Winter Song (9 page)

    "Are you really from the stars?" Thorbjorg said. Without waiting for an answer, she continued, "You must have seen so many things, if you are."

    "Where else would I come from?" Karl said, smiling. He didn't want to give too much away – he didn't know what Ragnar had told them, and didn't want to upset his host by straying from the party line. "Call me Karl."

    "You could be an outlaw," Thorbjorg said, widening her eyes. Her grin showed her teeth and a mouthful of lamb-in-green-sauce that made Karl feel queasy.

    "I'd be a pretty useless outlaw, wouldn't I?" He made himself ignore the thought of flesh, and grin back. Don't give offence. "I'm told I was found stark naked in a snowfield."

    "You could be some sort of Holy Fool," Bera nudged him.

    "What's that?"

    "Like a seer. They have knowledge that only the learned share, but are ignorant of everyday matters."

    "Hmm," Karl said. He was bemused at how much he knew about Isheimur, but the planetary mass didn't help him understand the details of the society; any information Ship had downloaded would be two centuries obsolete.

    For the first time he felt like the alien that he was, and missed Karla and Lisane with a stab of loneliness.

    His face must have shown his desolation. Bera said, "Are you tired, Karl?"

    "A little," Karl said.

    "Here's Yngi," Hilda said, and Karl wondered at the malice in her voice, and the unhappy look that flitted across Thorbjorg's face.

    The man who joined them walked with an odd shuffle. Like the others, hair erupted from his head and face, and even covered his forearms and spread down his chest from his throat. But despite being a young adult – Karl estimated he was about twenty – he gazed at Karl with a child's open joy. "Spaceman!"

    Karl couldn't help warming to him, but before he could reply, Ragnar's gruff voice interrupted. "Come sit here, son. Don't pester."

    The newcomer slouched off, still staring over his shoulder at Karl, a huge grin splitting his face.

    "My youngest," Ragnar said. "Yngvar."

    "Hello, Yngvar," Karl called.

Yngvar blushed, and his head bobbed.

    "Yngi was brain-damaged at birth," Bera whispered. Karl watched Ragnar fuss around the young man, whom he clearly doted on. Yngi seemed fascinated by Karl.

    Despair engulfed Karl. His body-clock, which displayed Avalon date and time on the top left of Karl's peripheral vision, showed that he'd been gone too long already. What was supposed to be a two-week voyage had already over-run even before the attack on Ship. Lisane would be close to term now. He wished that he had agreed to be told the baby's gender, but too late now.

    When the meal was over, Bera and the other women cleared the dishes away while Ragnar sat and stared into space, and Yngi was ushered away, still staring at Karl.

    Bera led Karl, half-walking, half-shuffling out into a squall. Karl was soaked to the skin in moments. "We have a motto," Bera said. "If you don't like the weather, just wait five minutes, and it will change. This will pass."

    She was right; by the time they reached the other side of the cobbled square, the twin suns were burning shafts of sunlight through the pink clouds.

    "It never rains for very long," Bera said. "In the open lands the winds are so constant that much of the rain and snow evaporate before it can nourish the ground. No oceans, you see, just lakes like this."

    Karl took a long look at the valley around them.

    Bales of corn stood in clumps in the fields on the far side of the lake. Figures pulled a trailer full of bales down toward them. Bera followed his gaze. "We store them over winter for animal feed." Further along were a few stunted trees lurking on the far side of the lake shore, barely bigger than shrubs. "They yield berries," Bera said. "There are a few farms on the equator that have proper trees, apples and pears and such-like, and a couple even used to have vineyards. But the crops failed, the farmers were driven into paupers' graves."

    "It sounds a harsh world," Karl said. They resumed their stately walk to the barn.

    "It's the only one we have," Bera said.

    "Is it getting colder? You mentioned farms failing…"

    "Some say so," Bera said. "Others that the men were fools to try growing such crops, that they could never have succeeded at growing luxury items. Once they had started, they couldn't just stop. You get just one chance at life. If you're lucky."

