A Wizard and a Warlord

6

Well…” Alea paused, taken aback, then said, “A king is a man who gives orders to everyone else.”

“Why?” one of the children asked.

Alea tried to think of a good reason, but could only say, “Because he doesn’t have anything else to do. Besides, all the other gods were Odin’s children, so they paid attention to what he said.”

“Oh,” the child said, thinking it over. Then, “Did he have a lot of children?”

“Lots and lots,” Alea said. “But this story is about one of his sons, the thunder god, and his name was Thor—and Thor had a friend named Loki.”

The adults frowned, and one of the children said, “Three boy gods? Isn’t that too many?”

“Why, how many should there be?” Alea asked in surprise.

“Well, one boy god in the sky and one girl god in the earth is enough,” the child answered, and the adults nodded.

“Oh,” Alea said, and thought fast. “Well, this story was made up a long, long time ago, before people realized that. They still thought there were lots and lots of gods and goddesses. Anyway, one morning, Thor woke up and…”

“Didn’t Thor have a mommy?” asked one little girl. “A mother?” Alea asked, startled. “Well, of course he did—Odin’s wife, Freya. But she isn’t part of this story.”

“Why not?” asked a big boy. “Mothers are important!”

“Why, so they are, and I know other stories about Freya and the goddesses of Asgard,” Alea said, surprised. “Would you rather hear one of those?”

“What’s this story about?” asked a five-year-old. “It’s about Thor’s visit to Jotunheim, the land of the giants,” Alea said.

A chorus of “ooohs” answered her, and several voices said, “Let’s hear about the giants!”

“Well, then.” Alea recovered her composure. “One morning, Thor woke up and found his magic hammer, Mjollnir, missing. He asked all around, but nobody had seen it. The watchman of the gods, though, had seen a giant sneaking around, and that’s how they realized that one of the giants had stolen Mjollnir.”

“What’s ‘stolen’ mean?” asked a little girl.

Alea stared a moment, then said, “Taking something that belongs to someone else, without asking.”

“Oooooh!” said several voices, and, “That was naughty!” said another.

“Naughty indeed.” One of the parents frowned. “Surely the other people who lived in this Asgard banded together to make the giant give back the hammer!”

“No,” said Alea, “because he lived with the other giants, in their own land. They were people of completely different nations, not just a different village.”

“Even so! The giant villagers would have made the thief give it back!”

“No,” said the grandmother. “Perhaps they didn’t know one of their number had taken it.”

“Oh, they knew,” Alea said rashly, “and were proud of it.”

“Well! I never!” a mother huffed. Alea realized that was probably true.

“What horrid people, to be proud of such a thing! ” said a father.

“What monstrous sort of people were these giants, who would applaud a thief?” asked a third parent. Alea saw a mother glancing with concern at her children and caught her feelings of apprehension. The man beside her was looking at her and Gar as though wondering whether or not to run them out of town. Could this story really be so controversial that the parents thought it was dangerous for their children?

Yes—if they had never heard of stealing, and if all villages were friendly with one another. Who would want the ideas of theft and war introduced where they hadn’t been?

“But what difference did it make?” asked an older man in a reasonable tone. “Couldn’t this Thor have just shrugged and made himself another hammer?”

“Well, it was a magical hammer,” Alea said. “Anytime he threw it”—she barely managed to keep herself from saying “at somebody”—“it came flying back to him.”

The children ooohed again, eyes round with wonder, but one of the fathers asked. “Why would he need a hammer that came back to him? Was he so lazy that he couldn’t go pick it up? And why would he want to throw it, anyway?”

Alea started to tell him the hammer was a weapon of battle, but out of the corner of her eye she saw Gar shake his head a centimeter, and Alea remembered that these people might not have heard of war. She glanced at the other parents; she had learned enough of telepathy to be able to perceive their growing unease at such an unfit tale, so she made some quick changes. “It was a special hammer, for hunting,” she said, making it up on the spot. “His people thought it was more merciful to knock animals senseless than to let them feel the pain of arrows or spears.”

