The Sword & Sorcery Anthology (36 page)

The space which the gibbous wall had concealed was cramped;
it contained only a stone bench draped with hide cracked by age.
Nevertheless Topops entered. One part of his mind recognised that
the mercenary would be outlined against the light, while he would be
less visible in the dim space but would have little room to manoeuvre.
Another deeper part of him was furiously impatient, and insisted that
he feel a presence latent somewhere in the shrine. And so he did: a
dormant light about to blaze forth. A peace which was also weakness
descended on him, and he sank on the bench, his sword ready by
his side. Now the shrine seemed thin as a shell, about to shatter and
reveal its contents, as did the landscape outside and the approach of
the mercenary. It stretched; it attenuated; it quivered, and a vision
rushed forth.

A plain of grey sand. Dry waves of dust fly up hissing and scatter.
Layers of black cloud are piled on the horizon like sediment, seeping
into the plain so that sky and earth are indistinguishable. Dust and
shadows drift across the plain. Sometimes the crust cracks like an egg,
and from the sliding mound malformed vegetable limbs edge forth. In
one place an eye the colour of decaying trees stares up from the sand,
sprinkled and bordered by dry tears of dust. A plain of grey sand.
Wooden figures climb forth from the sand, crippled and tottering, and
bludgeon one another clumsily. Where a limb is splintered or one of
the blind green eyes is gouged, white rot flows.

Beyond the sand, a beach of purple mud, almost black. A grey sea
laps at it, and where the waves collide the mud trembles and sucks
like gelatine. Conical cores of rock emerge from the sea, glinting
dully, and the tips of others are sucked by the mud. From the beach
arise flopping pillars of mud and tottering insect-like constructions
of shells. When they clash, the pillars spatter and are cloven like
worms; the white skeletal insects are smashed into fragments, and
each recombines. A beach of purple mud, almost black.

Deep in Topops’s mind the dormant light was forming. A point
of pitiless radiance began to grow, sweeping shadows back into the
landscape, spreading through his mind. “No,” he thought, “not a
plain of grey sand, not a beach of purple mud, but a green kingdom!”
His mind was stretched above the landscape, cupped like the shrine,
its edge drawn keen. He clamped it down like a crown thrust deeply
into sand and mud. Then, as his mind made a globe and tightened
upon its contents, he began to command the landscape.

“Sea, scoop the mud! Unblemished sea, pour on the beach! Laden
sea, sink to rest deep in the ocean! Winds, cast the grey dust upon
the mountains! White suffocated sand, rush to meet the sea! Soil
and rocks, rise now from the plain! Flying sand, sunder the wooden
cripples! Growing wood, become trees and come forth! Spring up,
grasses! Rocks, do not conceal the cripples in your hollows! Rocks,
close and crush them!”

Then the cup about him became the shrine, and in the doorway
behind the throne stood the mercenary. Topops gazed at him calmly
and rose; his mind still seemed cupped about him. He saw that the
man had come alone to take his sword and garments, as knowledge
comes instantly in a dream. The mercenary fell back into the throne-
room, raising his sword. Without thought of his own blade—indeed,
without thought—Topops caught up all the sand from the floor of the
shrine and flung it in the man’s eyes, searing through them. The man
fell twitching, already dead.

Topops gazed down at the corpse. The shrine had given him the
power to inhabit his own vision. Behind him he heard the door slide
into place and, turning, saw that the third form in the carving had
become clear. It was a man surrounded by light, gazing up in awe at a
sketched form. Topops stretched his hand towards it. Then he heard
the beat of hooves on the sand.

He strode to the door of the shrine. Outside, the third of Lomboan’s
men was dismounting. “Go back to Topome,” said Topops, emerging
from the shrine. “I have killed the mercenary but have no wish to
show other than forgiveness to my subjects. Return to Lomboan and
tell him that you speak the king’s words. Tell him that I have the
power to make Topome the greatest city on Tond, and that he and his
like must flee.”

