Gods of Fire and Thunder

by Fred Saberhagen

  Baldur frowned. "No, probably only into their houses. Their dwellings, at least the ones I've seen, are hardly ever dug very deep below the surface. Actually I doubt they'd let us go into a mine, even if we wanted to."

  Hal nodded sympathetically. "I can understand why they'd naturally want to keep their gold mines secret."

  Baldur looked up at him, as if surprised. "Gold? No, I don't think they really produce much gold. Not any longer. Those diggings were all worked out a long time ago. It's more that they have methods and tools they want to keep secret. When they're in a hurry, they can drive a tunnel through solid rock in no time at all."

  "I see." Hal sighed. "So, tell me some more about this place we're going to visit. Don't these holes you say they live in flood out every time it rains?"

  Baldur said that in the course of his affair with Brunhild, he had heard her more than once mention the name and location of the gnome settlement where lived the farrier, named Andvari, and his assistant, whose name Baldur did not know.

  Hal wondered what else the two lovers might have talked about—apparently they had done a lot of talking.

  Then Hal and Baldur began their journey by taking a small boat down the local stream, one of the Einar's tributaries, to the broad Einar itself, which would lead them directly to their secret destination.

  Baldur's relatives seemed to accept, largely with indifference, the story he and Hal told them about going fishing. It was hard to imagine weather bad enough to stop a fisherman. So the two men had little trouble in borrowing a cheaply constructed raft from one of Baldur's distant relatives who lived nearby, and who seemed really indifferent as to whether he got it back or not. At one point Hal turned down the offer of the loan of an uncle's trim little sailboat, pleading a lack of knowledge of how to manage one—a totally false plea, but he did not want to borrow any vessel that would be greatly missed if it did not come back. If all did not go precisely well, there would be no use in having an extra set of pursuers on his track.

  Baldur had not been entirely truthful with his family, before leaving them this time. His mother and most other members of the family seemed purely relieved that he was undertaking what promised to be an utterly peaceful enterprise.

  Holah and Noden, having several times volunteered to go with Hal next time he went to war, swore they knew where the best fishing could be found, and they wanted to come along on that trip if there was no prospect of fighting. But they were vigorously discouraged.

  As they were poling their raft downstream, Hal said to Baldur heartily: "So, tell me more about these people we're going to see. How well do you know them?"

  "I don't know that I would call gnomes people." The young man paused. "Though some of them were very good to Brunhild and me."

  Here was more news. "Good in what way?"

  Now the young man, continuing his progressive series of revelations, disclosed that over the past few months some of the gnomes had actually connived to provide a secret meeting place for Brunhild and her lover. A place underground, where Wodan and his agents were unlikely to discover them.

  "Why do you suppose they were so helpful?" Hal asked.

  Baldur lowered his voice, though it seemed unlikely that anyone was within a quarter-mile. "Perhaps I should not be telling you this. But it seems that Brunhild had done the Earth-dwellers some good turn previously."

  Perhaps you shouldn't. I may someday wish I didn't know it, Hal thought. But, curious as usual, he continued: "What sort of good turn?"

  "She never told me that."

  Maybe that was the truth and maybe not. Baldur was consistently hesitant about revealing his secrets to Hal, but he kept leaking them out anyway, slowly but surely. In concealing his affair with Hildy, he was also hiding the extent of the knowledge he had incidentally picked up about the gnomes. Certainly no one in Baldur's family suspected that the youth had established any degree of intimacy with certain members of the strange race that he and Hal were about to visit.

  Hal's persistent curiosity was a good match for Baldur's need to talk to someone about his troubles. Baldur struggled against the need, but not with much success.

  The more Hal learned, the more genuinely interested he became. "So, the gnomes secretly found a way for you and Brunhild to get around old Wodan's rules regarding Valkyrie behavior."

  Baldur hesitated. "Yes, that's about it."

  "Does the god expect all his flying scouts to remain virgins?"

  "Well—something like that, yes."

  "Never mind, it doesn't matter. But you and she managed to meet underground, by courtesy of the gnomes."

  The young man hesitated. "Yes."

  "These Earthdwellers don't much care for the Great All-Highest, is that it? Even though he trusts some of them enough to let them shoe his Horses? And gives them access to his supply of gold?"

  Baldur shot his companion a reproachful look. "Wodan is the All-Highest, the Father of Battles. No one speaks openly against him. Not even in jest."

  "Was I speaking against him? I didn't mean to give offense, I'm sure." And Hal put on an abashed look, and scanned the sky, as if to make sure no instant retribution threatened.

  When rain came, the two men sheltered under oilskins as best they could.

  They passed several more or less ordinary villages and any number of isolated houses, and exchanged comments with various fishermen on the quality of the catch. Gradually the land on both banks grew rockier, less and less suitable for farming, and the habitations fewer. In the cold mornings, there were fringes of thin ice along the shore and in the adjoining marshlands.

  Stopping at a small settlement of humans of their own variety, called by the gnomes Sundwellers, Hal and Baldur completed their outfitting for winter, including boots and leggings, taking care of such details as had not been done before leaving Baldur's home.

