Tom Trainor

VESTRIBYGD

From the stone cover of the ruins, two hunters watched eight men spill onto the ice-littered shore from a landing craft, which they pulled aground with them. A ninth, one with poor balance, stood up in the boat and fell immediately into the shallow water. The foreign wretch crawled ashore as if pinned beneath great weight, then rolled onto his back and thrust his hands skyward. Anda and Minik's own hands tightened on their bows as this sick man began bellowing as if he were a snared animal. Another of their number, towering even among the hairy outlanders, dragged the howling man further from the sea and silenced him with three heavy slaps. The boatmen had arrived from their lands in a tall, boot-shaped craft anchored in the bay, and wore what Anda recognized as the clothing of the intruders who fashioned these once upright ruins so many generations ago. Clothing the builders had buried their dead in, made of the hair of their animals and not skin. Useless in any rain or wind. Anda pitied them their inferior technology, but understood as his ancestors had that these invaders were men too stubborn to accept any knowledge that was not their own.