Elven Winter

by Bernhard Hennen

  Ollowain did his best to remain absolutely still. Individual bees landed on him, and close up he saw that they were unnaturally large, almost as long as the last two joints of his little finger. Their movements tickled him uncomfortably. The swordmaster felt a fat drop of sweat form on his forehead. Bees crawled everywhere on Emerelle’s blanket. Gondoran stared at him from the stern. A large bee dangled from the tip of the holde’s nose, but he seemed hardly to notice it at all. In the boatmaster’s eyes he read a silent plea not to move.

  The troll had hauled himself onto a flat bank of black mud. He held both hands to his throat as if trying to break the chokehold of an invisible adversary.

  From the corner of his eye, Ollowain saw the bees descend on one of the centaurs. The manhorse reared up, his tail swinging like a whip. Orimedes hurried to his compatriot’s aid, only to disappear beneath the prickly shroud himself.

  Ollowain pressed his teeth together. There were bees on his face now. Their small legs probed at his burned skin. Bees tumbled down onto Lyndwyn too, who still lay beside the mast. The sorceress blinked. She opened her eyes for a moment and looked at Ollowain. She did not seem at all like someone waking from a deep sleep, unaware of what was going on around her. She smiled almost coquettishly. Then she closed her eyes again. The bees that had settled on her now flew away, and none went near her again.

  Sweat was dripping from Ollowain’s forehead. Searing pain shot through his chin. One of the little beasts had stung him. Tears came to his eyes and rolled over his cheeks. The buzzing of the bees closest to him changed. It grew deeper, more menacing!

  More and more bees landed on him. Especially on his face. His cheeks burned as the bees stung him repeatedly. In the corners of his eyes. On his neck. Ollowain was trembling, straining to keep still. The buzzing was louder now. They were inside his ears. Then he felt a bee push its way into his nose, its feelers patting at the fine hairs inside.

  They crawled across his lips, trying to push their way into his mouth. Think of something else, he ordered himself. He tried to remember Nomja. More than a hundred years had passed since she had joined the queen’s guard. He had loved her from the first moment he saw her, yet he had never dared admit his feelings to her. And now she was dead, long dead, buried on a foreign world. He wanted to call up her face again. Her fine, well-proportioned lines . . . something crawled across his eye! Ollowain flinched. A bee stung his eyelid! Nomja! Think of her . . . The pain was maddening. He could not stand it any longer, all the thousands of bees probing at his face, his body, everywhere. He pinched his eyelids together and was immediately punished for it with stings.

  High-pitched screams pierced the buzzing. The dying had begun. They should never have called the bees! He felt his left eyelid swelling. The bees’ poison itched and burned. To scratch it would be a relief. Oh, to throw himself into the water!

  Think of Nomja! What color were her eyes? He tried to imagine her face. Her fine hair. Her large eyes. Large compound eyes. He was looking at a bee! A bee with a furry gray-brown body. Its large eyes looked at him expressionlessly while its feelers twitched excitedly.

  The bee in his nose pushed in farther. And then he felt the tickle of legs in his throat! He screamed, and they were instantly inside his mouth. Stingers bored into his tongue. Bees crawled across his palate, and he crushed them with his teeth.

  He pressed one hand to his mouth. His tongue swelled. Something stung him inside his throat. More bees had forced themselves into his nose. Why were they doing this? What drove them to penetrate his body? It meant their own death!

  A bitter taste spread in his mouth. Still, the bees came. Crawling over his face, his arms, in his mouth, everywhere. He grew dizzy. His lungs burned. He had to breathe. Were they in his lungs? No, that was nonsense. That was impossible. And yet, there was something there. Something was cutting off his air. Be calm!

  Ollowain thought of the troll that seemed to be struggling against an invisible opponent. Was the bees’ poison driving him insane?

  Was that smoke he smelled? Had the fire caught up with them? The swordmaster did not dare to open his eyes. He did not want to feel them crawling down his neck again. That would drive him completely mad.

