The Broken Sword (2 page)

Meanwhile she was proud and glad of her son, and sang to him as her mother had to her-

Lullaby, my little bird, of all birds the very best!

Hear the gently lowing herd. Now the sun is in the west

and ‘tis time that you should rest.

 

Lullaby, my little love, nodding sleepy on my breast.

See the evening star above rising from the hill’s green crest.

Now ‘tis time that you should rest.

 

Lullaby, my little one. You and I alike are blest.

God and Mary and their Son guard you, who are but their guest.

Now ‘tis time that you should rest.

Imric the elf-earl rode out by night to see what had happened in the lands of men. It was a cool spring dark with the moon nearly full, rime glittering on the grass and the stars still hard and bright as in winter. The night was very quiet save for sigh of wind in budding branches, and the world was all sliding shadows and cold white light. The hoofs of Imric’s horse were shod with an alloy of silver, and a high dear ringing went where they struck.

He rode into a forest. Night lay heavy between the trees, but from afar he spied a ruddy glimmer. When he came near, he saw it was firelight shining through cracks in a hut of mud and wattles under a great gnarly oak from whose boughs Imric remembered the Druids cutting mistletoe. He could sense that a witch lived here, so he dismounted and rapped on the door.

A woman who seemed old and bent as the tree opened it and saw him where he stood, the broken moonlight sheening off helm and byrnie and his horse, which was the colour of mist, cropping the frosty grass behind him.

“Good evening, mother,” said Imric.

“Let none of you elf-folk call me mother, who have borne tall sons to a man,” grumbled the witch. But she let him in and hastened to pour him a horn of ale. Belike what crofters dwelt nearby kept her in food and drink as payment for what small magics she could do for them. Imric must stoop inside the hovel and clear away a litter of bones and other trash ere he could sit on the single bench.

He looked at her through the strange slant eyes of the elves, all cloudy-blue without whites or a readily seen pupil. There were little moon-flecks drifting in Imric’s eyes, and shadows of ancient knowledge, for he had dwelt long in the land. But he was ever youthful, with the broad forehead and high cheekbones, the narrow jaw and straight thin-chiselled nose of the elf lords. His hair floated silvery-gold, finer than spider silk, from beneath his horned helmet down to the wide red-caped shoulders.

“Not often of late lifetimes have the elves gone forth among men,” said the witch.

“Aye, we have been too busy in our war with the trolls,” answered Imric in his voice that was like a wind blowing through trees far away. “But now truce has been made, and I am curious to find what has happened in the last hundred years.”

“Much, and little of it good,” said the witch. “The Danes have come from overseas, killing, looting, burning, seizing for themselves much of eastern England and I know not what else.”

“That is not bad.” Imric stroked his moustache. “Before them, Angles and Saxons did likewise, and before them Picts and Scots, and before them the Romans, and before them Brythons and Goidels, and before them-but the tale is long and long, nor will it end with the Danes. And I, who have watched it almost since the land was made, see naught of harm in it, for it helps pass the time. I would fain see these newcomers.”

“Then you need not ride far,” said the witch, “for Orm the Strong dwells on the coast, distant from here by the ride of a night. Or less on a mortal horse.”

“A short trip for my stallion. I will go.”

“Hold-hold, elf!” For a while the witch sat muttering, and her eyes caught what light came from the tiny fire on the hearth, so that two red gleams moved amidst the smoke and shadows. Then of a sudden she cackled in glee and screamed, “Aye, ride, ride, elf, to Orm’s house by the sea. He is gone a-roving, but his wife will guest you gladly. She has newly brought forth a son, who is not yet christened.”

At these words Imric cocked his long, pointed ears forward. “Speak you sooth, witch?” he asked, low and toneless.

“Aye, by Sathanas I swear it. I have my ways of knowing what goes on in that accursed hall.” The old woman rocked to and fro, squatting in her rags before the dim coals. The shadows chased each other across the walls, huge and misshapen. “But go see for yourself.”

“I would not venture to take a Dane-chiefs child. He might be under the Asir’s ward.”

“Nay. Orm is a Christian, though an indifferent one, and his son has thus far been hallowed to no gods of any kind.”

“Ill is it to lie to me,” Imric said.

