The Sword & Sorcery Anthology (15 page)

So he confidently took his place and gave order that the torture
begin.

As the great wheel creaked and the leathern wristlets and anklets
began to tighten a little, Mouse felt a qualm of helpless panic run
over his body. It centered in his joints—those little deep-set hinges of
bone normally exempt from danger. There was yet no pain. His body
was merely stretched a little, as if he were yawning.

The low ceiling was close to his face. The flickering light of the
torches revealed the mortises in the stone and the dusty cobwebs.
Toward his feet he could see the upper portion of the wheel, and the two
large hands that gripped its spokes, dragging them down effortlessly,
very slowly, stopping for twenty heartbeats at a time. By turning his
head and eyes to the side he could see the big figure of the Duke—
not wide as his doll of him, but wide—sitting in a carven wooden
chair, two armed men standing behind him. The Duke’s brown hands,
their jeweled rings flashing fire, were closed over the knobs on the
chair-arms. His feet were firmly planted. His jaw was set. Only his eyes
showed any uneasiness or vulnerability. They kept shifting from side to
side—rapidly, regularly, like the pivoted ones of a doll.

“My daughter should be here,” he heard the Duke say abruptly in
a flat voice. “Hasten her. She is not to be permitted to delay.”

One of the men hurried away.

Then the twinges of pain commenced, striking at random in the
forearm, the back, the knee, the shoulder. With an effort Mouse
composed his features. He fixed his attention on the faces around him,
surveying them in detail as if they formed a picture, noting the highlights
on the cheeks and eyes and beards and the shadows, wavering with the
torchflames, that their figures cast upon the low walls.

Then those low walls melted and, as if distance were no longer
real, he saw the whole wide world he’d never visited beyond them:
great reaches of forest, bright amber desert, and turquoise sea; the
Lake of Monsters, the City of Ghouls, magnificent Lankhmar, the
Land of the Eight Cities, the Trollstep Mountains, the fabulous Cold
Waste and by some chance striding there an open-faced, hulking
red-haired youth he’d glimpsed among the pirates and later spoken
with—all places and persons he’d never now encounter, but showing
in wondrous fine detail, as if carved and tinted by a master miniaturist.

With startling suddenness the pain returned and increased. The
twinges became needle stabs—a cunning prying at his insides—fingers
of force crawling up his arms and legs toward his spine—an unsettling
at the hips. He desperately tensed his muscles against them.

Then he heard the Duke’s voice, “Not so fast. Stop a while.”
Mouse thought he recognized the overtones of panic in the voice.
He twisted his head despite the pangs it cost him and watched the
uneasy eyes. They swung to and fro, like little pendulums.

Suddenly then, as if time were no longer real, Mouse saw another
scene in this chamber. The Duke was there and his eyes swinging
from side to side, but he was younger and there was open panic and
horror in his face. Close beside him was a boldly handsome woman
in a dark red dress cut low in the bosom and with slashes inset with
yellow silk. Stretched upon the rack itself in Mouse’s place was a
strappingly beautiful but now pitifully whimpering maid, whom the
woman in red was questioning, with great coldness and insistence on
detail, about her amorous encounters with the Duke and her attempt
on the life of herself, the Duke’s wife, by poison.

Footsteps broke that scene, as stones destroy a reflection in water,
and brought the present back. Then a voice: “Your daughter comes,
o’ Duke.”

Mouse steeled himself. He had not realized how much he dreaded
this meeting, even in his pain. He felt bitterly certain that Ivrian
would not have heeded his words. She was not evil, he knew, and she
had not meant to betray him, but by the same token she was without
courage. She would come whimpering, and her anguish would eat
at what little self-control he could muster and doom his last wild
wishful schemings.

Lighter footsteps were approaching now—hers. There was some
thing curiously measured about them.

It meant added pain for him to turn his head so he could see the
doorway; yet he did so, watching her figure define itself as it entered
the region of ruddy light cast by the torches.

Then he saw the eyes. They were wide and staring. They were
fixed straight on him. And they did not turn away. The face was pale,
calm with a deadly serenity.

He saw she was dressed in a gown of dark red, cut low in the
bosom and with slashes inset with yellow silk.

And then the soul of Mouse exulted, for he knew that she had
done what he had bidden her. Glavas Rho had said, “The sufferer can
hurl his suffering back upon his oppressor, if only his oppressor can be
tempted to open a channel for his hate.” Now there was a channel
open for him, leading to Janarrl’s inmost being.

Hungrily, Mouse fastened his gaze on Ivrian’s unblinking eyes, as if
they were pools of black magic in a cold moon. Those eyes, he knew,
could receive what he could give.

He saw her seat herself by the Duke. He saw the Duke peer
sidewise at his daughter and start up as if she were a ghost. But Ivrian
did not look toward him, only her hand stole out and fastened on his
wrist, and the Duke sank shuddering back into his chair.

