by Bill Fawcett
While the man's back was turned, Dall pushed himself up a little, wincing at the pain—he hurt everywhere—and picked up the wooden knife. If it could mend a serpent bite, what about a swollen ankle? And for that matter the bloody scrape some rock had made along his arm? He laid the knife to his arm, but nothing happened. Nor when he touched it to his ankle.
The man turned around while Dall still had the knife on his ankle. "What are you doing?" he asked sharply.
"Nothing," Dall said, pulling his hand back quickly. "Just seeing how bad it hurt if I touched it."
"Hmmm." The man cocked his head. "You know, boy—what is your name, anyway?"
"Dall Drop—Dall, son of Gory," Dall said.
"Dall Drop? That's one I haven't heard."
"My father calls me 'Drop-hand', " Dall said, ducking his head.
"Drop-body, if last night was any example," the man said, chuckling. Dall felt himself going hot. "Nay, boy—it's not so bad. Your dropping in no doubt scared those thieves away. Maybe it was all accident, but you did good by it. Let's see about your wounds . . ."
"They're not wounds," Dall said. "Just cuts and things."
"Well, cuts or whatever, they could use some healing," the man said. He looked around. "And none of the right herbs here. We'll have to get you down to a wood, and you can't walk on that ankle."
" 'M sorry," Dall muttered.
"Nonsense," the man said. "Just let me get the blood off this—" He took his wadded shirt back to the creek. Dall gaped. Was he going to pollute the pure water with his blood? But the man sat down, pulled off one of his boots, and scooped up a bootful of water, then stuffed his shirt into the boot and shook it vigorously. The water came out pink; he dumped the wet shirt on the ground, emptied the bloody water into a clump of grass, and did it again. That was bad enough, but at least he wasn't dipping the shirt itself in the water.
After several changes of water, he came back to Dall with the sopping mess of his shirt, wrung it out, and reached for Dall's foot. "This'll hurt, boy, but it'll help, too."
It did hurt; every movement of the foot hurt, and the wet shirt was icy. The man wrapped it around his ankle, and used the sleeves to tie it tightly. Dall could feel his bloodbeat throbbing against the tight wrapping.
"Now, boy, give me your hand."
Dall had reached out his hand before he thought; the man took it and heaved him up in one movement.
"You'll have to walk; I'm still too drunk to carry you safely on this ground," the man said. "I can help, though. Let me guide you."
"Sir," Dall said. His foot hurt less than he expected as he hobbled slowly, leaning on the man's shoulder. The other aches also subsdided with movement, though his cuts and scrapes stung miserably.
It was a slow, painful traverse of the slope, down and across, even when they came to the thread of a path the man said he'd followed the night before. "Sheep are not men," the man said, when they came to the first drop in the path. He slid down first, and Dall followed. The man caught him before his bad ankle hit the path. That was almost all the man said, other than the occasional "Mind this" and "That rock tips."
The sun was high overhead when the path widened abruptly at the head of a grassy valley, where several sheep trails came together. Ahead, smoke rose from a huddle of low buildings. Dall could smell cooked food for the first time in days; his stomach growled again and he felt suddenly faint. He sagged; the man muttered something but took more of his weight. "Come on, boy—you've done well so far," he said.
Dall blinked and gulped, and managed to stand more on his own feet. The man helped him down the wider track to an open space where someone had placed a couple of rough benches around a firepit. No one was visible outside the buildings, but from the smell someone was busy inside them. The man lowered Dall to one of them, then bent to unwrap his ankle. "I need a shirt, boy, if I'm to talk someone into giving us food. And down here I should be able to find the right leaves for your injuries."
Dall's ankle had turned unlovely shades of green and purple; now his foot was swollen as well. The man shrugged into the wet, dirty shirt, and headed for one of the huts as if he knew it. Dall glanced around, and caught sight of someone peeking around a house-wall at him. A child, younger, smaller. He looked away, then looked back quickly. A boy, wearing a ragged shirt much like his own over short trews . . . barefoot as he was. The boy offered a shy smile; Dall smiled back. The boy came nearer; he could have been Dall's younger brother if he'd had one.
