C. Dale Brittain

by Voima

  Someone had spotted her. She heard a shout that was not the gulls and looked up to see a warrior, perched high above her, signaling to someone. Eirik’s men? she thought, freezing. But it was someone she recognized, one of Hadros’s warriors.

  It was nearly evening before they would answer her questions or even let her speak. Men, she thought disgustedly, with the energy that came from sleeping most of the day and having had hot food again. But Queen Arane was just as insistent as the kings that she rest.

  “We haven’t seen this King Eirik or any of his men,” said Hadros, “or for that matter anyone for the last three days. I was ready to start for home, little princess, but your father insisted we wait in case you were still alive. He’s almost as stubborn as you are! Glad of it,” he added gruffly.

  The sun was sinking over the western sea. When she looked at the sunset, long ribbons of red-tinged clouds seemed to carry her hundreds of miles across the waves toward the dying sun. The moon climbed the sky behind her. She had not yet tried to say anything about the sun setting in the realms of voima.

  “And where have you been all this time, Karin?” asked Queen Arane, gently in spite of an irritated undertone in her voice. “Both your father and foster-father have been almost mad with wondering and waiting. We waited even when hope was dulled and gone—your father saying it was too late to begin again.” As the sun set, the long shadow cast by the burial mound of the slain warriors melted into the general darkness.

  “We were in the Wanderers’ lands,” Karin said slowly, deciding to keep the story as simple as possible, “Roric, Valmar, and I.”

  “They keep on giving us the same story about the Wanderers,” commented Hadros, half under his breath. “At this rate we’ll have to believe the lords of voima really might be interested in people like us.” Karin could see her father consciously keeping himself from asking questions.

  “I escaped from King Eirik,” she went on, “the outlaw king who attacked you here, then Roric and I escaped from the dragon.” It did sound in her own ears like one of the more fantastic of the old tales. “Then he and I went through a doorway the Wanderers had opened— But that door is closed now.” But the Wanderers had let Valmar back through before closing it, she thought. Men again, acting together against the women.

  “Eirik and his men followed us into the Wanderers’ realm,” she continued, “and Valmar was already there.”

  “Then that’s why the outlaw wasn’t in his castle,” muttered Hadros.

  “We stayed in that realm for a little while. Then, although I do not entirely understand how it happened,” which was true, “the lords of voima wanted me back in mortal realms. Valmar, as far as I know, is with the Wanderers.”

  “And Roric?” That was Queen Arane.

  “Roric,” she gulped and went on, her voice steady, “Roric is dead.”

  Karin forced herself to lift her eyes to meet those of the two kings and the queen. All looked startled and, she thought, sorry, but that might only have been sympathy for her. Well, the time for subtlety was long past.

  When she trusted her voice again, she said, “Yes, even in the realms of voima mortals can die. I loved him. He was the lord of my heart and my body. And I hope I am carrying his child.”

  She had expected Queen Arane to give her a reproving glare, both for her frankness and for allowing herself to be with child at all. But the queen’s look was distant and strangely expressionless. King Kardan reached out impulsively toward his daughter, as though to draw her in like a little girl, but he stopped.

  Once Karin had begun there seemed no reason not to continue. “Now that he is gone it may not matter—but it does matter to me and to our child. Was Roric my brother?”

  “No!” All three spoke at once, Hadros and Kardan and Arane, then became flustered, rewrapping their cloaks against the cool of the evening air, meeting neither her eyes nor each other’s.

  “Why are you all so sure?” she asked, looking in surprise from one to another. “Is there something you have kept from me?” When they all shook their heads emphatically she added, “Both the Weaver back home and the—well, a creature of voima we met seemed to suggest that, that . . . that I was his sister and for him to love me was incest.”

  “Like the old stories?” asked Hadros, recovering first. He shot Queen Arane a look, thrust out his chin, and went on. “It wasn’t my secret but I don’t mind telling it. He was born at Arane’s court, though I brought him home as a tiny baby to raise in my own castle. Roric was the son of Arane’s serving-maid and, I think, me.”

