The Forge in the Forest

by Michael Scott Rohan

  "No, I," sighed Elof. "The nearness of the Ice makes me restless, weary as I am. I shall sleep the better for growing used to it."

  "As you will! I am past all argument." The warrior pulled his hood over his face, and pillowed his head on his arm. Roc and Ils were already asleep. Elof felt suddenly dreadfully alone. He warmed his hands once more at the meager blaze, rose and clambered out into the archway and the Iceglow. Two nights without sleep, as he reckoned it, and with only a little food, had made him weaker than he realized; his legs wobbled beneath him, and a deep ache burned in his bones. At least that would help him keep awake, and should grow less as he sat awhile. But time passed, and it did not; indeed, it worsened a little, or he felt it more clearly, and found in it a shade of the pain his first steps on the living Ice had cost him.

  High up over the curve of the world glided a cold sliver of moon, like the sail of some unseen bark. Even to that faint radiance the Ice awoke, and Elof, who had been sitting numb and heedless in misery, sat up with a gasp. A greater spectacle it was than ever he had seen before, even in the Northlands. Here there were no mountains to hedge in that dazzling desolation, few outcroppings above it save this. The Ice shone out clear, unbroken, boundless from one edge of the world to the other and beyond, one vast sweeping sea of shimmering splendor, one enormous jewel that made the petty majesties of men seem minute, mean, transient.

  But even as that feeling came to him, he thought back upon Morvan, upon the mighty dead of Dorghael Arhlan-nen, and he cast it back, rejecting it utterly. Small wonder that the Ice provoked such thoughts; they were enshrined in it, spawned by the minds that made it. But slight and flawed as living things might be, at least they lived; they grew, they strove, and in their several ways they loved. And all those things men did, and had minds also. They could love the diverse riches of life, but still savor this sterile glory; theirs was the world in both its aspects. And by that much were the kindred of men richer, stronger, greater than those rebel Powers. Looking out over this, the embodiment of their narrowed vision, he almost found it in himself to pity them.

  As the moon climbed higher he found that the Ice grew tiring to watch, that his eyes seemed to be playing tricks upon him. Every so often in the distance northward he would see a sheen or flicker of light, but whether in Ice or sky he could not be certain; it would play slowly across the brightness for a moment, then vanish and reappear somewhere else, sometimes nearer, sometimes more distant. It began to disturb him, and he reminded himself he should be watching every way. He stood up stiffly and, staying in the shadow of the arch, turned southward. To his surprise, in this clearer light it looked as if the Ice there did not extend quite so far, as if it might end before the horizon. But as he could see nothing beyond it but sky, he could not be sure. Then something in the distance flickered: he groaned, rubbed his eyes and blinked. But when he looked again he saw it still, and more distinctly. This was no trick of his sight: it was on the Ice and moving, moving very fast, straight toward this hill. He turned to wake the others, but a sudden wailing wind ruffled his hair and plucked at his cloak, strongly enough in his weakened state to make him stumble. Then the shape was already, incredibly, almost at the hill's foot. And when he saw what it was, he stood in gaping amazement one moment too long. For the figure in the heavy mantle of midnight blue had already swung himself from the huge horse, and was striding up the rocky slope at as fierce a pace as if it was some trifling hummock.

  Elof gathered his wits. This time he would confront this weird wanderer, this time he would demand straight answers from this Raven who pecked and plucked so lightly at his destiny. Grateful as he was for the good things done him, he had a right to be angered at the play that was made of him, as if he were only some mindless piece on a gaming board. He was not; he knew he was not; and before much longer, come what may, the Raven would know it too. Elof ducked back into shadow, and as the heavy footfall passed he stepped out with all the grace he could muster, his hand held out to greet and to command.

  As well might he have sought to bar the wind in its course. The mantled figure swept up unheeding, and only its shadow touched him. But that touch struck him dumb, appalled, terrified. As from heights unguessable it fell upon him, and for an instant the swirling mantle seemed a thunderhead of cloud cresting the summit of the hill, the staff taller than the tallest trees of Tapiau. As immense as the Powers carved on the corridors of Dorghael Arhlannen he saw that shape, a towering shadowy vastness against the stars. Then it passed by him, and it was no taller than a tall man; but still its shadow swallowed up the arch, and Elof within it. He could only stand still and stare as the figure bestrode the hillcrest, and brandished its staff as if to strike down the wheeling stars. He could only listen, as it cried out in that same voice he had first heard upon the wind outside his marshland smithy, that rang out now above the gusts that wailed about the hilltop.

