And, fight against it as he would, Alfric had to obey the summons, and follow it where it compelled him.
A long running marathon he ran, a shadow fleeing through shadows to shadows, until at last the forest eased away to sand beneath his feet, and he broke free of the last trees, the gnarled evergreen pines of the dunes, and ran over the sandwaves and on to the open shore, where a fire burnt as bloody as the moon.
There were women gathered by the fire, women with strange marks on their foreheads and strange words in their mouths. And Alfric listened to the words and did not understand, but was compelled even so, and his Change came upon him, and, though he did not wish it, he was commanded from wolf to human.
Drunk with a sudden fatigue, Alfric Danbrog stood swaying by the balefire, his vision blurred, the flames smeared daubs of colour, the faces indistinct globs of mass and form, and either the women were chanting in a foreign language or else there was something wrong with his ears (his mind?) for he could not understand them.
Then But after that, what happened to him became incoherent, because he drank without thinking from a cup which they offered him, and his world blundered into something not far different from a dreamscape.
‘Well met,’ said the first hag.
‘By night with the moon abune,’ said the second.
‘By stam and stone,’ said the third.
‘Bring her forth,’ said the first.
‘Step forward, my darling,’ said the second.
‘Here she is,’ said the third.
Then it happened (or did it happen?) that Alfric Danbrog was face to face with a woman whose face was a mass of scars, burnt hideously by a balefire blaze like that which now made the sundering seas run red with reflected fire. Her face was cinders, ashes, desolation, scarred as the moon, but he accepted this, for a command was upon him. He did as she wished, and her blood broke, suddenly, yes, it was all over very suddenly.
When the girl was released, she went to the waters of the ocean and washed herself. And Alfric, feeling very weary, lay down by the fire. The old women covered his body with a blanket. Then the girl, washed cold by the waves of the Winter Sea, rejoined them; and the old women departed with the girl, leaving Alfric sleeping by the sea.
He dreamt, that night.
He dreamt of bones weeping for flesh, and of wind crying for the bones it thought it had once possessed. And then he dreamt of plum-petal pie, of untunchilamons by the thousand unquilting an eiderdown, and then (dreams shifting to nightmare) of gangrenous plague and carnivorous seals, of long-stretched scorlins in which lubbery kelp was entwined promiscuously with pungent blubber weed and the soft fronds of mermaids’ delight, of those skorlins becoming corpses, of the corpses walking, of a war of walking corpses, of a fish swinging on a string as it rotted, of waves breaking scales of encrusted moonlight from the flanks of shuttling rocks, and of fire, of fire Of fire, yes, for he was burning.
CHAPTER TWELVE
For night after night, Alfric Danbrog lay in his father’s house, shuddering with fever. In his illness, he endured incoherent visions, few of which were pleasant. Fragmentary ghosts smeared his cheeks with heated honey, spiked his bones with splinters of steel and whispered inscrutable words of wisdom into his ears.
‘The best and worst,’ said one. ‘The best and worst of blades alik e know that blood will have blood and blood.’ ‘What?’ said Alfric.
And his mother, intruding upon this dialogue with delirium, said:
‘There now, there now. Lie back. Rest. Don’t worry. You’ll be all right.’
But Alfric was not all right.
He was mortally ill, and he was living in torment.
In fever he imagined himself become a zombie, enslaved by witchcraft; his drudgery it was to be a corpse yet have to shift black wood and water until his bones neared breaking point from the strain of labour. At other times, he thought himself mutilated, staring at the world with one eye solo; and so convincing was this delusion that he tried to pluck out his rotten eye with his groping fingers.
Then, in one rare episode of peace, his hallucinations took him into a wonderwolf of pastoral bliss. It seemed to him that he spent an entire afternoon on a mellow-misty lakeside lawn, watching the wings of a bird making tracks upon the water. Then dark raindrops fell, and storm drenched down, and Alfric’s world dissolved to water.
Then to fire.
He lived with fire and in fire, and watched fire consume the hush of a bird’s egg, the bird itself, the bird’s nest, the tree which held the nest, and then the world which held the tree.
Such was the heat of Alfric’s fever that he imagined himself to be that world-burning fire. Wide he swelled, then shrank, diminishing in strength and freedom until at last he found himself burning in the confines of the hearth of a great hall, listening to bold singers declaring the deeds of dragons and telling of salamanders lapped in flame.
Later, he thought himself one of those singers; and imagined he stood by that fire. While thus standing, he saw the deathblade Bloodbane bury itself in the blazing hearth. It hurt him to see that weapon shrivelling amidst the fire-fretted wood. So Alfric, loathe to see such many-splendoured death destroyed, reached for the weapon and took it by the hilt.
For a moment he held it.
Then the sword turned to an eel, which writhed in Alfric’s hand, wet and slippery.
Alfric reproved himself:
‘This must stop. For this hints of neurosis, and my bank account cannot withstand the assault of any ailment so expensive.’
Obediently, his mind abandoned neurosis for madness, and he found himself plunged into an underhall deep in the earth where he fought against uncouth creatures of orange and umber, struggling long with nightmarish foes until at last he escaped to the world above.
Where was he? Dark thronged the shadows in a fastness of forest haunted by the deep-soughing song of millennial winds. Those winds began to weather and wither Alfric’s flesh as he quested beneath dead, creaking branches. He was looking for a path, a track, a road. But none such he found. The cold wind blew through the rags of his clothes, flirting with the ghosts it found in his pockets. The wind was mauve and tasted of lemons. Lemons?
‘None such grow in Wen Endex,’ said Alfric. ‘So these-’
But even in his fever-dreams he could not bring himself to speak of the Secret of the Partnership Banks.
‘Freeze,’ sang the wind.
Alfric thought its malice superfluous, for he was sure to freeze effectively without any such invitation.
Or was he?
By dint and endeavour, Alfric found a glowing ember — plucked it from the flesh of a toadstool and fanned it to life with a stuffed flamingo — and with that ember lit his own fever and fanned it into fire, until he was once more flame, and, thus incarnated, flourished skyward as an avatar of the sun.
At last, after much such turbulent adventuring, Alfric Danbrog slipped from fever into honest dream, and dreamt of bones scattered amidst the greyskull stones of a beach below the cliffs of the Winter Sea. There he stood, sadly contemplating life, time and mortality.
— Ever we die.
Thus thought Alfric Danbrog.
Death is the common fate of all. The fate of cowards and the fate also of those brave men and bold who seek to win a long-lasting glory with steel-edged swords. As even the heroes have found, to elude death is not easy. Even the mightiest, in time, must concede their wills to mortality. While the generosity of the flesh which allows the spirit to pursue its designs through many a year, each of those passing years is but a stay of execution, with the ultimate outcome unchanged.
