The First Book of Swords

by Фред Сейберхэген

  They crowded together on the surface, peering between sharp rocks at the surrounding lake.

  "We'll have to make for shore before morning — but which direction?"

  Mark held up the Sword of Chance. When he pointed it almost straight away from the castle, he could feel something in the hilt. It was impossible to see how far away the shore was in that direction.

  "I can't swim," Barbara admitted.

  "And I cant swim carrying two swords," Mark added.

  Ben said: "Maybe I can, if I have to. Let's see, maybe it isn't deep."

  The lake was only waist deep on Ben where he first entered it. He shed bits of armor, letting them sink. From that point, following the indication of the blade Mark held ahead of him, the three fugitives waded into indeterminate gloom.

  The sword worked just as well under the surface of the water as above it. At one point Mark had to go in to his armpits, but no deeper. From there on the bottom rose, and already a vague shoreline of trees was visible ahead. The strip of beach, when they reached it, was only two meters wide, and waves lapped it, ready to efface whatever footprints they might leave.

  The sheltering trees were close to shore, and just inland from their first ranks a small clearing offered grass to rest on.

  For a moment. Then, just beyond the nearest thicket, something stirred, making vague crackling sounds of movement. Mark let Ben grab up Coinspinner from the grass, while he himself drew Dragonslicer from its sheath.

  They moved forward cautiously, around a clump of bushes. An obscure shape, big as a landwalker but not as tall, moved in the night. There was a faint squeal from it, a muffled rumble… the squeal of ungreased axles, the rumble of an empty wagonbody draped with a torn scrap of cover.

  The two loadbeasts harnessed to the empty wagon were skittish, and behaved in general as if they had been untended for some time. This wagon was smaller than the one the dragonhunters had once owned. This one too had some symbols or a design painted on its sides, but the night was too dark for reading symbols. Barbara murmured that this must be the vehicle of some other fairgrounds performer, whose team must have bolted during the recent speedy evacuation.

  There were reins, quite functional once they were untangled. With Barbara resting in the back, Ben drove forth from thickets looking for a road. Dragonslicer was at his feet, and Mark on the seat at his side with Coinspinner in hand. The Sword of Chance was coming alive again, telling him which way to go.

  THE END

  The Song of Swords

  Who holds Coinspinner knows good odds

  Whichever move he make

  But the Sword of Chance, to please the gods,

  Slips from him like a snake.

  The Sword of Justice balances the pans

  Of right and wrong, and foul and fair.

  Eye for an eye, Doomgiver scans

  The fate of all folk everywhere.

  Dragonslicer, Dragonslicer, how d'you slay?

  Reaching for the heart in behind the scales.

  Dragonslicer, Dragonslicer where do you stay?

  In the belly of the giant that my blade impales.

  Farslayer howls across the world

  For thy heart, for thy heart, who hast wronged me!

  Vengeance is his who casts the blade

  Yet he will in the end no triumph see.

  Whose flesh the Sword of Mercy hurts has drawn no breath;

  Whose soul it heals has wandered in the night,

  Has paid the summing of all debts in death

  Has turned to see returning light.

  The Mindsword spun in the dawn's gray light

  And men and demons knelt down before.

  The Mindsword flashed in the midday bright

  Gods joined the dance, and the march to war.

  It spun in the twilight dim as well

  And gods and men marched off to hell.

  1 shatter Swords and splinter spears;

  None stands to Shieldbreaker

  My point's the fount of orphans' tears

  My edge the widowmaker.

  The Sword of Stealth is given to

  One lowly and despised.

  Sightblinder's gifts: his eyes are keen

  His nature is disguised.

  The Tyrant's Blade no blood hath spilled

  But doth the spirit carve

  Soulcutter hath no body killed

  But many left to starve.

  The Sword of Siege struck a hammer's blow

  With a crash, and a smash, and a tumbled wall.

  Stonecutter laid a castle low

  With a groan, and a roar, and a tower's fall.

