by Greg Bear
She knew about great things. She’d lived through a dragon’s onslaught, something of which few mortals could boast. (Not that she did boast—what point to it?) She’d met elflords and sorceresses and high nobles of the human kind as well . . . and here she was, wed to the smith who’d forged the iron hoops that bound the bucket’s oaken staves.
Sometimes she wondered whether the war against Chaos that had engulfed the whole world thirty years before was meant to bring nothing more splendid than countless villages, all of them places where great things never happened, scattered through plains and forests. But what better result could the war have birthed? If ordinary folk were able to live ordinary lives free from anything worse than ordinary fears, didn’t things wag the way they should?
She smiled when she passed the smithy. Theodo waved back through the open door. He was never too busy to look out whenever someone went by. Part of that came from having two strapping sons learning the trade. Part sprang from life in a place like this. Anything that chanced was perforce noticeable and interesting, because not much did.
The smile stayed on Alianora’s face as she walked on. Theodo was a good man, a kind man. He’d never struck her in anger, never once. He’d clouted Einhard and Nithard only when they’d really and truly earned it. His hands might be scarred and callused and hard, but they were gentle in the quiet dark. A good man. A kind man. Perhaps not the most exciting man God ever made, but . . .
“I’ve had enough excitements, enough and to spare,” Alianora whispered fiercely. Her own work-roughened hands tightened on the bucket’s handle. Having magic-dashing cold iron in the family, so to speak, wasn’t such a bad thing even today.
No, not half. The blue gloaming that warded Faerie folk from the daylight they could not bear had retreated many leagues after Chaos’ latest grand assault on the lands of Law went awry. Yet still you could see it on the horizon from here. It had even moved forward again, a little, once or twice, in the years since then. Law’s nature, after all, was to forget and to forgive. Chaos did neither, it seemed, and found more agents within Law’s borders to work its will than would ever be so in reverse.
Not that all wizardry was wicked. Oh, no! Alianora’s smile subtly changed. Her daughter Alianna wore the white, feathered swan-may’s tunic these days, and wore it wondrous well. Somewhere in the priests’ holy Book it said there was a time for everything, and there as elsewhere the Book spoke true.
Alianora knew without—too much—resentment that her own time for the swan-may’s tunic lay behind her. Three decades and four children (one tiny body had lain in hallowed ground since before its first saint’s day, an unending sadness) had widened the hips to which that tunic once clung. She’d lost two teeth and gained wrinkles; encroaching gray streaked and dulled her red hair.
But when she dreamt of flying, she knew whereof she dreamt! Everyone flew in dreams. Almost everyone had to imagine what it was like. Alianora knew the wind beneath her wings, knew the joy of soaring on streams of warm air gusting up from the ground, knew the wonder of freedom and speed in three dimensions.
She glanced up into the watery sky to see if she might catch a glimpse of Alianna. No; wherever her daughter flew today, it was not near here. Just as well. Who didn’t want to fly wide when young, to streak over the fields and the meadows and the dark woods beyond? A village was for settling down, for later. When you were Alianna’s age, you thought later never came. You thought all kinds of things when you were Alianna’s age.
Here was the green, and the stone-ringed well. Behind Alianora, Theodo’s hammer rang against the anvil. The iron he beat into shape there wouldn’t be cold, not yet. As always, she hoped he wouldn’t come home nursing a burn. He was careful, but once in a while everyone slipped.
Four or five women stood near the well. Berthrada’s twin blond boys toddled by her feet. One of them stooped and plucked up some grass or maybe a bug and stuck it in his mouth. She hadn’t seemed to be watching, but she grabbed him, thrust a finger in there, and got rid of whatever it was. Mothers had, and needed, eyes in the back of the head. Berthrada swatted her son on the bottom, not too hard, and set him down again.
Alianora nodded to the women as she came up. They nodded back. It wasn’t quite as if she’d been born and raised here, even if her husband had. She’d been places and done things they were just as well pleased not to know too much about. And the brief, form-fitting swan-may’s tunic that had been hers and was now mostly Alianna’s brought a whiff of scandal with it.
