by Tad Williams
“Hello,” Simon said. The boy nearest him stared sullenly, his face lapped in firelight. “Is your mother here?” The boy continued to stare.
“The child we brought went inside,” Sludig said. “That is undoubtedly where the grown folk are.” He hefted his spear thoughtfully and a half-dozen pairs of eyes warily followed his movement. The Rimmersman took the spear with him toward the abbey door which Vren had swung shut behind him, then propped it against the pitted mortar of the wall.
He gave his silent audience a meaningful look. “No one may touch this,” he said. “Understood? Gjal es, künden???” He patted his scabbarded sword, then lifted a fist and thumped on the door. Simon looked back at Thorn, a hide-wrapped bundle on one of the packhorses. He wondered whether he should bring it with him, but decided that would draw more attention than was best. Still, it rankled. So many sacrifices to get the black sword, just to leave it strapped to the saddle like an old broomstick.
“Binabik,” he said quietly, pointing at the concealed sword. “Do you think…?”
The troll shook his head. “Little need for concern, I am certain,” the troll whispered. “In any case, even if these children were to steal it, I am guessing they would have a difficult time carrying it away.”
The heavy door swung slowly open. Little Vren stood in the doorway.
“Come in, you men. Skodi says come in.”
Binabik dismounted. Qantaqa sniffed the air for a moment, then bounded away in the direction they had come. The children by the fire watched her departure raptly.
“Let her hunt,” Binabik said. “She is not happy walking inside a people-house. Come, Simon, we have been offered some hospitality.” He stepped past Sludig and followed Vren inside.
A fire nearly as large as the bonfire in the dooryard was roaring and crackling in the grate, throwing wild, flickering shadows on the cob-webbed plaster. Simon’s first impression of the room was of some kind of animal nest. Great piles of clothes and straw and other more unusual articles were piled haphazardly on every dirty surface.
“Welcome, strangers,” someone said. “I’m Skodi. Do you have any food? The children are very hungry.”
She was sitting in a chair close to the fire, with several children younger than those in the yard clambering over her lap or sitting at her feet. Simon’s first thought was that she was another child herself—albeit a very large one—but after a moment’s inspection he could see that she was his own age or even a little older. Her white-blonde hair, colorless as spidersilk, framed a round face that might have been quite pretty, despite a few blemishes, if she had not been so fat. Her pale blue eyes stared avidly at the new arrivals.
Sludig looked at her suspiciously, uncomfortable in such close surroundings “Food? We have little, mistress…” he considered for a moment, “but you are welcome to share.”
She waved her hand airily. Her chubby pink arm nearly dislodged a sleeping toddler. “It’s not important. We always get by.” As Sludig had predicted, she spoke Westerling with a heavy Rimmersgard accent. “Sit down and tell me the news of the world.” She frowned, pursing her red lips “There may be some beer somewhere. You men like beer, don’t you? Vren, go find some beer. And where are those oak-nuts I sent you for?”
Sludig looked up suddenly. “Oh.” Sheepishly, he produced Vren’s acorns from his cloak pocket.
“Good,” Skodi said “Now beer.”
“Yes, Skodi.” Vren scuttled off down an aisle of stacked stools, vanishing into the shadows.
“How is it, if we may be asking, that you can live out here?” Binabik said. “It seems a place of great isolation.”
Skodi had been staring at him avidly. Now her eyebrows lifted in surprise. “I thought you were a child!” She sounded disappointed. “But you are a little man.”
“Qanuc, my lady.” Binabik sketched a bow. “What your people call ‘trolls’.”
“A troll!” She clapped her hands in excitement. This time, one of the children did slither off her rounded lap into the blankets coiled at her feet. The little one did not wake, and another quickly crawled up to take the spot the first had vacated. “So wonderful! We have never had a troll here!” She turned and called into the darkness. “Vren! Where is the beer for these men?”
“Where did all these children come from?” Simon asked wonderingly. “Are they all yours?”