  Long roads the Sword of Fury makes

  Hard walls it builds around the soft

  The fighter who Townsaver takes

  Can bid farewell to home and croft.

  Who holds Wayfinder finds good roads

  Its master's step is brisk.

  The Sword of Wisdom lightens loads

  But adds unto their risk.

  Sword-Play

  An Appreciative Afterword

  By

  Sandra Miesel

  But Iron — Cold Iron — is master of them all.

  — Kipling

  From the kindling of the first fire to the latest breakthrough in computer design, each technological advance opens new levels of play in an age — old game for the mastery of Life. Calling Man's struggle for control over his environment a "game" is no idle figure of speech. Ours is a species of players as well as makers. Indeed, these two intertwined qualities describe humanness. Laughter and reason alike set us apart from beasts.

  Work and play are meant to reinforce each other. Sundering them is a measure of human imperfection the wages of original sin, some say — and their union is a sign of Eden's innocence. Yet no matter how tragically estranged labor and leisure become, we still dimly feel that matters should be otherwise and wish our work could be joyful as child's play.

  Slow-paced primitive societies take time to harmonize work and play. Each new way of working has to be played about so that it can be thought about sanely. Myth and ritual put technology into context, make it "user friendly."

  Consider the discovery of fire. It brought Early Man far more than light, warmth, protection, or any merely practical advantage. Fire became the focal point of the community, acquired symbolic meanings, participated in ceremonies, appeared in heroic tales, even received worship. Though we harness vaster energies now, echoes of the ways cavemen worked and played with fire resound in us at every sulking of a match.

  Likewise, tool-shaping, agriculture, metal-crafting — all the basic innovations — were transformed through playful celebration. These human activities became holy because making and playing were seen as divine operations. In some cultures, the world a creator-god has made is a battlefield for contending supernatural powers. In others, existence is a game the Absolute plays with Itself throughout eternity. The patterns also hold in Judeo-Christian contexts: Holy Wisdom plays beside Yaweh when He lays the foundations of the earth and Christ the carpenter has been symbolized by a clown.

  Speculative thought moves beyond imagery to ponder the ethics of work and play. What limits — if any exist on the ways we may shape matter? If a thing can be made, should it be made? How far can the quest for mastery go and by what means? If Life is a game, what are the rules? Does the outcome matter, or are victories as hollow as defeats? Who are the players and what are the pawns? Are the competing sides really different or ultimately the same? Is some supreme referee keeping score?

  Fred Saberhagen is genuinely comfortable with these questions. He believes that human acts have meaning and that we can compete for an everlasting prize. His grounding in traditional Western values gives his writing the staunchness of ancient and hallowed stone.

  Saberhagen's technical expertise and mythic instinct equip him to fabulize reality and rationalize fable. Scientific data quicken his imagination: he can find a story in a squash seed or a spatial sing
ularity. His innate feeling for archetype transforms specific facts into universal images. Thus in The Veils of Azarloc (1978), outre astrophysics provides a unique metaphor for the blurry barriers Time wraps about us.

  Examples abound in his popular berserker series (Berserker, 1967; Brother Assassin, 1969; Berserker's Planet, 1975; Berserker Man, 1979; The Ultimate Enemy, 1979; and The Berserker Wars, 1981). The berserkers are automated alien spacecraft that begin as deadly mechanisms but swiftly become symbols of Death itself. These ravening maws of Chaos, these "demons in metal disguise" are today's answer to the scythewielding Grim Reaper of old. "They speak to our fear of mad computers and killer machines with jaws that bite and claws that snatch." The general pattern governing the wonder-war between Life and Death is embellished with allusions to particular myths (an Orpheus sings in a cybernetic Hades) and legendary historical incidents (a Don John of Austria fights a Battle of Lepanto in space).