  Hearken, Louhi! Taounehtar, hark! From deepest Ice heed my behest! I call you up, I summon you

  From your bleak caves.

  From your stark caverns, arise!

  Louhi!

  Louhi!

  Mistress of Ice!

  From shimmering stillness

  Rise to the heights!

  Strong songs compel you!

  Hearken and answer!

  Wisdom within you

  I would awake!

  Louhi! Louhi!

  Lady of Death!

  Hearken and heed me.

  Hear me, and come!

  Silence fell as the song ended, fell like a blade. The breeze sank, the chill grew stronger, biting into Elof's trembling flesh. The tall figure stood unmoving as if it had taken root in the bare stone, its staff outthrust at the sky. But suddenly at the staff's head, wavering, crackling, sparking, a great column of green balefire burst out. Slowly the hooded head turned to the northwest. Elof followed its gaze, and sank down, shivering. Intense, vivid, closer far, that shimmer he had seen coursed through the Ice, and the whiteness darkened and grew transparent as if melted all in a moment to a deep pool. And within that depth stars awoke, mirroring the blazing skies overhead. Yet the stars above were still, while their images leaped suddenly, darted and swirled in the deeps like small fish around one single point of blue light that did not move. Brighter it waxed, broader, clearer it grew, until he saw in it a shape arising, floating upward as one drowned; a woman's form, unclad, her limbs outstretched and drifting, her pale hair billowing about her in some unseen current. He could see her face clearly, waxen and still, the eyes closed, the pale lips unmoving. But from the depths sang a voice, a voice clear and fair that he could not easily forget.

  Strong calls the song,

  Mighty the craft that should shield you!

  I do not sleep,

  And I am come

  Only to see who would dare …

  Deep-throated laughter echoed out across the Ice.

  A wanderer am I, and craft I called on

  To summon you far from your lair!

  A world-wide roomer,

  Thinker, Reflecter, delver of wisdom

  That lies at the roots of the world.

  Thus have I called you

  That you may answer,

  Thus am I free from your will!

  The staff swung downward in his hand, and in the swirl of its passage the green fire guttered into nothing. A black blade glittered in its place, that struck the stone of the hilltop into leaping, dazzling sparks. Elof blinked, and when his eyes opened the Ice stretched out unbroken, white and bleak as before; but another figure stood atop the hill. Slender and fair she was as the Wanderer was massive, and very straight she stood, haughty pride in the angle of her head, in the blazing sapphire of her eyes. Exactly as last he had seen her, years past, did she look, her pale fine hair gathered back from her brow but spilling in cascades about the shoulders of the soft white robes she wore, through which the starlight shone. And the quiet chime of her voice still set him ashiver, even with cool anger in its tone.

&n
bsp; "You are not what you would seem! Why summon me thus? Have you sunk to the level of the witless things you shield, that you must don their shape to speak with me?"

  The dark voice was calm. "You are not what you wish to believe! For though you deem yourself a conqueror, lady, yet to your own impatience are you still a slave. I came to save you some trouble, that is all. To tell you where he is, that you most seek."

  "To tell me… Where, then, Lord of Deceptions?"

  The tall figure shifted his mantle a little, settling its shadow more thoroughly over the archway. "Why, where you cannot see him, lady. So save yourself the trouble of searching, as you have done so frantically since you sensed his presence. He is free now, and will not easily be tamed again. Spring comes, even to Taoune'la, and that dark power declines. Your consort also can hinder him no more."

  The woman who was Louhi whirled sharply about, her eyes questing out across the southward Ice, her full lips working in fury. She rounded on the tall figure. "You! Though you skulk among the heights, and seek to shield your doings from my eyes, I know of them, believe you me! You give him too much aid. He is no free champion, such as you must have, but only a shadow, a thrall, a powerless puppet of your will!"

