Ursus of Ultima Thule (23 page)

The Orfas looked at him with dull, glazed eyes.
“Iron dies,”
he muttered.
“Iron is the matter of the king, and as iron dies, so dies the king …”

The chief witcherer buzzed and squawked, caught the border of the king’s robes when his master made as though to lie down again, his eyes leaving the box of sand in which the other made his signs and drew his lines. At length, the Orfas, his face hot and sore with the red scruf which disfigured it and his hands and all his skin as well, the Orfas groaned and half-rose and called in a voice louder than his wont, but a ghost of his former voice. And from behind the reed curtain a voice answered.

“Call the queen,” the Orfas said, falling back upon his down pouches and his fleecy coverlets. “Call the queen … Aye, Mered, Mered, you weary me, and to what end, when there is but one end certain and that is that I must die? Well, call the queen, and let her interpret, if she can. And if not, let her comfort me … as much as any can. Aye. So,” his voice sank low, his eyes turned up. “Call the queen … call the queen … call the queen …”

• • •

The sun beat down upon the black spot which was last night’s campfire, but Bab slept on as though it were still night. The sun passed over Roke’s white skin but though it tarried it seemed not to burn that pale integument. The sun moved its beams along Corm’s sallow face and closed eyes, but the eyes did not open. Only Wendolin seemed to sense the sun. Wendolin muttered, lightly, as though asking some riddle in his sleep. Then his face twitched, and he sat bolt upright and gazed around in astonishment. He stooped after a moment and assayed the angle of the sun. “So,” he said. “Then he has disengaged himself from us. Well, is it not all the same to me? Let me then get me gone.” And he had half risen to his feet and his hands were still flat upon the ground and he frowned as he saw the others. Then he was up, and sighing, and smoothing his garments.

“All the same,” he said. “One way or one other way. Then, so, not the way which would mean leaving these here alone.” He sighed, he went and set his hand into the old Bab’s bundle and withdrew a handful of twigs dried with the leaves still on them and the flowers still in place. He found no flame in the fire and so he made fire a-fresh and then he set this withered bouquet against a coal and whirled it round his head and then he walked thrice round the circle in the whirling smoke, chanting his chant. Then he dropped the smoldering herbs and spat three times upon them. And then he picked them up and cast them into the fire and next he drew open his breeks and made his water upon the fire. And ere it had ceased to sizzle and to steam, the three others had sat them up and were looking round about in puzzlement indeed.

Then, “Where is Bear?” one asked.

“That indeed I know not,” said Wendolin, a trifle sadly. “But I know that no common sleep it was which held us all fast-bound here until almost noon, the time of no shadow. Had it reached till then — Well, I know not. But such a deep sleep … Who indeed knows the witchery of sleep better than the Bear? Eh?”

The eyes of the others met his own, met each other’s, fell. At length, said Roke, “Bear or no, huge or no, still he be but boy.”

And his old uncle nodded, and said, more than a trifle sadly, “It may be that his strength came upon him too swift, too soon. A happy childhood and a happy young manhood, he never had: but as a mere cub he was cast into a whirlpool, and he has yet to reach safe shore.”

And Corm said nothing, but his mouth settled and his hands reached for All-Caller and he placed the great fey horn to his lips and his cheeks swelled and his lips trembled —

But no sound came out. Helplessly, he offered it to Roke, a flush upon his cheek. But Roke shrank away from it. And then Bab and Wendolin examined it, and then one said, “Ah,” and one said, “Oh,” and from inside the huge horn which an huger aurochs had once born aloft through every forest in Farthest Thule they extracted a small wad or mass of fur or soft hair or —

“Then what is it?” asked Corm.

Roke gave it a fearful look, then his face cleared and he half-laughed. “Why, tis no witchery but just a jape of sorts,” he said, flinging aside his yellow hair to crane for a closer look. “I know it be but the scut of a hare: know ye not that, all?”

Wendolin and Bab nodded, but did not laugh. Corm chuckled, at first in relief, but his relief but echoed Roke’s; then puzzlement returned. “What means this, then?” he asked. “And where is your sister’s grandchild, old shaman? Did he bewitch us, true? And why? And what is it that we must do?”

