he heard Bera's voice coming from the Oracle room. "You tell it your search parameters. 'Technology plus Terraformers plus interstellar communications.' Wait for the results. Hmm, not good. Seventeen responses."

    "This is like something from the Stone Age," Allman complained. "What if you try other parameters?" Ragnar didn't catch what was said next because it was drowned out by shouts from the kitchen. Bloody women and their squabbling!

    "What's that – a shrine to the south?" Allman said.

    "Oh, that's the W
inter Song
," Bera replied. She recited:

        "And when the Gods left Isheimur,

        They cast a bolt from the sky.

        The winter that followed was as bleak.

        As the heart of a harlot."

    "There's something about a possible location," Allman said, "on one of the responses." He groaned. "Two thousand kilometres!"

    "That," Bera said, "is where you pointed to on the map. Or Loki did. You confuse me."

    "I did?" Karl said.

    Whatever Ragnar had been going to say next, either to summon Allman or shout at the kitchen to quit their squabbling, Arnbjorn drove all thoughts of it from his mind with a foaming tankard of peat beer.

    There was another fragment, perhaps either imagined or dreamed, Ragnar wasn't sure afterward. It was the utlander walking past, head bowed. It made Ragnar happy to see all hope fled, but angry, too. "I'd never give up," Ragnar shouted to Arnbjorn. "Bigger the odds, more I like 'em. A man should fight to the death, like a berserk."

    "You tell 'em, Pappi," Arnbjorn slurred.

Ragnar awoke groggy, with a raging thirst and a hangover, something he didn't normally suffer from.

    Arnbjorn and Asgerd were wrapped in each other's arms with the youngest of their three children, toddler George wedged between them.

    Ragnar gradually became aware of raised voices, drifting from the kitchen.

    He stomped toward the source of the row.

    In the kitchen, Thorir – who was clearly still drunk – and Hilda stood on one side, while Bera glared at them from the other, Allman beside her. Everyone was talking at once.

    Ragnar bellowed, "Quiet!"

    The kitchen fell silent. Ragnar looked at them all in turn. Allman met his gaze levelly; Bera shrank back; Thorir dropped his gaze, while Hilda lifted her chin slightly. Ragnar said, "It's like a convocation of scolds in here. What's caused this?"

    Hilda said, "Karl's cleaning of the pans was unacceptable. When I told him so, Bera saw fit to interfere."

    "Because the dirt on the pans isn't new. It's been ground in for forever!" Bera said.

    "It doesn't matter." Allman pretended to act as peacemaker – having started it all, Ragnar guessed.

    "It's not your place to say what matters here,
boy
." Ragnar smiled inwardly at the flush that stained the stranger's dark face.

    "It's not Karl that's the problem," Hilda said, and Ragnar saw the way that she glanced at the stranger.

    Not you too. Does he
ooze
pheromones?

    They were all starved of novelty. Ragnar had heard them begging the utlander to tell them about his home, and for all his supposed reluctance, Allman had seduced them with tales of cities floating in the clouds above hell-worlds.

    Then Ragnar caught Hilda's defiant look and the way she stood between him and her idiot husband. Oho! You don't just fancy the alien, then? This was Hilda's way of getting back at him for his supposed harshness toward Thorir. For a moment, Ragnar had a crazy vision of how much better the utlander would be as a son-inlaw, but squashed it. "What do you suggest?"

    "I'll supervise them more closely," Hilda said, "and maybe make them work apart." Though Hilda liked to queen it over the others as eldest child, she had no actual authority. Putting these two under her supervision would legitimise her claim.

    She was braced for a row, he could tell, from the way that her nostrils flared.

    "I'll think about it," he said, wrong-footing her. "But meanwhile, keep the noise down, all of you. You're setting the children a bad example of how to behave."

But the next few days saw no relaxation of the internecine warfare between the women; Ragnar knew that Hilda disliked Bera, and now perhaps envied Bera her closeness to Allman. Whether the jealously was justified, Ragnar wasn't sure – Bera and Allman seemed to be just friends – but whatever the reason, Hilda bullied Bera relentlessly.

    The conflict obviously played into Thorbjorg's hands as well. She teased the unskilled and untrained Allman relentlessly about how much more women's work he did than the other men, to the extent that Ragnar almost wanted the utlander to slap her into respect. Ragnar grew even angrier with the alien for the sheeplike way he took Thorbjorg's taunting. Especially when it provoked Bera into sniping at Thorbjorg, which in turn earned Allman even greater scorn from Thorbjorg for needing a woman's protection.

    Sometimes Ragnar wondered what the utlander had done to provoke Thorbjorg. Had she offered herself to him, and been turned down? Whatever it was, Thorbjorg and Hilda seemed unable to leave Allman alone.

    It was enough to offer Ragnar the excuse he secretly wanted to ignore his administrative duties and join the other men on the fells. The trouble with that was that he wasn't as young as the others; so either his head ached from the bickering in the house, or his legs ached from walking the hills.

    Then one morning Thorir nearly lost several sheep in a bog.

