by Voima
Karin interrupted. “And where is that?” she cried.
He went on speaking to Valmar as though he had not heard her. “But I warn you, that which you must offer the Wanderers themselves may be far more than a Seer or Weaver will ask you.” He then turned to Karin. “I am surprised, as princess of this kingdom, that you did not know. A Wanderer may often be glimpsed at twilight on the top of that bald hill at the head of the valley. How you reach him and what you say to him,” turning his back abruptly, “is your problem.”
“You don’t have to come with me,” said Karin as she and Valmar rode on up the valley.
“Yes, I do. Roric told me to take care you if he didn’t come back.”
She smiled suddenly as though very pleased. But she said, “King Hadros will wonder if you are not there at the end of the day’s meeting.”
“Will they not wonder in your castle?”
She stopped smiling. “Let them wonder. Let them imagine anything they like about you and me. I could not stay in my castle, not knowing what has happened to Roric, surrounded by those people and doing nothing.”
Valmar was momentarily disconcerted by the implications of what she thought people might imagine. But he said, “If fate does not go well for the Wanderers, I wonder if that means they are being attacked by people with no backs.”
The valley was narrowing, with little room for more than the track and a few firs beside the river under steep rocky walls. The water beside them dashed white over tumbled boulders. At first the tracks had led on either hand up out of the valley, toward villages perched on the hills above it. But now their path seemed little frequented, shaded and strewn with brown fir needles. Valmar, looking ahead, saw no pass, only the river cascading as a thin white line out of a cliff face.
Karin reined in where the path died out completely. “The Seer must have meant that hill,” she said, pointing. “It’s called Graytop. I came up here on a picnic once, not long before the war, with my older brother and our nurse. We decided we were going to climb it. I doubt if we made it more than a quarter of the way up.”
Valmar looked at it critically. The hill stood out, separated from the valley walls and higher. It rose sharply from the far side of the river, its lower slopes green, the upper slopes bare granite. “If you made it a quarter of the way up, you were doing well.”
“I have always been good at climbing,” said Karin with a small smile. She dismounted. “If the Wanderer comes at twilight, that should give me about two hours. I think I can make it up there in that amount of time.”
“How shall we cross the river?” asked Valmar.
“As I recall, a little way along the bank there’s a place where we scrambled down to the water. The river’s course is very narrow there—I could jump it even when I was eight.” She turned her eyes full on him. “But I am going alone.”
Valmar swung off his own horse and seized her by the hand. “I told you I have to take care of you! I couldn’t wait here quietly while you tried to climb—perhaps slipping—and then maybe met—”
She put her free hand over his mouth. “I cannot climb in my mother’s brocade dress, so I am taking these clothes off. I am quite sure,” and for a second her lips twitched in amusement, “that your father would not want you beside me as I went up the hill naked.”
The shock silenced Valmar for a second. He dropped her hand and stared at her, wondering if she could be serious. Then he said resolutely, “In that case, you can wait here and I shall go alone.”
“You have never been as good at climbing,” she said, unfastening her cloak and turning around while she started on the lacings of her bodice. “You can help me and Roric most by staying right here. If I fall, drag me out of the river and get me back to my father’s castle if I am still alive. If I do not return, try if the Weaver back home will give you a clearer message.”
“But why do you want to risk your life like this?” he protested.
“I love Roric. Now turn your back, or you really will have King Hadros furious with you.”
He turned his back obediently, hearing the rustle of clothing coming off. He considered trying to wrestle his big sister back onto her horse, tying her to the saddle and leading the animal back down to the castle. He would seize her with his own cloak, he decided, making it hard for her to fight back while also covering up a nakedness that he startled himself by beginning to picture.
And then he realized there was silence behind him. He spun around to see a slim figure, wearing only riding gloves and a shift caught up above the knees, springing across a narrow place in the river course and scrambling up the far side.
He slowly gathered up the clothes she had dropped and folded them neatly. There were two long, blond hairs caught in the hood of her cloak. He picked them up carefully, then pulled two of his own red hairs out with a sharp tug. He leaned several tiny fir twigs together and laid the hairs across them, then struck a spark with the flint and steel at his belt. The dry twigs caught at once. The hairs twisted as though alive as they burned.
He ground out the embers with his heel and looked up the hill. Karin was now a small pale shape, higher than he had expected and apparently climbing easily. He hoped his offering was acceptable to the lords of voima.
4
At first when the cool afternoon air touched Karin’s skin she shivered, but the exercise of climbing quickly warmed her again. She wished for the sturdy boots she normally wore at home, as her toes cracked against still another stone. She had left her elegant slippers with Valmar as worse than useless, but at least her hands were protected by her riding gloves.
The hill was as she remembered, its lower slopes made up of stones that had long since wedged themselves firmly into position, now grown with weeds and moss. It made for surprisingly easy climbing, with plenty of chinks for toes and fingers. She and her brother had stopped eleven years ago because it was growing late, because their nurse, from whom they had slipped away, had finally spotted them and was shouting terrible threats, and because they were getting tired.