  The suspicion of a chuckle lay under the words that the Wanderer gave in reply. "What men have from me shall only balance what other Powers set against them. So it is with him. At most, perhaps, I have shown him a few truths he might otherwise have come upon more slowly, perhaps not even in time. But he has had to earn them, and what use he makes of them is his affair entirely. When he was under the hand of the Forest, could I help him, or you hinder? Yet he escaped. Without his free courage, and that of his friends, none of this could have come about. Lady, it is you and yours, fettered in yourselves, who deal in thralls. Powers that are free, only free heroes can serve!"

  The stamp of her foot split stone. "So is it all over, then, with the Powers? What is left to you or any of us? Why need you exist, if those who should serve you must be free to make sport and scorn of you at every turn of their feeble will?"

  "Lady, lady, will you always be what you were? Will you not learn, as I have had to, and thereby grow? Change and reshaping are the rule. They brought you into being as much as they did men, and that you cannot alter. Nor should you seek to restore what was, solely and selfishly because it pleased you! Deep in himself even grim old Taoune knows that! Or why else should he seek to pretend he preserves the minds of men, when he is only snatching at their shadows, wearing the sum of their memories like a mask of dead skin!"

  Louhi turned away angrily, still searching the Ice. To Elof s astonished eyes the falling moon seemed to settle behind her head, like a jagged crown. "And what of Tapiau?" she demanded, her voice taut and troubled. "He embraced life, yet even he abhors men, and seeks to subdue them!"

  The mantled shoulders shrugged. "Once he escaped your error, only to fall into it again. As if life and men were separable! Sooner or later must life lead to mind, in some form, just as your lifeless world had sooner or later to bear that life. Of us all, I among us, perhaps only Ilmarinen understood from the first; all things go their way appointed, and in their own time. Our hindrance or help may mean less than we think. So, there is more to come-but that you must find out for yourself!"

  The mantle shook like a shifting hill; a gigantic cawing laughter echoed through the stillness, deriding its barren majesty, stripping away its pretensions with the merry warmth of a spring breeze. Louhi's face twisted in fury. A pale flame beat down upon the hill, a curtain of light, green and scarlet, flickered and lashed about the mantled shape. Then like the echo of an angry cry it sprang away northward and faded. Below its passage the Ice heaved and shattered explosively, flinging bright shards, jagged as lightning, high into the empty sky.

  The Wanderer stood alone upon the hill a moment and then, without a glance at Elof the tall figure turned and retraced his steps down the steep slope. Behind the hill's shoulder he vanished, and a moment later the great horse sprang away across the Ice, westward after the sinking moon. Trembling, Elof lowered his brow to the cool stone, and when he lifted it again, though it seemed but a second, the stars were already paling in the eastern sky.

  On limbs first numbed, then aching, he heaved himself wearily up, brushing off gravel that had bitten into the flesh of his face, and hobbled down into the archway. There lay the others as he had left them, around a fire which had burned away unfed to a black stain upon the stone. Anxiously he started down, but at the first scrape of his foot there was a whirl of dark cloak, and Kermorvan was on his feet. The warrior blinked at the faint gleam upon the wall above, and frowned. "What, man, have you watched the night through?" Then he glanced from Elof's bruised cheek to the dead fire, and smiled wryly. "Ah, you fell asleep, did you? A mercy you did not freeze, and we also! Well, we were all of us weary…"

  "It was more than that…" mumbled Elof, as Roc and Ils began to yawn and stir. "I saw… I scarcely know what I saw, whether it was a dream or…"

  "Well, have a stab at telling," yawned Roc, "while we rekindle the fire."

  "No!" said Elof, though he yearned for the warmth and the comfort that fire gives. "We dare waste no hour of day. We are hunted, and must be off the Ice as soon as we can!"

  Kermorvan cast one swift look at him, and snatched up his pack. "Then tell us on the way! We will climb down to the very edge of the Ice, and at first light make what speed we can across it."

  "And what then?" sighed Roc gloomily, as they plodded out onto the hillside. "Back into merry Taoune'la?"

