The Wizard And The Warlord (2 page)

Sigurd yearned to put a stop to some of his neighbors’ malevolent gossiping; indeed his considerable presence was enough to silence the boldest of them and send them skulking away, remembering urgent errands they had barely begun. Sigurd was neither stout nor particularly tall, but no one liked to cross his proud and warlike disposition. Where he had learned such a dreadful proficiency with weapons the settlements could not guess and he never told that it was from Thorarna. From his earliest days, she had taught him how to wield a small sword and axe and had made him run up the steep fells until he thought his heart would burst and his exhausted legs would turn to paste. By the time he was old enough to find other boys to fight with, he had learned enough from Thorarna to compensate somewhat for the lack of a father and older brothers to teach him. His haughty determination to admit no superior and very few equals had won him a great many fights he ought to have lost and earned him respect not unmingled with fear among the inhabitants of the isolated Thongullsfjord. As long as Sigurd stood between his grandmother and the gossip, no harm would come to her while he could grasp an axe in her defense and dare anyone to accuse her openly in his presence.

Sigurd pulled his hood further over his eyes, knowing it was senseless to sit brooding and getting wetter by the minute, but it suited him to become thoroughly miserable and angry before he took action. He found himself resenting being an orphan of one-and-twenty and wishing he had a father and plenty of family to admire and encourage him, but here he was, virtually alone against the entire world. His few friends had learned early on that Sigurd brooked no teasing about being raised by his grandmother.

No one knew how he cherished the secret hope that his fate would be as lucky as that of a perfect dolt named Hemingr, whose natural father had honored the old tradition and sent for his son when he was sixteen years old. Sigurd had feigned lofty indifference; having an absentee father was common enough in a settlement where vikings and merchants landed. No one dared taunt him about it; he had seen to that by making swift and horrible examples of any boy who tried to mock him or the parents he had never known. Sigurd’s hopes hadn’t died easily—Sigurd never relinquished anything without a fight—and when he was eighteen he was still hoping, although he was far too proud ever to admit it, even to himself.

Until that period of his life, he had besieged Thorarna mercilessly with questions about his parents, but she was as stubborn as he was and refused to do more than say, “When I am on my deathbed I shall tell you, but until then I shall carry the secret locked within me. I have learned to live with it, but you aren’t prepared yet to bear the burden.” Then she sent him away on some complicated errand to tire him out with exertion and perhaps make him forget his troublesome questions.

As he passed his eighteenth year, Sigurd’s inquiries about his parents decreased; he found immediate concerns that were more interesting, such as his first lengthy sea voyage with an amiable viking who had designs upon the islands to the south of Skarpsey. When Sigurd returned, he was a man in his own right, and Thorarna was pleased to see him assume the master’s responsibility over their small holding. He bought some thralls to help expand the hay tuns and tend more sheep and cultivate more ground. Thorarna thought the parentage question safely dead and breathed a sigh of relief.

Sigurd himself put the question in the back of his mind for several more years, until the ugly rumors about Thorarna surfaced like sharks in the peaceful Thongullsfjord, just when he had begun to make a name for himself as a viking and a fairly competent farmer. Such gossip put him into a bad humor, since it pointed up what his neighbors must be saying about him and his grandmother. A man’s life could be mercilessly ended in battle or shipwreck, but his reputation lived on in the form of gossip or praise. His situation was tenuous, and if the men of Thongullsfjord decided to banish Thorarna, either he would die fighting them or he would become a landless, lordless wanderer, outlawed and outcast. It was a sentence of lingering death by starvation and exposure.

He glared gloomily at the toes of his boots and was not at all surprised or dissatisfied when the stitching suddenly parted under his gaze. Calamities great and small had followed him all his life when he was in this sort of humor. A strange influence broke plows, harnesses, and tools; oars fell overboard, sails ripped, and anything else occurred that would further exasperate him. Cursing his bad luck, he started to get up to leave, but suddenly realized that a man on a horse was standing just above him on the steep fell. He freed his sword immediately. A friend would have hailed him; only an enemy would creep up so close and sit staring so rudely.

“Who’s there? Speak your name!” he commanded with a flourish of his sword, striding two steps closer to get a better look at the intruder.

