The captain was a man of the Swan, and his once-yearly confessions in Svanstad were long and specific and left the unlucky priests in their boxes as pale as the snows of the Trollberg. Yet he bore around his neck both the silver token of the Swan and its opposite number, the iron axe of the heathen god Torden. For the Swan’s mercy was a great prize, but in the Bladed Isles with its troll-haunted ways it paid to remember the lore of the grandfathers.
“We sail to Fiskegard,” the captain said. “The fishermen there can take him in. I trust you’ll remember, lad, the kindness of Captain Erik Glint.” For something cold as a troll’s seeing-well told Erik Glint he’d be hearing from this boy again. That indeed they all would.
Now, Fiskegard was a forbidding place even in Haymonth, craggy gray peaks rising sheer from the sea like monstrous arrowheads. The island was grim, but the waters were a sea-giant’s purse of silver fish, and many men sailed to Fiskegard for the winter spawning, earning themselves coin for the year and the local lords a surplus they could sell across the Bladed Isles. Already a few knarrs nosed into the harbors bearing hardscrabble men, who peered at the notices in taverns like the Raven’s Perch, known to the likes of the prince of Soderland, and the Pickled Rat, known to the likes of the Lardermen.
Thus Erik Glint tugged the boy his crew now called Askelad, the Ashen Lad, up the creaking, barnacled stairs of the Rat and into the squinting regard of Freidar the Wayfarer and Nan Henricksdatter, the proprietors.
“This lad speaks the Roil speech of the South,” the captain told them, “and a bit of Kantentongue we’ve taught him on the way. He’s a hard worker.”
Old Freidar favored Askelad with a whisker-fringed frown like a cleft framed by new-fallen snow. “You’re not selling him, are you, Erik?”
“Do you think I’m Yngvarr the Thrall-Taker or some such swine? You know me, Freidar.”
“He is from far away, I think.”
Askelad bowed with cold courtesy.
“Aye, from the South,” Erik agreed.
“No,” said Nan, as wizened as her husband. “Farther.” Upon her red vest lay a bronze brooch, half-hidden by a coiling lock of gray hair. It had the shape of three sinuous dragons, their necks intertwined in fierce conflict. She smiled at Askelad and asked him in Roil, “Who are your people? Where is your home?”
Askelad had been taciturn aboard ship, and he startled Erik with an eloquent answer the captain couldn’t quite follow. “My mother was a poet, and my father a thief. I was raised by monks, and by a warrior-scholar whom I hated in the flesh and revere in memory. My home is lost among the mountains of the known world’s heart. I left it months and years ago, and bitterly now do I recall my exile. My only friend in the wider world was a rug. The thing I hate most is innocence, and the thing I miss most is joy. When can I start?”
“Son of a poet, you say,” said Freidar, scratching his chin.
Nan turned to the captain. In Kantentongue she said, “A suspicious woman might mistrust him.”
“He worked his passage, Nan,” said Erik, “never complained. Help him out, for me. Remember when Soderland tried to annex Fiskegard and blockaded your harbor. Who was it brought you victuals?”
“You,” said Nan.
“And when the cod-catch was sparse and hungry fishermen troubled your sleep, who kept you supplied?”
“You,” said Freidar. “But when the lad turns out to be the lost son of the North Wind, and that one comes screeching to blow down our tavern, who gets the bill?”
“Me,” said Erik with a nod. “Of course, I’ll be halfway to Kpalamaa then.”
So it was settled. Before the Lardermen cleared the harbor, Askelad was clearing tables. He cooked and carried and tended the fire. And late by firelight, he learned Kantentongue. As Harvestmonth approached, Freidar and Nan took turns sacrificing sleep to ensure their hire could speak to the fishermen.
Freidar’s lessons soon had Askelad reading Huginn Sharpspear’s Younger Sagas. “Oxiland’s is the oldest dialect of these islands,” the old man explained, “preserving root-words that appear all over.”
“These islands are small,” Askelad said. His red hair seemed a cousin of the firelight. His nimble hands passed over a map of the archipelago. “Perhaps no more than three thousand li along the longest path. How can you have so many dialects?”
“Three thousand what?”
