“How beautiful, that garment,” Edh murmured. “I think Niaerdh wears the like when she visits the other gods.”
“Maybe ere sundown it will be yours.”
“Oh, I dare not ask.”
“Ho, there!” bawled a man in the boat. He was the biggest, fair-haired, doubtless a German-born interpreter. The rest were a mixed lot, some also light of hue, some darker than Heidhin. But of course the Romans had many different folk to draw on. All wore knee-length tunics over bare legs. Edh flushed and kept her gaze from the ship, where most went naked.
“Be not afraid,” the German called. “We’d fain deal with you.”
Heidhin reddened too. “An Alvaring knows no fear,” he shouted. As his voice cracked he grew redder yet.
The Romans rowed in. The two ashore waited, blood loud in their heads. The boat grounded. A man jumped forth and made fast. The one with the cloak led them up the strand. He smiled and smiled.
Heidhin clasped hard his spear. “Edh,” he said, “I like not the look of them. I think we’d be wisest if we kept out of reach—”
He was too late. The leader yelled an order. His followers dashed forward. Before Heidhin could raise his weapon, new hands grabbed it. A man stepped behind him and caught his arms in a wrestler’s lock. He struggled, screeching. A short stick, to which he had paid no heed—the gang was unarmed save for knives—struck his nape. That was a skillful blow, to stun without real harm. He sagged, and they bound him.
Edh had whirled to run. A sailor caught her hair. Two more closed in. They flung her down on the grass. She screamed and kicked. Another pair grabbed her ankles. The leader knelt between her spraddled legs. He grinned. Spit ran from a corner of his mouth. He hiked up her skirt.
“You trolls, you dog turds, I’ll kill you,” Heidhin raged weakly, out of the pain that stabbed through his skull. “I swear by every god of war, no peace shall your breed ever have with me. Your Romaburh shall burn—” Nobody listened. Where Edh lay pinned, the thing went on and on.
14
Tracing Vagnio’s voyage back to his departure from Öland was easy. With skill and persistence, it was possible to find that a boy and a girl had walked to his home from a village about twenty miles south. But what happened earlier? Some cautious inquiries on the ground were in order. First, though, Everard and Floris planned an aerial survey over the previous several months. The more clues they collected in advance, the better. Vagnio would not necessarily hear of an event such as a murder; perhaps the family could hush it up. Or he and his men might keep silent about it before a stranger. Or Everard might simply get no chance to ask before circumstances forced him from the camp on the beach.
Leaving behind their van and horses, the agents flitted off together on separate hoppers. Their search pattern was a set of leaps from point to point of a precalculated space-time grid. If they spied anything unusual, they would take as close a look through as long a duration as needful. The procedure wasn’t guaranteed to pay off, but it was better than nothing and they didn’t have infinite lifespan to spend here.
A mile above the village, they flashed from midsummer balefires to a couple of weeks later and hung in an enormous blue. Wind whittered thin and cold. The view wheeled over a sunlit Baltic Sea, Sweden’s hills and forests to the west, Öland a straitness mottled with heather, grass, woods, rock, sand—names no dweller would speak for unchronicled centuries to come.
Everard swept his scanner around. Abruptly he stiffened. “Yonder!” he exclaimed into the transmitter at his neck. “About seven o’clock—see?”
Floris whistled. “Yes. A Roman ship, is it not, anchored offshore?” Thoughtfully: “Gallo-Roman, most likely, out of some such port as Bordeaux or Boulogne, rather than the Mediterranean. They never had a regular trade directly with Scandinavia, you know, but records mention a few official visits, and occasional entrepreneurs sail to Denmark and beyond, bypassing the long chain of middlemen. Amber, especially.”
“This might be significant for us. Let’s check.” Everard increased magnification.
Floris had already done it. She screamed.
“Oh, my God,” Everard choked.
Floris swooped downward. Cloven air boomed behind her.
“Stop, you fool!” Everard yelled. “Come back!”
Floris ignored him, her popping ears, everything but that which was ahead of her dive. Still her shriek trailed after. So might a plunging hawk scream, or a wrathful Valkyrie. Everard struck fist on control console, cursed, and grimly, all but helplessly, trailed at a slower pace. He halted a few hundred feet aloft, keeping the sun at his back.
The men, clustered to watch the show or wait their turns, heard. They looked up and saw the death-horse bound for them. They wailed and scrambled in every direction. The one on the girl pulled from her, got to his knees, yanked out his knife. Maybe he meant to kill her, maybe it was only defensive reflex. No matter. A sapphire-blue energy bolt smote him through the mouth. He crumpled at her feet. From a hole in the back of his skull curled the smoke off his brain.
Floris whipped her cycle about. A man’s height above ground, she fired at the next nearest. Gut-shot, he yammered and threshed on the grass, to Everard like an overturned beetle. Floris chased a third and dropped him cleanly. She ceased then, motionless in the saddle for a minute. Sweat mingled with tears on her face, as cold as her hands.
Breath shuddered into her. She holstered her pistol and leaf-gentle descended by Edh.
Done is done, tolled through Everard. Swiftly he considered his options. In blind panic, surviving sailors spurted along the shore or toward the woods. Two had kept some wits, had waded out and were swimming for the ship, where horror boiled. The Patrolman bit his lip till blood ran. “Okay,” he said aloud, tonelessly. With jumps around space and precise aim, he killed each of those who had landed. Finally he put the wounded man out of his misery. I don’t suppose Janne left him on purpose. She just forgot. Everard rode back to a fifty-foot altitude and poised. By scanner and amplifier he observed what went on below him.
Edh sat up. Her stare was blank, but she plucked at her skirt and got it down over the red-streaked thighs. Hog-tied, Heidhin writhed toward her. “Edh, Edh,” he groaned. He stopped when the timecycle settled between. “Oh, goddess, avenger—”
Floris dismounted and knelt beside Edh. She laid her arms about the girl. “It is over, dear,” she sobbed. “It will be well with you. Nothing like this, ever again. You are free now.”
“Niaerdh,” she heard. “All-Mother, you came.”
“No use denying your divinity,” Everard snarled in Floris’s receiver. “Get the hell out before you make matters worse.”
“No,” the woman answered. “You don’t understand. I have to give her what little comfort I am able.”
Everard sat mute. The crewmen in the channel heaved frantic on halyard and anchor rode. “Loose me,” Heidhin pleaded. “Let me to her.”
“Maybe I do understand,” Everard said. “Be as quick as possible, can you?”
The daze was lifting from Edh, but unearthliness brimmed the hazel eyes. “What do you want of me, Niaerdh?” she whispered. “I am yours. As I always was?”
“Slay the Romans, all the Romans!” Heidhin bawled. “I’ll pay you for it with my life if you will.”
Poor muchacho, Everard thought, your life is already ours to take, anytime we might choose. But I could hardly expect you to act sensible right off the bat, could I?
Or ever, by my lights. You are not a scientifically educated post-Christian Western European. To you, the gods are real and your highest duty is avenging a wrong.