It was indeed a fair land, with broad lakes and inlets and fine grazing pasture. Someone ran sheep and cattle; to Eyvind’s eye, the beasts looked well-tended and strong, though somewhat stocky in build. There were modest dwellings tucked here and there; plumes of smoke rose from household fires. A good place, though curiously devoid of trees. The few they saw were clustered in sheltered folds of the land like refugees of conflict. They speculated on this. There had been giants, maybe, who ripped them up like twigs, or fierce-toothed creatures that crunched them as easily as stalks of wheat. Perhaps the island had suffered a great fire. Or maybe it was simply too windy; those small birches and willows that clung here and there did have a somewhat prostrate look to them, as if accustomed to bow before some powerful force of nature.

“If I were to offer a gift to these people,” Ulf remarked, “it would be timber for building, for they surely have a sore lack of it.”

They came to a place of standing stones, set on a heather-cloaked rise by a neck of land which separated two wide expanses of bright water. In that place, all fell silent. The stones were tall; even Eyvind was dwarfed by them. And they were many. Holgar tried to count them, but he ran out of numbers before he came around that great circle. More than fifty, Ulf reckoned, and beyond them mounds in the earth, burial chambers perhaps, sealed by a blanket of turf. Somerled remarked that such hidden places might just as readily conceal gold or silver than men’s bones, and it was a shame there was no advantage to be had, in such a desolate corner of the world, from the sudden acquisition of such treasures. They did not stay long in that place. No priest had traveled with them, and there was no saying what ancient gods lingered there, or what they thought of unexpected visitors.

They walked a long way, and never a living thing in sight but cows and sheep and a chicken or two. The wind got up and they began to feel the bite of it through cloaks and tunics still damp from the hard voyage.

“What are these people, some kind of ghosts, that they let us cross their land unchecked, and themselves remain unseen?” Hakon commented as they came up over a rise in the land and looked northward. “We should return, perhaps, and stay by our womenfolk until we learn more.”

“I think not,” said Ulf in a strange tone, and there, striding toward them across the grassy hillside with grim purpose was a group of men in tunics dyed blue or green or red, men of small stature, dark-haired and armed with bows and staves.

“Well, well,” observed Somerled under his breath. “Genuine barbarians. I wonder if they’ll introduce themselves before they start shooting. What tongue might we try, do you think? Latin? Frankish?”