Round and round — He could hear nothing at all. He had no sense of heat or cold, or of the pressure of the chair seat against him. There was nothing but millions of whirling spots of colour.
Yes, he could feel temperature now. He was cold. There was sound, too, a distant whistling sound, like that of a wind in a chimney. The spots were fading into a general greyness. There was a sense of pressure, also, on the soles of his feet. He straightened his legs — yes, standing on something. But everything around him was grey — and bitter cold, with a wind whipping the skirts of his coat around him.
He looked down. His feet were there all right — “hello, feet, pleased to meet you.” But they were fixed in greyish-yellow mud which had squilched up in little ridges around them. The mud belonged to a track, only two feet wide, On both sides of it the grey-green of dying grass began. On the grass large flakes of snow were scattered, dandruffwise. More were coming, visible as dots of darker grey against the background of whirling mist, swooping down long parallel inclines, growing and striking the path with the tiniest ts. Now and then one spattered against Shea’s face.
He had done it. The formula worked!
Chapter Two
“WELCOME TO IRELAND!” Harold Shea murmured to himself. He thanked heaven that his syllogismobile had brought his clothes and equipment along with his person. It would never have done to have been dumped naked onto this freezing landscape. The snow was not alone responsible for the greyness. There was also a cold, clinging mist that cut off vision at a hundred yards or so. Ahead of him the track edged leftward around a little mammary of a hill, on whose flank a tree rocked under the melancholy wind. The tree’s arms all reached one direction, as though the wind were habitual; its branches bore a few leaves as grey and discouraged as the landscape itself. The tree was the only object visible in that wilderness of mud, grass and fog. Shea stepped towards it. The serrated leaves bore the indentations of the Northern scrub oak.
But that grows only in the Arctic Circle, he thought. He was bending closer for another look when he heard the clop-squosh of a horses hoofs on the muddy track behind him.
He turned. The horse was very small, hardly more than a pony, and shaggy, with a luxuriant tail blowing round its withers. On its back sat a man who might have been tall had he been upright, for his feet nearly touched the ground. But he was hunched before the icy wind driving in behind. From saddle to eyes he was enveloped in a faded blue cloak. A formless slouch hat was pulled tight over his face, yet not So tight as to conceal the fact that he was full-bearded and grey.
Shea took half a dozen quick steps to the roadside. He addressed the man with the phrase he had composed in advance for his first human contact in the world of Irish myth:
“The top of the morning to you, my good man, and would it be far to the nearest hostel?”
He had meant to say more, but paused uncertainly as the man on the horse lifted his head to reveal a proud, unsmiling face in which the left eye socket was unpleasantly vacant. Shea smiled weakly, then gathered his courage and plunged on: “it’s a rare bitter December you do be having in Ireland.”
The stranger looked at him with much of the same clinical detachment he himself would have given to an interesting case of schizophrenia, and spoke in slow, deep tones: “I have no knowledge of hostels, nor of Ireland; but the month is not December. We are in May, and this is the Fimbulwinter.”
A little prickle of horror filled Harold Shea, though the last word was meaningless to him. Faint and far, his ear caught a sound that might be the howling of a dog — or a wolf. As he sought for words there was a flutter of movement. Two big black birds, like oversize crows, slid down the wind past him and came to rest on the the grass, looked at him for a second or two with bright, intelligent eyes, then took the air again.
“Well, where am I?”
“At the wings of the world, by Midgards border.”
“Where in hell is that?”
The deep voice took on an edge of annoyance. “For all things there is a time, a place, and a person. There is none of the three for ill-judged questions, and empty jokes.” He showed Shea a blue-dad shoulder, clucked to his pony and began to move wearily ahead.