"What happened to you?" the boy asked. "Did he beat you?"
"No," Dall said. "I fell on the mountain."
"You need to wrap that," the boy said, pointing to his ankle. "Are you hungry?"
"I have nothing to share," Dall said.
"You're hurt. It's Lady's grace," the boy said. "Don't you have that where you come from?"
"Yes . . . I just . . ."
"I'll get something," the boy said, and was gone like a minnow in the stream, in an instant.
He was back in a moment, with a hunk of bread in his hand. "Here, traveler; may the Lady's grace nourish us both."
"In grace given, in grace eaten, blessed be the Lady." Dall broke the bread, giving a piece back to the boy, and looked around for the man. He had disappeared; an empty doorway suggested where he'd gone. Dall took a bite of bread and the younger boy did also.
The bread tasted better than anything he'd ever eaten, so much better that he forgot the pain in his foot, and his other pains. He could've eaten the whole piece, but he set aside a careful half for the man, in case no one shared with him.
But the man was coming back now, carrying a jug and another loaf. "I see you've made friends," he said.
"I saved you a bit," Dall said. "It's Lady's grace."
The man raised his eyebrows. "I suppose we could all use grace." He ate the piece Dall had set aside, then broke the loaf he carried. "Here—you could eat more, I daresay. And here's water."
Dall wanted to ask if this too had been given as Lady's grace, but he didn't. The man sat a few minutes, eating, and taking sips of the water. Then he stood. "I'd best be going to work," he said. "There's a wall to mend." He nodded at the far end of the village, where one wall of a sheepfold bulged out, missing stones at the top. Dall started to push himself up and the man shook his head. "Not you, boy. You're still hurt. Just rest there, and one of the women will be out to tend you shortly. She's boiling water for boneset tea for you."
That night Dall lay on straw, his injured ankle wrapped in old rags. Sleeping under a roof again after so many nights in the open made him as wakeful as his first nights on the trail. He could hear the breathing of others in the cottage, and smell them all too. He wanted to crawl outside into the clean night air scented with growing things, but that would be rude. Finally he fell asleep, and the next morning ate his porridge with pleasure. Cooked food was worth the discomforts of the night, he decided.
He and the man stayed in the village for six hands of days; the man worked at whatever chores anyone put him to, without comment or complaint. As Dall became able to hobble around more easily, he too worked. It was strange to do the familiar work he had grown up with, but for strangers. When he dropped something—less often than before—he waited for the familiar jibes, but none came. Not even when he dropped a jug of new milk and broke the jug.
"Never mind," said the woman for whom he'd been carrying that jug and two others. "It's my fault for giving you more than you could carry, and the handle on that one's been tricky for years." She was a cheerful dark-haired woman with wide hips and a wider smile; all her children were like her, and the boy who had first given him bread was her youngest.
One evening after supper, Dall had an itch down his back, and scratched at it with the point of the wooden knife. The man watched him, and then asked, "Where did you get that knife?"
"I told you—my sister gave it to me." Dall sighed with relief as the tip found the perfect itchy spot to scratch.
"And where did she get it?"
>
"She found it in the woods last fall; we were all out nutting together, and she was feeling among the leaves in between the roots, and there it was."
"By itself?"
"I don't know. I didn't see her find it. Why, what could have been with it?"
The man sat down, heavily. "Dall, I carved that knife myself, two winters gone. I had thrown away my sword—oh, aye, I had a sword once, and mail that shone like silver, and a fine prancing horse, too. I had a dagger yet, and while I was snowed in, that first winter of my freedom, I whittled away on the kindling sticks. Most I burnt, but a few I kept, for the pleasure of remembering my boy's skill. Then spring came, and when I set out again I tossed them in the stream one summer's day to watch them float away."