The stranger, closely cloaked, made no move. Sigurd halted and returned the man’s intense stare, suddenly wondering if he were seeing an apparition. The stranger edged his horse sideways up the hillside, still keeping his eyes fixed on Sigurd. The rain began descending with a vengeance. As Sigurd shook the water from his eyes, the image of the horseman faded into the mist and was gone.

Sigurd blinked. “An Alfar!” he said to himself, forgetting his wet condition for a few moments in his awe. Then he hurried downhill to tell Thorarna, who seemed to know almost everything a Scipling could know about the old legends. She held her beliefs with passionate fervor, in spite of the growing tendency to disbelieve in the unseen realm and its inhabitants. Sigurd sheathed his sword with a smile, confident of astonishing her when he told her what he had seen.

Thorarna, however, seemed in no mood for his news when he arrived home. She was carding wool, an occupation she took up when she was particularly piqued at someone or something. Today she scraped the fibers back and forth as if she were carding the heartstrings and sinews of a cherished enemy.

“Bah!” she declared, her eyes burning with an aggressive gleam when Sigurd announced his discovery. “Alfar! You must have fallen asleep and dreamed it. A man on a horse, you say, came and stared at you? A rude thing to do, knowing Alfar aren’t welcome in this realm. I wouldn’t have wondered if you’d been kidnapped and carried away. But look at you, wet through and cold as a fish. Imagine a grown man without the wits to get out of the rain. A fever more than likely inspired you to imagine you saw a man and a horse.”

“I don’t feel that I have a fever.” Sigurd hung up his cloak and sat down by the fire, where his fleece slippers waited. With a twinge of uneasiness, he noticed that Thorarna carded the wool away to nothing, allowing it to fall unnoticed at her feet. Her hands were shaking and her eye was too bright and fixed, gazing away at unpleasant scenes that were miles away.

“Grandmother? Is anything wrong?” Sigurd asked.

“Wrong! What would a boy like you know about it?”

“I’m not a boy,” he reminded her gently, but she only pshawed such a notion. When it suited her, she conveniently reduced Sigurd to the status of a boy of twelve, with all the accompanying aggravating defects. Nine years ago she had been quite stout enough to intimidate him with a willow switch and she frequently reverted to those glorious days even yet.

Now, as he looked at her with considerable consternation, it struck him that she was much reduced from those past days. No longer robust, she looked more like an old twig with its bark dried around it.

“Haven’t I warned you enough about strangers who might tell you they once knew us?” she went on in her lecturing tone. “It’s not safe for you to talk to strangers!”

Sigurd tried to make her laugh. “To be sure, Grandmother, I ought to be frightened—a great fellow such as I am, who has gone viking three summers now and ought to know how to take care of himself. Come now, Grandmother, what are you so upset about?”

“I’m not upset. You’re the one with the fever and chill, and you won’t stop pestering me about your father and mother, so it’s no wonder I’ve gotten into a state!” Her hands trembled so much that she dropped her carders and scarcely noticed, plucking distraitly at her hair and gown as if she didn’t know what she did.

Sigurd leaped up in alarm, seeing what a tremble she had fallen into. “Grandmother, you’re not well. Something has excited you. I decided long ago not to trouble you any more about my parents, who by now are surely dead and gone. You ought to lie down; let me help you.” He picked her up gently and deposited her on the narrow shelf of a bed with great solicitude.

“Dead and gone!” she exclaimed to herself in an odd voice, looking around fearfully, as if she had forgotten where she was.

“Shall I make you some tea to steady your nerves?” Sigurd tucked her eider around her awkwardly. “Your hands are like ice and your poor little feet, too. What did you ever do to get so shrunken and tiny, Grandmother? Don’t tell me it’s just age; old Grelod is twice your age and fatter every year.”

Thorarna glared at him helplessly, but her voice was grateful. “You great ninny, do you think I can’t care for myself and you, too, as I have done for all these years? With precious little help from anybody else, too,” she added emphatically. “Now brew me some tea, Sigurd. My wits need clearing. I’ve had something of a shock today, that’s all. Nothing you should concern yourself about just yet. A visitor from as well as beyond the grave,” she added in a sleepy whisper, but Sigurd caught the word visitor.

“Was it that brainless Bogmoddr, accusing you about his wretched colt? If he was here on such an errand, I’ll break his head for him. I’ve heard enough idle gossip. I’ll go and—”

“Sigurd, hush.” Her voice was weak and tired. “Stop stamping around and pay attention to the tea. Talk won’t hurt such a tough old boot as I am.” She opened her eyes, which held a flicker of their old fierceness. “But it will hurt you. I want you to leave here before your name is too damaged to repair. I can’t allow my bad reputation to tarnish yours.”

