"Let that one be!" Nils shouted, and left the man on hands and knees beside his crutch while they finished their killing.
The women stared in shock and fear as Nils turned his horse and looked at them. "Can you ride?" he asked in Anglic.
They nodded dumbly.
"Then get on those horses. Ride to the top of that ridge and go in that direction." He pointed. "Do you understand?" They nodded again. "Stay on top of the ridge until you come to a road. It will take two or three hours or maybe more. When you come to the road, ride down the road with the sun on your right shoulder. Your right shoulder. When you come out of the forest, you'll soon arrive at a crossroads. From there you can see a castle. Go to the castle. Tell them that the enemy is in Doppeltanne. Doppeltanne! Now tell me what I said."
Hesitantly and with help they repeated his instructions, then walked to the horses and rode away, glancing back repeatedly until they were out of sight.
"Think they'll get lost?" Leif asked.
"I don't think so," Nils answered. "They had the directions well enough." Then he turned and looked at the man he'd spared.
The stocky barbarian stood now, staring at them, not knowing what to expect. He didn't imagine that Nils knew who he was. He'd been one among tens of thousands shouting in the stands, and when he'd thrown the sword, the giant had been looking the other way.
Nils dismounted and walked over to him. "You gave me a chance to live," he said. "Now we are even." The Swedish words meant nothing to the man, but the tone was not threatening. The other northmen looked at each other. Nils jabbed the man lightly on the shoulder with a thick, sword-callused forefinger, then pointed to the man's side where his sword would have hung. Next he moved as if drawing a sword and made a throwing movement. Pointing to himself, he bent as if to take something from the ground, then held out his hand as if armed. The man stared with awed understanding.
Nils remounted then and they rode leisurely to the meadow where the horse barbarians had kept their horse herd. There the northmen hobbled their mounts and let them graze until after noon, while they napped in the autumn sun.
5.
It was night. The horse barbarians had loosed their horses in a field fenced on three sides with rails and on the fourth with a tight hedge. The fence wasn't high enough to hold horses like theirs, so they had hobbled them.
Their chief had posted four guards on horseback to patrol outside the paddock, and they were disgusted to be pulling guard duty while they could hear the drunken shouts from the village. So when buddies sneaked out to them with two jugs of schnapps, they didn't hesitate. It wasn't as if vigilance was needful. The fighting men in this land had all the stealth of a cattle herd.
Dismounting, they tethered their mounts to the fence and squatted down together with their backs against it to test the schnapps. The chief, they agreed, would be too busy enjoying himself to check on them. Or if he did, it was very dark and the moon wouldn't rise until after midnight. They'd be able to hear him before he found them.
The three northmen lay in the tall grass at the edge of a ditch, listening to their murmuring and quiet laughter.
He had read his peasants well, Hannes realized. The thirty he'd chosen, most of them youths, had more violence simmering in them than he'd realized they could generate, partly a result of being armed. To strengthen their anger, he had purposely moved them close enough, shortly after the village had been taken, to hear the shouts and occasional screams. Then he'd pulled them back, for Nils had warned him that one of the horse barbarians was a psi. Probably their chief, Hannes decided. Now he listened to the thoughts and emotions of his men. Some were angry enough that they were not even nervous, only impatient. A few were managing to doze, but the night was too cold here behind the hedge to sleep soundly, and their homespun blankets were not for out-of-doors.
He looked at the big northman beside him, Sten. The face was turned eastward. Occasional patterns in unintelligible Swedish drifted through the man's mind, with fragmentary and partially visualized scenes, but mostly the neoviking's mind was nearly motionless, though awake and quietly serene. To a degree it reminded Hannes of a cat they'd had at home when he was a boy. Or of Nils.
At the thought of Nils he turned and looked westward past the village toward the low black mass of mountains defined against gleaming stars. Had the three northmen survived their scouting expedition? Had they found the paddock? If they hadn't… Shivering partly with cold, he tried to shake off the line of thinking, but thoughts of death came back to him. If they had died or otherwise failed their mission, the rest of them would be dead by morning. Except perhaps Sten; Sten might escape.
Would Sten feel grief if his three friends were killed? There was clearly strong affinity between them. Yet somehow Hannes didn't think Sten would. It would be like his cat, when he'd been a boy. She'd loved her kittens, in her way, and defended them, but when one was killed, she'd sniffed it and then walked casually away without sorrow. That was how it would be with Sten; Sten was somewhat like Nils.
Nils. Someday the big psi-warrior would die, probably violently, but somehow he didn't believe he was dead yet.
Zuhtu Hakki lay on his side on the straw-filled tick, staring through the darkness at the dim form of the woman on the heap of hay across the room. She lay still, but her mind was awake, her thoughts an unintelligible mental murmuring in German. From somewhere outside he heard coarse laughter. Drunk, every mother's son of them probably. Probably even the paddock guards. All but Mustafa and his detail. It's a good thing the enemy are all bottled up inside the castle, he thought. Old Mustafa will keep his boys sober and in the saddle, and the dogs in the castle won't try to sally out past that pack of wolves. Mustafa never drinks. The older men say he never did. Wonder why? Almost unheard of, a man who doesn't drink. Besides Mustafa I'm probably the only man here who's voluntarily sober, and I've had a pull or two. Funny that since my psi was trained, I've had no desire to get drunk. Other desires, but not to get drunk. He opened his eyes again and looked toward the woman. There were prettier women; plump ones. But I'll stick with this one. You can get tired of a pretty woman, but this one has a mind. Funny. Until my psi was trained, I never cared if a woman had a mind. And tonight she'd been different. No wonder I'm tired. Very tired. Loose and relaxed and very, very tired. And safe here. Very safe here. Very safe and very secure. My eyes are heavy. Very, very heavy. They keep wanting to close. Can't keep them open any more. No need to. Now they're closed. And I can't open them. Couldn't open them if I tried. Don't want to try. Sleepy. Very sleepy. Very, very sleepy. I'm falling asleep. Falling deeply asleep. Deeply asleep. It feels so good to fall deeply, deeply asleep.
Ilse kept the thoughts running through her/his mind, surrounding them with full, soft inner feelings and pictures of sinking through clouds. She took him deeper and deeper. And now I can't move, her mind murmured. Don't want to move. Can't move. Very peaceful here, and I refuse to move, or see, or hear, or feel.
She continued this briefly. Then she rose quietly, rolled the comatose chieftain off the straw tick and pulled his war harness from under it. And usually, she thought, he sleeps as lightly as a cat. The curved sword was not heavy and her arms were strong. There was light enough from the dying fire. She kept her eyes on the neck and swung hard, then, with a shudder, threw the blade on the tick and wiped her hands on her greasy homespun skirt, although there was no blood on them. Her mind shifted outside where it found a drunken guard sleeping on the cold doorstone. Fumbling in the gloom, she got the knife sheath off the harness and fastened it to the strip of homespun that served her as a belt.