by Thomas Head
“She let you out of the house with this chill in the air?” asked Addly’s tall guard. The young man was gazing hard at the helm, which should have been taken off at the door. Everyone kept their weapons at hand at all times, of course, but the helms were to be taken off, a custom shared by dwarf and man alike.
Not a word came from Halvgar.
“How’s the cold in your head?” he continued, still trying to stare Halvgar’s helmet off.
I rushed forward. “Hullo, old fellow! What’s kept you?”
But I quickly checked myself.
Halvgar turned slowly towards me. Looking up at me, he offered no greeting but a stone-set pair of eyes and parched, wordless lips. If Addly, insufferably honest ass that he was, hadn’t been jowls-deep in beer, even he would have noticed that there was something terrible written on Halvgar’s face.
“Did the wifey let him out of her arse long enough to come play?” he asked, despite my raised hands and headshaking.
Barely were the words out when Halvgar’s teeth clenched behind his bearded lips, giving him a feral expression that was strange to his jolly face. He spun and took a quick stride toward the officer.
Then he whirled his whip in one cutting blow, landing it across Addly’s red cheeks.
Chapter 3
The whole thing was so unexpected that for a moment not one soul in the room drew a breath. Then Addly sprang up with the bellow of an enraged bull, overturning the table in his rush. A dozen guards were pulling him back from Halvgar.
“Halvgar!” I yelled, unsure what to add
But Halvgar stood motionless. It was as if he saw none of us. Except for being out of breath now, he wore precisely the same strange, distracted air.
“Hold back!” I implored.
Old Addly was striking every nose and noggin around him to get free from the guards.
“There’s a mistake! Something’s wrong!”
“Glad the mistake landed where it did, all the same,” whispered Uncle Jickie.
“Demon!” Addly roared. “Cowardly little devil, you will pay!”
“Frozen hell, but get him out of here,” my uncle said. “Side room—here—lead him in—he’s gone mad, by thunder!”
“Never,” I said. I knew both Halvgar and his wife too well. They were stout dwarves with stout minds.
We led the poor, dazed being into a side office.
Jickie promptly turned the key and took up with his back against the door. “Now, master,” he broke out sternly, “if it’s neither drink, nor madness—” There, he stopped, for Halvgar, utterly unconscious of us, moved automatically across the room. Throwing his helm down, he bowed his head over both arms above the mantelpiece.
My uncle and I looked to each other. Raising his brows, Jickie touched his forehead and whispered across to me, “Mad.”
At that, Halvgar turned slowly round and faced us with blood-shot, gleaming eyes. “Mad,” he muttered. He took a breath, framing his next words with great effort. “By thunder, fellows, you should know me better than to mouth such rot! Tonight, I’d sell my soul, sell my very soul to be mad, to know that all I think has happened, hadn’t happened at all—” and a sharp intake of breath broke his speech.
“Frozen hell, out with it, old friend!” Jickie shouted. “We’ll stand by you! Has that blasted tall, red-cheeked bastard—”
“Pray, spare your curiosity a moment,” Halvgar cut in. He put his gloved hand to his forehead.
“What the—what did you strike him for?”
“Did I strike somebody?” Halvgar asked, speaking with the slow, icy self-possession bred by a lifetime of danger.
He almost seemed to chuckle.
Again, my uncle flashed a questioning look at me.
“Did I strike somebody? Wish you’d apologize—”
“Apologize!” thundered my uncle. “I’ll do nothing of the kind! Served him right. ‘Twas an ugly way, an ugly way indeed, to speak of anybody’s wife—” But the word “wife” had not been uttered before Halvgar threw out his hands in an imploring gesture.
“Don’t! I can’t get away from it! It’s no nightmare. My lads, how can I tell you? There’s no way of saying it! Such things don’t—couldn’t—to her—of all… But she’s… She’s gone.”
“See here, Halvgar,” my uncle said, utterly beside himself.
