“All the same,” he said. “One way or one other way. Then, so, not the way which would mean leaving these here alone.” He sighed, he went and set his hand into the old Bab’s bundle and withdrew a handful of twigs dried with the leaves still on them and the flowers still in place. He found no flame in the fire and so he made fire a-fresh and then he set this withered bouquet against a coal and whirled it round his head and then he walked thrice round the circle in the whirling smoke, chanting his chant. Then he dropped the smoldering herbs and spat three times upon them. And then he picked them up and cast them into the fire and next he drew open his breeks and made his water upon the fire. And ere it had ceased to sizzle and to steam, the three others had sat them up and were looking round about in puzzlement indeed.
Then, “Where is Bear?” one asked.
“That indeed I know not,” said Wendolin, a trifle sadly. “But I know that no common sleep it was which held us all fast-bound here until almost noon, the time of no shadow. Had it reached till then — Well, I know not. But such a deep sleep … Who indeed knows the witchery of sleep better than the Bear? Eh?”
The eyes of the others met his own, met each other’s, fell. At length, said Roke, “Bear or no, huge or no, still he be but boy.”
And his old uncle nodded, and said, more than a trifle sadly, “It may be that his strength came upon him too swift, too soon. A happy childhood and a happy young manhood, he never had: but as a mere cub he was cast into a whirlpool, and he has yet to reach safe shore.”
And Corm said nothing, but his mouth settled and his hands reached for All-Caller and he placed the great fey horn to his lips and his cheeks swelled and his lips trembled —
But no sound came out. Helplessly, he offered it to Roke, a flush upon his cheek. But Roke shrank away from it. And then Bab and Wendolin examined it, and then one said, “Ah,” and one said, “Oh,” and from inside the huge horn which an huger aurochs had once born aloft through every forest in Farthest Thule they extracted a small wad or mass of fur or soft hair or —
“Then what is it?” asked Corm.
Roke gave it a fearful look, then his face cleared and he half-laughed. “Why, tis no witchery but just a jape of sorts,” he said, flinging aside his yellow hair to crane for a closer look. “I know it be but the scut of a hare: know ye not that, all?”
Wendolin and Bab nodded, but did not laugh. Corm chuckled, at first in relief, but his relief but echoed Roke’s; then puzzlement returned. “What means this, then?” he asked. “And where is your sister’s grandchild, old shaman? Did he bewitch us, true? And why? And what is it that we must do?”
There was a silence, and Roke laughed no more, but a color came and went in his skin and for a moment it left the Sign of the Bear outlined upon his scarred breast. “Do? Why — we must follow after and face him, then, and ask what it is he means, and what it is he do not mean: for if he mean to leave we lone and lorn in this Land of Thule, then we be but dead men, all, so long as we do tarry in this Land of Thule.”
No one said him nay. And then he spoke again, saying, “And I understand it not, but that I have already died once here, and before I die again, why, I will get me — somehow! — away from this fell Land of Thule.
“If so be that I must swim across the all-circling sea myself.”
• • •
And later they came to an oval-shaped greensward with a bald of sand in about the center of the lower part of it and this had been much scratched with a stick, it seemed. And at the sight of this both Bab and Wendolin uttered short cries, stilled at once, and they squatted by this bit of sand, and muttered and made witcheries and waved the scut of the hare to the six directions: then Wendolin crouched over and blew and blew, gently, so, so, so, he gently blew, and grain by grain the sand moved: and behind his moving head moved the moving hand of old Bab, grey-white with the white-grey ash the hand bore, scattering ash, letting it sift slowly down, slow, so slow, so, so …
“A map!” Corm exclaimed, in wonder.
“By this trail moved the Bear,” old Bab began — when a sound which was not a sound was not so much heard as felt, in their inner ears and on the outer air.
Said Roke, uneasy: “What was that?”
And Wendolin: “That was the intended breaking of the spell which I broke earlier, else we had all still been there where we were last night. So, then, that at least is well, that he did not intend us to remain bewitched there forever and until the snows froze us or the spotted ounces dug us from the snow for their food.”
Said Roke, slowly, his fingers fretting upon his scars and the weals of his wounds, “That is well, then, yes. But it will be weller when we can look him face to face and ask: Be you man or bear or boy: and what do you mean for us, whichever?”
• • •
“You are my woman, then,” said Arnten, taking her by the arms and turning her about to face him. Her face had been calm and now it seemed suffused with joy; it had been pale and now it took on the faint, faint color of the wild rose.
“I am yours,” she said.
“And I may take and have you when I want,” he said, speaking with a roughness which he was far from feeling.
“I am yours in all things and at all times,” she said.
He said, still rough, but his voice now and then loosening into a tremor, “Then I will have you now, and here and now, and they had better not come spying on me or calling me, or — ”
But her mouth was on his and he forgot what he had intended to threaten.
Afterwards, he said, intending to sound scornful but instead sounding only happy, “Well, and am I better than that rusty old wolf?” She hid her face against him and gently took his skin between her teeth. Then she released him and she nodded. Swiftly looked up, a sheen upon her own skin, swiftly nodded again, shyly smiled; again hid her face. “And,” he asked, boldly, defiantly, and again would-be-scornfully and happily, “And does he shoot rust loads as well?”
