In the Moons of Borea (8 page)

'You talk of a raid,' de Marigny queried. 'What sort of raid?'

She nodded, grinning. 'Soon all Vikings will put on metal and sail their dragons against the people of the Isle of Mountains. Ithaqua has commanded it; he has set the hand of Leif Dougalson and the Vikings against the mountain isle.'

Here she paused, then laughed loudly and grasped their elbows. 'Aye, and your arms, too, will find work on that bat-haunted isle! Have I not foreseen it? Bat wings beating in the mist blood and terror and great winds blowing — and all in the name of . . . of Lord Ithaqua!' And it seemed to the two men that she spat the Wind-Walker's name out on the sand.

By this time the Vikings were back on their feet, and the two newcomers were able to see their Numinosian hosts more clearly; from which moment onward they began to feel a certain gratitude for the doubtful affections of the witch-wife. For the clan of Thonjolf the Red, while only four or five dozen in number, was almost without exception a clan of giants among men. Even the stripling youths of fourteen or fifteen years were well over six feet tall, while some of the full-grown men were almost seven. Silberhutte, for all his massive stature by Earth standards, was dwarfed by them!

'Another effect of the low gravity, Henri?' the Warlord asked out of the corner of his mouth.

'I would say so. By the same token their strength has probably not increased in proportion. Might even have been reduced ... I hope!'

Now the Vikings crowded forward, eager to get a closer look at their visitors, still open-minded about Annahilde's assertions regarding these men come down from the sky. So they flew, did they? Well, so did midges! What other powers did they have? Surely the Wind-Walker's chosen ones must be of greater stature than these men? What proof was there that they were what the witch-wife said they were? They moved closer still, then —

'Ho, there! Out of my way — move, man! Where are these strangers I heard the hag ranting about, these
"emissaries of Ithaqua?"' The voice was a deep, drunken bass rumble issuing from behind the massed Vikings.

As all eyes turned from the strangers and a way was cleared for the speaker, so Annahilde whispered: `Harold, the chief's son. He's a drunkard and a bully. Beware . . . !'

As large and foreboding as his voice — seven feet tall, with a middle like a barrel and a huge red face that well matched his tangled red hair and the blood in his pig eyes — Harold was a monster. He glanced once at the strangers, took a long draught from the jug he carried, then threw back his great head and burst into malicious laughter. His mirth was short-lived, however, and quickly gurgled into silence as he contemplated the two a second time. Now his peering inspection was much more thorough, more threatening; and while Harold was not as drunk as the Earthmen might have preferred, he certainly appeared to be all of the bully that Annahilde had named him.

Finally he turned scornfully on the assembled Vikings and roared: 'A trick! You've been tricked, all of you. By these two, aye, and by the hag there . . Harold waved a massive hand in Annahilde's direction. 'Emissaries of Ithaqua, indeed! Why, only
look at
them! They're common men, can't you see that?'

`But we all saw them fly in from the sea,' one of the younger men protested.

Harold stepped over to the youth and dealt him a backhanded blow that sent him reeling. 'Fool! Oaf! It's Annahilde's work. She's blown her powder in your faces. You'd see anything she wanted you to see. Sent by Ithaqua, my backside! These two? They look more like men from the Isle of Mountains to me . . . and we all understand the witch-wife's interest in the Isle of Mountains . .

Instantly Annahilde's sons, great hulking men in their late twenties, stepped forward and confronted Harold. At the same time a pair of surly looking brutes, Harold's
cronies, took up positions flanking him. From one of these Harold snatched a spear whose shaft was thick as a man's wrist.

`Stand aside, bitch-sons, for I've no quarrel with you two — not yet! Aside, I say, and let's see what these strangers are made of.'

In the chief's absence Harold had a certain authority with the clan. With his cronies beside him and following his cryptic accusations — against Annahilde as well as the two strangers — it would have been purest folly for the witch-wife's sons to oppose him in earnest. Thus Erik and Rory reluctantly stood aside as de Marigny and Silberhutte separated and backed up against the hull of one of the beached longships.

Quickly then, allowing no time for thought, Harold drew back his arm and made as if to throw his spear. Instead of hurling the weapon, however, he retained it in the ready position. Silberhutte — a born fighter and greatly experienced — merely froze and narrowed his eyes, waiting for the cast, knowing he could step out of the spear's flight path. De Marigny, on the other hand, for all he had learned in the plateau's arenas, was short on practical experience. He feinted, almost tripped, and in the split second it took him to regain his balance, Harold laughed harshly and made his throw.

Without a doubt the hurled shaft should have pinned de Marigny to the planking of the dragonship, would have done so but for the intervention of Armandra's familiar winds. For when that deadly weapon was only three feet away from his middle, it met a violent, invisible force that wrenched it from its path and drove it point down into the coarse sand between the two outsiders. Silberhutte snatched, the weapon up in a hail of pebbles and gravel, breaking it like a twig over his bent knee.