A defensive look came to the girl’s face. “Yes. They are now. Their parents did not want them, so Skodi keeps them instead.”
“Well…” Simon was nonplussed “Well, that’s very kind of you. But how do you feed them? You said they were hungry.”
“Yes, it is kind,” Skodi said, smiling now. “It is kind of me, but that is how I was taught. Lord Usires said to shelter the children.”
“Aye,” Sludig grumbled. “That’s so.”
Vren came back into the firelight balancing a jar of beer and several cracked bowls. The pile swayed dangerously, but with help he was able to set them down and pour beer for all three travelers. The wind had risen, making the flames billow in the grate.
“This is a very good fire,” Sludig said as he wiped froth from his mustache. “You must have had a difficult time finding dry wood in yesterday’s storm.”
“Oh, Vren chopped for me early in the spring.” She reached out and patted the boy’s head with her plump hand. “He butchers and cooks, too. He is my good boy, Vren is.”
“Is there no one here who is older?” Binabik asked. “I am meaning nothing discourteous, but you seem young to raise these children in solitude.”
Skodi looked at him carefully before answering. “I told you. Their mothers and fathers have gone away. There is no one here but us. But we do very well, don’t we, Vren?”
“Yes, Skodi.” The little boy’s eyes were growing heavy. He snuggled himself against her leg, basking in the warmth of the fire.
“So,” she said at last, “you said that you had some food. Why do you not get it, then we can share. We can find the makings of a meal somewhere here. Wake up, Vren, you lazy thing!” She cuffed him lightly on the side of the head. “Wake up! It’s time to make supper!”
“Don’t wake him,” Simon said, feeling sorry for the little black-haired boy. “We’ll take care of the meal.”
“Nonsense,” Skodi said. She gave the protesting Vren a gentle shake. “He loves to make supper. You go and get what you have. You will stay the night, yes? Then you should stable your horses. I think the stable is around the side of the courtyard. Vren, get up, you lazy lump! Where is the stable?”
The forest had grown close around the back of the abbey where the stables were located. The old trees, dusted with snow, swayed mournfully as Simon and his companions threw dry straw onto the floor of one of the stalls and dumped snow into the trough to melt. The stable seemed to have been used occasionally—there were blackened torches in the cressets, and the crumbling walls had been haphazardly patched—but it was hard to guess when the most recent occasion might have been.
“Shall we bring all our things inside?” Simon asked.
“I am thinking so,” Binabik replied, loosening the belly-strap on one of the packhorses. “I doubt the children would steal anything that was not food, but who can say what might become mislaid?”
The smell of wet horses was strong. Simon rubbed Homefinder’s hard flank. “Don’t you think it’s strange that no one lives here but children?”
Sludig laughed shortly. “The young woman is older than you, Snowlock—and quite a lot of woman at that. Girls her age often have children of their own.”
Simon blushed, but his irritated reply was forestalled by Binabik. “I am thinking,” the troll said, “that Simon speaks with good sense. There are things unclear about this place. It will do no harm to ask more questions of our hostess.”
Simon wrapped Thorn in his cloak before carrying it back through the snow to the abbey. The changeable sword was at this moment quite light. It also seemed to throb slightly, although Simon knew that
might be no more than his chilled, trembling hands. When little Vren let them back inside, Simon placed Thorn near the hearth where they would sleep and piled several of their saddlebags atop it, as though to immobilize a sleeping beast that might wake and flail about.
Supper was an odd mixture of unusual food and strange conversation. Beside the remains of dried fruit and meat provided by the three travelers, Skodi and her young charges put out bowls of bitter acorns and sourberries. Scavenging, Vren found a molding but edible cheese somewhere in the abbey’s ruined larder, along with several more jars of musky Rimmersgard beer. With this they managed to make a meal that served the whole company, albeit meagerly: the children all assembled numbered a dozen or more.
