The Silver Stone

by Joel Rosenberg

  The horse snorted; it sounded like a thunderclap.

  “So?” A voice screeched from behind him. “Should that be a surprise?

  “Should I question my vision,

  “Should I doubt my eyes?”

  Arnie spun around.

  A raven sat on a tree stump, glossy wings folded back, eyeing them skeptically.

  Ian just smiled at the raven, as though recognizing an old friend. “Hugin or Munin?” Ian asked.

  “Munin,” the bird said. “Memory.

  “Munin I have always been, and

  “Munin I shall ever be.

  “Are you Ian Silver Stone,

  “Or are you Ian Silver Stein?

  “Answer in your language,

  “Or tell me in mine.”

  “Either,” Ian said. “Jeg star till dinab Deres’t‘jenest.”

  And why the hell would Ian put himself at the service of a raven? And—

  It hit Arnie like an electric shock—Ian had spoken in a language that had the lilt, the music of Norski, perhaps, but it wasn’t a language Arnie had ever heard before.

  And how had Arnie known that the bird’s name meant Memory?

  And waitaminute. The bird hadn’t spoken in English; it had been Bersmal. Arnie had understood it without having to think about it.

  Ian was watching him, head cocked to one side, perhaps in unconscious imitation of the raven. “It works, I see,” he said.

  “And even if it didn’t work for you, it worked for me,” the raven cawed—this time in English, with an accent that sounded vaguely British.

  “I have heard the words before,

  “And if not for the remembering,

  “What is Memory for?”

  At a sound from behind him, the bird turned; Arnie followed his gaze to see Ivar del Hival and Hosea at the top of the path, Hosea’s arm thrown over Ivar’s broad shoulders, Ivar half-supporting him.

  “I see you, Orfindel,” the bird said. “I can remember you fatter;

  “Has age finally caught up with you,

  “Or is something else the matter?”

  Hosea nodded. “And I see you, Munin. We’ve come—”

  “I know why you’ve come,” a voice boomed.

  There had been no sound of footsteps on the gravel path behind them, or if there had, they had been covered by the rush of the river.

  But a man stood there, leaning on a spear.

  His age was impossible to guess. His hair and full beard were gray—a dark and threatening gray, the gray of a thunderhead, peppered with strands of black, not a cottony Santa Claus beard—and his face was weathered and creased like old leather. But his shoulders were broad, and his back was straight and unbowed, and he stood with a young, strong man’s ease.

  He wore heavy calf-high boots, laced with leather, his trousers bloused, and his shoulders and torso covered by a cloak that rose into a hood that covered half his face, leaving one unblinking eye watching them all.

  He was a big man, perhaps six feet tall, but somehow he seemed taller.

  “You’ve come to see to the healing of Orfindel,” he said. His voice was a rumble of distant thunder. “For the second time, Ian Silverstone,” he said to Ian, ignoring the rest of them as though they weren’t there. “You’ve come unbidden. But I do give you greetings, even though I do not give you welcome.”

  “G-greetings, Harbard,” Ian said. His lips tightened, and he swallowed once, hard, and then spoke quietly, with only a small stutter in his voice. “I seem to recall having sent something of value this way,” he said.

  “This way, you did,” the bird cawed, loud and piercingly.

  “And this way it came,

  “But you bound Hugin to give it to her, not to him.

  “They argued, but he claimed it was your decision, and not merely your whim.

  “But as much as they argued, it all was the same.”

  Harbard reached out a hand in an odd gesture, his fingers spread, but not far, vaguely curled, as though pointing with them. His fingers were long and thick, and his arm was covered with thick gray hair from the root of the fingers up to where it emerged from his shirt. A round, puckered scar on the back of his hand was almost hidden by the hair.

  “And now, she is gone,” Harbard said, “at least for a time, putting it somewhere for safekeeping, she says.” He let the arm drop by his side. “She climbed aboard Silvertop’s broad back, and rode off without a backwards glance.”

  That was something Arnie could understand, at least the gist of it: Harbard’s wife had left him to hide the Brisingamen ruby that Ian had spoken of, and he was lonely.

