Ursus of Ultima Thule (10 page)

Of course, pots had no light blue lids on them. Against the rim, outlined, stood the guards. His eyes swung around. The nain groaned gratefully between gulps. All about the rim the guards stood at equal intervals, weapons sticking up like fishnet sticks. But at one place there were a number of them grouped together. They moved and he saw that one of them had no spear, no club, seemed to be dressed differently. Dressed more.

The nain gave one last groan, looked enviously at the rest of the water in the pails, licked his mouth and bristles and put the flat of his huge hand between the boy’s shoulders below the yoke the nain had effortlessly lifted into place, gently shoved him on his way. The yoke grew lighter as he went from nain to nain. Presently he stood before his father. Arntat looked at him a moment with a dull gaze. His eyes were filmy. Then they saw the boy. A faint smile rested briefly on his haggard face. Suddenly the boy cried out, “I am sorry! I am sorry, Father, that I ever took away the bearskin!”

The yoke was lifted, the buckets put down. “I had set all things to
that
end,” his father said. “As for all
this
— it be our weird. Ah, water. Good.” He took the horn and dipped it full and raised his head as he raised the horn to his mouth and his eyes settled on something beyond. For a moment he did not move. Then his teeth clicked and rattled on the rim of the horn. Then he made sounds in his throat. And next he drank. But his eyes never moved.

A guard, perhaps thinking that they had been too long over the matter, approached — the expression on his face was part sneer and part fear. He gave a quick look over his shoulder and with his head motioned to another guard to follow. This first guard set his features for stern speech and gave the hand which held the club a shake or two. But what he was about to say went unsaid, as from above and beyond, a voice whose syllables the boy could not make out came floating on the air and echoed twice or more. The guard’s face twisted in his own effort to comprehend, then showed surprise — regret — relief. The guard turned away, turned back, spoke to the guard behind. And this one gave a quick look at the captive father and son, a quick look up and beyond. He shrugged. The two king’s men moved apart and drew themselves up in a stance of bravado and watchfulness.

Arntat let out a long breath. One hand groped for his son. The other then hung the horn-thong around the boy’s neck. A drop of water trickled from it, made a muddy wormtrack through the dust on his chest. Both hands found the yoke and lifted it as the boy bent to receive it. Both hands turned the boy around and told him, plain as words, to be on his way. Arnten went. He went several steps. He heard behind him the grunt and the thud as, rest over, toil returned to, the mattock struck the red-ore ground. Then he stopped and looked up, whither his father had looked, up to where the guards had looked. Nothing was there. His eyes, darting about, saw again the group of guards. They had just begun crossing over the rim and, as one by one they stepped out of sight, he saw once more the unarmed person among them, who paused upon the edge between earth and sky. Pausing for a moment and looking back, this person for an instant seemed to have raised wings poised for flight.

Wide-cut sleeves. A woman.

She vanished over the rim.

A blow caught him in the ribs, a rock fell and bounced. He dodged the second. It came from the guard who had desisted from striking him and his father before. But he had to move and turn his back and yet balance the yoke and the buckets, so he could not run. The third stone caught him. And so did the fourth.

• • •

When the thralls lay down their mattocks and began to load the broken ore into the barrows the first captain looked, saying nothing. Afterward he gestured to Arnten and Arntat. “You two — or you one and half” — the guards guffawed — “take the tools to the tunnel. The rest of you to the forge.” Two by two, the nains stooped and took up the barrow poles. Low at first like a mutter, then a rumble, as though the voices had descended from mouth to throat and chest; then so very high it seemed almost that they sang not at all as they padded along the curving path; and then cry after cry, as great wave after great wave breaking upon the rocks —

The guards could not ken the words, but the sound of the chant made them uneasy. They howled and mocked, they threw stones, small ones but vicious and thrown hard.

