The Broken Sword

by Poul Anderson

  Leea put certain keys beside him. ‘When you feel recovered enough,’ she whispered, ‘release the elf thralls. They have all been locked into the dungeons for safety. There are weapons hidden in the old well-house behind the keep. Sneak out there and get them when the fighting starts.’

  ‘Good,’ he muttered with his dry throat. ‘Also I will get many kegs of wine and a haunch of meat. And vengeance on the trolls.’ His eyes held a terrible gleam.

  Leea sped on soundless bare feet up an old and little-used tower. When she came to its top she stepped out, shielding her eyes against the sinking sun. A figure tall and brightly byrnied stood outside the wall, she could not tell who it was in the, to her, intolerable glare. A warrior of the Sidhe, perhaps, or – her heart beat faster – Skafloc himself.

  She leaned over the battlement and flung the ring of keys upward and outward. In a glittering arc the ring looped on the warrior’s spear – and among them were the keys to the main gates!

  Leea sped back into the grateful dimness of the castle. Like a flying bird she raced for the earl’s chambers. She sprang into the bed, and Valgard stirred and blinked awake.

  He looked about him, out the dimming window. ‘It is almost sundown,’ he said. ‘Time to rouse the trolls.’

  He took a great horn from the wall, and, opening the door, blew a mighty blast, all unaware that it was the signal for every elf woman in the fortress who was beside a troll to plunge a knife in his heart.

  Freda kept fainting, and waking up in a whirling red-spattered darkness just as she was about to fall off her horse. It was the pain, ripping sword-like through her half-healed body, that roused her, and she thanked it with dry lips.

  The horse could go no faster. Unmercifully she flogged it. The hills and trees swam in an unstable half-dark before her eyes, like stones seen through a swiftly running river. Often they seemed unreal, somehow things of dream, they were impossible and fantastic. There was a rising roar in her ears, filling her head with its dark tumult.

  She remembered the horse stumbling once and throwing her into a river. Its waters were like ice, and they soon froze stiffly in her dress and hair as she rode on.

  Later, many eternities later, when the sun was dying as red as the blood in her trail, her horse fell again, nor did it rise. She went on afoot, crashing into trees because her swimming blurring eyes could not place them, falling, getting up, groping through bushes whose barren twigs clawed at her.

  North – north to Elfheugh, to Skafloc.

  The clamor of dark waters seemed to fill her skull. Her being drowned in their elemental madness, she knew not who she was nor cared – but north, north, north to Elfheugh—

  28

  At sundown Skafloc let sound the battle horns. The elves, who had slept and eaten within their tents, came forth into the dusk with a clashing of metal and a great vengeful shout. Horses tramped and whinnied, war chariots rolled brazen over the frosty ground, and a forest of shining spears and lances lifted among the flying banners and the head of Illrede.

  Skafloc mounted his Jötun stallion. The demon sword seemed almost to stir of itself at his hip. His face was a mask, worn and gaunt and pitiless, as he spoke to Firespear: ‘There seems to be a great disturbance within the walls.’

  ‘Aye, so,’ grinned the elf. ‘The trolls must just have found out how the other castles fell so swiftly. But they will not catch the women ere we are at their throats.’

  Skafloc jingled the key ring at his belt. ‘Do you lead the attack on the rear,’ he said. ‘When we have opened the front gates, it will draw enough defenders for you to be able to ram down the rear ones. Flam and Rucca will lead assaults on the sides, diversionary ones which will swing to help us once we are in. I will go with the Sidhe and the Erlking’s guard against the front gates and unlock them.’

  The moon rose, gleaming on metal and eyes and white horses. The lurs blew again and the host raised a mighty shout that rang between the crags and cliffs and frosty hills, up almost to the coldly glittering stars. As one, the elves charged up the steep hillside, up toward the sky-storming walls of the fortress.

  A great twanging sounded through the night. Shaken the trolls might be, with a third of their number murdered in sleep and their slaves loose somewhere in the labyrinthine castle, but they were stout warriors and Valgard roared them on to battle. Now from the walls the archers sent a steady rain of arrows down on the elves.

