Winter Song (12 page)

    Ragnar continued, "He claims it's his territory but we both know that his argument won't hold at the Althing. So he tries guerrilla tactics like letting his flocks wander onto my land. This was the third time; the time before, I found some man Steinar had hired hanging around the boundary. This goon heaped so many insults on me I had little choice but to challenge him to combat then and there." He cleared his throat. "It was obvious from the eager way he drew his sword that the man was a mercenary. I can bloody tell you girl, I wondered what I'd got into then." Ragnar chuckled. "But though he was good, he wasn't that good. To his dying breath, he denied that he was even a sword-for-hire – let alone who had hired him – to me."

    "Why would he do that?" Bera said quietly, still picking through the heather.

    Ragnar said, "I've no idea. He admitted he had kin on Steinar's lands, so perhaps he was protecting them. Perhaps some obscure code of the mercenary that he needed to adhere to." He sighed. "Whatever the reason, it only needs the sight of bloody Steinar to set me off. This time he had a couple of goons with him and I was on my own. He thought that with them there he could mouth off." Ragnar's jaw tightened, then he said, "No one calls me 'troll-shit' and prospers."

    "I can imagine, Gothi," Bera said, her voice dull.

    Ragnar said, "I only walked away with difficulty, especially since it left the little turd with the last word. But I'll bide my time. I'll nail him in the spring." Ragnar smiled.

    "It must have been very provoking for you," Bera said, her voice still flat. She did not raise her eyes to him.

    "It was," Ragnar said. "And then – on the way back – Thorir the Stupid almost let the sheep run over a sheer drop. We stopped them, but it took ages, and a world of effort. By the time we got to Skorradalur I was boiling hotter than a pool of volcanic mud…" He unclasped his hands and straightening, fiddled with a hang-nail. "I know that you think I don't notice things, but I do. When I saw you shrink back from me into Allman's clutches as if I was threatening you, it was too much."

    Bera stopped still; you had the impression that this was an important moment.

    "Not that that excuses it," Ragnar said, picking fiercely at the hang-nail now. "But better I took it out on that yapping little beast of yours, than beating our 'guest' or someone else into senselessness." He sighed. "But I feel bad that the poor little bitch caught the backlash of my temper."

    "My Gothi is too concerned with the feelings of your constituents," Bera said, but now there was a tension in her voice, as if she was only keeping her emotions in check by a huge effort of will. It had taken you a long time to learn to analyse and decode the complexity of these emotions of the humans, but you managed it, and were oddly proud. It also proved strangely addictive, this observing of others.

    Ragnar said, "I wondered if–"

    But you never found out what he wondered, for you must have made a noise, stepped on a twig. Or perhaps she knew that you were there all along, and had decided that she didn't want to hear what Ragnar wondered: whatever the reason, Bera looked up. "Oh," she said. "It must be Loki. Karl wouldn't stand there holding a half-peeled carrot."

    "What in Ragnarok do you want?" Ragnar snarled at you.

    You could visualise what you needed, but forming the words to fit the thoughts was more difficult. Ignoring him, you said to Bera, "Maps?"

    "More nonsense," Ragnar said.

    You formed another word, slowly wrapping your jaw around it: "Need maps."

    "Of course," Bera said, taking your arm. "We'll find you some maps. Later, after you've peeled the vegetables. Come on, lovely, let's finish peeling the vegetables." She turned to Ragnar. "I'll only be a few minutes, Gothi. I'll get him back to work, and then I'll resume my duties. Unless you prefer to have him milling around wasting time?"

    "No," Ragnar said, his voice normal now, the yearning tone gone. "Take him back to work. I've things I need to get on with, anyway."

    She led you down the hill, back to your tasks. You caught a fragment of memory from the Other: this is all there is; peeling vegetables and sleeping on straw for the rest of your life. The despair in the thought was enough to stain the day dark despite its sunshine.

    "You must try to keep to your chores, Loki," Bera said. Her identifying you from the Other gave you pleasure, though you did not know whether it was good or bad.

