Ursus of Ultima Thule (5 page)

• • •

The breadth of the cavern was one nain wide and the height of the cavern was one nain high. Soldier guards, kingsmen, were obliged to stoop. More than once when the nain-thralls had been ordered to make the roof higher they expressed a gruff unwillingness to do so, saying that the roof would fall. So the guards were obliged to swing sideways the cudgels with which they struck the nain-thralls if the nains did not hack their stone-mattocks into the crumbly ironrock swiftly enough or if they lingered or stumbled while carrying the baskets of ore up the long incline and up the risky ladders set in shallow steps — up, up, and up to the open sky inside the grim stockade.

Not long ago the notion of nain-thralls had only belonged to the past — a subject for winter tales or summer-night songs — how, in the days of bronze, when no king reigned, the nain-thralls dug the brazen-ore* and forged the brazen-tools; how the green-sickness came upon Thule and all bronze died and Chaos was king; how the nains discovered the secret witchery of iron and were free men at all times after, only paying the nainfee to the man king who in subduing the chiefs succeeded them as Power.

Thralldom was still — or rather, again — the subject of song and story.

But who cared what dirges the nains sang as they toiled or what accounts they told as they lay on their beds of bracken in their imprisoned nights?

The baskets of ore were emptied into hand barrows and the thralls carried the barrows to the forge.

The forge was a flat rock rising from deep under the ground. The fire burned upon a hearth of other flat rocks, raised to a platform of the same height as the forge. The lumps of ironstone (and the articles of sick iron) were placed in the fire and burned. Although the kingsmen walked to and fro in violation of the ancient compact, which excluded them as it did all strangers, they learned nothing from their observations that did them any good. All ores looked alike to them; they did not know which ones to discard. All fired ironstones remained mysteries still to them; they knew not, though the nains did, which ones to discard as too brittle and which to pull out with greenwood toolsticks to be pounded upon the forge stone. Nor did they learn (or very much attempt to learn) the art of smiting with the stout stone hammer, turning and beating, beating and turning — all the while intoning in the Old Tongue:

because it was said,
The sound of the voice is good for the iron …

• • •

Perhaps it was no longer as good as it once had been. Nothing seemed to be. Day after day the nains toiled to make new iron, hacks and spears and knifeheads and arrow points. And day after day the productions of — at first — the previous year were returned to them, rotten with rust, flaking and powdering to be melted down and made new and whole again. The previous year, at first. Then the irons of the previous half-year. Then the previous season. Then last month, fortnight — last week.

One sweating nainsmith paused and pointed to a red-sick lancehead and his chest, thick and thicketed as some woodland hill, swelled as he spoke. “Not a seven-night since I beat this out — and now look how swift the iron-ill has afflicted it!” And he added in the witchery-tongue: “Thou art sick, thou art sick. Alas and woe to thee and us for thy very sickness.”

And in his rumbling, echoing voice he began to chant and was joined by his thrall-fellows:

He thrust the heap of rusted metal into the wood fire, deep, deep, till red coals and red metals met.

The nainsmith seized a lump of iron and beat upon it with the stone hammer with great, resounding blows; and with each blow they all shouted a word:

Strange sounds he heard as he lay between earth and sky, rising and sinking, turning over and over again. Strange calls upon strange horns, strange voices, sounds. Pains, swift and passing like flashes of lightning, shot through him, again and again, then less often. The Painted Men were pursuing him; he hid from them; he hid in hollows beneath the roots of trees, he hid in the forks of the branches of trees, perched upon the crests of rocks, slid into the spaces between them. Always, always, he saw the Painted Men prance by, panting in rage and shame that he had seen their naked skin. Always, always he stayed quite still. And always, always, they passed him by. And always, always they paused, legs frozen in mid-stride.

And always they turned, saw him; he felt the blows; all vanished.

Years went by.

• • •

When he became aware that he was returning to the everyday world he said in his mind that he would be very cunning and not reveal that he was no longer in the other world. He lay very still. Perhaps the Painted Men were uncertain if he were alive or dead and were lying in wait to see. He could not, through his parted eyelids, observe anyone or anything at all, save for the green network surrounding him and through which faint glints of sky were visible. But he had a faint yet firm feeling that if he were to roll his eyes just a bit to the right — He did not; he was too canny for that.

Besides, his right eye seemed swollen so much that —

And then a hand appeared, small as that of a large child, delicate as that of a young woman, yet not either: in the dim green light and through only one and a half eyes the hand seemed not entirely real, seemed almost translucent, had something about the bone structure, the nails — how many joints were there — nacreous as the inside of certain sea or river shells.

The hand placed something on his puffed eye, something cool and damp and soothing.

… and without awareness of intent to do so, he put up his hand and took the other by the wrist and sat up. Almost, he had not held the hand at all. Almost, it was as if his fingers were encircling something which had dimension without having substance — a delicate flower, as it might be, in the shape of a hand — and it slipped out from his grasp as simply as a sunbeam.