  The missiles rattled off lifted shields and metal-bound helms – but they also struck deep. Elf after elf toppled under the sighing cloud, horses screamed and bolted, corpses littered the upward way.

  Only the narrowest of paths led up to the huge brazen gates. But these were elves, who needed no paths, they sprang over sliding talus and frost-slippery rocks, from crag up to next higher crag, their war-cries tearing from their throats. They threw hooks that clutched deep into creviced precipices and swarmed up ropes tied to these, they rode their horses where no mountain goat would have dared go, they stormed to the flat ground about the walls and fired their own arrows upward.

  Skafloc took the path, so that he could lead the war chariots of the Tuatha De Danaan. Frightfully they rumbled behind him, wheels sparking and crashing, brazen bodies gleaming like the sun. The whining arrows rattled off helms and hauberks and shields, none of Skafloc’s allies were hit. And he himself, thundering on his dark horse up a path of shadow and tricky moonlight, was not even approached by a missile.

  Thus the elves won up under the walls. Now boiling water and blazing oil and ice-slick vitriol rained down, spears and stones and the lurid fire of the Greeks. Elves screamed as the flesh peeled from their bones, and their comrades drew snarling back.

  Skafloc shouted, wild with wrath and battle lust, longing only to lose himself in the terrible game of weapons. To him the elves dragged a covered passageway on wheels, and under shelter of this he moved toward the gates.

  Valgard, standing on the wall just above, shouted for the heaviest ballista to be brought forth. The brazen-bound gates could not be beaten down ere the shelter was crushed under huge hurled stones.

  Skafloc put the first key in place and turned it, calling out the old rune words. A second key, a third, a fourth – Now Valgard himself helped load the ballista with a boulder under whose weight the engine groaned. Trolls were already winding it up.

  Seven keys, eight – Valgard grasped the lever. Nine keys, and the gates were unlocked!

  Skafloc leaped onto his horse and reared him back. The pawing forefeet clashed mightily on the gates, giant strength to swing them back. The gates flew open, and Skafloc galloped the tunnel-like thickness of the wall and burst into the moon-silvery courtyard. Behind him, the passage echoed to the wheels of the chariots of Lugh, Dove Berg, Angus Og, Eochy, Mananaan, Coll, Cecht, Mac Greina, the whole host of the Sidhe, to hoofs of horses and running of feet. The gate was taken!

  The gate guards struck out with their weapons. An ax smote the leg of the Jötun horse. The stallion kicked out, snorting, trampling, treading warriors into bloody smears.

  Skafloc’s sword screamed forth. The blade flamed icy blue in the half-light, thundered, rose and fell, striking like a living snake. Clamor and clangor of metal belled under the grandly wheeling stars, shouts of warriors, whistle of cleaving glaives, thunderous rumble of sword-hubbed wheels.

  Back and back went the trolls. Valgard howled, his eyes flaming wolf-green, and led a rush down from the wall to the courtyard. Mightily he smote at the flank of the invaders. An elf fell to his ax, he twisted the weapon loose and struck at another, smashed the face of a third with his shield – hewing, hewing, he waded into battle.

  At the rear gate rose the roar of Firespear’s battering ram. The trolls hurled stones at it, fire to set it ablaze, spears and arrows at the warriors around it. But now from behind leaped a crew gaunt and bloody and coldly afire for revenge, weapons singing in their hands – Imric’s gang of freed slaves. The trolls turned to fight this new menace, and Firespear broke down the
gates.

  ‘To the keep!’ Valgard’s voice rose huge over the tumult surging between the walls. ‘To the keep – hold it!’

  Some few trolls battled their way to where he towered gigantic and blood-streaming over the combat. They went in a tight ring, the clattering elf swords menacing them from every side, they hewed their way to a door in the keep.

  It was locked.

  Valgard hurled himself against it. The door groaned under his frightful strength. He chopped at the lock, it shattered in sparks and he swung the door open.

  Bows twanged from the darkness inside. Trolls sank, and Valgard staggered back with an arrow through his left hand. Leea’s voice jeered at him, sweet poisonous mockery: ‘The elf women guard this place for their lovers – better lovers than we have lately had, O you ape of Skafloc!’

