Page 29 of Alien Viking's Plunder

“Not a bad idea to get some rest,” he rumbled, picking at the fire with a long stick. “I think you will need it.”

Josie blinked and yawned as she came properly awake. She would have loved to stay like that, using him as a big, totally steady pillow.

He took the stick out of the fire and handed it to her. It was the one she had used as a weapon. “I sharpened the end of it and fired it to make it hard. Now it’s a spearanda club.”

Josie examined the tip. It was needle sharp and burned black. “Thank you.”

“Now sleep more. Get comfortable. I will stay awake.”

There was only one way she could see that would be really comfortable, but she didn’t want to sit on his lap. Not yet.

Instead she curled up on the plank and put her head on his thigh, facing away from him.

She felt a warm hand on her upper arm, holding it loosely and not moving. It was his way to say ‘don’t worry, I won’t get any weird ideas while you sleep’.

His touch calmed her and allowed her to let go.

When she woke up again, she sat up, feeling well rested.

Bragr handed her a dark brown piece of something hard. “This looks like wood, but it’s meat. Dried meat that you can chew.”

Josie knew she had to get as much energy as possible to face the day, so she gingerly bit into the meat and ripped off a piece. It was similar to beef jerky, but sweeter.

She rubbed sleep out of her eyes. “The hunters prepared well.”

“This cave is one of many that the various villages have prepared all over the mountains,” Bragr rumbled and got up, stretching and placing the palms of his hands on the ceiling of the cave, ten feet above the ground. “It means we still have days of walking ahead of us. Hopefully we can keep finding caves like this one.”

Josie understood every word, and she was able to form whole sentences in her mind. That sleep had been good for the neural lace — it was the way she remembered it working. It was when she slept that it would make major strides in learning a language.

She looked out of the entrance. It was as dark as ever. “Do they hunt vettir? Or dfergir?”

Bragr folded up a piece of the jerky and put the whole thing into his mouth. “Not if they have a shred of sense. Those things are dangerous to eat. Their flesh is all poison. Same with trolls. There is a lot of game here, though. A good hunter can gather all the meat his family needs for a whole winter from one good hunting trip to the mountains. I have done it many times myself. But I don’t recognize these mountains. We must be in the south of the island.” He replaced the unused firewood in the box and stomped out the embers. “Now I think we should get going. There will still be some minutes of darkness left.”

Josie studied the tip of her spear. It was razor sharp. “Where are we going?”

“To Hjalmarheim,” Bragr said. “Now, thisisHjalmarheim, of course. The whole island is. But this part is all vilmark. We need to get to the coast, to the settlements And to my jarlagard, the earl’s estate.”

“And then what happens?” Josie lifted her gaze to look him in the eye in the dim cave.

“Then we eat and drink and recover from the walk,” the Viking said and went over to the entrance.

Josie didn’t move. “And then what happens?”

“Then we’ll see,” he rumbled, got down, and crawled out.

Josie hadn’t gotten a reply, but she wasn’t too interested in staying in this dark cave alone. She walked after him out of the cave.

Outside it was night, but the sky was clear, showing an intense myriad of stars. She recognized some constellations, but some were distorted and some were new to her.

Josie felt a sucking feeling in her stomach. One of those little pinpricks might be the Sun. Her home had to be light years away. Possibly hundreds or thousands. There were no pulsars close to Earth, as far as she knew, unless one had gone undetected.

She shook off the dark thoughts that pressed on her mind. Shewouldget home.Theywould get home, Aretha and Josie and the other girls. If nothing else, those primitive wooden ships had shown them how easy space travel could be. All they needed was one of those, and they’d be on their way.

They stood still for a while, just looking and listening. The air was cold, probably below freezing.

“We’ll be quiet,” Bragr whispered. “We don’t want the vettir or the dfergir to hear us leave.” He walked along the rock face, going uphill. Josie followed, clutching her spear and looking up and behind her. She wouldn’t let those vettir surprise her again, so she kept a sharp lookout upwards.

The snow crunched softly under her boots as she kept following Bragr’s giant shape along the side of the hill. The stars gave more light than she’d ever seen, casting him as a black shadow against the sky. He wasn’t limping anymore, she noticed. But he was walking with a heavier, more lumbering gait, swaying from one side to the other with each slow step. It had to be his injured foot that did it.

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