Ironfoot

by Dave Duncan

  Guy shrugged and moved closer to the fire. “Useless. Put all that stuff back in the chest and someday you can list it all.”

  But I laid the duplicate scrolls of Hwæt segst side by side on the table and compared them. “They’re not exactly the same, master. This one uses a dual pronoun to address the three Wyrds in a couple of places. That’s wrong! And the other has a dative case noun here instead of—”

  “Never mind!” Guy barked. “I’ve warned you a thousand times that tampering with the ancients’ words is not just a waste of time, it can be very dangerous. Oh, God’s flesh! Is that the vespers bell already?” He strode across the cabin and lifted his cloak off the hook by the door. I knew the faculty was scheduled to meet at sunset that day.

  Guy was normally a logical and patient instructor, but he would take only so much from a brash Saxon varlet.

  “And you,” he told me as he wrapped himself, “had better get back to the horses, or you’ll be trying to rub them down in the dark.” He paused with the door half open and regarded me suspiciously. “But put all that old tongue junk away first! You hear me?” Then he was gone.

  After six years, he knew me well enough to guess exactly what I wanted to do. As I said, most of the old spells did not work, so the Saxon material was no different from classical in that. The trouble, as I rebelliously saw it, was in the copying. I knew the infinite pains taken by the monks to avoid errors when replicating holy texts. Sages and their scribes had been less careful, and it was common to find divergent versions of the same text. Sages like Guy stubbornly refused to make any effort to correct the texts, not even quite obvious errors. Spells could go bad, they insisted, and men who tampered with them might raise the Devil by mistake.

  My mentor and I had gone over this same argument several times, and I had always deferred to his wisdom and authority. But that evening I felt rebellious. To repair an ancient spell would be a triumph, and my Saxon heritage made me especially attracted to these two, whose corruptions were so clear to my eyes.

  Hwæt segst was a very brief spell. It would also be a very valuable one if it could be made to work, for prediction is one of the hardest tasks in the enchanter’s repertoire. So I took time I could not spare to compare the two versions and memorize what I thought must have been the original text.

  Voices going past the door suddenly reminded me that night was falling fast and I had work to do. Most sages used their cottages as both sanctum and living quarters, but Guy had independent income, and soon after arriving at Helmdon, had made an arrangement with Thyra, a widow in the village, penniless mother of two girls. He normally slept there—she had already had a child by him and was working on another—but on a night such as this he might well decide to sleep in his sanctum in the academy.

  Hastily I tossed everything into the chest. Except the bag of tiles. I took that with me when I departed.

  Helmdon was not much of a village then, and is probably even less now, with the academy gone. The academy was located at the south end and its stable at the north, for no known reason. The entire hamlet could be taken in at a glance, being just a dozen or so cottages with thatch roofs and walls of cob. Understandably, several were then showing damage from the long wet. Windows were narrow slits, smoke escaped through a hole in the roof. Add in a few hedges, vegetable patches, and fruit trees, all strung along a single street that had now become a slow-flowing cesspool, and you have a good picture of Helmdon.

  Leaning on my staff, I hobbled along that sodden road as fast as I could go, trying to ignore that pain in my hip that such a gait always caused me. I paused only once, at Edith’s cottage. She cooked for the academy, and always prepared a separate evening snack for me in winter, when I could not tarry to eat with the others. That night she knew I was already late, and handed it out to me before I could even knock.

  I had to bring the five horses in from the common, wipe them off as well as I could, and feed them. When I had done all that, night had fallen and I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. I was also wet.

  My billet was still the hayloft above the stable, heated by the breath of the horses below me and as dark as the inside of a grave. The danger of fire prevented me from having heat or candles, and winter nights were maddeningly long. I climbed up there, stripped off my sodden clothes, and rolled up in my blanket. Then I ate my bread and cheese.

  The beat of rain upon the roof barely two feet above my nose was muffled by the thickness of the thatch, but I could hear the steady trickle of water into the barrels under the eaves. This deluge had begun on the eve of St. Matthew the Apostle and hadn’t stopped since. Although the lord’s crops had been safely gathered in, some of the peasants’ lay rotting in the fields, warning of hard times ahead, come spring.

  The horses snuffled, farted, and staled as usual, but I was confident that none of them was being dripped on. The mice in the thatch sounded busy, perhaps moving babies to drier nests.

  My bed was comfortable enough, and the prospect that what I was planning to do might summon the Devil did not worry me overmuch. My lack of progress at Helmdon frustrated me deeply. I knew everything a varlet could know, and some lore that was normally restricted to adepts. I believed Guy when he said he had asked several times for me to be promoted, but promotion required the faculty’s unanimous consent. I had a fair idea which of the other sages had vetoed me, but there was nothing I could do about it. I seemed fated to remain a stable hand forever. I could imagine myself as a competent village healer somewhere, but I was certain to starve to death before I began to earn enough to live on.

  The time had come! I would not dare to remove any tiles from the bag, because any I lost in the straw would never be found. Fortunately there was room for my hand inside the bag, and I could read the inscriptions with my fingers.

