by Andre Norton
“Yaaahh!” Haraska gave a cry of horror, such as might be born when sighting a peril from which there was no escape. The healer thrust the shovel with its now-depleted dusting of burnt herbs toward the stricken woman’s daughter to be set aside, and both her hands vanished under the overhang of the cupboard. Slowly she began to stroke the forehead of the clan mistress, whose face was now knotted in terror. From the still-open door behind them came a breeze thatblew into the wall bed, and Haraska’s contorted features relaxed. Yet the old woman’s eyes still remained open, focused on something that drained the vibrant, happy life from her face and left a mask of growing despair.
Larlarn’s hands cupped over those open eyes, not touching the skin underneath.
“Let the Wind sweep,” she commanded. Others of the homestead were now crowded about the doorway of the kitchen. One or two of the women had edged inside, but none of the men intruded. The Wind had chosen its voice; they had only to listen.
“The Shadow rides, the Dark rises.” Haraska’s voice was the monotone of one reciting a well-learned message. “Styrmir will be the abiding place of all evil, and we”—now her speech held a broken note—“shall serve one such as none of humankind have bowed to for near a hundred hundred seasons. There comes a lord for the tower; and his power—aaghha!” Again her cry rang out. “His power shall be rooted within us of peace, from the babe new-born to the great-grandmam. The Covenant be broke!” Haraska reached up one hand now and clutched at Larlarn’s sleeve. “We took not the Oath of Watch, and so we shall be the first of the prey. He comes down the Lost Road, no honest trader, but—a ruler of demons!”
Haraska gave a sigh, and her body relaxed, leaving her limp. When the healer lifted her hands, Haraska’s eyes were closed, and her breath came fast and with a force that shook her whole body. Larlarn held out a hand and had pressed into it an oddly shaped cup, whose edge was pulled forward in one place to form a spout; then she gave a quiet nod to Sulerna. The girlheld her grandmother’s head steady while Larlarn worked the spout into the clan mistress’s mouth, at the same time stroking her corded throat so they could see the old woman swallow. When that was done, Larlarn pulled the doors of the cupboard bed nearly shut and turned to face those of the clan who had gathered.
“This was a sending,” the healer told them with authority, “by its strength from, I think, one of Those Who Dwell Apart.”
None of the dunsfolk answered, but a hum arose.
“What have they to do with us?” asked a man who stood close to the door, a branch-cutting tool in his hand.
“The Light must always warn, Geroge!” Larlarn returned sharply. “It would seem the world has turned too many times, and we are about to witness a return of what we have nigh forgotten. Who has flock duty in the eastern meadows this day?”
“Yurgy,” Geroge replied. For a moment, the husbandman twisted the reaping hook in calloused hands; then he burst out, “Mistress, does it matter who stands where this day? Do we not call—”
A large hand on his shoulder shook the youth warningly. “Where learned you what each Styrmir man born must know, boy? The Wind is not ours to summon, though it helped to carry this warning.”
“We deal not with the Forest—and we have no truck with the ones who chose to stand apart!” Geroge refused to be silenced. “Where are our weapons?” His glance swept the chamber, resting for an instant on each face turned toward him. “Do we just stand, doing nothing to defend ourselves and what was always accounted ours?”
Mistress Larlarn turned away from the sleeping Haraska. “There were always those, and of our own clan blood, who had a foreboding that this day might sometime come. Go out that door, Geroge. Run to the duns of Ithcan, of Brandt, of Katha, and call up an army. No? Then listen! Within our line, we have taught the children the wisdom that others have not dealt out in generations. Yet, even in the days of the Last Battle, what we had to offer was too thin a talent to count much. Death and worse comes upon us now, and none will be left to hold a taper against the fall of night. Those Who Dwell Apart may well believe that they have done their duty by this sending. They are great cherishers of traditions and oaths, and they will stand by the Covenant. And think not that the Forest will take heed of our plight. We shall, indeed, be sheep—bound and delivered to the slaughter!”