  While Saberhagen's hard sf can soar into metaphysical realms, his fantasy has a matter-of-fact solidity about it that leaves no room for disbelief. This quality is admirably demonstrated in his Dracula series. These novels (The Dracula Tapes, 1976; The Holmes-Dracula File, 1978; An Old Friend of the Family, 1979; and Thorn, 1980) condense the murky haze of folklore and gothic romance surrounding vampires into premises that can stand the light of day. The Count's ascerbic character and occult gifts are made all the more convincing by the strictly authentic settings (Victorian England, Renaissance Italy, contemporary America) through which he moves. Furthermore, as an unforeseen player in sundry power games, the Count is an agent of rough justice and a witness to some higher law governing all creation.

  Fact and fancy are complimentary categories for Saberhagen because, as indicated above, his art depends on disciplined exchanges between the two. Since both possible and impossible worlds have their technologies, either applied science or practical magic, technological issues are prominent in Saberhagen's work.

  His concern for making is matched by an enthusiasm for playing, perhaps because his personal hobbies include chess, karate, and computers. Whether mental, physical, or cybernetic, games are a recurring device in Saberhagen's fiction.

  His gaming principles can be deduced from the berserker series. Indeed, the berserkers themselves were invented to serve as the antagonist that a games' theory ploy defeats ("Fortress Ship"/" Without a Thought," 1963). Although most of the battles are fought between computers ("faithful slave of life against outlaw, neither caring, neither knowing"), one killer machine is undone by joining in a human recreational warsimulation game ("The Game," 1977). Direct personal combat still retains its place — Berserker's Planet features a rigged tournament of duels to the death and dialectical clashes abound. As the series expands, its military campaigns grow more complex, ranging across time as well as space and employing psychological and spiritual as well as physical strategems. The initial struggle for survival gradually unfolds into a conflict of vast cosmic import.

  No compromise is possible between the opposing players. The berserkers are "as near to absolute evil as anything material can be." Resisting them requires total mobilization and eternal vigilance since no victory over them is ever quite perfect or complete.

  The cause of Life turns enemies into allies but alliances change to emnities in the camp of Death. Yet the contending sides are not homogeneous: humans use thinking machines and berserkers incorporate living tissue. The cyborg hero of Berserker Man becomes humanity's paladin without denying the machine side of his nature. In the long run, Life may be more at risk from treachery by the living than from attack by the unliving. The berserkers' "goodlife" servants are worse than their masters because they freely choose and bleakly enjoy their perversions. These worshipers of destruction are but one particular expression of sentient beings bent toward sin. Before the berserkers came to be, Evil was.

  Turns of play proceed by ironic reversals of fortune. The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong. Pawns have a way of becoming kings — and vice versa. Unable to penetrate the councils of the light, darkness often falls into its own malicious snares. Even when it wields planet-shattering weapons, Evil can be defeated by a child, an animal, or even a plant. Eucatastrophe, the unexpected happy ending, is always possible when the game is bravely — and skillfully played.

  The stakes could not be higher. The very nature of the universe is being put to wager of battle. Is existence a circular parade of ants? ("What did it all matter?" asks one villain. "Was it not a berserker universe already, everything determined by the random swirls of condensing gas, before the stars were born?") Or is it a march towards a glorious destination? Defeating Death's legions vindicates the evolutionary potential latent in every bit of Life.

  Likewise, human art, love, holiness, even humor and personal quirks can transcend the laws of probability that govern berserkers. Machine intelligence cannot grasp why "the most dangerous life units of all sometimes acted in ways that seemed to contradict the known supremacy of the laws of physics and chance." Capacity for growth and choice is humankind's passport to a paradoxical space-time region — and a boundless future — barred to its unliving foes.

  Unto what purpose was the match held? Perhaps to let Life win its laurels under fire. Virtue untried by adversity is meaningless. Moreover, the game does not end where it began. Neither players nor field will ever be the same again. Evil has only improved what it sought to annihilate. The berserker wars are but one set among the contests being played out instant by instant until the end of time. Yet whatever the odds in Death's favor, Saberhagen stubbornly proclaims that Life will wear the victor's crown.

