Sightblinder's Story

by Fred Saberhagen

  “And how came this Sword into your hands?” This was the giant, anger still rumbling dangerously in his voice.

  Arnfinn continued the slow process of getting himself under control. “Some children of our village found this weapon—they said they found it under a bush, I suppose they were telling the truth but I don’t know how it got there—and they were playing with it. Frightening everybody, and—”

  “And so you took it away from them.”

  “Yes. For their own good. The gods know what trouble they might have caused with it.” Arnfinn looked up, appealing to the three grim faces. “I intend—I intended to share the money with them, and with their parents, when I had sold the Sword. Their parents were very much afraid. They just wanted to be rid of it.”

  Anger still threatened in the huge man’s voice. “Who did you think you were going to sell it to?”

  Arnfinn gestured toward the water. “I had heard there were good wizards living on the islands in Lake Alkmaar—that’s what all the people in my village believed, though our people seldom came here to Triplicane. I didn’t mean to do any harm.”

  “What harm do you think you’ve done?” This was from the young man. Despite his youth he somehow sounded more like a leader than either of the others did.

  Arnfinn shifted his position on the rough ground. He drew in a deep breath and heaved it out again. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”

  There was a pause. Then the woman asked him: “How long have you been here, then?” And the young man at the same time: “What kept you from going through with the sale?”

  Now words poured out of Arnfinn in a rush. “I’ve been here for days. I’ve lost count how many. When I got here—well, I was carrying the Sword, and so naturally everyone in the town acted strange every time they saw me. The gods only know who or what they saw, or thought they saw, when they looked at me. If there’s any way to turn the power of this weapon off, I don’t know what it is. And of course I didn’t dare to leave the thing anywhere, for fear of losing it. I hardly dared to set it down. So—I haven’t had much actual contact with the people here. I’ve been sleeping out, up there on the hill.”

  “And you’re saying,” the lady asked him, “that you never actually tried to sell the Sword to anyone?”

  “That’s right. I never showed it to anyone, or talked about it.”

  “Why not?”

  “I was afraid to try, ma’am. As soon as I arrived in town, I began to hear that there were strange things going on out on the islands. I could see that there were quite a few soldiers in the town and they had taken over the docks. And there were strange rumors about Honan-Fu and what might have happened to him. The people I talked to were all worried.”

  “What did these strange rumors say, exactly?”

  Arnfinn managed a shrug. “That there were new rulers out there on the island, and they were evil. One man had heard a story about huge flying shapes, reptiles, demons, the gods know what, dropping out of the sky at night over Honan-Fu’s castle. And there were stories of how the new rulers had done bad things—even kidnapped a few people from villages along the mainland shore. I didn’t want to sell the Sword to anyone like that.”

  The giant said: “Fortunate for you, you didn’t try, I’d say. Well, you won’t have to worry any longer about selling the Sword. It’s in good hands now.”

  Arnfinn nodded hastily.

  Zoltan looked at his two companions, then back at Arnfinn. He said with authority: “You’ll be compensated for it someday. You and the children of your village who found it for you. If your story about how it came into your possession turns out to be true.”

  “I’ve told you the truth.” At least he had told them a lot of it. What he had held back, he thought, would probably not be of any importance to them; and it was not something he was going to tell to anyone, whatever happened.

  Arnfinn wiped his face with his sleeve again. “Now, can I go?” When nothing intimidating happened to him in response to this question, he dared to get back to his feet.

  That move, too, was accepted. At least nobody knocked him down again. Instead, the big man pointed a huge finger at the ground, and grumbled a warning at him, that he should stay right where he was; and then the three moved to a little distance, where they could confer without their victim hearing them. Obviously the subject of their conference was what to do about him.