“See here, Halvgar,” I said, stupidly heedless of the brutality of our consol.
But he heard neither of us.
“They were there—they waved to me from the garden as I entered the forest. By damn, only this morning. They were waving to me, and when I returned from the river at noon, they were gone! The curtain moved and I thought my boy was hiding, but it was only the wind. We’ve searched every nook from cellar to attic. His toys were littered about and I heard his voice everywhere, but no! No—no—we’ve been hunting the house and garden for hours—”
“And the forest?” Jickie asked, the cutter instinct of former days suddenly re-awakening.
“The forest is ankle-deep with snow! We beat through the bush everywhere. There wasn’t a track. Not a broken twig!”
His torn clothes bore evidence to the thoroughness of that search.
“Nonsense,” my uncle burst out, beginning to bluster. “They’ve been driven to town without leaving word!”
“No sleigh was at Bastard Hill this morning,” returned Halvgar.
“But the road, Halvgar?” I questioned, recalling how the old timber hall stood well back in the center of a cleared plateau in the forest. “Couldn’t they have gone down the road to those elf encampments?”
“The road is impassable for sleighs, let alone walking, and their winter wraps are all in the house. For Heaven’s sake, lads, suggest something! Don’t madden me with these useless questions!”
But in spite of Halvgar’s entreaty, my excitable uncle subjected the frenzied soul to a storm of questions, none of which helped. I stood back, listening, and pieced the distracted, broken answers into some sort of coherency:
* * *
That morning, Halvgar light-heartedly kissed wife and child and waved them a farewell. He rode down the winding path at the northern edge of Frostetch Forest to catch some fish. At noon, when he returned, there was no wife nor child, nor any trace of them. The great hall, which had echoed to the boy’s prattle, was deathly still. The nurse was summoned. She was positive Madam Shiri was amusing the boy across the hall, and reassuringly bustled off to find mother and son in the next room, and then the next, and yet the next, all to discover each was empty. Utterly. Empty. Alarm spread to the hall servants. The handmaids and shieldwives were questioned, but their only response was white-faced, blank amazement. And all the superstitions of hillside lore added to the fear on each anxious face. Halvgar had torn outside, followed by the whole household; but from Bastard Hill in the center of the glade to the encircling border of snow-laden firs there was no trace of wife or child. He could see for himself that the snow was too deep and crusty among the trees for Madam Shiri to go twenty paces into the woods. Besides, footmarks could be traced from the garden to the bush. Pawprints too. Besides, he need not fear wild animals. They were receding into the mountains as spring advanced.
Then Halvgar had laughed at his own growing fears.
Shiri must be in the house.
The search of the old hall began again. From the hidden chambers in the vaulted cellar to the attic rooms above, not a corner of the hall was unexplored. He wondered if anyone had come and driven her to Goback. But that was impossible. The roads were drifted to the height of a horse and there were no marks of sleigh runners on either side of the riding path. He wondered if she could she possibly have ventured a few yards down the main road to the small encampment of elves, whose women had made such a smiling fuss of over the stubby little baby. But the elves had broken camp earlier in the morning and there was only a dirty patch of littered snow, where the skin-tents had been.
The alarm now became a panic.
Halvg
ar, half-crazed and unable to believe his own senses, began wondering whether he was in a nightmare. It was as if he thought he might wake up and find the dead weight smothering his chest had been the boy, snuggling too close. He was vaguely conscious that it was strange of him to continue sleeping with the noise of shouting men and whining hounds and snapping branches going on in the forest. But the din of terrified searchers rushing through the woods and of echoes rolling eerily back from the white hills called him back to an unendurable reality—that, in broad daylight, his young wife and infant son had disappeared as suddenly and completely as if blotted out of existence, or spirited away by demons…
* * *
“The thing is utterly impossible, Halvgar,” I cried, afraid to give the thought any reins whatsoever.
“Would that it were, dammit!”
“It was daylight, Halvgar?” Jickie asked.