  Arnie nodded in silent commiseration.

  Harbard looked him over, penetratingly. “And who would you be?” he asked.

  “My name is Arnold Selmo,” Arnie said, drawing himself up straight. He might be feeling young and more bouncy than he had in a quarter of a century, but he wasn’t a kid, to be sent stuttering by a glare.

  “Ah.” His face was still half-hidden by the hood. “I remember you. You were a brave man in your youth. There was a time—” He stopped himself and raised a palm, fingers widespread, a sign of stopping, of apology. “That is the trouble when you get old. You let your mind stray towards the what that was, and not the what that is.”

  “Look,” Ian said, “Hosea’s got trouble, and—”

  “As do I,” Harbard said, sharply. “As do I,” he repeated, slowly, carefully. “I will try to ease his trouble if you will ease mine.”

  Ian’s smile looked forced, and his voice sounded strained. “Sure. What do you need, the broomstick of the Wicked Witch of the West?”

  For a long moment, Harbard stood silent. Then his mouth opened, with a broad smile that was accompanied by a deep laugh that shouldn’t have sounded as threatening as it did.

  He threw back the hood of his cloak, revealing a black eyepatch that covered his left eye. “We shall go inside and talk about it, while we eat,” he said. “There is much to talk about, Ian Silver Stone.”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” the bird cawed. “There is much to discuss: what we’ll do for you, and what you’ll do for us.”

  Arnie didn’t like this one bit. But shit, there was a lot he didn’t like, and he was used to it.

  Well, Harbard’s cooking sure wasn’t worm a trip, Ian decided. Not a trip through the Hidden Ways, and barely a walk across a room. The stew was probably just venison that had been boiled until it fell apart, seasoned with a handful of crushed wild onions, although a bit of salt and pepper from Ian’s kit improved it considerably.

  On the other hand, the apples from the apple barrel just inside the door were incredibly sweet, with a quiet tartness that lingered on the tongue. It was like biting into perfectly aged cider, perhaps, except that there were rich, creamy overtones to the taste. And maybe a hint of blackberries? It looked like an ordinary enough apple, with more Macintosh than Delicious in its ancestry. But the vaguely golden flesh was firm without being hard, crunchy to the bite.

  The strange thing, though, was how filling it was. The smell of the stew had reminded him painfully how long it had been since their sketchy breakfast, and he was certain he could empty the bowl of stew and eat a dozen of the apples, but after wolfing down a moderate bowl of stew, it was all he could do to nibble one apple down to the core.

  Hosea lay behind him, stretched out on a cot near the stove, propped up with pillows improvised from sacks of cornhusks, while Arnie and Ivar del Hival flanked Harbard, who sat on the other side of the table, having sat down to his own meal after serving them with surprising grace and goodwill, considering.

  Ian finished nibbling at the core of the apple, and started to set it down on his plate.

  Keep the seeds, Hosea murmured, his voice pitched too low for anybody else to hear. Plant them, somewhere, some time. The fruit of their trees will not have the same virtue as those which were tended by Idunn and now by Freya, but they will grow in any soil.

  “You have been made welcom
e,” Harbard said in fluent Bersmal that had a hint, perhaps, of the lilt of an older language, “with water, food, and fire, and now, perhaps, it is the time to discuss a matter of… ”business.“ ” He said the last word in English, perhaps because the same word in Bersmal didn’t quite have the same neutral connotation.

  “ ‘Business’,” Arnie Selmo said. “What business do we have?” He had clearly been following the discussion in Bersmal, but spoke only in English. Deliberately, or couldn’t he manage in Bersmal? Ian couldn’t tell.

  “I…” Harbard said, slowly, “have need of a herald, a messenger, to one of the Vandestish. He—or they—seem to be intent on provoking a war with the Middle Dominions. You spoke earlier of seeing a Tyr-son on patrol.”

  Ivar del Hival nodded. “Well, that’s an obvious enough explanation for the Vandestish patrol we sported.” He took another bite from his apple. “The Margrave of the Hinterlands, perhaps?”

  “He … appears to be involved. And that war must needs be stopped,” Harbard said, “before it ever begins.”