Binabik found little time to ask questions during the meal. Those of Skodi’s charges who were old enough to go outside stood up to relate fanciful stories of various adventures they had encountered that day, stories so exaggerated as to be obviously untrue. One little girl told off lying to the top of a mighty pine tree to steal a feather from a magical jaybird. Another, one of the older boys, swore that he had found a chest of ogre’s gold in a cave in the forest. Vren, when his turn came, calmly informed his listeners that while gathering acorns he had been pursued by an icy demon with glinting blue eyes, and that Simon and his two companions had saved him from the frosty menace’s clutches, smiting it with their swords until it shattered into icicles.
Skodi held the smaller children on her lap as she ate, each in its turn, and listened to each story with an expression of envious fascination. She rewarded those she enjoyed most by giving the teller an extra morsel of food, which was eagerly accepted—indeed, Simon decided, the reward was probably the main reason for the fabulous nature of the stories.
There was something about Skodi’s face that Simon found captivating. Despite her great size, there was a delicacy to her girlish features and a brightness to her eyes and smile that transfixed him. At certain moments, as she laughed breathlessly at one of the children’s inventions, or turned so that the firelight played glinting in her flaxen hair, she seemed quite beautiful; at others, when she greedily snatched a handful of berries from one of the smaller the children and stuffed her wide mouth, or when her spellbound appreciation of the story-telling for a moment resembled mere idiocy, he found her repellent.
A few times she caught Simon staring. The glances she returned to him frightened him a little, even as they made him blush. Skodi, for all her bulk, wore a hungering look that would not have been out of place on a starveling beggar.
“So,” she said when Vren had finished his wild tale, “you are even braver men than I guessed.” She smiled hugely at Simon. “We will sleep well tonight, knowing you are under our roof. You do not think Vren’s ice-demon has brothers, do you?”
“I am thinking it is not likely,” Binabik said with a gentle smile. “You need not be fearing any such demon while we are staying here in your home. In return, we have much gratitude for a roof and a hearth for warming.”
“Oh, no,” Skodi said, her eyes wide, “it is me who is grateful. We do not get many visitors. Vren, help clear a place for the men to sleep. Vren, do you hear me?”
Vren was staring intently at Simon, an unfathomable expression in his dark eyes.
“Your mentioning of guests, my lady,” Binabik began,.”—it brings to my mind a question I had meant to be asking you. How is it that you and these children have come to be in such a place of isolation…?”
“The storms came. Others ran away. We had nowhere else to go.” Her brisk words poorly concealed her wounded tone. “None of us were wanted—none of the children, nor Skodi either.” The subject discussed, her voice warmed again. “Now it is time for the little ones to sleep. Come, all of you, help me up.” Several of her wards scurried to assist Skodi in levering her large body up out of the chair. As she moved slowly toward the door at the back of the room, a pair of sleeping children clinging to her like baby bats, she called: “Vren will help you find your way. Bring the candle when you come, Vren.” She disappeared into the shadows.
Simon awakened from an uneasy sleep in the depths of night, filled with confused panic by the red-touched and starless darkness, and also by a faint thread of sound that wove itself in and out of the muted tapestry of windsong. It took some moments to remember that they slept near the hearth of the old abbey, warmed by dreaming coals and sheltered from the elements by the roof and decaying walls. The noise was Qantaqa’s lonely howl, floating distantly. Simon’s fear faded a little, but did not disappear.
Was that a dream I had last night? Shem and Ruben and the voices? Was it truly just a mad fancy, or was it as real as it seemed…as it sounded?
Ever since the night of his escape from the Hayholt, he had not felt a master of his own destiny. That same Stoning Night, when he had somehow felt Pryrates’ repellent thoughts and had unwillingly shared in the ritual as Elias received the terrible gift of the sword Sorrow, Simon had wondered if he was even a master of his own mind. His dreams had become vivid far beyond the realms of mere night-wandering. The dream at Geloë’s house, in which a cadaverous Morgenes had warned him of a false messenger, and the repeated visitations of the great, all-crushing wheel and of the tree-that-was-a-tower, white among the stars—these seemed too insistent, too powerful to be just unsettled sleep. And now, in his dreams the night before, he heard Pryrates talking to some unearthly thing as clearly as if Simon listened at a keyhole. These were not anything like the dreams of his life before this last terrible year.