  They had come many miles, and the youth said that he could now recognize several landmarks. He added that they were very near their goal.

  * * *

  6

  Suddenly Baldur broke off their conversation to point at a muddy hole in the riverbank. It was as big around as a man's leg, just at water level, a dark mouth half submerged. "One of the entrances to their village. There'll be a tunnel running from it inland, just above water level."

  The black gap looked to Hal intensely uninviting, like the kind of cave that an otter might call home, or maybe some kind of giant snake. He supposed he might go crawling into such a place, if it was big enough, but only if he was fleeing some great peril, desperate to save his life.

  Now Baldur was steering their craft closer to the right bank of the river. They went slowly, and more slowly still. Hal kept studying the slope of land slightly above the shore, which carried what looked to him like nothing but virgin forest.

  "If that was really one of their tunnels in the bank," he remarked, "then one of their settlements must be near."

  "Oh, it is. But you can see how easy it would be to pass it by and never realize that it was there." Baldur went on to explain that almost everything the gnomes created was underground, where they spent nearly all their time. For extensive settlements they favored sites near rivers, for if the tons of excavated earth could be handily dumped into a briskly flowing stream, very little of their presence would be visible.

  Having chosen a place to land, the men tied their raft securely to a handy willow stump—even if they were really indifferent to its loss, it might be suspicious to give that impression. Then they ran through a last-minute rehearsal of their supposed reason for dropping in on this particular village. Hal would introduce himself as a warrior of high status, who contemplated commissioning the forging of some kind of weapon or armor.

  At that point Baldur suddenly decided there were a few more things Hal should know about the people they were going to visit.

  First of all, the gnomes were sometimes called dwarfs, but gave themselves the name of Earthdwellers. Just why the gnomes, or Earthdwellers, insisted on spending
their time and strength grubbing in the earth, instead of coming out on the surface like real people, was more than Baldur could explain.

  Hal supposed the main reason was probably just that the gnomes had a lot of trouble with sunlight. So few of the occupations normally open to the children of light were open to them.

  Baldur informed him that the gnomes were very clever in some ways, and certainly not lazy. Many or most of them were physically deformed, at least by the standards of surface-dwelling humans. They tended to have pale faces and long beards.

  "It's only the men who have beards, of course," the young man added after a pause.

  "I am relieved."

  By now the two of them were walking slowly inland, through a shallow screen of dead reed-stalks. Baldur said: "We humans, of course, can go down into caves and mines, and they can come up into daylight. But neither of our races can ever be really comfortable away from our own element."

  "But where do gnomes come from? How long have they been around?"

  The young man seemed vaguely surprised by the question, as if he had never thought about it. "Some say they are formed right in the dust of the earth, just as maggots naturally appear in dead meat. But that's not true," Baldur hastened to assure his comrade. "Those are the kind of things said by folk who really know nothing about gnomes. Get down into one of their houses, and you'll see some big-bellied women, and others nursing small children, just as in any human town."

  "Well then, they are human, are they not?"

  The younger man grunted something, and his face showed his disapproval of that idea. He was not ready to go quite that far with what he considered his liberal attitude.

  Hal pressed him: "Do they ever intermarry with—what did you say their word is, for people like us? 'Sundwellers'?"

  The expression of disapproval became stronger. "I don't know of anyone who's done that. Married a gnome." Baldur sounded vaguely scandalized. "There are stories about people doing that kind of thing in the past."

  "What are the children like?"

  "You'll have to ask someone else."

  They had come inland but a little distance through an almost trackless wintry forest, a domain of barren limbs and fallen leaves, when Baldur paused and indicated a kind of semi-clearing just ahead, an extensive glade whose grassy floor was irregularly raised and pocked by dozens of low mounds. These ranged in size from no bigger than human heads to the bulk of capacious ovens.

  Baldur had come to a stop. "Here we are. I'm certain now, I remember the way it looked. This is the place I visited with Brunhild."

  "I still don't see any village."

  "But it's there, right ahead of us. You can see the holes in the earth, scattered around, if you look for them. The rooms below ground are bigger than the mounds, which are mainly for ventilation."

  Hal studied the rugose surface of the partial clearing. Gradually he was able to make out that there were many small openings for ventilation, mostly near the bases of the mounds, or among the roots of the surviving trees, suggesting some kind of elaborate excavation beneath. Hal thought to himself that the drainage system must be ingenious, to keep them all from drowning when it rained.

  Cautioning Hal to follow, and to avoid walking on the mounds as much as possible, Baldur advanced to a position close to the center of the complex. There he stamped one foot on the ground, not too hard, in a small flat area, and called out in a loud voice what Hal supposed must be a traditional word of greeting.

  Moments later, heads began to peek up out of several nearby holes, some at the base of tree stumps. Shortly afterward, half a dozen gnomes, of both sexes, emerged from one of the larger apertures, blinking in cloudy daylight. They were all unarmed, Hal noted, unless you counted a couple of the men who were holding what must be their miners' tools. The welcome offered the visitors was courteous enough, no more wary than they would have received at many settlements of Sundwellers.

