“What’s that sound? I don’t hear a sound. Listen, that sounds like footsteps! It’s just somebody outside. No, I tell you, someone is in the tunnels and coming this way!”
The voices were high, almost squeaky. He continued forward with a wondering smile, on his knees now.
“I don’t hear anything! That’s because it stopped. Do you want to go look? All right then, I’ll look. But you have to come too. But you’re the one who heard the sound!”
Now he himself heard footsteps, light and quick. He waited in the near darkness while the green light rapidly approached.
But he was not prepared for the shriek.
“A Wanderer! A Wanderer! They’ve come for us! Flee while you can! We can’t get out! What can we do!?!”
He sat back on his heels to appear less threatening to the very short people who now ran in circles before him. They had dropped their light, but it still burned, giving their faces, already distorted by panic, an unreal quality.
“I am not a Wanderer,” he said, not shouting for fear of frightening them worse but speaking very clearly. “Who are you?”
“It’s not a Wanderer! He says he’s not a Wanderer. Is it a mortal? But how did a mortal get in our tunnels? Who are you?”
They were all around him now, jumping to get a better look over each other’s shoulders, pushing forward and then scrambling back if he shifted.
“I am indeed a mortal,” he said slowly, “but I have been in the Wanderers’ realm. I followed a stream into the back of your cave.”
“There is no stream! What does he mean, a stream? Do you see a stream?”
And indeed the tunnel floor was dry. He could not even hear the splash of the waterfall. Goldmane! He looked over his shoulder into blackness. I’ve gone somewhere, he thought, I don’t know where, like stepping through that stone gate, and I’ve left Goldmane behind.
“Can I return to the Wanderers’ realm by going back?”
“No! You can’t go anywhere! There’s nowhere for mortals to go! And if you really are a mortal, you should be here, in mortal lands!”
These were certainly not the mortal lands he remembered. He looked at the excited group before him. “Are you perhaps faeys?”
“Yes, yes, of course we’re faeys! And we don’t like mortals here in our tunnels! They’re too dangerous! We’ve only ever tamed one successfully.”
“Then I shall bother you no more.” He groped back the way he had come, on his knees, his head bent beneath the low ceiling. But in twenty feet he reached a solid wall.
He turned around slowly. They were clustered, watching him. “We told you mortals can’t reach the Wanderers’ realm that way.”
“Then how can I?”
“You can’t! We already told you that you can’t! You have to stay here, or at least not here, but in mortal lands. As soon as it’s dark outside we’ll put you out the door.”
And the lords of voima only knew where he would be when they put him there, without even his horse. He might be a thousand miles from Hadros’s court and from Karin. At least he seemed to be back in a land with sunsets. He settled himself cross-legged to wait until evening.
But the faeys did not go away although they retreated a little down the passage. “Maybe we could try taming this one,” someone suggested, but the rest shushed him. Roric ran his thumb along his jaw, realizing that his beard had not grown in the week-or however long it had been-that he had been in the Wanderers’ realm. “You haven’t told us your name,” another faey said boldly after several more minutes had passed.
There seemed no reason to hide his identity. “I am Roric No-man’s son.”
“There! I knew we should try to tame him! But are you sure? Suppose it’s a different Roric?”
He leaned forward. “What do you mean?” he asked sharply.
“Do you know someone named Karin? She’s going to be queen!”
Long, long, ago, when the earth was new and men and women first came, blinking wide-eyed, out from the forests, there was life but no death on earth, and the Lords of Death waited without taking anyone. The lords of voima brought birth and growth, but very soon the earth became crowded, for children did not replace their parents but were added to them, and even the insects and the birds and the trees constantly multiplied.
And at first humans were happy, thinking themselves eternal, knowing that fate could not touch them. But then the wisest among them realized that all was not well. Where there was no end for men to fear, there was no goad to complete any task. Deeds were left ever undone, songs were left ever unsung, and there was neither growth nor change among men or women, only more and more persons, each like all the others. The wise, and at last even the foolish, understood something was wrong, but none knew what to do.
Finally Sielrigg the hero said, “I shall seek out Fate and see if something different can be arranged, before we crowd ourselves into the very sea and fall into a torpor that would make even life itself no longer worth having.”
So he went to the Weaver’s cave and burned an offering, then he took his sword and swung astride his great warhorse. He rode for miles, for days, for months, for years. He rode from the north to the south, from the east to the west. And at long last he came to a hut in the deep, deep woods, where a wizened old woman waited all by herself, and he knew that she was Fate.
“We need to grow, we need to change,” Sielrigg told her. “Humans are not made to sit idle. But our immortality makes it hard for us to treat anything seriously, and there are too many of us for any one to hope he may do any new thing.”
“What you are missing,” said the wizened old woman, “is a needful balance, a balance between life and death, ceasing and becoming.”
“But I did not come to ask for death,” said Sielrigg, hefting his great sword although he knew well that the old woman could not be wounded any more than he could. “I ask for a way for us to find again the sense of purpose the lords of voima meant us to have.”
“And I give it to you in my own way,” answered Fate. “Henceforth the Lords of Death shall have powers to balance those of the lords of voima even in the present world. All were fated already to come to Death at the last, when even Time shall end; now I shall allow Death to take men and all other creatures even from the very midst of life. When all humans know that their end must someday come, that if they do not grow the food they shall starve, that if they do not sing their songs they will go forever unheard, then you shall see renewal.”
Then Sielrigg the hero said, “Very well. But I ask a boon of Fate. If this will help my people, then I ask that I be the first to die.”
And his wish came true on the spot, for his sword turned in his hand and stabbed him, and as his body sank to the forest floor his spirit went forth, a shadowless wight. It went down to Hel, which until then had stood vast and dusty and empty, and he became the first mortal spirit ever to reach that realm. But then many more humans began to die, and insects and animals and trees as well. Hel then became the place of despair and unfulfilled plans for all who went there untimely, but the earth was a land of ceaseless striving, where glorious battle was worth fighting, where the food had to be grown and the young children cherished, and the songs that were sung kept the spirit and memory of the dead alive.
CHAPTER FOUR
1
“I think you misunderstood something important,” said Karin. “Please listen to me.”
The All-Gemot of the Fifty Kings had ended, and after it several days of games and feasting, and at last King Hadros was preparing to start back to his kingdom. The whole area where the kings had camped was full of tents
