Winter Song (18 page)

    "You blacked out again," Bera said.

    He exhaled. "Probably that blow to the head when I first landed."

    "Really?" Bera didn't bother to hide her scepticism.

    Karl wracked his brains for what could have triggered the episode; his memories didn't seem impaired, but what did he have to compare them against?

    "Maybe we should call an early halt," Bera said.

    Karl said, "No, let's keep going." * * *

Afterward, Ragnar was never quite sure how much he dreamed, and what was real.

    He had taken a bottle of Brennivin – the fearsome schnapps normally only drunk a glass at a time – and a heated brick to his bed. He had tossed the brick into his bed to warm it, but instead lay down on the coverlet, drinking the Brennivin sip by sip, feeling the welcome scarifying warmth of its passage down his gullet, willing it to burn away his memories.

    Yngi, his Yngi, cowering like a whipped cur, screaming like a broken-backed animal, blood pouring down his face. Arnbjorn trying to pull Ragnar off and flailing across the room, propelled by Ragnar's shove. It should have been the utlander who took the thud after thud of fists, into soft flesh and crunching cartilage and breaking bone.

    Ragnar's fists were sore and swollen, his eyes felt heavy, and it was so very comfortable lying here on the soft bed, the cleansing liquor burning away his sin. He giggled, although it was as much a sob as a giggle. Perhaps the drink would burn away his gullet, and he'd slip into a long sleep.

    He was tired of fighting: his sons, the Black Dog, the shrill, bickering women, above all the utlander and the traitoress Bera. Outside the narrow window, the snow swirled in a hypnotic dance in the air, and as he neared the bottom of the bottle, he felt his lids close.

    As always, when he neared sleep, his thoughts turned to places they dared not venture while he was fully awake.

    The utlander had them in thrall, the lot of them. Must be that big horse's-sized cock of his, he thought with a little tipsy giggle, and then the image was in his head, of the utlander riding Bera, pulling her head back by her hair.

    He undid the buttons on his pants with languorous, clumsy fingers, and brushed his fingers against his stiffening member as he thought of the utlander servicing, first Bera, her legs now splayed apart as that huge thing slammed into her, and in his head she was screaming in pleasure as then Thorbjorg pushed her away, and pushed her big ass up into Allman's face.

    His cock was rigid, and he smelled her a moment before her fingers pushed his away, and she climbed onto the bed, kneeling beside him, so that he could stare at her tits as they spilled out of her dress, as if by thinking of her, he'd summoned her up.

    "You shouldn't be alone," Thorbjorg whispered huskily. She shed her clothes and she was naked, splaylegged like a whore at one of the fairs as she knelt at a right angle to him, across his body, and pushed off his remaining clothing.

    He hadn't heard the door open. Surely he'd locked it, hadn't he? But then he arched his back and all thoughts of whether he had locked the door were drowned in a swirling tsunami that swept him away from his guilt.

    He lay back mouth agape like an idiot, as her lips played over his chest.

    "Don't," he gasped. "You think I've hurt my son enough today?"

    Thorbjorg lifted her head, and those full lips parted in a smile tinged with sadness. "This is where the healing starts, Pappi. He forgives you. It wasn't your fault."

    Somehow Ragnar doubted that his idiot son, if he were brutally honest with himself, would even understand let alone forgive. He should have let the boy die, as everyone said that defective children should. Not kill them, for that was murder – but not spend time, effort and resources that the colony didn't have on fighting a battle that could never be won. It was harsh, but fair. For Yngi needed constant care, diverting precious energy away from survival.

    His first sin had been to break that law from love, to keep something of his beloved Gunnhild who'd died bringing Yngi into the world. His second was in allowing what he'd thought of as just an overripe daughter-in-law, who even as he wept for his broken boy, hushed him, before she whispered, "I'll make you forget. I'll make you better, Pappi," and then took him in her mouth, before straddling him.

    But when he awoke, he was cold and alone, and the memories of her mouth and her lips were the only sign that she had ever been there. And the closed, but unlocked door. Which maybe he'd simply forgotten to lock.