The youth brought his hook down against the back of a chair, hacking a grievous gouge in the flawless, brightly rubbed wood. His face was flushed, and his mouth was flattened into a tight line to lock unseemly words within. The healer regarded him for a moment, then turned to the oldfather of the dun. When she spoke, her voice was freighted with the heaviness of one about to shoulder a great burden and already nearing the end of her strength.
“Though it will do us little good, Grandsire, someone should ride for Yurgy. Should the innocent young of a neighbor be the first to feed the enemy?”
Though the day had started out clear, a spiderweb of fog now appeared to be clinging to the heights of the bare mountainside eastward. That precipice was not ofthe Forest, nor did any of the valley venture there; but men had and did, for the traders who came twice a year still used the pass above. On their last visit, however, these chapmen had reported a dangerous overhang that might in time close off the narrow passage.
It was warm enough that Yurgy had discarded his outer coat and now, in his jerkin, he sat on a rock, very still. He was engaged in something exciting—a trick of Power he was not sure he could do.
The stout reed he had harvested this morning with dew still beading it lay on the ground, twisting now and again until it seemed about to spin over. Within it, a grub was very busy, eating out the sweet pith and leaving in its wake a smoothed tube. The young herdsman had concentrated on summoning that voracious small worker, and his delight that the worm had appeared and the work was being done was almost more than he could contain.
So the old stories were right! One who surrendered his own will to the Wind could hope to become a part of all the world in a new way. The boy watched the grub’s blunt, brownish head emerge from the far end of the reed, and he wanted to shout; instead, he held his body moveless and let the Wind carry his thanks to the little borer of cores.
Then came a sharp interruption. The wiry-coated bas-hound gave tongue at the side of the flock nearest the old road—and the dog’s ululating howl was picked up and echoed by his two half-grown sons.
The boy was on his feet instantly, leaving his coat and food pouch where they lay, and heading down from the rock. The sheep were milling about, and the shrillness of the new lambs’ bleats and the ewes’ anxiouscries made a clamor that broke the usual quiet with a hint of worse to come.
A scream rent the air—not from any living throat, but as if the Wind itself had uttered a cry that was half pain, half promise of peril. And then, where those webs of mist had been gathering on the heights, a spear of light flashed forth, so bright that even the sun could not hide it. Not honest sun glare or the softer beaming of the moon, not true fire flame—that brilliance was nothing of Yurgy’s world to which he could give name.
Nor was the light all. There followed an instant of dead silence. The young herdsman, no longer even aware of his flock, wrapped his arms around his suddenly shivering body. The Wind—that low-voiced being that had encircled him so comfortingly through the morning—was gone!
Sound came again: a crackling—the earth itself might be splitting apart. That dangerous rock in the pass—had it yielded to some force, falling and walling off Styrmir from every other land?
Now birds climbed the sky, black of wing, their hairless heads mere puffed sacs of scarlet skin—such pollution as neither the valley nor the Forest had ever vomited into the air. There was a breathless feeling, as if both the land and the trees . . . waited.
The fragments of talent, which were the Wind’s remaining gift, whirled abruptly in a wild dance about and above the flock, for there were calls even the earth itself could be summoned to answer. Yurgy swayed. His hounds—! Tusker, the s
ire, was walking stiff-legged down the road, leaving the flock and his duty behind him; while his sons followed, nearly on their bellies as if crushed down by fear.
A sudden movement showed ahead in the fringe of old gnarled trees bordering the curve of the road where it entered the valley: a pack train. But the boy knew, from his first sight of it, that this was no trader such as had ever before visited Styrmir.
Bile rose in Yurgy’s throat, but he could not move so much as a finger. Though the mist web did not enwrap him, he was still trapped—trapped!
The fear rising from the animals, by now running back and forth across his path, fed his own growing horror. In the past, strange creatures had sometimes come to the edge of the Forest to be sighted by those of humankind; but the woods children had been merely different, not—not—evil.