She felt the strain especially in the muscles between her shoulder blades. Every now and then there was a small tree, well-rooted among the rocks, and she allowed herself to rest for a moment within its crook, trying to stretch out the stiffness. But the sharp twigs caught at her skin and the light fabric of her shift when she moved again.
As the afternoon advanced the sun disappeared behind the high hills and a wind began to blow, moaning softly, not quite shaping intelligible words. Karin glanced back down into the valley, heavily shadowed now so that it was impossible to pick out detail although she could see a dark mass that must be the horses.
Then she looked up the slope before her, becoming ever steeper. Soon she would be out of the area where the stones were well lodged, into a region where no plant life grew because the stones were still constantly shifting. The sky was a thin and pale blue; she did not dare rest longer if she wanted to be at the top before twilight.
As she continued upward she startled birds nesting in crevices on the steep slope. She thought about the Mirror-seer, wondering if his willingness to give information so openly, so freely, was all a deception, that he knew it was no easier to meet a Wanderer on Graytop than anywhere else in mortal realms. If so, he must be having a hearty laugh at her expense, watching in his mirrors as a woman wearing nothing but a ripped shift risked death on a steep slope for no reason at all.
Karin kept on climbing. She had reached the gray rocks that gave the hill its bald appearance. She was high enough that she now looked down on the little clusters of distant houses that perched on the hills above the valley, and the setting sun touched the granite with a deceptively warm light.
Here she had to go very carefully, testing each step before she shifted her weight. Several times as she started to pull herself up a piece of rock broke loose and plummeted back toward the valley, sending the birds whirling dismayed out of their nests. If she fell, she thought grimly, Valmar would have trouble findin
g enough of her body to make it worth carrying the pieces back down to her father.
Her heart was beating so hard it shook her whole body as she reached up again and again in search of a solid grip, forcing her battered feet to follow. But then suddenly she realized that the slope against which she pressed was less steep, that she was crawling more than climbing. She raised her head. The air was darkening, though the sky above was still light, and she had reached the top.
If there was a Wanderer here, she certainly did not see him. She scrabbled away from the edge and stretched out in the minimal wind protection a large stone provided, sucking at a deep scratch on one wrist. The cool air quickly dried her sweat.
“Are you an outcast?” came a quiet voice behind her.
She spun around, wrapping her arms around herself and keeping her knees together, suddenly deeply ashamed to be found undressed.
But the Wanderer—if it was a Wanderer—gave no sign that he had noticed. He sat on a stone a short distance away, his face hidden by a wide-brimmed hat, seeming to look northward toward the sea.
Karin stared at him as though paralyzed. She had been so glad to reach the top of the hill alive that she had forgotten that she would have anything else to fear. But if the Mirror-seer was right, this was one of the immortal lords of voima who controlled mortal destinies, whose power over earth and sky, life and death, was limitless.
Somehow she had expected him to look more impressive.
Then she found her voice, forcing herself to speak without trembling. “I seek information. I regret that I have climbed up here nearly naked, with nothing to offer you, but I have come because I am trying to find Roric No-man’s son.”
As she spoke she wondered wildly if he might be right, that she really was an outcast. She had been taken out of the only home she had known for ten years, to be returned to the home that had sent her away.
The man chuckled. “Then you and I seek the same thing.”
She took a moment to analyze this. “You do not know where Roric is? But he left to go with the Wanderers!”
“When you say he left,” said the man a little sharply, “what exactly do you mean?”
Karin frowned. Wherever Roric was, this person ought to know it. “I mean that a being came and summoned him away from home, and no one has seen him since.” The twilight was rapidly hastening toward dark. Either a late-flying bird or a bat darted past her head. “Those who saw it, said the being had no back.”
The man in the wide hat, sitting half turned away from her, certainly had a back. But as she finished recovering her breath, trying unsuccessfully to see his face—if he even had one—the chill that gripped her went far deeper than the touch on her skin of the evening air.
He did not answer for a moment. “Then I fear we will not be able to use him,” he said at last, with what sounded like a sigh. “We do not force mortals against their will, and he has made his choice.” Something about his voice sounded, not aged or creaky, but still extremely old.
“But where is he?” Karin cried.
“You, on the other hand,” he said, not answering her question but turning fully toward her for the first time, “might be useful to us. It is a rare person who has the strength and the will to climb this high, seeking someone who might be nothing more than a shadow.”
She thought she felt his eyes on her, but she was now too angry and too disappointed to feel shame. “I do not intend to become ‘valuable’ for anyone else,” she said bitterly. “I climbed here because I hoped you could tell me where Roric is. I know I have nothing to offer you, but I could bring you a bracelet or rings tomorrow—” She paused, not liking to think of climbing up here again. “Or we could meet somewhere else . . .”
“Do you think me a Weaver or a Seer,” the other asked, sounding amused, “that you must offer me a bracelet as a gift? Think what you put in the flames when you burn an offering: some hairs, a scrap of wool or parchment, a bite of flesh or some grains of wheat— Are these not gifts that symbolize the yearning spirit more than iron and gold?”
Then he really is a Wanderer, she thought, even if he does not shoot flame from his fingers.
