Ursus of Ultima Thule (2 page)

Pointing to the token on the thong, “My father,” he said.

“Yes,” said the old man, unsurprised. Then he winced.

What made the boy say what he next said, still pointing? No knowing — unless it was unrealized awareness of a connection between strange things enclosed in a space of time — such as this moment which had just passed, or perhaps still was passing.

Pointing to the token he said, “Arn’t. Arn’t.”

“Arn,” his uncle said, absentminded correction in his tone.

So.
Arn
was the token that was the bear that was his father and his father had somehow thrown the old woman into a fit in which
Arn’t
was somehow different. And what else was in the fit which was familiar yet different — for something was.

Ah.

“Tenna,”
the boy said, immediately correcting himself:
“Hinna-tenna.”

Without so much as a sigh and in the same flat, abstracted voice in which he would explain to a visitor at the medicine hut the care and feeding of mandrakes or the price of a charm or the manner of a charm (other men whose work was witchery had the better sense to sink their voices and roll their eyes and make at least a few fearful gestures and whisper at least a few words dolefully, lips to ear. Other witcherers commanded higher prices, too, got amber-grains and goodly pelts, were not content with bones and offals) his granduncle said to him, “Hinna is the cornflower and is also my sister’s name. Your grandmother. Was her daughter’s name. Your mother.
Tenna
is a word in the Old Tongue, now archaic, used chiefly for witchery. Spoken sometimes by such relics as myself and sister. Tenna means ‘daughter.’
Arn
in the older tongue is ‘bear.’ So, now I consider it, ‘
Arn’t
’ may be applied to the token, for my sister’s daughter said she had it of the bear. As she said, too, she had you. But she was never right in her wits after that and grew worse and we found her drowned.”

After a moment he nodded once or twice and left the house without more word, confident, apparently, that he had said everything there was to be said. As, perhaps, he had.

• • •

The boy realized, growing older, that often he himself saw sequences and connections where other boys saw none. But just as he could see logic and they not, just so things that seemed sensible to them were senseless and unpredictable to him. More than once he had been stoned away from following hunters, yet today he had been asked — not allowed,
asked
— “Come, honey-dripper, bring us good luck!” And here he was with the rest of them in the high grass and the sun hot upon the earth and on them all so that he could smell it and them and the grass and other things not even seen.

Honey-dripper
, with a guffaw. It was a name for him.
Comb-robber
was another. Both meant
bear
, who stole the honeycomb from the honey tree and ate it, dripping its richness, grubs and wax and all. But
comb-robber
, applied to him, was merely an ill-name.
Honey-dripper
was less so, was a laughing term, and — somehow — referred not exclusively to the bear but also had something to do with men and the things men had with women. Tall Roke it was who’d said him this name this day and asked him to come; and Tall Roke it was, when another had looked black and muttered, who had briskly and blithely answered, “What? For that some rough fellow tumbled his mad mother and gamed her, saying, ‘I’m a bear!’ What? A bigger fool than she or you I’d be to think the kid an ill-bringer for that. Ah no, but that his old uncle’s witchery had maybe rubbed off on him a bit, and then a-smells as wild as any beasty and so may cover our own man-stinks — ”

But as yet the boy could not smell the wild white horses they were hunting — the swift, mane-tossing, clever-cunning, clever-mad, mad-eyed, red-eyed, wild-eyed, wild, white horses — whom no man’s mind or hand had ever yet thought to tame. Three days since, some village stripling, gaming about in the meadows, had found a colt with its leg broken in a mole hole, had swiftly (but, be sure, not without a swifter, fearful lookabout) cut its throat and borne it home. Perhaps one of its marrowbones was still stewing in a pot of spelt; the rest had sure been eaten. But the clever-mad horses of the herd had tracked the lostling down to its place of injury, had seen the blood, had traced the drips of blood as far to the village as even their mad courage cared to go. Since then they had been waging war; trampling crops, attacking cultivators and wanderers with hooves and teeth. So now the menfolk were carrying the war unto the horsefolk.

