Medlo curved his hands about his mouth, cried between the stones in an echoing roar. ‘Strike where stone burns as thy need burns, O King!’
The horseman leaned from his mount to strike the fiery lava with the lance he held. A clot of burning stone flew up to hit him on the forehead so that he cried out. Now he saw the Sword. Medlo could see it, too, glittering, green, scarcely heated by the lava flow. The horseman dismounted, took it up to look upon it with unbelieving eyes, then rode back the way he had come.
Medlo leaned against the stone, weary beyond hope of rest. ‘So,’ he whispered. ‘It is done. The Sword made as it was made, set as it was set, found as it was found. Done. As I am done.’
‘No,’ said a voice behind him. ‘Not so.’
There in the fireglow stood a giant figure which Medlo thought he should recognize, except that it shifted in the shifting light. ‘Northward,’ the figure told him. ‘Beyond the great Abyss which men call the Abyss of Souls, a kingdom waits your founding, Scion of Rhees. Even now, events so move that a people will come to you. You are not done.’
It seemed then that Medlo was led away to the north, a journey of many days which, afterward, he could scarcely remember, into a land of cleanly green, watered by many fountains. The people there were herdsmen and workers in stone. They greeted Medlo as a king foretold, and he lived there long. He was still there when Widon the Golden came out of the south to build even greater the green and meadowy land of Ris. He was yet alive, white-bearded, honoured, and as content as any man has ever been.
LEONA
In the great forests of the north there was a tall cliff which loomed across the world, its face pocked with caves. In these caves lived a squat, strong people who hunted all the creatures of the forests and die grasslands, painting their likenesses upon the rough, curved walls of the caves. They knew the beasts of the world as they knew the feel of their own flesh, their own hands clenched around a flint knife. When they showed the children how it was that each beast lived and moved, the hunters would become the animal with each thrust of neck and head, each movement of shoulder, each stride becoming the thrust, movement, and stride of the animal. When they drew the beasts upon the rock walls, the animals breathed there as though they lived. The people were as close to the creatures of the earth as it was possible to be. They did not think of themselves in any way separate.
So it was with a feeling of strangeness but not separation that they saw one of the rare animals moving among the long grasses at the foot of the cliff. These were animals so rare that the people never learned them well enough to paint them, scarcely well enough to name them, never enough to dance their beings in the hunting dance. It looked somewhat like the great cats, which they usually avoided, but it was not one of those. It had a great, curved beak, shining and metallic, sharp as their knives, curved at the tip and knobbed like a fern frond at the base. It had forefeet clawed like those of a bird of prey, and it had mighty wings like the wings of an eagle. Its eyes were calm, like the eyes of an aurochs, yet full of understanding, and when it saw the men crouched at the cave entrance, it cried once and moved away.
The first hunter knew that the beast should not have been there, there in the grass at the foot of the cliff, but knowing it did not help matters. The cry of the beast had been the cry of the hunt, and he followed that cry, the men following him, spears dangling in their hands, unready, almost unwilling.
The beast led them three days south, down the grasslands to a place of meadows above the long, southeasterly flow of a great river. There, above the river, the beast turned toward them, crying once more. The hunt leader shuddered, his throat dry, and made a clumsy throw of his spear. It touched the beast, and the beast fell, its wings bearing once against the earth as though it might have wished, at the last, to fly.
It lay unbloodied, its eyes half closed. Around them was a flicker of summer lightning, the eyes of the beast glittering in that light. Two of the hunters took to their heels. The others watched while the first hunter cut off the strange, curled beak with his knife, grunting and sweating as though he struggled with some unseen enemy while the lightning flickered nearer in a mutter of thunder. The first hunter rose from the body of the beast, weeping, and stepped away with the brazen beak in his hands.
Wordless, he led them back as they had come. When they had returned to their own cave, he placed the beak far back on a shelf of stone in that part of the cave where they painted the animals. He never spoke of it again. Long after, one of the hunters asked if he had heard a voice in the thunder. The first hunter only shrugged, but he did not say he had not.
A strange beak it was. When the hunter people had passed away, another people came who found it where it had been hidden, and they took it with them in their wanderings. It was given to a trader, at last, who traded it to a metalsmith who made a vessel of it, plating it with
