He was surrendered.
And in that instant, his heart was struck like so much ice on the anvil of a smith. And he was become Haldane again—Haldane the Whirly-Headed, who reserved from surrender.
For as he sat helpless, of a sudden a light but powerful grip seized his chin from behind and a finger skated over his teeth like a single foot on winter ice.
“In truth, I do believe that you are marked as Mine, though I had doubted it,” said a voice. It was the rich firm voice of a woman of command, like a Nestorian nurse when he was small or his mother.
In cold fear, Haldane turned to see who it was treating him so. The hair on his neck prickled. He saw a giant woman’s body but One who was not a woman. He saw warts and growths and thought of the horrid snow monkeys of which Oliver had told him, and of nightmare pigs. But She was more whelming than either. She was more than he could bear.
“Are you Libera?” he asked. “Are you the One I dread?”
The Thing-Woman gobbled hideously. Haldane looked about him, but no one roused at the sound. All continued to lie silent and still.
If this was Libera, then this light by which he could see Her more clearly than night should allow was Libera’s light, and this time in which all slept but Haldane was Libera’s time. The face of the creature altered before Haldane’s sight and became such that Haldane must look away, then back, then away again. His limbs were boneless before Her and he disgraced himself again, bright and hot on his leg.
“You are as artless as the flimsy cantrip you hide under,” She said. “Poor wee warrior.” She laughed or cried again, and Her various growths shook like colored caterpillars in the wind. “You should be abed. It is late. Come ride My horse until you sleep and I will judge you. I will see whether you are Mine, or whether you are yours, or whether you are Someone Else’s. Come horsie, come; give infant Giles a lullaby ride.”
Haldane could not even say, “I am not Giles! I am Haldane!” His mouth would not work.
He cowered before Her. His eyes were lowered to the ground because he could not bear the sight of Her. He heard the sound of Her steed as it picked its way through the camp and he feared to look upon the beast. Its sound was clopping, seeming aimless, slowly wandering. Then it ceased. She—Libera?—made the noise She made once again then, as though that were the call by which She fetched Her horse. Closer it ambled. It stopped. Was it here? Where was it?
When Haldane could not bear waiting longer, he looked up at Her. And when he looked at Her, She, the great Thing-Woman, gestured to Her night horse. She gobbled again, Her face bright blue and red in the darkness that surrounded him. But there was not the sound of hooves again. Instead, at that moment, there was hot moist breath on Haldane’s neck.
He started hugely and scrambled about. Libera’s horsie was limned as brightly as milk in twilight. Her steed was the great wurox cow, head lowered. It was larger than any natural animal. Libera and Her beast made Haldane feel smaller than small again, as he had when the world was huge. The wurox gazed at Haldane and looked as though she might speak. She opened her mouth and lowed. He could not bear the sound.
Libera seized him suddenly in a grip that took no account of his dignity or manliness. She whirled him through the air and set him down on the broad felt back of Her white cow. The cow shook her head. There was no purchase and Haldane felt that he was about to fall from a great height, and was frantic. He was aswim. He scrambled to help himself, but could find no help.
“You must ride around my old standing stone like thread around a spool,” said Libera, She of hideous aspect. And She gestured at the rock which Haldane could suddenly see, standing like a brother by the camp.
“You must ride around it three times, and if you fall off, I will eat you alive,” said She. “I would you held on tight.” And She put Her face close to Haldane, showed Her white teeth in their dark red gums, and made Her lures to jump and jiggle.
The cow began to step, and Haldane cried in desperation, “I cannot even ride so far,” tears starting from his eyes. He was tossed like a die in a shaken cup, like a mouse by a cat, like a snowflake on the wind.
“You must ride so far,” She said, “if you would be My Lover.”
It was ferocious logic and Haldane could not withstand its force. He could not hold on for there was nothing to hold on to. He must be thrown. He would be devoured. He chose to be devoured, and found that when he did not strive to hold on, he did not slip. He was tossed lightly on the broad back of the white wurox as though he were a feather juggled on a coverlet. The wurox halted when they reached Libera’s standing stone. But he would not be Libera’s Lover.
Libera then said to Haldane: “You are Mine. You would have fallen and I would have ground your bones in My teeth if you were not Mine. You will love and serve Me. You were marked rightly as My child.”
She touched Haldane’s brow by his right eye most tenderly then, and the touch was like a wasp walking with burning feet.
“But you are not yet ripe,” She said. “Now is not yet the time for you to ride alone around My standing stone. You are not yet the man to ride alone around My standing stone. But still you shall ride. I will ride with you.”
She leaped onto the back of the wurox behind Haldane. And the wurox ran as no cow could run, faster than the swiftest horse, faster than a skycatcher, faster than thought, around the tongue of stone. At this speed, Haldane could have been no feather juggled. He must have fallen. But the grip on him that held him secure and steady was no more than a finger touch. Haldane felt Her great presence behind him as they sped so fast he could not see over distances he could not reckon.
His heart surged within him and She said, “You will not be My Lover until you deny the Gets.”
They crossed great leaps. Time was forgotten. He expanded and She said, “You will not be ripe until you deny Morca.”