“Proceed!” he heard the Duke call out to the torturers, and this
time the panic in the Duke’s voice was very close to the surface.

The wheel turned. Mouse heard himself groan piteously. But there
was something in him now that could ride on top of the pain and that
had no part in the groan. He felt that there was a path between his
eyes and Ivrian’s—a rock-walled channel through which the forces of
human spirit and of more than human spirit could be sent roaring like
a mountain torrent. And still she did not turn away. No expression
crossed her face when he groaned, only her eyes seemed to darken
as she grew still more pale. Mouse sensed a shifting of feelings in
his body. Through the scalding waters of pain, his hate rose to the
surface, rode atop too. He pushed his hate down the rock-walled
channel, saw Ivrian’s face grow more deathlike as it struck her, saw
her tighten her grip on her father’s wrist, sensed the trembling that
her father no longer could master.

The wheel turned. From far off Mouse heard a steady, heart-
tearing whimpering. But a part of him was outside the room now—
high, he felt, in the frosty emptiness above the world. He saw spread
out below him a nighted panorama of wooded hills and valleys. Near
the summit of one hill was a tight clump of tiny stone towers. But as if
he were endowed with a magical vulture’s eye, he could see through
the walls and roofs of those towers into the very foundations beneath,
into a tiny murky room in which men tinier than insects clustered and
cowered together. Some were working at a mechanism which inflicted
pain on a creature that might have been a bleached and writhing ant.
And the pain of that creature, whose tiny thin cries he could faintly
hear, had a strange effect on him at this height, strengthening his
inward powers and tearing away a veil from his eyes—a veil that had
hitherto hidden a whole black universe.

For he began to hear about him a mighty murmuring. The frigid
darkness was beaten by wings of stone. The steely light of the stars
cut into his brain like painless knives. He felt a wild black whirlpool
of evil, like a torrent of black tigers, blast down upon him from above,
and he knew that it was his to control. He let it surge through his
body and then hurled it down the unbroken path that led to two
points of darkness in the tiny room below—the two staring eyes of
Ivrian, daughter of Duke Janarrl. He saw the black of the whirlwind’s
heart spread on her face like an inkblot, seep down her white arms
and dye her fingers. He saw her hand tighten convulsively on her
father’s arm. He saw her reach her other hand toward the Duke and
lift her open lips to his cheek.

Then, for one moment while the torch flames whipped low and
blue in a physical wind that seemed to blow through the mortised
stones of the buried chamber...for one moment while the torturers and
guards dropped the tools of their trades...for one indelible moment
of hate fulfilled and revenge accomplished, Mouse saw the strong,
square face of Duke Janarrl shake in the agitation of ultimate terror,
the features twisted like heavy cloth wrung between invisible hands,
then crumpled in defeat and death.

The strand supporting Mouse snapped. His spirit dropped like a
plummet toward the buried room.

An agonizing pain filled him, but it promised life, not death.
Above him was the low stone ceiling. The hands on the wheel were
white and slender. Then he knew that the pain was that of release
from the rack.

Slowly Ivrian loosened the rings of leather from his wrists and
ankles. Slowly she helped him down, supporting him with all her
strength as they dragged their way across the room, from which
everyone else had fled in terror save for one crumpled jeweled figure
in a carven chair. They paused by that and he surveyed the dead
thing with the cool, satisfied, masklike gaze of a cat. Then on and up
they went, Ivrian and the Gray Mouser, through corridors emptied by
panic, and out into the night.

POUL ANDERSON

A
man
called
G
eirolf
dwelt on the Great Fjord in Raumsdal. His father was Bui Hardhand, who owned a farm inland near the Dofra Fell. One year Bui went in viking to Finnmark and brought back a woman he dubbed Gydha. She became the mother of Geirolf. But because Bui already had children by his wife, there would be small inheritance for this by-blow.

Folk said uncanny things about Gydha. She was fair to see, but
spoke little, did no more work than she must, dwelt by herself in
a shack out of sight of the garth, and often went for long stridings
alone on the upland heaths, heedless of cold, rain, and rovers. Bui
did not visit her often. Her son Geirolf did. He too was a moody sort,
not much given to playing with others, quick and harsh of temper.
Big and strong, he went abroad with his father already when he was
twelve, and in the next few years won the name of a mighty though
ruthless fighter.

Then Gydha died. They buried her near her shack, and it was
whispered that she spooked around it of nights. Soon after, walking
home with some men by moonlight from a feast at a neighbor’s, Bui
clutched his breast and fell dead. They wondered if Gydha had called
him, maybe to accompany her home to Finnmark, for there was no
more sight of her.