  “Oh, dear.” The queen put her graceful hands over her face, and the jewels on her rings winked in the firelight.

  “Your son?” said Karin in bewilderment to the king. This changed everything. “But why would anyone do to his son—” She stopped, not wanting to get into that issue now. She whirled toward Kardan. “Tell me,” she commanded, her eyes intense in the shadows, “is there any chance that a baby born to Arane’s serving-maid could have been fathered by you?”

  He was flustered but certain. “No. No chance at all. I have never lain with any woman at Arane’s court.” He paused uncertainly. “I can swear on steel and rowan if you like.”

  Karin looked questioningly toward Arane but the queen had turned her head away. Roric had said he knew for certain he was not Hadros’s son—and had he not said Arane herself told him?

  Someone else, then, had also enjoyed the favors of the queen’s maid, though the queen had managed to make Hadros believe the baby was his to ensure him a good upbringing. Whosever son he might have been, he was not the son of King Kardan.

  Roric’s father was another man. She did not know how relieved she was to learn this until she found herself throwing her arms around her own father, just on the edge of sobbing again.

  Queen Arane rose briskly, pulling up the hood of her cloak. “The girl is exhausted and drained,” she said firmly. “She can tell you the rest of her story in the morning. What she needs now is sleep, which she can best have in my tent.”

  Before Karin could protest, the queen had her by the elbow and was propelling her across the camp. Now that she had begun telling her tale she would have been willing to continue, but there seemed no chance of that. “Well, goodnight!” came her father’s voice, belatedly and behind them.

  Karin entered the queen’s tent resignedly, ready to be tucked back into the blankets where she had slept that afternoon. Her life seemed rather empty and pointless, now that she knew the lords of voima would not let her rescue Valmar. It would be best perhaps to let others make the decisions for her until the baby within her quickened and gave her again a reason to live.

  But the queen put the lantern between them and sat on her cushions, eyes glittering. “Now, Karin. I want you to tell me how Roric died.”

  “King Eirik had captured Valmar, there in the Wanderers’ realm,” said Karin slowly, wondering why Arane did not want the kings to hear this. “Roric freed him, but Eirik was such a short distance away that we had very little chance of escape. Roric pushed Valmar and me into, well, a tunnel that led to safety.” There would be time enough to mention their brief visit to Hadros’s court. “Roric guarded our backs, and there he was killed.” She was almost able to say it calmly now.

  “Did you see him die?” asked the queen sharply.

  “No, but he would have come behind us if he had lived, and he did not.”

  “I would not yet give up hope of him,” said Arane very quietly. “But if he is gone he died to save his beloved and his foster-brother. I shall commission a bard as soon as I am home to put it into song.”

  When the queen did not speak again Karin asked, “Is there a reason you did not want Hadros to hear about his death? Were you afraid it would reflect dishonorably on Valmar?”

  But the queen did not answer her question. “You know I only ever spoke to Roric once as an adult, after he left my court where, it is true, he was born. Tell me: did he carry any charm?”

  “He
had a little bone charm, cut in the shape of a star. He was told it was in his blankets when he was found—though I gather now he was not a foundling?”

  Still ignoring her questions, Arane reached into her belt pouch and pulled out something that she placed on Karin’s palm. It was a star-shaped bone charm. “Did it look like that?”

  Karin stared at it. “He gave you his charm?” She tried to remember if she had seen Roric thumbing it, as he had so often, in the period between when they had been reunited outside Eirik’s castle and when Eirik and his men had slain him. She could not remember.

  Arane smiled slowly and sadly. “This is not Roric’s. But you have answered my question. This in your hand is the twin of the charm that I sent with him, all the meager powers of voima that I dared give him. For you see, Roric was my own son.”

  Just when Karin thought she had become calm she found herself weeping wildly again. She had not felt entirely sure of Hadros’s story, but this— This she believed.