He was warm. He rocked.
In fullness, She said, “You will not be Giles until you deny Haldane.”
Sleepily, he said, “But you know I cannot do that, Mother. I am Haldane.”
The last thing he remembered was that Libera said: “When next we meet, it will be in other light.” But also She gobbled once and it almost made him wake.
When Haldane did wake, it was morning, just before dawn. The air was cool and clear, and so was he himself. Birds were singing. He was sitting on a height, his back resting against a firm support, and his neck and head too. From this comfortable seat, fields and forests were to be seen stretching below like a tapestry with a pattern, and as he saw the pattern in a burst of revelation—recognized the fact of interrelationships deliberately made—the first light of the sun swung from the heavens and made his eyes water.
Haldane was gripped by sudden awe. He didn’t move. He didn’t stir. As though it had been a farewell gift from the Goddess, he was able to see shape and pattern in the bones and tissues of the land, to feel power coursing like blood, where before he had only seen random trees and hills and streams. From this sudden new perspective, with this sudden new perspective, he saw design everywhere.
It was no passing idle. He could not doubt the truth of what he perceived, even though he could not comprehend it. Like an ant overcome by the majesty, design, and rectitude of his anthill, Haldane suddenly perceived that which was larger than himself.
He felt this place where he sat as a place of power. The landscape all around was molded and sculpted and channeled and directed to focus the power of the land upon this height. The power made his skin prickle. He could not doubt what he felt.
At a sound, Haldane turned to see Oliver sitting beside him, his back also against the wood of a stockade fence. Oliver—Oliver himself! short, plump, white-bearded, winter-thicketed—wore magenta satinet with many rents. He was calmly striking a light with his firepump and applying it to his clay pipe, which he puffed until it was lit as he would have it. Then he nodded to Haldane and commenced to smoke.
In that moment, Haldane realized that he was Haldane.
Oliver was Oliver, and not Sailor Noll. And Haldane was not the Nestorian moonling, Giles, but himself once more as he had been before Oliver’s spell.
He scrambled to his feet. He touched his head where he had been wounded and felt a great rough scab under his fingers. He looked out at the land spreading away and his heart rose and fell.
Haldane said, “I know that tapestry.”
He unstrung the horn from around his neck.
He said, “I know this place from my dreams.”
Haldane pointed to the gate against which Oliver sat, still smoking his pipe as though half-bemused. Haldane swept his arm wide and pointed to the country round.
“This is my grandfather Arngrim’s dun!” he said. “This is Little Nail, and we are here!”
Oliver came to his feet, pipe in hand. And Haldane, the son of Black Morca, blew the horn that had been given to him by Arngrim, his mother’s father, outside Arngrim’s gate, announcing his presence. He blew the horn and blew it again, his heart overflowing.
And in time the gate was unbarred. It swung open, revealing the hospitality waiting within. Standing together before them were Arngrim, who was once most trusted by Garmund, and Ivor Fish-Eye, that dagger man.
And Haldane knew in that moment that all that was old and familiar and true was now scattered and wasted and could not be regathered. Morca was dead, his head on a pole. Arngrim, Haldane’s grandfather, was in league with Morca’s enemies. And there was no haven in the world of the Gets for Haldane, Morca’s son.
● Part III ●
Engagement
Chapter 16
ON A MORNING THAT WAS BRIGHT, cool and still as a clear teardrop of dew hanging from a spider’s eye. On a hill that was higher and safer than Morca’s.
Below, the pattern of land was as deliberately made as writing on the page of a book. But the pattern was visible only to one who could sense the power that the pattern gathered. Otherwise, it was invisible, unsuspect, unimaginable. And still, the power gathered in the land, as palpable as fear and hate, as imminent as catastrophe, awaiting direction, awaiting discharge.
Four men stood in a tableau vivant, two within the open gate of a dun, and two without. Even the wind did not blow, honoring the moment.
Haldane, dressed in bridegroom finery, stood poised with his horn, which was his from Arngrim’s own hand. Oliver held his pipe, as though by and by to knock it against his palm, but not for now. Arngrim—who was like a silvered sword, or a falcon, or an ugly tall monkey with a large nose and eyes deep set in circles within circles—displayed no expression. Ivor, a fixed half-smile on his face, peeped around the corner of his graveyard eye.
When this frozen moment ended, things were not the same as they had been before. Time itself was shattered, never again to be reassembled as it was.
What outwardly happened was suddenly begun, suddenly over, and of no import in itself. That is, Ivor spoke. Haldane passed his horn from his left hand to his right, drew Marthe’s black dagger, then rushed at Ivor to kill him. Arngrim, that tall powerful private old man who seemed to understand all there was to be understood, struck Haldane a terrible efficient blow that knocked him to the ground just within the gates of the dun. Then he spoke words to Haldane, and all went within to breakfast.
Outwardly, nothing was changed. Nothing was different. But after this moment all was changed in Haldane’s mind. He was not the same Get he had always been, but one step along the path toward being something else, something there was no name for that he would yet accept. The Get world had no place for him. Very well, he had a glimpse of a larger and older order.