“Hey!” cried Shea. He was feeling good and sore. The wind made his fingers and jaw muscles ache. He was lost in this arctic wasteland, and this old goat was about to trot off and leave him stranded. He leaned forward, planting himself squarely in front of the pony. “What kind of a runaround is this, anyway? When I ask someone a civil question —”
The pony had halted, its muzzle almost touching Shea’s coat. The man on the animal’s back straightened suddenly so that Shea could see he was very tall indeed, a perfect giant. But before he had time to note anything more he felt himself caught and held with an almost physical force by that single eye. A stab of intense, burning cold seemed to run through him, inside his head, as though his brain had been pierced by an icicle. He felt rather than heard a voice which demanded, “Are you trying to stop me, niggeling?”
For his life, Shea could not have moved anything but his lips. “N—no,” he stammered. “That is, I just wondered if you could tell me how I could get somewhere where it’s warm —”
The single eye held him unblinkingly for a few seconds. Shea felt that it was examining his inmost thoughts. Then the man slumped a trifle so that the brim of his hat shut out the glare and the deep voice was muffled. “I shall be tonight at the house of the bonder Sverre, which is the Crossroads of the World. You may follow.” The wind whipped a fold of his blue cloak, and as it did so there came, apparently from within the cloak itself, a little swirl of leaves. One clung for a moment to the front of Shea’s coat. He caught it with numbed fingers, and saw it was an ash leaf, fresh and tender with the bright green of spring — in the midst of this howling wilderness, where only arctic scrub oak grew!
Shea let the pony pass and fell in behind, head down, collar up, hands deep in pockets, squinting against the snowflakes. He was too frozen to think clearly, but he tried. The logical formulas had certainly thrown him into another world. But he hardly needed the word of Old Whiskers that it was not Ireland. Something must have gone haywire in his calculations. Could he go back and recheck them? No — he had not the slightest idea at present what might have been on those six sheets of paper. He would have to make the best of his situation.
But what world had he tumbled into? A cold, bleak one, inhabited by small, shaggy ponies and grim old blue-eyed men with remarkable eyes. It might be the world of Scandinavian mythology. Shea knew very little about such a world, except that its No. 1 guy was someone named Odinn, or Woden, or Wotan, and there was another god named Thor who threw a sledge hammer at people he disliked.
Shea’s scientific training made him doubt whether he would actually find these gods operating as gods, with more-than-human powers; or, for that matter, whether he would see any fabulous monsters. Still, that stab of cold through his head and that handful of ash leaves needed explaining. Of course, the pain in his head might be an indication of incipient pneumonia, and Old Whiskers might make a habit of carrying ash leaves in his pockets. But still — The big black birds were keeping up with them. They didn’t seem afraid, nor did they seem to mind the ghastly weather.
It was getting darker, though in this landscape of damp blotting paper Shea could not tell whether the sun had set. The wind pushed at him violently, forcing him to lean into it; the mud on the path was freezing, but not quite gelid. it had collected in yellow gobs on his boots. He could have sworn the boots weighed thirty pounds apiece, and they had taken in water around the seams, adding clammy socks to his discomfort. A clicking sound, like a long roll of castanets, made him wonder until he realized it was caused by his own teeth.
He seemed to have been walking for days, though he knew it could hardly be a matter of hours. Reluctantly he took one hand from his pocket and gazed at his wrist watch. It read 9.36; certainly wrong. When he held the watch to a numbed ear he discovered it had stop
ped. Neither shaking nor winding could make it start.
He thought of asking his companion the time, but realized that the rider would have no more accurate idea than himself. He thought of asking how much farther they had to go. But he would have to make himself heard over the wind, and the old boy’s manner did not encourage questions.
They plodded on. The snow was coming thickly through the murky twilight. Shea could barely make out the figure before him. The path had become the same neutral grey as everything else. The weather was turning colder. The snowflakes were dry and hard, stinging and bouncing where they struck. Now and then an extra puff of wind would snatch a cloud of them from the moor, whirling it into Shea’s face. He would shut his eyes to the impact, and when he opened them find he had blundered off the path and have to scurry after his guide.
Light. He pulled the pack around in front of him and fumbled in it till he felt the icy touch of the flashlight’s metal. He pulled it out from under the other articles and pressed the switch button. Nothing happened, nor would shaking, slapping, or repeated snappings of the switch produce any result.