The man unsheathed his sword, casting the sheath into the sand.
Topops urged the sand to throw the man to the ground, so that he
could subdue him, but his mind had shrunk. The man flew at him,
sword moaning. “Do not tempt your king!” shouted Topops. “I will kill
no more slaves to Lomboan’s words! A king does not punish slavery!”
But as he retreated into the shrine, his adversary sheathed his sword
in the sand and poised a knife to throw. He refused Topops even the
honour of a sword; instead, a knife, as one impaled a criminal. Topops
clamped his mind about the shrine and the doorway contracted,
cleaving the man’s hands and arms as he sought to hold back the
walls. Then Topops, out of pity, brought the walls together.

The shrine cast out the corpse of the mercenary. Topops closed
the door, sweeping the remains of the third man onto the plain, and
gave himself up to sorrow. As he grieved he glimpsed the landscape
beneath the layers of black cloud. Wooden figures were scrambling
forth from the rocks, and beneath the white sand on the beach pillars
of mud were struggling up, coated with crumbling sand.

He thought: “A king’s mind should be worthy of him. My mind
has allowed evil to lie its way into Topome, and has been guilty of
the deaths of two subjects whose only crime was slavery. Nor does it
have faith outside this shrine. Therefore I shall do battle with it, and
shall subdue the evil which threatens my vision, for then my mind
shall have full use of its power and may use it to benefit Topome and
indeed Tond itself. My mind shall be purified and whole, as befits a
king.”

Then Topops found his way through the darkness to the throne
and began to cup his mind.

All this happened centuries ago, or so say the legends of Yemene. The
city of Topome was rent by riots and looting long since. The shrine
now stands between a rocky plain and a beach patched with mud.
Travellers who skirt the land of the shrine say the trees fight there,
levering themselves from caves which sometimes close in on them,
splintering. Sailors say that skeletal figures and dark worms battle at
twilight on the beach. When the people of Yemene shelter from the
tides that storm upon the beach, this is the tale they tell. None goes
near the shrine.

DAVID DRAKE

P
layfully
,
U
lf
W
omanslayer
twitched the cord bound to his saddle
horn. “Awake, priest? Soon you can get to work.”

“My work is saving souls, not being dragged into the wilderness by
madmen,” Johann muttered under his breath. The other end of the
cord was around his neck, not that of his horse. A trickle of blood
oozed into his cassock from the reopened scab, but he was afraid to
loosen the knot. Ulf might look back. Johann had already seen his
captor go into a berserk rage. Over the Northerner’s right shoulder
rode his axe, a heavy hooked blade on a four-foot shaft. Ulf had swung
it like a willow-wand when three Christian traders in Schleswig had
seen the priest and tried to free him. The memory of the last man in
three pieces as head and sword arm sprang from his spouting torso
was still enough to roil Johann’s stomach.

“We’ll have a clear night with a moon, priest; a good night for
our business.” Ulf stretched and laughed aloud, setting a raven on
a fir knot to squawking back at him. The berserker was following a
ridge line that divided wooded slopes with a spine too thin-soiled
to bear trees. The flanking forests still loomed above the riders. In
three days, now, Johann had seen no man but his captor, nor even a
tendril of smoke from a lone cabin. Even the route they were taking
to Parmavale was no mantrack but an accident of nature.

“So lonely,” the priest said aloud.

Ulf hunched hugely in his bearskin and replied, “You soft folk in
the south, you live too close anyway. Is it your Christ-god, do you
think?”

“Hedeby’s a city,” the German priest protested, his fingers toying
with his torn robe, “and my brother trades to Uppsala.... But why
bring me to this manless waste?”

“Oh, there were men once, so the tale goes,” Ulf said. Here in the
empty forest he was more willing for conversation than he had been
the first few days of their ride north. “Few enough, and long enough
ago. But there were farms in Parmavale, and a lordling of sorts who
went a-viking against the Irish. But then the troll came and the men
went, and there was nothing left to draw others. So they thought.”

“You Northerners believe in trolls, so my brother tells me,” said
the priest.

“Aye, long before the gold I’d heard of the Parma troll,” the
berserker agreed. “Ox broad and stronger than ten men, shaggy as a
denned bear.”

“Like you,” Johann said, in a voice more normal than caution
would have dictated.