  Was it his lungs that were burning? A fire blazed inside him. He jerked his mouth open—the bees immediately swarmed in. He panted like a dog and swallowed dozens of them. He had to cough, inhaled frantically, but the air did not want to reach his lungs. His hands rose to his throat.

  He collapsed over the queen. His mouth fell open. The buzzing grew quieter. He felt as if he were falling and, indistinctly, saw dark branches passing by overhead. The fire in his lungs would kill him. He had no strength left. Something crawled across his eye. He saw a single bee fly up, then felt nothing more. All the pain was gone.

  A pale face moved in front of the blurred branches. Nomja! No. Her hair had not been black. Lyndwyn. No bees troubled her. Her face was without expression. Something silver sparkled. She held a dagger!

  “You will die . . .” The blade came down—he felt it slice into his throat. Then the face of the sorceress vanished in brilliant light.

  MORNING ON THE FJORD

  You will kill it!” Asla’s eyes sparkled with ire. A fine vertical crease appeared between her eyebrows. Alfadas knew that look. Trying to talk to her now would be a waste of time. “Yesterday, Luth took it into his head to save Kadlin, but will he protect her from that brute today? Take the mongrel down to the fjord and kill it. Get it out of here. I don’t want to see it in my house ever again!”

  Blood pricked up his ears, but his massive head did not rise from his front paws. He looked over attentively at Asla and Alfadas.

  “Come!” Alfadas flicked his fingers, beckoning the dog. Instead of standing up, Blood let out a growl.

  “Wowow!” Kadlin squealed. She let go of Asla’s leg and headed back toward the dog. Alfadas picked her up. He could see Blood’s muscles tense beneath his crow-black fur. “Easy now. I’m not hurting her.”

  Kadlin pinched his cheek and babbled something, then began to laugh. Blood snuffled and stretched.

  Alfadas went to the door. The dog shook itself reluctantly, then followed them. At the chopping block, the jarl jerked the heavy axe from the wood. He weighed the weapon in his hand, thinking. The dog could not stay in the house, he told himself. It was only a matter of time before something unfortunate happened. Asla was right. They had to kill him. Alfadas strolled down the hill toward the fjord; off in the distance, the last drifts of fog were lifting from the foot of the Hartungscliff.

  The smell of something frying wafted past on the breeze. From somewhere came the monotonous plunging of a butter churn. Kadlin pressed her head to Alfadas’s cheek. “Wowow,” she explained to him, and she pointed at Blood.

  Alfadas had pocketed some of the leftover meat from the previous night’s festival. He would toss the meat to Blood to distract him. A last meal from his executioner. He felt terrible. Blood had hurt no one. At least, not yet . . . he had to kill him for what Ole had done to him. Alfadas knew that hardly anyone in the village would give a second thought to whether his treatment of a dog had been fair.

  The sky stretched clear and cloudless across the fjord and the mountains. It was still cool. Today would be one of the last sunny days of late summer—when the summer faded with such magnificence, it was always a prelude to an early winter. The first traces of red and gold were already showing in the tops of the oak trees on the opposite shore. Alfadas hated winter in the Fjordlands. He was not made for the cold, and the summers there were always far too short. He thought wistfully of Albenmark; unconsciously, his eyes turned again to the stone crown atop the Hartungscliff.

  “Dada!” Kadlin babbled away incessantly and pointed to everything that caught her curious eye. A rock by the shore, a gold leaf in the grass, a piece of wood floating on the water. For her, the world was still full of wonder. Blood looked wherever she pointed and occasionally replied with a short bark.

 
Alfadas made his way along the shore. He did not want to do the deed in a place he liked to spend time. Soon, the first salmon would be coming up the fjord. He looked forward to that, to spending the entire day fishing by the water.

  Finally, he reached a bare stretch of shoreline, an area with no rocks where one could camp, with no old fireplaces between soot-blackened stones. It was a place without a history. Random. A place that one could easily forget again.

