Ursus of Ultima Thule (16 page)

Swans flying, long and melancholy their trumpet sounds. Elk trample through the breast-high snow. The hunting cry of the great white ounce, the leopard of the snow. Deep in their nests the snow-white ermine lifted their heads. Somewhere in the snow, the ptarmigan, couching in cold, white upon white, lifted their wings and beat them as they rose upon the snowy air, like a flurry of snowflakes. Mered-delfin made signs to the Orfas-King. Pale as snow, the queen sat upright, alert, silent. Somewhere a milk-white hare made faint tracks in the soft white snow. “Yet another hour or so,” muttered the wolf-king. He was loathe to show himself as yet. It was not his hour of the day.

Soon enough his hour would be. The dead bear would be dragged forth and flayed; flayed, the dead boy inside. Let all the people see, let all hope die forever within them that any rule in all of Thule was to be expected save from the House of the Wolf. And then let the long-waiting, long watching, long steadfast, suffering guardians be released from watch and ward. And let them ravage, ravish, break, burn, and bare away. Let all of Thule take heed, let not for a single day, henceforth, suffer any pretender to the vulpine throne.

Mered-delfin made signs to King Orfas. The queen, too, turned her head. “What sounds are these?” she asked. Mered-delfin made signs to his liege and lord the king. “Sounds?” groaned the king. “What …?” He lifted his head. Watched. Hearkened. Many people were now coming. Who had summond them? Who had given orders — Mered-delfin made signs, lifted hands before mouth. “What? Horn? Calling? Who gave orders? Sounding … what horn? No order did I give, and no horn have I heard. Only — ” He lifted a hand for silence which did not altogether come, his face was strained, intent. “ — only this wind do I hear, and — ”

Wind, if wind it was, sounding very strange indeed. He scowled his bewilderment, his concentration. There were many things in that wind, indeed, and many images gathered suddenly in his mind in swift confusion. He seemed to hear the trumpeting of swans, and the bugling of elk, the coughing bark of the snow-white ounce; he seemed to see the ermine lifting their heads like serpents, amid flurries of snowflakes which were simultaneously snowbirds — “Out!” he said, low-voiced, abrupt, more than merely urgent: “out — out — have them take me out of this —
Out!
What delay is this?
Out
and
out
, or — ”

Oh, how many of the folk were now there, standing in the snow! How the kingsmen turned their heads this way and that, unsure if they should maintain their attention as it had been all this while, or if their spearheads should now at once face the multitude of the townsfolk: and meanwhile and at the same time, what winds were these, what sounds, what witcheries?

The litter-bed of King Orfas came swiftly from his tent-house, and the bearers bore down in one straight line for the very center of the encircling guards and watchfires. The guardsmen closed in without present word or order round the figure of their lord. And the people closed in close all around the guards. And so they all — king and king’s household and king’s guards and king’s subjects — closed in from all sides round about that old crook tree: and while the litter-bed of the king was but a few paces away therefrom, the snow at the base of the tree seemed to boil up from between the roots and in one second more, so swiftly that no eye saw the several steps which must have preceded it, there stood there confronting the king, gaunt but huge and with eyes blazing red with rage and arms upraised and talons poised to rake and with teeth and tusk bared to tear —

“The Bear!”
all voices cried aloud with one voice. “Not dead, not dead, but risen living from the bear-death, returned hither from the depths below and from the World of the Deads as ever does the true Bear. “
The Bear!”
rose one great cry from many throats. For the length of that first flurry in which snow fell up instead of down and for the length of that one shout
“The Bear!”
all stood as though painted on a hide: King: kingsmen: folk: Bear.

And then the scene dissolved into a thousand fragments, and some were fleeing and some had fallen, as though some had gone down into the snow to make obeisance as one does before a king, and as though some of sudden terror and fright had fallen dead; and there was blood, red blood, upon the trodden white blanket of the snow: but as to whose blood it was, or how it had been shed or who had shed it or why: none paused to ask or seek.

Sometimes the howling of wolves was heard, now nearer and now farther; sometimes the white elks lifted up their snowy heads and spoke to each other, drawing closer, but not fearfully, before any of the men could hear the other sounds. The white elk had been waiting for them in a wide bare place in the forest, a quarter-day’s journey from the township, as the four of them fled: one bear-man, one dead-man, one witchery-man, and one for whom as yet no name had been devised, except the one already his — Corm.