The next morning Karl and Bera rolled up the miscellany of furs that they had slept in.

    "Look how clear Thekla is!" Karl said, pointing at the jagged peak on the eastern skyline whose white cap rose high above the dun-coloured hills around it. One of the peaks bled lava, the brilliant carmine the only highlight in an otherwise drab landscape.

    Bera whistled, and held out our hand. "Dried fruit, high in sugar," she said, answering Karl's look. The horses duly ambled to her, while Karl unpacked food Bera had spent much of the previous evening separating into portions. "We won't have much to eat," she said, "but at least it gives us an idea. I think we have about twenty days' worth."

    Karl was sceptical, but then, he'd been wrong about the horses, he grudgingly admitted, as Bera fed them. When Bera had allowed the horses free rein, Karl had said, "You're not going to tie them to anything?"

    "They won't go far," Bera had said. "There's nothing much around here, which is a shame. I'd hoped we'd have grazing. They can eat a little before the toxins build up. But there's hay and feed in the bags, so unless there's native sedge or heathers right under their nose, the lazy buggers won't go far. They're not stupid."

    She was right, Karl thought, staring at the horses who stood over their saddlebags with reproachful looks that said, Come on, we're starving, feed us!

    "Rock-eaters," Karl said, indicating the score of white bundles ambling across the hills. He squinted, zooming in on them. "Some of them look as if they're wounded."

    "How can you tell?" Bera said, peering at the animals. "If you're right, that's not good. Rock-eaters mean snolfurs. Snolfurs attack rock-eaters and wound them, leaving them to bleed to death, and the snow to act as a deep-freeze. We should assume that there are snolfurs and other predators about."

    "Their meat's inedible?" Karl said, and joked, "It must be bad if you lot say that."

    "It's toxic over a period of time – how long varies from individual to individual – so we don't want to eat it and start poisoning ourselves until we have no other choice."

    "That makes sense," Karl said.

    The ground trembled as they munched on cold, dried meat, and Karl caught Bera watching him carefully. He decided not to mention the tremors if she didn't. He had grown almost used to the earth's almost constant shivering, but these were worse than usual.

    "What's the matter?" he said, wiping imaginary grease off his face, but she didn't react to the little halfjoke.

    "You were raving again last night," Bera said. She shivered. "It's scary."

    Karl felt a chill beyond that of the cold morning air. He thought he'd slept surprisingly well, considering how stony the ground was, but he had woken a couple of metres away from where he'd fallen asleep. There'd been a lot of lost hours lately.

    Bera blurted, "Some people at Skorradalur believed you're possessed."

    "You mean like a ghost or something?" Karl didn't bother to hide his scepticism.

    "Maybe," Bera said. "You're alien, so maybe ghosts are common to your people."

    "No," Karl said, "they're not."

    "I don't think that Ragnar believed it, but he pretended to, to keep some of the people happy."

    Karl shook his head. "Unbelievable."

    "Ragnar and I both heard you talking High Isheimuri, babbling about things; things that when I asked you about later, you denied all knowledge of. So, either you were lying one or other of the times, or you know things that you then forget you know."

    "Ragnar heard me, as well?" Karl said, a ball of ice forming in his stomach. What if the stress of Ship's attack and his subsequent isolation had induced schizoid behaviour? It would explain some of the symptoms; and neuro-nanophytes could only do so much.

    Bera nodded, "Oh yes."

    Karl said, "I'm going to run a diagnostic. I should have done it last night, since it puts me into a deep trance, but I didn't think of it. I've not wanted to do it before because it takes some time."

    Bera frowned. "How long is some time?"

    "Dunno," Karl said. "I've never done one before, so it could be a couple of minutes, or hours, depending on what, if anything, it finds."

    "I'm not sure I like the sound of that," Bera said. "As well as predators, Ragnar must have set off by now."

    "I'll be as quick as I can," Karl said. Closing his eyes, he began reciting the random lines of poetry and mathematical formulae that he'd been compelled to memorise at a subconscious level.

    The world faded.

Ragnar stared at the Oracle in dismay. It had always worked. "How long has it been like this?"