    They were bringing in the last flock, racing against another storm, lightning flickering on the horizon, creeping closer. The flock had ranged furthest, and was one of the biggest, so it needed all the men to help the two shepherds who guarded it. Orn and Bjarney and their men who had already returned had joined with Ragnar, Arnbjorn, Thorir and even Allman in striding up to the fells. Only Yngi had stayed behind to attend to his chores, and the sight of him gazing forlornly after them had pierced Ragnar's heart. That's why you should never look back.

    Once again Thorir somehow managed to end up as point, nearest the bog, and once again the mutton-head had shown why he shouldn't be allowed near anything that could break or die.

    Even as the lightning of the impending storm flickered in the distance, they heard the bleating, and the utlander raced into the bog, and grabbed the nearest of the two sheep by the scruff of the neck. But within seconds, the animal's frantic struggles – the very opposite of what it should do to survive the mud – had taken them both under. Only one hand remained waving above the mud. Without bothering to vent his spleen on the hapless Thorir, Ragnar held out a branch from a blasted tree and swung it so that it slapped against Allman's palm.

    Allman grabbed the branch.

    "Help me get him out!" Ragnar bellowed.

    Strong hands took the branch and pulled on it. For a few seconds nothing happened, and Ragnar feared that the alien's lungs had filled. Another part of his mind noticed that the storm was coming closer, faster, and he knew that they wouldn't have long before they had to decide whether to fight the bog or flee the lightning.

    Then with a horrid sucking sound, the bog slowly gave up its prisoners.

    First Allman's arm emerged, then his shoulder and head, his torso, and even his other arm – somehow wrapped around the sheep – finally his legs.

    They hauled the utlander and his prize onto firm ground. "Take care of the sheep!" Ragnar shouted at Arnbjorn, and turned to look for the second sheep.

    It was gone.

    Ragnar turned away and took in the sight of both Allman and the ewe struggling to their feet, both coughing and spluttering, Arnbjorn and Bjarney wiping their mouths of the residue of the resuscitations. The ewe staggered, then galloped after the flock.

    "You let the second one go?" Ragnar bellowed at Allman, and as the alien straightened to give the Gothi a mouthful of abuse, Ragnar grinned and winked, and got a smile in return.

    Ragnar turned to Thorir, who was wringing his hands, shoulders hunched. "It wasn't my fault!"

    "You," Ragnar bellowed, "are going to be on firewood duty for the rest of your life! That's how many sheep you've lost? It comes out of your meals! Even Yngi's a better bloody shepherd than you are! You needed an untrained novice to show you how it's done?"

    Pausing for breath, Ragnar saw Bjarney's eyes widen.

    Bjarney opened his mouth and then Ragnar felt a thump in his back, and the world tilted. There was a sound like a buzz-saw, and Ragnar felt the fiery thumps of the snolfur's claws through his clothes, pounding down his back. His head jerked back to scream, and he saw the snolfur's hindquarters as it hurdled him.

    Twisting, despite the agony of his back, Ragnar saw a ball of blue-white fire rolling toward them, and smelled the ozone crackling off the fireball.

    At the last moment it careered into the bog and sank slowly in a wall of steam from the stagnant surface, and a murmur of plops and bubbles.

    Behind him Ragnar heard shouts, and the buzz-saw yowls of the fleeing snolfur, and then the world went black.

He awoke to a world that pitched and rolled. "Keep still, Pappi," Arnbjorn's voice said. "We're nearly home, now. We turned the shepherd's tent into a stretcher. Bjarney and I will take you home."

    "The others?" Ragnar whispered. His back felt as if he'd been stabbed with hot needles.

    "OK," Arnbjorn said. "The snolfur was gone before we could shoot it. The men are rounding up the last stragglers."

    Ragnar's protests that he should supervise went unheeded, and they insisted on shovelling him into the bed on his return, so that the women could fuss and cluck over him.

    When he got to his feet that afternoon, Allman was waiting for him at the back door.

    After the barest of civilities, Allman said, "I want to travel south, to find the W
inter Song
, if it exists. If it does, it should have a distress beacon. Maybe I can activate it. I've done loads of digging, and I think I've found the likely location. I'm convinced that there's substance to the story of the W
inter Song
."

    "So you've been keeping other people off the Oracle?"

    "Absolutely not. I've only used it when it's been quiet, when I've finished my tasks."

    Ragnar's back was giving him grief; it felt as if the snolfur had left its claws in. If Allman had only waited, he often thought afterward, maybe so many men might not have died. Maybe things would have turned out differently.

    Maybe. But his back hurt. This cheeky bastard thinks that fishing one sheep out pays all debts? "Have you indeed?" Ragnar said. "Forgive my ignorance, friend, but what are you going to live on while you make this epic journey south?"

    "I'll live off the land," Allman said, and Ragnar could see that he hadn't thought it through. "Since you attach a price to everything, then I'll work extra over the next few days to buy food."

    "You can only travel during Faradalur. The Moving Days won't be until the spring."