He caught the odor of lamp oil again. At first he thought it was still filling his nostrils from the fiery slaughter of the muties, but he soon realized that the woodwork of the long ship was also soaked with it.

Jorund threw the first flaming torch. The fire caught immediately, tongues of smoky red and orange dancing along the deck and creeping up the mast, lapping their way toward the snarl-toothed figurehead.

The next senior warrior threw his torch, followed by Egil Skallagson and Sigurd Harefoot, then all the others. The lights whirled through the dusk, then flames exploded in roaring streaks. In less than a minute, the ship was ablaze from end to end, the smoke beginning to obscure the small group of corpses.

"It's the way for a warrior to leave this life for the next," Erik said with an almost religious awe.

"What's the next life like?" J.B. asked interestedly.

"You carouse with a multitude of available women," the young man replied.

J.B. turned to Ryan and lowered his voice. "Sounds like living forever in a frontier pesthole gaudy house."

"Yeah. Look. Boat's near burned down to the water already."

"With the evil offered through the wicker men, there will be no need of further gifts," Erik told them.

"Gifts?" Doc asked. "What kind of gifts, young fellow?"

The Viking turned to face him, his mouth working uncertainly. "Gifts? I had not meant that. It is that our warriors need company on their sky-road, once taken and never retraced. The sluts and evil ones are enough, and they will keep off more dark days."

There was a roar of noise from the throng of watching Norsemen. Fire hissed as the lake swallowed the flaming remains of the long ship. The fierce dragon's head was the last part to be consumed and disappear beneath the water.

The sun had gone, the last sliver of scarlet vanishing over the hills. Darkness had come to the ville of Markland.

Ryan led the other friends back to their hut, feeling tired from the fight, the killing and the brutality of the executions. And he still hadn't been able to snatch a private moment with Krysty.

The night would call for a lot of thinking and talking with the others.

And the development of some kind of plan.

Chapter Twenty-Five

The sun rose into a sky of brilliant blue, with only a handful of scattered, purple chem clouds to mar its perfection.

Ryan, J.B., Doc and Jak had talked quietly until late in the night, trying to formulate some sort of plan. There'd been general agreement among them that Markland surely wasn't the kind of ville in which to pass the rest of your life.

The conclusion was simple, and Doc voiced it best. "A rad-sick, brutalized, antiwomen, primitive and lost community. To visit here is like visiting the dark side of the Middle Ages on a bad day."

"So we get out." Ryan's words weren't any kind of question.

"Today," Jak agreed.

"Tonight," J.B. offered.

Ryan hadn't been so certain. And now, as he stood with one hand on the crudely carved door frame, looking out across the great lake, he felt his worries were justified.

The setting of the ville made it difficult to break clear and run. The bowl of wooded hills were a maze of twining paths, and the Norsemen would know and hunt along all of them. Once the crest of the ridge was reached, there was the perilous descent into the hothouse tropical world that hid the redoubt.

Some of the Vikings were obviously sickly, but there were enough healthy warriors to make escape hazardous. Though Mildred looked as if she could wrestle a grizzly, she obviously wasn't anywhere near fit yet, after the long freezing. And stamina over rough backcountry had never exactly been Doc Tanner's strongest suit.

J.B.'s idea to creep away at night was the best, but since the muties' sneak attack, Jorund had announced that there would be extra roving guard patrols after dark.

They'd even talked about trying the lake. In addition to the dragon-head long ships, the ville possessed smaller boats. But there was little prospect of getting far in those without the faster ships catching them.

On the far side of the steading, beyond the big central fire, Ryan glimpsed Krysty's dazzling hair. Mildred was only a step away, as she'd been ever since they arrived at the Norse ville.

Ryan glanced around furtively, then beckoned to the women. There was no doubt that they had seen him, but they kept walking at an angle, cutting around the side of the longhouse, ignoring him. Nobody noticed them. The ville went about its business: men worked on one of the boats and a hunting party readied itself to go out into the woods; women carried water and wood and began the preparation of the evening meal.

Ryan looked back into the hut at his three friends, who were finishing off a jug of buttermilk. "Women are off some place. I'm going to meet them if I can. Stay here."

"Would it not be possible for the rest of us to accompany you, Ryan? A stroll through the pine trees would be most beneficial in purging my mind of the unpleasant scenes of yesterday. I would be most obliged, Ryan."

"Sorry, Doc. If anyone comes, try and cover for me. Don't straight out lie. Kinda hint I'm inside resting. Be back soon as I can."

He left the rifle inside, carrying only the pistol at his hip and the sheathed panga.

It was a fabulous day, one of the finest that he could ever remember. The air was free from the taint of dust and death that still lingered, century-old over so much of Deathlands. The gentle wind that came sighing in off the lake stirred the topmost branches of the big pine trees as he walked among them.

Krysty and Mildred could only have taken one trail, which meandered gently toward a razorback ridge, some fifteen hundred feet above him.

The ville shrank beneath him, like a picture he'd once seen in a scorched and tattered mag. It had had the remnants of a bright yellow cover, he recalled, and had contained photographs of different places taken from a hot-air balloon. That was what Markland looked like from a turning of the trail, across a flower-spotted meadow.

There should be a guard somewhere along this track. Ryan wondered whether Krysty and Mildred would have cut away from the path before they encountered him, and if they did, what kind of a marker would they have left him?

He'd met men with better woodcraft than he possessed. But not many. Krysty would know he'd be coming slow and cautious, on the lookout for her sign.

It was easy.

A small branch had been snapped off a little more than head high, broken in two and laid at the edge of the path. It pointed away into the gloom under the branches. Perhaps one man in ten thousand would have spotted it for a deliberate sign.

There was only way the women would have gone-onward and up. Once Ryan was off the well-trodden track, the marks became easier to follow. Pushing between the pines had snapped off small twigs, and in the moist places Ryan could see clear impressions of their feet.

Shortly after entering the forest, he heard the sound of someone whistling behind him, and guessed that it must be the guard.

After another ten minutes or so, he glimpsed two figures ahead of him, both wearing dark clothes. Only Mildred's white sneakers showed up in the shaded gloom. Ryan pushed on faster, and almost immediately he saw Krysty turn around. He knew she couldn't possibly have heard him. But she'd "felt" his closeness.

The women stopped and waited for him.

"Hi, lover. How goes the thrilling life of the warrior?"

"Beats standing neck-deep in a cesspool, I guess. How about on the female side?"

Mildred answered him, her eyes flashing angrily. "It's not funny, Ryan. This place is like Boston in the 1800s. A woman's position is not just in the kitchen, or under her husband. She's a very poor third after the dogs and cattle!"