    You exist. She recognised you, whatever she thought of you.

    "Need maps," You said. "Need maps. To. Find beacon."

    She stopped, still holding your elbow, and stared at you. "A beacon?"

    "Need maps. To find beacon."

    "Tonight," Bera said. "I have maps in my room, printed on pieces of scrap. I like to see how the world looks – it may be the only way that I will ever see it. When we finish our work, I'll sneak them out."

    "Tonight?"

    "Yes, tonight, Loki. Now, back to work." * * *

    Sometime – perhaps while you peeled vegetables – the Other returned. The next you knew, the setting suns and mellower light indicated that it was evening. Perhaps some weakening of his resistance, or some other trigger than the smoke that reminded the Other of Ship's death had allowed you back, with your hellish chorus of voices.

    
"For two centuries, after Gagarin, Armstrong and Heng led
humanity out of their stellar cradle, space flight was only pos
sible at sub-light velocities."

    Bera stood with ragged scraps in her hand. One of them you recognised as a map of Isheimur. You snatched it from her hand, tearing it, inwardly screaming at the voices to be silent. Mercifully, it seemed to work.

    "Beacon," you said, scanning the map for something familiar. You pointed to a patch of light blue on the equator. Ship had noted a lake shaped like that. "Where. This?"

    "Surtuvatn," Bera said. "Where my parents lived. Is there where your beacon is?"

    You ignored her, scanning the map: another body of water to the south-east. For all its periodic drizzle and scatterings of showers, the precipitation is never quite enough; this is almost a desert world, its few seas no bigger than lakes.

    "Loki?" Bera said.

    You looked up, realising that she wanted your attention. You'd learned what one of the voices calls socialisation, and were obscurely proud of this, although you knew that you were a mere apprentice compared even to small children. "Yes?" You said.

"You
are
Loki, then?" Bera said.

    This was a question, the socialisation parameters indicated. Questions need answers. "Yes. I am Loki, Jocasta – Bera." She smiled at your correction, and you knew that you pleased her, which made you tingle. Perhaps she no more knows of her Jocasta side, the mothering side, than the Other knows of us.

    "I never know which one of you I'm dealing with. Just a minute ago you were Karl."

    This was not a question, so you did not need to answer. Nonetheless, there were concepts that you would have explained, that you both wanted to get home, albeit for different reasons, but the thoughts were too big to fit into the small words that are the only way of communicating between these people. Instead: "Need pictures," you said, pointing to the lakes on the maps. "Pictures of mountains. Lakes. Deserts." The view from space is not one of maps.

    "Here," Bera said, offering you a set of similarly ragged photos from the bottom of the little bundle of maps she carried. "Printed from satellite views, taken before the Formers left. Most are meteorological or topographical images, rather than pictures." She sighed. "They took the satellites they could use elsewhere with them, and crashed the rest down into Nornadalur to feed the Norns; all the pictures we have pre-date the Leaving, and what there are – and there aren't many – probably aren't very accurate now."

    "Nothing new?" You said.

    Bera shook her head. "If we had, you wouldn't be able to get near them anyway. We have to make do with ground-based beacons scattered across the planet's surface to monitor the weather, and Ragnar and the other Gothis already spend their time poring over the output from them to try to predict the weather. Freya knows, if they had access to satellites, you'd never see a photograph. They'd hoard them all."

You studied them, looking for an answer.

    You'd started to get an idea of time how much time had passed while the Other had taken over. At first there were simply blank patches, but now a few precious images had started to soak through the barriers between the different parts of the brain where your memories and his were scattered. Your consciousness was squeezed into odd little corners of the brain everywhere and they needed to connect, so such seepage should have been no surprise.

    It was the next day.

    You walked a hillside with two other men. In the distant south-east the horizon flickered. One of them flinched.

    "Storm season's starting," one of the other men said. Big, with dark hair and patches of bare skin between strips of facial hair: Arnbjorn Ragnarsson, a memory told you. Literally, Ragnar's son.

