“No,” I said. “He’s no kin or oath-brother of mine. This is not my quarrel.”
“That’s good,” said Hjalmar. “I’d not like to fight with you. You were ever a good neighbor.”
We stepped forth together and staked out the ground. Thorgunna told me to lend Gerald my sword, so he could use a shield too, but the man looked oddly at me and said he would rather have the ax. They squared off before each other, he and Ketill, and began fighting.
This was no holmgang, with rules and a fixed order of blows and first blood meaning victory. There was death between those two. Drunk though the lot of us were, we saw that and so had not tried to make peace. Ketill stormed in with the sword whistling in his hand. Gerald sprang back, wielding the ax awkwardly. It bounced off Ketill’s shield. The youth grinned and cut at Gerald’s legs. Blood welled forth to stain the ripped breeches.
What followed was butchery. Gerald had never used a battle-ax before. So it turned in his grasp and he struck with the flat of the head. He would have been hewn down at once had Ketill’s sword not been blunted on his helmet and had he not been quick on his feet. Even so, he was erelong lurching with a dozen wounds.
“Stop the fight!” Thorgunna cried, and sped toward them. Helgi caught her arms and forced her back, where she struggled and kicked till Grim must help. I saw grief on my son’s face, but a wolfish glee on the carle’s.
Ketill’s blade came down and slashed Gerald’s left hand. He dropped the ax. Ketill snarled and readied to finish him. Gerald drew his gun. It made a flash and a barking noise. Ketill fell. Blood gushed from him. His lower jaw was blown off and the back of his skull was gone.
A stillness came, where only the wind and the sea had voice.
Then Hjalmar trod forth, his mouth working but otherwise a cold steadiness over him. He knelt and closed his son’s eyes, as a token that the right of vengeance was his. Rising, he said: “That was an evil deed. For that you shall be outlawed.”
“It wasn’t witchcraft,” said Gerald in a stunned tone. “It was like a . . . a bow. I had no choice. I didn’t want to fight with more than my fists.”
I got between them and said the Thing must decide this matter, but that I hoped Hjalmar would take weregild for Ketill.
“But I killed him to save my own life!” protested Gerald.
“Nevertheless, weregild must be paid, if Ketill’s kin will take it,” I explained. “Because of the weapon, I think it will be doubled, but that is for the Thing to judge.”
Hjalmar had many other sons, and it was not as if Gerald belonged to a family at odds with his own, so I felt he would agree. However, he laughed coldly and asked where a man lacking wealth would find the silver.
Thorgunna stepped up with a wintry calm and said we would pay. I opened my mouth, but when I saw her eyes I nodded. “Yes, we will,” I said, “in order to keep the peace.”
“So you make this quarrel your own?” asked Hjalmar.
“No,” I answered. “This man is no blood of mine. But if I choose to make him a gift of money to use as he wishes, what of it?”
Hjalmar smiled. Sorrow stood in his gaze, but he looked on me with old comradeship.
“One day he may be your son-in-law,” he said. “I know the signs, Ospak. Then indeed he will be of your folk. Even helping him now in his need will range you on his side.”
“And so?” asked Helgi, most softly.
“And so, while I value your friendship, I have sons who will take the death of their brother ill. They’ll want revenge on Gerald Samsson, if only for the sake of their good names, and thus our two houses will be sundered and one manslaying will lead to another. It has happened often enough ere now.” Hjalmar sighed. “I myself wish peace with you, Ospak, but if you take this killer’s side it must be otherwise.”
I thought for a moment, thought of Helgi lying with his head cloven, of my other sons on their steads drawn to battle because of a man they had never seen, I thought of having to wear byrnies each time we went down for driftwood and never knowing when we went to bed if we would wake to find the house ringed in by spearmen.
“Yes,” I said, “You are right, Hjalmar. I withdraw my offer. Let this be a matter between you and him alone.”
We gripped hands on it.
Thorgunna uttered a small cry and flew into Gerald’s arms. He held her close. “What does this mean?” he asked slowly.