  “Well, that would be nice,” Ivar del Hival said, “but who will go to bind the wolf?”

  “You cannot,” Harbard said. “No matter what token you carried, you are still fealty-bound to the House of Fire, and would not be accepted; your oath is to the Fire and the Sky, not to me.”

  “Well, yes, it is.” Ivar del Hival nodded. “True enough. I was nervous about being even on the fringes of Vandescard. And still am, for that matter.” He spread his hands. “But be that as it may, what can one do?”

  “Ian Silverstone will carry it. You will fall under his protection. That is likely to save you.”

  Ivar del Hival frowned. “I’ve always preferred better odds than ‘likely’, but so be it.”

  Ian was puzzled. Why would Odin—or Harbard, or whatever he called himself these days—want to have a war stopped? And what did Ian and his friends have to do with that?

  “Why?” Arnie Selmo’s lined face was unreadable. Ian wouldn’t have wanted to play poker with him, not now. “Why,” he said, choosing his words slowly, “would red-handed Odin, the carrion-god, want to stop a war? Why would he not want to see yet another field fertilized with the blood and shit of dead young men?”

  Ivar del Hival started to rise to his feet, but dropped back to his chair. “Odin?”

  Shitshitshit. The last thing they needed to do was aggravate Harbard, particularly with Freya gone.

  “If I had cared to be called Odin,” Harbard said, his voice the roar of approaching thunder, “I would have so named myself.” Harbard rose slowly, the tips of his broad fingers pressed gently against the surface of the table. “There was a time, youngster,” he said, his voice husky, “when I would have slapped your head from your shoulders for such impertinence.”

  Ian considered the grip of Giantkiller, next to his left shoulder, as it hung in its scabbard on the back of his chair.

  He didn’t like his chances much, and besides—

  “But old men have to learn patience,” Arnie said, not backing down, his eyes on Harbard’s, “and they can’t let themselves have the recklessness, the impetuousness, the go-to-hell of youth. They have to learn how to balance what they want with what they can do, and they have to, perhaps worst of all, learn how to let others do for them what they could once do for themselves.

  “They have to learn that foul, horrible word: settle. They—no, we. We have to learn how to settle.” His lips were tight, but his hands were loose on the table in front of him. “If you could do for yourself what you need to have done, you wouldn’t be negotiating with us. So, old one, if you are going to negotiate, then sit down at the table and tell us what you offer, and what you want. Settle, Harbard.”

  Harbard stood silently for a moment, his massive hands clenched at his sides, visibly fighting for control. “So be it,” he said. He reached into his pouch and brought out a ring, and slipped it over a thick knuckle. It was plain and unadorned, a simple gold band, gently rounded, too thick to be a wedding ring. It reminded Ian of another ring, of a ring he had come to hate, but this looked only vaguely similar. This one was plain, uninscribed, and it didn’t have that red stone with the nauseating symbol on it.

  “Try this on,” Harbard said. He rolled it across the table to Ian, who reflexively picked it up. It felt warm, body-temperature or maybe a little warmer, and was heavier than it ought to be. It was obviously too large for Ian’s ring finger; he tried the index finger and then the middle finger of his left hand, with no success; he tried the thumb, and there it fit comfortably, if a trifle snugly. Ian slid it off and held it on his palm for a moment—it still seemed heavier than it ought—before setting it down in front of Harbard.

  “Draupnir?” he asked. “Odin had a ring called Draupnir. Every eight days—”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” Harbard dismissed the idea with a wave. “Dropper. Yes, every eight days it would drop eight rings. The vestri can be blamed for that silly tale; they’ve always been overly fond of gold. It never existed. Call this Harbard’s Ring, if you like.”

  “And they’re going to believe me because I have a gold ring on my thumb,” Ian said.

  Harbard’s unblinking eyes stared at Ian from under heavy brows. Ian couldn’t tell what color the eyes were, though, even though he was looking right at them, a bird hypnotized by an unblinking snake.