There was a silence, and Roke laughed no more, but a color came and went in his skin and for a moment it left the Sign of the Bear outlined upon his scarred breast. “Do? Why — we must follow after and face him, then, and ask what it is he means, and what it is he do not mean: for if he mean to leave we lone and lorn in this Land of Thule, then we be but dead men, all, so long as we do tarry in this Land of Thule.”

No one said him nay. And then he spoke again, saying, “And I understand it not, but that I have already died once here, and before I die again, why, I will get me — somehow! — away from this fell Land of Thule.

“If so be that I must swim across the all-circling sea myself.”

• • •

And later they came to an oval-shaped greensward with a bald of sand in about the center of the lower part of it and this had been much scratched with a stick, it seemed. And at the sight of this both Bab and Wendolin uttered short cries, stilled at once, and they squatted by this bit of sand, and muttered and made witcheries and waved the scut of the hare to the six directions: then Wendolin crouched over and blew and blew, gently, so, so, so, he gently blew, and grain by grain the sand moved: and behind his moving head moved the moving hand of old Bab, grey-white with the white-grey ash the hand bore, scattering ash, letting it sift slowly down, slow, so slow, so, so …

“A map!” Corm exclaimed, in wonder.

“By this trail moved the Bear,” old Bab began — when a sound which was not a sound was not so much heard as felt, in their inner ears and on the outer air.

Said Roke, uneasy: “What was that?”

And Wendolin: “That was the intended breaking of the spell which I broke earlier, else we had all still been there where we were last night. So, then, that at least is well, that he did not intend us to remain bewitched there forever and until the snows froze us or the spotted ounces dug us from the snow for their food.”

Said Roke, slowly, his fingers fretting upon his scars and the weals of his wounds, “That is well, then, yes. But it will be weller when we can look him face to face and ask: Be you man or bear or boy: and what do you mean for us, whichever?”

• • •

“You are my woman, then,” said Arnten, taking her by the arms and turning her about to face him. Her face had been calm and now it seemed suffused with joy; it had been pale and now it took on the faint, faint color of the wild rose.

“I am yours,” she said.

“And I may take and have you when I want,” he said, speaking with a roughness which he was far from feeling.

“I am yours in all things and at all times,” she said.

He said, still rough, but his voice now and then loosening into a tremor, “Then I will have you now, and here and now, and they had better not come spying on me or calling me, or — ”

But her mouth was on his and he forgot what he had intended to threaten.

Afterwards, he said, intending to sound scornful but instead sounding only happy, “Well, and am I better than that rusty old wolf?” She hid her face against him and gently took his skin between her teeth. Then she released him and she nodded. Swiftly looked up, a sheen upon her own skin, swiftly nodded again, shyly smiled; again hid her face. “And,” he asked, boldly, defiantly, and again would-be-scornfully and happily, “And does he shoot rust loads as well?”

She leaned her head up towards his, her neck stretching, and he bent down to kiss one pulse which trembled in the hollow of her throat and she jumped and gasped and then he bent his head still lower and he heard her whisper in his ear and he raised his head and his throat swelled with his howl of triumphant laughter.

“What? None at all?” he bellowed. And her face lit up with a glee which he had never before seen and perhaps few others had ever seen either, and she nodded: and he laughed again. And again. And he crushed her in his arms, and he laughed, and he laughed, and he laughed.

Mered-delfin heard her laughing as he moved slowly down from the north. He made signs, and the captains of the kingsmen nodded.

Wendolin and Corm and Roke and Bab heard it, approaching with stealth from the west.

She laughed there upon the deck of the largest of her three vessels in the hidden cove. She had sent the sailingmen away a distance, to the south. They were strange to Arnten’s eyes, those twenty men, squat and strong, with shiny black hair and grey eyes and tiny rings in their ears: they had bowed down at the sight of her. And then they had talked, swift-worded, together, and then they had all bowed down to him. And then she had sent them a distance away, to the south.

“They will return before dawn tomorrow,” she said.

“So.”

“I should have wished to go now, even now, even before now. But they said twas best to take the dawn-tide.”

He said, “So,” and spread fleeces on the deck and snuffed up the scent of land and of river and of sea.