“I have naught to lose,” answered the witch. “Orm burned my sons in their house, and my blood dies with me. I do not fear gods or devils, elves or trolls of men. But ‘tis truth I speak.”

“I will go see,” said Imric, and stood up. The rings of his byrnie chimed together. He swept his great red cloak around him, went forth and swung on to the white stallion.

Like a rush of wind and a blur of moonlight he was out of the woods and across the fields. Widely stretched the land, shadowy trees, bulking hills, rime-whitened meadows asleep under the moon. Here and there a steading huddled dark beneath the vast star-crusted sky. Presences moved in the night, but they were not men-he caught a wolf-howl, the green gleam of a wildcat’s eyes, the scurry of small feet among oak roots. They were aware of the elf-earl’s passage and shrank deeper into the gloom.

Erelong Imric reached Orm’s garth. The barns and sheds and lesser houses were of rough-hewn timbers, walling in three sides of a stone-paved yard. On the fourth, the hall raised its gable ends, carved into dragons, against the star clouds. But Imric sought the small lady-bower across from it. Dogs had smelled him, bristled and snarled. Then before they could bark he had turned his terrible blind-seeming gaze on them and made a sign. They crawled off, barely whimpering.

He rode like a wandering night-wind up to the bower. By his arts he unshuttered a window from without, and looked through. Moonlight shafted over a bed, limning Ailfrida in silver and a cloudiness of unbound hair. But Imric’s gaze was only for the new-born babe nestled against her.

The elf-earl laughed behind the mask of his face. He closed the shutters and rode back northward. Ailfrida moved, woke, and felt after the little one beside her. Her eyes were hazed with uneasy dreams.

In those days the Faerie folk still dwelt upon earth, but even then a strangeness hung over their holdings, as if these wavered halfway between the mortal world and another; and places which might at a given time appear to be a simple lonely hill or lake or forest would at another time gleam forth in eldritch splendour. Hence those northern highlands known as the elf-hills were shunned by men.

Imric rode toward Elfheugh, which he saw not as a tor but as a castle tall and slender-spired, having gates of bronze and courtyards of marble, the corridors and rooms within hung with the loveliest shifty-patterned tapestries of magic weave and crusted with great blazing gems. In the moonlight the dwellers were dancing on the green before the outer walls. Imric rode by, through ,the main portal. His horse’s hoofbeats echoed hollowly, and dwarf thralls hurried forth to attend him. He swung to the ground and hastened into the keep.

There the light of many tapers was broken into a flowing, tricky dazzle of colours by mosaics gilt and bejewelled. Music breathed through the chambers, rippling harps and keening pipes and flutes with voices like mountain brooks. Patterns in the rugs and tapestries moved slowly, like live figures. The very walls and floors, and the groined ceiling in its blue twilight of height, had a quicksilveriness about them; they were never the same and yet one could not say just how they changed.

Imric went down a staircase. His byrnie clinked in the stillness. Of a sudden it grew dark about him, save for the rare light of a torch, and the air of the inner earth filled his lungs with chill. Now and again a clash of metal or a wail resounded through the wet rough-hewn corridors. Imric paid no need. Like all elves, he moved as a cat does, swift and silent and easy, down into the dungeons.

Finally he stopped at a door of brass-barred oak. It was green with mould and dark with age, and only Imric had the keys to the three big locks. These he undid, muttering certain words, and swung back the door. It groaned, for three hundred years had gone by since last he opened it.

A woman of the troll race sat in the cell beyond. She wore only the bronze chain, heavy enough to anchor a ship, which fastened her by the neck to the wall. Light from a torch ensconced outside the door fell dimly on her huge squat mighty-muscled form. She had no hair, and the green skin moved on her bones. As she turned her hideous head toward Imric, her snarl showed wolf teeth. But her eyes were empty, two pools of blackness in which a soul could drown. For nine hundred years she had been Irene’s captive, and she was mad.

The elf-earl looked at her, though not into her eyes. He said softly, “We are to make a changeling again, Gora.”

The troll-woman’s voice was like a thunder, slowly rolling from the deeps of the earth. “Oho, oho,” she said, “he is here again. Be welcome, whoever you are, you out of night and chaos. Ha, will none wipe the sneer off the face of the cosmos?”

“Hurry,” said Imric. “I must make the change ere dawn.”