“Sorry, I should say rast? Or mil? One thousand mil. So many little kingdoms and lordships!”
“Little?”
“I don’t mean to offend, Freidar.”
The tavernkeeper rubbed his eyes. “What lands are you familiar with, boy, that you think all the Bladed Isles so tiny?”
“I don’t think I have the language to explain. Yet. So what did Eilifur Ice-Gaze do after the witch-woman tricked Wiglaf Sword-Slave into wooing his beloved, and Eilifur raised his blade Crypttongue against him?”
“You read and tell me, Askelad.”
“Eldur og sorg. Fire and woe.”
“You skipped ahead.”
And thus on Freidar’s nights for teaching, Eilifur Ice-Gaze and his ilk loved and fought their way toward doom, and in the nights between Nan used myths for the same purpose.
“And so, Askelad, the warring tribes of gods spat berry-juice into the vat to seal their pact of peace.”
“They what?”
Nan smiled. “That’s not the half of it. After the berry-juice and god-spit had swirled around a while, it gave birth to a new god.”
“It what?”
“The god of knowledge. Kantenjord had a god of knowledge.” Nan giggled. “He could answer any question, on any subject. A wonderful thing. So much wisdom he had. Naturally someone drowned him in the vat so they could take the magic juice.”
“Aiya—crazy! I mean, Uff da? These legends are insane. I say this as one who knows the story of the philosopher who thought he might really be a dreaming butterfly, and of the tale of the peasant who married a snake.”
“I might like to hear those sometime, Askelad. Well, I think sometimes Huginn’s Elder Sagas make more sense when you’re drunk.”
“May I find out, Nan? No? All right, then. . . . So, the mead of drowned Knowledge was the making of skalds . . . Skalds?”
“Poets. Bards, you might say.”
“My mother . . . she was a bard, once.”
“Tell me about her. What has become of her?”
“I haven’t seen her since the day an angry power slapped her from the sky. Nan, I’m sorry . . . Beklager. I do not think I can continue tonight.”
Nan worried after Askelad, but in the gray of the next morning he was nowhere to be found.
She confided in Freidar, who answered, “Sometimes I think he carries a doom great as any in the sagas. That is why I taught him of Eilifur, of Wiglaf, the rest. To tease out his story. Or prepare him for his fate. He knows more than he’ll say, that much is sure.”
“I think he dwelled far to the east, Freidar. Farther than the Eldshore or the wild forests or the steppe. I think something bad happened to his parents there. As to how he ended up here . . .”
“He will tell us, or not. But I think Erik brought us trouble.”
“I’m sure of it. But I like the lad.”
“As do I.” Freidar clutched the edge of the first of four shields hanging from the tavern wall. “Four sons, Nan.”
“Don’t speak of it.”
“War. Sickness. Falling. Drowning. It still hurts.”
“Then don’t speak of it, Freidar. Nor of how Erik knew exactly how we’d feel.”
Freidar sat and pounded a table. “He knew also we’re Runewalkers. That we might be able to fight Askelad’s doom, if it comes to that.”
She sat beside him, wrapped an arm around him. “We gave all that up.”
“Ah, Nan.” He squeezed her hand. “As long as you’re here, I won’t worry.”
“Be glad of what we have, Freidar. And that for a while we’ve another boy to care for.”
“Glad is a fit feeling for day’s end, when we know at last what the light’s wrought.”
As the sun struck a golden road upon the eastern waves, the one they called Askelad scaled a sea-cliff, shrieking gulls his only company. He’d avoided the other children of the island. They knew him, of course, for he was a trifle young to stand among the men of the fishing shacks, hauling and drying stockfish. And he knew the children, though he was a little old to run amongst them. They gave each other stares and a wide berth. He needed no company that lacked wings.
He was more at home with things that flew.
He reached the cliff top and collapsed in a blast of cold wind. He clutched his Kantenjord cloak. At last he stood, the dark cloth flapping like a torn sail.
“I am Innocence!” he bellowed to the steel-gray sea, with dawn still a newborn thing to his left, rays thin and tentative as the legs of a colt. To his right the infinite blade of the sea clove blue-black armor of storms. “I’m chosen of the chi of the Heavenwalls! Commander of the vital breath of Qiangguo! Master of Deadfall! I need no mother, no father! I am power, and this is my world!”