“There are good winds at this season, and we shall cross the all-circling sea sooner than you might believe. And then whither, eh?” she asked.

He began to pluck at her garments, he had not yet gained deftness at this, but perhaps she preferred it so. Certainly she preferred to pretend that she knew not what he was about. And as he fumbled, she asked, “Shall we intend for the nearest port and sell our furs and amber and ivory and gold at heavy prices, it having been long since any treasure cargoes have reached there from hence?”

“My treasure-cargo is here,” he muttered. And tugged. And, she not moving, he lifted her up with a sigh of impatience, and tugged and slipped the clinging cloth away, and then he touched her in wonder, and, wondering, watched her touch him.

And she had laughed, exulting.

They heard her laugh, the sailingmen, a distance away to the south, and they grinned at each other and they ate their roasts of the wild sheep which they had hunted: and next they cast the shoulder blades of the sheep upon the fire: and watched the omen-telling cracks appear: and then they pulled long faces and they shook their heads. And they examined their weapons by the firelight and in the gathering dusk, exclaimed at the tell-tale signs of the iron pox which afflicted this odd, strange land of Thule: and they muttered their relief that they would leave it soon; to be exact, at next dawn-tide. And then they glanced again at the cracked shoulder blades and again they shook their heads.

So it was that, as the two lovers lay upon their bed upon the deck of the ship, their fingers and the locks of their hair twining together and watching the pale stars come to peer through the veil of night and minding not the first faint fall of dew, that a one or two things made them pause. He felt her grow tense. He sat upright, growling.

She said, “What — ”

He said, “Did you hear it, too? It is that one called Corm, he knew me as I was a boy, and remains but still a boy himself, and thinks — they all think — that I am yet to be controlled as one controls a boy …”

She said, “What — ”

He said, “It is that horn of my father’s which I let Corm bear for me and so he may think tis his, which tis not, the horn called
fey
, called
All-caller —
”

She said, “Ahhh …”

“And now he dares not blow it full, but his lips breathe a riff of air into its mouth, and that is what I hear, and it fills me full with rage: that still they follow after me and will not let me be free. They come. They are near.”

And she said, “Did I not speak to my own sailingmen, bidding them be gone till dawn-light? Yet they approach: Hear.”

There was the sound of a strange call of a bird which had never nested in the Land of Thule. “Tis their signal,” she said. “How do they dare? Is disobedience abroad on every breeze tonight? They come. They are near.”

Without other word the two of them dressed themselves and arose and peered into the dimness and the dark. And it seemed that the dim and the darkness peered back at them, and that something moved therein.

Arnten said, grim, and growling in his chest, “I know who you be, your faces I need not see, for I know your tread and I snuff your smell. What, Roke! What, Corm! What, my mother’s uncle! And what — you youngling nain whose name my tongue would trip upon! And what — you wizard Wendolin! Listen, all. I am not that bear who may be ringed through the septum of his nose and trained to dance upon the tug of a rope, do thee hear, every which one of thee?”

“Thy weird, Bear,” a voice from the night began, slowly.

“My weird!” he cried. “I cry scorn upon my weird as you be-think it! My weird now and for some time since and for all time hence, my weird be what I shall make it. You have pressed and followed me too close with your mumble and your snuffle of
My weird, Thy weird, His weird
, and
That one’s weird
.”

“Thy father,” another voice began: and he growled more fiercely, even, against this other voice. “My father, aye! My father, true! My father, so! Woe was upon my father that he suffered his weird to fall into the hands of wizards, nains, witcherers, and indeed of any in the Land of Thule. He ought never to have returned unto the Land of Thule, and this I shall tell thee all: Does my weird suffer me to escape this Land of Thule, curse me from the day that ever I return to it, as was my father cursed ever from that day that
he
returned to it?”

And, soft from the darkness: “Thy father’s curse, O Bear, do stand upon the ship beside thee …”

“Oh, lie!” she cried — and then the strange birdcall sounded clear, and sounded near, and with relief she cupped her hands and called, “Hither, hither, faster, and hither to me!” And the other figures melted back into the bosky and the black as, by one and by two and three, the squat, stout sailingmen appeared.