The huge bas-hound had come to a halt, his offspring behind him. As, in a happier time, he might have saluted the moon, he now threw back his head and bayed—not in warning but rather as if he faced now what neither fang nor claw could bring down. That howl rang so ear-numbingly through the windless world of the pastureland that it shook Yurgy partway free.
The panicked sheep were beginning to collapse here and there; some ewes had even crushed their lambs. Now the young herdsman could feel the force that had kindled the tinder of their fears into a mad flame. This was no Wind, caressing and healing—it was a power arising from the earth and gathering to itself parts of life which none could see. Unable to stand against that, Yurgy moved forward, stiff-legged and helpless as his own hound. And what he saw, through staring eyes he could not close, was so sickeningly unbelievable that his whole inner being was wrenched with revulsion.
Things—things no mortal, even one twisted of mind, might put name to—led the head-drooping pack animals. Then, as if they, too, were hounds, albeit of hellish breed, the creatures launched themselves forward, bore the herd dog to the ground, and ripped the living flesh from the screaming animal. And the bas-hound was not alone in his torment. Several of the horrors raced down the road and, even as had their sire, the two whelps ceased, in a rain of blood, to be.
The sheep had subsided; perhaps the death of their guardians had touched them in passing. Those monstrous butchers had begun to move purposefully in the direction of the flock itself when, as though heeding a silent command, they suddenly stopped and swiveled their heads in the direction of an approaching figure.
The rider who led this demonic crew urged his trembling, sweating horse forward, skirting fastidiously the fouled places where his minions still fought over the scraps of their feast. So great was his contrast to those beings that it could almost make Yurgy believe the events of the moments just past to be those of a troubled night vision.
This was a man, slender of body and bravely dressed in a jerkin from which dangled chains, each supporting a winking jewel. He wore no head covering, but his waves of thick reddish brown hair were kept in place by a wide metal band which, though bare of any ornament, somehow drew the eye. He was clean-shaven—in fact, his skin gave the appearance of having never supported hair. Thus, he seemed young—until one saw the feral yellow eyes beneath his smooth brows. Had it not been for those eyes, and for the cruelcurl to his lips, the stranger might have been judged as handsome as a lord’s son from one of the old tales.
Now the coldly compelling gaze was bent upon Yurgy. The horseman raised his arm and beckoned with a graceful sweep of a gauntleted hand. In spite of every instinct against it aroused in him by the night, the boy obeyed.
Goaded by fear, Yurgy did next what he was, by the most binding rule of the Valley, never to attempt—he strove to reach the Wind. But there was no Wind—only an eerie emptiness and that pull of power he had felt from the herd and its hounds on the first appearance of this man.
Then he was standing at the side of the windblown horse—and its master.
“Greetings—Yurgy.”
The soft voice seemed, in an odd way, to deaden the nightmare about the boy. But how did this stranger know his name?
“Who is your headman?”
Did he mean the oldfather of the dun? Yurgy wondered. Guessing that that might be so, he answered hoarsely, “Racal the Sixth of our dun here.”
“Excellent.” He of the catlike eyes fairly purred. “And now you shall lead me to him.”
It felt to the young herdsman as though a haze had risen all about him. He was not even aware that he trod right through the bloody puddle which was all that was left of his youngest dogs; still less did he know that he led the grasping hand of the Dark itself into his beloved Valley.
6
THERE WAS SILENCE IN THE FOREST. PERHAPS SOME OF the very oldest of the huge trees could recall its like, or the toss of ruin stones here and there; but there were no others to remember a time when the Wind was stilled—utterly stilled. It might have balled inward upon itself, solidified, and then departed all the dimensions, worldwide, in which it once had life. As for the Valley which had been encompassed by it for so long, this was like the setting of the sun at midday, the shattering of the full moon’s glory.
Small creatures ran madly for their burrows or crouched beneath the nearest shelter they could see. Birds sat claw to claw, wing tip to wing tip on branches, enough of them so gathered as to bend stiff wood earthward.
