An Empire Unacquainted With Defeat (11 page)

Bragi was surprised by the gloominess of the city, then realized how many little noises he had always taken for granted. The song of wind was gone. The humming of insects. The creaks and groans of wagon wheels. The sounds of hooves on pavement. The silence was unnerving. He was beginning to understand the mood of the fleeing thousands.

The northman's scroll cheered the sour guard captain. The soldier quickly delivered him to the palace and King's herald. The herald got a second letter, danced with joy. He directed Bragi's attention to a poster. The northman was certain it was another of Norton's proclamations. He nodded.

The Vizier himself soon appeared, ushered Bragi into the Royal Presence. Here he delivered a scroll to the King. While Norton anxiously poured over the text, Bragi slipped a letter to Yselda. She read and laughed. Then, knowing there was nothing to do but wait, he sat on the floor, leaned against a pillar, and went to sleep.

Mountains of parchments and buckets of ink were used during an argument between Norton and his advisers, the latter pleading for accession to Aristithorn's demands. Bragi went unnoticed only because his prodigious snoring was inaudible. Later, however, someone did notice him and decided he might be pressured into betraying the wizard. Bragi was given parchments dripping doom and golden promises. He grinned at them all. Considering the direness of some of the threats, Norton soon concluded he could not read.

Bragi—always wearing his lack wit's smile—considered the Royal argument. It seemed the King's advisers wanted to pay Aristithorn. The King refused to give up a politically valuable daughter. The Vizier, however, found Norton's weakness.

The King, so the Vizier argued, would be lord of an empty city if the silence continued—the people were fleeing in thousands. Where, when the people were gone, did the Crown expect to apply taxes?

A telling blow! If there was anything Norton enjoyed more than lying, it was taxing his subjects to staggering. Insufferable demand, with no return, had made Norton one of the better known tyrants of his end of the world. Other monarchs envied him. These were distinctions he would not willingly surrender. Therefore, after breakfast, he put on his sad face and sent for Yselda. Sorrowfully, he told her what he had to do.

Yselda tearfully made apparent her willingness to sacrifice herself for her people.

Norton seemed delighted with Yselda's sorrow—not suspicious because her possessions were already waiting on a cart at the palace gate. However, he shrugged that off as he had all the other oddities about his child—unaware she had needs other than those complementing his own.

Bragi and the woman quickly departed.

His daughter gone, the King dried his tears and turned to business. He sent his bodyguard after the two, with orders to slay the northman and sorcerer. The wizard's death should cancel all his spells. He would then have his daughter back and could put her to good use.

However, a chuckling Aristithorn was watching from afar.

Bragi and Yselda left the silence, rode up a tall hill, over, and entered a smallish wood. Behind them, outside the wood, shimmering appeared, coalesced into duplicates of the couple. The specters rode at right angles to the path of those they imitated.

Norton's soldiers topped the hill, followed the decoys. Only later did they notice the chimeras had no cart—and then it was too late to find Bragi's carefully concealed trail. Somewhere afar, an old man chortled at his deception, then, weary, retired.

Bragi and Yselda covered most of the distance to the wizard's camp before nightfall. Yselda had ridden silently the afternoon long, eyes always on the northman. He grew wary of the hungers he saw there. He had his own desires, and one of the strongest was to avoid antagonizing Aristithorn.

But there was no avoiding the trap—all too well did the woman know how to bait it. Bragi was a long time getting to sleep. And rode with guilt next morning. He was surprised when the wizard greeted him pleasantly.

"Hai!" the old man cried when they rode up. "So Norton
can
be beaten. Wonderful—wonderful—wonderful! Hello, my dear. Did you have a pleasant journey?"

"Indeed I did, Thorny," she replied, sighing. "Indeed I did."

A suspicious look passed across Aristithorn's face, but he was too eager to waste time worrying. "Thank you, thank you," he said to Bragi. "I hope you did well too."

Grinning, the northman held up a sack with the mark of the Itaskian Treasury.