“I had told the tallys in my tallybag,” said Bab witch-uncle; “I counted the notches cut into other sticks by me. I watched the moon and the wheeling stars, and the angle of the sun’s shadows day by day.

“But of course, not I alone did these things. Orfas had powerful witchery in his own tent-house. My calculating showed that a good several days yet remained before we could or should suspect to see thee stir — ”

Whisper after whisper, snow sliding from tree limb, snow falling from elk-hoof and fetlock, snow blowing from one drift to another. “Thee might never have seen me stir at all,” said Arnten, his mouth and face passing swiftly from wonder to grimness to gladness to wonder again; “had not Corm summoned me by All-Caller,” and his eye and every eye went to the great fey horn, swinging in its cover-case of dull red leather against Corm’s side.

Some tinge of that same color came to Corm’s face. “It bade me do so,” he said, almost faintly. “It spoke to me in clear tones by night and it murmured to me by day. But I feared … till that time just a while before the king and all his folk went rushing out, came a wind, a great wind rushing, and I heard the horn say
Sound me
and I heard the Bear say
Summon me …

“It seemed to me, as I lifted it, heavy and fearful to my lips, as I held it, fearful and heavy at my lips, it seemed to me as my lips trembled and my hands faltered and my fingers fumbled in trying to turn the setting so that I should summon and sound well and call aright, it seemed to me as first my breath sooned in it when first I wound that great fey horn, oh! — that I did hear all manner of creature of sea and air and land, and I struggled, lest I call them all — ”

Roke rubbed one hand, which was still slow to full mending, and said, soft, “It is called by name, All-Caller.”

“Surely thee called the wolf,” said Bab, “else why rushed he there so soon? But,” — seeing that Corm looked abashed, the dark old man, sunk and huddled in his many furs, reached out a hand all gloved in mitt and patted the youngest of the four — “but no matter, that: In fact, twas well, to that: twas good indeed and well indeed that the wolf did see the triumph of the Bear. How so many folk fled so fast,” the old witcherer said, all in mild wonder, nowise gloating. And the snow-whispers sounded as he paused.

Roke rumbled, “And of full surety thee did call the elk. Who did ever see elk so near to mendwelling? Who did ever see even two white elk together, nay, and there we saw four! And who has ever heard, when twas not story-telling time, that elk should kneel for men to mount?”

Arnten’s rumble, containing agreement without words, was deeper than Roke’s. Out of the dark depths of the bearsleep he had heard All-Caller, heard it as his father’s voice:
Arnten! awake! Awake! The wolf and carrion-crow are at thee — awake! awake! Arise!
All the voices of the wild world sounding simultaneously in his ears behind his father’s voice, he hearing the sky-trumpet of the swans, the cough of the snowy ounce, wild horses screaming, the fury of the mammont and the chirp and chatter of small bird and bark and bellow of sea-creature, morse and seal, which he had never heard before but knew, but knew — heard also, as though laying bare and in intended concealment, heard the hungry howl of a sick yet still-fierce wolf —

Heard no crow.

Swam up, in fury, through the snow, lashing out at those he had wearily bent before, before the time of and on the way to the bearsleep: they now in full terror before him. Some bleeding, torn. Some falling face-forward before him, spared. Some, shrieking, ran. Kingsmen and townsmen: some, shrieking, ran; some falling face forward very soon before him. He heard the shriek of a frightened hare, the whimper of a sore-sick wolf. Turned to find
wolf
, turned to slay
wolf
, saw three men neither fleeing nor falling face forward before him, reared up against them, teeth and claws bared: heard them cry,
“Bear! We be yours! Bear.”
Saw and heard one of them give one last blast on one great horn —

Heard no crow.

Muttered, now, leaning forward against the snow-soft neck of the elk, “My father said, ‘Crow …’ ” He looked up, and saw a hawk swoop, saw it flurry, feint and pounce in the flurry of snow, saw it pause a moment and then, having missed, begin its ascent again. He whistled, and it paused and hung in the soft grey air. “Saw you any crow, swiftwings?” he called.

“Nay, no crow,” the hawk shreck down to him. “All have gone, me think, to rob the granaries and skim the stinking midden-heaps of men. No skulk, black form defouls sky or land, O get of the Bear.”

