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shoulder.
    “Let’s not stand and freeze, you there!”
    They walked on and on; the snow, reasonably hard packed, made a fair footing most of the time, though there were difficult places. Inland, the ghostly skeletons of a forest showed on the higher ridges; sometimes they passed heaped shadowy shapes that Banar said had once been villages.
    “Many lived here, once,” Banar said sadly. “Here, where we are, there was a great road.”
    The wind had dropped and they made even better time now. The sun was still up when Banar cried out and pointed ahead.
    Here, a valley had curved toward the sea; the trace of the buried river still showed. In the bend there were shrouded roofs, a snow-cloaked village of many houses, and where the frozen river’s ice still showed, there was a long, barnlike structure.
    Banar led them down and they managed, with difficulty, to dig the snow away from an entrance. Within, enough light filtered through roof openings to illuminate the place with a grey glow; the boats were there, six of them, on a beamed platform.
    Daniel stopped, looking at them with a pleased grunt They were big enough; the largest was fifty feet or more, he thought, and wondered momentarily how they would be able to move that huge hull. Damn it, I’ll move it, he thought fiercely, if it takes me a year.
    Ammi and Galta busied themselves getting wood together; there were broken pieces everywhere, as if the place had been a boat-building workshop. While they built a fire under an open part of the roof, Banar showed Daniel the boats as proudly as though he had built them himself.
    They were double-ended, high in prow and stern, very like the pictures Daniel recalled of Viking longboats. The wood was strange to him, a very dark, close-grained stuff that reminded him of black walnut. Within, the frames were made of what he thought to be oak; there were copper nails studding the sides. It was beautiful work, obviously done with skill and affection.
    They were all single-masted, the masts lying down with their booms along the flush deck; frozen canvas was rolled about each boom. Daniel, attempting to pull a corner loose, found it too tightly icebound to move, but the material resembled canvas, at any rate.
    Under the deck there were spaces obviously meant for sleeping, and a dozen long oars of white wood; there were empty chests and frozen coils of line. It was as if the builders had gotten everything ready for sea only the day before, and then stepped out of the building, never to return.
    Banar, at first, took it for granted that they would try to move the smallest of the boats, a craft about thirty feet long. But Daniel had set his mind on the big one, and was determined about it.
    “It’s no harder to move one than another,” he pointed out. “Once it moves, it can slide. On rollers, do you see?” He indicated the round logs that leaned against a wall. “I think they used those to do it.”
    The fire burned well now, and there was food in their packs. The four gathered around the blaze, warming themselves and eating, talking in low voices. In the ancient building, it was as if the ghosts of those old builders still listened; maybe deciding if these were worthy recipients of their work.
    The heat spread slowly through the place; there were odd creaking sounds and the dripping of water. The sun had set; in the darkness a wind had risen, keening on the roof.
    “Once we have it down on the ice, it will slip along,” Galta said, looking up at the big hull. “There’s open water, farther down.”
    “We could fall through the ice and drown, of course,” Banar said cheerfully. “Daniel, do you think we will be born again, in that future world of yours?”
    “Not if you’re lucky,” Daniel grunted.
    “Lucky?” Galta looked puzzled. “But, Daniel, you told us strange stories… wonderful things. Men who flew in the air like birds. I’d like to do that, I think.”
    “Would you?” Daniel said, his voice edged. He