“I cannot keep you any longer,” I said, “but maybe some crofter will give you a roof. Hjalmar is a law-abiding man and will not harm you until the Thing has outlawed you. That will not be before they meet in fall. You can try to get passage out of Iceland ere then.”
“A useless one like me?” he replied in bitterness.
Thorgunna whirled free and blazed that I was a coward and a perjurer and all else evil. I let her have it out before I laid my hands on her shoulders.
“I do this for the house,” I said. “The house and the blood, which are holy. Men die and women weep, but while the kindred live our names are remembered. Can you ask a score of men to die for your hankerings?”
Long did she stand, and to this day I know not what her answer would have been. But Gerald spoke.
“No,” he said. “I suppose you have right, Ospak . . . the right of your time, which is not mine.” He took my hand, and Helgi’s. His lips brushed Thorgunna’s cheek. Then he turned and walked out into the darkness.
———
I heard, later, that he went to earth with Thorvald Hallsson, the crofter of Humpback Fell, and did not tell his host what had happened. He must have hoped to go unnoticed until he could somehow get berth on an eastbound ship. But of course word spread. I remember his brag that in the United States folk had ways to talk from one end of the land to another. So he must have scoffed at us, sitting in our lonely steads, and not known how fast news would get around. Thorvald’s son Hrolf went to Brand Sealskin-Boots to talk about some matter, and mentioned the guest, and soon the whole western island had the tale.
Now, if Gerald had known he must give notice of a manslaying at the first garth he found, he would have been safe at least till the Thing met, for Hjalmar and his sons are sober men who would not needlessly kill a man still under the wing of the law. But as it was, his keeping the matter secret made him a murderer and therefore at once an outlaw. Hjalmar and his kin rode straight to Humpback Fell and haled him forth. He shot his way past them with the gun and fled into the hills. They followed him, having several hurts and one more death to avenge. I wonder if Gerald thought the strangeness of his weapon would unnerve us. He may not have understood that every man dies when his time comes, neither sooner nor later, so that fear of death is useless.
At the end, when they had him trapped, his weapon gave out on him. Then he took a dead man’s sword and defended himself so valiantly that Ulf Hjalmarsson has limped ever since. That was well done, as even his foes admitted. They are an eldritch breed in the United States, but they do not lack manhood.
When he was slain, his body was brought back. For fear of the ghost, he having maybe been a warlock, it was burned, and everything he had owned was laid in the fire with him. Thus I lost the knife he gave me. The barrow stands out on the moor, north of here, and folk shun it, though the ghost has not walked. Today, with so much else happening, he is slowly being forgotten.
And that is the tale, priest, as I saw it and heard it. Most men think Gerald Samsson was crazy, but I myself now believe he did come from out of time, and that his doom was that no man may ripen a field before harvest season. Yet I look into the future, a thousand years hence, when they fly through the air and ride in horseless wagons and smash whole towns with one blow. I think of this Iceland then, and of the young United States men come to help defend us in a year when the end of the world hovers close. Maybe some of them, walking about on the heaths, will see that barrow and wonder what ancient warrior lies buried there, and they may well wish they had lived long ago in this time, when men were free.
R. A. LAFFERTY
Eccentric, outrageous, and packed with bizarre characters and incidents, R. A. Lafferty’s (1914–2002) stylistically unconventional short stories are as much a part of the oral tall tale tradition as they are fantasy and science fiction. Lafferty began publishing fiction in the 1960s and was a prominent figure in science fiction’s iconoclastic New Wave, where his gnomic, challenging variations on standard science-fiction and fantasy themes bridged the gap between speculative and mainstream fiction. A stylistic maverick, Lafferty fills his stories with puns and wordplay that create incongruous associations. The style of his narratives is similarly adventurous and includes mixtures of sermons, riddles, doggerel, epigrams, imagined reference works, and textbook treatises. He has written on subjects ranging from supernatural conspiracy to evil adolescents, celestial revolutionaries, Native American lore, utopia, demons, and carnal love.
