Chapter 18: Survivors III

What a strange group. The warrior, the old wise man, and somehow her. She would have laughed to hear herself counted with them, really. She led nothing. She decided very little.

Perhaps Emerald Bjornsdottir was too blind to see it.

The way people drifted toward her without knowing they were doing it. Not for anything she could do, because she could do very little. But because of the way she was.

When she sat with the weeping woman until the woman slept.

When she got the whole of Eivind's story out of him over a few evenings, and he stood a little straighter for the telling.

When she kept track of which child was frightened of which dark corner of the ruins.

Emerald was a good person.

Haaland and Oddr saw it.

That is why they stuck together when their duties allowed. Usually near the camp, at dusk, when the cold began creeping in and most of the day's tasks were taken care of.

Haaland set a slaver's short sword in her hands one afternoon, and he closed her fingers around the grip and showed her how to place her feet so a bigger man could not simply push her over.

"You are small," he chuckled. "So you will never win by overpowering things. You can only win by leveraging what you have. Feet first. The hands come after."

She was clumsy, and slow, and she tried to take his teachings seriously. Then Oddr would giggle to death as she fell face first to the ground.

It was a lot of fun.

She kept at it, evening after evening, until she could hold the thing without her wrist folding and take three steps back without falling over her own feet. It was not much. But it was more than she had ever had.

Some more people joined with time.

The three of them became five and the five became eight. They began taking their meals together and whispered stories after the rest had gone to sleep. Still, the relationship with everyone else never became quite as strong as the one between the three of them.

Sometimes she caught herself thinking of Oddr as a grandfather, and Haaland as a father. It felt good, for the first time in a long, long time.

Sometimes she wondered how long it would last.

Haaland had a plan.

He had scratched it in the ashes the first morning.

A raft. Logs laid side by side and lashed crosswise with vine and twisted fiber, a little square of sail cut from the dead men's tenting in case the current tried to carry them wrong.

Small.

Just big enough for four of the strongest to ride the sea south until they steered their way to shore.

Once they made it to a village, they would spend the little gold they had pulled off the dead slavers to buy a shipload of mercenaries, and come back, and take the rest of them off this land.

It was a thin hope.

However, a thin hope was more than they had woken up with, and it put the spirit back in them.

From that point on most of them worked the raft. A few went to fish.

It sorted itself out along the lines of what people's bodies could still do, the sound backs to the logs, the patient hands to the water, Oddr by the fire minding the children and the pot.

And one evening, some days into the work, hauling the last big log up from the tree line, someone started to sing.

It was an old work-song, a stupid one, about a farmer and a whore and a barrel of ale, and the man who started it had a terrible voice.

The goatherd shouted "wrong, you fool, it is the ale first and then the whore" and sang it back at him louder and worse. Then half the line had it, timing the pull to the chorus so the log came up the slope in great lurching heaves.

The children were shrieking the ale's part.

Emerald was laughing so hard she could barely keep her grip. How long since she laughed, really? She didn't remember.

For the length of one bad old song about a farmer and a whore there was not a demon or a dead city anywhere in the world. Only a hundred people dragging a log up a hill and singing about ale.

No one had thought they would sing again.

The forest, in daylight, was almost kind, like something out of a fairy tail.

There were old pines, and trees they had no names for, and birds they had never heard. There were squirrels.

There were small bright dragons no bigger than cats that watched from the high branches and fled chittering the moment anyone looked up.

The smell of pine and cold sap, and grass, actual grass, soft under bare feet that had known nothing but iron and wet planking for longer than any of them cared to count.

There were berries, and nuts, and twice someone swore they had seen deer.

They worked the forest north of the camp, always in groups, never alone, and never out of earshot of the horn Oddr had cut from a dead man's drinking horn.

For the first time in months no one went to sleep hungry. The not-being-hungry turned out to be its own strange grief, because a full belly leaves room to feel everything else.

The fishing bays lay west of the camp.

The water ran out shallow and clear a hundred paces before it ever reached your knees, freezing but thick with life. Fat fish and seal hauled up lazy on the rocks, and seabirds so thick you could drop one with a stone.

They speared fish with swords lashed to poles, and the low winter sun warmed the skin of their backs even as the sea froze their legs to the bone.

There were wild dragon nests on the cliffs above the bay, a few of them.

The people stayed away from the dragons, and the dragons stayed away from the people, and that was all it ever came to, a mutual respect, or something near enough to it that no one felt the need to test it.

Through it all, the demon had not shown up.

They learned to recognize the signs here and there. A footprint pressed too deep into the mud of a stream. Thin black scales of a dragon shed near the ruins.

But they never saw the thing itself.

They took the not-seeing as a mercy on the good days and a warning on the bad ones, and mostly they could not tell which it was.

It was on one of those nights that the sky screamed.

It was not quite a scream. It was a rising shriek with a whistle buried down inside it, there and gone before the ear could catch hold of it.

The men were on their feet with their swords up, pointed at a night sky that showed them nothing at all.

The children began to cry.

Then it was gone, vanished into the night.

The silence it left behind was worse than the sound had been. Hours went by before anyone spoke.

It was Oddr who finally did.

"That," sighed the old man, there was something almost smug in his tone, "is the Night Fury."

He looked round at their white faces. After that night they did not speak of the sky at all.

By then, after many days' labour, the raft was nearly done.

It lay drawn up on the north shore, above the tide-line so the sea would not take it before morning, and it was ugly and simple and strong.

Logs lashed tight, the little sail furled and waiting. Many days of hope made solid enough to stand on.

They had argued, briefly, about going that same night.

Haaland had put a stop to it. The four who would ride it were bone-tired, the wind was up, and a man does not launch onto a winter sea in the dark on the strength of being impatient.

Morning, he said. First light. They would push off at dawn.

So they went to their furs that night closer to happy.

Someone said, only half joking, that they should decide now who got the first hot meal on the mainland. Someone else was already bragging about the faces of the mercenaries when they saw the gold.

A woman held her sleeping boy and told him, very softly, the names of the people back home he was going to meet.

A few of them, worn out and warm and daring to believe it, actually slept.

Emerald woke to glow of blue on the walls.

She did not understand it at first.

That soft blue glow flickering across the carved stone above her, almost gentle.

Then the sound reached her. Far off. A great soft WHUMP like the whole night drawing one long breath, and behind it a low rolling boom that came across the water and into the ground under her.

People were scrambling up out of sleep all around her. Most were already running.

She was running too, out through the broken columns to the lip of the cliffs where the whole camp was gathering.

It was burning.