by Greg Bear
“But . . . But . . . ” Holger gaped like a boated carp. “I never gave up looking for you, looking for a way back here. Never once, never for a minute, never in thirty years. Now I make it, and what do I find?”
“That life went on whilst you were busy with other things?” Alianora suggested. His gape only got wider. She sighed again, out loud this time. “Holger, how could I know what you strove for, there in your other world? Even did I know, how could I guess you’d succeed?”
“You should’ve.” Holger muttered to himself, scowling and shaking his head. He might bring out the words, but he had trouble believing them himself.
“Here. Wait.” Alianora began bringing up the bucket of water again. “Your coming fair made me forget why I was at the well. I aim to stew up a great kettle of pease porridge, for supper this even and for as long after that as it may last. Will you come home and eat with us?”
He grinned crookedly—more the expression she remembered him wearing than the loss and rage that had been chasing each other across his features. “Bread and salt, Carahue would say.”
“That’s the Moor’s custom, not mine, but I think it a good one,” Alianora answered. After you ate with someone, trying to cut out his liver ought to be bad form.
“He’s probably got himself a harem.” Holger’s grin widened. “Song girls and dancing girls and girls to peel grapes for him and drop them into his mouth. Oh, and about fifty-eleven kids, too. I bet he’s fat, but happy.”
“It would not surprise me. He always fancied the good things in life,” Alianora said.
“Well, so did I.” Holger looked straight at her.
More than anything else, that was what made her say, “Theodo, why don’t you close the smithy, and you and the boys come home with us? ’Tis a holiday—an unlooked-for holiday, which makes it but the sweeter.”
“Aye, I’ll do it,” Theodo said at once. He didn’t want Alianora alone with Holger. She didn’t want—she didn’t think she wanted—that, either. Her feelings for him might be buried, but they lay restless in the grave. Best give them no chance to see light of day once more. And also best to give no one here the least excuse to think of scandal. Some of the women would regardless; they were made so. But no one else ought to be able to hearken to their vinegar tongues.
“Not a great big place, is this?” Holger remarked as they walked back to the house. He carried the water bucket. Theodo gave him a quizzical look when he lifted it, but at Alianora’s quick gesture lowered his eyebrows and kept quiet. Holger had always been full of such small, strange courtesies.
“Grandest village for twenty miles around,” Nithard said proudly. Holger nodded, polite as an elflord. If he also smiled for one brief moment, Alianora was pretty sure she was the only one who noticed.
She stirred the peas and strewed in salt. After adding the fennel—its spicy scent made her nostrils twitch—she cut the pork into little cubes. It went into the kettle, too.
“Will you chop some more firewood for me?” she asked Theodo.
“Aye.” He went out to do it without a backward glance. Einhard and Nithard chaperoned Alianora better than well enough, even if they didn’t realize that was what they were doing. They wanted every cut and thrust of Holger’s adventures in this world, in the one where he’d spent some years, and in the others he’d passed through on his long, roundabout journey back here. To help loosen his tongue, they broached a barrel of beer Alianora hadn’t planned on opening so soon.
Holger was a good talespinner, of the kind who could laugh at himself and his blunders: one more thing Alianora recalled from bygone days. She’d lived through some of his stories, and heard others before—how they came back! Others still were new to her. The feathered demons—or were they pagan gods?—who ate hearts and drank blood made her shiver in spite of herself.
Theodo had come back in with an armload of wood. Alianora scarcely noticed. Her husband got caught up in Holger’s latest tale, too. When the knight paused to wet his whistle, Theodo asked, “This is truth, not just a yarn spun for the sake of yarning?”
“Truth.” Holger signed himself to show he meant it. “Oh, sometimes neatened up a bit for the sake of the story, and maybe the way I remember it now isn’t exactly the way it happened then, but . . . close enough for government work, they say in the other world where I lived a long time.”
The phrase sounded odd to Alianora, but Theodo grasped it at once. “That is truth,” he agreed gravely. “As near as a mortal man’s likely to come to it, any road.” He took up the beechwood dipper and poured himself a stoup of beer.