  The same ground rules obeyed in the berserker series reappear in all Saberhagen's fiction because they express his personal — and highly traditional values. Length and continuity permit some especially engrossing refinements of play in The Empire of the East (1979), the revised one-volume edition of a trilogy originally published as The Broken Lands (1968), The Black Mountains (1971), and Changeling Earth (1973).

  Ingenious though he is, Saberhagen has never been wildly innovative. His strength as a writer lies in seeing old concepts from new angles and employing them with unswerving thoroughness. Empire is a monument to these qualities. It rests on that venerable fantasy premise, "a world where magic works." In the version pioneered by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt in their Incomplete Enchanter (1942), magic totally replaces science. However, in Larry Niven's The Magic Goes Away (1978), magic is being supplanted by science. Works like Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos (1971) and Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy series show the two kinds of knowledge co-existing unequally in realistic twentieth century settings, but series by Andre Norton (Witch World) and Marion Zimmer Bradley (Darkover) set them at odds in archaic alien societies.

  Saberhagen's Empire takes place in a post-catastrophe North America whose culture is vaguely medieval. Wizardry dominates this demon-ridden age while the rare bits of technology surviving from the Old World are objects of superstitious awe. Sometimes Old and New can unite, as in the temperamental person of the djinn technologist, a being as maddeningly literalminded as a computer, who must be properly programmed to perform his magic feats.

  The novelty of the situation is why magic has become feasible. There was no thaumaturgic breakthrough. Instead, the very nature of physical reality has been fundamentally altered by the doomsday weapons used in a past global war. The probability of occult phenomena occurring has increased enormously. "Since the Change it could scarcely be said that anything was lifeless; powers that before had only been potentialities now responded readily to the wish, the incantation, were motivated and controlled by the dream-like logic of the wizard's world." Meanwhile, the likelihood of certain physical reactions and technical aptitude itself have correspondingly declined. Or as the author himself remarks, "We are not justified in assuming that all physical laws are immutable through the whole universe of space and time."

  But no matter how much else may
change, the craving for mastery endures. Whether engineers or wizards build their war gear, conquerors will be conquerors still. The tyrant of the age is John Ominor ("The AllDevourer"), Emperor of the East, a man far wickeder than the demons he binds to his will. Not long before the story opens, Ominor's armies consumed the last independent bit of the continent, the Broken Lands along the West Coast. But before his world dominion can be perfectly secured, rebels calling themselves the Free Folk challenge his despotic rule. Aided by a quasimaterial power named Ardneh, they fight their way up through the feudal hierarchy, from satrap past viceroy to confront the Emperor himself.

  Each volume of the trilogy has a different source of mythic inspiration. As the text itself explains, The Broken Lands is based on an Indian myth concerning the god Indra and the demon Namuci. The gods (devas) and demons (asuras) of India are the opposite poles of the same transcendent nature. Each side continually struggles to amass enough spiritual energy to subdue the other. Indra the Thunderer; god of storm, war, and fertility; rider of the white elephant Airavata; Guardian of the Eastern Quarter of the Universe; once swore an extravagant oath of friendship with the powerful drought demon Namuci. Later, he slipped through a loophole in the terms to slay the complacent demon. (Georges Dumezil's Destiny of the Warrior exhaustively analyzes this episode as a key Indo-European myth.) In other adventures, mighty Indra also slew Trisiras, a triple-headed hybrid of god and demon, and Vritra, a cosmic dragon who had impounded the waters of life.

  Saberhagen works some clever and selective transformations on this raw material. Indra's discus-shaped Thunderstone appears as a practical device for making rain or war. The oath becomes a prophecy of retribution by Arneh, the mysterious presence who can manifest himself in persons, places, or things. Namuci is the East's cruel satrap Ekuman, leigeman of demons, and the sea-spume that kills him is fireextinguisher foam. The instrument of Arneh's justice is a youth named Rolf who has a natural affinity for technology and the courage to ride the atomic-powered elephant to victory.