He nodded moodily.
“And she couldn’t be lost in Frostetch Forest?” I added, taking up the interrogations where my uncle left off.
“No trace—not a footprint!”
“And you’re quite sure she isn’t in the house?” uncle said.
“Yes! Quite!”
“And there was an elvish encampment a few yards down the road?” Jickie asked.
“What has that to do with it?” he asked, springing to his feet. “They had moved off long before they disappeared. Besides, elves don’t run off with dwarf maidens. Haven’t I spent my life among them? I should know their ways!”
“But my dear fellow, if she isn’t in the hall, and isn’t in the woods or in the garden, can’t you see, the elvish encampment is the only possible explanation?”
The lines on his face deepened. A sort of blackness overcame his brow. He made a noise you might hear in the shadows of a forest, and if ever I’ve seen murder written on a face, it was on Halvgar’s.
“What tribe were they, anyway?” I asked, trying to speak indifferently, for every question was a dirk in his heart.
“Mongrel curs, neither one thing nor the other. Some are Lepre Cruithne canoemen, guides for the men of Delmark, the rest are just your normal elvish vagabonds! But they’re all connected with those merchant crews stuck in the bay north of Dragonfell. When the ice breaks up and the kilted devils can leave to circle the Great Horn, the elvish riffraff will follow in their dugouts!”
“Know any of them?”
“No, I don’t think—Let me see! Thundering hell! Yes, Killroot!” he shouted.
“What about Killroot?” I asked. I had never heard of him. I was just pinning Halvgar down to the subject; his mind was instantly lost in angry memories.
“What about him! He’s my one enemy among the elves,” he answered. “The thieving long-ear… I thrashed him within an inch of his life at Bardo Isle. Having half human blood from those Cullish Clans at Bloodhelm’s Landing, he thought it a fine sport to pillage the pack of a Cutter. The snake stole a silver dirk that my grandfather had at Cullo’s Den. By thunder, Killroot!”
“Did you get it back?” I interrupted, referring to the silver dirk.
“No! That’s why I nearly finished him!”
“Is that all about Killroot, Halvgar?” my uncle asked.
He ran his fingers distractedly back through his long, red beard. Then he rose and came over to me and laid a trembling hand on each shoulder.
“Killroot,” he muttered. “No, that isn’t all. I didn’t think at the time, but the morning after the roll with that pointy devil, I found a dagger stuck on the door of my hut. The point was through a fresh sprouted leaflet. A withered twig was wound tightly over the blade.”
“Halvgar, old boy! Are you mad?” cried Jack Jickie. “He must be the very devil himself. You weren’t married then—He couldn’t mean—”
“I thought it was an elvish threat,” Halvgar interjected. “I thought that if I had downed him in the fall, when the branches were bare, he meant to have his revenge in spring when the leaves were green; but you know I left the island that fall.”
“You were wrong, Halvgar!” I blurted, the significance of that threat dawning on me. “That wasn’t the meaning at all.”
But then I stopped.
And we all just stood there a moment.
Jickie was the first to pull himself together.
“Come,” Uncle Jickie said. “Gather up your wits! To the camping ground!”
The three of us flung through the pub room, much to the astonishment of the gossips who had been waiting outside for developments in the quarrel with Addly.
There was no time to explain ourselves.
At the outer porch, Halvgar laid a hand on Jickie’s shoulder.
“Old friend, I pray don’t come,” he begged. “There’s a storm blowing. It’s rough weather and a rough road, full of drifts.”
“Nonsense!”
“Please, Master Jickie. Make my peace with that old tall bastard in there I struck.”
And with a huff, Jickie nodded.
Then Halvgar and I whisked out into the blackness of a boisterous, windy night. A moment later, our horses were dashing over snow-packed cobblestones.
Chapter 4
“It will snow more,” I said, already feeling a few flakes driven through the darkness against my face. “The wind’s veered north. After the sleet, it will come thick as feathers. We need to get out to the elves’ old camp before all the traces are covered. How far by the High Dog Road?”