Those glittering motes, which made outward glory for the great Stone, swarmed until they made a thick mass about the hole that pierced the rock. There theypulsed, dimming and then flaring up, as if to offer protest and, perhaps, futile battle.
From the earth below the north side of the pillar came a stirring, a faint scent of long-settled soil reluctantly yielding place to life. Upward thrust a sheath of rolled green leaves, taller and taller, as if here was bursting into the outer world a plant to rival the rise of the trees themselves. Just short of the top of the monolith, the green blade came to a halt.
Sound arose now—not the soothing of Wind song but rather a drumming, an ear-numbing boom that seemed to issue out of the ground itself. The curl of the leaves began to loosen, but there was movement along the living wall of the glade, as well.
Here came one, then another, three, and four beings, all as alike to the untutored eye as if they had been hewn from logs. Their powerful, uncovered bodies were also the color of polished wood, and heavy fur with a sheen like the finest of satin cloaked each. Though they strode on hind legs in humanoid fashion, these were not men and women but creatures of a race the Forest itself had bred and nurtured.
Some of them had twisted a garland of flowered vines about their shoulders or thighs, and the perfume of those adornments mingled with a musky body smell which was not unpleasant. A number of them carried huge clubs—weapons such as might bring an ox to its knees with one well-aimed blow.
Yet their furred faces were not masks of malice. Rather, as they came on, they looked at the leaf sheath by the Stone and then to their nearest neighbors, and their uneasiness was plain.
Once the Forest’s children had circled the waitingStone, those with clubs held them high, then brought down to earth in unison the thick butts of those weapons; and the dull booming echoed again. Others began to sway their well-muscled bodies from side to side so that their vine-twinings were set in motion. They opened their heavy jaws, and there came forth, as if in a single voice, a call that was also a name.
“Theeossa—Ever-Living One—She Who Can Command the Storm Winds—” They added, to that first hailing, title after formal title.
The leaf continued to unfurl, until it spread wide, as might a wing. Then She who had been reborn again after generations of sleep stepped forth and, leaning back against the great rock, ran Her hands up and down it as one might stroke a beloved beast.
No more than the beings who stood in a silent ring about the place of rebirth might She be named human, but in a far-off mountain refuge She was known—known, yes, and now being watched by those gathered there to put to use a weaving of their own talents.
Though Her
figure was feminine, showing the proper curves, Her smooth skin was pale green. Her dress was sleeveless and only half thigh in length, and it was girded by a wide belt that might have been fashioned from vine flowers stripped of their leaves and tucked tightly together. She held her head high, and Her hair was so bright a silver that the band holding it back from Her face looked dull and almost tarnished.
And Her face . . . But to those who had come at Her call, She had no true face. Between chin and brow, there was only a greenish mist no eye could penetrate.
“Sasqua.” Because the Wind had deserted them, the earthborn could not speak in Her private voice, but inHer tone was the warmth of friend meeting friend. “Daughters, sons, who serve well this world of ours—greeting! You have been summoned as witnesses so that no one can ever afterward say a warning was not delivered.”
Before Her, the air seemed to flicker. A section of it became opaque—and not only opaque, but occupied. Another stood there, matching the woman in height. His cockscomb of hair was nearly as silver as her own locks, but his features were not veiled.
The newcomer raised a long-fingered, pale-skinned hand to the Green One as if in greeting; but She, standing with Her hands planted against the Stone, made no answering move. The voice which issued from behind Her masking oval of mist no longer held a soft and welcoming note.
“Evil has rooted itself well within your company—deny it not!”
The man bowed his head in assent, and it was evident that he accepted Her anger as just.
“And yet you sit at your ease,” She continued relentlessly, “making no move to finish that which should never have been allowed to begin!”
Now there was a slight change in the other’s face. “Final judgment is not for either of us to utter.” He answered as one who has long wielded authority.