by Andre Norton
There was a second man in the bushes. He half-lay, face stark, a mangled arm across his breast, looking at her wild-eyed as she came to him, his good hand awkwardly fumbling with a short hunting sword. She took that from him easily, wrenching it free, for her own arming.
While he spat meaningless words at her she staggered back, still afire, straight into the path of another running to the fight.
“Die, devil!”
She was still not at ready and he was about to cut her down when he shrieked aloud and threw up his hands, the wounded man echoing his cry. This pain in her head—she could hardly see. However on hands and knees Thra scrambled away as a heavy body crashed down. To make certain of his helplessness she brought the heavy pommel of the sword on the nape of his neck as his helm loosened and rolled away.
For a moment she simply crouched, sobbing for breath, hardly daring to believe she yet lived. The pain was now no longer a torment; rather a steady fire which strengthened her in a way she could not understand.
Out of a tangle of tall grass came Grimclaw. As he passed the legs of the man before her a paw aimed a quick blow claws out. Thra used the spear to aid her to her feet where those other two still fought with skill and desperation. Thrusting the hunting sword close to hand in the ground she stood with the spear at ready, to hold the lists. Grimclaw stationed himself beside her.
Mastery of steel—Thra knew that she watched two evenly matched fighting men of top skill. And they could almost have been brothers from one birthing. That strange cast of Farne’s features had faded away. He was smiling slightly, yellow eyes alight—only the color of those differing from his enemy.
The blaze from his blade now formed a nebulous glow about his whole body through which the sword moved like a darting tongue. Were they so evenly matched that they might fight forever without giving way? Thra could detect no sign of fatigue, no lighting of the clang of weapons.
She had no more that thought then when the flame-wreathed blade appeared to turn of itself in Farne’s hand. The weapon might command the man not the man the weapon. There was a hard clang of sound and the lord’s sword spun out of his grip to strike against the trunk of the tree where Thra had sheltered. He stood bare handed, with no change of expression, as if he now waited stocially that thrust at throat or breast which would put an end to him.
As the fire blade turned point down Farne caught and held those other chill eyes.
“Blood calls to blood,” he said slowly.
The other’s mouth contorted. He spat and the spittle flecked the trampled leaves by Farne’s boots.
“Beast calls not to true man!” He flung up his head in harsh pride. “Kill if you will but think not that aught between us can ever be altered—runner in the night!”
Farne swung the sword, not towards the other but as if he weighed something in his hand and that weight dragged heavy upon him. He shook his head.
“Run no more,” he said slowly. “The choice has been forced upon me at last. I may well have lost more than I gain—”
“I do not understand you,” broke in the other impatiently. “Kill me—you win nothing, beast—”
Farne, to Thra’s surprise, nodded. “Nothing,” he agreed. “Did you think I challenged your rulership with this?” Again he waved the sword.
That light which had blazed along it was gone. But the strangeness did not return to his face. Now he stepped back and away from the other.
“This much is true. You live, kinsman, by my leave.”
The other scowled and took a step forward as if he wished to drag Farne down by strength alone.
“Also,” once more the forest man shifted his grip on the sword, “I have at last come into my inheritance. No, kinsman, do not fear that you shall be dispossessed of your lands, your ill-ruled people—not yet. But the ‘beast’ you have been pleased to hunt is gone. Try your tricks again at your will, they shall net you naught. Take up your liegemen and get you gone. This forest has an ill name among your kind that was not lightly earned, nor shall it be forgot.”
Deliberately he sheathed the sword and held its belt in one hand. The other he put to the wide buckle of the furred belt.
As Farne’s fingers touched that buckle it burst open. The metal over which the strange colors had played flaked away. Fur loosened from scaling hide and shifted through the air, the hide itself slipped and fell from about his body, to lie in bits upon the ground. Then he fastened the sword belt in its place.
The lord watched through narrowed eyes.
