The Yngling

6.

This gray dawn was the coldest yet, and the horses' hooves sounded sharply on the frozen ground. There were no clouds. To the east the sky shone yellow along the line of hills as they rode southward down the road. Ilse was draped with a sleeping robe dropped at a door by a horse barbarian and snatched up by Nils as the three warriors had galloped through the village to get her. Now Sten, having circled eastward, caught up with them.

Hannes, he said, had stayed with his surviving peasants, leading them into the forest.

"And what will happen to them?" Ilse asked. "Will the enemy hunt them down?"

Nils smiled. "The first thing the enemy will do is see what horses he can find. It won't be many; mostly peasant plow horses." He turned to Sten. "How many horse barbarians died, do you think?"

Sten answered in Swedish so that Leif and Erik could understand. "I'd guess maybe twenty were killed this afternoon with arrows from the roofs, but that's just a guess. I watched from a hedgerow, but not very close. And tonight Hannes' peasants must have tallied twenty or more killed. Killed or maimed, that is. Their strokes weren't too accurate, and I kept worrying they'd fall off their horses. But even peasants can be effective with an advantage like that.

"The knights must have killed ten or a dozen when they hit, and maybe a few more getting back to the castle. And the archers at the castle might have gotten lucky in the moonlight and knocked off a few more if they followed too close to the walls. How many does that come to?"

"Fifty or sixty," Nils answered. "And we killed four paddock guards and maybe half a dozen in the village when we rode in to get Ilse. And we killed horses until my sword arm got so tired I had to switch hands."

He turned to Ilse. "We'll have to teach you Swedish now. Our people don't know Anglic."

"Perhaps we should teach Leif and Erik Anglic, too." She smiled when she said it, but Nils sensed something behind the words. "I had a precognition weeks ago," she went on. "Men will come out of the sky in a starship, men like the ancients, speaking Anglic, and they will come among your people."