She leaned her head up towards his, her neck stretching, and he bent down to kiss one pulse which trembled in the hollow of her throat and she jumped and gasped and then he bent his head still lower and he heard her whisper in his ear and he raised his head and his throat swelled with his howl of triumphant laughter.
“What? None at all?” he bellowed. And her face lit up with a glee which he had never before seen and perhaps few others had ever seen either, and she nodded: and he laughed again. And again. And he crushed her in his arms, and he laughed, and he laughed, and he laughed.
Chapter XIX
Mered-delfin heard her laughing as he moved slowly down from the north. He made signs, and the captains of the kingsmen nodded.
Wendolin and Corm and Roke and Bab heard it, approaching with stealth from the west.
She laughed there upon the deck of the largest of her three vessels in the hidden cove. She had sent the sailingmen away a distance, to the south. They were strange to Arnten’s eyes, those twenty men, squat and strong, with shiny black hair and grey eyes and tiny rings in their ears: they had bowed down at the sight of her. And then they had talked, swift-worded, together, and then they had all bowed down to him. And then she had sent them a distance away, to the south.
“They will return before dawn tomorrow,” she said.
“So.”
“I should have wished to go now, even now, even before now. But they said twas best to take the dawn-tide.”
He said, “So,” and spread fleeces on the deck and snuffed up the scent of land and of river and of sea.
“There are good winds at this season, and we shall cross the all-circling sea sooner than you might believe. And then whither, eh?” she asked.
He began to pluck at her garments, he had not yet gained deftness at this, but perhaps she preferred it so. Certainly she preferred to pretend that she knew not what he was about. And as he fumbled, she asked, “Shall we intend for the nearest port and sell our furs and amber and ivory and gold at heavy prices, it having been long since any tr
easure cargoes have reached there from hence?”
“My treasure-cargo is here,” he muttered. And tugged. And, she not moving, he lifted her up with a sigh of impatience, and tugged and slipped the clinging cloth away, and then he touched her in wonder, and, wondering, watched her touch him.
And she had laughed, exulting.
They heard her laugh, the sailingmen, a distance away to the south, and they grinned at each other and they ate their roasts of the wild sheep which they had hunted: and next they cast the shoulder blades of the sheep upon the fire: and watched the omen-telling cracks appear: and then they pulled long faces and they shook their heads. And they examined their weapons by the firelight and in the gathering dusk, exclaimed at the tell-tale signs of the iron pox which afflicted this odd, strange land of Thule: and they muttered their relief that they would leave it soon; to be exact, at next dawn-tide. And then they glanced again at the cracked shoulder blades and again they shook their heads.
So it was that, as the two lovers lay upon their bed upon the deck of the ship, their fingers and the locks of their hair twining together and watching the pale stars come to peer through the veil of night and minding not the first faint fall of dew, that a one or two things made them pause. He felt her grow tense. He sat upright, growling.
She said, “What — ”
He said, “Did you hear it, too? It is that one called Corm, he knew me as I was a boy, and remains but still a boy himself, and thinks — they all think — that I am yet to be controlled as one controls a boy …”
She said, “What — ”
He said, “It is that horn of my father’s which I let Corm bear for me and so he may think tis his, which tis not, the horn called fey, called All-caller — ”
She said, “Ahhh …”
“And now he dares not blow it full, but his lips breathe a riff of air into its mouth, and that is what I hear, and it fills me full with rage: that still they follow after me and will not let me be free. They come. They are near.”
And she said, “Did I not speak to my own sailingmen, bidding them be gone till dawn-light? Yet they approach: Hear.”
There was the sound of a strange call of a bird which had never nested in the Land of Thule. “Tis their signal,” she said. “How do they dare? Is disobedience abroad on every breeze tonight? They come. They are near.”
Without other word the two of them dressed themselves and arose and peered into the dimness and the dark. And it seemed that the dim and the darkness peered back at them, and that something moved therein.
Arnten said, grim, and growling in his chest, “I know who you be, your faces I need not see, for I know your tread and I snuff your smell. What, Roke! What, Corm! What, my mother’s uncle! And what — you youngling nain whose name my tongue would trip upon! And what — you wizard Wendolin! Listen, all. I am not that bear who may be ringed through the septum of his nose and trained to dance upon the tug of a rope, do thee hear, every which one of thee?”
“Thy weird, Bear,” a voice from the night began, slowly.
“My weird!” he cried. “I cry scorn upon my weird as you be-think it! My weird now and for some time since and for all time hence, my weird be what I shall make it. You have pressed and followed me too close with your mumble and your snuffle of My weird, Thy weird, His weird, and That one’s weird.”
“Thy father,” another voice began: and he growled more fiercely, even, against this other voice. “My father, aye! My father, true! My father, so! Woe was upon my father that he suffered his weird to fall into the hands of wizards, nains, witcherers, and indeed of any in the Land of Thule. He ought never to have returned unto the Land of Thule, and this I shall tell thee all: Does my weird suffer me to escape this Land of Thule, curse me from the day that ever I return to it, as was my father cursed ever from that day that he returned to it?”