  Kermorvan glanced at the graying sky. "I cannot say. But I think you do not realize how much farther east we were taken. I am hardly certain myself; even the duergar maps do not extend this far. But by the stars we could be as far from where we fled the Forest as that place was from the Shieldrange."

  The others stared at him. "That far?" asked Ils.

  "Very possibly. Perhaps here Taoune's dead hand will hold less sway. We can only hope." He set his face to the weather-scoured stone and began to clamber down the uncertain slope, the way the Wanderer had taken.

  "We have some reason to hope," said Elof, and as they climbed, he told them of the meeting on the bare hilltop.

  "You actually heard them talk?" marveled Ils. "Talking as we do?"

  "I don't know what I heard!" confessed Elof. "Whether it was true speech, or… I don't know. But the meaning, that I am sure of. Louhi took it as an insult that he addressed her in human form. But I think, I am sure, somehow, that it was so I could hear and understand."

  "Couldn't all have been just you dreaming, could it?" Roc asked. "Had some funny ones myself, on an empty gut…"

  Elof smiled ruefully. "Dream, or vision, or whatever, how can I tell? But something happened, of that I am sure; a search, an encounter. And that we were shielded, and she misled into thinking we had already quit the Ice…" Then he fell silent, gazing at the rubble beneath his feet. "Aye, I am sure. See here, here in all this deathly Waste!" There, and all the way downhill to the very edges of the Ice, wherever there was a scrap of shelter among the barren soil, tiny stars of bright hue had sprung up. Where the Wanderer had trodden, the King's Hill was carpeted with flowers.

  "Spring comes!" said Elof. "As he promised, even to this ruined place. It is not wholly conquered!"

  "Not yet!" said Ils. "Not yet!"

  They rested for a few precious moments at the foot of the hill, watching light climb up behind the gray clouds eastward, and they ate the last of their provision to fortify themselves for the coming dash. Elof sat silent, for a thought had come to him in the middle of his tale, the memory of words he had hardly taken in. "Kermorvan," he said suddenly, "if what you said is true, then this is about as far as we might have come, if we had had no hindrance! If we had been traveling for all those months we lingered in the Forest!"

  Kermorvan frowned. "You would say that he repaid the time the Forest took from us? It could be, I suppose…"

  "Yes! As he cleare
d our way through the western Forest, because Niarad had forced us ashore too early."

  Ils nodded. "What men have from me …That must be what he meant, mustn't it?"

  "Some of it, at any rate," said Kermorvan thoughtfully. "He may also have been warning us we could expect no more help for now."

  "That was my thought also," said Elof.

  "Might be a relief!" growled Roc. "His brand of help's a whit hard to handle; I'd sooner fend for myself. Short of any more spooks at my shirttails, that is!" he added hastily.

  "I am inclined to agree with you," said Kermorvan, very gravely. "Given that small exception!" They laughed, and it was as if that living sound was answered. Molten gold spilled suddenly across the rims of the charcoal clouds, and then burst between them as a river through a crumbling wall. Long beams lanced out across the lifeless landscape, playing over the curve of the hill as a hand might caress a cheek, warming and gladdening. And from the south came a breeze that was not yet turned cutting and cold, and carried still some faint benison from warmer lands. Kermorvan sprang up, and threw back his cloak. "That is our sign! Let us not waste a second of it!" He strode out onto the Ice, and Ils after him. Elof hesitated, and Roc watched him keenly.

  "Something the matter?"

  Elof stretched out a foot, like a hesitant swimmer, half believing he would have grown immune to the pain by now. But at the first touch of the Ice agony lanced up his leg, and he stumbled. Roc ran to help, but Elof shook him off and staggered on, probing within himself for the source of that pain as a surgeon might search a wound. Like a thin blade it flickered and stabbed at him, striking in one place and then another as he sought to guard it; he was like a swordsman set against an opponent who could toy with him, as Kermorvan once had. But against it, as against Kermorvan, he set the smith's strength in him, and looked through the pain, past it, as he might look past the sting of forge-sparks in the finishing of some fine work. When Ils and Kermorvan looked back in concern, he stiffened his back, swung his pack about him casually, and even managed to force a smile.