A Wizard In a Feud

by Christopher Stasheff

  "But I don't come to hunt, I come to trade!" Gar dropped to one knee, just in case the elf did hurl the spear, and pulled his pack around as an excuse. He unbuckled the straps, saying,

  "If you know so much of the powers of the plants, you should have potions that can cure as well as maim! Surely I have some goods that will delight you!"

  "Beware!" cried an elf. "What will he draw from that pack?"

  "Leave off!" cried a dozen voices, and an elf toward the back raised a crossbow, leveling it at Gar.

  "Treachery!" Kerlew leaped in front of Gar, a knife with a foot long blade appearing in his hand.

  Suddenly the air was full of gauzy wings and a crowd of fairies hovered all about them, crying, "Leave the Wee Folk alone!" and hurling tiny objects that winked in the sunlight as they shot toward the outlaw.

  Kerlew cried out in horror, twisting and turning aside, but half a dozen of the bright shards buried themselves in his scalp and neck. He fell down as though dead, and a dozen hot needles seemed to pierce Gar's brain. He clutched his head, screaming, "Chop it off! Chop it off to make the pain stop!"

  The Gregor party camped in a sort of three-sided cabin, a trail shelter. There wasn't room for the whole party, so half of them spread their blanket rolls on beds of evergreen boughs. Resolved to honor Moira's promise not to preach, Alea asked her, "I'm from very far away, and though I've guested at homesteads, I've heard no stories save those about the feuds. Are there any others?"

  "Oh, a host of them!" Moira smiled, dimpling prettily. "Most are told to lull children to sleep, though."

  "Well, I'm not sleepy yet." Alea wrapped her arms around her knees and leaned her chin on them. "Tell me one."

  "Oh, I suppose my favorite is that of the two sisters who loved the same suitor." Moira settled into the telling of the wicked sister who drowned the good sister, and of the minstrel who found the good sister's breastbone, made a harp of it, and played it at the wicked sister's wedding feast, whereupon the harp sang the truth of the murder.

  The clansfolk fell silent as she talked until all were listening. When she finished, one said, "There's not too much of peacepreaching in that."

  "There is, if you think about it," Hazel said, frowning.

  "Is there?" Moira asked in surprise, then frowned too. "Well, yes, I suppose there is, if you think of war as murder. I only thought of it as a tale of justice winning out, though."

  Hazel's frown deepened. "Do you say that peace is justice?"

  "Not I," Moira said slowly, "but I think you just have. I'll need to think about that awhile."

  A man groaned. "Oh no, Hazel! You've given her fuel for another sermon!"

  "Quickly, tell another tale!" Hazel said.

  "I know one of a miser who spied on the fairies at their dancing," Alea offered.

  An uneasy silence fell. The clansfolk looked at one another, then away, not quite meeting Alea's eyes. "We'd just as soon have no tales of the fairies," Hazel said, "nor of the Wee Folk, either."

  "Speaking of them might draw them to us," Moira explained to Alea.

  "Oh!" Alea knew enough to respect superstition-and having come from a planet where dwarves and giants were real, she wasn't terribly certain what was superstition and what wasn't. "Then you won't want to hear tales of ghosts, either."

  "Oh no, ghosts are perfectly all right," Hazel said, and the clansfolk leaned forward with relish.

  Alea managed to shake off her surprise. "Well, then, I'll tell you of a wise teacher who made a man of clay and brought him to life by magic."

  Several of the clansfolk shivered with delight, and Hazel said, "Aye! What was the teacher's name?"

  "MoHaRaL--well, that was his title," Alea amended, remembering the tale as she had read it on Herkimer's screen. "His people lived surrounded by others who didn't like them, so they never knew when their enemies might attack.. ."

  The crowd scowled and muttered, and Alea realized that this sounded far too much like their own lives. She hurried on. "So MoHaRaL went down to the river in the gray light before dawn and sculpted a huge man out of the mud of the bank, and recited magical spells that brought him to life-but since he had no soul, MoHaRaL called him by the word that meant 'incomplete' in his language-'golem.' "

  Then she was off, telling them how the golem chopped wood and carried water for everyone on the holy day when they weren't supposed to work, and guarded the homestead at night. "Then the enemies attacked, and the golem fought them off."

