“Are you truly from the Stars?” he asked, after the food was on the table and they had begun to eat. “Neither I nor any in the village have seen anybody from the Stars before.”
The big man with the red hair nodded. “Yes. We are from Dremna.”
Why, Dremna was the Great World, at the middle of everything! Dremna was the Empire. People from Dremna came to the cities of Awster and fabulous Antark as Southron traders from the Warm Seas came to the villages of the Northfolk. He stammered something about that.
“Yes. You see, we. …” Dranigo began. “I don’t know the word for it, in your language, but we’re people whose work it is to learn things. Not from other people or from books, but new things, that nobody else knows. We came here to learn about the long-ago times on this world, like the great city that was here and is now mounds of stone and earth. Then, when we go back to Dremna, we will tell other people what we have found out.”
Vahr Farg’s son, having eaten his fill, was fidgeting on his stool, looking contemptuously at the strangers and their host. He thought they were fools to waste time learning about people who had died long ago. So he thought the Keeper was a fool, to guard a worthless old piece of junk.
Raud hesitated for a moment, then said: “I have a very ancient thing, here in this house. It was worn, long ago, by great kings. Their names, and the name of their people, are lost, but the Crown remains. It was left to me as a trust by my father, who was Keeper before me and to whom it was left by his father, who was Keeper in his time. Have you heard of it?”
Dranigo nodded. “We heard of it, first of all, on Dremna,” he said. “The Empire has a Space Navy base, and observatories and relay stations, on this planet. Space Navy officers who had been here brought the story back; they heard it from traders from the Warm Seas, who must have gotten it from people like Yorn Nazvik. Would you show it to us, Keeper? It was to see the Crown that we came here.”
Raud got to his feet, and saw, as he unhooked the lumicon, that he was trembling. “Yes, of course. It is an honor. It is an ancient and wonderful thing, but I never thought that it was known on Dremna.” He hastened across to the crypt.
The dogs looked up as he approached. They knew that he wanted to lift the cover, but they were comfortable and had to be coaxed to leave it. He laid aside the deerskins. The stone slab was heavy, and he had to strain to tilt it up. He leaned it against the wall, then picked up the lumicon and went down the steps into the little room below, opening the wooden chest and getting out the bundle wrapped in bearskin. He brought it up again and carried it to the table, from which Dranigo and Salvadro were clearing the dishes.
“Here it is,” he said, untying the thongs. “I do not know how old it is. It was old even before the Ice-Father was born.”
That was too much for Vahr. “See, I told you he’s crazy!” he cried. “The Ice-Father has been here forever. Gorth Sledmaker says so,” he added, as though that settled it.
“Gorth Sledmaker’s a fool. He thinks the world began in the time of his grandfather.” He had the thongs untied, and spread the bearskin, revealing the blackened leather box, flat on the bottom and domed at the top. “How long ago do you think it was that the Ice-Father was born?” he asked Salvadro and Dranigo.
“Not more than two thousand years,” Dranigo said. “The glaciation hadn’t started in the time of the Third Empire. There is no record of this planet during the Fourth, but by the beginning of the Fifth Empire, less than a thousand years ago, things here were very much as they are now.”
“There are other worlds which have Ice-Fathers,” Salvadro explained. “They are all worlds having one pole or the other in open water, surrounded by land. When the polar sea is warmed by water from the tropics, snow falls on the lands around, and more falls in winter than melts in summer, and so is an Ice-Father formed. Then, when the polar sea is all frozen, no more snow falls, and the Ice-Father melts faster than it grows, and finally vanishes. And then, when warm water comes into the polar sea again, more snow falls, and it starts over again. On a world like this, it takes fifteen or twenty thousand years from one Ice-Father to the next.”
“I never heard that there had been another Ice-Father, before this one. But then, I only know the stories told by the old men, when I was a boy. I suppose that was before the first people came in starships to this world.”
The two men of Dremna looked at one another oddly, and he wondered, as he unfastened the brass catches on the box, if he had said something foolish, and then he had the box open, and lifted out the Crown. He was glad, now, that Salvadro had brought in the new lumicon, as he put the box aside and set the Crown on the black bearskin. The golden circlet and the four arches of gold above it were clean and bright, and the jewels were splendid in the light.