“You have given me quarter—I asked it not, I shall not accept it!” His voice was harsh challenge.
“Accept or not as you wish,” Farne shrugged. “You stand on land which I know and which knows me. I have made my choices—yours shall be yours only, and you shall answer for them.”
He turned his head to look to Thra. What he had just said, she thought, was meant in its latter part as much for her as for the lord.
She swallowed. Life was always choices and somehow she knew she faced a mighty one now. As she settled the sword she had taken into the empty scabbard at her belt she saw on the ground a wisp of dirty fur.
Two belts and a man, there was a meaning she could guess at. But in this forest one need not be surprised at anything. She made her choice.
As Farne moved forward she fell in at his right hand, Grimclaw padding into the shadow of the great trees at his left.
By a Hair
YOU say, friend, that witchcraft at its strongest is but a crude knowledge of psychology, a use of a man’s own fear of the unknown to destroy him? Perhaps it may be so in modern lands. But me, I have seen what I have seen. More than fear destroyed Dagmar Kark and Colonel Andrei Veroff.
There were four of them, strong and passionate: Ivor and Dagmar Kark, Andrei Varoff and the Countess Ana. What they desired they gained by the aid of something not to be seen nor felt nor sensed tangibly, something not in the experience of modern man.
Ivor was an idealist who held to a cause and the woman he thought Dagmar to be. Dagmar, she wanted power—power over the kind of man who could give her all her heart desired. And so she wanted Colonel Andrei Varoff.
And Varoff, his wish was a common one, though odd for one of his creed. When a man has been nourished on the belief that the state is all, the individual nothing, it is queer to want a son to the point of obsession. And, though Varoff had taken many women, none had produced a child he could be sure was his.
The Countess Ana, she wanted justice—and love.
The four people had faith in themselves, strong faith. Besides, they had it in other things—Ivor in his cause and his wife, Varoff in a creed. And Dagmar and Ana in something very old and enduring.
It could not have happened in this new land of yours, to that I agree; but in my birth country it is different. All this came to be in a narrow knife slash of a valley running from mountains to the gray salt sweep of the Baltic. It is true that the shadow of the true cross has lain over that valley since the Teutonic knights planted it on the castle they built in the crags almost a thousand years ago. But before the white Christ came, other, grimmer gods were worshipped in that land. In the fir forest where the valley walls are steep, there is still a stone altar set in a grove. That was tended, openly at first, and later in secret, for long after the priests of Rome chanted masses in the church.
In that country the valley is reckoned rich. Life there was good until the Nazis came. Then the Count was shot in his own courtyard, since he was not the type of man to suffer the arrogance of others calmly, and with him Hudun, the head gamekeeper, and the heads of three valley households. Afterwards they took away the young Countess Ana.
But Ivor Kark fled to the hills and our young men joined him. During two years, perhaps a little more, they carried on guerrilla warfare with the invader, just as it happened in those days in all the countries stamped by the iron heel.
But to my country there came no liberation. Where the Nazi had strutted in his pride, the Bear o
f the north shambled, and stamped into red dust those who defied him. Some fled and some stayed to fight, believing in their innocence that the nations among the free would rise in their behalf.
Ivor Kark and his men, not yet realizing fully the doom come upon us, ventured out of the mountains. For a time it appeared that the valley, being so small a community, might indeed be overlooked. In those few days of freedom Ivor found Dagmar Llov.
Who can describe such a woman as Dagmar with words? She was not beautiful; no, seldom is it that great beauty brings men to their knees. Look at the portraits of your historical charmers, or read what has been written of Cleopatra, of Theodora and the rest. They have something other than beauty, these fateful ones: a flame within them which kindles an answer in all men who look upon them. But their own hearts remain cold.
Dagmar walked with a grace which tore at you, and when she looked at one sidewise. . . . But who can describe such a woman? I can say she had silver, fair hair which reached to her knees, a face with a frost white skin, but I cannot so make you see the Dagmar Llov that was.