Holger refilled his own mug, not for the first time. He sipped appreciatively. “Mighty fine stuff,” he said.
“I have a charm against souring I got years ago in the Middle World,” Alianora said. “It works as well on this side of the border, so there must be no harm in it.”
“Not unless you’re the wrong kind of microorganism.” That last must have been a word from some other world, for it meant nothing to Alianora—nor, plainly, to her kinsmen. Holger took another pull at the beer. “I saw a tavern near the well,” he said. “If you can brew like this, I’m surprised you don’t run it out of business.”
“We would never do that!” Theodo sounded shocked. “Gerold needs must make his living, too.”
“Besides, brewing a barrel of beer now and again is one thing. Brewing enough for a thirsty village, that’s summat else altogether,” Alianora added.
“Mm, I shouldn’t wonder if you’re right,” Holger said after a little thought. “You always did have a good head on your shoulders, and not just for looks.”
Alianora’s cheeks heated. Theodo scowled. Then Einhard, not noticing anything amiss, said, “Sir Holger, will you speak more of these . . . Nasties, did you call ’em?”
“Nazis,” Holger corrected. His face went hard. “Though Nasties is a good name for them, too. Some ways, I think they were worse than any of the evils that haunt this world, because the only devils that drove them boiled up from the bottom of their own shriveled souls.”
He told some of what they had done. Only two things made Alianora believe him: that his voice held unmistakable conviction, and that no one could or would invent such horrors for the sake of making talk spin along. It was as if, for a time, a shadow hovered under the roof thatching.
Alianora got the fire on the hearth built up the way she wanted. She hung the cauldron of porridge above it. Then she said, “Shall we get out into the open air a while, to let it cook?” That made a fair enough reason, but she also wanted to escape the shadow that—she hoped—wasn’t really there. She knew she would never eye a fylfot the same way after this.
“It is a trifle smoky in here,” Holger said. Theodo laughed under his breath. Einhard and Nithard both smiled. With the forge always blazing in the smithy, they knew more of smoke than Holger would . . . or did they?
“What became of your pipe, wherein you burned the nickels’ smoking-leaf?” Alianora asked him as they went out to the little plot of vegetables and herbs by the side of the house. A hen that was pecking at something clucked at the interruption and scuttled away.
“I gave it up. Didn’t much want to, but I did.” Sure enough, Holger’s voice was plangent with regret. But he went on, “The miserable doctors have shown it steals years off the back end of your life. I still miss it sometimes, I will say.”
“Doctors!” Theodo snorted scorn. “Me, I’d sooner go to a priest. He has a better chance of fixing what ails me.”
“In this world, a priest would,” Holger agreed. “Not in all of them, though. Some places, a sawbones knows as much about the way your body works as you do about shaping iron. He knows what’s good for you, and he knows what isn’t. And smoking isn’t, and there’s no way in the world—in any world—to pretend it is.”
Theodo hoisted his tankard. “Next thing you know, you’ll try and tell me beer is bad, too.” He laughed. So did his sons and Alianora.
So did Holger, but h
e said, “There are people—bluenoses, we call ’em—across the worlds who’ll tell you just that. I’m sure not one of ’em, though.”
“I should hope not!” Theodo reached for the knight’s mug. “Fill you up again?”
“Much obliged.” Holger handed it to him.
Alianora went back inside, too, to stir the porridge. As Theodo dipped out more beer, he spoke in a low voice: “I do see why you cared for him. And if you think I’m sorry to have a long lead now he’s back in the race, you’re daft.”
“Don’t sound more foolish then you can help,” she answered tartly. “There is no race, nor shall there be.” There wouldn’t have been a race had Holger ridden back from the battlefield, either. But that was a different story, one that hadn’t happened. She’d done the best she could in the one that had.
All the same, she poured herself a fresh mug before following her husband outside once more. Sometimes the world needed a bit of blurring.
Holger had launched into another tale, about a folk he called Reds. Einhard and Nithard listened, entranced. “Now, the measure of the Reds’ damnation was that tens of thousands of their men took service with the Nazis against their own liege lord,” the knight said. “The measure of the Nazis’ damnation, though, was that almost every other realm in the world allied with the Reds’ liege lord, wicked though he was, against them.”