"Ah, good. My friend, you've helped an old man beyond all hope of repayment. If you ever need a friend, drop by my castle in Necremnos. It's the one with the chained chimeras guarding the gates and the howls coming from inside—I suppose I'll give that up, now I'm retiring. Drop by any time. I've got to go. The silence will end when I do. One more magick, then I'll get to the business of renouncing my vows."

The wizard was so excited he flubbed his incantation three times. The fourth, while Bragi watched, saw woman, sorcerer, cart, and two donkeys vanishing in a fearsome cloud of smoke.

Shrugging the affair off as profitable and amusing, but of no great import, Bragi returned to Itaskia. He stopped by the Red Hart Inn for a stoop with old friends.

But the story did not end so easily. Bragi found himself outlawed for his part in the affair. Off he went, on an adventure into Freyland where he planned to liberate a fortune said to be lying in the heart of a certain mountain. The treasure he found—and the dragon guarding it. The worm won the ensuing battle handily.

The singed northman, outlawed all along the western coast, decided to impose upon Aristithorn's hospitality. The wizard welcomed him warmly, immediately took him to see his children. Yselda had recently given birth to a pair of sturdy little blond, blue-eyed sons.

Innocently, Bragi asked, "How old are they?"

"Two months," Yselda replied. Confirmation of his suspicions was in her face.

Aristithorn said something about it being time to feed the vampires in the basement. He shuffled off. Bragi and Yselda went for a walk in the garden.

"Is he the man he claimed?" the northman asked.

"Indeed! A one-man army on that battlefield. There's a problem, though. He abstained so long he can't father children. He doesn't know, I'm sure." A strange light twinkled in the Princess's eyes as she added, "It's a pity. He wants more children. So do I, but I just don't know how we'll manage . . . ."

"If I can be of any help . . . ."

Deep in the dungeons, Aristithorn hummed to himself as he tossed wriggling mice to his vampire bats while watching a garden scene in a magical mirror . . . .

He'd lied when he said he was retiring.

Celibacy has nothing to do with his kind of magic.

He'd known of his sterility.

Trust a wizard no more than a King. They're all chess players.

After completing two vast, never published, lethally influenced by Tolkien, Eddison, and the Victorian fantasists, inscribed in a nineteenth-century writing style trilogies, I became intrigued by the simple storytelling of folk tales. I was especially fond of the folklore of Norway. That became a powerful influence in the creation of both Bragi Ragnarson and his native Trolledyngja. The first few centuries after Norway's at-point-of-sword conversion to Christianity gave rise to many interesting tales as the Old Gods receded—much more slowly in the mountains and remote provinces, naturally. The Old Ones lived on as lesser, wicked supernatural beings. The Oskorei is sometimes identified with the Aesir. A character type identifiable as Thor can be found in tales as late as the first half of the twentieth-century—though the Thunderer has been demoted all the way to drunken troll.
This story, appearing for the first time, and "Silverheels" later, fit equally well into the Trolledyngja of the Dread Empire world or that of twelth-century Norway.
From small bricks like this, never-to-see-the-light novels like
The King of Thunder Mountain
and two others would arise—and in their turn provide the soil from which
A Shadow of All Night Falling
sprang. Nepanthe and the Storm Kings, Varthlokkur and others, had a long, quiet history ere ever they stepped onto the public stage.

Tröndelag was wild country inhabited mainly by trolls and
huldre
-folk. Hifjell Mountain frowned down on Alstahaug village like a brooding giant. On Hifjell's skirts Dark Wood began, a dense pine forest where wolves prowled and the Hidden People spent summer nights in dances to the wicked Old Gods. Few Alstahaugers were brave enough to climb the mountain. Especially not Svale Skar, the village chieftain.

There was one old man, Ainjar, though, who came and went in Dark Wood. He had courage enough for all the villagers. They believed him almost as brave as the King.

Ainjar had no family save a one-eyed dog name Freki. He made his living hunting in Dark Wood. When he needed something that the forest could not provide he brought furs to town.

Grownups did not trust Ainjar because of the dark places he walked, but their children loved him. He always had time to describe a
huldre
wedding or trolls brawling by throwing boulders from wall to wall of canyons deep in the mountains. They thought his tales were tall but he told them well.

Svale Skar awaited Ainjar's coming from Dark Wood with deepening dread.