  Watching them, Arnfinn could imagine them coming to one of at least three possible decisions. One, they could determine to kill him after all, in which case he ought to be bounding down the hillside right now, running for his life. He wasn’t doing that, so it followed that he didn’t really believe that he was going to be killed, not after their having talked to him so reasonably. Two, they could try to enlist him in their cause, whatever that might be. Three, they could send him home. In Arnfinn’s current mental state he wasn’t sure which alternative would be worse.

  The three did not take long to reach a decision. In only moments they were coming back, surrounding him again.

  The gray-robed woman had pulled out her purse and was counting out some coins. Arnfinn felt a little dizzy; at least they were not going to finish him right now.

  “What will you do,” the young man asked, “if we tell you, you are free to go?”

  “I’ll go home,” said Arnfinn promptly. “I’ll leave here this instant, and never come back.”

  The big man added his endorsement of that plan, emphasizing it with a brutally graphic statement of what would happen to Arnfinn if he did come back.

  “I won’t.”

  “See that you don’t.”

  The lady extended the coins to him in her hand, and Arnfinn muttered thanks and took them—he put them into his pocket without counting, but still it looked like more money than anyone in Lunghai except the lord of its manor had seen for a long time.

  He turned away. The moment he started downhill toward the town, three voices challenged and warned him.

  He stopped and turned again, explaining that his road home led in that direction. “But I’ll not stop in the town. I don’t know anyone there, and none of them know me.” Which was true enough, for none of the folk of Triplicane had ever seen him without the Sword.

  The three let him go on, evidently convinced by his fright, which was certainly real enough.

  * * *

  Even though Arnfinn knew no one in the town, and no one in the town knew him, still there was one stop he had to make, someone in the neighborhood he had to try to see. He knew it was mad foolishness, but still he had to try to see her once more, even if he knew it could be no more than one look from a distance. Even if the three came after him and killed him for it.

  He kept on going straight through the town, a stranger insignificant and unnoticed, until he came out on its other side. There he presently found himself standing in front of Triplicane’s most substantial dwelling. It was a low, sprawling manor house, which was invisible from the road behind high walls and trees. It was obvious that wealth and power dwelt here.

  Arnfinn had entered the grounds of this manor before, but now he knew that he would never be able to enter them again. Now, without the Sword of Stealth, the best he would ever be able to do was to wait outside, loitering in the road. If he did that it might be possible for him to see her just once more—perhaps catch a brief glimpse through the strong bars of the gate. It was not much of a chance, but it appeared to be all that he now had left.

  The realization was sinking in on him that in losing the Sword he had lost whatever chance might have remained of repairing the ruin he had managed to make of his life during the few days when he’d had the Sword in hand.

  Arnfinn began to weep again. This time his sobs were quieter, slower, and more bitter. Looking back it was hard for him to see how he might have been able to do things differently.

  Chapter Six

  His journey to sell the Sword hadn’t started out in hopelessness. Far from it; in the innocence of it
s very beginning it had been something of a lark.

  The presence of the Sword of Stealth in the village of Lunghai had been kept a secret from the great majority of the villagers, at least up to the time of Arnfinn’s departure. The very few people who knew what he was up to, a small group of immediate family and close friends, had seen him off with quiet rejoicing. At the last moment a couple of his relatives had suggested that it would really be better after all if someone accompanied him. But that point had already been discussed, and really settled. Everyone else in the little group of people who knew about the Sword had work to do in the village, work it would be impractical for them to leave. Arnfinn would have little work to do until the harvest started, and he swore he would be back before then. And if Arnfinn went alone, taking the Sword with him, it was possible no one else in the village would know about the real purpose of his trip until he was back with the money he had realized from its sale.

  The day of his departure was fine and promising, in the lull of work before the harvest began in earnest. Arnfinn, riding a borrowed load beast, took pleasure in the sheer novelty of the journey. And not long after he had left his own village behind him, he began to appreciate the possibilities of fun in the miraculous power of the weapon he was carrying.