  The clansfolk were listening, wide-eyed and fascinated now. "But MoHaRaL found blood on the golem's hands and recited a spell that canceled the first, and the golem fell to the ground, lifeless once more."

  The clansfolk burst into cries of indignation.

  "What? Killed the poor thing just for doing its duty?"

  "How did the magician expect him to guard the homestead without fighting?"

  "You can't fight off an attack without bloodying your hands!" Alea stared at them, completely taken aback.

  Hazel pointed a trembling finger at Moira. "It's your doingl One day with you and she turns into a peace-preacher herself!"

  "It's only a story" Alea objected.

  "Yes, and what's the moral of it?" another clanswoman countered. "That it's wrong to fight back when your clan is attacked!"

  "Aye!" said a man indignantly. "What did this magician think the golem was going to do-sing his enemies to sleep?"

  "Throw them back over the wall," Alea told him. "Knock them back with his fists! He didn't mean for the golem to kill them!"

  "Oh, aye," said another with withering scorn. "How can you fight without killing? People always die in a battle, everyone knows that!"

  Desperately, Alea said, "They're much more likely to die when you fight with rifles!"

  "And how long would we live if we put down our rifles and the Mahons kept theirs?" Hazel demanded.

  "Much longer than you do by fighting, if you take their rifles away!"

  The clansfolk fell silent, frowning at one another, uncertain, and Alea felt a glow of success. Even to make them stop to think about it was an achievement!

  Only a small one, though. Hazel turned back to her and asked, "How do you get close enough to take away their guns?" That stopped Alea. She glanced at Moira, but the younger woman could only smile at her with sympathy. She turned back to Hazel and admitted, "I haven't figured that out yet."

  "Well, let us know when you do."

  "Let me try another story" Alea said quickly. "It's about a gloomy old castle called the Tower of London. Duke Richard sent his nephews there to keep them safe, when his brother the king died. Then he had himself crowned, and no one ever saw the two boys again..."

  She told them the first of the many tales of the Bloody Tower that she had read on Herkimer's screens and was very relieved that no one saw it as an indictment of Richard III and Henry Tudor, for fighting over the crown. They could have called it a peace-sermon-after all, no matter who won, the little princes lost-but they would have had to stretch.

  Instead, the clansfolk seemed to have forgotten reality in place of stories for the moment. Hazel told a tale of a dragon hunter, and Ezra told of the man who saved Death from dying himself, when he'd been beaten sorely by a giant who refused to admit his time had come. The evening passed merrily until Hazel finally stood up and stretched. "While we're waiting, I think I'll sleep. Who wants first watch?"

  The mood for storytelling was still with them when they woke up, but it shifted to tall tales. Around the campfire over their morning brew, the clansfolk rivaled to see who could invent the most impossible anecdote.

  "So Marl the Smith made a rifle with ten barrels that went around and around as Geordie fired..."

  "He'd still have to stop to reload some time! Besides, what would he hunt with a gun like that., Burley the Hunter, now, he noticed the branches of the trees were broken twenty feet high, but no lower, so he tracked the monster that had done it. Let me tell you, it had hoof-tracks the size of dinner plates..."r />
  "So the farther along that pass Brandy went, the more boys there were coming out to follow her, until she brought them out of the gully and they found themselves looking at three packs of wolves, a whole fifty of them, and each one of them as big as a pony.. ."

  They kept up the tale-telling even as they broke camp and drowned the fire, so they set off on the road in gusty high spirits that lasted a mile and a half, till they rounded a bend and found a score of clansfolk drawn up three deep across the road, rifles in their hands.

  10

  The Gregors stopped in their tracks, laughter dying on their lips, rifles rising.

  "Good thing you're under a peddler's truce," said the man in the middle of the line. "You Gregors track like bulls blundering through thickets. We heard you half a mile away."

  "We must be really bad if a Campbell can hear us," Hazel said with an edge to her voice. "But if we hadn't been escorting a peddler, you may be sure you wouldn't even have guessed we were coming."