  When the visitors announced that they had come on important business, they were warily invited underground, an apparently solid tree stump being easily rotated aside to make a doorway big enough for them. Hal soon found himself in a kind of anteroom, just underground. He realized that this chamber had probably been designed for entertaining the occasional Sundweller. From here, steep, ladderlike stairs led down again, evidence of at least one habitable level lower than this one. It seemed likely that only a small portion of the extensive underground complex would be accessible to people as big as Baldur and himself.

  The guests were offered seats on an earthen bench, and then a tray of food. Hal sampled some whitish roots that had a crisp texture and sharp but pleasant taste, along with several varieties of raw mushrooms. Hal found the mushrooms delicious.

  Baldur was chewing too. "I've had these little ones before, they're really good. Try one."

  Hal tasted and approved. The gnomes who served the food were glum and businesslike. At least Hal felt reasonably confident that he was not going to encounter any gnomish version of Matilda, ready to encourage him with talk of how many miles of underground tunnels, suitable for root farming, she owned, free and clear in her own name.

  The natives of this town were small and lean, most of the adults no higher than Hal's armpit. They seemed to Hal not so much deformed as just built on a slightly different body plan. By the time he had exchanged handgrips of greeting with half a dozen or so, he realized that they were surprisingly strong for their small size. The adult males were indeed heavily bearded. All had pale skins, small and rather sunken eyes, large ears and hairy noses. Most were something like fully dressed, in garments of smooth leather and tightly woven cloth.

  On his earlier visit, Baldur had briefly met the farrier, Andvari, who had the honor to serve the Valkyries' Horses. Obviously he was a person of some status and importance among his people.

  And when the gnome Andvari now appeared, garbed in what looked like leather and stroking his gray beard, he did remember saying hello to Baldur, the Sundweller man who was the lover of the Valkyrie Brunhild. Visiting Sundwellers must be rare creatures here, and no doubt tended to stick in the memory.

  As Hal could see for himself on entering their town, the presence of gnomish children, warped little creatures to his way of thinking, confirmed Baldur's opinion that they were in the habit of reproducing in the same way as anyone else.

  Baldur had told him that the gnomes were abnormally sensitive to sunlight, and generally came hooded and wrapped in extra clothing when they were required to be out in full daylight. They also protected their eyes with special goggles. Hal had seen similar devices in the far north, where they guarded against snow blindness. Each eyepiece was a flat, opaque disk of bone or wood, pierced by a single, narrow horizontal slit for vision.

  As far as Hal could tell from listening to Baldur on the subject, there had never been a whole lot of intercourse between Sundwellers and Earthdwellers, and there was always a fair amount of mutual suspicion. The visitors were objects of curiosity, though hardly of awe. Only a few gnomes came to look at them, and those who exchanged bits of conversation with Hal were polite enough, but their manners were reserved, and Hal could well believe that they had misgivings about Sundwellers, at least as great as those Baldur had about them. Doubtless Andvari and his tribe considered those who chose to live on the earth's surface as something of an aberrant offshoot of humanity.

  In response to their questions, Hal and Baldur were informed that no one in this village was authorized to contract to produce custom designs of weaponry or discuss the terms of payment. Hal was given directions to another village, many miles away, where skilled armorers could be found.

  Privately Hal wondered whether the gnomes had a god of their own—it was the kind of thing that might be awkward to ask about directly, and he wished now that he had found out more from Baldur.

  Baldur had been certain that only Sundwelling humans could possibly become gods, but now the gnomes seemed calmly certain that that was nonsense. It seemed that the gnomes f
elt more akin to the great powers of the Underworld, even though those powers were now their bitter enemies.

  In conversation, Hal learned that some of the Earthdwellers firmly believed that the current avatar of Hades was also a gnome, in fact that he could hardly be anything else. That only gnomes could wear that Face, or had ever worn it.

  Hal was not going to get involved in any argument, certainly not on matters of religion.

  Prolonging their visit just a little, mainly out of curiosity, and also on the theory that it would not be polite to immediately rush away, he studied the walls of the underground anteroom where he and Baldur sat talking.

  The walls were of what appeared to be a smooth, light-colored clay, and decorated with an extensive series of pictures, or rather carvings in low relief.

  Someone pointed out that here on the wall was Jormungand, the world-serpent, doomed in legend to die fighting against Wodan on the last day of the world's existence. And over on the adjoining wall were other creatures of the nether world—great nasty serpents, shown being trodden underfoot, torn apart with picks, flattened with huge hammers, by some obviously gnomic heroes.

  When Hal asked about the pictures, he was told: "This commemorates some of our famous victories in the past—and others that are yet to come."

  "Hope I never meet this one in a dark alley," Hal muttered, pointing at an image, when he was sure he would not be overheard. He wasn't certain if the creature he was looking at was fighting for the gnomes in the panel or against them.

  Suddenly he began to pay close attention to the talk around him. Baldur had somehow worked the subject back to Wodan, and naturally the villagers brought up a matter of which they were obviously proud. Yes, it was confirmed: four times a year, or more often when necessary, two or three of the gnomes made the journey up to Valhalla, to see to the Horses' shoeing, and perform certain odds and ends of metal-work for which Wodan wanted to enlist their special skills.