  “They will believe you because you are my herald, my messenger, my spokesman, Ian Silverstein,” he said, the rumble in his voice making the dishes dance on the rough surface of the table. “That is enough.” He was silent for a long moment, then dropped his gaze to the surface of the table. One blunt finger played with a small pool of spilled cider as he spoke. “I’m old and tired, Ian Silverstein,” he said, his voice no longer the rumble of a god but the high, quiet one of an old man, “and that’s the truth. I am not now what I was, and I will be even less as the millennia spin by, out of control. My wife has left me, and while I think she shall return, I don’t think she’ll return to a war-torn land.”

  He looked at Arnie Selmo. “I would hope, young one, that you would understand how horrible it is to grow old alone.”

  “Yeah, I know something about it.” Arnie’s expression was cold granite. “Too much about it. So what do we do now?”

  Harbard stood slowly, an old man whose every movement was painful. “I now shall take down my spear, but by my oath and affirmation, know that I do not do so intending to strike at any now in this room.”

  Harbard walked to the front door, and removed the spear that hung above it.

  It was hard to tell how it all changed, but it was different. The top of his gray head came no nearer the overhead beams, and he didn’t fill the doorway any more than he already had. But somehow, as he held the worn wooden shaft, he seemed to grow, to swell until his presence if not his body filled the room almost to bursting.

  A distant bass thrumming filled the air, and when Harbard set the butt of the spear against the wooden floor as he sat back down in his chair, the whole cottage shook, sending dishes dancing on the shelves, some of them falling and smashing themselves on the rough-hewn floorboards.

  Ian knew that he should have felt frightened, but for the life of him, he could not disbelieve Harbard. He tried to, but he couldn’t.

  “You will wear my ring and carry Gungnir, as my herald,” he said to Ian, his single eye unblinking. His voice was pitched low, but even so, it was painfully loud, a voice that could splinter mountains with a shout. “And you will tell the Vandestish that this war is not to be, that my peace will not be shattered, not by humans who claim the mantle of the Vanir, not by others.”

  He leaned the spear toward Ian, who reached out a hand to take it.

  “No.” Hosea was on his feet, an arm outstretched. “You must not so much as touch it. Any of the Elder weapons would tear off the hand of the mortal that gripped it.” His voice started to slur, and he weaved like a drunk trying to gain his balance, but he fought for stability and contro
l.

  “Unless, of course …”

  “No.” Hosea’s mouth worked silently. “Ian Silver-stein is brave—braver than he knows—and true of heart. But he’s not Aesir.”

  Harbard nodded slowly. “I had considered that.” He turned back to Ian. “Look down on the table before you.”

  They hadn’t been there a moment before, but a pair of gloves lay on the table, to one side of Ian’s plate. Unornamented, they were woven of fine white silk—no, not silk—it was—

  Hair.

  Her hair.

  “She left these behind; she spun the hair into thread, twisted the thread into yarn, and knitted the gloves herself,” Harbard said. “You should, perhaps, try them on.”

  Ian quickly slipped one on, then the other. They were, surprisingly, exactly the right size, even down to the way that the left one fit his slightly overlong ring finger perfectly. And they didn’t feel like hair; they were practically a second skin, cool and comforting. And while they were soft and silky, they seemed to grip his hands like dry latex, so much so that for a moment he feared he wouldn’t be able to take them off. But one nervous tug was all that it took to remove one; he quickly slipped his fingers back in.

  He reached out a hand toward the shaft of the spear. It was strangely hard to get his gloved fingers to work; his hand felt distant, remote, like it belonged to somebody else. He concentrated, and slowly, slowly his fingers dosed around the shaft. The deep thrumming became a silent shout that echoed through his mind.

  And then his other hand closed on the shaft, and it fell silent and still. Ian moved to set the butt of the spear against the floor. It moved slowly at first, as though it had more inertia than its weight should have permitted, then quickly, as though it was light as a straw, only to come to rest gently against the rough wood of the floor. Ian’s hands tightened, then loosened, around the spear’s shaft. It would be important to be careful with it; he knew that a blow from the butt of Gungnir could shatter stone.

  “Yes, do treat it gingerly. It is strong, and wise, but Gungnir never has permitted itself to be abused.” Harbard nodded. “When you are finished, throw it hard toward me.”