  And so, that horrible wet evening, I began to chant the Hwæt segst, begging the Wyrds to reveal my destiny. The old tongue is not a good choice for such an appeal, because its verbs lack the future tense that both Latin and French have. It gets around that by liberal use of flowery language.

  “What do you say, oh bird in the tree? Do you croak as the raven or trill as the lark? Gracious ladies, at your loom, what do you spin for me? Is the road rough or smooth? . . .” And so on.

  The horses, accustomed to my oddities, paid no attention.

  As I told you, an enchanter can almost always tell as he chants whether a spell is going to succeed or not. He—and usually his cantor, too, if he has one helping him—feels a rush of satisfaction that we call the acceptance, a sign that the spirits are hearing his plea.

  That evening I felt acceptance. I had met it before, of course, when chanting responses for Guy or another sage, or even performing minor healing spells on my own. But what I was meddling with that evening was a deeper, more potent mystery, and the acceptance was unusually strong, making my hair stir. I was reviving a magic that had not been used in centuries.

  Trembling with excitement, I selected the first tile my fingers found. The sign on it was undoubtedly man, corresponding to m in the Christian alphabet. I let it go, shook the bag, and drew another.

  The second was os, or o, and the third was rad, or r.

  I hesitated. Mor . . .? My prophecy would be given in the same language as the chant, of course. Mor could be the start of morgen, which was “morning,” or morig, “swampy.” Just about everywhere was swampy just then. It could also be the start of more ominous words, but at least I seemed likely to be given a real word.

  I drew again, and got thorn, or th.

  Morth was “death” or “destruction.”

  Starting to wonder just what I was meddling with, I dropped that tile and drew a fifth time. Os again. I was not surprised when the sixth tile was rad again.

  And then I drew the blank tile. Was that to signal a new word coming or the end of the reply? Very old inscriptions usually run the words together, leaving no spaces between them. And I believed that the tiles had spoken, for the acceptance had fa
ded. I drew a few more times but was given no more guidance, only gibberish: lagu, cen, wynn. . . .

  So the prophecy was Morðor, and Morðor meant “murder.”

  Be careful what you ask for, as the old proverb says.

  chapter 3

  torn by conflicting emotions, I slept badly that night, as you may guess. Frightening as the prophecy itself was, I was overwhelmed by a sense of triumph. I had revived an ancient incantation that had been lost to the world, perhaps for unknown ages. I had done something that every sage in the academy had insisted was impossible. For the first time I could truly believe in my skill and my destiny as an enchanter—provided, of course, that I did not get murdered first.

  Not necessarily literal murder, I reminded myself. Morðor could mean mortal sin, or a terrible crime, or even drastic punishment, for the old tongue was often poetic or metaphorical. Whichever way it was intended, morðor was definitely not a good prospect.

  The drastic punishment possibility was certainly possible, for I had taken the bag of tiles against my tutor’s explicit orders. Discipline was very strict in Helmdon—far stricter than today’s lax standards. Varlets could be severely beaten. Squires rarely were, with the notable exception of Squire William Legier. I shall come back to him shortly. Sage Guy had never beaten me, but then I had never disobeyed his orders before. A varlet who proved his tutor wrong was practically begging for a beating, or even expulsion. I might find myself limping back to Pipewell before noon, and nothing good awaited me there, for my father had died and my mother remarried.

  Literal murder? At first glance, that seemed absurdly unlikely. Who could possibly commit homicide on a penniless servitor like me? But there was one possible candidate—Squire William Legier, who hated me to the point of insanity.

  William was a Norman, but otherwise something of a mystery. He was the most recently matriculated student except for Eadig son of Edwin, although at seventeen or so and owner of a creditable mustache, he was certainly older than most of them. The sages would not discuss his background, but his father was rumored to be a wealthy lord.

  Then, as now, a knight’s son would remain with his mother until he was seven, then serve as a page—for his father or his father’s overlord—until he was about fourteen, when he became a squire, entering knights’ training, expecting to be belted as a knight at around twenty-one. Then, as now, some squires chose not to work toward knighthood. Some entered the Church, others just enjoyed life as landowners, while a very few studied secular arts and became lawyers or sages.

  According to academy gossip, William was a fourth son; the two eldest had been trained for war and the third pushed into the Church, leaving only a secular education for the runt of the litter. Darker whispers suggested that he had been expelled from knights’ training after some terrible scandal, like blasphemy or cowardice.

  He certainly looked as if he had spent some years swinging maces or broadswords, running in chain mail, and all the rest of the sweaty things that squires have to do. Knights are always large, powerful men. He was as tall as me, and until old age gave me my stoop, I was unusually tall for a Saxon.

  William had turned up at Helmdon a few months ago, had behaved himself for a week or so, and then started being deliberately obnoxious. Refusing to tolerate such nonsense, Dean Odo had sent him home with—according to rumor—a letter saying that William was totally unsuited to be a scholar, and never would be before the Second Coming of Our Lord. But William’s father, whoever he was, had either enormous money or enormous power, because William had returned and remained.

  He did not mend his ways, though. He grew worse and worse, skipping most classes, turning those he did attend into riots, and refusing to learn anything at all. Lately he had even taken to wearing a sword, which was totally against academy rules, but more evidence that he had been trained for war, because it takes years of practice to bear a sword without tripping over it or banging into things.

