watch to a numbed ear he discovered it had stopped. Neither shaking nor winding could make it start.
He thought of asking his companion the time, but realized that the rider would have no more accurate idea than himself. He thought of asking how much farther they had to go. But he would have to make himself heard over the wind, and the old boy’s manner did not encourage questions.
They plodded on. The snow was coming thickly through the murky twilight. Shea could barely make out the figure before him. The path had become the same neutral grey as everything else. The weather was turning colder. The snowflakes were dry and hard, stinging and bouncing where they struck. Now and then an extra puff of wind would snatch a cloud of them from the moor, whirling it into Shea’s face. He would shut his eyes to the impact, and when he opened them find he had blundered off the path and have to scurry after his guide.
Light. He pulled the pack around in front of him and fumbled in it till he felt the icy touch of the flashlight’s metal. He pulled it out from under the other articles and pressed the switch button. Nothing happened, nor would shaking, slapping, or repeated snappings of the switch produce any result.
In a few minutes it would be too dark for him to follow the man on the pony by sight alone. Whether the old boy liked it
or not. Shea would have to ask the privilege of holding a corner of his cloak as a guide.
It was just as he reached this determination that something in the gait of the pony conveyed a sense of arrival. A moment more and the little animal was trotting, with Shea stumbling and skidding along the fresh snow behind as he strove to keep pace. The pack weighed tons, and he found himself gasping for breath as though he were running up a forty-five-degree angle instead of on an almost level path.
Then there was a darker patch in the dark-grey universe. Shea’s companion halted the pony and slid off. A rough-hewn timber door loomed through the storm, and the old man banged against it with his fist. it opened, flinging a flood of yellow light out across the snow. The old man stepped into the gap, his cloak vividly blue in the fresh illumination.
Shea, left behind, croaked a feeble «Hey!» just managing to get his foot in the gap of the closing door. It opened full out and a man in a baggy homespun tunic peered out at him, his face rimmed with drooping whiskers. «Well?»
«May I c-c-come in?»
«Umph,» said the man. «Come on, come on. Don’t stand there letting the cold in!»
THREE
Shea stood in a kind of entryhall, soaking in the delicious warmth. The vestibule was perhaps six feet deep. At its far end a curtain of skins had been parted to permit the passage of the old man who preceded him. The bonder Sverre — Shea supposed this would be his host — pulled them still wider. «Lord, use this as your own house, now and forever,» he murmured with the perfunctory hurry of a man repeating a formula like «Pleased to meet you.»
The explorer of universes ducked under the skins and into a long hall panelled in dark wood. At one end a fire blazed, apparently in the centre of the floor, though bricked round to knee height. Around it were a number of benches and tables. Shea caught a glimpse of walls hung with weapons — a huge sword, nearly as tall as he was, half a dozen small spears or javelins, their delicate steel points catching ruddy high lights from the torches in brackets; a kite-shaped shield with metal overlay in an intricate pattern —
No more than a glimpse. Sverre had taken him by the arm and conducted him through another door, shouting; «Aud! Hallgerda! This stranger’s half frozen. Get the steam room ready. Now, stranger, you come with me.»
Down a passage to a smaller room, where the whiskered man ordered him: «Get off those wet clothes. Strange garments you have. I’ve never seen so many buttons and clasps in all my days. If you’re one of the Sons of Muspellheim, I’ll give you guesting for the night. But I warn you for tomorrow there be men not far from here who would liefer meet you with a sword than a handclasp.» He eyed Shea narrowly a moment. «Be you of Muspellheim?»
Shea fenced: «What makes you think that?»
«Travelling in those light clothes this far north. Those that hunt the red bear» — he made a curious motion of his hand as though tracing the outline of an eyebolt in the air — «need warm hides as well as stout hearts.» Again he gave Shea that curiously intent glance, as though trying to ravel some secret out of him.
Shea asked: «This is May, isn’t it? I understood you’re pretty far north, but you ought to get over this cold snap soon.»
The man Sverre moved his shoulders in a gesture of bafflement. «Mought, and then mought not. Men say this would be the Fimbulwinter. If that’s so, there’ll be little enough of warm till the roaring trumpet blows and the Sons of the Wolf ride from the East, at the Time.»
Shea would have put a question of his own, but Sverre had turned away grumpily. He got rid of his clammy shorts instead, turning to note that Sverre had picked up his wrist watch.
«That’s a watch,» he offered in a friendly voice.
«A thing of power?» Sverre looked at him again, and then a smile of comprehension distended the wide beard as he slapped his knee. «Of course. Mought have known. You came in with the Wanderer. You’re all right. One of those southern warlocks.»
From somewhere he produced a blanket and whisked it around Shea’s nude form. «This way now,» he ordered. Shea followed through a couple of doors to another small room, so full of wood smoke that it made him cough. He started to rub his eyes, then just in time caught at the edge of his blanket. There were two girls standing by the door, neither of them in the least like the Irish colleens he had expected to find. Both were blonde, apple-cheeked, and rather beamy. They reminded him disagreeably of Gertrude Mugler.
Sverre introduced them; «This here’s my daughter Aud. She’s a shield girl; can lick her weight in polar bears.» Shea, observing the brawny miss, silently agreed. «And this is Hallgerda. All right, you go on in. The water’s ready to pour.»
In the centre of the small room was a sunken hearth full of fire. On top of the fire had been laid a lot of stones about the size of potatoes. Two wooden buckets full of water sat by the hearth.
The girls went out, closing the door. Shea, with the odd sensation that he had experienced all this at some previous time — «it must be part of the automatic adjustment one’s mind makes to the pattern of this world,» he told himself — picked up one of the buckets. He threw it rapidly on the fire, then followed it with the other. With a hiss, the room filled with water vapour.
Shea stood it as long as he could, which was about a minute, then groped blindly for the door and gasped out. instantly a bucketful of ice water hit him in the face. As he stood pawing the air and making strangled noises a second bucketful caught him in the chest. He yelped, managing to choke out, «
Somewhere in the watery world a couple of girls were giggling. it was not till his eyes cleared that he realized it was they who had drenched him, and that he was standing between them without his protecting blanket.
His first impulse was to dash back into the steam room. But one of the pair was holding out a towel which it seemed only courtesy to accept. Sverre was approaching unconcernedly with a mug of something. Well, he thought, if they can take it, I can. He discovered that after the first horrible moment his embarrassment had vanished. He dried himself calmly while Sverre held out the mug. The girls’ clinical indifference to the physical Shea was more than ever like Gertrude.
«Hot mead,» Sverre explained. «Something you don’t get down south. Aud, get the stranger’s blanket. We don’t want him catching cold.»
Shea took a gulp of the mead, to discover that it tasted something like ale and something like honey. The sticky sweetness of the stuff caught him in the throat at first, but he was more afraid of losing face before these people than of being sick. Down it went, and after the first gulp it wasn’t so bad. He began to feel almost human.
«What’s your name, stranger?» inquired Sverre.