In his novels he is fond of creating modern corrollaries for classic myths and legends. Space Chanty works the basic story of Homer’s Odyssey into a wild space opera. In the Argos cycle, which includes Archipelago, The Devil Is Dead, and Episodes of the Argo, Jason and the Argonauts are reincarnated as members of a former World War II battle unit. In Past Master, Sir Thomas More is transported in time and space to the planet Astrobe, where he falls afoul of political intrigue and suffers his seemingly inescapable martyr’s death. Lafferty’s preoccupation with religious archetypes and the battle (and sometimes collusion) between good and evil gives much of his writing a mythic character.
His short fiction has been collected in Nine Hundred Grandmothers, Strange Doings, Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add?, and numerous other collections. His novels include The Reefs of Earth, Fourth Mansions, Annals of Klepsis, and Arrive at Easterwine. He has also written a volume of essays on fantastic literature, It’s Down the Slippery Cellar Stairs. Interviews with him have been collected in Cranky Old Man from Tulsa.
“Rainbird” is one of R. A. Lafferty’s early stories, but it shows the wide-ranging influences that would shape his future fiction. The notion of going back in time to “correct” mistakes that would be made by oneself has rarely been explored with as much verve and imagination as with Rainbird and his “retrogressor.” Naturally, Lafferty also makes a wry comment on what can happen if one decides to tinker with the past too much.
RAINBIRD
R. A. LAFFERTY
WERE SCIENTIFIC FIRSTS truly tabulated the name of the Yankee inventor, Higgston Rainbird, would surely be without peer. Yet today he is known (and only to a few specialists, at that) for an improved blacksmith’s bellows in the year 1785, for a certain modification (not fundamental) in the moldboard plow about 1805, for a better (but not good) method of reefing the lateen sail, for a chestnut roaster, for the Devil’s Claw Wedge for splitting logs, and for a nutmeg grater embodying a new safety feature; this last was either in the year 1816 or 1817. He is known for such, and for no more.
Were this all that he achieved his name would still be secure. And it is secure, in a limited way, to those who hobby in technological history.
But the glory of which history has cheated him, or of which he cheated himself, is otherwise. In a different sense it is without parallel, absolutely unique.
For he pioneered the dynamo, the steam automobile, the steel industry, ferro-concrete construction, the internal combustion engine, electric illumination and power, the wireless, the televox, the petroleum and petro-chemical industries, monorail transportation, air travel, worldwide monitoring, fissionable power, space travel, group telepathy, political and economic balance; he built a retrogressor; and he made great advances towards corporal immortality and the apotheosis of mankind. It would seem unfair that all this is unknown of him.
Even the once solid facts—that he wired Philadelphia for light and power in 1799, Boston the following year, and New York two years later—are no longer solid. In a sense they are no longer facts.
For all this there must be an explanation; and, if not that, then an account at least; and if not that, well—something anyhow.
Higgston Rainbird made a certain decision on a June afternoon in 1779 when he was quite a young man, and by this decision he confirmed his inventive bent.
He was hawking from the top of Devil’s Head Mountain. He flew his falcon (actually a tercel hawk) down through the white clouds, and to him it was the highest sport in the world. The bird came back, climbing the blue air, and brought a passenger pigeon from below the clouds. And Higgston was almost perfectly happy as he hooded the hawk.
He could stay there all day and hawk from above the clouds. Or he could go down the mountain and work on his sparker in his shed. He sighed as he made the decision, for no man can have everything. There was a fascination about hawking. But there was also a fascination about the copper-strip sparker. And he went down the mountain to work on it.
Thereafter he hawked less. After several years he was forced to give it up altogether. He had chosen his life, the dedicated career of an inventor, and he stayed with it for sixty-five years.
His sparker was not a success. It would be expensive, its spark was uncertain and it had almost no advantage over flint. People could always start a fire. If not, they could borrow a brand from a neighbor. There was no market for the sparker. But it was a nice machine, hammered copper strips wrapped around iron teased with lodestone, and the thing turned with a hand crank. He never gave it up entirely. He based other things upon it; and the retrogressor of his last years could not have been built without it.
