"Chernobyl."

"Your knob'll what?" Jak called, not quite hearing what she'd said.

"A place in Russia," she said, her breathing becoming steadier.

"Upon my soul, ma'am, but I remember that," Doc said. "And there were two more such accidents within a few years. Damnably similar. One was in... Pennsylvania, wasn't? Or Manitoba? And one in Europe. Near Lyons? Or Cardiff. I can't recall."

The beach opened before them, the expanse of the lake narrowed by the enclosing rocks of the headlands on either side.

Mildred had recovered, and climbed into the boat to sit on a thwart, hand pressed against her chest. "If ever I have a coronary," she said, "I'll have it now."

The others got in, and they pushed off, paddling quickly toward open water. Ryan noticed that the rad count had fallen back to red-orange. Still high, but below lethal.

As they rowed past the obscuring headland, they found themselves on top of two of the pursuing Viking dragon-ships.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Their escape had been discovered a little after dawn, and Jorund Thoraldson had immediately ordered out the long ships. He sent two vessels, under the command of Egil Skallagson, toward the west, while he led two more dragon-ships in an easterly direction.

"I had thought we would take you, outlanders," he said, once the small boat had been hauled alongside and the six companions were on the deck.

"And you were right," Ryan replied. "But there's something important we have to tell you about."

"No. Escape is treachery. The karl of Markland will not talk with traitors."

"You damned fool!" Doc exclaimed. "You and your people — every man jack of them — faces a slow and painful death within a matter of weeks unless you move your steading."

"Words, words, words. Like small pebbles rattling in a crab shell. I have said I will not talk. Perhaps when we return to Markland, before you all take the long road without turning, we might talk."

"The flying eagle for the one-eyed outlander," Sigurd said eagerly.

Jorund nodded. "For such treachery... perhaps. We shall see."

He gestured for the prisoners to be taken into the bow of his ship, where they were guarded by a couple of the younger warriors. There had been no attempt to search Ryan or any of the others, but their firearms had all been taken and placed in the stern. One of the guards was Erik Stonebiter.

"What's flying eagle?" Jak asked him.

"You would not wish to know."

"Tell us," the albino boy pressed.

"It is a way of slaying, only to be done by the karl himself. Because you have betrayed his wishes, he may kill your leader in that way."

"What fucking way?" Jak insisted. Ryan, sitting on the gently heaving deck beside the teenager, was beginning to wish he'd stop asking about the flying eagle.

The young Norseman blankly refused to face Jak and stared out across the lake, where the first tendrils of gray mist were already appearing. "It is a hard passing," he finally said.

Jorund had also spotted the threatening bank of fog and was urging his rowers on to greater efforts, beginning to beat out a rhythm with his sheathed sword on the bulwark of the vessel.

With Jak and the others still waiting, Erik Stonebiter eventually told them of the flying eagle. "If the karl wills it, urged by the wisewoman, then you may be bound crossways, wrists and ankles to a frame. The point of the knife will enter here." He touched himself under the short ribs, low on the right side of his chest. "It is thrust in and drawn deep, up to the top of the ribs' curve. Then down again and out on the opposite side. The shape is like that of an eagle, flying high against the sun."

J.B. had been particularly interested in the telling. "And that's it? Doesn't sound anything special to me."

"No. That is but the half of it. Once the chest is laid open, the karl steps in close and reaches within the cavity. He seizes the lungs in his fists and draws them slowly out. I have seen it. The lungs flutter and fill for many minutes."

"A hundred years sure hasn't made folks any sweeter," Mildred said quietly.

The fog closed in, thicker and more blinding than before. It surrounded the two dragon-ships in a cocoon of muffling damp. Jorund ordered the two vessels to make fast to each other to prevent their becoming separated and lost. The oars were shipped, and they drifted in silence. Lookouts were posted at stem and stern. Water lapped and chuckled against the wooden bows. The crew sat around, not talking, made uneasy by the shrouding mist.

Krysty huddled against Ryan for comfort and for warmth. "You figure we did right not to take them on in a firefight, lover?" she whispered.

He shrugged. "Moment like that, seeing them on top of us, you shoot or you don't. There's a good forty men, most with blasters, hid behind the wooden sides of their ships. With the rifles we could have done some serious chilling."

She smiled at him. "Sure. And so could they, huh? They had speed on the water, too. Rammed us. And that would have been the end of the book."

"That's the way I figured it, too." He wiped beads of moisture from her cold cheeks. "I hoped the baron might have listened about the rad leak."

"It'll chill everyone in the ville, won't it? Hot spot as red as that?"

"Sure. Mebbe we can get him to listen to us back at the ville. If the flying eagle don't get..."

"Doesn't," she corrected.

Ryan grinned and shook his head. "Sure. If the flying eagle doesn'tget us first."

A light offshore wind was blowing the two Norse long ships farther out onto the lake. Jorund refused to allow the oars to be used to bring them back closer to the invisible land, worried that they might run upon saw-toothed rocks that would rip the belly out of the vessels.

J.B. suggested to Ryan that they might risk a break for their boat, which was being towed behind the dragon-ship. "Grab the blasters. Cut the line. Be gone, out of sight, in a minute or less." It was tempting.

"Not a zero option situation," Ryan replied. "Some of us'd make it. Sure. But we'd leave a lot of blood behind us."

J.B. nodded. "Guess so."

As the afternoon wore on, Mildred was working herself into a righteous rage. "That blond hulk of total stupidity is sentencing every living thing in his village to certain, slow, painful death. And the pig-ignorant son of a bitch won't listen."

Ryan touched her on the arm. "Sure. But a man insists on putting the barrel of a Colt Magnum in his mouth and pulling the trigger, you'll likely get hurt if you try too hard to stop him."

"If we get to live long enough, we can try and get the word through someone like the young guy with the broken teeth," Krysty suggested.

Mildred sighed. "I suppose so. I wish we could have had a good bath real soon to try to wash off some of the surface radiation we must have picked up from that hell's caldron back there."

"Will the lake water not be severely contaminated as well?" Doc asked, his angular figure looming from the mist. He'd been standing and leaning on the side, peering into the afternoon gloom.

"I wouldn't want to drink much of it," Mildred agreed. "But it's barely tepid compared to that boiling river."

Unbelievably the fog was growing even thicker as the afternoon dragged by. When sitting on the cold wood of the bow, the friends could no longer see the ferocious head of the dragon with its blood-tipped teeth, only ten feet away. Ryan could just make out the boots of the lookout who perched there.

It had also become much colder.

Somewhere out in the murk a fish leaped, entering the water again with a slapping splash. Everyone on board jumped, startled.