“You are a princess, Karin Kardan’s daughter. Why is Roric No-man’s son important to you?”
“I love him,” she said defiantly. “He and I are sworn together.”
She trembled now as she spoke, weak with exhaustion and fear for Roric. But at least with this strange figure, on this bald hill in the dusk, she did not feel any need to hide and control her feelings and her words.
“You have, I recall, long been a hostage in a foreign court,” said the shadowed figure thoughtfully. “It is not surprising that you would swear yourself to someone else out of desperation—it cannot be easy being an outcast.”
“I did not choose Roric out of desperation,” she said heatedly. “I chose him because I love him. Now, are you going to tell me where he is?”
“Not unless I know myself,” he said with a low chuckle. “But you yourself have possibilities . . . Tell me, what did you think to do next?”
“Get off this hilltop, because the only thing I’ve found here is someone who claims to be a Wanderer but doesn’t know anything!”
“I make no ‘claim’ to be anyone,” said the other, quietly and good-naturedly. He rose, stepped behind a large rock, and disappeared.
Karin jumped up and ran around the rock, knocking her toes again in the shadows. There was no one there; she had not really expected that there would be.
She walked over to the edge and looked down. Though there was still a little light off to the west, the rocks below her disappeared into blackness. The bottom of the hill was completely hidden. There was no way she could descend that rock face in the dark and still live till morning. She listened, hearing nothing but the distant sound of the rushing river.
Valmar would be worried. She put her hands on either side of her mouth and shouted. “I shall pass the night up here! I’ll see you tomorrow!”
Again she listened but heard no reply. Maybe he had already gone. But she could not climb down in the dark. This looked, she thought uneasily, like a good place for a troll, and not even the semi-domesticated one who lived under Hadros’s bridge, whom Roric at least had dared face.
She settled herself stiffly against a rock so that her back was protected, then realized how cold it was growing. On the hilltop the wind blew steadily, with a bite as though it reached her fresh from distant ice fields. If she fell asleep up here she might not wake. She pushed herself to her feet and groped until she found a fairly broad expanse of smooth granite on which to spend the night pacing.
# * # * # * # *
Long, long ago, before your grandfather’s time or great-grandfather’s time or even his great-grandfather’s time, there was no glory or honor on the earth. The earth was ruled by women, and their only thought was for their children and for their children’s safety, even when those children were grown, even when those children had become men and yearned for adventure and far places. The men were at most allowed to travel to market, to hunt bears who had threatened the flocks, to fish on the deep and dangerous sea, but never to go to war.
And in those days there was one young man named Laaiman, brave and glorious, whose mother kept him from everything but taking care of the cows. But one day, coming home from pasture, he saw something shiny lying in his path, something made of steel, long and sharp with a handle that just fit his hand. It was a sword, but he had never before seen one.
He left the cows and went to the Weaver who lived in a cave nearby to ask him what it was. And when he had burned an offering, and the Weaver had woven its web, he was told, “It is the sign. The end of women’s rule has come.”
Laaiman did not know what this meant, but the Weaver would say no more, and as he left sealed up the entrance to the cave. And that night there was blood on the moon, and wolves howled all around the cow barn, and in the morning came blizzard snow though it was midsummer. Snakes writhed in the
sea and fish on dry land, and all the women went into labor and brought forth monsters. And beings appeared who had never been seen before, like tall and shining men whose faces were concealed—Wanderers, they called themselves, lords of voima.
Then mortal man rose against man, and Laaiman, the only one with a sword, defended his manor and his mother and sisters against the other men. The Wanderers applauded him and gave him greater strength yet, so that he could conquer all others even when other men too began to make swords.
And when Laaiman had conquered a kingdom and won himself eternal fame and honor, he saw a woman crossing his fields, walking lightly on the very tops of the barley stalks. She was slim and dark-haired, with eyes like the deepest night. A woman of voima, she named herself, made for the pleasure of the Wanderers. But he took her into his own bed, and on her he fathered a race of great men, of heroes, and of kings.
CHAPTER THREE
1
The ale horn came down the table again, and Roric drank deeply before passing it on. The ale here tasted even better than Karin’s brewing, and as far as he could tell he could drink any amount without it going to his head.
His companions, however, had already reached the stage of laughing for no reason, shouting good-naturedly but incomprehensibly, and struggling for possession of an ale horn that always had enough left for one more drink. They were all slightly bigger than he was, and all had the disconcerting trick of becoming blurred and shadowy if he looked at them directly. They now seemed to be competing in boasts, who would do the most now that they had a mortal with them—but exactly what they intended to do with him remained unclear. Two took their boasting to the stage of jumping up and seizing each other by the neck. But they stopped their squabbling to cheer when a well-endowed young woman with a strangely vacant expression rose and began to dance.
Roric shrugged off his unease, forcing himself to relax and enjoy this feast. He had stayed constantly alert, constantly watching, in the three days—if indeed it was three days—while the person who might be a Wanderer had led him across a startlingly lush and beautiful countryside, but led him furtively. They had kept behind the tall hedgerows, plunged deep through woods that seemed to glow green, galloped the other direction if surprised slipping past the barns.