Time was when only the poorest of the poor would have had stone or bone for his weapons. All else had had iron — had even had arrow or spearheads to spare, in case of breakage before a wandernain (some called them “shamblenain,” but not to their faces) would come trading new irons for old; amber and peltries their fee: taking the broken points with them back to strange and distant Nainland to mend upon their witchery-forge, an art that only the nains had. As for bronze, that was only a memory, bronze had long since died of the green-sickness. As yet, out here, the deadly rust was moving slowly, but move it did; something was deadly wrong with iron, and no nains came; grim was the mood of the distant king, and —

“Hist, now,” said Tall Roke. “Mind the plan, now. Drive away the young stallions and the mares with stones, the colts will follow — cut off the great stallion, and whilst we three engage him from in front, you two cut his tendons from behind.” The great stallion, with hamstrings severed on his hind legs, would go down and never rise. Deprived of leader, the other steeds would flee.

Tall Roke hawked and spat and granted. He needed not to point. They had come to the edge of the escarpment and in the near distance of the wide, shallow valley, they saw the horses like wee white clouds floating in the blue-green sky of grass. For a moment they gazed, the five or six full men, the twice-that-many striplings and the boy who had no name. Then they spread out widely and began the slow and cautious descent from the rim. Slow, for there was no swift going down that uncertain slope; cautious, because they dared not give alarm to the horse herd.

The boy felt for the pouch with the stones in it. The touch was reassuring. Nothing else was. His first hunt. His heart pounding. It had been agreed that any needed signaling would take the form of a ground squirrel’s whistling, as this would (at most) arouse the hunger of no creature larger than a fox or hawk. Tentatively the boy formed his mouth to make such a signal. But he never made it. The while he had been keeping a sort of sketch of things in his head. Yonder was the sun. The cliff directly behind. The wind, so. To the right must be the horse herd. A little left of straight ahead were, though now not seen, a clump of thick-boled trees. Beyond that, a low hillock of rusty scrub. A brook. A wallow.

• • •

Alarm, alarm rose so swift in his chest that it choked his breath. Something was wrong. Everything was wrong. He had gone the wrong way — or — for he was much too close to the hillock, he could see it now, he could not see the trees, which meant — and then came the whistle, and the whistle was to have come from Tall Roke and Tall Roke should be
that
way and the whistle was over
this
way — vertigo took him, he was on both knees and one hand. Earthshake? For the hillock moved and his eyes fled from it and his eyes saw trees walking and someone screamed and screamed — it was not him, then it
was
him as it was many others, for by now all knew it was
the hill-that-moves, the trees-that-walk
, all of them could see the
serpent snout
that rose up huge and hairy and drank the wind, all could see the flash of
spear teeth
, all could hear the horrid trumpet scream of the
mammoni! mammont! mammont!
as its tree-huge legs shook the grassy ground in its terrible charge, its trunk sweeping down the grass before it as a scythe, bloody scythe, bloody grass, bloody spears, bloody teeth —

Fear and failing flesh and yet senses still undimmed enough to hear Tall Roke’s voice full strong as he shouted, “Hold to the plan! Axe men to the rear whilst I engage to the front — ”
I
and not
we
, he did not trust to any others’ courage to face the huge red mammont from the front, but still had hopes that some might brave the great beast’s hind legs to strike at the lower tendons. Onward the mammont beast had come, fast, fast, but faster yet ran Tall Roke, passing it — so swift he might have escaped, had such been his intent, had he run in another direction — passing it, running backward before it, turning it, darting back and away from it, shouting and feinting his spear at it — “Strike! Strike!” he shouted —

But no one was there to strike. No one was there but Tall Roke. One man. One boy. Who shrieked with all the fury of his unformed voice and cast his stones with all the power of his unformed arms. For one fell moment the mammont wavered, rage-reddened eyes darting from man to boy.

“Ankles! Ankles! Ah! Strike! Ankles!” hoarsely but still hopefully: Tall Roke’s voice. But no one struck. And the one man’s spear hung in the air, it seemed not so much that he had cast it at the mammont as that the mammont had hurled itself upon the airborne spear; it lanced the line of the great face from tusk-socket to eye-socket: the mammont screamed its pain and rage: again the spear hung in the air: and now — and this was so puzzling — Tall Roke himself hung in the air, his fair hair all in a mist about his face — the python trunk seemed to rise slowly, slowly, slowly, and to descend slowly, slowly, and to wrap itself so slowly gently lovingly about the man’s neck.