Sigurd snorted, scalding himself with the hot water. “Now she’s raving out of her mind. She thinks I would desert her when she’s sick and old. She must think I’m not much of a man, to abandon my own grandmother to the trolls in the fells and to vengeful neighbors!”

Thorarna lifted one hand for silence. “At least I don’t talk to myself yet,” she snapped. “Now listen to me and stop trying to jolly me along as if I were a feeble old woman and you were a grown man. You think you’re protecting me, but there’s not much left any more for you to fuss about. It’s simply not worth it any longer. I want you to leave Thongullsfjord at once, Sigurd. Tonight or tomorrow at the latest. It isn’t safe here for you any more.”

Sigurd handed her the tea. “Didn’t you begin training me to fight early in my life, Grandmother? You told me one day I would have to use my weapons to save myself and you. Why were you so intent, if I’m only to run away after all?”

She shook her head impatiently. “Can’t you see, you fool, that you can’t fight sendings and trolls? That’s what has been terrorizing the settlements, Sigurd, and most of these fools must soon realize that an entity far more malignant and powerful than old Thorarna is behind the misfortunes of Thongullsfjord. After today, the troubles will grow worse; and the cause of it, Sigurd, is inside this house. It is you and me, and a certain carved box in that trunk by the loom. Our doom has been following and searching for us these twenty years. It can have me—I don’t mind dying now—but you must escape, Sigurd.”

“Escape? No, I’ll fight, Grandmother! I’ll not give up our home to sendings and trolls!”

“You don’t understand. These things come from the other realm. I see now that there’s not much we can do against them—against a certain one who would like to possess that box and its contents.” Her eyes flashed and she propped herself up a little straighten “I’ve outwitted them all for more than twenty years. I bear them the greatest of malice, Sigurd, and I wish you to continue it. For that reason I’ve kept you and that box from them.”

Sigurd stared at her without understanding. He seated himself on a stool at her side and demanded, “Who, Grandmother?” He was so uneasy that his glance caused the cup to leap out of her fingers and spill on the packed earth floor. A long black sausage dropped from its moorings in the rafters, and the broom fell over with a crash into a nest of buckets and kettles.

Thorarna looked at the mess and pressed her hand over her eyes. “Go away, Siggi, I’m too tired to tell you anything else. Run outside and play, won’t you?” Her voice trailed away sleepily, and all Sigurd could do was pace up and down, clenching his fists and wondering who had visited his grandmother that day and who had stared at him on the fell. Finally he put on a cloak and saddled a horse to fetch a woman from Bogmoddrsstead to sit with his grandmother.

When that was done, it was nearly dark, and old Grelod, a great friend and ally of Thorarna’s, was installed beside the hearth like a protective dragon, swathed in shawls and various smelly charms done up in little bags. She had a charm, a petrified foot or claw or some ghastly object, for every illness and occasion of life, from a birth to a burning. Sigurd thought her quite a sorceress, and there was something awful and inevitable about the way she took charge of Thorarna, banishing Sigurd contemptuously as a mere male who was of no consequence in the unfolding drama. Thorarna’s fate lay in the hands of Grelod, which were soon busily mixing and powdering things and simmering small pots that made an abominable stink over the fire.

Sigurd kept out of the way, feeling absolutely worthless. He made his bed in the barn and spent an uneasy night listening to the strange creatures that had come to inhabit the fells of Thongull—trolls, with bellowing voices like bulls or seals, whose noises kept the livestock restless all night. Knowing that they had followed him and Thorarna was not a thought that lent itself to composing a mind for peaceful slumber.

To his further dismay, Grelod’s presence threatened to become a permanent institution beside his hearth. Thorarna got no better. Sigurd soon abandoned the hope that her sickness would convince the hardheaded neighbors that she was innocent of the supernatural crimes of which they suspected her. The depredations worsened in frequency and destruction. The trolls no longer took the trouble to hide themselves from view in the twilight after sundown, and the nighttime hours became a period of terror. Many people reported that the dead were no longer quiet in their graves, but stalked about, doing unspeakable acts of malice against both man and beast.