John Dalmas - The Yngling

She was speaking Anglic to him.

The light was growing stronger. Slowly Nils slid into the dark opening under the tipped-up roots. Breakfast fires were being lit. Soon early-morning taciturnity disappeared among the enemy tribesmen as fires and movement warmed them. Their eating took some time, and Nils could hear them talking and laughing, the sounds mixed with the patterns of telepathic emissions that were their natural accompaniment.

He continued to lie there, his mind focused on the two psis, other minds relegated to background. He knew which tent was theirs. Then a man came from it and the bearings of the two minds separated as he walked through the camp. Soon men and captive women began to strike tents, rolling them into bundles. Others trailed down the gentle toe slope toward a long meadow that bordered the creek in the valley bottom and returned leading strings of horses.

Nils saw Ilse then, pulling down the tent, folding and rolling it. The man returned when she was done and helped load it on a horse. Within an hour all gear had been loaded. The horse barbarians mounted, their voices lively and boisterous at the prospect of action. The psi led them in a loose column through the trees, eastward toward Doppeltanne. Pack animals, spare mounts and colts followed. A score of women sat the nags of the string bareback, waiting while the pack train moved out. Behind them were mounted guards.

By the time the women started moving, the chief of the band was perhaps a kilometer ahead. Nils called to Ilse telepathically. She did not turn; only her mind responded.

"Nils!"

"Are they going to attack Doppeltanne?"

She wrenched her mind to the question. "Yes. And be careful. He's a psi you know, and he understands a fair amount of Anglic; he's been learning it since Poland." She began to ride more slowly, letting most of the women pass, until one of the rearguard shouted at her and gestured with his lance.

"I'll try to get you free tonight," Nils thought after her.

"Don't take chances. Perhaps I know how to kill him."

"Tonight," his thought followed her. "We'll make our move tonight." He watched her out of sight. The information should be safe with her, if she'd been able to submerge and screen well enough to work out a murder scheme without her captor reading it. One of Kazi's psi officers must have discovered the man's potential and had him trained, as Raadgiver had done with him. Operational telepaths very rarely just happened.

Several tents remained. Two women worked around them, and two guards sat beside a fire, talking and laughing. A man came from one of the tents, helping himself with a crutch. Very carefully Nils moved from his post toward the hiding place of his companions. Softly though he moved, his approach awakened Erik, whose hand moved quickly to his sword as he sat up. Leif grinned. "I let the growing boy sleep late," he said softly in his lilting Norwegian.

"They've broken camp," Nils said, "and they're riding toward Doppeltanne. They left some wounded behind, with a pair of women to look after them, and a couple of guards. We'll get our horses and then ride in and take them."

The northmen hiked over the ridge top and down to their horses, saddled them and fastened the bits in their mouths, all without hurry. Then they rode back and walked their horses toward the camp.

When one of the guards heard their approach and looked their way, they kicked their mounts into a gallop and cut the men down while they scrambled for their bows. One of the women half-choked a scream and then both stood by, frightened. These savage foreigners in deerskin breeches and black mail, with bare-fanged totems on their helmets, seemed just a different variety of horse barbarian. While Erik sat with arrow on bowstring, covering, Nils and Leif rode around cutting the lodgepoles with their heavy swords and knocking down tents. As the occupants ducked or crawled out or lay humped beneath the hides, they were killed.

One stared as Nils charged at him, a shock of recognition on his dark, scarred face, and Nils reined hard left to avoid trampling the man. A picture had flashed through the horse barbarian's mind, of this same giant warrior with straw-colored braids standing naked and weaponless in an arena, stalked by a grinning orc officer with sword in hand. It was this man. Nils realized, who had thrown his own curved sword down onto the sand.

"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.

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.