• • •

There were flowers in the meadow and bees in the air and then there was a dripping comb of honey and he thrust his paws first into the comb and then into his mouth and its taste was of gold and sweet and strong and delightful beyond the taste of any food tasted before and when it was quite quite gone he licked his paws and he licked the grass it had dripped on and then he went scampering off to where the bushes hung heavy with the full ripe berries and he ate his wonder full of them and …

• • •

Three of them returned alive to the village and Tall Roke was found alive (though only barely) where the mammont had tossed and gored him but, unaccountably, not trampled him as it had the others. But he, too, was soon dead. Another’s head was found in the branches of a tree. Something that was probably his body, for it could be nothing else, was smeared nearby.

The horses had vanished.

That the great roan mammont was a rogue, all agreed. Only a rogue would travel alone, and there was no sign at all of any other mammont — or, for that matter, him — any more.

At first no one in the village said anything but,
It has happened
. Since the starting of the red-rust-sickness of all iron and the increasing wrath of the distant and once indifferent king, since the nains had ceased to visit and the tax exactions had begun to increase, rumors faint as whispers and whispers loud as shouts had been spreading, spreading, spreading. Some great calamity impended. And now it had come. It had happened.

Next in the village they began to ask,
How did it happen?

By this time the boy thought he knew. And there was one other who, he thought, also thought he knew. And that meant there was a third who certainly knew.

The name of the second was Corm, a lad perhaps a year or two older, eyes gray rather than the common blue, hair not blond and curling but brown and lank, sallow of skin; his father was one of the three subchiefs of the townlet. If Corm had not given the boy many good words, that was nothing, no one did that; but he had never given any ill ones at all.

The third was a whey-faced, slack-mouthed, slack-limbed shambleton, with an almost perpetual eruption about the mouth at which he ever picked and which generally bled; a liar and bully and boor, yet well connected — that is, connected to families of some small importance who, by talking loud and often and big, made that small seem greater.

It was one of those moments that seem to have been a part of the center of all things, lying in wait from the beginning. No hint of it before. Old Hinna’s grandson standing idly watching. Whey-face shambling along. The boy looking at him. Looking up to see Corm watching Whey-face as well. His eyes meeting Corm’s. Instantly, as though spoken words had passed between them:
It was Whey-face who gave that first, wrong whistle, which would have been done right if Tall Roke had done it at the right time if it should have been done at all; it came from where Whey-face was, and only he would have been fool enough, coward enough to have done it, done it in coward-fool hopes of a reassuring return of it: it was that whistle, ill-done, that roused the mammont — in another moment Tall Roke would have seen it and managed to get us all safe away somehow, but —

Still that same second, Whey-face looking up as though called, catching their glance, understanding, flushing, paling, and at once reacting in his coward way — not coward-foolish this time but coward-cunning. Pointing at the boy, shouting at the boy, attracting instantly every eye and mind voicing the unvoiced and making clamor become instant fact: “It was
him! He
brought the ill-fate,
he
brought the mammont there! The bear’s bastard with the bear-stink on him! Bear’s bastard! Nain’s get! Made the mammont come! Curse-bringer! Shag-skin! Killed our men and boys!
Him! Him! Him!
” And, stooping, he snatched up a piece of dried filth, ran and flung it.

Then sticks, then stones. Next would-be arrows, axes, spears. No need to inquire, discuss, reason, weigh — instant, heart-warming hatred was quick, easy.
“Bear’s bastard! Curse-bringer! Men killed! Bear-stink!”
The mammont was gone, the boy remained. He saw Corm’s mouth open but neither he nor any heard Corm’s word, drowned out in the bull-voiced clamor of all of Whey-face’s kith and kin, believing or not believing, belief beside the point, the point: Ours. Support him. Shout loud. Throw something.