Blood fury glared in Ulf’s eyes and he gave a savage jerk on the
cord. “You’ll think me a troll, priestling, if you don’t do just as I say.
I’ll drink your blood hot if you cross me.”

Johann, gagging, could not speak nor wished to.

With the miles the sky became a darker blue, the trees a blacker
green. Ulf again broke the hoof-pummeled silence, saying, “No, I
knew nothing of the gold until Thora told me.”

The priest coughed to clear his throat. “Thora is your wife?” he asked.

“Wife? Ho!” Ulf brayed, his raucous laughter ringing like a
demon’s. “Wife? She was Hallstein’s wife, and I killed her with all
her house about her! But before that, she told me of the troll’s horde,
indeed she did. Would you hear that story?”

Johann nodded, his smile fixed. He was learning to recognize
death as it bantered under the axehead.

“So,” the huge Northerner began. “There was a bonder, Hallstein
Kari’s son, who followed the king to war but left his wife, that was
Thora, behind to manage the stead. The first day I came by and took
a sheep from the herdsman. I told him if he misliked it to send his
master to me.”

“Why did you do that?” the fat priest asked in surprise.

“Why? Because I’m Ulf, because I wanted the sheep. A woman
acting a man’s part, it’s unnatural anyway.

“The next day I went back to Hallstein’s stead, and the flocks had
already been driven in. I went into the garth around the buildings
and called for the master to come out and fetch me a sheep.” The
berserker’s teeth ground audibly as he remembered. Johann saw his
knuckles whiten on the axe helve and stiffened in terror.

“Ho!” Ulf shouted, bringing his left hand down on the shield slung
at his horse’s flank. The copper boss rang like thunder in the clouds.
“She came out,” Ulf grated, “and her hair was red. ‘All our sheep
are penned,’ says she, ‘but you’re in good time for the butchering.’
And from out the hall came her three brothers and the men of the
stead, ten in all. They were in full armor and their swords were in
their hands. And they would have slain me, Ulf Otgeir’s son,
me,
at a
woman’s word. Forced me to run from a woman!”

The berserker was snarling his words to the forest. Johann knew
he watched a scene that had been played a score of times with only
the trees to witness. The rage of disgrace burned in Ulf like pitch in a
pine faggot, and his mind was lost to everything except the past.

“But I came back,” he continued, “in the darkness, when all
feasted within the hall and drank their ale to victory. Behind the hall
burned a log fire to roast a sheep. I killed the two there, and I thrust
one of the logs half-burnt up under the eaves. Then at the door I
waited until those within noticed the heat and Thora looked outside.

“‘Greetings, Thora,’ I said. ‘You would not give me mutton, so I
must roast men tonight.’ She asked me for speech. I knew she was
fey, so I listened to her. And she told me of the Parma lord and the
treasure he brought back from Ireland, gold and gems. And she said
it was cursed that a troll should guard it, and that I must needs have a
mass priest, for the troll could not cross a Christian’s fire and I should
slay him then.”

“Didn’t you spare her for that?” Johann quavered, more fearful of
silence than he was of misspeaking.

“Spare her? No, nor any of her house,” Ulf thundered back. “She
might better have asked the flames for mercy, as she knew. The fire
was at her hair. I struck her, and never was woman better made for
an axe to bite—she cleft like a waxen doll, and I threw the pieces
back. Her brothers came then, but one and one and one through the
doorway, and I killed each in his turn. No more came. When the roof
fell, I left them with the ash for a headstone and went my way to find
a mass priest—to find you, priestling.” Ulf, restored to good humor by
the climax of his own tale, tweaked the lead cord again.

Johann choked onto his horse’s neck, nauseated as much by the
story as by the noose. At last he said, thick-voiced, “Why do you trust
her tale if she knew you would kill her with it or not?”

“She was fey,” Ulf chuckled, as if that explained everything. “Who
knows what a man will do when his death is upon him? Or a woman,”
he added more thoughtfully.

They rode on in growing darkness. With no breath of wind to stir
them, the trees stood as dead as the rocks underfoot.

“Will you know the place?” the German asked suddenly. “Shouldn’t
we camp now and go on in the morning?”