In a few minutes it would be too dark for him to follow the man on the pony by sight alone. Whether the old boy liked it
or not. Shea would have to ask the privilege of holding a corner of his cloak as a guide.
It was just as he reached this determination that something in the gait of the pony conveyed a sense of arrival. A moment more and the little animal was trotting, with Shea stumbling and skidding along the fresh snow behind as he strove to keep pace. The pack weighed tons, and he found himself gasping for breath as though he were running up a forty-five-degree angle instead of on an almost level path.
Then there was a darker patch in the dark-grey universe. Shea’s companion halted the pony and slid off. A rough-hewn timber door loomed through the storm, and the old man banged against it with his fist. it opened, flinging a flood of yellow light out across the snow. The old man stepped into the gap, his cloak vividly blue in the fresh illumination.
Shea, left behind, croaked a feeble “Hey!” just managing to get his foot in the gap of the closing door. It opened full out and a man in a baggy homespun tunic peered out at him, his face rimmed with drooping whiskers. “Well?”
“May I c-c-come in?”
“Umph,” said the man. “Come on, come on. Don’t stand there letting the cold in!”
Chapter Three
SHEA STOOD IN a kind of entryhall, soaking in the delicious warmth. The vestibule was perhaps six feet deep. At its far end a curtain of skins had been parted to permit the passage of the old man who preceded him. The bonder Sverre — Shea supposed this would be his host — pulled them still wider. “Lord, use this as your own house, now and forever,” he murmured with the perfunctory hurry of a man repeating a formula like “Pleased to meet you.”
The explorer of universes ducked under the skins and into a long hall panelled in dark wood. At one end a fire blazed, apparently in the centre of the floor, though bricked round to knee height. Around it were a number of benches and tables. Shea caught a glimpse of walls hung with weapons — a huge sword, nearly as tall as he was, half a dozen small spears or javelins, their delicate steel points catching ruddy high lights from the torches in brackets; a kite-shaped shield with metal overlay in an intricate pattern —
No more than a glimpse. Sverre had taken him by the arm and conducted him through another door, shouting; “Aud! Hallgerda! This stranger’s half frozen. Get the steam room ready. Now, stranger, you come with me.”
Down a passage to a smaller room, where the whiskered man ordered him: “Get off those wet clothes. Strange garments you have. I’ve never seen so many buttons and clasps in all my days. If you’re one of the Sons of Muspellheim, I’ll give you guesting for the night. But I warn you for tomorrow there be men not far from here who would liefer meet you with a sword than a handclasp.” He eyed Shea narrowly a moment. “Be you of Muspellheim?”
Shea fenced: “What makes you think that?”
“Travelling in those light clothes this far north. Those that hunt the red bear” — he made a curious motion of his hand as though tracing the outline of an eyebolt in the air — “need warm hides as well as stout hearts.” Again he gave Shea that curiously intent glance, as though trying to ravel some secret out of him.
Shea asked: “This is May, isn’t it? I understood you’re pretty far north, but you ought to get over this cold snap soon.”
The man Sverre moved his shoulders in a gesture of bafflement. “Mought, and then mought not. Men say this would be the Fimbulwinter. If that’s so, there’ll be little enough of warm till the roaring trumpet blows and the Sons of the Wolf ride from the East, at the Time.”
Shea would have put a question of his own, but Sverre had turned away grumpily. He got rid of his clammy shorts instead, turning to note that Sverre had picked up his wrist watch.
“That’s a watch,” he offered in a friendly voice.
“A thing of power?” Sverre looked at him again, and then a smile of comprehension distended the wide beard as he slapped his knee. “Of course. Mought have known. You came in with the Wanderer. You’re all right. One of those southern warlocks.”
From somewhere he produced a blanket and whisked it around Shea’s nude form. “This way now,” he ordered. Shea followed through a couple of doors to another small room, so full of wood smoke that it made him cough. He started to rub his eyes, then just in time caught at the edge of his blanket. There were two girls standing by the door, neither of them in the least like the Irish colleens he had expected to find. Both were blonde, apple-cheeked, and rather beamy. They reminded him disagreeably of Gertrude Mugler.