  Like a blind man, Valgard turned away, wrenching the arrow from his hand. He howled, gnawed the rim of his shield, froth at his mouth. His ax began to shriek and thunder, striking at all before it, he was mad with killing-lust.

  Skafloc fought with a bitter flame of cold murder within him. The giant’s sword was a living fire in his hands. Blood and brains spurted, heads rolled on the ground, guts were slippery under his horse’s hoofs – he fought, he fought in a timeless whirlpool of death where only the icy lightning-swift workings of his brain were real. He scattered death as a sower scatters grain, and wherever he went the troll lines broke.

  Swords blazed under the moon. Spears flew, axes smote, metal and men cried their pain. The horses reared, trampling, whinnying, their blood-clotted manes flying. Elves and trolls died in a storm of weapons and were crushed under the swaying struggle.

  The moon climbed over the castle walls. Its light was ghastly on the clanging, roaring battle. It rose up until it seemed pierced by the castle’s highest towers. It began to sink, and the trolls broke in fear.

  Few of them were left. The elves harried them about the courtyard and out onto the white hillside, slaying them, hunting them.

  ‘To me, to me!’ Valgard’s great voice boomed over the waning battle. ‘Hither, trolls, and fight!’

  Skafloc heard the sound and wheeled about. He saw the changeling standing huge in the gateway, drenched with blood, a heap of elf corpses before him. The berserker’s eyes still flamed with cold fire as he battled. And toward him some few trolls were making their way for a final stand.

  For a moment, the black rush of his hatred blinded Skafloc. He felt the hunger of the sword and it was his own hunger. Valgard, Valgard, your weird is upon you!

  As he spurred his horse, he had a sudden instant when he saw a hawk rising up toward the moon. The chill struck deep into his bones, and he knew he had seen his own fetch. He was fey.

  Valgard saw him coming and grinned in hate. He put his back against the wall and raised his mighty ax. As the black stallion thundered down on him, he swung as he had never swung before. The weapon sank into the horse’s skull.

  That terrible rush could not be stopped. The stallion crashed into the wall, shaking its stones. Skafloc flew from the saddle, twisting elf-lithe even as he did. But he could not save himself from caroming off the wall and out the gateway.

  Valgard wrenched his ax from the dead horse and ran after his foe. Skafloc, his right arm hanging limp, was reeling to his feet. The sword gleamed in his left hand. Blood dripped from his torn face and ran down the bright blade.

  ‘Many things end tonight,’ quoth Valgard, ‘and your life is one.’

  ‘We were born nigh the same night,’ muttered Skafloc. Blood ran from his mouth with the words. ‘There will not be long between our deaths.’ He sneered. ‘When I go out, how can you, my shadow, live?’

  Valgard screamed and struck at him. Skafloc lifted the sword in his left hand. The ax Brotherslayer hit the demon blade and in a tremendous clang and crash and sheeting of sparks burst asunder.

  Skafloc staggered back, caught himself, and lifted the sword anew. Valgard stalked empty-handed toward him, growling deep in his throat like a maddened wolf.

  ‘Skafloc! Skafloc!’

  The cry rang and wavered in the night, and it was like a sword in his heart. The warrior turned to see Freda, haggard, bloody, in rags, but the most beautiful sight in all the wide world – Freda, his Freda, stumbling up the narrow path to him.

  ‘Skafloc,’ she breathed. ‘Skafloc, dearest—’

  Valgard rushed forward and wrenched the sword from the hand of his unseeing foe. A surge of strength and hate flamed icily in him, he lifted the blade and brought it screaming down.

  Howling like a wild beast, he lifted the sword. It ran with unearthly blue fires under the moon, ‘Victory!’ he shouted. ‘Victory and death are in the blade! I have won, I am master of all the world and I tread it beneath my feet – Come, darkness!’

  His hands, slippery with blood, lost their hold. The sword seemed almost to twist in the air, it flamed as it fell point foremost down on him. Its great weight knocked him from his feet, drove through his neck and into the earth, and there he lay pinned with the blade gleaming before his eyes and his life rivering from his throat. He tried to pull it loose, and the edges opened the veins in his wrists. And that was the end of Valgard the Changeling.