Because of his leadership in the underground, Ivor was a hero to us. In addition, he was good to look upon: a tall whip of a man, brown, thin, narrow of waist and loins, and broad of shoulder. He had been a huntsman of the Count’s, and walked with a forester’s smooth glide. Above his widely set eyes his hair grew in a sharp peak, giving his face a disturbingly wolfish cast. But in his eyes and mouth there was the dedication of a priest.
Being what she was, Dagmar looked upon those eyes and that mouth, and desired to trouble the mold, to see there a difference she had wrought. In some ways Ivor was an innocent, but Dagmar was one who had known much from her cradle.
Also, Ivor was now the great man among us. With the Count gone, the men of the valley looked to him for leadership. Dagmar went to him willingly and we sang her bride song. It was a good time, such as we had not known for years.
Others came back to the valley during those days. Out of the black horror of a Nazi extermination camp crawled a pale, twisted creature, warped in body, perhaps also in mind. She who had once been the Countess Ana came quietly, almost secretly, among us again. One day she had not been there, and the next she was settled in the half-ruinous gate house of the castle with old Mald, who had been with her family long before her own birth.
The Countess Ana had been a woman of education before they had taken her away, and she had not forgotten all she had learned. There was no doctor in the valley; twenty families could not have supported one. But the Countess was versed in the growing of herbs and their healing uses, and Mald was a midwife. So together they became the wise women of our people. After a while we forgot the Countess Ana’s deformed body and ravaged face, and accepted her as we accepted the crooked firs growing close to the timberline. Not one of us remembered that she was yet in years a young woman, with a young woman’s dreams and desires, encased in a hag’s body.
It was late October when our fate came upon us, up river in a power boat. The new masters would set in our hills a station from which their machines could spy upon the outer world they feared and hated; and to make safe the building of that station they sent ahead a conqueror’s party. They surprised us and something had drained out of the valley. So many of our youth were long since bleached bones that, save for a handful, perhaps only the number of the fingers on my two hands, there was no defiance; there was only a dumb beast’s endurance. Within three days Colonel Andrei Varoff ruled from the castle as if he had been Count, lord of a tired, cowed people.
Three men they hauled from their homes and shot on the first night, but Ivor was not one. He had been warned and, with the core of his men, had taken again to the mountains. But he left Dagmar behind, by her own will.
Mald and the Countess were warned, too. When Varoff marched his pocket army into the castle, the gate house was deserted; and those who thereafter sought the wise women’s aid took another path, up into the black-green of the fir forest and close to a long stone partly buried in the ground within a circle of very old oaks, which had not grown so by chance. There in a game-station hut, those in need could find what they wanted, perhaps more.
Father Hansel had been one of the three Varoff shot out of hand, and there was no longer an open church in the valley. What went on in the oak glade was another matter. First our women drifted there, half ashamed, half defiant, and later they were followed by their men. I do not think the Countess Ana was their priestess. But she knew and condoned. For she had learned many things.
The wise women began to offer more than just comfort of body. It was a queer wild time when men in their despair turned from old belief to older ones, from a god of love and peace, to a god of wrath and vengeance. Old knowledge passed by word of mouth from mother to daughter was recalled by such as Mald, and keenly evaluated by the sharper and better-trained brain of the Countess Ana. I will not say that they called upon Odin and Freya (or those behind those Nordic spirits) or lighted the Beltane Fire. But there was a stirring, as if something long sleeping turned and stretched in its supposed grave.
Dagmar, for all her shrewd egotism (and egotism such as hers is dangerous, for it leads a man or woman to believe that what they wish is right), was a daughter of the valley. She was moved by the old beliefs; and because she had her price, she was convinced that all others had theirs. So at night she went alone to the hut. There she watched until the Countess Ana left. It was she who carried news and a few desperately gained supplies to those in hiding, especially Ivor.