Harold shook his head in bewilderment, unable to accept the evidence of his own eyes. He knew his cast lad been a good one. It had seemed as if some unseen hand had struck the shaft aside in midair. And now the larger of the strangers — whose strength, for all his comparatively diminutive size, must be prodigious — was striding over to him, looking up at him through eyes that were unafraid, eyes filled with anger.

De Marigny knew at once what had saved his life. Now, as Silberhutte approached the huge, red-haired Viking, he whispered his thanks into thin air, saying: 'Just keep watch over us, friends. I've a feeling there'll be more work for you shortly.'

Now the bullyboys flanking Harold puffed themselves up and gripped their weapons in massive hands. One carried an axe; the other, whose spear lay broken on the sand, had drawn a sword. Harold glanced at his brutal colleagues, turning his head from side to side and grinning. To the Warlord he said, 'You wanted to speak to me, little man?'

'The two of us,' the Texan grated out through clenched teeth. 'You and I, dog, hand to hand. After that — then we'll decide which of us is the "little" man!'

`You call me . . .
dog!'
Harold almost choked on the 'word, going bright as a beetroot in his rage. 'And you, a midget, challenge me in hand-to-hand combat? Breath of Itha He drew back his arm to deliver a backhand blow like that dealt to the young Viking a moment or two earlier. Silberhutte ducked under the flying arc of muscle and bone, driving his rock-hard fist like a ramrod into Harold's solar plexus.

The bully immediately doubled forward, breath whistling from him. His descending chin met the clasped fists of the Warlord as they rose from knee level. It was a rapid combination of blows delivered by an expert; certainly it would have killed many a lesser man. As it was, Harold was lifted right off his feet, stretched out on the sand like a felled oak.

De Marigny had guessed the outcome of any contest'
between
his companion and the bullying Viking, and he had foreseen the natural aftermath. Now, as Harold's 1 henchmen made to strike — the one lifting his axe while the other drew back his sword — he cried out: 'Hold . . or be whirled aloft by angry winds and thrown down into the sea to drown!'

And with that he made a swift motion with his hand, as if casting sand in the faces of the two who threatened the Warlord. On the instant, as their eyes swivelled toward him and their blows were momentarily checked, twin spirals of sand and pebbles grew up from the beach, leaped upon the two and enveloped them, whirling them about and casting them down. For a few seconds, where a mere moment of time ago only a breeze had whispered off the sea, the wind whined its rage and drove sand up the beach in stinging flurries. Then there was quiet again.

The two Vikings, thoroughly cowed and shaken, carefully climbed to their feet and backed off, then turned and ran, fighting their way through the crush of silent, wide-eyed observers. And not once during the confrontation had the visitors from the skies reached for their own weapons .. .

The witch-wife, herself amazed at the way things had gone, but quick to take advantage of the situation, cried: `Now lift your blades high and give these men welcome for what they are: true emissaries of Ithaqua, Lord of the Winds!'

`Aye,' cried Erik and Rory in unison, `here's a good strong arm for Lord Ithaqua's proven emissaries!' And the crowd on the beach joined in, lifting up their weapons and their voices in an accolade which was only cut short by Annahilde.

`And now,' she shouted above the general babble, 'to complete the day, comes Thonjolf himself.' She pointed out to sea where, from behind the tall rocks at the mouth of the fjord, the dragon prow of a magnificently painted longship had appeared. There, in the prow at the neck of the nodding dragon, stood a man taller by inches than the tallest of his clan; a man whose stature, even as seen from the beach, was obviously that of a giant among giants, his red hair blowing behind him like a mane in the breeze from the open sea.

'Thonjolf the Red,' Annahilde cried again. 'And what news we have for him, eh, lads? For he's never had visitors such as these before. Men from the skies sent by the Wind-Walker himself — emissaries of Ithaqua!'

Later, ostensibly as guests in Annahilde's house — a thatched, single-storey affair of two small bedrooms, a kitchen half-open to the sky, and a living room of sorts where now they rested at their ease, or as best they could, on low wooden benches decked with smelly furs — Hank Silberhutte and Henri-Laurent de Marigny held a muted conversation. Outside the door to this crude but comparatively clean shelter, the two brothers Rory and Erik silently squatted like human watchdogs.

The visitors from Borea were unable to say whether they were under the quiet protection or merely the wary scrutiny of Annahilde's sons, but whichever way it was, at least they each had felt sufficiently secure to snatch a few hours sleep. While it had not been immediately apparent, their hurtling voyage through the void had been both physically and mentally strenuous; now, with a pint of sweet, sticky ale inside them along with a plate of smoky, half-cooked meat of undetermined origin, they felt up to facing their next problem as it presented itself.

Of the events immediately following on Thonjolf's return to his clan: that had been something of an anticlimax. And little wonder he was occasionally known as Thonjolf the Silent!