  “Oh, Karin,” Arane said, stroking Karin’s hair as she lay with her face in the queen’s lap. “It seems very long ago, but I too can remember how miserable and how wonderful it can be to be young, to feel intense love and great sorrow without the experience to deal well with either . . .”

  “If he was your son,” Karin brought out, trying to overcome her tears, “why did you send him away? And which man fathered him?”

  “He was called No-man’s son, I understand,” said the queen slowly. “And even if he had lived I would never have wanted him to know his father’s name. He was not Hadros, not your father, only a man who may never even have known he had fathered a son but whom I loved very much . . .”

  This, thought Karin miserably, was what Arane had suggested to her back when they had first met, that as long as a queen was very discreet she could enjoy an occasional man in her bed. But she had also spoken of jealousies and rivalries—had Roric’s father been killed by some other would-be suitor of the queen, even before the baby was born? Perhaps it was better not to know.

  “The Witch told Roric he could never know his father’s name,” she said through her tears. She had not mentioned the Witch before, but it did not matter. “But it—she—also said that having the name, having the answer, would take away Roric’s goal of trying to live up to an image of a glorious father.”

  “Well, Roric cannot know his father’s name now,” said the queen reasonably. “And I had never intended to tell him. The man I loved came to me in secret, and I have always honored his secrecy. He gave me these two little charms before we parted for the last time, and I thought his son should have one, but no other information.”

  Karin felt a sudden horrible suspicion. “Roric’s father—” she said between tight lips. “Was he perhaps King Eirik?”

  Arane managed her tinkling little laugh. “No, Karin, I can reassure you quite certainly on that point. I knew Eirik, of course, from meetings of the All-Gemot over the years, and he was somewhat dashing in his youth in a rather coarse way. But you should give Roric’s mother credit for better taste than that!

  “King Hadros,” she went on, “in spite of an edge of uncertainty, has always assumed that Roric was his. I did not wish to tell him otherwise, though of course that meant he could not know that Roric was born to a queen, not to a serving-maid. My little deception assured that Roric would receive much the same training and advantages any son of one of the Fifty Kings might receive—though Hadros’s fatherly methods may be rougher than most! If Roric is indeed dead, I would appreciate it, Karin, if you never told Hadros the truth yourself.”

  “All right. It doesn’t matter now anyway.”

  “I hope you realize, Karin,” the queen continued, “that it is very hard to keep the reputation of a virgin queen if one is seen to suckle a babe! People may have suspicions, but without evidence suspicions are nothing. My household has always been very protective of me and very loyal, but there are limits to what even the most close-mouthed servants can keep hid. And of course I did not want Roric to grow up the target for a dagger-thrust from any man who hoped to win me and father his own sons on me.”

  “Did you think never to see him again when you sent him away?” Karin asked dully.

  “If he had lived, I would have told him, sooner or later, that he was my son. A little boy would be in too much danger from his relatives for me openly to declare him my heir, especially when he was a child born to a secret union, when I had never married the man before witnesses or with the consent of my kin. Someone like that the Fifty Kings would be very slow to accept! But a full-grown man, someone with the warrior skills of King Hadros, would have been different. Even as No-man’s son, such a man could still be chosen by my kingdom’s Gemot as the next king—and accepted by the other kings—if I had no obvious other heir and swore that he was mine.

  “But your child,” continued Arane with the ghost of a smile, “will be the grandchild of a king and of a sovereign queen, a fine baby boy or girl to rule Kardan’s kingdom after him and after you. All you need now is a husband—the Fifty Kings will still be reluctant to recognize that the child of a woman who has never been wed may inherit royal rule. Of course, as long as you are married before the babe is actually born, you should be all right . . . I do not, from my own experiences, recommend out-fostering your child on someone else! Now, you said you thought that Valmar may still be alive—”

  Karin could not stand it, the plotting, the maneuvering, all ready to begin again and this time around her. “No!” she cried, sitting up abruptly. “Roric is scarcely dead! I cannot start looking at once for a husband, planning whom to fool into thinking Roric’s child is his. I would rather—”

  She never had a chance to say what she would rather do. There was a great roar outside the tent, not an animal sound but much deeper, a roar of sea and earth.