Einhard frowned. “Even the realms of Law? Did not this wicked Red serve Chaos as much as the Nazis’ chief did?”
“He served Chaos, I think, yes, but less than the Nazis did.” Holger gnawed on his underlip. “Things aren’t always so black-and-white in that world as they are here. They—” He broke off.
A great white shape gyred down out of the sky toward the vegetable plot. Broad wings thuttered as the swan braked against air. Muscles in Alianora’s shoulders tensed, remembering those automatic motions. Only a woman’s muscles now, but still . . .
Suddenly the swan was swam no more, but Alianna, her bare toes digging into the soft, black dirt of the plot. She studied Holger with frank curiosity. “God give you good day, sir,” she said; she’d always been a mannerly lass. “Who might you be?”
His eyes almost bugged out of his head. He started violently and shaped the sign of the cross on his chest. “Jesu Kriste!” he barked out.
For far from the first time that mad day, tears stung Alianora. Just so had Holger responded when she first transformed from swan shape to her own before him. Then he’d reckoned the very notion of magic all but incredible. He knew better now; else he’d never have found his way back to this world, this village. Too often, though, you forgot what a useless thing mere knowing could be.
Holger stared at Alianna. She’d just turned eighteen. Her hair was red, though darker than Nithard’s. The spotless swan-may’s tunic covered enough of her for decency’s sake, but accented her sweet young curves.
“Jesu Kriste,” Holger said again, in a hoarse whisper this time, a whisper that struck Alianora as something close to true prayer. “Oh, Jesu Kriste!” Slowly, slowly, his gaze swung from Alianna to Alianora and back again.
Alianora knew what he was seeing, or thought he was seeing: her, as she’d been in the days when they were both young and everything stretched ahead of them. He stared down at the backs of his hands. The loose, age-freckled skin and the harsh tendons standing out like tree roots where the soil was washing away told him how lost those days were.
“Alack, the poor bugger!” Theodo murmured in Alianora’s ear. He was thinking along with her again. After so long together, scant surprise there.
“Sir?” In the way Alianna repeated the word, she let her patience show. She had no notion what the sight of her was doing to this unexpected guest.
Alianora did what little she could: “Alianna, here before you stands the great Sir Holger, of whom you’ll have heard me speak many a time. Holger, Alianna is the youngest chick in my brood.”
Her daughter’s face lit like sunrise. “Sir Holger? The famous Sir Holger? Come here?” She dropped him a curtsy more heartfelt than practiced.
Holger made heavier going of it. “Your chick? You said you had two—” He stopped short, looking absurdly astonished, and thumped himself in the forehead with the heel of his hand. “No. Wait. You did say you had three kids. You said, and either I didn’t quite hear it or I didn’t think what it might mean.” He managed a ragged bow. “Alianna, you’re . . . as pretty as your mother was.” A tiny pause as he looked back to Alianora. “Is.”
“Gramercy, sir knight,” Alianna said. “She tells such tales of you, and of the days when you twain strove together against Chaos! I never thought to meet a grand paladin in the flesh!” She clapped her hands together.
“Here I am, such as I am.” The old, familiar self-mockery sounded in Holger’s snort. He held out his mug to Alianora. Almost plaintively, he said, “This got empty some kind of way. Could you fix that, please?”
“Certes.” Alianora took it and went inside.
She gave the bubbling cauldron another stir. As she dipped up more beer from the barrel, she heard Alianna say, “Oh, Sir Holger, will you not grant us the boon of some tales of your brave adventures?”
“What do you suppose he’s been doing?” Einhard sounded as snotty as only an older brother could. “If you’d stuck around instead of flying all over creation or swimming in a pond and sticking your tail up in the air whenever you spied summat tasty at the bottom—”
Theodo’s rumbled “That will be enough—more than enough—of that” rose above Alianna’s irate squeak.
