Lore of Witch World (Witch World Collection of Stories) (Witch World Series)
Read Lore of Witch World (Witch World Collection of Stories) (Witch World Series) Online
Authors: Andre Norton
“The world has changed
since the Sulcar ruled the waves about the oceans. They were fighters and fighting men get killed. The Kolder they fought, and they blew up Sulcarkeep in that fighting, taking the enemy—but also too many of their own—on into the Great Secret. Karsten they fought, and they were at the taking of Gorm, aye. Then they patrolled against the sea wolves of Alizon.
“Now if they take a ship out of the harbor they do it with others besides just their kin to raise sails and set the course.
“Now, let us to business between us, girl. I have learned much about you. You have some of the Talents of the Wise Women. You yourself said it—if any can treat with those devil females of Usturt, it must be one such as you. The whole land is hard pressed now for any who hold even a scrap of the Power. .. “
Also By Andre Norton
Garan The Eternal
Gryphon In Glory
High Sorcery
Horn Crown
Iron Butterflies
Merlin’s Mirror
Moon Called
Moon Mirror
Octagon Magic
Red Hart Magic
Sargasso Of Space
Snow Shadow
Spell Of The Witch World
Stand To Horse
The Gate Of The Cat
The Jargoon Pard
The Prince Commands
The Sword Is Drawn
Trey Of Swords
Velvet Shadows
Wheel Of Stars
Yurth Burden
Zarsthor’s Bane
Wizard Worlds
LORE
OF
THE
WITCH
WORLD
Andre Norton
Premier Digital Publishing - Los Angeles
C
OPYRIGHT
©, 1980,
BY
A
NDRE
N
ORTON.
All Rights Reserved.
eISBN: 978-1-937957-43-8
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
by C. J. Cherryh
Writing an introduction for one of Andre Norton's books is rather like applying gilt to a lily, superfluity to be sure. When I was offered the chance to do it, I first thought it was impossible and then sat down to try, and then began to think of thousands of readers who would
love
to get a line in . . . to say some things that want saying; things I don't think can be said too often, ever.
About the Witch World stories: For all of us who've ever created a world to dream about, for those of us who write and for those who keep theirs in their hearts . . . the Witch World stories hold a special place. It's a land, a world, a place of dark shadows and alien powers and human beings touched with strangeness, a place where men and women find extraordinary things within them, and match themselves against an environment at once marvelously detailed and full of mysteries. The Witch World is never explored. The smallest valley holds strange happenings and a past which reaches into things stranger still. The traveler finds the unexpected, the ancient, the bizarre at every turn. Nature is powerful here and those who open their hearts to it and to living things find themselves capable of marvels and involved in an old, old warfare. One meets old friends here, and hears of them; finds remnants of eldritch powers and visitants; finds . . . if one looks . . . ancient truths about courage and honesty and duty that involve the highborn and the ordinary, the young and the old, humans and the four-footed kind all in one fabric of magic and mystery.
The Witch World both lies within a tradition and generates a tradition of its own. It comes of that mythic tradition out of which comes Homer's wine-dark and fantastically mapped Mediterranean, peopled with gods and strange powers, which other heroes went on to sail in their turn, because it was a Place and a Time which had to exist; and which made heroes out of men and women of unlikely sort, because they met the unknown with
why
?
and
what if
?
and
why not
?
The Witch World is one of those places a reader lives in, and some of those readers have become writers, and writers who never quite forget their journey in that ever-surprising and yet strangely familiar terrain. A lot of us who create worlds, whether we write them or dream them secretly, owe a great deal to this place, for its completeness, its way of underlaying daily life with the fantastical, its way of seeing vast forces implicit in the smallest and humblest things.
If the Witch World had never been written, so many other worlds would be the poorer.
And that brings me to Andre Norton herself.
There's been a great deal of fuss about women entering the science fiction field lately. Oh, no. Not lately. Andre Norton has been there, long before, doing things her way. I did some checking on publication dates and I was stunned to realize that Andre was publishing in this field the year this writer was a knobby-kneed kid in the third grade, struggling to get a bicycle home in what (to that third-grader) was the blizzard of the century . . . and I was too young to read the stories then, myself not one of the youngest of this crop who keeps getting asked about “women breaking into the field.” . . . Andre's been there, writing her stories.
That skinned-knee kid with the pigtails didn't meet Andre Norton until 1977, although we'd corresponded a bit, because Andre out of the goodness of her heart did the introduction for my first book, which is one reason why I'd fight tigers to get the chance at this introduction. She asked me,
me
,
the stranger from Oklahoma, to drop in on her to visit after Worldcon; and when that occasion turned into the chance for me to bring her the Gandalf Award she'd won from the World Convention for Life's Achievement in Fantasy—oh, I was delighted! For one thing, I figured that had to at least win me a welcome at the door. When I showed up at Andre's door and had a time to catch my breath I found myself with one of those people who do kindnesses as if it were nature's most logical process, who is on the side of good books and living things, who has the kind of definite ideas about what's right and what's just that might be expected of the creator of worlds where people stand by each other.
I
like
Andre Norton. I knew that from the start.
And when people sit down and start talking about how they got into this field in the first place, what writers were responsible for leading them deeper and deeper into that attitude we call sense of wonder, and which has to do with being really
alive
to this universe and all the possibilities of it—that most precious gift of learning how to see what we look at—Andre Norton's name is one that always comes to the front.
What has Andre Norton done for this field? She's written for all ages; she's been the gateway through which so, so many of us have come into this field in the first place. She created
women
who did things, such as Jaelithe, and she sparked imagination in a host of young minds who had rarely seen such a thing; she created heroes who were more than strong, and touched the hearts of countless young people who could never be quite the same afterward. There's a special look that comes into the eyes of these folk when they talk about Andre Norton, and you know full well that she has a very special place in their hearts, forever; that Andre's books are the ones they're going to put into the hands of their own sons and daughters and say with that special, waited-for hope: “I think you might like this. It's good.” There's hardly a gift one can give another so precious as something that wakes us to what we call sense of wonder. That's what Andre's work has done for so very many of us. She's special. She's one of those talents without which this field would be inestimably the poorer. She reminds me curiously enough of John Wayne: a quiet person with strong convictions, who never much goes with fads but does things her way, whose style is her own, and who has shot straight and told the truth and given a lot of readers, young and old, a marvelous sense of heroism possible in their own lives, because it's right there pointed out to us what great possibilities there are, what great hearts in unlikely frames, what grand adventures likely for those who see their world with sense of wonder!
She writes. And the thing she does for this field has woven itself through so many lives that that influence keeps traveling. She's vexingly modest and deprecates such notions, but they're
true
,
Andre! And I'm glad to have gotten the chance to say them. Thank you Andre, for being there, for making worlds, for opening up so much of wonder to us. . . .
I
get to say it; but I say it for so many others. Thank you.