When Binabik and Geloë had taken him on the Road of Dreams, the vision he experienced there had felt much like these others—like dreaming, but with a wild and indescribable potency of vision. Perhaps somehow, because of Pryrates on the hilltop or something else, a door had opened in him that sometimes led to the dream-road. That seemed like madness, but what did not in this topsy-turvy age? The dreams must be important—when he awoke, it was with the sense of something infinitely crucial slipping away—but terrifyingly, he had no idea what they might mean.
Qantaqa’s mournful cry sounded again through the storm that blew beyond the abbey’s walls. Simon wondered that the troll did not get up to soothe his mount, but the sound of Binabik’s and Sludig’s snoring continued unabated. Simon tried to rise, determined to at least offer her the chance to come in—she sounded so lone and lorn, and it was so very cold outside—but found that a heavy languor clutched his limbs, so that he could not force himself up. He struggled, but to no avail. His limbs were no more responsive than if they had been carved of ash-wood.
Simon suddenly felt terribly sleepy. He fought his drowsiness, but it pulled him relentlessly downward; Qantaqa’s distant howl faded and he went sliding as though down a long slope, back coward unknowingness…
When he woke again, the last coals had burned black and the abbey was in utter darkness. A cold hand was touching his face. He gasped with horror, but air barely filled his lungs. His body still felt heavy as stone, without the power of movement.
“Pretty,” Skodi whispered, a deeper shadow, sensed rather than seen, looming tall and wide above him. She stroked his cheek. “Just got your beard, too. You are a pretty one. I will keep you.”
Simon strove helplessly to wriggle from beneath her touch.
“They don’t want you, either, do they?” Skodi said, crooning as though to a baby. “I can feel it. Skodi knows. Cast out, you were. I can hear it in your head. But that is not why I had Vren bring you.”
She settled down beside him in the dark, folding into a crouch like a tent pulling loose from its stakes. “Skodi knows what you have. I heard it singing in my ears, saw it in my dreams. Lady Silver Mask wants it. Her Lord Red Eyes does, too. They want the sword, the black sword, and when I give it to them they will be nice to me. They will love Skodi and give her presents.” She caught a lock of his hair between her plump fingers and gave it a sharp pull. The twinge of pain seemed far away. A moment later, as if in recompense, she ran her hand carefully o
ver Simon’s head and face.
“Pretty,” she said at last. “A friend for me—a friend my age. That is what I have waited for. I will take away those dreams that are bothering you. I will take away all your dreams. I can do that, you know.” She lowered her whispering voice even further, and Simon realized for the first time that the heavy breathing of his two friends had ceased. He wondered if they were lying silent in the darkness, waiting to save him. If that was so, he prayed they would act soon. His heart seemed as nerveless as his leaden limbs, but fear beat through him, aching like a secret pulse. “They drove me out of Haethstad,” Skodi muttered. “My own family and neighbors. Said I was a witch. Said I put curses on people. Drove me out.” Horribly, she began to snuffle. When she spoke again, her words were garbled by tears. “I sh-sh-showed them. When Father was drunk and sleeping, I stabbed Mother with his knife and then put it back in his hand. He killed himself.” Her laugh was bitter but remorseless. “I could always see things others could not, think of things they would not. Then, when the deep winter came and would not go away, I began to be able to do things. Now I can do things no one else can do.” Her voice rose triumphantly “I am growing stronger all the time. Stronger and stronger. When I give Lady Silver Mask and Lord Red Eyes the sword they’re looking for, the singing black sword I heard in my dreams, then I’ll be like they are. Then the children and I will make everyone sorry.”
As she spoke, she absently slid her cold hand from Simon’s forehead down into his shirt, letting it play over his naked chest as if she petted a dog. The wind had stilled, and in the dreadful silence of its abatement he suddenly knew that his friends had been taken away. There was no one in the lightless room but Skodi and Simon.