Still and all, she lived here quietly enough, as she had for many years now. She made eyes at no man but her own. Her sons would be catches; no doubt of that. So Ethelind, the miller’s wife, said, “Have you heard the latest about Walacho and his poor sorry family?”
“What now?” Alianora asked sadly, working on the crank to bring up a bucket of well water. Any sensible man drank beer instead when he could; if you drank water all the time, you pretty much begged for a flux of the bowels. Walacho wasn’t such a sensible man. He drank to get drunk, and when he got drunk he got mean. He did things he was sorry for later, which helped him as much as it did anyone else.
Before Ethelind could come out with—or embroider upon—the juicy details of his latest rampage, Berthrada pointed out to the edge of the woods and exclaimed, “Look! A stranger’s coming!”
Ethelind shot her a dirty look. Walacho’s ordinary folly would have to wait for another time. Strangers didn’t come to the village every day, or every week, either. This one might give folk here things to talk about till the next one showed up.
He tramped along with determined strides, like a man who has been traveling for a long time and knows he may have to keep going longer yet. He was a big man, tall and broad through the shoulders. He wore a green plaid wool shirt with a stand-and-fall collar; sturdy, snug-fitting trousers dyed a blue not quite that of woad; and ankle-length brown leather boots. A scabbarded sword hung on his left hip, a sheathed knife on his right.
“Well, heaven knows I’ve seen worse,” Berthrada murmured when he was still a little too far away to hear her.
“He’s too old for you, dear,” Ethelind said, also softly. She freighted the last word with poisonous sweetness.
No matter how catty that made her, it didn’t make her wrong. The stranger’s fair hair—so far, telling how much gray it held was hard—receded at the temples. Harsh grooves scored his forehead and the skin between his nostrils and the corners of his mouth. When you got a good look at it, his nose had a distinct dent.
When Alianora got a good look at that dent, it was as if someone had punched her, hard, on the point of the chin. She sagged. Her hands slipped off the crank. It spun backwards, and almost did clip her in the face. She wondered if she would even have noticed. She’d already been hit harder than that.
“Holger,” she said, and groped for the stone wall around the well to help steady herself.
His eyes snapped sharply toward her. They were blue as she remembered, blue as a deep lake seen from the sky when she soared above it in swan’s guise. But he had not known her till she spoke his name. Grief flamed within her for that.
“Alianora?” he said. “Is it really you at last?” Blood drained from his weathered face, leaving it lich-pale.
“Aye,” she answered. She’d told him she loved him, there in the ruined church of St. Grimmin’s. And he’d taken the sword Cortana, which he’d found hidden there, and he’d ridden forth on his great black horse, and he’d broken the forces of Chaos, for they could not stand against him and what he bore.
And that was thirty long years ago now, even if it sometimes seemed like yesterday. It might seem so, but seeming was not reality.
“My dear,” he said. “My love.” He took a step in her direction. The village women stared avidly, their eyes wide as saucers. Even Berthrada’s twins peeped out from behind their mother’s skirts.
Alianora straightened. It was like taking a wound. Once the first shock passed, you steadied—if it w
asn’t mortal, of course. “You never came back to me,” she said, as if that were all the explanation she needed. Perhaps it was. No one died of a broken heart, regardless of how many people wished they could.
Holger’s hands dropped. He had started to get his color back. Now he whitened again. “I couldn’t, dammit,” he mumbled, staring down at the grass and dirt between his feet. “The magics that brought me here swept me back to the world where I’d lived before. I was needed there, too, it turned out.”
She believed him absolutely. That more than one world might require the services of such a hero . . . Well, who could doubt it? In the end, though, what difference did it make? Two worlds might need Holger, but so had she—then. “You never came back to me,” she repeated, this time adding, “I thought sure I would never see you again.”
He cocked his head to one side. A small, tight, crooked smile came and went. “You don’t talk the way you used to,” he said, sliding away from what she’d told him.
