The Armies of Elfland, page 4
part #0.30 of Thieves' World Series
Mistherd’s belly muscles tensed. There was danger for fair, in that shearbill head. The Garland bearer must be warned. For a minute he wondered about summoning Nagrim to kill these two. If the nicor jumped them fast, their firearms might avail them naught. But no. They might have left word at home, or — He came back to his ears. The talk had changed course. Barbro was murmuring, “— why you stayed on Roland.”
The man smiled his gaunt smile. “Well, life on Beowulf held no challenge for me. Heorot is — or was; this was decades past, remember — Heorot was densely populated, smoothly organized, boringly uniform. That was partly due to the lowland frontier, a safety valve that bled off the dissatisfied. But I lack the carbon dioxide tolerance necessary to live healthily down there. An expedition was being readied to make a swing around a number of colony worlds, especially those which didn’t have the equipment to keep in laser contact. You’ll recall its announced purpose, to seek out new ideas in science, arts, sociology, philosophy, whatever might prove valuable. I’m afraid they found little on Roland relevant to Beowulf. But I, who had wangled a berth, I saw opportunities for myself and decided to make my home here.”
“Were you a detective back there, too?”
“Yes, in the official police. We had a tradition of such work in our family. Some of that may have come for the Cherokee side of it, if the name means anything to you. However, we also claimed collateral descent from one of the first private inquiry agents on record, back on Earth before spaceflight. Regardless of how true that may be, I found him a useful model. You see, an archetype —”
The man broke off. Unease crossed his features. “Best we go to sleep,” he said. “We’ve a long distance to cover in the morning.”
She looked outward. “Here is no morning.”
They retired. Mistherd rose and cautiously flexed limberness back into his muscles. Before returning to the Sister of Lyrth, he risked a glance through a pane in the car. Bunks were made up, side by side, and the humans lay in them. Yet the man had not touched her, though hers was a bonny body, and nothing that had passed between them suggested he meant to do so.
Eldritch, humans. Cold and claylike. And they would overrun the beautiful wild world? Mistherd spat in disgust. It must not happen. It would not happen. She who reigned had vowed that.
The lands of William Irons were immense. But this was because a barony was required to support him, his kin and cattle, on native crops whose cultivation was still poorly understood. He raised some Terrestrial plants as well, by summer-light and in conservatories. However, these were a luxury. The true conquest of northern Arctica lay in yerba hay, in bathyrhiza wood, in pericoup and glycophyllon, and eventually, when the market had expanded with population and industry, in chalcanthemum for city florists and pelts of cagebred rover for city furriers.
That was in a tomorrow Irons did not expect that he would live to see. Sherrinford wondered if the man really expected anyone ever would.
The room was warm and bright. Cheerfulness crack led in the fireplace. Light from fluoropanels gleamed off hand-carven chests and chairs and tables, off colorful draperies and shelved dishes. The outwayer sat solid in his high seat, stoutly clad, beard flowing down his chest. His wife and daughters brought coffee, whose fragrance joined the remnant odors of a hearty supper, to him, his guests, and his sons.
But outside, wind hooted, lightning flared, thunder bawled, rain crashed on roof and walls and roared down to swirl among the courtyard cobblestones. Sheds and barns crouched against hugeness beyond. Trees groaned, and did a wicked undertone of laughter run beneath the lowing of a frightened cow? A burst of hailstones hit the tiles like knocking knuckles.
You could feel how distant your neighbors were, Sherrinford thought. And nonetheless they were the people whom you saw oftenest, did daily business with by visiphone (when a solar storm didn’t make gibberish of their voices and chaos of their faces) or in the flesh, partied with, gossiped and intrigued with, intermarried with; in the end, they were the people who would bury you. The lights of the coastal towns were monstrously farther away.
William Irons was a strong man. Yet when now he spoke, fear was in his tone. “You’d truly go over Troll Scarp?”
“Do you mean Hanstein Palisades?” Sherrinford responded, more challenge than question.
“No outwayer calls it anything but Troll Scarp,” Barbro said. And how had a name like that been reborn, light-years and centuries from Earth’s Dark Ages?
“Hunters, trappers, prospectors — rangers, you call them — travel in those mountains,” Sherrinford declared.
“In certain parts,” Irons said. “That’s allowed, by a pact once made ’tween a man and the Queen after he’d done well by a jack-o’-the-hill that a satan had hurt. Wherever the plumablanca grows, men may fare, if they leave man-goods on the altar boulders in payment for what they take out of the land. Elsewhere —” one fist clenched on a chair arm and went slack again — “’s not wise to go.”
“It’s been done, hasn’t it?”
“Oh, yes. And some came back all right, or so they claimed, though I’ve heard they were never lucky afterward. And some didn’t; they vanished. And some who returned babbled of wonders and horrors, and stayed witlings the rest of their lives. Not for a long time has anybody been rash enough to break the pact and overtread the bounds.” Irons looked at Barbro almost entreatingly. His woman and children stared likewise, grown still. Wind hooted beyond the walls and rattled the storm shutters. “Don’t you.”