    He wanted to ask her whether she'd been lucky, but remembered his decision to keep his distance. "And sheep on the high ground," he said, pointing to where low clouds covered the hills. Then he looked again. "Is that smoke?" He pointed at the smoke.

    "Steam," Bera said. "Isheimur's riddled with volcanoes, hot springs and geysirs. That resemblance to Iceland as it's described in legends is one of the things that attracted the Formers." She added, "There's precious little soil good enough for growing crops, and what there is, is on the south side of the valley, but the grass grows well throughout Skorradalur from spring through the summer – though the winters are too harsh to allow animals to graze outside. Even if they could the snolfurs would rip them apart."

    "Snolfurs?" Karl frowned in puzzlement.

    Bera didn't see, and carried on talking, "Yes. You remember snolfurs. Big." He shook his head, and frowning, she held her free hand a metre off the ground. "Predators. They kill by wounding their victim, which bleeds to death. Snolfurs kill more than they need, but the winter acts as a deep freeze. The carnage if we don't patrol the flocks is awful. That's where most of the men are: out on patrol."

    "I'm surprised you haven't wiped them out."

    "We hunt them, but the meat tastes awful. There's something in it that's toxic to us, though apparently the first generations were able to deal with the poisons. But we've lost that ability." She shrugged. "It's a big world, there are many snolfurs, and lots of places for them to hide."

    Back in the barn, he helped with her task of peeling vegetables, then dozed.

    Later, he awoke to find her standing over him. "Do you feel up to facing them again?"

    "Yes," he said, though he didn't really – he felt drained.

    He pushed himself to his feet, and she helped him back to the farmhouse, which was again filling with family members, including a freckle-faced man with red-gold hair.

    Karl felt Bera tense. "Thorir," she said.

    Thorir turned to face them. "Bera," he said, then looked Karl up and down. "And you are the spaceman."

    Karl struggled not to stare. All the settlers seemed incredibly hairy, especially the males. As well as Ragnar and Yngi, whose faces hid behind unkempt mats of varying thickness, Karl had seen a man almost bald but for a ring of hair semi-circling the back of his head from ear to ear, then running into a facial covering, but for a top lip that Bera had said was shaved. Arnbjorn – Ragnar's son – sported twin strips of hair running from his nose down either side of his mouth to his chin, and twin strips of hair separating shaved cheeks from his ears.

    But Thorir sported the most elaborate arrangement Karl had yet seen: cranial and facial hair alike braided into ten to twenty centimetre-long stiff spikes. From the way that Thorir stroked them, it was obvious that he took great pride in his locks.

    Karl nodded a greeting in return, feeling as if he had wandered into an antique bestiary. Bera led him to the far end of the table, where Ragnar sat, thinking. "Have you a moment to spare, Gothi?" Karl stressed the honorific.

    Ragnar indicated that Karl should sit opposite him. "I was glad to see you at lunch," Ragnar said. "I'm glad that you made the effort tonight, as well. It bodes well for your recovery."

    Karl said, "It was the least I could do, given my graceless reaction to being awoken. I wanted to apologise and thank you again for your hospitality."

    Ragnar said, "That was well said, Karl Allman." Was it his imagination, or did Karl sense faint mockery in Ragnar's tone? "You seem to be mending well."

    "Getting better. I wish it were faster."

    "So do I," Ragnar said. "We have little spare food."

    "I would be on my way as soon as I can, if that would help," Karl said.

    Ragnar's head lifted, as did his eyebrows. "Just like that? No working off your debt?"

    "I meant no offence," Karl said quickly. "If there is work I can do… but you mentioned a drain on your food stocks."

    "I said spare food," Ragnar said. "We can always find food for hands that can work."

    Karl said carefully, "If I can get a message to your capital?"

    "Our what?"

    "Your major centre of population?"

    Ragnar looked bemused. "Why do you want to get to such a place?"

    Oh, Vishnu, Karl thought. Are you really so stupid, or being deliberately obtuse? "To send a signal to my people," he said with exaggerated patience. "I'd like to return home. To my family."

    Ragnar stared at him. "Signal? Are you mad? You think that if we had such technology, we'd live like this?"

    "I – I assumed that this was an isolated outpost."