  A pair of poor farmers, one of whom Arnfinn recognized when he chanced to meet them on the road, suddenly put on unintentionally comical expressions and cleared themselves hastily out of his way. This pleased him disproportionately, and he tried in vain to imagine who, or what, the Sword had made them see. At the next tiny hamlet that Arnfinn came to, shortly after his encounter with the farmers, the peasant women who saw him pass ran from their huts to grab up small children and bring them inside.

  Arnfinn, grinning as he tried to guess in what image, terrible or awesome, the Sword had presented him to the women, rode past all of them on his phlegmatic borrowed load beast and said nothing. Whenever he cast his eyes down at his own body, even if he did so at the very moment when people were retreating from him in fear, he saw only the same poor clothes as always, covering the same scrawny and unimpressive frame. Only within the past year, after his sixteenth birthday, had he begun to admit to himself the possibility that he was never going to grow much bigger than he was, never going to be huge and powerful.

  Even earlier in life he had been forced to concede in his own mind that he was never going to be handsome. His face had never actually frightened anyone—not until the magic of the Sword of Stealth had begun to alter it in the sight of others. But with his nose and Adam’s apple standing out like brackets above and below the bony projection of his chin, his was a countenance that had provoked more than a few jokes.

  After passing through that first hamlet Arnfinn came to a long stretch of road where there were no more villages. Nor, for the time being, were there any other travelers for him to meet. In solitude the load beast kept plodding methodically forward. The sun turned through a sky hazed lightly with the onset of autumn.

  And, he kept thinking to himself, he hadn’t even drawn the Sword to frighten any of those people. Sightblinder—that was what it had to be—was just hanging there in its fancy scabbard, from the fancy belt that had been with it when the children found it. Belt and scabbard alike were skillfully sewn of fine sturdy leather, and both were mounted with what Arnfinn assumed were real jewels; he suspected that those decorations might be treasure enough in themselves to enrich the village of Lunghai considerably.

  Or, perhaps, more than enough to get the whole village into trouble. Even in Lunghai people had heard of the Twelve Swords, magical weapons forged by the gods themselves more than thirty years ago. If Arnfinn and his people hadn’t known of the good wizards on their island, he wouldn’t have any idea of where to go to try to sell this marvelous blade. But Honan-Fu the wizard was known to be a good man, kindly to the poor, and trustworthy in all his dealings; not that Arnfinn himself had ever met him, but all the common folk who had met him said so. The good wizard would advise Arnfinn on what to do, and not cheat him out of the village treasure that had been entrusted to him.

  * * *

  The next village that Arnfinn came to was totally new territory to him. He had never in his life before traveled so far in this direction. And this village saw the end of the lightheartedness with which he had begun his journey.

  The road passed directly through the small village square, a plot of brown grass and a few trees. A woman who was seated on a bench at one side of the square stared at Arnfinn as he approached. Her face grew pale, very pale. And then, jumping to her feet and giving a cry suitable for a death or a birth, she appeared to go mad.

  Arnfinn, already alarmed, panicked now and kicked his load beast to make it go faster. But the woman overtook the trotting animal and then ran beside it, clinging to Arnfinn’s knee, entreating him to stop. She kept calling him over and over by some name he could not understand, one that he had never heard before. The woman’s cries resounded, bringing people out of the little houses around the square. She was not young. Her graying hair fell in disheveled curls beside her weathered cheeks. Her eyes, enormous with emotion, never left Arnfinn’s face.

  Arnfinn, in his embarrassment and growing fright, was unable to imagine what might happen if he did stop and try to talk to this screaming madwoman. How could he explain? That would mean giving up the treasure of the Sword, if only for a moment, trying to demonstrate its magic. And to give it up was something that he dared not do.