When a lamb or chicken disappeared everyone knew the
huldre
had been up to mischief and thought little more of it. It was the way of the land and the forest dwellers. But this had been an evil year all round. Right here in Tröndelag, at Stikklestad, there had been a great battle. The King himself had fallen. Before his death he had built bridges and strongholds, had bested giants and trolls, and had driven the wickedest things deep into the mountains or the icy northern wastes. Now he was gone. The new conqueror king, far, far away, had no time to shield his remote new subjects.

The old evils had begun to return.

Sons and daughters and wives had begun to disappear.

Svale's little girl, Frigga, was among the missing.

"Ainjar," he said when the old man finally came down from the mountain, "you wander Dark Wood. You have converse with the
huldre
-folk. Have you heard anything of my little Frigga?"

The old man's dog regarded him with bared teeth.

No one liked Svale Skar. He was a troublemaker. He always drank too much, then started something.

"Svale, you talk too loud, you brag too much, and you're cruel to your wife and children. The
huldre
wise would say you deserve your suffering. So you surprise me now, showing this spark of goodness. For the first time in your life, I think, you want to ask something not for your own sake. I'll ponder that while I deliver my furs to Fat Jens."

Ainjar returned from the furrier's with a smaller pack and lighter step. "Svale, I can give you no good news. This evil plagues the Hidden Folk, too. The
huldre
wise say the
Oskorei
has returned."

"The
Oskorei?
The Terrible Host?"

It was an army of evil spirits. The fallen King had banished it northward, to the realms of always cold. Old tales told of the
oskoreien
raging through the night, astride fire-breathing black stallions whose hooves struck lightning off the sides of mountains, hunting souls unlucky enough not to be safely home by dark. Their hunting horns could still be heard mourning on winter's bitterest northern winds.

"The Wild Hunt!" Svale stammered, frightened. "What can we do?"

Ainjar stared up the dusty path, tugged his ragged gray beard. "I wonder, are there any brave men left? Men like Hatchet-Face Svien, who plundered the Hifjell troll? Somebody who could lay hands on an iron sword?"

Hatchet-Face Svien had lived in nearby Aalmo. Svale often bragged that Alstahaug's cowards were braver than Aalmo's heroes.

His bluff had been called. He owned the only sword in Alstahaug. He had it of his grandfather, whose father had taken it a-reaving in the old days. He had always considered it only a keepsake.

"I have an iron sword."

Ainjar pretended surprise. "Yes? Good. I'll wait here."

Svale was scared but his neighbors had overheard. He got the rusty sword, a blanket, and a bag of food. He could do nothing but shake and stammer Frigga's name when his wife asked where he was going.

A mile into Dark Wood they found a fairy ring. Seven worn, rune-carved stones stood round its edges. Svale thought he saw shadows darting amongst the trees in the twilight.

"I've brought the man," Ainjar said.

Seven old
huldre
stepped into the circle from behind the standing stones. They were the wise of the Hidden People.

The oldest said, "So. Bold Svale Skar himself. In Dark Wood. Though I live another thousand years, no greater wonder shall I see. We have brought the
hulder
."

A young
hulder
entered the circle. He carried a spear with a silver head.

"This is Sköl," said the chieftain. "He's taken a vow not to speak till his son is free."

"We go, then," Ainjar said. "To Thunder Mountain. Fetch me my staff and cloak."

Svale started shaking all over again. Thunder Mountain lay far inland. The ancient stronghold of the
Oskorei
supposedly lay at its heart.

Ainjar led. Svale followed. Sköl came last. Freki ranged ahead. After four hard days, in forests that Svale thought haunted, they reached the foot of Thunder Mountain.

Svale had thought Dark Wood menacing when seen from Alstahaug, then terrifying once it surrounded him. On Thunder Mountain it was worse. There the forest grew dense as night, up to the snow line, and seemed eager to gulp him up. Wolves called on the mountainside.

"How much farther?" Svale's feet ached. Like most people of his time, he had never before strayed more than a few miles from home.

"To the snow line. Where that small hump sticks out like a nose. And now I must leave you."

"But . . . ."

"But me no buts, Svale Skar. Freki!"