Sverre introduced them; “This here’s my daughter Aud. She’s a shield girl; can lick her weight in polar bears.” Shea, observing the brawny miss, silently agreed. “And this is Hallgerda. All right, you go on in. The water’s ready to pour.”
In the centre of the small room was a sunken hearth full of fire. On top of the fire had been laid a lot of stones about the size of potatoes. Two wooden buckets full of water sat by the hearth.
The girls went out, closing the door. Shea, with the odd sensation that he had experienced all this at some previous time — “it must be part of the automatic adjustment one’s mind makes to the pattern of this world,” he told himself — picked up one of the buckets. He threw it rapidly on the fire, then followed it with the other. With a hiss, the room filled with water vapour.
Shea stood it as long as he could, which was about a minute, then groped blindly for the door and gasped out. instantly a bucketful of ice water hit him in the face. As he stood pawing the air and making strangled noises a second bucketful caught him in the chest. He yelped, managing to choke out, “Glup . . stop . . that’s enough!”
Somewhere in the watery world a couple of girls were giggling. it was not till his eyes cleared that he realized it was they who had drenched him, and that he was standing between them without his protecting blanket.
His first impulse was to dash back into the steam room. But one of the pair was holding out a towel which it seemed only courtesy to accept. Sverre was approaching unconcernedly with a mug of something. Well, he thought, if they can take it, I can. He discovered that after the first horrible moment his embarrassment had vanished. He dried himself calmly while Sverre held out the mug. The girls’ clinical indifference to the physical Shea was more than ever like Gertrude.
“Hot mead,” Sverre explained. “Something you don’t get down south. Aud, get the stranger’s blanket. We don’t want him catching cold.”
Shea took a gulp of the mead, to discover that it tasted something like ale and something like honey. The sticky sweetness of the stuff caught him in the throat at first, but he was more afraid of losing face before these people than of being sick. Down it went, and after the first gulp it wasn’t so bad. He began to feel almost human.
“What’s your name, stranger?” inquired Sverre.
/> Shea thought a minute. These people probably didn’t use family names, So he said simply, “Harold.”
“Hungh?”
Shea repeated, more distinctly. “Oh,” said Sverre. “Harald.” He made it rhyme with “dolled”.
Dressed, except for his boots, Shea took the place on the bench that Sverre indicated. As he waited for food he glanced round the hall. Nearest him was a huge middle-aged man with red hair and beard, whose appearance made Shea’s mind leap to Sverre’s phrase about “the red bear”. His dark-red cloak felt back to show a belt with carved gold work on it. Next to him sat another redhead, more on the sandy order, small-boned and foxy-faced, with quick, shifty eyes. Beyond Foxy-face was a blond young man of about Shea’s size and build, with a little golden fuzz on his face.
At the middle of the bench two pillars of black wood rose from floor to ceiling, heavily carved, and so near the table that they almost cut off one seat. It was now occupied by the grey-bearded, one-eyed man Shea had followed in from the road. His floppy hat was on the table before him, and he was half leaning around one of the pillars to talk to another big blond man — a stout chap whose face bore an expression of permanent good nature, overlaid with worry. Leaning against the table at his side was an empty scabbard that could have held a sword as large as the one Shea had noticed on the wall.
The explorer’s eye, roving along the table, caught and was held by that of the slim young man. The latter nodded, then rose and came round the table, grinning bashfully.
“WouId ye like a seat companion?” he asked. “You know how it is, as Hávamál says:
Care eats the heart
If you cannot speak
To another all your thought.”
He half-chanted the lines, accenting the alliteration in a way that made the rhymeless verse curiously attractive. He went on: “It would help me a lot with the Time coming, to talk to a plain human being. I don’t mind saying I’m scared. My name’s Thjalfi.”
The Incompleat Enchanter Page 3