The chief had left his longship with his retinue of a dozen
or so men, had briefly inspected the visitors, had grunted sourly at the sight of his son snoring on the beach, and had patiently given ear to Annahilde's shrill outline of events. Indeed her ragged figure and wild-eyed look had seemed to command their fair share of respect from the chief.

Then, following an aerial demonstration by de Marigny and the flying cloak, Thonjolf had gone off with the witch-wife and several members of the clan into the meeting-house. If the chief had been impressed by de Marigny's triumph over gravity, it had not showed, except perhaps in a slight arcing of his bushy red eyebrows.

And it was the general response to their coming — or rather the lack of response — that formed the topic of conversation between de Marigny and Silberhutte in Annahilde's house.

‘I
don't understand it,' de Marigny said. 'I always believed the Vikings to be a fiery, volatile people. The type of folk who would make a lot of an "omen" such as we've provided. Yet here we are, a pair of near-dwarfs, flying in like something out of the
Arabian Nights,
"emissaries of Ithaqua" and all that; not to mention your knocking the chief's son out cold. I mean, by my reckoning we should either be hanging up by our thumbs somewhere by now, or else occupying Thonjolf's throne — if he has one!'

Silberhutte nodded. 'Yes, it puzzled me, too, at first. But the more I think of it —'

`Yes?'

`Well, to start with, visitors from the skies are by no means unheard of on Numinos, Henri. Ithaqua's comings and goings must be fairly frequent.'

`Not too frequent, I hope,' de Marigny answered with feeling.

`And then there's Annahilde and her hallucinatory powders,' the Warlord continued. 'You'll recall Harold mentioned them? If all of the clans come equipped with witch-wives, and if all of them know where to lay their hands on the plants or whatever they use to concoct their powders ... little wonder it requires a lot to make your average Numinosian Viking sit up and take notice! And just suppose Ithaqua had sent us here — how would you react if you were a Viking?'

'I'd be pretty wary, I suppose.'

Silberhutte nodded. 'Sure you would — and that was more or less the reaction we got. Except from Harold, who's a pretty stupid bully. And I fancy that even he was only trying to assert himself in his father's absence. As for the chief himself: Thonjolf strikes me as a man with a lot on his limited mind, namely this big meeting he's just back from and the upcoming raid on the Isle of Mountains. What with those things, and on top of them Ithaqua sending us as emissaries to
his
clan — which must strike him as a hell of a thing despite his nearly negative reaction — and at the same time having to bear the responsibility for the actions of his oaf of a son .

`I suppose you're right,' de Marigny conceded. 'But it still doesn't get us any closer to finding the time-clock.'

`No, but unless my ears deceive me, here's Annahilde now. On her own by the sound of it. This could be the ideal opportunity to fill in on background information — and at the same time try and find out about the clock. Let's see what she has to say.'

The gabble of the witch-wife's voice grew louder as she approached the house, questioning her sons about the welfare of the strangers. They answered her respectfully if noncommittally, and she gave them permission to go down to the meetinghouse. Apparently the building within the stockade doubled not only as a throne room but also as a drinking place. A moment later she came through the door, closing it carefully behind her. Then she cocked her head to one side and listened, waiting for a few moments to ensure that her sons had indeed left their posts as instructed.

Satisfied, she turned at last and said: Now then, the pair of you, let's have it.'

'Let's have it?' de Marigny queried, doing his best to look blank.

`No games!' Annahilde cautioned. `You are not sent by Ithaqua, I know that. I knew it from the moment I touched-you.' She grasped their arms. `See! See! You' — she stared- at Silberhutte —'A, you have known Ithaqua's touch, his carmine gaze, his icy breath in your face, aye. But you are not his. He has chilled your blood, true, but you are your own man.'

She turned to de Marigny. 'And you — you, too, have met the Wind-Walker, but he has not touched you. Your blood is still warm. No, you are not Children of the Winds ... so what are you? I do not even believe you to be of Numinos. But if not Numinos, where else?'

The two looked at each other, silent for a moment, then Silberhutte said: 'Annahilde, it seems we're forced to trust you. No, we are not Ithaqua's emissaries, and we are not men of Numinos. I am Hank Silberhutte, Warlord of the Plateau on Borea. My people are sworn enemies of Ithaqua. This man' — he placed a hand on de Marigny's shoulder — 'is Henri-Laurent de Marigny, and he is from the Motherworld. I, too, was born on Earth, but Borea is now my homeworld.'

If Annahilde's eyes had gone wide when Silberhutte spoke of Borea, they became huge orbs at mention of the Motherworld. 'Men of Earth, here on Numinos?' she gasped. 'And not by Ithaqua's hand! But how? Why?'

`The how of it will have to wait,' de Marigny told her. 'As for why we are here: we seek a . . . a box.'