  Karin and Arane scrambled out into the cold night air to see beneath a moonlit sky the Hot-River Mountains quivering as though shaken by an unimaginably enormous hand. The ground beneath their feet began to tremble and sway. As they clutched at each other the moonlight glinted on a giant wave racing up the salt river. It swept across the pebbled beach where the warriors of the two kings were sleeping and spun around the longship that had been hauled up beside them. Splashing and yelling, the men bobbed to the surface as the wave passed by. The few horses they had with them began to scream, and the dogs barked wildly.

  “The end has begun,” said Karin in a very small voice.

  They were not far from the burial mound where Gizor and the others were laid, built well above the waterline. Karin heard Hadros’s and Kardan’s voices shouting over the din, trying to find out how many men they still had and bellowing orders to secure the ship again.

  But she paid no attention, for her eyes were riveted on the burial mound. It moved, but not with the motion of earthquake. One of the horses—Roric’s stallion, she thought—had broken loose and was striking at the mound with his hooves. It shook as though something—or someone—was coming up beneath it.

  The wave, having bounced off the cliffs at the eastern end of the salt river, came pouring back, lower now but sending the men and supplies anew into swirling confusion. The stallion screamed again. The men, snatching their equipment out of the water, scrambled for higher ground. A number pulled at the ship’s mooring lines. Both kings climbed to the top of the burial mound to shout orders. They had not seen the shaking she had seen.

  It came again. A great clod of dirt flew from the side of the mound, then another. The dogs went abruptly silent. And someone, black with earth, stepped from within the mound.

  That was when the moon went out.

  3

  Roric glared upward at the renegade king. The sky above was still pale, though everything around them was losing its color as dark came on.

  “You’re definitely more trouble than you’re worth,” said Eirik with a sneer of his scarred lip. “If it hadn’t been for you, me and my men would still be living peacefully in wh
at’s left of our kingdom, raiding and capturing those who didn’t know better than to come within a hundred miles.” He paused for a second, muttered, “Though that life’s been getting pretty thin lately,” then glared at Roric again. “First you show up with the princess, then it turns out that ship had come looking for you, you free the king’s son I was going to offer to the lords of death, and now between you and him I’ve lost half my men.”

  “Where’s your fair lady Wigla?” said Roric mockingly. “Am I responsible for her disappearance as well?”

  Eirik shook his head. “You fight like a berserker, like someone who doesn’t care if he lives or dies—only I, Eirik, am supposed to fight like that. And now you act like you want me to kill you in cold blood. Well, I wouldn’t let my men kill you, to let the princess make a great song to keep your spirit happy in Hel. And I’m not going to kill you quickly and cleanly now. You’re going to be the sacrifice.”

  They dragged him up the cliff by the waterfall and back to where the bodies of those Valmar had slain were laid out. They added the men Roric had killed before they overpowered him.

  Two of the king’s warriors had gone back into the cave by the pool but emerged in a moment with puzzled frowns. So Karin and Valmar were safely back home, Roric thought and grinned wolfishly.

  The sounds of the fight between the Wanderers and the dragon had died away. Roric peered through the dimness but saw no sign of the lords of voima. “No use waiting for midnight,” said Eirik. “The day moves so slowly around here that it might be a week’s worth of waiting. We’ll make the sacrifices and get back to our own land with the booty.”

  “How about Wigla?” asked one of his warriors, picking up Roric’s question.

  Eirik growled and glared over his shoulder at Roric again. “She can do what she likes.” He turned back to his men. “Now, we don’t have any women so you two will have to do. And this spring will do instead of the boiling pool. Stand there with the bread and ale. I don’t have my lyre, but I should still be able to make a song.”