“I’ll know it,” Ulf grunted. “We’re not far now—we’re going down
hill, can’t you feel?” He tossed his bare haystack of hair, silvered into
a false sheen of age by the moon. He continued, “The Parma lord
sacked a dozen churches, so they say, and then one more with more
of gold than the twelve besides, but also the curse. And he brought
it back with him to Parma, and there it rests in his barrow, the troll
guarding it. That I have on Thora’s word.”

“But she hated you!”

“She was fey.”

They were into the trees, and looking to either side Johann could
see hill slopes rising away from them. They were in a valley, Parma or
another. Scraps of wattle and daub, the remains of a house or a garth
fence, thrust up to the right. The firs that had grown through it were
generations old. Johann’s stubbled tonsure crawled in the night air.

“She said there was a clearing,” the berserker muttered, more to
himself than his companion. Johann’s horse stumbled. The priest
clutched the cord reflexively as it tightened. When he looked up
at his captor, he saw the huge Northerner fumbling at his shield’s
fastenings. For the first time that evening, a breeze stirred. It stank
of death.

“Others have been here before us,” said Ulf needlessly.

A row of skulls, at least a score of them, stared blank-eyed from
atop stakes rammed through their spinal openings. To one, dried
sinew still held the lower jaw in a ghastly rictus; the others had
fallen away into the general scatter of bones whitening the ground.
All of them were human or could have been. They were mixed with
occasional glimmers of buttons and rust smears. The freshest of the
grisly trophies was very old, perhaps decades old. Too old to explain
the reek of decay.

Ulf wrapped his left fist around the twin handles of his shield. It
was a heavy circle of linden wood, faced with leather. Its rim and
central boss were of copper, and rivets of bronze and copper decorated
the face in a serpent pattern.

“Good that the moon is full,” Ulf said, glancing at the bright orb
still tangled in the fir branches. “I fight best in the moonlight. We’ll
let her rise the rest of the way, I think.”

Johann was trembling. He joined his hands about his saddle horn
to keep from falling off the horse. He knew Ulf might let him jerk and
strangle there, even after dragging him across half the northlands.
The humor of the idea might strike him. Johann’s rosary, his crucifix—
everything he had brought from Germany or purchased in Schleswig
save his robe—had been left behind in Hedeby when the berserker
awakened him in his bed. Ulf had jerked a noose to near-lethal
tautness and whispered that he needed a priest, that this one would
do, but that there were others should this one prefer to feed crows.
The disinterested bloodlust in Ulf’s tone had been more terrifying
than the threat itself. Johann had followed in silence to the waiting
horses. In despair, he wondered again if a quick death would not have
been better than this lingering one that had ridden for weeks a mood
away from him.

“It looks like a palisade for a house,” the priest said aloud in what
he pretended was a normal voice.

“That’s right,” Ulf replied, giving his axe an exploratory heft that
sent shivers of moonlight across the blade. “There was a hall here, a
big one. Did it burn, do you think?” His knees sent his roan gelding
forward in a shambling walk past the line of skulls. Johann followed
of necessity.

“No, rotted away,” the berserker said, bending over to study the
post holes.

“You said it was deserted a long time,” the priest commented. His
eyes were fixed straight forward. One of the skulls was level with his
waist and close enough to bite him, could it turn on its stake.

“There was time for the house to fall in, the ground is damp,” Ulf
agreed. “But the stakes, then, have been replaced. Our troll keeps his
front fence new, priestling.”

Johann swallowed, said nothing.

Ulf gestured briefly. “Come on, you have to get your fire ready. I
want it really holy.”

“But we don’t sacrifice with fires. I don’t know how—”

“Then learn!” the berserker snarled with a vicious yank that
drew blood and a gasp from the German. “I’ve seen how you Christ-
shouters love to bless things. You’ll bless me a fire, that’s all. And if
anything goes wrong and the troll spares you—I won’t, priestling. I’ll
rive you apart if I have to come off a stake to do it!”

The horses walked slowly forward through brush and soggy rubble
that had been a hall. The odor of decay grew stronger. The priest
himself tried to ignore it, but his horse began to balk. The second time
he was too slow with a heel to its ribs, and the cord nearly decapitated
him. “Wait!” he wheezed. “Let me get down.”