“Five miles,” he said, and I knew by the sudden scream and plunge of his horse that spurs were dug into its raw sides.
We turned down that steep, tortuous street leading from Goback to the Valley of the Leaf. The wet thaw of midday had frozen and the road was slippery. We reined our horses in tightly, and by zagging and zigging from side to side, we managed to reach the foot of the hill without a single fall.
Here, we again gave them the bit, thundering across the bridge without stopping, which brought the keeper out, cursing and yelling for his toll.
I tossed a coin over my shoulder and we galloped up the elm-lined avenue leading to that Frostetch Forest retreat that Kenzo called home. Turning suddenly to the right, we followed a seldom frequented road, where snow was drifted heavily. Finally, our beasts sinking to their haunches and snorting through the white billows, we had to slacken pace.
Halvgar had not spoken a word. Clouds were still massing on the north. Overhead, a few stars glittered against the black, but the wind had the most mournful wail I have ever heard.
“Fie—listen! Do you hear anything? Do you hear someone calling for help? Is that a child?”
“No, Halvgar. I hear nothing but the wind.”
But my hesitancy belied the truth. We both heard sounds that could have easily been wailing. It was impossible to discern anything in the gathering storm. And the wind burst upon us again, catching my empty denial in a mean sound, like the howling of a woman.
Then there was a lull, and I discerned the noise: It was Halvgar.
I looked away.
The stout dwarf by my side, who had held iron grip of himself before other eyes, was now giving in fully to grief.
Yet we pushed on.
At last, a red light gleamed from the window of Gilli’s low-slung cottage. That was the signal for us to turn abruptly to the left, entering the forest by a narrow bridle path that twisted among the cedars. The moon shone for a moment above the ragged edge of a storm cloud, and in that same moment all the snow-laden evergreens stood out, spectral and still, like mourners. I shuddered, looking. Snow was beginning to fall in great flakes that obscured the air. Here, the road again took us right. At a sharp angle to the road was Halvgar’s Hall. It suddenly loomed up in the center of a forest clearing on the mountain side. Just beyond, the path to the garden came near the road, followed it a bit, then crossed a frozen stream to a small open space.
Here, the small band of elves had been encamped.
We rounded back for his hall and hallooed for servants.
* * *
With the lanterns they brought us, we examined every square inch of the smoke-scarred rocks and snowy rubbish heaps. Bits of hide or bone were scattered here and there, along with stones for the fire, and ends of ropes and tattered rags lay everywhere over the black patch.
In the end, we found nothing, not one single thing to indicate any trace of the lost woman and child, until I caught sight of a tiny, blue string beneath a piece of rusty metal. Kicking it aside, I picked it up.
On the lower end was a child’s shoe. I confess it took me a moment to reveal it. I would have rather had felt the point of a dagger, shoved in my ear, than have shown that simple thing to Halvgar.
But I did.
He nodded, grimaced maniacally, then just nodded again.
Then the sky fell out. The snow broke upon us in white billows, blotting out everything. We spread a sheet on the ground to preserve any marks of the campers, but the drifting wind drove us indoors and we were compelled to cease searching.
* * *
All night long, Halvgar and I sat before the roaring fire of his hunting room. Both of us were at a loss for what to do.
He just leaned forward with his chin in his palms, saying few words. I could only offer futile suggestions, uttering mad threats about Killroot. But we knew enough of elf character to know what not to do—which was raise an outcry, because that would surely bring on Killroot’s cruelty.
Chapter 5
We spent a long, melancholy night, waiting. Amid the roaring of the northern gale, driving through any gap it could find in the hall, Halvgar roared back. But the wind only grew stronger. It seemed as if it would wrench all the eaves from the roof. It shrieked across the garden like malignant spirits. And all the while poor Halvgar kept rushing into the blinding whirl.