"So the knife is yours," Dall said.
"I threw it away," the man said. "Like my sword. And unlike my sword it has come back, in a hand that valued it more." He cleared his throat. "I just wondered . . . if any of the others were found. Some flowers—mostly rose designs, over and over—and one fairly good horse."
"I don't know," Dall said. "But if the knife is yours . . ." He held it out.
The man shook his head. "No, lad. I threw it away; it's yours now."
"But it's special," Dall said. "It saved me—" He rattled on quickly, sensing the man's unwillingness to hear, about the little people in the grass, and the serpent's bite, and the strange being that appeared from nowhere and vanished back into nowhere, and the water . . .
The man stared at him, open-mouthed. "That knife?"
"This knife," Dall said. He held it out again. "Your knife. You made it; the magic must be from you."
" 'To ward from secret treachery, from violence and from guile, from deadly thirst and hunger, from evil creatures vile . . .' " The man's voice trailed off. "It can't be . . ." His fingers stretched toward it, then his fist clenched. "It can't be. It's gone; what's loosed cannot be caught again."
"That's silly," Dall said. He felt silly too, holding out the knife. "When we let the calf out of the pen, we just catch it and bring it back."
"Magic is not a cow, boy!" The man's voice was hoarse now; Dall hardly dared look at his face for the anger he expected to see, but instead there were tears running down the furrows beside his mouth. "I forswore it . . ."
And will the wind not blow? And will not the spring return? The man's head jerked up; he must have heard it too.
Dall took a small step forward, and laid the knife in the man's hand, folding the man's fingers around it. As he stepped back, he saw the change, as if the sun had come out from behind a cloud. Light washed over the man, and behind it the man's filthy old shirt shone whiter than any cloth Dall had seen. His scuffed, worn boots gleamed black; his mud-streaked trews were spotless. On his tired, discouraged face, a new expression came: hope, and love, and light. What had seemed gray hair, once clean, now gleamed a healthy brown.
And the knife, the simple wooden knife, stretched and changed, until the man held a sword out of old tales. Dall had never seen a sword at all, let alone such a sword as that.
Vows are not so easily broken, or duties laid aside. Dall had no idea what that was about, but the man did; his quick head-shake and shrug changed to an expression of mingled awe and sorrow. He fell to his knees, holding the sword carefully, hilt upright. Dall backed away; a stone nudged the back of his legs and he sat down on it. He watched the man's lips move silently, until the man looked straight at him out of those strange green eyes, eyes still bright with tears.
"Well, boy, you have done quite a work here."
"I didn't mean to," Dall said.
"I'm glad you did," the man said. He stood, and held out his hand. "Come, let me call you friend. My name's Felis, and I was once a paladin of Falk. It seems Falk wants me back, even after—even now." He looked at the sword, the corners of his mouth quirking up in what was not quite a smile. "I think I'd better find this wood where your sister found the knife I carved, and see if any of the other bits washed up there. Something tells me the road back to Falk may prove . . . interesting."
Dall took the proferred hand and stood.
"What about me?" he asked.
"I hope you will travel with me," the man said. "You saved my life and you brought me back my knife . . . my life, actually, as a servant of Falk. And surely you want the sister who found it to know that it saved you."
"Go home?" Dall's voice almost squeaked. He could imagine his father's sarcasm, his brother's blows.
"It seems we both must," Felis said. "We both ran away; the knife called us both. But neither of us will stay with your father, I'm sure. What—do you think a boy who has saved a paladin remains a drop-hand forever?"
* * *
In the days of high summer, when the trees stood sentinel over their shade at noon, still and watchful, and spring's racing waters had quieted to clear pools and murmuring riffles, Dall no longer Drop-hand returned to his home, walking across the hayfield with a tall man whose incongruous clothes bore no sweat-stains, even in that heat. Gory the Tall recognized Dall the moment he came out of the trees, but the man with the spotless white shirt and the sword he did not recognize. Dall's brothers stood as if struck by lightning, watching their brother come, moving with the grace of one who does not stumble even on rough paths.