But the main thing was steam, iron, and tools. He made the finest lathes. He revolutionized smelting and mining. He brought new things to power, and started the smoke to rolling. He made mistakes, he ran into dead ends, he wasted whole decades. But one man can only do so much.
He married a shrew, Audrey, knowing that a man cannot achieve without a goad as well as a goal. But he was without issue or disciple, and this worried him.
He built a steamboat and a steamtrain. His was the first steam thresher. He cleared the forests with wood-burning giants, and designed towns. He destroyed southern slavery with a steampowered cotton picker, and power and wealth followed him.
For better or worse he brought the country up a long road, so there was hardly a custom of his boyhood that still continued. Probably no one man had ever changed a country so much in his lifetime.
He fathered a true machine-tool industry, and brought rubber from the tropics and plastic from the laboratory. He pumped petroleum, and used natural gas for illumination and steam power. He was honored and enriched; and, looking back, he had no reason to regard his life as wasted.
“Yes, I’ve missed so much. I wasted a lot of time. If only I could have avoided the blind alleys, I could have done many times as much. I brought machine tooling to its apex. But I neglected the finest tool of all, the mind. I used it as it is, but I had not time to study it, much less modify it. Others after me will do it all. But I rather wanted to do it all myself. Now it is too late.”
He went back and worked on his old sparker and its descendents, now that he was old. He built toys along the line of it that need not always have remained toys. He made a televox, but the only practical application was that now Audrey could rail at him over a greater distance. He fired up a little steam dynamo in his house, ran wires and made it burn lights in his barn.
And he built a retrogressor.
“I would do much more along this line had I the time. But I’m pepper-bellied pretty near the end of the road. It is like finally coming to a gate and seeing a whole greater world beyond it, and being too old and feeble to enter.”
He kicked a chair and broke it.
“I never even made a better chair. Never got around to it. There are so clod-hopping many things I meant to do. I have maybe pushed the country ahead a couple of decades faster than it would otherwise have gone. But what couldn’t I have done if it weren’t for the blind alleys! Ten years lost in one of them, twelve in another. If only there had been a way
to tell the true from the false, and to leave to others what they could do, and to do myself only what nobody else could do. To see a link (however unlikely) and to go out and get it and set it in its place. Oh, the waste, the wilderness that a talent can wander in! If I had only had a mentor! If I had had a map, a clue, a hatful of clues. I was born shrewd, and I shrewdly cut a path and went a grand ways. But always there was a clearer path and a faster way that I did not see till later. As my name is Rainbird, if I had it to do over, I’d do it infinitely better.”
He began to write a list of the things that he’d have done better. Then he stopped and threw away his pen in disgust.
“Never did even invent a decent ink pen. Never got around to it. Dog-eared damnation, there’s so much I didn’t do!”
He poured himself a jolt, but he made a face as he drank it.
“Never got around to distilling a really better whiskey. Had some good ideas along that line, too. So many things I never did do. Well, I can’t improve things by talking to myself here about it.”
Then he sat and thought.
“But I burr-tailed can improve things by talking to myself there about it.”
He turned on his retrogressor, and went back sixty-five years and up two thousand feet.
———
Higgston Rainbird was hawking from the top of Devil’s Head Mountain one June afternoon in 1779. He flew his bird down through the white fleece clouds, and to him it was sport indeed. Then it came back, climbing the shimmering air, and brought a pigeon to him.
“It’s fun,” said the old man, “but the bird is tough, and you have a lot to do. Sit down and listen, Higgston.”
“How do you know the bird is tough? Who are you, and how did an old man like you climb up here without my seeing you? And how in hellpepper did you know that my name was Higgston?”
“I ate the bird and I remember that it was tough. I am just an old man who would tell you a few things to avoid in your life, and I came up here by means of an invention of my own. And I know your name is Higgston, as it is also my name; you being named after me, or I after you, I forget which. Which one of us is the older, anyhow?”
Harry Turtledove Page 20