The gulls winged warily, and he raised his hand to call upon the wind.
It became no more fierce, no more cold, than before.
He lowered his hand. It became a fist as it fell.
“Why have you abandoned me? I did not want you, but you chose me. You cannot just discard me on this barbarian rock!” The wind had nothing to say beyond its continual groan. Innocence backed away and folded his arms. “Where are you, Deadfall? You saved me. You may be an evil thing, but I don’t want you dead.”
He stayed there, amid the raw sounds of wind and surf and birdscreech, until he risked vexing his employers. The master of the world had to get to work.
As he descended he noticed a dark winged shape, angling closer. He hurried. In Freidar and Nan’s tales the three great islands of Kantenjord were in fact the greatest of arkendrakes, mineralized long ago. Oddly enough, the tales had it that younger, mobile dragons avoided these lands, for if a young dragon fell under the influence of a dreaming elder, madness might result. He didn’t know what the shape was. But it was darker than a seagull—
He dropped the last ten feet, stumbled, rolled, and ran.
He remembered his mother’s voice, like something in a dream. Your father was a great climber and runner, a master acrobat and a survivor. Oh, and he stole things sometimes.
Something screeched past him, something much faster than he.
He froze upon the rambling path, between tiny wildflowers and little granite islands in the grass. The thing rushed ahead, converged with its shadow upon the path, and revealed itself as a peregrine falcon.
It did not alight but spun midair and rushed toward him, golden belly flashing with the brightening dawn, wings gray like the western sea. Somehow its wide, dark eyes were full of recognition. The feeling was mutual.
He had seen it before, on a day that haunted his thoughts.
“Get away! I want nothing from that time! I don’t need you, or them! Go!” He clapped his hands together, and thunder cracked.
The boy fell to his knees, deafened by sound and shock. When his senses returned, the falcon had gone. He searched the sky for wings and the ground for feathers. Nothing.
“I have power yet,” he said to his stinging hands. He ran to the village, head down, feeling as though dark eyes followed him the whole way.
Two weeks later the knarr Swan-road arrived ahead of an early snowstorm, and the Pickled Rat bustled with old hands and new arrivals. Among the fresh fishermen was an unexpected visitor, a Swan priestess in a cloak of silver-gray whom Freidar and Nan offered a booth. “Are you visiting Mentor Ulf up at the church, then?” Freidar asked.
“My plans are uncertain,” the priestess answered. “Except for the aquavit.”
“Coming right up!”
The one called Askelad, now navigating Kantentongue with dispatch if not grace, cocked his head at the cloaked woman. He was starting to detect accents, and hers struck an odd note. It was not, he thought, of Oxiland, Svardmark, or Spydbanen, or any other nook of the Bladed Isles. It sounded closest to that of Swanisle, the nearest foreign land and home to some of Fiskegard’s winter workers.
And my mother’s land, he thought. But there was a lilt to it that spoke of somewhere farther off. As he studied her, neglecting the flow of cups, she turned and studied him back. She was not young, perhaps in her forties, yet with youthful mischief in her expression. She was dark brown in the way of folk from Kpalamaa and other great lands of the distant South. Her hair, what he could see of it under the hood, was a lively tangle, and dark freckles made her weathered face look impish. Yet there was a hardness in the set of her jaw. Something about her made him think of daggers and monsters, but also laughter and marvels.
As he’d grown comfortable with the language of his benefactors, he’d acquired a certain swagger that amused the fishermen. But it was all gone now. I’ve been found was his first thought, though by whom and for what he didn’t know.
He busied himself with this or that and skirted that corner; and perhaps he’d inherited some of his father’s stealth, for he appeared to avoid the priestess’s attention until nightfall. He whirled here and there on currents of ale, mead, brandy, aquavit, hovering at times in a vortex of talk:
They say there’s been more fires on the troll-mounts, up Spydbanen way—
They’ve talked down that rebellion in Soderland for now—
Hear tell of the Nine Wolves? Been killing folk beside the roads—
Princess Corinna and Prince Ragnar, they’ve got their work cut out for them—
The talk circled round and round like a raven waiting for something to die, and all the good gossip was in time rent and digested, with only the offal of old rumors and tired grudges to chew between sips. Yet snow and chill discouraged the clientele from tromping to their whistling shacks. Innocence was tired, but Freidar and Nan weren’t about to close shop. When he dared glance toward the priestess she beckoned him closer . . . but he was rescued by a fisherman who called for stories.