“Tis well, swiftwings.” His deep rumble-voice declined into his deep chest, the others looking at him, Roke and Corm in awe, Bab nodding as at the but expected. League after league they paced swiftly through the snow, the elk avoiding the deep-drifted places where even their nimble feet would flounder. “Tis well,” he repeated. “No crow: no spy.” They nodded, understanding now what the bird had said to him, and recollecting what he, Arnten, had told them of what he had realized of the spyings of the crow; all fitting into place with what Bab had told them of Mered-Delfin, Corby-Mered, who had the crow for his medicine-creature.

It was wolf weather, but they heard, they saw, no wolf. Only once were they sharply disturbed, in hastening at full pace towards their first destination, when, all slouching wearily against the necks of their elks towards the close of one day, Corm’s head lolled and then snapped upright — At his cry they all were at once alert, and called out to him.

“Did no one see it? Did I alone see it? Did I dream?”

“Ask no more, but tell instead: what made thee cry out?”

He seemed slow, fearful, reluctant to speak of it. Then, “What said the hawk to thee, Bear? Said he indeed,
No crow —
?”

Arnten, bear-man, son of the Bear, considered. His face still had somewhat of the gauntness which had marked his arise from foodless bearsleep, though he had eaten — it had seemed — full enough to make up for it. Perhaps it was but a certain sharpness which now lay upon him. His voice had deepened. He said, slow, “His word was, ‘
Nay, no crow … No skulk, black form defouls sky or land
’ was his word to me. And now your word to me, Corm-hornbearer?”

Corm answered his question with another. “Is there … has any heard … ever … could there be such a thing, for there be indeed white elk and white leopard, and ermine and … could there indeed be such a thing as a
white
crow?”

No one answered. But no one’s head lolled more. Each head gazed about, keenly at each snowy branch, slantly at each white-tufted treetop. And now and often each head was raised to try and pierce the secrets of the dull, concealing sky.

Only when they had paused, when the elk had found the sheltered and snowless side of some great thrust of rock, and knelt; only then, all dismounted and baggage laden off, twiggy branches gathered for resting place and small fire made; only when all had eaten and drunk the melted snow whose stale taste they now barely noticed, and sighed and composed themselves for sleep: only then did Bab speak.

“This time tomorrow should see us at Nainland,” he said. And he said, “I trust that we shall be safe there.”

• • •

The forges of Nainland were cold.

Uur-tenokh-tenokh-guur was greatly aged. His pelt was grizzled; his eyes, deep-sunken, seemed more often to gaze through them than at them. And, what Bab for one found most shocking, the old nain slouched and swayed slightly back and forth before them, slouched so that the backs of his knuckles rested on the ground. It was the openness of this stance which Bab found shocking, not the swaying, for many creatures swayed so at times. That nains did sometimes rest and sometimes even walk, slouching, so, knuckles on the ground, all men did know. In fact, from this and this alone came the evil nickname of
shamblenain
which was sometimes shouted in their direction with much mocking imitation by children … when the nains had certainly gone of out both eyesight and earshot. But it was unknown that nains or any nain would willingly act this in the presence of men, for they were, it was thought, as sensitive on this as the Painted Men were about seen by other men with unpainted skin.

“The forges of Nainland are cold,” murmured Uur-tenokh-tenokh-guur. “Some say, Forge cold iron, then — fools! Forge cold iron, then — fools! Men-fools, saying, Forge cold iron, then … spies of Orfas, eyes and ears of wolf-king …

“But you are safe here,” said Uur-tenokh-tenokh-guur, in the moment when Arnten was certain that the old chief smith did not see them at all, nor clearly wit that they were there. “You are safe enough here,” he said, clearly enough, looking at them full wittingly, though unsurprised. The sight of him, the nain-burr in his voice, the strong old smell of him, for a moment Arnten felt himself begin to sway, was born back in memory to his vile prisonment in the Wolf-king’s mines, smelled the burning of the bracken-fern which had been their sole bed, heard his father roaring as he held off the guards, having dropped him, then Arnten only, through the long scraped-at scape hole to safety — he, for at least one more minute or two still only Arnten, the Son of the Bear. He stilled himself. He was Arntenas-Arnten now: in the Old Tongue, in the witchery-language, Bear-Man-Son-of-the-Bear. Or, merely —
merely?
— he himself was now Arn. Bear.