    "Storm season?" You said. You'd identified that this is an optimal process for downloading information from brain to brain, via their mouth to your ear. Repeat what they say, and they would elucidate, usually.

    "Aye, Loki," Arnbjorn said. "Storm season."

    He did not elaborate, so perhaps you must provide a further stimulus, you decided. "There is… a storm season? Explain, please."
Please
is like a command prompt, you'd learned.

    Arnbjorn shrugged. "The things you don't seem to know, utlander." They often call your frame "Utlander".
Foreigner, stranger, alien,
the lexicon supplied as meaning. Arnbjorn said, "No one's quite sure why Isheimur grows so racked by electrical storms during the weeks around the equinox – some say it's the seasonal drop in temperatures, some that Gamasol and Deltasol's radiation causes ionisation, others that it's simply a freak of timing – whatever the reason, storms will soon sweep through the area."

    The other man, a Thrall –
indentured farm-labourer,
your lexicon explained – laughed. "Let's hope that we get home first, or that it heads elsewhere." His cranial hair was long and tied back, his beard bushy like Ragnar's.

    A series of cries rended the air. "Trolls!" the Thrall said.

    Arnbjorn broke into a run. "We need to make sure that they don't panic the sheep and drive them over a cliff!"

    "What are trolls?" you asked.

    "A pain in the bloody arse!" The Thrall was already starting to pant. "Hairy critters that attack farmsteads and drive rock-eater flocks across our lands!"

    Your long, ranging lope had brought you level with them, although their swords weighed them down and you only had the wooden stick that Bera (or Jocasta?) gave you to slow your pace. You could have passed them easily, but they knew where they were going; you didn't. "This is problem? Rock-eaters?" Rock-eaters were not something that your memories contained. An anomaly, you thought. To your logical mind, an anomaly was the equivalent of ancient pornography – illicit, guilt-inducing, yet thrilling in a way that was inexplicable to someone who didn't share such feelings.

    "Rock-eaters aren't a problem in themselves." Arnbjorn's breathing had grown increasingly ragged. "Though a million little hooves at a time can wreck the crops. Vast flocks of 'em migrating, bringing snolfurs and trolls in their wake. They're a bloody problem! Now shut the fuck up!"

    You shut up. Breaching the ridge, you saw a wave of white that filled the next valley and beyond.

    "It looks," the Thrall said, gasping, hands on knees, "a… small… one… only… a… few… tens of… thousands."

    "Aye," Arnbjorn said, gasping too.

    You were barely breathing heavily.

    You heard a screaming whistle that seemed to come from all sides, but must have been the sound echoing off the hills. Arnbjorn touched your arm. "Stand still," he said. You did as they did.

    Something flashed into the middle of the sea of white, and one of the stocky rock-eaters erupted in a gout of flesh.

    Arnbjorn's laugh was a maniacal cackle.

    The Thrall said, "What?" When Arnbjorn didn't answer, but kept laughing, the Thrall said, growing progressively more annoyed, "What is it?"

    Arnbjorn's laughter slowly wound down, and he wiped his eye. "This is amongst the land that Steinar's claiming – the valley runs down to the meadows over there." He pointed. "I bet he's included them on the details he's provided to the Norns. So when he asked for something really essential, they've fired it in a sub-orbital trajectory with their ballista – and it's over-shot. The Norns will reckon that it's within acceptable parameters, but the truth is that it's just eviscerated that Rock-eater, and ended up on our territory. Let's go take a look, see whether there's anything left of that package they've lobbed over."

    "So that exploding rock-eater – that was a missile?" the Thrall said as your group set off toward the vast flock.

    "It was an aid package," Arnbjorn said, laughing again.

    "You're kidding me," the Thrall said.

    "Nope." Arnbjorn continued, "That's why we have to file our land dimensions; the Norns can aim their packages away from the houses, but near enough that any bouncing projectile still ends up on the land of the petitioner." He said to you, "Exploding wildlife isn't normally one of the hazards of life on Isheimur, but sometimes we're warned to stay indoors when a package is due. This is why." He indicated the splattered rock-eater.