“I’ve reason to believe my son is there,” she answered.
“Yes, yes, you’ve told and I’m sorry. Maybe something can be done. I don’t know what, but I’d be glad to, oh, lay a double offering on Unvar’s Barrow this midwinter, and a prayer drawn in the turf by a flint knife. Maybe they’ll return him.” Irons sighed. “They’ve not done such a thing in man’s memory, though. And he could have a worse lot. I’ve glimpsed them myself, speeding madcap through twilight. They seem happier than we are. Might be no kindness, sending your boy home again.”
“Like in the Arvid song,” said his wife.
Irons nodded. “M-hm. Or others, come to think of it.”
“What’s this?” Sherrinford asked. More sharply than before, he felt himself a stranger. He was a child of cities and technics, above all a child of the skeptical intelligence. This family believed. It was disquieting to see more than a touch of their acceptance in Barbro’s slow nod.
“We have the same ballad in Olga Ivanoff Land,” she told him, her voice less calm than the words. “It’s one of the traditional ones — nobody knows who composed them — that are sung to set the measure of a ring-dance in a meadow.”
“I noticed a multilyre in your baggage, Mrs. Cullen,” said the wife of Irons. She was obviously eager to get off the explosive topic of a venture in defiance of the Old Folk. A songfest could help. “Would you like to entertain us?”
Barbro shook her head, white around the nostrils. The oldest boy said quickly, rather importantly, “Well, sure, I can, if our guests would like to hear.”
“I’d enjoy that, thank you.” Sherrinford leaned back in his seat and stoked his pipe. If this had not happened spontaneously, he would have guided the conversation toward a similar outcome.
In the past he had had no incentive to study the folklore of the outway, and not much chance to read the scanty references on it since Barbro brought him her trouble. Yet more and more he was becoming convinced that he must get an understanding — not an anthropological study, but a feel from the inside out — of the relationship between Roland’s frontiersmen and those beings which haunted them.
A bustling followed, rearrangement, settling down to listen, coffee cups refilled and brandy offered on the side. The boy explained, “The last line is the chorus. Everybody join in, right?” Clearly he too hoped thus to bleed off some of the tension. Catharsis through music? Sherrinford wondered, and added to himself: No; exorcism.
A girl strummed a guitar. The boy sang, to a melody which beat across the storm noise:
“It was the ranger Arvid
rode homeward through the hills
among the shadowy shiverleafs,
along the chiming rills.
The dance weaves under the firethorn.
“The night wind whispered around him
with scent of brok and rue.
Both moons rose high above him
and hills aflash with dew.
The dance weaves under the firethron.
“And dreaming of that woman
who waited in the sun,
he stopped, amazed by starlight,
and so he was undone.
The dance weaves under the firethorn.
“For there beneath a barrow
that bulked athwart a moon,
the Outling folk were dancing
in glass and golden shoon.
The dance weaves under the firethorn.
“The Outling folk were dancing
like water, wind, and fire
to frosty-ringing harpstrings,
and never did they tire.
The dance weaves under the firethorn.
“To Arvid came she striding
from whence she watched the dance,
the Queen of Air and Darkness,
with starlight in her glance.
The dance weaves under the firethorn.
“With starlight, love, and terror
in her immortal eye,
the Queen of Air and Darkness —”
“No!” Barbro leaped from her chair. Her fists were clenched and tears flogged her cheekbones. “You can’t — pretend that — about the things that stole Jimmy!”
She fled from the chamber, upstairs to her guest bedroom.
But she finished the song herself. That was about seventy hours later, camped in the steeps where rangers dared not fare.
She and Sherrinford had not said much to the Irons family, after refusing repeated pleas to leave the forbidden country alone. Nor had they exchanged many remarks at first as they drove north. Slowly, however, he began to draw her out about her own life. After a while she almost forgot to mourn, in her remembering of home and old neighbors. Somehow this led to discoveries — that he, beneath his professorial manner, was a gourmet and a lover of opera and appreciated her femaleness; that she could still laugh and find beauty in the wild land around her — and she realized, half guiltily, that life held more hopes than even the recovery of the son Tim gave her.
“I’ve convinced myself he’s alive,” the detective said. He scowled. “Frankly, it makes me regret having taken you along, I expected this would be only a fact-gathering trip, but it’s turning out to be more. If we’re dealing with real creatures who stole him, they can do real harm. I ought to turn back to the nearest garth and call for a plane to fetch you.”
“Like bottommost hell you will, mister,” she said. “You need somebody who knows outway conditions, and I’m a better shot than average.”
“M-m-m… it would involve considerable delay too, wouldn’t it? Besides the added distance, I can’t put a signal through to any airport before this current burst of solar interference has calmed down.”
Next “night” he broke out his remaining equipment and set it up. She recognized some of it, such as the thermal detector. Other items were strange to her, copied to his order from the advanced apparatus of his birthworld. He would tell her little about them. “I’ve explained my suspicion that the ones we’re after have telepathic capabilities,” he said in apology.
Her eyes widened. “You mean it could be true, the Queen and her people can read minds?”