She knew what he meant. When he’d known her before, she’d had a thick back-country burr. It wasn’t the way folk in the villages around here spoke. To fit in better, she’d softened the burr as much as she could.
“I’ve dwelt in these parts a long time now,” she said, talking the way she talked.
“I know. I’ve been trying to get to these parts for a long time now.” Holger stared off toward the horizon, and toward the blue Faeries gloaming darkening one stretch of it. “I’ve been to a lot of places—a lot of worlds. But Something or Somebody kept holding me away from this one. I can make a pretty good guess Who, too.”
Alianora could make that same guess. If the Powers Holger had bested here had their way, they would never want to see him again. And, even if they’d lost their war to rule this world wholly, their strength was not to be despised.
“I wonder that you succeeded in their despite,” she said, her voice softening a little.
“You’d better believe I did, kiddo. I don’t give up, no matter what.” He stuck out his chin. He was in good hard shape for a man his age—in extraordinary shape for a man his age—but the flesh under there still sagged. Well, so did the flesh under Alianora’s chin. The earth dragged you down towards it, and then it dragged you down into it, and then . . . you found out for sure what came afterwards.
“Thirty years. I was thinking on that earlier today,” Alianora said.
Holger nodded brusquely. “A devil of a long time,” he agreed. “I made it, though.” He looked at her as if she were the only thing in all the world—no, in all the worlds.
Once upon a time, that look would have melted her the way a mild spring morning melts the last winter frost. To a certain extent, it still did—but only to a certain extent. She was no longer who she had been in those dark and desperate days. Nor was he. She knew as much. She was far from sure he could say the same.
“So much time gone by,” she murmured.
“Not too much. We still have a good bit left,” he said.
She made herself meet that intent gaze. It wasn’t far removed from crossing swords. “Thirty years,” she repeated. “Thirty years of faring betwixt—amongst—the worlds for you.”
“I was always trying to get here,” Holger said. “Always.” The word clanged in his mouth.
Alianora nodded. “I believe you.” Even with the white tunic, she hadn’t flown so far as she used to do. After the war, the sullen, sulking, beaten Middle World was no longer such a welcoming place. Since Alianna took wing in her stead, she didn’t think she’d gone farther than a day’s walk from the village. As gently as she could, she asked, “In all your wanderings, did you never, ah, meet anyone who made you want to leave off and bide where you found yourself?”
He looked down at the ground once more: dull embarrassment this time. “I won’t lie to you. There’s been a girl or three. You know how things are.” He spread his hands. A swordsman’s calluses marked his right palm.
She did know how things were. A knight errant spent his nights erring—that was what they said, anyhow. How the woman he loved—the woman who loved him—felt when he did, he could always worry about later . . . if he worried about it at all.
Holger raised his big head. Fierce intensity filled his stare. “But there was never anybody else, babe. Never really. Never so it counted here—” He touched himself on the heart. “Only below the belt, if you know what I mean.” He chuckled.
Again, Alianora knew. Pity stabbed through her. “Why not, Holger?” she asked. “Why not, in heaven’s name? So many long, dry years . . . ”
She didn’t think he heard, or noticed, that last. “I’ll tell you why not. Because all I ever cared about in this miserable universe is you, that’s why. Because I aimed to go on till I found you, no matter what I had to do, no matter how long it took. And here I am.” His pride blazed like a forest fire.
Trying to deflect it seemed wisest. “All you ever cared for is me, say you? You know you speak not sooth. What of Morgan le Fay?”
He didn’t flinch. She wished he would have. “Well, what about her?” he said roughly. “That was a long time ago, and in another country, and besides, I hadn’t met you yet. I never would’ve busted my hump the way I did, fighting back to this world for the likes of her, and you can take that to the bank. But you, you’re worth it.”
He was convinced she was; she heard as much in his voice. He had to be, lest all he’d done and suffered this past half a lifetime turn to dust and blow away like fairy gold tried on an anvil of cold iron. “Surely life goes on wherever one wanders,” Alianora said. “Surely, had you sought, you would have found many, or one at least, not so very different from me.”