“How kind!” a woman exclaimed, and the men nodded judiciously. One said, “A hammer that came back could be very useful in the forest, where a tool could easily be lost in the underbrush.”

“Or fallen into a lake, if you were shooting geese,” another man agreed. “Yes, that could be quite valuable. Odd thing for a hunt, though.”

Another man shrugged. “We use boomerangs for much the same purpose. Was his hammer some sort of boomerang, lass?”

“Something like that,” Alea said, relieved. “The gods valued it highly, so Odin sent Loki and Thor to make the giants give back Mjollnir.”

The older woman shook her head in disapproval. “To think that he could give orders to another adult!”

“A fool,” one of the men opined. “When a child’s grown, he should still consider his elder’s words carefully, but that doesn’t mean he has to obey them if he doesn’t think them wise.”

“Odin had no business trying to give orders to another adult,” said another, and there was a general chorus of agreement.

“Odin was Thor’s father,” Alea reminded.

One of the younger mothers frowned at her. “Do you come from a land where the parents think they can go on bossing their children all their lives?”

Yes, Alea thought, remembering her neighbors but she remembered her own gentle parents, too, whom the neighbors scolded for not laying down the law to Alea, and how deeply she missed them now that they were dead. She choked back the tears and said only, “It was their custom.”

“A bad one,” one of the men said severely. “God or not, I think that perhaps Odin was a very bad father.” Alea was astonished to find that she agreed with him.

Another woman asked, “Didn’t Thor’s mother have anything to say about this trip?”

Lamely, Alea had to admit, “She didn’t have much to do with Thor after he became a teenager.”

All the people shook their heads, adults and children alike exclaiming at the scandal. One childish treble rose clearly above all: “Poor man!”

“Poor indeed!” the older woman said, seeming shaken. “What an undutiful son, what a neglectful mother!”

“The one follows from the other, I suppose, Aunt,” one of the younger women said. “If she neglected him so, it’s no wonder he didn’t pay any attention to her when he was grown.”

The parents nodded, agreeing with her in many different words but one common opinion.

“Well, Thor was eager for more traveling, anyway,” Alea said quickly: Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Gar sitting with his head bowed, lips pressed tight and shoulders shaking.

“Wasn’t one wanderjahr enough for him?” the younger woman said, frowning.

“No, he was like us peddlers,” Alea said, “one of the ones who has a great deal of trouble settling down.”

“Well, he was the thunder god, she said, and storms do travel,” a man said thoughtfully. “If they didn’t, one village would be drowned while another was parched. I suppose a thunder god would have to be a wanderer, yes.”

“That was it!” Alea said, relieved. “So he and Loki harnessed Thor’s two giant goats to his chariot and drove away down the road toward Jotunheim.”

“Giant goats?” one of the children asked, eyes wide.

“Oh yes, taller than a man at the shoulders,” Alea said, warming to her audience, “with long twisted horns and shaggy black-and-white coats. Thor’s chariot stood on wheels as tall as my shoulder and rose as high as the goats’ horns. What was more, those goats could fly and pull the chariot through the air faster than any bird.”

“Magic indeed,” one of the parents said above the children’s excited murmurs.

“Well, he had to be able to fly, to bring the storms,” Alea explained, then looked down at the children. “Do you know, when the lightning flashes, how there’s a big boom, then a rumble dying away? That boom is the sound of Mjollnir hitting a cloud, striking the gigantic sparks that we call lightning. The rumble is Thor’s chariot wheels rolling away across the sky.”

The children chorused wonder, and the parents smiled, recognizing a fairy story when they heard one. Encouraged, Alea went on to tell her audience how Thor and Loki had decided they would have to camp at the end of the day and came down to earth to find a cave taller than Thor’s head, which wasn’t exactly a cavern but was warm and dry inside. There were five smaller caves arranged around the outside, but they were too narrow to be interesting, so Thor and Loki ignored them. The children shivered with delicious apprehension, wondering what would come out of such horrid places, and were rather disappointed when nothing happened all that night. But when a giant came the next morning to invite Thor and Loki to his hall, then picked up the “cave” and slipped it on his hand, the children laughed and clapped, delighted that the giant’s glove could be so huge that the gods would have been able to spend the night in it.