“That’s part of the dread which surrounds their legend, isn’t it? Actually there’s nothing spooky about the phenomenon. It was studied and fairly well defined centuries ago, on Earth. I dare say the facts are available in the scientific microfiles at Christmas Landing. You Rolanders have simply had no occasion to seek them out, any more than you’ve yet had occasion to look up how to build power-beamcasters or spacecraft.”
“Well, how does telepathy work, then?”
Sherrinford recognized that her query asked for comfort as much as it did for facts, and he spoke with deliberate dryness: “The organism generates extremely long-wave radiation which can, in principle, be modulated by the nervous system. In practice, the feebleness of the signals and their low rate of information transmission make them elusive, hard to detect and measure. Our prehuman ancestors went in for more reliable senses, like vision and hearing. What telepathic transceiving we do is marginal at best. But explorers have found extraterrestrial species that got an evolutionary advantage from developing the system further, in their particular environments. I imagine such species could include one which gets comparatively little direct sunlight — in fact, appears to hide from broad day. It could even become so able in this regard that, at short range, it can pick up man’s weak emissions and make man’s primitive sensitivities resonate to its own strong sendings.”
“That would account for a lot, wouldn’t it?” Barbro said faintly.
“I’ve now screened our car by a jamming field,” Sherrinford told her, “but it reaches only a few meters past the chassis. Beyond, a scout of theirs might get a warning from your thoughts, if you knew precisely what I’m trying to do. I have a well-trained subconscious which sees to it that I think about this in French when I’m outside. Communication has to be structured to be intelligible, you see, and that’s a different enough structure from English. But English is the only human language on Roland, and surely the Old Folk have learned it.”
She nodded. He had told her his general plan, which was too obvious to conceal. The problem was to make contact with the aliens, if they existed. Hitherto, they had only revealed themselves, at rare intervals, to one or a few backwoodsmen at a time. An ability to generate hallucinations would help them in that. They would stay clear of any large, perhaps unmanageable expedition which might pass through their territory. But two people, braving all prohibitions, shouldn’t look too formidable to approach. And… this would be the first human team which not only worked on the assumption that the Outlings were real, but possessed the resources of modern, off-planet police technology.
Nothing happened at that camp. Sherrinford said he hadn’t expected it would. The Old Folk seemed cautious this near to any settlement. In their own lands they must be bolder.
And by the following “night,” the vehicle had gone well into yonder country. When Sherrinford stopped the engine in a meadow and the car settled down, silence rolled in like a wave.
They stepped out. She cooked a meal on the glower while he gathered wood, that they might later cheer themselves with a campfire. Frequently he glanced at his wrist. It bore no watch — instead, a radio-controlled dial, to tell what the instruments in the bus might register.
Who needed a watch here? Slow constellations wheeled beyond glimmering aurora. The moon Alde stood above a snowpeak, turning it argent, though this place lay at a goodly height. The rest of the mountains were hidden by the forest that crowded around. Its trees were mostly shiverleaf and feathery white plumablanca, ghostly amidst their shadows. A few firethorns glowed, clustered dim lanterns, and the underbrush was heavy and smelled sweet. You could see surprisingly far through the blue dusk. Somewhere nearby, a brook sang and a bird fluted.
“Lovely here,” Sherrinford said. They had risen from their supper and not yet sat down again or kindled their fire.
“But strange,” Barbro answered as low. “I wonder if it’s really meant for us. If we can really hope to possess it.”
His pipestem gestured at the stars. “Man’s gone to stranger places than this.”
“Has he? I… oh, I suppose it’s just something left over from my outway childhood, but do you know, when I’m under them I can’t think of the stars as balls of gas, whose energies have been measured, whose planets have been walked on by prosaic feet. No, they’re small and cold and magical; our lives are bound to them; after we die, they whisper to us in our graves.” Barbro glanced downward. “I realize that’s nonsense.”
She could see in the twilight how his face grew tight. “Not at all,” he said. “Emotionally, physics may be a worse nonsense. And in the end, you know, after a sufficient number of generations, thought fellows feeling. Man is not at heart rational. He could stop believing the stories of science if those no longer felt right.”
He paused. “That ballad which didn’t get finished in the house,” he said, not looking at her. “Why did it affect you so?”
“I couldn’t stand hearing them, well, praised. Or that’s how it seemed. Sorry for the fuss.”
“I gather the ballad is typical of a large class.”
“Well, I never thought to add them up. Cultural anthropology is something we don’t have time for on Roland, or more likely it hasn’t occurred to us, with everything else there is to do. But — now you mention it, yes, I’m surprised at how many songs and stories have the Arvid motif in them.”
“Could you bear to recite it?”
She mustered the will to laugh. “Why, I can do better than that if you want. Let me get my multilyre and I’ll perform.”
She omitted the hypnotic chorus line, though, when the notes rang out, except at the end. He watched her where she stood against moon and aurora.
“— the Queen of Air and Darkness
cried softly under sky:
“‘Light down, you ranger Arvid,
and join the Outling folk.
You need no more be human,
which is a heavy yoke.’
“He dared to give her answer:
‘I may do naught but run.