He had never seen a perry before.

Something slipped off his eye — he saw it was a dressing of bruised leaves and grasses, damp as though with the morning’s dew: the perry’s delicate and almost insubstantial hand took it and placed it on the swollen eye again and the perry’s other hand took his hand, did not so much lift as guide it to hold the compress in place.

As the thin dew sparkling upon a cobweb, so did the perry’s garments glint and sparkle; as the shy fawn stands in the gladey underbrush, not quite trembling and not quite looking at the intruder but poised for instant flight, so did the perry stand at the entrance to the leafy bower.

Arnten’s body did not so much still pain him as it echoed faint reflections of remembered pain. Dim outlines of bruises he could see here and there upon his skin; he remembered enough lore of herbs and simples from his medicine-uncle to know that even the most puissant leaves or roots or grasses had not by themselves done all this work of healing: but the witchery of the perries, either intent or inherent or both, had aided them. At first he had had a fleeting thought that he might be in the hands of the Woman of the Woods, of whom many tales were told. To be sure, he had never seen the Woman of the Woods, just as he had never seen a perry — but his uncle had told him enough of each so that now he knew. His uncle who was his mother’s uncle. His mother whom he had lost.

Arnten, find your father
.

His father whom he had never had. The bear he could not find. The man, the mocker (had said Tall Roke) who had “gamed” his mother. The bogey for whom the boys of the village had held him slightly in awe and so much in scorn. Because of whom he had fled for very life. In which flight he had all but nearly lost his life. And now lay here, back from the edge of death, in the company of a creature far more fey than any nain, who spoke no word and barely looked at him and barely smiled yet had felt that deep concern for him and even now trembled between visibility and invisibility, substance and shadow, staying and leaving.

This gentle presence touched the cords which bound his pent misery and long-contained sorrow and did that which heavy and brutal blows had not and could not have done, and he covered his face with his hands and broke into tears.

He wept long and without restraint and when he had stopped at last, he knew it would be long, if ever, before he wept again. His eyes were wet and his chest ached, but these were slight shadows which would pass. All his body aches had gone. Something had changed in him forever. He dried his eyes, including the one no longer swollen — and he was on his knees and rising when he realized that the perry was no longer there.

• • •

He was aware of hunger and thirst, but more of thirst. He was aware of something else, a sound that had been sighing in his ears for as long as he had been in this shelter which somehow the perry had made for him. Sometimes the sound was as faint as a baby’s breath; sometimes it grew almost as loud as the wind which carried it and sometimes louder, the rider overbearing the steed. Somewhere not so very far away was a river and now, in this moment of his great thirst (water perhaps needed to replenish that shed by his uncommon tears), great was the sound of its rushing.

The perry had stood upright, but Arnten found he was obliged to stoop, although certainly the grasses and the light, light withes would have yielded easily to his head. And so, while at the curiously woven opening, stooping slightly and about to go out, he became aware of two things lying almost concealed by the fragrant grasses of the shelter’s floor. One was the witchery-bundle to which both bark basket and knife had been tied by deft and curious perry-knots; the other reappeared to him as though out of his dream-world between the time the Painted Man had beaten him to the ground and the time of his reawakening.

He recalled it now. When he had felt (and doubtless had indicated) thirst, something had glowed and glittered in the air before him, touched his lips and he had drunk. He had in his semi-thoughts believed it a fragment of a rainbow conveying the cooling rainwater to his lips; or a gigantically distended drop, suffused with multicolored lights, distilling into water on his lips and tongue. Now he saw it to be, less fantastically but not much less wondrously, a flask of some substance unfamiliar to him. Light passed into it and through it and he voiced wordless surprise on observing that he could see
through
it! What he saw was subject to a gross distortion. The flask was iridescent as the fingernails of the perry or the interior of certain shells, shining with a multitude of colors which shifted and changed. And it weighed much less than a vessel of earthenware of the same bulk. He marveled, but did not stop for long to do so; he placed it in the basket along with the witchery-bundle (knife again by hip); he considered what its name might be. For present identification alone he deemed to call it perryware.

And then he stepped outside, ready to seek his stream.

The sound of the river was quite strong outside the small grass shelter, shelter so slight that seemingly a fawn could have crushed it by rolling over, now that the protecting presence of the perry was withdrawn. He saw no traces of a fawn, but pausing a moment and wondering what had cropped the small measure of meadow, greenery and flowery, he saw the pellet droppings of the wild rams and — his eyes now opened — here a shred and there a fluff of their wool. His uncle had at one time amassed a small heap of their hooves (begged, doubtless, from hunters) which lay a long while in a corner, oily and strong-smelling. Once a nain had come to trade new iron for old and the rams’ hooves had vanished — but for what consideration and for what purpose he had never asked and never learned.