“Let’s hear marvel-tales, Askelad! Let’s hear eventyr!”
He pretended not to have noticed the priestess and leapt onto a table. Men laughed and cheered, and now a hush came upon the Pickled Rat as he began, “Hear now the tale of Impossible Paal.” He’d learned it from a pamphlet come lately out of Ostoland, called simply Eventyr, or fairy tales, compiled by two women combing the villages for stories. He’d loved them at once.
He told how lazy Paal tricked a king into thinking Paal’s kettle could boil by itself, leading the king to embarrassment; and how Paal tempted him into thinking Paal’s flute could restore the dead to life, leading the king to murder; and how Paal fooled him into thinking Paal had leapt off a cliff into an undersea paradise, leading the king to death—and Paal’s claiming all his lands. As the poor fishermen laughed at the pranking and slaughtering of the mighty, the priestess stood and walked closer to the table, and so he launched into another story, of how the North Wind scattered the flour a poor boy was carrying, and how the boy marched right up to the North Wind’s home to demand restitution. And so it went, as tale after tale, plucky ordinary folk got the better of the wise, the mighty, and the supernatural.
At last he ran out of such fare and, racking his brains, spun a chilling account of a man who raced an evil sea-spirit, a Draug, across the stormy ocean in a confrontation that could only end with shipwreck and death. He’d heard this story only once, and he embellished it by letting the man escape with the help of a merciful water-dragon.
“I’ve never heard it like that,” said a man doubtfully.
“I think I did hear it told that way,” the boy replied. “Once. In eastern parts.”
“Dragons don’t live in the sea,” another man objected.
“They can if they want to,” said the Swan priestess, drawing stares. “You’ve lived in places where that’s true, haven’t you,
lad?”
“Tell us!” a fisherman said.
“Yeah, Askelad,” said another. “We never hear tell about yourself.”
There was general agreement, amid some knocking of mugs upon tables. Someone passed him an ale, which made self-confession more reasonable. Wiping foam from his lips, he began.
THE TALE OF THE BOY, THE SCROLL,
AND THE MAGIC CARPET
East of the sunrise, far beyond the Eldshore and the Wheelgreen and the Ruby Waste, there was a land of wisdom and grace, where sages fashioned works of wonder. One such was a scroll-painting of strange peaks, ones even more jagged and spindly than those of Fiskegard, wreathed in forest and wrapped in cloud.
Had the painting only been beautiful, it would have been enough. But it was also a thing of magic. Gaze upon the mountains, or clutch the scroll, and you might find yourself drawn into another world, where the timeless mountains speared an infinite sky. A great wizard-king made the scroll to be a haven, and it had yet another peculiar property. Time flowed differently within the scroll than within our world. The relationship was a fluid thing, but time inside the scroll always flowed faster, so that hours outside might be days inside.
Once a boy and a girl were abandoned within the scroll. Their parents did something foolish—bringing a male Western dragon to an island that was really a sleeping, female Eastern dragon. The dragons’ mutual desire destroyed that island with fire and earthquake, and the kids could only survive inside the scroll. The parents were supposed to come back. They never did.
I’ll translate the kids’ names as Innocence and A-Girl-Is-A-Joy. In some ways they were very different. The boy’s parents came from the West of the world, the girl’s from the East. He liked battling; she liked exploring. He was quick with the spoken word, she with the calligrapher’s brush. But after their parents disappeared, they were inseparable. Their only other companions were monkish sorts full of lofty thoughts. So they chased each other around the monastery and up and down the rainy mountain. They discovered and built up and destroyed enough kingdoms to fill Peersdatter and Jorgensdatter’s Eventyr. Such was childhood. Yet their orphanage in the mountains did not come free. There was among the monks a warrior who went by the name Walking Stick. He drilled the children endlessly.
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