  The leader's eyes sparked, but before he could dream up an insult, his gaze fell on Moira. He stared; then, affronted, he demanded, "What're you doing back so soon, Moira?"

  "Don't worry, Jethro, I'm not," Moira said, amused. "I've only joined this peddler for company on the road."

  "And she's going to the Tossians," Hazel snapped, "not to you Campbells."

  "Just like a Gregor-trying to tell everyone else what to do." Alea thought there was something a little weary about the exchange of insults, as though it were a necessary ritual that nobody really enjoyed any more.

  "Just like a Campbell, waylaying a peddler who might bypass their clan!"

  "Well, as to that, we'd like to ask differently." The clansman took off his hat as he turned to Alea. "We've one took bad sick, miz, and we've heard you're a healer."

  Alea glanced left and right and was amazed that none of the Gregors even thought to ask how the Campbells had heard of her so soon. There was a chink in the armor of the clans, perhaps only one sentry calling out boasts to his enemy's watchman, bragging about the healer who had chosen to honor his clan with her presence, and that watchman had told the whole clan, and another sentry had gone out to the far boundary and boasted to a third clan-the Campbells, in this instance.

  Which meant they were talking to each other. That talk might be nothing but insults and braggings, but it was communication nonetheless. Alea would have to find out how to use that communication to lighten the feuds, not increase them, that was all.

  All! But how? She shelved the question for another day. "I'll heal whoever is ill," Alea said, then remembered something else from Herkimer's database. "The Oath of Hippocrates demands it."

  "Hippocrates?"

  "What clan was he from?"

  Campbell and Gregor were both instantly suspicious.

  "He was the founder of medicine in a land far away," Alea explained, "the first healer. He swore to heal anyone who was ill wherever he found them-stranger or neighbor, rich or poor, enemy or friend."

  Clansfolk were nodding slowly; the idea seemed to make sense to them. Healers and Druids, after all, were neutral. "Well, it's your choice," Hazel said, scowling, "but I hope you don't expect much of Campbell hospitality."

  "Don't worry, it will be better than a Gregor could manage," Jethro said with a glare at Hazel, but it didn't have much spirit behind it.

  "I don't heal for pay," Alea said, "neither in kind nor in kindness. Simple food and a roof over my head is all I expect." She turned back to Hazel. "Hospitality such as yours is a pleasant bonus."

  "Then you'll have an even more pleasant surprise at the Campbell homestead," Jethro averred. "If you'll come with us, lady, you won't regret it."

  "If I heal your sick ones, I won't," Alea told him, then to Hazel and her Gregors she said, "Good-bye, then. Thank you very much for good guesting and fine company on the march. I'm sorry to have taken you so far out of your way, but I did enjoy your presence."

  "As we enjoyed yours, and the trip together." Hazel smiled and caught her hand. "Thank you for our kinswoman's life, Alea. Our house is yours, whenever you wish it."

  "As is ours," Jethro rumbled. "Lady, will you walk with us?"

  "That I will," Alea said, and strode away with the Campbells, but she turned back to wave at the Gregors before they were quite out of sight.

  "Stop! Stop!" cried a dozen voices, and the elf leader called, "He only sought to protect his friend!"

  The pains ceased as suddenly as they had come, and Gar sagged with relief.

  "We thought the tall one might be a friend to us, too," one of the fairies trilled, "but what does he seek to bring forth from that pack?"

  Gar let go of the twist of paper that held a dozen needles and pulled out a knot of ribbons instead.

  "Move slowly," the bird-voice warned.

  Gar winced at a reminder, a pain that twisted in his brain and was gone. "Only some pretty things that might delight the Wee Folk," he protested.

  "He may indeed be a friend," the lead elf told the fairies. "Certainly he shows a friend's interest."

  "A friend's?" asked the fairy. "Or a hunter's?"

  The elf shrugged. "We have given him warning, but were only beginning to let him show good will."

  "I mean no harm," Gar told them, then frowned. "But I will protect myself as well as I can, and my friend." He stared meaningfully at the fairy and readied a mental bolt of his own.