  The jarl set Kadlin down. The little girl immediately tottered across the pebbly shore to the water’s edge. She picked up a gray pebble and tried to throw it into the water, but it fell short; grumbling, she searched around for a fresh stone. Blood lay down close to where she played—he seemed tense, and his ears did not droop. Did he suspect what was coming? Alfadas took the chunks of cooked meat out of his pocket and tossed them to Blood. The dog did not move, and instead Kadlin came back up from the water. She picked at the fibrous meat with her fingers and pushed it into her mouth, and only then did Blood eat one of the chunks.

  Suddenly, the dog jumped to its feet, knocking Kadlin over. Kadlin just shook herself and laughed, thinking it was a game. Stiff legged, with his head stretched forward, Blood let out a deep, throaty growl. Kadlin grasped a handful of his fur and pulled herself back to her feet. She tried to imitate the dog’s growl.

  From the forest above the shore stepped a white-haired figure. Gundar, the Luth priest. He wore a gray smock and had slung a grease-stained leather satchel over his shoulder.

  Blood stopped growling but did not take his eyes off the new arrival. The priest ran his hand over his forehead. His face was bright red, and he was panting for breath. “You have quite a stride, Jarl,” the old man gasped. “I’m afraid I am no longer built for taking walks before first breakfast.” The priest sat down on the pebbly shore and took a bottle out of his satchel. He drank in long drafts, then held the bottle out to Alfadas. “A good drop. Best spring water, from the foot of the Hartungscliff. You’ll like it.”

  The jarl took the bottle but did not put it to his lips. “Why did you follow me?”

  “Oh . . . I had a dream. I think that dog might be good for something after all. And I had a notion that you might make a mistake.”

  Alfadas shook his head. “Dreams, notions . . . we both know what Ole has turned Blood into. It is just a question of when the dog attacks someone, not if. And I don’t want it to be my wife or my children. He has to go . . .”

  “I understand your concerns, Jarl. But trust in the gods! Have you already forgotten what happened last night? Luth gave you a sign. Respect it. You are one of the most important threads in the tapestry he is weaving to decorate his Golden Hall. I believe it would be wrong to kill the dog.” The priest winked. “Tell the truth, Jarl—it was not your idea to take an early morning walk by the fjord with a dog, a child, and an axe.”

  Alfadas could not suppress a smile. Canny old man! Could he see into his heart? But he would not go against Asla’s will. Her decision was correct . . . unjust but sensible. “I have seen what lies beyond the world, Priest. The void. An abyss with no end. Darkness inhabited by disembodied horrors hungry for the light of those with living souls. There are no gods there, no golden halls. I hold you in high regard, Gundar. And I know how much you do for the village. But don’t expect me to believe in your god, let alone heed him.”

  “Are you sure that you have seen everything? We are not like the elves that raised you, Jarl. We are no Albenfolk. And the races of men were not created by the Alben. We have something that they lack. Something they envy us for. We can enter the golden halls of the gods, when we have earned the right. And we will celebrate there unto all eternity.”

  Alfadas sighed. He liked the old man and did not want to injure his feelings. How could he make it clear to him that elves could live forever? What he saw as the promise of a marvelous afterlife was their reality. Alfadas knew the stories of his people, but what halls of the gods could compare with Emerelle’s palace? The priests talked about enormous longhouses with gold-plated wooden pillars, where the gods and their chosen indulged in a never-ending banquet. Halls full of smoke and the howls of revelers.

  How much more marvelous were the banquet halls of the elves! High and spacious, with walls that looked as if they had been created from pure moonlight. The scent of flowers in the air. And when one of their masters played the flute or plucked the lute, the music went straight into one’s heart. Alfadas stroked the smooth shaft of the axe. The wood was dark with sweat. The jarl thought of the long travels he had undertaken with his father on their cursed search for the bastard child.

  “I have seen the void, old man. And other places that you could not imagine in your most daring dreams. But I don’t believe in golden halls.”

  “I am not saying that the void you speak of does not exist,” Gundar conceded. “A place of darkness and despair. I am sure we have all had hours in which we have felt very close to that place. I even fear that most of us will go there when our hour comes. But it is up to us to decide where our destiny lies.”