    "Since yesterday morning," Hilda said, looking sheepish. "We were going to call a healer to treat Yngi's injuries, but it failed. You were… resting." She looked down.

    Ragnar felt his face flame. "How is he?" His voice came out harsher than he'd intended.

    "Blind in one eye, lacerations that will heal… physically. I don't know about any internal injuries, or mental scars."

    "Mental scars?" Shame made Ragnar defiant. "Stop blathering, girl. If he hadn't lied, he wouldn't have needed punishing. Maybe I should have given him a good hiding before." He flexed his sore knuckles. "Now, this…" He pointed at the silent Oracle.

    "We couldn't get it to work," Hilda said, "although Orn worked on it all night. But he did find what was wrong with it." She looked at him expectantly.

    "Go on," Ragnar said.

    "Orn found that a tiny crystal was missing. Only someone who knew what they were doing would have known to take that."

    "Allman," Ragnar breathed.

    "Or Bera," Hilda said. "She spent much more time with it."

    "No!" Ragnar scoffed. "What would a chit of girl know about something as delicate as this?" He ignored Hilda's look. "The bastard has gone too far this time." It felt good, having something he could really blame on someone else, again. "It's about time we brought the utlander to justice," he mused.

    Bjarney appeared in the doorway to the study-room. "Arnbjorn told me. We have no Oracle?"

    "For the moment, no," Ragnar said.

    Hilda chipped in, "We've been searching their rooms since last night – it's a tiny memory crystal that's missing, that acts as a guide to the Oracle on how to hook up with the others."

    "We have to find it! How did this happen?" Bjarney was rarely rattled, and didn't intrude into Ragnar's family's concerns, despite their living in each other's pockets in the winter. And he was entitled to question Ragnar – the vandalism affected all of them.

    Ragnar kept his face straight for all that Bjarney's indignation reminded him of a big red rooster. The Gothi felt he was walking an emotional tightrope. Rarely did Skorradalur feel quite this isolated for all that they were two days' ride from the next farmhouse. But while he didn't want to show just how worried he was, nor did Ragnar want to seem so dismissive that the others thought he was underestimating how serious the situation was.

    "It happened because we were stabbed in the back," Ragnar said. He still found himself getting irritated with Bjarney. It's happening more and more, an inner voice said. His demon comparison the day before wasn't quite right. It was more like he had an inner cauldron of anger that flared up at the slightest obstruction to life's normal flow of life, just as a geysir erupts when its internal pressure can't vent smoothly.

    While they'd been talking, Orn had arrived and Arnbjorn returned. Orn said, "Those vandals must be punished – this is endangering people's lives."

    "Maybe," Ragnar said. While it suited his purposes that the neighbours were indignant at the culprits, he needed to control their anger.

    "No maybe." Orn was as angry in his own restrained way as Ragnar had ever seen him. Orn was slow to anger, but unlike Ragnar he didn't explode, but stayed angry.

    "How many labourers can you spare?" Ragnar said.

    "None," Bjarney said, folding his arms. "What do you have in mind?"

    "We know who did it, and which way, roughly, they've gone," Ragnar said. "I suggest we leave a labourer each. They stay here with the women and Yngi and hunt the missing crystal. If either of you has any short-term needs while we're away, your wives can talk to Hilda. They'll work something out, they're sensible folk. But apart from the three labourers and Yngi, we men form a posse and bring them to justice."

    Ragnar took a key and unlocked the glass-fronted armoury case and took from it a long-barrelled rifle. "We don't use this very often," he said softly. "Bullets are too scarce, and the climate will kill this eventually, but this shows how seriously I take endangering our families' lives."

    "Swords are good enough for self-defence, or whatever else we need," Thorbjorg said.

    "What if they can't find the crystal?" Arnbjorn said.

    "We load the ballista with a message capsule, and send it to the Norns," Ragnar said.

    He saw the others' bodies straighten, and knew that he had them. "In fact," he said, "we send a capsule anyway. Let's make sure that Skorradalur is isolated for as little time as possible."