  "Do not fear for the young one," another fairy said contemptuously. "He only sleeps-he is not dead."

  "We do not kill lightly," explained another.

  "Nor do I," Gar assured them. He frowned from the one group to the other. "But how is this? Do fairies and elves league to protect this wood?"

  "We league to protect one another," a fairy said, scowling. "The New Folk think that we are spirits whom their ancestors feared," an elf explained. "We do all we can to encourage that thought, and punishing their minor crimes, or rewarding their virtues, seems to strengthen it."

  "I can see that it would." A dozen stories of elfin capriciousness cascaded through Gar's mind-everything from Rip van Winkle's twenty-year sleep to neat housekeepers finding six pences in their shoes. "Why only minor crimes, though?"

  The elf made a face. "They will not leave off their great sins for any reason. They will murder one another no matter what punishments we visit."

  "Because you draw the line at killing them yourself," Gar said slowly.

  "Aye, unless they seek to slay us," the elf said darkly. "But for slaughtering one another ... Well!"

  "We will hurt them sorely," a fairy said, "but we will not slay."

  "I understand well." Gar had a similar code. Then, daring, he said, "I am greatly honored by your telling me this, but how do you know you can trust me?"

  "Oh, we have long ears," the elf said, grinning. "We have heard you speak of seeking to end the continuous havoc these New Folk wreak upon one another."

  "I do seek peace," Gar said slowly, "and of course that means peace with your peoples as well as among my own."

  "Are they truly yours?" a fairy said pointedly.

  Gar felt a chill. "How could they be anything else? Do I not look like them?"

  "Save for being taller, aye," the fairy admitted. "Why then would you think I am not of them?"

  "Chiefly because one of our number saw you descend from a golden egg."

  Well, Herkimer was more of a discus than an egg, but Gar took the point.

  "You and your leman," another fairy added.

  "She is not my leman," Gar said automatically, then added in explanation, "only my friend, and my companion in arms." The fairies exchanged a glance that clearly said they knew his heart better than he did, but they were polite enough not to say it out loud. One turned back to Gar and said, "At least you will not deny that you are both of a kind with the New Folk who war upon one another continually."

  "I am of their kind, but not of their nation."

  "Not of their nation." An elf nodded. "I like t
hat. But certainly of their kind, for their ancestors, too, did come from the sky."

  Gar remembered his earlier encounter with the fairies, and his conjecture that they were native to the planet. "Did not your ancestors also come down from the heavens?"

  "They did not," the elf said firmly. "We are of the earth, and our oldest tales tell how the first elves sprang from forest mold."

  "And the first fairies from an eagle's aerie," a fairy added. Gar guessed that they were both right-that the common ancestor of their kind had been a catlike forest creature whose descendants had branched into a tree-living race and an earthbound race. The first had evolved into a bird's worst nightmare-winged cats-which had evolved further into fairies. The second had evolved into the elves, and the extra two limbs that had been transformed into wings in the fairies had become extra arms in them.

  Extra? Surely they only seemed superfluous from a Terran's persepctivel To the elves, he no doubt seeemed maimed by only having two arms.

  "We count you an ally," the fairy said reluctantly, "because you seek peace."

  "And, too, because you come well recommended," another fairy chipped in.

  The first turned to give her a black look, and Gar found himself wondering who had recommended him-one of the first clansfolk with whom they had stayed? Still, it didn't pay to be too inquisitive, so he asked, "Are you still wary of me?"

  "Not at all," an elf said, "for we hear your thoughts, and they are goodly-at least toward us."

  Gar froze. Then his brain thawed and kicked into overdrive, a dozen conclusions racing through it in an instant. No wonder both fairies and elves had been able to find him whenever they wanted! No wonder they knew he had come in a spaceship, and no wonder they were sure of his good intentions. They were telepaths!

  The e was also the matter of his relationship with Alea, but he shoved that issue aside quickly. "You do not hesitate to read people's minds, then, do you?"

  "Why should we?" a fairy asked. "All your kind are like open books to us. Wherefore not read?"

  "Do you think we break some sort of trust, fellow?" an elf asked, and laughed.