Geirolf bargained with his kin and got the price of a ship for himself.
Thereafter he gathered a crew, mostly younger sons and a wild lot,
and fared west. For a long while he harried Scotland, Ireland, and the
coasts south of the Channel, and won much booty. With some of this
he bought his farm on the Great Fjord. Meanwhile he courted Thyra,
a daughter of the yeoman Sigtryg Einarsson, and got her.

They had one son early on, Hauk, a bright and lively lad. But
thereafter five years went by until they had a daughter who lived,
Unn, and two years later a boy they called Einar. Geirolf was a viking
every summer, and sometimes wintered over in the Westlands. Yet he
was a kindly father, whose children were always glad to see him come
roaring home. Very tall and broad in the shoulders, he had long red-
brown hair and a full beard around a broad blunt-nosed face whose
eyes were ice-blue and slanted. He liked fine clothes and heavy gold
rings, which he also lavished on Thyra.

Then the time came when Geirolf said he felt poorly and would
not fare elsewhere that season. Hauk was fourteen years old and had
been wild to go. “I’ll keep my promise to you as well as may be,”
Geirolf said, and sent men asking around. The best he could do was
get his son a bench on a ship belonging to Ottar the Wide-Faring
from Haalogaland in the north, who was trading along the coast and
meant to do likewise overseas.

Hauk and Ottar took well to each other. In England, the man
got the boy prime-signed so he could deal with Christians. Though
neither was baptized, what he heard while they wintered there made
Hauk thoughtful. Next spring they fared south to trade among the
Moors, and did not come home until late fall.

Ottar was Geirolf’s guest for a while, though he scowled to himself
when his host broke into fits of deep coughing. He offered to take
Hauk along on his voyages from now on and start the youth toward
a good livelihood.

“You a chapman—the son of a viking?” Geirolf sneered. He had
grown surly of late.

Hauk flushed. “You’ve heard what we did to those vikings who set
on
us,
” he answered.

“Give our son his head,” was Thyra’s smiling rede, “or he’ll take
the bit between his teeth.”

The upshot was that Geirolf grumbled agreement, and Hauk fared
off. He did not come back for five years.

Long were the journeys he took with Ottar. By ship and horse, they
made their way to Uppsala in Svithjodh, thence into the wilderness of
the Keel after pelts; amber they got on the windy strands of Jutland,
salt herring along the Sound; seeking beeswax, honey, and tallow,
they pushed beyond Holmgard to the fair at Kiev; walrus ivory lured
them past North Cape, through bergs and floes to the land of the fur-
clad Biarmians; and they bore many goods west. They did not hide
that the wish to see what was new to them drove them as hard as any
hope of gain.

In those days King Harald Fairhair went widely about in Norway,
bringing all the land under himself. Lesser kings and chieftains must
either plight faith to him or meet his wrath; it crushed whomever
would stand fast. When he entered Raumsdal, he sent men from
garth to garth as was his wont, to say he wanted oaths and warriors.

“My older son is abroad,” Geirolf told these, “and my younger still
a stripling. As for myself—” He coughed, and blood flecked his beard.
The king’s men did not press the matter.

But now Geirolf’s moods grew ever worse. He snarled at everybody,
cuffed his children and housefolk, once drew a dagger and stabbed
to death a thrall who chanced to spill some soup on him. When
Thyra reproached him for this, he said only, “Let them know I am
not altogether hollowed out. I can still wield blade.” And he looked
at her so threateningly from beneath his shaggy brows that she, no
coward, withdrew in silence.

A year later, Hauk Geirolfsson returned to visit his parents.

That was on a chill fall noontide. Whitecaps chopped beneath a
whistling wind and cast spindrift salty onto lips. Clifftops on either
side of the fjord were lost in mist. Above blew cloud wrack like smoke.
Hauk’s ship, a wide-beamed knorr, rolled, pitched, and creaked as it
beat its way under sail. The owner stood in the bows, wrapped in a
flame-red cloak, an uncommonly big young man, yellow hair tossing
around a face akin to his father’s, weatherbeaten though still scant
of beard. When he saw the arm of the fjord that he wanted to enter,
he pointed with a spear at whose head he had bound a silk pennon.
When he saw Disafoss pouring in a white stream down the blue-gray
stone wall to larboard, and beyond the waterfall at the end of that
arm lay his old home, he shouted for happiness.

Geirolf had rich holdings. The hall bulked over all else, heavy-
timbered, brightly painted, dragon heads arching from rafters and
gables. Elsewhere around the yard were cookhouse, smokehouse,
bathhouse, storehouses, workshop, stables, barns, women’s bower.
Several cabins for hirelings and their families were strewn beyond.
Fishing boats lay on the strand near a shed which held the master’s
dragonship. Behind the steading, land sloped sharply upward through
a narrow dale, where fields were walled with stones grubbed out of
them and now stubbled after harvest. A bronze-leaved oakenshaw
stood untouched not far from the buildings; and a mile inland, where
hills humped themselves toward the mountains, rose a darkling wall
of pinewood.