  The sages responded with beatings, of course, which William accepted without a murmur. His tolerance of pain was incredible. He seemed unmoved by thrashings that would have any other student sobbing and screaming. I had little doubt that he was in some ways insane, waging a battle of wills against the faculty. So far neither side was willing to concede defeat.

  If he despised the sages, many of whom were revered for their wisdom throughout Christendom, his contempt for me was bottomless. In his eyes I was just a crippled Saxon stable hand who should not be allowed anywhere near Norman gentry. For months he had been trying to pick a fight with me. I refused to respond, because I had to, but it was not easy. I would gladly have taken him on with fists. Out of doors, where there was plenty of room, I would have even settled for my quarterstaff against his sword.

  He never swung the first punch, though, and I dared not. A Saxon who injured a Norman would almost certainly hang. Back then a Norman who injured or even killed a Saxon would merely have to pay compensation to the man’s lord, or owner if he were a serf. If there was any man in England who might murder me that day, it was Squire William Legier. Or would I finally lose my temper and murder him?

  Or Guy himself. I had taken the tiles on impulse, meaning to return them before he noticed their absence. That should be easy enough, for he often trusted me to work alone in his sanctum— writing, grinding potions, casting horoscopes. But I had used the tiles to disprove one of the basic tenets of enchantment. How could I not tell him what I had achieved, when the consequences might be so great? Highly respected sages do not enjoy their pupils making them look ignorant.

  He did have a temper. I had seen him thrash William several times. Now I had started disobeying, just as William did. It would seem to Guy that the troublemaker’s example was starting to spread like rot, so I could expect no mercy. For some unknown reason the academy was powerless to expel William Legier, but I was only a Saxon, and had no wealthy father behind me.

  chapter 4

  at long, long last the night began to yield. Seeing chinks of gray through the air hole in the gable, I reached for my clothes. I dressed as a peasant in those days, of course, and peasant dress has not changed at all. My basic garment was a knee-length belted smock, which had probably served several generations of plowmen before me. Originally a reddish color, it was now faded almost to gray, and was much patched. The sleeves fell a handbreadth short of my wrists, and I had to take care pulling it over my shoulders or it would have ripped in two. Below it I wore a thin linen shirt, to keep the rough wool off my skin, and leggings that laced to the shirt. They were all still damp from yesterday’s drenching.

  By the time I was dressed the roosters were crowing. I crawled to the hatch, clambered down the ladder, and prepared to face whatever the day might bring.

  My mind was still full of Guy, William, and morðor as I went through my morning routine of feeding the horses and shoveling out the barn. Knowing they would not stray far in such weather, I let them loose on the common to graze. They ran at once to shelter under the elms that gave Helmdon its name, huddling close together and looking miserable as the wind whirled yellow leaves down on them.

  By then it was daylight, as much as it was going to be. I donned my cloak and hood—the hood was leather and had belonged to my grandfather, the cloak was only waxed linen, and sodden by the weeks of rain. I gathered up my staff and the satchel in which I carried my supply of herbs. That day it also contained the futhorc tiles.

  I set off for the academy, hobbling as fast as I could go without pain, swinging my staff, trying to stay out of the deepest mud, but soon feeling trickles of water sneaking in under my hood and down my neck.

  No, it wasn’t much of a place to live. Looking back now, I am amazed at how accepting we all were of such peasant conditions. Life there was hard and short. Daily I give thanks to God, who has raised me so far.

  Even a cripple could make the journey in a very few minutes. I saw no one else out, and heard nothing other than some singing as mothers soothed bored children. The rain w
as so heavy that even the dogs and geese had taken cover, letting me go by without challenge.

  I did have one call to make, though. I turned aside to tap softly on the door of Widow Edith’s cottage. Being the academy’s cook, Edith raised a brood of four on the leftovers. My mouth began to water as I stood there under the eaves. Even before she opened the door my nose had told me that someone was going to enjoy meat today—possibly only the sages and adepts, of course, but we varlets and squires were allowed some once or twice a week.

  Edith was a short, plump woman with more smiles than teeth, ever ready with a quip, but when she peered out and saw me, she slid outside, rather than invite me in, and lowered her voice as we exchanged morning blessings. Behind her, children were arguing over whose turn it was to feed the pig.

  “How is he today?” I asked. Her youngest was dying and we both knew it. By long custom the academy provided free medical care for the village, but lately the sages had delegated that unprofitable duty to me. It was an acknowledgment of skill and trust that I really did not want on top of all my other duties.

  She shrugged pillowed shoulders. “The rain doesn’t help his cough. He’s asleep at the moment, Your Wisdom.”

  I was not then a Wisdom, of course, but I did not bother to correct her. “Then I won’t disturb him. Keep him warm and I’ll look in on him at noon.”

  It was Monday. In the morning, I would be tutoring some varlets and junior squires in reading and writing. Monday afternoons might see Dean Odo le Brys lecturing on numerology, Sage Alain on Aristotelean logic, or Sage Rolf on alchemy. None of those prospects pleased, especially the last.