The tools were gathered and bundled together like great faggots of firewood. Father and son bowed their backs beneath their loads and turned their faces toward the tunnel. It was not the load that made Arntat tremble now, nor was it his last labor of the day that made him sweat and gasp. Unwilling, unwilling, slow, were his steps and he craned his neck at the darkening sky as though he would never see it again.

Beyond them the guards seemed to have been taken by a frenzy, stoning the nains and shouting and feinting at them with clubs and spears. But above all such noise the wild chant continued to be heard.

Sometimes the bigger Arn trudged back and forth in the tunnel, head stooped low — perhaps for safety, perhaps from apathy — hands against the sides as though at any moment he might push one or another of them aside. Sometimes he shambled on all his limbs, head weaving from side to side. But he was sitting motionless when the dry bracken rustled as it sometimes did, as though remembering when it was alive and yielding to each slight breeze. And a woman came in. She first saw the smaller Arn, and for just a moment the smooth composure of her face was disturbed — how curious, then, her expression! He moved at once to his father’s side and her face was as before. In a single motion, effortless, graceful, she seated herself, her legs tucked under, her hands resting in her lap. Son looked at father and he thought his father looked as though he had always been looking at her.

“Yet another son gotten, Ahaz-mazra,” she said. “And so much younger than the others.” She made a slight sound as if pleasantly relaxing from some not too onerous task and she said, “You will want to know about your other sons.”

Lips barely moving, he said, “Either they died or they made their peace. I can do them no good. Nor they me.”

Calmly: “You may do good for this one then,” she said.

This one
, crouching next to his father, was not much thinking how good could be done for him. Part of his mind was entranced by the appearance of her. Part of his mind scurried and searched, as a squirrel rousting nuts, for certain words his father had said — when? Long, long ago. When they were free.

‘
Tis nought to you what’s my-name-then
. But now he knew, his fullfather’s name then was Ahaz-mazra and if this woman knew it she had known him then. Her underdress, beneath which her feet were tucked, was all of blue. He had never seen so much cloth of blue before, blue was a precious color, a sky color, and he had heard more than one say that far-far-away at the farthermost edge of the world dwelt the Sky Gatherers and that all the blue in the world came from them, scarce, scarce, precious and beautiful blue: but his old uncle had said this was in no way true and that blue was made from an herb called woad; it did not flourish in Thule, was brought from the barbar-lands and traded for amber, weight for weight.

Ahaz-mazra. And not Arn.

My other begotten sons … made upon empty bearhide in lawful bedchamber
. Her sleeveless overdress was the whitest white he had ever seen, paler than the common pallor of barkcloth, and came to her knees. Round yoke and hem were broad and complex broider-work in several colors, flowers and leaves and thicket — something else which he could not quite determine and which peered out of the thicket. Around her neck was a rope of pieces of amber wrapped in golden wire. Her face was strong, serious, totally self-assured. Although she had come from the free, the outside world, she had come neither to triumph nor to condescend.
I have dabbled
. Why was that word in his mind? …
have dabbled
… Or should it be
dappled?
That made no sense. Yet the memory that went with the words was of his father’s face dappled by leaf shadows as he held for a passing moment a branch he presently threw upon the fire.
I have —

“I have done ill enough for him by getting him,” said his father now to the strange woman. Who said a strange, strange thing indeed.

“You may get him back with you whither you both came — on a ship already prepared in all things — at dawn tide three days hence,” she said. “You have only to renounce the curse on iron and to swear by your shadow and by his that it shall stay renounced. And you may even delay compliance to the last — when the third day’s sun comes up and shadows first appear — upon the very shore beside the ship.”

The sick, confused look, which had been absent since her entrance, now returned to the man’s face. He muttered, uncertainly, “The third day’s sun?”

“It is three days’ journey to where the boats are.”

He squinted, trying to resolve all into sense. Then he in one swift rush was on his feet and Arnten cried out and put his hands on his own head as though feeling the pain of his father’s crash into the tunnel top. But one or two fingers’ breadth away, the man’s head stayed, stooped. The woman had not moved. She did not even raise her eyes. And the man fell to a charging position, his eyes level with hers, his face very close to hers, his eyes now suffused with blood.