  “Is it?” Alfadas asked cynically, although he was happy to be able to put off for a little while what he had to do . . . at least for as long as he talked with the priest. “Your god is the weaver of fate. How can I decide my future if my path has already been determined? Am I not then Luth’s slave? A small figure in the game of the gods, with no will of my own?”

  Gundar took an apple out of his bag and bit into it heartily. He looked over at Kadlin, who had returned to the water’s edge and was playing with pebbles there. “You misunderstand the nature of Luth, Jarl. It is true that he is the weaver of fate, but he knows what you will do because he knows you very well—it was he who spun the threads of your life, after all. Sometimes he tries to help us by giving us signs. He is a hospitable god, and he would like to see all of us find our way to the golden halls, even though he knows that most of us won’t make it. His hope is that we will live our lives with our eyes open to the workings of the gods. Those familiar with Luth’s works in their lifetime will find their way to him more easily in death. Unfortunately, most of us are blind to his signs. Even I don’t always understand them.”

  Alfadas shook his head. He would never understand this belief in gods. It was difficult for him even to accept it in others. He did not want to taunt Gundar, but the old man was starting to upset him. “We should give your god the opportunity to give us one of his signs here and now. The water in the fjord is bitter, but Kadlin tries to drink from it all the time. No doubt Blood will also soon be thirsty. If Kadlin drinks first, then I will spare the dog’s life.” He looked up to the sky. “Hear me, Luth? Can I make it any easier for you? Blood’s life is in your hands. Decide!”

  The priest remained astonishingly relaxed. Alfadas had expected indignant protest, or at least to be admonished for challenging a god, but Gundar sat serenely and ate his apple. When he was finished and had spat the seeds into the grass, he said, “It may well be true that there is no one among the humans who can match the famed swordsman Alfadas, the king’s duke in times of war, the terror of all enemies of the Northlands, but whatever names and titles you are given, to challenge a god is beyond the powers of even the best of men. It is as if Kadlin were to challenge you to single combat.” He smiled. “But Luth is wise and forbearing. I am certain that he will answer you appropriately.”

  The jarl looked up to the sky. “I’m waiting.”

  In silence, the two men sat side by side and watched the dog and the child. It was not long before Alfadas regretted his behavior. He was being silly! And still, he did not back down.

  Gundar, grinning, polished off a second apple while Kadlin returned from the water. The little girl rubbed her eyes tiredly. Blood lay stretched out on the grass, dozing. Kadlin went to him and snuggled against his scraggy black fur. Soon, she fell asleep.

  Alfadas watched the dog for a long time. Thick bands of muscle were hidden beneath the dog’s fur, making the beast look bulky and ungainly. The s
crape on Blood’s snout was covered with a dark scab, and in the morning light, the jarl could see many older scars, too. He thought of the whip that Ole had left behind—torture instrument, made to open deep wounds. Bastard! He ought to take all his dogs away from him.

  Gundar had leaned his head back and was looking up at a single lonely cloud passing slowly across the radiant blue of the sky. The priest said not a word, but he smiled silently to himself, and his silence was more eloquent than any words.

  Alfadas was still not prepared to concede. One of the two would go down to the water! It did not matter to him if it was Blood or Kadlin. The jarl gave himself up to his thoughts. What would he say to Asla if he returned with the dog? Would she accept a judgment from Luth? Perhaps. She certainly would not accept his decision not to kill the dog. It was basically good that he had the priest there as his witness; it would make things easier for him.

  It was Gundar who finally broke the silence. “We’ve been here well over an hour, Jarl. I have to admit that I am now so thirsty myself that I am tempted to drink from the fjord. How much longer do you want to wait?”

  “Until we have a sign,” Alfadas said defiantly.

  The priest sighed. “Don’t you think that Luth has long since spoken? We could sit here until dusk, and neither child nor dog would drink from the fjord. Until today, I have always held you to be a clever man, Jarl. You must also have recognized what the answer is. The weaver of fate is not prepared to relieve you of your decision.”

  Alfadas had expected a speech like this. The most important quality one needed to be a priest was the talent to turn everything that happened to your god’s favor. Gundar might have his failings, but he did not lack a silver tongue. “Then what, in your opinion, is your god telling me?”