Bjarni made a gesture of acknowledgment with one spade-shaped, red-furred hand.
“Norrheim is cold and poor compared to your land here; but on my journey with Artos Mikesson I saw much land that wasn’t. Rich land around the inland seas; what they called Quebec and Ontario in the old world, and the south shore is good too. Rich land thinly peopled, and the dwellers ignorant savages who lost all arts in the Change, who live on rabbits and freeze in the winters. Fine farmland, timber, plenty of ruins for salvage and the lakes for fishing and trade.”
“The savages are Eaters,” Eric said, and Signe made a slight moue of disgust.
“Not all of them; some are just poor and backward, like the South Side Freedom Fighters that Artos befriended, Jake Jakesson and the others, who’ve settled in the Mackenzie lands now. And my own folk grow in numbers. We live wide-scattered, but that’s from choice and because good plowland is scattered too, and our farms raise many strong sons and daughters along with the barley and rye. It’s in my mind that Norrheim could take much of that land around the Great Lakes. Settle some of our people there, and by their might and their craft bring the dwellers…or their children…back to the life of real men, with fields and farms and homes. They’re of blood kindred to our own. And we could bring them seemly ways and knowledge of the true Gods, not just the edge of an ax. And I could make those I favored lords and chiefs there, who have no such prospects here, with broad lands and followers. In time…in time, a realm as great as Montival, or nearly. For my descendants, if I lay the foundations.”
“You’re not afraid to dream grandly,” Signe said, giving him a long look.
Eric laughed. “You and I might disagree on the true Gods,” he said, touching the cross around his neck. “But otherwise, yes, I see what you mean. There might be some here who would find your offer attractive; some Bearkillers, though I warn you any willing to take such a leap would likely have big eyes and be troublesome. Broken men elsewhere who’ve lost everything in the war and need a fresh start anyway. You wouldn’t have the time or knowledge to find them, or not many of them and not the right ones, but…”
“But we Bearkillers would, since we have the contacts,” Signe said thoughtfully. “And I wouldn’t mind seeing those true to the Aesir spread their rule, if it didn’t cost my own folk much and we had recompense from that treasure you mention. We’ve won much glory in this war, and we’ll get much more, but not much plunder. More, we-the Outfit, not the High Kingdom-don’t stand to acquire more land, either.”
“All we’re likely to get in Corwin is hard knocks and some scrawny cattle,” Eric said as he stretched his thick-muscled arms. “It needs doing but that’s all you can say.”
Signe nodded. “Revenge is good, but you can’t eat it or make shoes for your children out of it. Yes, Bjarni King, we should talk further about this. There will be time, over the year to come.”
Eric abandoned his restraint and drained his horn, then turned it over to show that there was nothing left inside.
“It’s wonderful how victory opens possibilities,” he said. “It enlarges men’s minds, like good wine. And sometimes makes them drunk, too.”
“The end of one saga is the beginning of the next.” Bjarni nodded. “And the hanger-on of one can be the hero of another.”
“And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a wife waiting,” the big man said.
“So do I,” Bjarni mused when he’d left. “But unfortunately, she’s a continent away. She has our children and our household to occupy her, too; only memories and hopes for me.”
“Your wife will have you back, and you’ll dwell with her all your days,” Signe said thoughtfully, and raised her horn. “I toast her luck.”
Then she raised it again to the vacant chair at the center of the high table, with the Bear Helm laid on it and a great sword across the rests.
“I’m a lonely widow, and my man is dead these fifteen years. There will be no homecoming for me, not in this life.”
Bjarni toasted it as well. “But life goes on, and we make the best of it.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
DUN FAIRFAX
DÙTHCHAS OF THE CLAN MACKENZIE
(FORMERLY THE EAST-CENTRAL WILLAMETTE VALLEY, OREGON)
HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL
(FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)
DECEMBER 18TH, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD
“Well, ’ave it out heare, then, son,” Sam Aylward said, in his slow drawl. “Bit on the cold soid tu go fur a walk.”
It was cozy enough in the workroom, by the standards of Edain’s generation; the little airtight stove made it so, and the inner walls of thick boards and battens that had been added in the years after the Change. He wore only his kilt and a light green-dyed linen shirt with wide sleeves, fastened at the neck and wrists with drawstrings. His father had on a wool shirt and a baggy knit sweater in its natural off-white as well, and his sock-hose and brogans.
“Don’t rightly know what I want to say, you might say,” his son said.
Edain sat on a stool and braced one foot against the wall. The space had been what the old world called a two-car garage attached to the farmhouse that had formed the original core of Dun Fairfax. That meant it was large enough to hold his mother’s big loom and his father’s woodworking bench and tools. The windows at the south end overlooking the herb garden had been added later, to give her more light for the delicate task, and the original sliding doors at the front had been replaced by a more conventional arrangement. The big chamber had a clean smell of glue and shavings and varnish and linseed oil, as well as the skeins of wool and linen yarn that shared the rafters above with billets of yew and cedarwood, plus hunks of rock-hard root-wood from curly maple or black walnut.
“’appen you ’aven’t settled since you came home from the fight,” Sam said. “The war isn’t over yet either, of course.”
His voice didn’t have the usual Mackenzie burble and lilt; he’d been past forty at the Change and had never lost the deep slow burr he’d grown up with in rural Hampshire.
“All well with you and Asgerd?” he continued.
Garbh heaved her massive grey form up from beside Edain and padded over to his father’s side, politely nosing at one of his hands and thumping her tail. The two younger hounds stayed by Edain’s feet, great shaggy barrel-shaped heads questing after burrs and tangles in their fur. They were a mongrel breed but mainly mastiff and Great Dane with a tinge of wolf, a new strain coming together since the Change. One that Mackenzies took on the hunt for dangerous game-bear, say, or tiger-and sometimes to war as scouts and guards.
“Never a problem, save that we’ve less privacy than is convenient,” Edain said with a quick grin. “Less here than in the field with the host, to tell the absolute and unpleasant truth.”
The old man grinned himself, his teeth still strong but slightly yellowed.
“And it’s not the season for hay-lofts and swimming in ponds and ducking into the woods,” he said. “You and she being wed only a year, Oi call that an ’ardship.”
“Well, I’m just back for the Yule feast,” Edain said awkwardly; he’d never been a fluent man. “Fair crowded it is!”
“Yus, we’ve still the folk from the Bend country,” Sam said; every Mackenzie Dun and most households within each had taken in some of the refugees. “Champing to get their own back, they are. And a lot of their so’jers ’ave come to see the families settled here, what with things slowing down fur now.”
“I don’t blame them! And they fought well at the Horse Heaven Hills. Fine riders and good shots in their way with those short bows from horseback.”