“Innahat — erex,” he cried, “ah, eh! Does that crow still live, that he has stolen all the wits of thee? ‘Wither we both came?’ ‘By ship?’ ‘Renounce the curse on iron?’ What babblement is this? From nowhere did we come by ship! No word of any curse on iron heard I ever till my cub here did mention it, before we fell into the nets of your long-tongued lord! ‘Swear by my shadow and by his?’ Eh, ah! By my shadow and by his, then — ”

• • •

More than once, after having returned in from out, Arnten had felt sickened and dizzied. The sun might have been the cause, beating as it did on him all day. Such a moment came upon him suddenly as he wondered what great oath his father was about to swear upon their twain shadows. He closed his eyes. He did not hear if the oath were sworn. He did hear the distant droning of the nains as they returned, as their voices rose suddenly and dropped again. The strange woman was now gone, he saw. He saw his father’s eyes were fixed on his and all manner of strange things he saw in them.

“Eh, ah, Bear! What odd thing we seed by yonder tunnel-mouth but two, or three! Howt did leap! A hare! Was’t an omen, eh?”

“I ken’t not, if omen ‘tiz,” another nain said. “But ‘twas as thee say, senior Aar-heved-heved-aar, a great puss-longears indeed, and would I’d a snare to catch she doe-hare, do she return — eh? — cub?”

For this other nain looked now at Arnten, who had stood up, although still dizzied, waving his hand, trying frantically to put a thought into words before the thought fled. “The hare came in!” he said, almost stammering. “The hare came in! What way she came in, would she not go out?”

The man put an arm around his son. The comforting nain-drone and nain musk surrounded them. The boy’s head drooped upon his father’s side. He felt weak and sore and hungry. Food would come. Words sang in his head and faint fires danced there.
Bee and salmon, wolf and bear
. A rough hand rested gently on him.
Tiger, lion, mole and hare
.

Fetters do not bind the moles.

And the nains see them
.

Aar-heved-heved-aar that night sent a youngster nain to search out the passage where the hare had run. Guards did not trust the lower levels at night, would not even if the nains were gone. Posts and watch fires were at pit mouth only. Even wind and rain could not drive the guards more than a few feet inside after full dark. The nain-senior knew this, but did not trust the slickskins as cowards any more than he trusted them as braves; he chose to lessen all risks. It was not true that nains had full vision in the dark, but in this wise their eyes were in between those of men and those of beasts. The younger nain reported that although the tunnel appeared to be a blind gut, yet it did not end clean. A huge pile of debris at one end seemed to show that it might not always have been a blind gut — that perhaps the roof had fallen in at one time. And, more than this, the younger nain had sought and found the scent of the hare and it had seemed to go on up the pile of detritus to its peak.

“But I clambered not after it,” he concluded.

“Wisely,” said the senior. “For though I be as much a-zeal as any to be gone from here, needless risks we must not take. It is man who is impetuous, but we nains do be deliberate, so — ”

“Feed the wizards.”

Aar-heved-heved-aar, true to his penultimate word, reflected. Then, “Eh, ah, Bear. Say thee well.”

“Feed the wizards!”

The nain-senior looked up at the man — for all his breadth, the nain was no taller than Arnten — and nodded his massive head. “That must be our aim, hard task though it be. It is the coming death of iron which has turned this king’s head mad and turned his hands against us all. His need be great. But is our need not greater? If he do die tonight and tomorrow we be told that we be free, what then? Iron be our life, without iron we be dead nains. ‘Tiz but the first step, getting gone from here. He will pursue we, but if he should not, what, eh? We do make the hoe, but we hoe not; we have traded iron and iron’s work for most our food. We make the spearhead, but we cast no spear. And if we will to eat in the woods, as the wild brawnes do — say, ah! — be not the wild brawnes a fitter match for us, be we not armed with iron?”