The door opened. A tall man stood outlined black between the posts, a spear of his own at the ready. Several more gathered at his back. “Who comes?” he called distrustfully.
“Two of us,” Tauno answered from the dark. “Fear not if we look eerie. Our will toward you is good.”
A gasp arose as he and Eyjan stepped into the fireglow. oaths, maybe a hurried prayer. The tall man crossed himself. “In Jesu name, say what you are,” he demanded, shaken but undaunted.—
“We are not mortals,” Eyjan told him. The admission always scared less when it came from her sweetly curved lips. “Yet we can speak the name of Jesu Kristi as well as you, and mean no harm. We may even help, in return for an easy favor we hope you can grant us.”
The man drew a loud breath, sank his weapon, and trod for- ward. He was as gaunt as his dogs, and had never been stout; but: his hands were large and strong. His face was thin too, in cheeks, straight nose, tightly held mouth, plowshare chin, faded blue eyes, framed by gray hair and cropped gray beard. Beneath a long, plain woolen coat with hood thrown back could be seen stockings and sealskin shoon; nothing smelled well. A sword, which he must have belted on when he heard the noise, hung at his waist. To judge from the shape, it had been forged for a viking. Were they truly that backward here, or could they afford nothing new?
“Will you give us your names too, and name your tribe?” he ordered more than asked. Defiantly: “I am Haakon Arnorsson, and this is my steading Ulfsgaard.”
“We knew that,” Eyjan said, “since we inquired who the chief man is in these parts.” In about the same words as she had used to his daughter, she told of the quest up to yesterday-save for merely relating that Liri had become barren, not that the cause of the flight there from was an exorcism. Meanwhile the men of the household got courage to shuffle nigh, and the women and children to jam the doorway. Most were younger than Haakon, and stunted by a lifetime of ill feeding; some hobbled on bowed legs or in unmistakable pain from rheumatism and deformed bones. The night made them shiver in their patched garments. A stench welled from the house which the eye-smarting smoke could not altogether blanket, sourness of bathless bodies that must live packed in a narrow space.
“Can you tell us anything?” Eyjan finished. “ ‘Ye will pay. . . not gold off these rings of ours, unless you wish it, but more fish and sea-game than I think you’d catch for yourselves.”
Haakon brooded. The wind moaned, the folk whispered and made signs in the air, not all of the Cross. At last he flung his head on high and snapped: “Where did you learn of me? From the Skraelings, no?”
“The what?”
“The Skraelings. Our ugly, stumpy heathen, who’ve been drifting into Greenland from the west these past hundred years.” A snarclass="underline" “Drifting in together with frosty summers, smitten fields, God’s curse on us-that I think their own warlocks brought down!”
Tauno braced muscles and mind. “Aye,” he answered. “We met a party of them, and your daughter Bengta, Haakon. Will you trade your knowledge for news of how she is?”
An outcry lifted. Haakon showed teeth in his beard and sucked air in between them. Then he stamped spearbutt on earth and roared, “Enough! Be still, you whelps!” When he had his silence, he said quietly, “Come within and we’ll talk.” Eyjan plucked Tauno’s elbow. “Should we?” she questioned in the mer-language. “Outdoors, we can escape from an onset. Between walls, they can trap us.”
“A needful risk,” her brother decided. To Haakon: “Do you bid us be your guests? Will you hold us peace-holy while we are beneath your roof?” Haakon traced the Cross. “By God and St. Olaf I swear that, if you plight your own harmlessness.”
“On our honor, we do,” they said, the nearest thing to an oath that Faerie folk knew. They had found that Christians took it as mockery if soulless beings like them called on the sacred.
Haakon led them over his threshold. Eyjan well-nigh gagged at the full stink, and Tauno wrinkled his nose. The Inuit were not dainty, but the ripeness in their quarters betokened health and abundance. Here—
A miserly peat fife, in a pit on the clay floor, gave the sole light until Haakon commanded that a few soapstone lamps be filled with blubber and kindled. Thereafter his poverty became clear. The house had but a single room. People had been readying for sleep; straw pallets were spread on the platform benches which lined the walls, in a shut-bed that must ,be the master’s, and on the ground for the lowly. The entire number was about thirty. So must they lie among each other’s snores, after listening to whatever hasty lovemaking any couple had strength for. An end of the chamber held a rude kitchen. Smoked meat and stockfish hung from the rafters, flatbread on poles in between, and were gruesomely little when the wind was blowing winter in.
And yet their forebears had not been badly off. There was a high seat for lord and lady, richly carved though the paint was gone, that had doubtless come from Norway. Above it gleamed a crucifix of gilt bronze. Well-wrought cedar chests stood about. However rotted and smoke-stained, tapestries had once been beautiful. Weapons and tools racked between them remained good to see. It was all more than these few dwellers could use. Tauno whispered to Eyjan, “I reckon the family and retainers used to live in a better house, a real hall, but moved out when it got too hard to keep warm for a handful, and built this hovel.”
She nodded. “Aye. They’d not have used the lamps tonight, had we not come. I think they keep the fat against a famine they await.” She shivered. “Hu, a lightless Greenland winter! Drowned Averorn was more blithe.”
Haakon took the high seat and, with manners elsewhere long out of date, beckoned his visitors to sit on the bench opposite. He ordered beer brought. It was weak and sour, but came in silver goblets. He explained he was a widower. (From her behavior toward him, they guessed the child was his which bulged the belly of a young slattern.) Three sons and a daughter were alive-he believed; the oldest lad had gotten a berth on a ship bound back to Oslo, and not been heard of for years. The second was married and on a small farm. The third, Jonas, was still here, a wiry pointy-nosed youth with lank pale hair who regarded Tauno in fox wariness and Eyjan in ill-hidden lust. The rest were poor kin and hirelings, who worked for room and board.
“As for my daughter—”
Bodies stirred and mumbled among thick, moving shadows. Eyes gleamed white, fear could be smelled and felt in the smoke. Haakon’s voice, which had been firm, barked forth: “What can you tell of her?”
“What can you tell of merfolk?” Tauno retorted.
The Norseman curbed his wits. “Something. . . maybe.”
It gasped and choked through the dimness. “I doubt that,” Eyjan breathed in her brother’s ear. “I think he lies.”
“I fear you’re right,” he answered as low. “But let’s play his game. We’ve a mystery here.”
Aloud: “We found her at sea, not far hence, amidst Inuit-Skraelings, do you call them? She and her baby looked well.” They looked better than anybody here, he thought. Belike Haakon had seen to it that she got ample food while growing, because he wanted her to bear him strong grandsons or because he loved her. “I warn you, though, you’ll not like what she told us to tell you. Bear in mind, this was none of our doing. We were on hand for a very brief time, and we don’t even understand what she meant by her words.”
The father’s knuckles stood white around his swordhilt. Jonas his son, seated on the bench next to him, likewise grasped dagger.
“Well?” Haakon snapped.
“I am sorry. She cursed you. She said everybody should depart this country, lest you die of a—a tupilak, whatever that is—which a magician of theirs has made to punish a sin of yours.”