“No way. Not a chance.” Holger had vast reserves of stubbornness. Without them, he never would have won Cortana, never would have had the chance to scatter the host of Chaos before him. Now . . . Now he said, “You’re the one, the only one.”
“Oh, Holger.” Alianora tried to make him hear what he would not see: “I am no more the lass you wooed.”
He wasn’t listening. And he had his reasons: his eyes shifted away from her, and his yellow-callused hand dropped to the hilt of his sword. “Who’re these clowns?” he ground out. “They better make tracks, kid. They mess with me, it’s the last dumb stunt they ever pull.”
Alianora turned to follow his gaze. One of the other women by the well must have hotfooted it back to the smithy. Alianora hadn’t noted anyone leaving, but to say she was distracted only proved the weakness of words. Here came Theodo, a heavy hammer clutched in his fist. Behind him strode Einhard and Nithard, one with an axe, the other with a cleaver.
“Hold!” Alianora spoke quickly to her kinsmen. “This is the famous Sir Holger, come to call after all these years.”
Einhard and Nithard broke into delighted grins. They knew she’d been friends with the paladin in the great days before they were born. Now at last they got to meet a hero in the flesh! Theodo’s face was a study. He knew rather more than they did, and liked what he knew rather less. So long as Holger was gone and stayed gone, it didn’t bother him—much. Now that he got to meet the hero in the flesh . . .
Seeing them lower their weapons, Holger also took his hand away from his sword, though not very far. He asked once more, “Who are these people?” This time, the question sounded cautious and formal rather than ferocious.
With relief, Alianora too chose formality: “Sir Holger, I have the honor to present to you my sons. The tall one is Einhard; the redhead, Nithard. With them stands my husband, Theodo.”
Her sons rushed up to clasp the hero’s hand. Theodo hung back a little, but only a little. He also set his hard palm against Holger’s. He didn’t pound the paladin on the back the way Einhard and Nithard did, or help try to lift him off his feet. The gray streaks in his beard excused his lack of youthful enthusiasm. Other things, perhaps, excused his lack of enthusiasm of any sort.
As for Holger . . . Alianora might have known—hellfire, had known—formality wouldn�
��t be enough. While the puppies pounded on him and Theodo gave him more restrained greeting, he looked like a man who’d just taken a boot in the belly out of nowhere.
When the commotion around him eased a little, he stared over at Alianora with that astonished disbelief still all over his face. “Your . . . sons?” he said. He might never have heard the word before.
“Aye,” Alianora answered stolidly.
“Your . . . husband?” By the way Holger said it, he had heard that word before, and didn’t fancy it a barleycorn’s worth. Theodo caught the same thing. He unobtrusively shifted the hammer from his left hand back to his right.
Alianora nodded. “Aye,” she said again. It was the truth. Why should she not repeat it? Why should she want to weep when she did?
“But how did that happen?” Holger asked, still lost, speaking as if of flood or fire or other natural catastrophe.
“How do you think?” For the first time, irritation rose against sympathy in Alianora. “You were gone, Holger. Gone off the battlefield. Gone from human ken. Gone from the ken of other folk, too, as I have reason to know. Even smarting from their loss, the Middle Worlders laughed that I should have looked for aught else. So I came hither one day, and I met Theodo, and this is all these years and three grown children later.” She raised her head and looked him full in the face. She’d essayed nothing harder since she last lay down in childbed, but she did it. “I would not change it now even if I could.”
Einhard and Nithard blinked at her. They understood that they didn’t understand everything that was going on. She sighed within herself. She would have a deal of explaining to do to them, and to Alianna. One of these days. Not today. Today had its own sorrows.
Theodo hung on to the hammer. How not? Alianora sometimes thought he set it down only to make love to her. Well, she never would have wanted a man who was not a willing worker. His grip eased a bit, though. He must have had his own fears about this moment, if it ever came. She’d slain some of them, at any rate.