  Skafloc lay on the ground with his breast hidden in blood. His face was white in the moonlight, but he smiled as Freda bent over him and his eyes held their old merry gleam.

  ‘I am sped, my dearest,’ he whispered. ‘But you have too much youth and beauty for a dead man. You are too lovely to weep. Forget me—’

  ‘Never, never,’ she sobbed. Her tears fell like a spring morning’s rain on his bloody face.

  ‘Will you kiss me goodbye?’ he asked.

  His lips were already cold, but she sought them hungrily. And when she had opened her eyes again, Skafloc was dead in her arms.

  Imric and Leea came out into the first bitter dawn-light. ‘No use to heal the girl and send her home,’ said the elf woman. Pain and sorrow twisted her lovely white face. ‘Better to send her screaming in torment to hell. It was she who slew Skafloc.’

  ‘It was his weird,’ replied Imric. ‘And helping her is the last thing we can do for our comrade. Elves know friendship, if not love, and I would fain see that done which would have gladdened him.’

  ‘Not know love?’ murmured Leea, so softly he did not hear. ‘You are wise, Imric, but you know not all things.’

  Her eyes went to Freda, where she sat on the rime-white ground with Skafloc cradled in her arms. She was singing him to sleep with the lullaby she had thought to sing to her child.

  ‘Happier was her fate than mine,’ said Leea.

  Imric misunderstood her, on purpose or otherwise, and nodded bleakly. ‘Happier are all men than the beings of faerie – or the gods, for that matter,’ he said. ‘Better a life like a falling star, brief and bright across the dark, than the long, long waiting of the immortals, loveless and cheerlessly wise.’ He looked to the sword, flashing ominously in the throat of its prey. ‘And I feel a doom creeping on me,’ he muttered. ‘I feel that the day draws nigh when the powers of faerie fade, when even the Erlking shrinks to a forest sprite and then to naught, when the temples of the very gods crumble and are forgotten. I think man is fated to outlive the immortals.’

  He walked slowly toward the shining blade. ‘As for it,’ he told the dwarf thralls who followed him, ‘we will take it and cast it far out to sea. But I do not think that will do much good. The will of the Norns stands not to be changed, and the destiny of the sword has not yet run its course.’

  He followed the thralls out in a boat to see that they did their task well. When he returned, he and Leea went slowly into Elfheugh, for the cold pale dawn of winter was breaking.

  Here ends the saga of Skafloc Elf ’s-Foster.

  AFTERWORD

  This is frankly a romance, a story of admittedly impossible events and completely non-existent places. Whether or not it is true must be settled by those scientists who argue the reliability of the a
nnals of faerie and those philosophers who are trying to settle what truth itself may be. The historian can only set down the plain tales of the doubtful milieu of faerie and hope that they be found readable. He can scarcely debate their truth or falsity, especially in these latter days when so much of the patently absurd has become everyday fact and so many of the eternal verities been shown to be blatant fabrications.

  For the benefit of the curious, however, it should be remarked that such parts of the story as deal with purely human beings are as accurate as the scanty records permit. There were many such half-converted Christians as Orm, many forcible exchanges of property, much violence, and, one suspects, much peace and tenderness at times. Our own age is not one which can afford to call its ancestors savage.

  I am also well aware that the winters in England are not as cold as here suggested. But there is considerable evidence that at the time of this story the English climate was more continental, with warmer summers and colder winters than now. If that is true, then a few days of extreme chill are not unreasonable in the middle of such a winter.

  Much of the culture of the time lay in the verses, which every well-educated man was expected to be able to make on occasion and which certain men, the skalds, made more or less professionally. The verses were not sung but recited – I have used the term ‘quoth’ to replace one for which there is no real modern equivalent but which was cognate – and followed certain rules of meter and alliteration which I have also obeyed. But it seemed best to omit the elaborate metaphors of the skalds, and to keep to a minimum the conventional wolves and ravens of the poetic battlefield. It is recorded of Sighvat, skald to King Olaf the Stout (later known as St Olaf), that he spoke slowly, but made verses faster than most men could talk – indeed, he made a whole political speech in verse once, to good effect. So it did not seem incredible to me that the men of faerie, or even their human fosterlings, should have the same gift.