That evening, in the long soft twilight, Felis told of Dall's courage, of the magic in the knife he'd carved, of his oaths and his need to return.
"Then—I suppose this is yours too," said the youngest girl, Julya. She fished out of her bodice a little flat circle of wood carved with rose petals and held it out to him. Dall could hear the tears in her voice.
Felis shook his head. "Nay, lass. When I carved the flowers, I thought of my own sisters, far away. If it has magic, let it comfort you." He touched it with his finger. Then the air was filled with the perfume of roses, a scent that faded only slowly. The girl's face glowed with joy; she sniffed it again and tucked it back into her clothes.
"And he really saved you?" Dall's oldest brother asked.
"I slipped and fell," Dall said.
"At exactly the right moment," Felis said, a wave of his hand shutting off the gibes Dall's brothers had ready. "I hope he'll come with me, help me find the rest of the carvings I must find before I go back to my order."
"But—" Gory the Tall peered through the gloom at his son and at Felis. "If he's not the boy he was . . ."
"Then it's time for him to leave," Felis said. He turned to Dall. "If you want to, that is."
He was home without blows and jeers; he had triumphed. If he stayed, he would have that to fall back on. Stories to tell, scars to show. If he left, this time it would be for such adventures as paladins find—he knew far more about real adventures now than he had . . . and he was no longer angry and hurt, with every reason to go and none to stay.
An evening breeze stirred the dust, waking all the familiar smells of home. At his back, Julya pressed close; he could just smell the rose-scent of the carving in her bodice. But beyond that, he could smell the creek, the trees, the indefinable scent of lands beyond that he had only begun to know.
"I will go with you," he said to Felis. And then, to his family, "And someday I will come home again, with gifts for you all."
The Amorous Broom
A John Justin Mallory story
Mike Resnick
John Justin Mallory, his feet up on his desk, his battered fedora worn at an angle, was studying the Racing Form.
"You know," he announced, "I think I just may take a run out to the track this afternoon."
"Oh my God!" breathed Winnifred Carruthers, his pudgy, pink-faced, gray-haired partner. "That poor creature is entered again, isn't he?"
"How did you guess?" asked Mallory.
"It's the only time you ever go to the track—when Flyaway's running."
" 'Running' is an overstatement," said the not-quite-human creature perched atop the refrigerator in the next room. "Flyaway plods."
"When I want advice
from the office cat," said Mallory irritably, "rest assured I'll ask for it."
"That's what Flyaway does," continued Felina from atop the refrigerator. "He rests assured."
"If you ever leave here," said Mallory, "don't apply for a job as a comedian."
"Why should I leave here?" purred Felina. "It's warm and dry and you feed me."
"How many races has Flyaway lost in a row now, John Justin?" asked Winnifred.
"Fifty-three."
"Doesn't that suggest something to you?" she persisted.
"That it's past time for him to win."
"You are the finest detective in this Manhattan," continued Winnifred. "How can you be so stupid?"
"O ye of little faith," said Mallory.
"You've solved a lot of tricky cases, and put yourself in harm's way at least half a dozen times. Did you do it solely so you could keep losing your money on Flyaway?"
"When I go out on a case, my function is to detect," replied Mallory. "When I go to the track, my function is to bet. Why do you have such a problem with that? Mallory & Carruthers is paying its bills. This is discretionary income."
"I don't have a problem with betting," shot back Winnifred. "But betting involves an element of chance. Putting your money on Flyaway doesn't."
"You're going to look mighty silly when he finally wins one," said Mallory.
"Well said!" cried a voice. "You tell 'em, John Justin Mallory!"
Mallory was on his feet in an instant. "Who said that?" he demanded.
Felina leaped catlike to the floor and bounded into the office. She grinned, extended a shining claw at the end of her forefinger, and pointed it toward a broom that was leaning against a wall in the far corner.