Winter Song (24 page)

    Bera laughed and peered at something small scuttling across the ground, then relaxed. "It's not dangerous."

    "But was it edible?" Karl said. "We don't want you wasting away."

    "I'll need something bigger than that," Bera replied. She smiled. "Not dangerous and not edible; therefore not interesting – to me."

    "Hmm," Karl said. "That sounded like a hint to stop asking so many questions."

    A thin cry split the still air, almost too high to be heard, and so quiet that had they still been talking they would've missed it.

    "Snawk." Bera shaded her eyes as she peered toward where the cry had come from. "We'll be OK. We're too big for a snawk."

    The snawk stooped to the ground in a white blur, moments later rising with something struggling in its claws.

    "That could've been our dinner," Karl said.

    "The snawk? Or what it caught?"

    "Either."

    "You wouldn't get much meat on a snawk," Bera said. "And whatever it caught wouldn't be edible, though you can eat anything, it seems."

    "Not anything," Karl said with a laugh. "A diet of rock-eater would probably kill me in the end. But the nanophytes will slow the effects for a long time."

    They rode on.

    Bera cleared her throat. "About earlier…"

    "Forget it," Karl said. "It's done."

    "No. I just wanted to say… if I could tell you about it, I would. But I can't talk to anyone, without losing control. Not even to you. If I could tell anyone, it would be you. 'Cause I think you're wonderful, Mister Spaceman." She laughed nervously. "There, said it."

    Karl didn't answer for a while, but finally said, "Thank you."

    They rode on, seeing the snawk again and again.

    When they were almost through the foothills they saw a fluttering of wings ahead.

    Karl straightened in his saddle and glanced at Bera, but she seemed lost in thought. He decided against asking her about the bird.

    They rounded a bend in the path. The snawk sat on the rock. With it was a short, stocky man-shaped being, covered with drab grey fur. The snawk leapt from its rocky perch and flew away.

    The man-shape yowled and shrieked.

    "Troll!" Bera said, and swore. She kicked her heels into Grainur's flanks and the little grey horse responded.

    The troll jumped from the rock and hobbled into their path, but it was moving slowly and they easily rode around it. Something flew past them. Bera said, "Bloody thing's throwing stones at us! I should shoot it, but it'd be wasting a bullet."

    From a wide ravine ahead came another series of yowls.

    "More trolls?" Karl said.

    "Sounds like the rest of its pack," Bera said. "Unless it's a loner, and the pack's presence is coincidence. Considering we share a world, we don't know much about them."

    Karl thought of all the times that human societies had fought over resources, particularly when new arrivals came up against weaker resident societies, and was unsurprised. If historical parallels ran true, the settlers would only be interested in eradicating the trolls, rather than learning about them.

    "What do we do?" he said, as they neared the entrance to the ravine. Finding an alternative route meant retracing their steps for kilometres – the path had gradually funnelled, offering fewer and fewer exits.

    "This." Bera ducked down into Grainur's mane and urged her into a gallop. Karl followed her lead.

    In the ravine a half-dozen of the hairy humanoids milled and shrieked. Bera and Karl burst through at such speed that they were gone before the trolls could react.

    Once through, Bera allowed Grainur to slow, and stood up straight in the saddle. Karl slowed until he was beside her, watching the steam rising from Grainur's flanks.

    Bera beamed. "That won't do our poor horses much good."

    "No."

Her grin grew wider. "But I enjoyed it!"

    After a couple of minutes of trotting, Karl said, "That's the first time I've seen a troll."

    "It won't be the last," Bera said. "We've driven them off our lands, though sometimes a lone troll gets old or sick and will take to raiding the farms. As long as they stick to rock-eaters, we tolerate them. But if they start killing sheep or people, we don't stand for that."

    "That one on the rock…"

    "What about it?"

    "It was feeding a snawk. On blood from his toe. In exactly the same way as Yngi fed his snawk."

    "We probably copied it from them," Bera said dismissively.