Here is the outside and inside of it:
Ivor Fish-Eye unfroze his smile and spoke with the relish of a starving man watching a suckling lamb at play. He said, “Now—so soon—we begin. It is no matter now when Romund arrives with the pig.”
Oliver thoughtfully tapped his pipe out on his palm. He coughed rackingly—the expectable outcome of the weight of spells he had carried so far. The cough seemed dry and forced, and more racking therefore.
For one blazing moment, Haldane hated Ivor fiercely as he who had broken the old warm secure world, the island fortress in the Sea of Nestor, the safe near horizon. This was the last moment that Haldane still thought as a Get. In his anger and rage, he felt that the dun of Black Morca had been a glowing gem, precious and enclosing, now shattered by men like Ivor Fish-Eye who had no concept of its value.
He unsheathed the thin knife with the fine black handle and rushed at Ivor with determination to kill him. While Haldane was striving to rise from the ground, Arngrim picked up the fallen knife, cleansed it of spring dirt with a finger, and made of it something to keep.
Then he said to Haldane, “By the horn you hold, and have, it seems, learned to sound, I take you to be my daughter Freda’s son. If this be your main method, you will soon be dead.”
It was when he heard these words that Haldane changed. He nodded his head once in assent, for it was then that he realized that he must be different than he had been.
The old world was truly shattered. The jewel could not be mended.
He was at sea, and he was bound to swim for his life in this shocking and promising universe, so vast and incredible—this universe in which everything was always new.
Later, after they had eaten, but before they had fled the dun on Little Nail, Haldane said to Oliver, to indicate what he now knew: “It is exciting and fearsome, both, to be out here where everything is always changing.”
Oliver tested his cough and then said, “That’s what life is like. One thing after another. It is something you can forget when you are near a man like Morca who wraps the world around himself and holds it still.”
But in that moment before breakfast, when Haldane was on his knees before Arngrim, his head still ringing from Arngrim’s blow, it was within this moment that Haldane woke up. In an instant of splendid clarity, for the first time since the death of Morca, Haldane knew where he was.
He was at home in the unknown.
He was no longer lost in the unknown.
It was a great difference, as different as up and down. As different as being a Get and not being a Get.
Arngrim said, “Breakfast waits. You must surely be hungry after your long journey.”
It was a strange feeling. All that Haldane had ever known, all that had sustained him and given him being and definition, all this lay thrown down and broken. But he was not thrown down and broken. Through a miracle, he still continued, independent of the world that had given him birth.
As they went in for breakfast, Haldane’s heart turned over at the very thought of not being a Get anymore. Strange to feel joy in the midst of danger and uncertainty, so frightening and exciting. But the day was still clear and cool and sustaining, by itself giving him being. And when he shot one last look through the open gate at the message writ for him on the land, the design in the tapestry was still there like a key.
A Gettish woman, wholly unlike the Nestorian serving women Haldane was used to, served their meal. He was taken with her braids. He allowed himself to look at her twice when to do so meant glancing away from Arngrim and Ivor. But he felt reckless and powerful.
That recklessness was still with him when he and Oliver were alone. That was in the moment before Ivor burst upon them to kill them for his own reasons.
“How is that cough of yours, Oliver?” Haldane challenged. “How are your pains?”
“I am . . . not so ill as I might be. Ill, though, mind you. What demands would you make on me?”
“We must be gone from here,” Haldane said. “They are certain to kill us if we stay. There is no one in Nestor to trust, so we must leave Nestor.”
“And where are we to go?” Oliver asked.
“Let us go to Palsance as you proposed before.”
“Palsance . . .” said Oliver, and sighed deeply for what might await him there. Then he raised his head and said, “Let it be Palsance, then. But how are we to leave? W
e are in the grip of hosts, and their hospitality is strong.”
Haldane nodded. With cunning certainty he said, “We must use your magic.” If he was no Get, he did not mind magic.
Oliver attempted to protest, waving him away, breaking down into coughs. “How can you ask that? I can only bear so much.”
“A small spell only. You once instructed me in such a spell—the Pall of Darkness. I don’t ask that you magic us to Palsance. But cast a net of invisibility over us, and let us leave this place.”
Haldane was strangely sure of his words. He was delighted to be in the new universe where the stuff of education—like spells—might be applied to make more newness.
But Oliver protested. He said, “No, my young friend,” and patted his chest. “Lend me a hand with your strength. You cast the spell. Remember your studies with me and cast the Pall of Darkness for us.”
Haldane shook his head. “It is for you to do. I cannot. I would an I could, but since I was granted justice by my father, I cannot . . .” and he gestured to show that memory and voice must fail him whenever he approached the spell.
“You cannot remember at all?” asked Oliver in amazement.
Haldane shook his head again. The passage surrounding Morca’s death was still a blank to him. If this were not so, he might not have been so blithesome and so certain. He might have had questions to ask of Oliver. As it was, his very lack of memory permitted him to act, and to demand of Oliver that Oliver act.
“You must suffer another spell for us,” Haldane said. “I will supply our strength and see you safe to Palsance.”
“Do you swear that?” asked Oliver.
“I swear it,” said Haldane, who was still Get enough to make oaths and to keep them.
Earth Magic Page 14