There was the lover of their mistress, and he seemed grown exceeding great and he spoke in a voice like the voice of thunder and they noticed now of great sudden that the pelt he wore was the pelt of the bear and it be-thought them how he was very Bear indeed and perhaps that same Bear whose stars trod the skies of heaven: he gave them orders, they swarmed up and they obeyed.
“Fire against fire!” he cried. “Shoot up that way! And over there! And over there! Good! Good! As long as arrows and tow and tinder and earth-fire hold out, continue your shooting; and you will indeed see victory — ”
They, half-numbly at first, and then with growing zeal, wrapped tow and tinder round their arrows’ heads and dipped them in the pot of coals and fired them off whither he, this Bear, had directed. And from the fire-flecked darkness a ways off came cries of terror and alarm, of horror, fright, and flight. For the star-spears fell not that close at all (but Arn and his company marked where they were falling), fell farther off by far from where the kingsmen lay huddled in terror. But when the sailingmen shot off their own burning arrows at the sky, why … what goeth up must in time come down … And come down the shipmen’s arrows did. And all about the place where the wolf had howled and where the men of the wolf had huddled. It was all the same to them: they did not pause to consider if one or if two different kind of fiery missile came down at them from the burning sky. They fled. They left spear and club and every weapon indeed, and they fled. And they howled as they fled. But it was not the menacing howl of the great wolf.
And in a while the time came, as Arn had known it would, that the stars began to slacken in their hurling of fire-spears and of thunderstones. And when the ships men saw this, they shouted in fierce triumph, and had no further doubts but that — and thanks to the wisdom of the Bear — they had indeed fought fire with fire. So they shouted and seized fresh arrows and wound tinder and tow about their heads and dipped them in the pot of glowing coals and nocked them into their bows and shot them, cursing and gleeing, towards the fleeing stars; shouting to each other and to their mistress and her leman, this great Bear, that they had put and were still putting the stars to flight: and would soon have them driven back to their own country once and for all.
Arn had not noticed her as she crept across the deck, had not felt her grasp his leg; only now when he turned — without word — to go, did he feel her. And he muttered and would have shaken her loose.
“O Bear! By my body and by yours! Whither do you go? And why?” she begged.
He was of no mind to return reply to this witless question, but it seemed simpler to speak than to grapple. “I was wrong, see you, about my weird,” he said. “It lies here in this Land of Thule, it was but slow in coming, slow to show itself,” he said. “My weird is iron. See now how the time for the curing of the sickness unto death of iron has arrived? The stars, don’t thee see?” he burst out at her. “The stars have cast down spears at earth, and spears be made of iron, yea or nay? Be sure that the stars have no sickness among them. Be sure that we shall be-cure our iron by means of the fresh, hot, and healthy iron of the star-spears. Be sure — ”
She moaned and shook her head. She clung to him. Again he recollected that twas she to whom he owed his father’s death, but he was not minded yet to savage or to slay her. Was she ravaged with grief and pain? Off and away with her, then! Let her get herself and her hare’s scut gone —
“Arnten, Arnten, Arn!” she cried, clinging to him. “Thy weird be iron, but iron is also the weird of the king! As iron was dying, so was the king dying. And if it be that thee cure iron while he does live, Arnten, Arnten, Arn, do ye not see, all of ye, thee and thy fellows — If you cure iron, then you cure the king!”
He stood there, stock-still, his mouth agape, and looked at her. The truth of her words transfixed him. To do and to undo! To repeat it all again, then? Once more to be the enemy and flee the wrath of that kinsman who hated him more than any stranger? Fights and flights and long and weary journeyings …
The captain-chief, nothing heeding (as nothing knowing) of all these words and all these thoughts, half-turned and flung up his head toward the sky, whence fewer and fewer fire-stones came, and they seeming to drift languidly.
“Eh, master!” cried the captain-chief. “See how they flee! How folk will give thee ward and worship, then, across the sea, when we sail in with word of this great night!”
And he gave Arn a half-bow, and he turned and shouted and dipped his arrow in the fire and let fly his shaft.
What, then, was weird, what was indeed his fate, what role had he to play? By this latest omen it was to sail with her and her men across the all-circling sea, to find more than mere refuge: to find rule! He called into the darkness by the shore, “Bab and Roke and Corm, Wendolin, and thee nain …?”
Let them come aboard. He would not for anything abandon a one of them here. Let them come with him across the sea and begin life new: and a curse to Thule and all its thrall-weirds.
“Bear and Son of the Bear,” said one voice.
“Star-sender,” said one voice.
“Star-disperser,” said another.
“Star-finder,” said a next one.
“Finder of Star-spears, Heater of Forges, Forger of Fire-born, Seer of the Sorrows of the Land and Freer of this Land from Sorrows …”
He said, “Aboard of this vessel.” He watched as they came. The woman’s face glowed. Then her eyes met his in the brief flare of the tinder and the swift glare of the tow. And he saw that she knew, and he saw that her hopes were dead and he saw that her age was full upon her. The dawn now sailed up from the sea and its pale lamp replaced the flash-flash-flash of star-spear and fire-arrows. He said, “Captain-chief.”
“Master. Bear.”
He said: “Past this harbor is a headland and past that is another and past that is a river-mouth. Thither we will go.”
The chief sailingman nodded.
“There you may leave us, and return to your own country, or you or any of you who wish may remain with us and fare if they will with us.”
The sailingman scanned the tide and the shore and turned a bit and gazed off as if laying put a voyage in his mind’s eye. “In that direction, then, Bear, you will go?” — he moved his hand — “To that way whither the stars hurled down their spears? — and where, I must suppose, those fiery spears may still be found?”
Arn said, “Yes. It is there.”
Author’s note to
URSUS OF ULTIMA THULE
The magic status of the smith and the mingled awe and horror which attach to it still endures in parts of Africa, where the ironworker is sometimes — at least till not so long ago — the priest as well; and sometimes believed to be a were-hyaena. It may be, then, that in African folk-lore the hyaena does for the wolf just as in the folk-lore of southern Europe the wolf occupied the place taken in northern Europe by the bear. I have not ever seen in any folk-lore a connection between iron-magic and bear-magic, but in this book I have ventured to close that gap in the circle. The motif of The Boy Who Was Nobody’s Son is of course quite common, that of The Boy Who Was The Son of the Bear is much less common. This commingling of the two elements is as far as I know unique, at least in modern writing. I am indebted to Dr. François Bordes of the Bordeaux Museum of Pre-History for a personal relation of the French legend of Jean-à-l’ourse; and to Prof. Rhys Carpenter’s book, Folk Tale, Fiction and Saga in the Homeric Epics (U. of Cal. Press, 1958).
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Copyright © 1973 by Avram Davidson
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Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
eISBN 10: 1-4405-4586-3
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-4586-3
Ursus of Ultima Thule Page 19