    "Have you ever seen a wild snawk eat?" Karl said.

    "I'm sure someone has," Bera said.

    "I'm willing to bet that people have seen snawks catching prey, but not eating. Why else would a wild snawk feed on troll blood?"

    The land grew drier and harsher as the afternoon wore on; only gradually, but each time they crested a rise in the undulating landscape, the view ahead seemed to include fractionally less scrub than before. And the wind picked up, spinning the bare grey earth into dust-devils. Bera fashioned impromptu hats out of furs, and passed one to Karl; "thirty per cent of your body heat is lost through your head. I should have thought of this before."

    Karl perched it on his head, feeling like a fool.

    After a while Karl said, "It's a tough life."

    "It can be," Bera said, "though it can be pleasant, especially in summer."

    "Still, to have survived two centuries of equipment wearing out, forced to endlessly recycle in what amounts to a closed system…"

    Bera said, "That's why we hoped you were part of a bigger group. And I think that that was what Ragnar feared: because if such a group did arrive, who would he be to the strangers? Just another local chieftain."

    "Why did your people settle here in the first place?"

    
A radical Icelandic Recidivist Sect was funded by Terraform
ing Council Grants – it was one of the tactics of escalation that
eventually fuelled the Long Night.
Loki's interruption distracted Karl, who had momentarily forgotten the other's shadowy presence and that the download would have been listening in. Loki's here all the time – of course it'll be aware of what was going on.

    Bera was saying, "On the Oracle, that about twenty thousand of them settled here. One man, Asgeir Sigurdsson, led the original group. Enough people felt the same – out of place everywhere else, that our language was being eroded, our customs forgotten, our people's ethnicity diluted – that they were willing to join him."

    Karl was surprised at the passion in her voice. "You wouldn't want to leave Isheimur, then?"

    Bera reared back as if he'd waved something under her nose, and pulled a face. "Let's find your lost ship first and get a message off to your people."

    "What do you want to do, though, if our signal gets us rescued?"

    Bera didn't answer immediately. "I thought that… if off-worlders do arrive, that I might be like a link between our people and those off-worlders. But let's take one day at a time. At the moment such thoughts feel as foolish as wishing for wings."

    "Don't you ever wish for wings?"

    Bera stared at him, and slowly grinned. "Do you read minds?"

    "No." Karl laughed. "If you mention it, then it's a fair bet that it's something important to you."

    Bera nodded. "Every summer they have hang-gliding championships at the Summer Fair. Women aren't actually forbidden to enter…"

    "But they're not encouraged either."

    "Too much of a risk," Bera said. "Mustn't lose one of our precious baby-making machines and threaten the colony's future." Her voice cracked a little at the end.

    "Do you still miss him?" Karl asked, as gently as possible.

    Her face twisted. "Baby Palli? Every single day. I didn't want him when it happened, but when I had him…" She wiped her face then started. "Oh, Freya! You're trying to get home for your own child's birth, and here I am bleating on. Do you miss her?"

    "Every single day," Karl said and wanted to reach out and hug her, but held back. She might misunderstand.

Toward the twin sunset the wind dropped. They rode on at a steady canter until the shadows were so deep that the horses stumbled. It was colder than on previous nights. Whether they had climbed higher, were further south or it was just a cold night, Karl wasn't sure, but even he felt it tonight.

    Bera sighed. "We'll rest up for the night here."

    When she dismounted, Karl realised how much the day had taken out of her. "We need a fire," he said.

    "We can't spare any more flares," Bera said, voice dull with exhaustion. When she fed the horses Karl saw that she was shaking with cold, and her teeth chattered.

    "It's been a good day," Karl said.

    "Has it?" She stared at him, clearly bemused by the sudden change of subject.

    "Almost a whole day of sunshine," Karl said, "better for me than a hundredweight of mutton." He had no idea what a hundredweight was, but it sounded good, and Bera seemed to understand. "While we've been riding, Loki and I have been working on something. It'll seem like a magic trick." He looked around. "Not much vegetation or combustible stuff here. Still, we'll get what we can."