Seeing the hunched figure creep off, Dagmar laughed spitefully, making a secret promise to herself that even a man she might choose to throw away would go to no other woman. But since at present she needed aid and not ill-will, she put that aside.
When the Countess was out of sight, Dagmar went in to Mald and stood in the half-light of the fire, proud and tall, exulting over the other woman in all the sensual strength and grace of her body, as she had over the Countess Ana in her mind.
“I would have what I desire most, Andrei Varoff,” she said boldly, speaking with the arrogance of a woman who rules men by their lusts.
“Let him but look on you. You need no help here,” returned Mald.
“I cannot come to him easily; he is not one to be met by chance. Give me that which will bring him to me by his own choice.”
“You are a wedded wife.”
Dagmar laughed shrilly. “What good does a man who must hide ever in a mountain cave do me, Old One? I have slept too long in a cold bed. Let me draw Varoff, and you and the valley will have kin within the enemy’s gate.”
Mald studied her for a long moment, and Dagmar grew uneasy, for those eyes in age-carved pits seemed to read far too deeply. But, without making any answer in words, Mald began certain preparations. There was a strange chanting, low and soft but long, that night. The words were almost as old as the hills around them, and the air of the hut was thick with the scent of burning herbs.
When it was done Dagmar stood again by the fire, and in her hands she turned and twisted a shining, silken belt. She looped it about her arm beneath her cloak and tugged at the heavy coronet of her braids. The long locks Mald had shorn were not missed. Her teeth showed in white points against her lip as she brought out of her pocket some of those creased slips of paper our conquerors used for money.
Mald shook her head. “Not for coin did I do this,” she said harshly. “But if you come to rule here as you desire, remember you are kin.”
Dagmar laughed again, more than ever sure of herself. “Be sure that I will, Old One.”
Within two days the silken belt was in Varoff’s hands, and within five Dagmar was installed in the castle. But in the Colonel she had met her match, for Varoff found her no great novelty. She could not bend him to her will as she had Ivor, who was more sensitive and less guarded. But, being shrewd, Dagmar accepted the situation with surface grace and made no demands.
As for the valley women, they spat after her, and there was ha
te in their hearts. Who told Ivor I do not know, though it was not the Countess Ana. (She could not wound where she would die to defend.) But somehow he managed to get a message to Dagmar, entreating her to come to him, for he believed she had gone to Varoff to protect him.
What that message aroused in Dagmar was contempt and fear: contempt for the man who would call her to share his harsh exile and fear that he might break the slender bond she had with Varoff. She was determined that Ivor must go. It was very simple, that betrayal, for Ivor believed in her. He went to his death as easily as a bullock led to the butcher, in spite of warnings from the Countess Ana and his men.
He slipped down by night to where Dagmar promised to wait and walked into the hands of the Colonel’s guard. They say he was a long time dying, for Andrei Varoff had a taste for such treatment for prisoners when he could safely indulge it. Dagmar watched him die; that, too, was part of the Colonel’s pleasure. Afterward there was a strange shadow in her eyes, although she walked with pride.
It was two months later that she made her second visit to Mald. But this time there were two to receive her. Yet in neither look, word, nor deed, did either show emotion at that meeting; it was as if they waited. They remained silent, forcing her to declare her purpose.
“I would bear a son.” She began as one giving an order. Only—confronted by those unchanging faces she faltered and lost some of her assurance. She might even have turned and gone had the Countess Ana not spoken in a cool and even voice.
“It is well known that Varoff desires a son.”
Dagmar responded to that faint encouragement. “True! Let me be the one to bear the child and my influence over him will be complete. Then I can repay—it is true, you frozen faces!” She was aroused by the masks they wore. “You believe that I betrayed Ivor, not knowing the whole of the story. I have very little power over Varoff now. But let me give him a son; then there will be no limit on what I can demand of him—none at all!”