    "Hah! We don't have capitals. This
is
a population centre."

    Karl swallowed, swayed and slumped back against the wall behind him.

SIX

They ate their meal in near-silence. Karl seemed stunned and Ragnar was in a sour mood, so Bera kept quiet. The others also recognised Ragnar's glower, and murmured among themselves.

    When Ragnar left the table – still without speaking – the others brightened.

    "You should show our guest the sauna, Bera," Thorbjorg said with a sly smile.

    Bera felt her face burn. "You know men and women aren't supposed to sauna together!"

    "I said
show
him." Thorbjorg was all mock-innocence, but didn't fool Bera for a moment. "Not sit with him. Though if he needs his hand holding…" Thorbjorg raised her eyebrows. "He has very big… hands, hasn't he?"

    You're not thinking about his hands, you bitch, Bera thought.

    "Do you want to use the sauna?" Thorir called to Karl from along the table. "A pipe runs down from a hot spring on the hillside to the far end of the house."

    Bera nudged Karl, and he started, but must have been half-listening, for he said, "It'd be nice to get clean. Thanks."

    "I'm going in there," Thorir said. "I'll show you which stones are the very hot ones, and how to scrape the dirt off and still have your skin."

    Bera breathed a sigh of relief when Karl accompanied Thorir to the sauna. Since he'd awoken she felt differently about him, and Thorbjorg's "witticisms" had rattled her. Karl awake was overwhelming. His muscular chest, the unnatural hairlessness of his head and body – maintained by his nanophytes – the feel of him against her as she propped him up, the slightly musky yet sweet sweat he exuded; it terrified her even as she wanted him. There was simply too much of him.

    By the time he returned an hour later, glowing and clean, she'd calmed down. "I'll help you to the barn," she said, "before I use the sauna."

    "You're going to wash?" Thorir said. "Blimey."

    There was no one else around, so Bera balled up her courage. "Piss off," she told Thorir.

That night she slept in the big house for the first time since Karl's arrival, earning a few sly digs from the other women, and (though she'd probably imagined it) a disappointed look from Karl.

    So the next morning it felt as if in some way it were her fault that Loki stared at her from Karl's now slatehard eyes, as if she'd summoned him back with her absence.

    The day crawled past in one long jabber-filled drone, the alien rarely pausing for breath, leaving her to wipe the drool from the side of his mouth. He kept calling her Jocasta; after a while she didn't bother to correct him.

    When she relayed the news, Ragnar snorted. "He's trying to get out of the chores."

    "He won't," Bera said grimly, "He can peel the vegetables."

    She slept in the barn that night, awaking to the dog's frantic barking. Out in the yard, Thorir was standing eyeball-to-eyeball with the gabbling sleepwalker.

    "Go back to bed, boy!" Thorir snarled.

    "Don't hit him!" Bera pulled Loki away from the swinging rifle-butt.

    The next night, after another day of raving, poor motor co-ordination and Loki trying to grope her, she was half-tempted to abandon him for the house and the other's jibes, but she gritted her teeth.

    She awoke late next morning, muzzy-headed.

    Karl was sitting staring at the stars, now rapidly fading under the twin suns' onslaught of light. A solitary tear trickled down his face, and she wrapped her arms around his shoulders, moved by pity.

    He touched her arm, when she jerked away.

    "Sorry," he said, wiping his eye.

    "It's OK." She couldn't tell him what was wrong, even if he'd emerged from his self-absorption. She'd spent too long bottling it up. "Sleep well?" Bera said.

    "Very," Karl said, contradicting the bags under his eyes.

    "Come on or we'll be late. I'll get food. We'll eat as we work."

    As they neared the laundry, Yngi shuffled past, flashing his toothy grin at them.

    Karl said, "Where's Yngi going in such a hurry?"

    "Taking care of the snawk," Bera said, helping him up.

    "The what?"

    But she didn't answer, instead leaving him in the laundry.

    She returned with bread and a boiled egg, some meat and a handful of dried berries. "Against scurvy," she explained as he pulled a face at the berries' sourness. They ate in companionable silence.