  Obviously the woman thought that he was someone she had deeply loved, someone she had not seen for many years—perhaps someone who was dead. Unable to remain silent in the face of her clamoring entreaties, he made abortive attempts to reassure her, to explain, to somehow shut her up. But despite his stumbling efforts, all she could see and hear was her loved one, inexplicably riding on, refusing to stop for her. Some of the other people of the village, this woman’s neighbors and perhaps her relatives, were looking on aghast, though they made no move to interfere. Eventually, Arnfinn thought, even as he struggled to get away, they will be able to help her. Because each of them will have seen me as a different person, and sooner or later they will all realize that what has ridden through their village was an enchantment. Then soon they will all get over this.

  And how could Arnfinn stop? What could he have said to her, what could he have done for her if he did stop?

  At last he clamped his own lips shut and kicked the load beast into a run. This too, at first, only seemed to make matters worse. The woman’s grip on the load-beast’s saddle was brutally broken when the animal began to run. But she still tottered down the road after Arnfinn. For a long time she kept up the hopeless pursuit, begging him to come back to her. It seemed to him that he had to ride for an hour, sweating in the chill air, trying to shut his ears, before the sound of her cries had faded entirely away.

  When night came he slept in the open. And for a day or two after that incident he avoided villages altogether, making a long detour whenever a settlement of any kind came into sight ahead.

  He could not avoid encountering other travelers now and then. Inevitably they displayed either one of two basic reactions, and Arnfinn wasn’t sure which one was worse: the fear or the strange, puzzled love. Puzzled, he supposed, because the loved one was behaving so strangely, offering no recognition.

  But Arnfinn no longer found anything enjoyable in either reaction. And so he ceased to wear the Sword. Taking off the belt and scabbard, he wrapped them in his only spare shirt, making an undistinguished-looking bundle, and then contrived to tie the bundle onto the load beast’s rump along with the rest of his meager baggage.

  On the following day he was traversing a particularly lonely stretch of road when two men suddenly appeared out of the scrubby forest no more than an arrow’s flight ahead of him.

  More to reassure himself that his treasure was safe than to seek its protection, Arnfinn reached behind him and felt inside the bundle for the hard hilt of the Sword And the moment he touched
it, his perception of the two men changed.

  In Lunghai, robbers were very rare indeed. But stories about them were common enough, and many of the village men were reluctant to undertake even necessary journeys on these roads, except in groups. Arnfinn, listening to the stories, had mentally allied himself with the braver village men, and had tended to dismiss such fears as a sign of timidity. Now, however, matters suddenly wore a somewhat different aspect.

  There was no obvious reason to assume that these two men were robbers. But Arnfinn, from the moment he touched Sightblinder, was certain that they were. When they looked toward him, and then started in his direction, he stopped his mount, then turned it off the road at an angle, urging it to its greatest speed. It was a young animal, and healthy enough, but the healthiest load beast was not a riding-beast, and certainly not a racer.

  Behind him now the men’s voices were hailing him, in friendly tones, but Arnfinn ignored the call. He steered his animal among trees, and forced it through a thicket, trying to get himself well out of their sight.

  Halfway into the thicket his mount rebelled against this strange procedure, and came to a stubborn halt. He saw, through a thin screen of dead leaves, the two men on their swift riding-beasts go cantering by on the road he had just left. They were a savage-looking pair now in their anger, muttering curses as they rode, and Arnfinn noted with a feeling of faintness that they both had drawn long knives from somewhere. Robbers, no doubt about it. Murderers. He twisted in his saddle as soon as they had passed, and with shaking hands he started to undo the bundle that held the Sword.

  His fumbling fingers let the burden go, and with a noisy crash it fell from the animal’s rump into the dry twigs of the thicket. At once one of the robbers’ voices sounded, startlingly near; they must have already turned, they were already coming back to kill him.

  Jumping, almost falling, from his saddle after the Sword, Arnfinn, praying to all the gods whose names he had ever heard, scrambled after Sightblinder on the ground. At last he reached it. Unable to get the bundle open quickly, he thrust his right hand inside and grasped the Sword’s hilt, and felt the full power of it flow into his hand. That flow was not of warmth, nor cold, it was of something he could not have described, but it passed through the skin as cold or heat would pass.