And, soft from the darkness: “Thy father’s curse, O Bear, do stand upon the ship beside thee …”
“Oh, lie!” she cried — and then the strange birdcall sounded clear, and sounded near, and with relief she cupped her hands and called, “Hither, hither, faster, and hither to me!” And the other figures melted back into the bosky and the black as, by one and by two and three, the squat, stout sailingmen appeared.
“O Mistress,” one began.
“I forgive your disobedience,” she said, “in returning so long before the time I said: only get you now unto your several ships and hoist the anchor-stones: if there is as yet no wind, no tide, then pole us out at least a way to sea, for — ”
And the captain-chief of the small fleet, coming nearer and bowing low, said, “This, Mistress, is what we would hear you say, for on casting the shoulder blades of the wild sheep into our evening fire, we saw malign configurations appear as the lines of fortune and of weird appeared when the heat o’ the fire produced the cracks of predication. Exceeding strange they were, and — ”
A sound broke in upon his words, rose upon the shuddering air, ululated, fell away; and twice more was repeated.
“A wolf — ”
“The wolf!”
From afar, but yet not far, other men’s voices —
“The wolf! The wolf! The Orfas! King Orfas!” and, “His men! Kingsmen! King Orfas!”, and, “The wolf!” cried Arnten’s men.
She said, “To sea — At once, at once — to sea — ”
“No, now, not so swift and soon,” Arnten said. “To sea, and soon, yes. But not so soon that I do not sooner settle what lies between me and this wolf-king, for as my father — ”
And she, hot-swift, her hand clasped on his, and stronger her grip than ever he would have thought, whilst still the howling wolf came nearer and the enemy voices clamored from the wood; she: “Ah, Bear! By my body and by yours! This accursed stubbornness of thy seed and blood! Did I not years gone by beg your father to get us gone together away from wolf and Thule? And he would tarry and he would fight, and see what that but brought him! And long I’d thought him gone from Thule across the all-circling sea without me and I waited, waited, dured long and woefully without him, till the old chief smith of all the nains persuaded me that twas not so that all the nains were in cabal with him to curse iron that he might then return — And so — And then — ” her words tumbled in confusion and he tugged, impatient.
She mastered her mouth, and said, clear, “So then I knew he must still be here in Thule, and if none of all our spying had espied him as a man, then — So I had the kingsmen sent out, for I asked of the hares and I asked of the salmon and the bees, and they told me where, the Bear — ”
Now he broke her grip as twas grass, and now he gripped her and he said, low, “So twas thee encompassed his captivity, and mine?”
“Only that I might confront him and again offer him — ”
“Then twas because of thee he died!”
“I never wished him dead, only that he and I might go forever gone, as now I want that thee and I — ”
Arn’s voice was grom, and his hand tightened upon hers and he said, “Because of thee he died: So.”
And then she cried out, astonishment greater than pain or fear, and pointed, pointed with her other free hand. And every voice was stilled, afar as well as near. Then every voice broke loud again, in shock, in fear, in wonder great.
Across the sky from past the dripping stars a fiery spear was hurled, and then after it another, and another, and from every quarter of the sky came fiery spear, arching across the sky and falling, falling, falling, hurling down to earth.
The sailingmen uttered together one sound like the wail of a babe torn brutely from a mother’s breast and they fell face down where they had stood, and buried their faces in their arms. But Arn shouted a great high shout of understanding and of triumph, and Corm raised All-Caller to his lips, and Wendolin laughed aloud in wizard-glee and Bab danced and croaked and pointed, and even the silent nain lifted his heavy head and bayed at the sky; and Roke beat his hands upon his breast and stamped with his feet upon the ground.
And all the sky was filled with the light of the falling fire-streaks and sound of rumbling and above all of this rose Arn’s voice.
“ ‘When the stars throw down their spears and pelt the earth with thunderstones’ — See now? See now! See how the stars throw down their spears — hear how they pelt the earth with thunderstones — ”
• • •
One after the other the burning spears hurtled, crashing, into the ground, and Arn marked the quarter of their crashing, noted the section of their fall; and still the angry stars hurled more. Arn took one stride to where the pot of coals rested on sand and on stones and slowly turned to ashes, there safe in its nest at the bow of the ship. And he stepped over her as though she were not there as she lay there, moaning in terror, and he ripped up handfuls of tow and tinder as he strode, and he blew upon the grey embers and saw them flash into light and life. And he snatched at the quiver and the bow. And he called to the captain-chief of the sailingmen.
Little indeed in those moments did that one think that ever he would see again his home across the all-circling sea and had no other thought but that he would die, and directly, there in the fell Land of Thule, crushed and burned to death by the fall of heaven — as so he and they, his mates, did think it. But out of the fear and doom and terror of that while a horn sounded and a voice called him by title and there was in that voice somewhat which bade him not tarry. He rose to his feet, he hearkened, half-understanding, he kicked his mates, and they all rose up and went stumbling to the ships.
Ursus of Ultima Thule Page 18