    Bera busied herself laying out the blankets. "We might as well huddle up," she said. "But no funny stuff – you tell that Loki."

    "He's got the message," Karl said, dropping his trousers and squatting over the fire.

    "What are you – oh! Couldn't you crap somewhere else?"

    "No," Karl said. "Then I'd have to carry it over, and I don't want to dirty my hands."

    "So you shit on the fire instead? Why?"

    "Primitive peoples often used dung for fuel." Karl pulled up his trousers, rubbing at his burning bladder.

    "Yes, but they usually dried it out first, didn't they?" Bera stared horrified at him.

    "You'll happily change a baby's nappy." Karl wandered around the horses, looking for more droppings for fuel. "Yet you baulk at this. Anyway, it is dried. Loki and I managed to reprogram the nanophytes to reabsorb the fluid, and divert it. It burns like buggery, and if I did it too often I'd end up with kidney infections and who knows what else, but this is an emergency." He dropped the few pieces of horse-dung that he'd been able to find on the fire, and urinated on them, the fluid glowing in the dark. "Ohhh," he groaned. "That is such a relief."

    "It's – hot," Bera said. "I can feel it from here." She shrieked, and clapped her hands. "It's burning."

    "Told you," Karl said. "Loki and I had a lot of time to think this one up, and we can't do it too often."

    "But how?"

    "Two problems," Karl said, sitting beside her. "No, three. The sunlight solved one by charging the nanophytes. The second problem was to get them out of me. I needed to cut myself, or find some other way–"

    "Ahhh." Bera grinned in the firelight.

    "Ahhh," Karl echoed. "So, once we reprogrammed some of them to migrate and others to combust on exposure to air, we must solve the third problem. If I'm wounded, they replicate to replace any losses. I'm not wounded, but their numbers have dropped to a critically low level." So I'd better not get hurt in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours, he thought, or I'm in big trouble.

    It was only a stunt really. The fire would soon burn out, and he dared not repeat the trick, but it had lifted her spirits.

    "Can I have a hug?" Karl said. "No tricks – just warmth."

    She draped the blankets around them both, and curled up in his arms.

    "Happy birthday," Karl said.

    Bera stared at him. "It's not my birthday–"

    "Just pretend it is. This is my birthday present to you."

    "And wonderful it is, too, you, you clever, clever man."

    They sat in companionable silence, arms wrapped around one another, Karl trying not to think of the warm, breathing body curled into him. When the fire burned low, Bera ate her nightly portion of meat and fruit.

    Karl said, "I've finally realised what's been bothering me."

    "Oh?" Bera mumbled, half-asleep.

    "If snawks can feed on both farmers' and trolls' blood, then the farmers and trolls must share the same genetic code, despite superficial differences."

"Don't be silly," Bera mumbled.

    "The troll's shrieking," Karl said. "It sounded regular."

    "So does any animal's cry," Bera said.

    "What if it was more structured than it first sounds?" Karl said. "I can see up and down the visible spectrum. What if they can hear and talk up and down the audible ranges?"

    "Don't be silly," Bera said, with a sigh, sounding as if she was reluctantly waking up.

    Loki said,
Don't distress her.

    I've no desire to upset her, Karl sub-vocalised. But we can't let her reluctance to face facts distract us. What information can you find?

    Loki spent what was hours to the construct – but only seconds to Karl – scanning the jumbled mess of memory that Ship had downloaded.

    Then Karl jerked upright, spilling Bera from any last chance of sleep.

    "What?" she grumbled.

    "Loki tells me," Karl said, "that there's a story. A Pantropist ship, lost sometime around the time of the Interregnum. They were due to seed a world in an adjacent star-system."

    "But that's–"

    "Seven or eight hundred years ago," Karl finished for her. "They'd have had gene-splicing and some primitive techniques, but even less than you have. If it's true…"

    Bera wiped at her face, still only half-awake. "What happened to it?"