Spearheads and helmets glimmered ashore. But men saw it was
a single craft bound their way, white shield on the mast. As the hull
slipped alongside the little wharf, they lowered their weapons. Hauk
sprang from bow to dock in a single leap and whooped.

Geirolf trod forth. “Is that you, my son?” he called. His voice was
hoarse from coughing; he had grown gaunt and sunken-eyed; the ax
that he bore shivered in his hand.

“Yes, father, yes, home again,” Hauk stammered. He could not
hide his shock.

Maybe this drove Geirolf to anger. Nobody knew; he had become
impossible to get along with. “I could well-nigh have hoped otherwise,”
he rasped. “An unfriend would give me something better than straw-
death.”

The rest of the men, housecarls and thralls alike, flocked about
Hauk to bid him welcome. Among them was a burly, grizzled yeoman
whom he knew from aforetime, Leif Egilsson, a neighbor come to dick
er for a horse. When he was small, Hauk had often wended his way
over a woodland trail to Leif’s garth to play with the children there.

He called his crew to him. They were not just Norse, but had
among them Danes, Swedes, and English, gathered together over the
years as he found them trustworthy. “You brought a mickle for me
to feed,” Geirolf said. Luckily, the wind bore his words from all but
Hauk. “Where’s your master Ottar?”

The young man stiffened. “He’s my friend, never my master,” he
answered. “This is my own ship, bought with my own earnings. Ottar
abides in England this year. The West Saxons have a new king, one
Alfred, whom he wants to get to know.”

“Time was when it was enough to know how to get sword past a
Westman’s shield,” Geirolf grumbled.

Seeing peace down by the water, women and children hastened
from the hall to meet the newcomers. At their head went Thyra.
She was tall and deep-bosomed; her gown blew around a form still
straight and freely striding. But as she neared, Hauk saw that the
gold of her braids was dimmed and sorrow had furrowed her face.
Nonetheless she kindled when she knew him. “Oh, thrice welcome,
Hauk!” she said low. “How long can you bide with us?”

After his father’s greeting, it had been in his mind to say he must
soon be off. But when he spied who walked behind his mother, he
said, “We thought we might be guests here the winter through, if
that’s not too much of a burden.”

“Never—” began Thyra. Then she saw where his gaze had gone,
and suddenly she smiled.

Alfhild Leifsdottir had joined her widowed father on this visit. She
was two years younger than Hauk, but they had been glad of each
other as playmates. Today she stood a maiden grown, lissome in a
blue wadmal gown, heavily crowned with red locks above great green
eyes, straight nose, and gently curved mouth. Though he had known
many a woman, none struck him as being so fair.

He grinned at her and let his cloak flap open to show his finery
of broidered, fur-lined tunic, linen shirt and breeks, chased leather
boots, gold on arms and neck and sword-hilt. She paid them less heed
than she did him when they spoke.

Thus Hauk and his men moved to Geirolf’s hall. He brought
plentiful gifts, there was ample food and drink, and their tales of
strange lands—their songs, dances, games, jests, manners—made
them good housefellows in these lengthening nights.

Already on the next morning, he walked out with Alfhild. Rain
had cleared the air, heaven and fjord sparkled, wavelets chuckled
beneath a cool breeze from the woods. Nobody else was on the strand
where they went.

“So you grow mighty as a chapman, Hauk,” Alfhild teased. “Have
you never gone in viking…only once, only to please your father?”

“No,” he answered gravely. “I fail to see what manliness lies in
falling on those too weak to defend themselves. We traders must be
stronger and more war-skilled than any who may seek to plunder
us.” A thick branch of driftwood, bleached and hardened, lay nearby.
Hauk picked it up and snapped it between his hands. Two other men
would have had trouble doing that. It gladdened him to see Alfhild
glow at the sight. “Nobody has tried us twice,” he said.

They passed the shed where Geirolf’s dragon lay on rollers. Hauk
opened the door for a peek at the remembered slim shape. A sharp
whiff from the gloom within brought his nose wrinkling. “Whew!” he
snorted. “Dry rot.”

“Poor
Fireworm
has long lain idle,” Alfhild sighed. “In later years,
your father’s illness has gnawed him till he doesn’t even see to the
care of his ship. He knows he will never take it a-roving again.”

“I feared that,” Hauk murmured.

“We grieve for him on our own garth too,” she said. “In former
days, he was a staunch friend to us. Now we bear with his ways, yes,
insults that would make my father draw blade on anybody else.”

“That is dear of you,” Hauk said, staring straight before him. “I’m
very thankful.”