“Yes, more than enough,” Holger agreed as Alianora came out again. He nodded to her as he took back the stoup and drank from it. Then his gaze returned to Alianna. “I don’t mind spinning out a few more stories if you folks can put up with listening to ’em.” He might have been talking to all of them, but he had eyes for only one—with the occasional bemused glance at her mother.
Alianna couldn’t have made a better audience had she rehearsed for the role. She laughed in all the right places. She clapped her hands some more when the story turned exciting. Whenever magic intruded, her eyes—they were green, not blue like Alianora’s—widened.
Theodo blew on a fire with a goatskin bellows when he wanted to make it hotter. All unwittingly, Alianna had the same effect on Holger. He paid less and less heed to anybody else. Alianna basked in his attention, probably because, like Alianora at the same age, she wasn’t used to getting much.
Alianora wasn’t alone in noticing. After a while, Theodo said, “Sir knight, will you walk a little ways with me? Alianora, you may as well come, too.” When their sons and daughter started to follow along, the smith held up a hand. “Nay, bide you here, an’t please you. This is for the older heads. We’ll be back betimes, I vow.”
Einhard, Nithard, and Alianna all looked dissatisfied, each, perhaps, for different reasons. In the face of Theodo’s stony stare, though, and Alianora’s, they did not try to press their luck.
Holger didn’t seem happy to cut short his latest yarn, either. But he did it with such good grace as he could muster. Theodo and Alianora led him along a narrow, muddy path through the fields—and away from the children. Holger did have the wit to wait till they got out of earshot before asking, “Well, what’s this all about?”
“Sir knight . . . ” Theodo stopped and scuffed one boot in the dirt. Then he squared his shoulders. Though shorter than Holger, he was nearly as broad through them. “Sir knight, I want you to understand I speak to you without meaning to offend. Can you do that, please?”
“Go on,” Holger said grimly. “I’ll try my best.”
“For which I cry your grace.” Theodo sketched a salute. “Now, I am but a simple fellow, and not a traveled man. I can only tell you how things seem to me, and how they’d look to other village folk.”
“You can cut out the sandbagging.” Holger’s voice was desert-dry. When he saw Theodo and Alianora didn’t follow the phrase, he explained it: “Say what you
mean to say, and never mind all the ‘simple fellow’ garbage.”
A ghost of a smile crossed Theodo’s face and was gone before Alianora could be sure she saw it. “Right well said. I will, then: when a man your age, or mine, looks on a lass like Alianna the way you’ve looked on her this past hour and more, well, here in the village we make goaty jokes about it. Is it the same other places you’ve seen, or is it otherwise?”
Holger’s cheeks flamed the color of heated iron. “I—I—I—” He tried three times, but nothing more came out. Then he tilted his head back and drained the stoup of beer, larynx bobbing as he swallowed. He took a deep breath, and another one. This time, he managed to speak: “I beg your pardon, Theodo. I did not know I was looking at her that way.”
“Well, you were,” Theodo said. Holger’s eyes asked Alianora a silent question. Regretfully, she nodded. He had been.
He winced. He swore in the language Alianora used, and added things that sounded hot in what seemed like several others. “I must be a perfect jackass,” he said at last. He met Theodo’s eyes with a courage Alianora had to admire. “And to answer your question, they joke about pretty young girls and not-so-young men everywhere I’ve ever been. I expect God made those jokes about twenty minutes after He finished making the world—uh, worlds. Maybe even sooner.”
“Mm, I’d not know about that,” Theodo said uncomfortably. Like Alianora, like most of the villagers, he spoke little of God. Such things were more for priests than for the likes of them. She remembered Holger had always had an easier way with the Deity. She’d got used to it in the bygone days. No doubt she could again.
“Shall we go back now, before the children do come after us?” she said.
She looked to Theodo, but her husband only shrugged. It fell on Holger to answer the question. “Yes, let’s,” he said. “I’ll behave myself, honest.”
“We do understand the why of it, Sir Holger,” Alianora said as they ambled toward the house once more. She almost said dear Holger, as she had so often while he was here before. But it would not do now. It most especially would not do right this minute. After a beat, she went on, “You’ve had yourself a whole great stack o’ surprises since you came forth from yon woods.”