“Hurry and hurry, autumn leaves hurrying on the rainy wind, snow hurrying out of the sky, life hurrying to death, gods hurrying to oblivion.” The troll-woman’s crazy voice boomed down the corridors. “All ashes, dust, blown on a senseless wind, and only the mad can gibber the music of the spheres. Ha, the red cock on the dunghill!”

Imric took a whip from the wall and lashed her. She cowered and lay down. Quickly, because he liked not the slippy clammy cold of her flesh, he did what was needful. Thereafter he walked nine times widdershins about her where she squatted, singing a song no human throat could have formed. As he sang, the troll-woman shook and swelled and moaned in pain, and when he had gone the ninth time around she screamed so that it hurt his ears, and she brought forth a man-child.

The form could not by a human eye be told from Orm Dane-chief’s son, save that it howled wrathfully and bit at its mother. Imric tied the cord and took the body in his arms, where it lay quiet.

“The world is flesh dissolving off a skull,” mumbled the troll-woman. She clanked her chain and lay back, shuddering. “Birth is but the breeding of maggots therein. Already the skull’s teeth stand forth uncovered by lips, and crows have left its eyesockets empty. Soon wind will blow through all the bones.” She howled as Imric closed the door. “He is waiting for me, he is waiting on the hill where the mist blows ragged, for nine hundred years has he waited. The black cock crows-”

Imric locked the door anew and hastened up the stairs. He had no joy in making changelings, but the chance of getting a human baby was too rare to lose.

***

When he came out into the courtyard he saw that bad weather was brewing. A wrack of clouds drove across heaven, blacknesses from which the moon fled. Mountainous in the east, with runes of lighting scribbled across, a storm stood on the horizon. Wind hooted and howled.

Imric sprang to the saddle and spurred his horse south. Over the crags and hills they went, across dales and between trees that writhed in the rising gale. The moon cast fitful white gleams across the world, and Imric showed as another such phantom.

He raced with his cloak blowing like bat wings. Moonlight glittered on his mail and his eyes. As he rode along the strands of the lower, flatter Danelaw country, surf clashed at his feet and spray blew on to his cheeks. Now and again a lightning flash showed that waste of running waters. Thunder bawled ever louder in the darkness that followed, boom and bang of great wheels across the sky. Imric urged his horse to yet wilder speed. He had no wish to meet Thor out here in the night.

At Orm’s garth he reopened Ailfrida’s window. She was awake, holding her child to her breast and whispering comfort to him. The wind blew her hair around her face, blinding her. She would suppose it had somehow unlatched the shutters.

Lightning burst white. The thunder that went with it was a hammer-blow. She felt the baby leave her arms. She snatched for him, and felt the dear weight once more, as if it had been kid there. “God be thanked,” she gasped. “I dropped you but I caught you.”

***

Laughing aloud, Imric rode homeward. But of a sudden he heard his laughter echoed through the noise by a different sound; and he reined in with his breast gone cold. A last break in the clouds cast a moonbeam on the figure which galloped across Imric’s path. A bare glimpse he had, seated on his plunging steed, of the huge eight-legged horse that outran the wind, its rider with the long grey beard and shadowing hat. The moonbeam gleamed on the head of a spear and on a single eye.

Hoo, halloo, there he went with his troop of dead warriors and howling hounds. His horn called them; the hoofbeats were like a rush of hail on a roof; and then the pack was gone and rain came raving over the world.

Imric’s mouth grew tight. The Wild Hunt boded no good to those who saw it, and he did not think the one-eyed Huntsman had merely chanced this near to him. But-he must get home now. Lightning seethed around him, and Thor might take a fancy to throw his hammer at anyone abroad. Imric held Orm’s son in his cloak and struck spurs into his stallion.

Ailfrida could see again, and clutched the yelling boy close to her. He should be fed, if only to quiet him. He suckled her, but bit until it hurt.

Skafloc, Imric named the stolen child, and gave him to his sister Leea to nurse. She was as beautiful as her brother, with thinly graven ivory features, unbound silvery-gold tresses afloat beneath a jewelled coronet, and the same moon-flecked twilight-blue eyes as he. Spider-silk garments drifted about her slenderness, and when she danced in the moonlight it was as a white flame to those who watched. She smiled on Skafloc with pale full lips, and the milk that she brought forth by no natural means was sweet fire in his mouth and veins.