“What happened when they came to the giant’s hall?” one of the boys asked, eyes shining.

But Alea had been smelling dinner cooking for some time and the parents were glancing at the cottages and beginning to look impatient. “Perhaps I’ll tell you that after dinner,” she said, “but I’m rather tired of talking now.”

The children complained, a disappointed chorus, but the older woman stepped forward to clasp Alea’s shoulder with a friendly touch, saying, “You’re rather hungry, too, I should think, lass, and if you’re not, your brother must be, with a great frame like that to fill! No, children, she has the right of it—we’ll come out to the common after dinner, if she is willing, but for now, it’s time for supper.”

Disappointed but hopeful, several children went home with each adult. Alea was interested to see that every man or woman went to a different cottage; apparently there had been no adult couples here, which meant that men as well as women did the cooking, just as women worked alongside the men in the fields. She marveled at the notion, delighted, but wondered how they decided who did which chore.

Over dinner, the parents with whom they were staying let her know, very gently, their concerns about the moral values in the tale she’d been telling. Alea assured them the rest of the story was nothing to distress them, and sure enough, after dinner, she presented the tale of the giants’ challenge as a friendly invitation to a contest, and the theft of Mjollnir had been only a practical joke designed to bring the strongest god and the shrewdest god to match strength, speed, and wits with the giants, simply to while away a dull winter’s day. In that context, everybody could relax and enjoy the eating bout and the race and the feats of strength—and, rather than recapturing Mjollnir and using it to ay waste the giants’ hall, Thor was awarded his hammer as a prize and sent on his way back to Asgard with good wishes. The tale ended with giant and god in happy accord, and the audience loved the tale. Alea was rather impressed with it herself, in spite of the fact that Gar refused to meet her eyes and kept his thoughts shielded.

The children pestered Alea for another story, of course, but the parents firmly sent them off to bed, claiming the peddlers must be exhausted with so much talking, then turning to Alea with avid interest as the children scampered away, asking, “What news have you of the wide world?”

“Nothing terribly much.” Alea’s thoughts raced. “Someone claimed to have seen a great golden disk in the sky some days ago.”

The people laughed and one man asked, “How much had he been drinking? I wonder.”

“Oh, I saw a disk in the sky myself,” one of the women said. “I call it ‘the sun.’ ”

They laughed anew at that, then quieted, looking hungrily to Alea.

“There is General Malachi,” she said tentatively. The people’s faces darkened. “General, is it?” said an older man. “It was ‘major’ when last we’d heard, and that just means ‘bigger.’ What does ‘general’ mean, I wonder?”

“Including everything,” Alea said, “which I gather is what Malachi means to do. He has conquered all the outlaw bands in his forest and seized three villages around the woods.”

The people were startled and unnerved. “Seized them? What did he do with them?” one woman cried. “Plundered and bullied, I don’t doubt,” the oldest man said, his bushy white brows drawn down so far as to hide his eyes in shadow. “I’ve seen the like of him come, and I’ve seen them all go, or heard of it. But they cause a deal of grief while they last.”

“Bandits always do,” a woman agreed. “I suppose we’ll have to band together with the other villages soon to go and talk sense into them again.”

“The only talk they’ll listen to is the sound of scythes and flails.” The old man sighed. “Still, we must see the roads safe for the bands of young folk in their wanderjahrs.”

“You had best do it quickly, then,” Alea said, “before General Malachi becomes too strong. He’s making the people of the captured villages fight for him.”

That upset the villagers mightily. They burst into talk, but not arguing about the best way to counter General Malachi—only deploring what he was doing, and wondering how a decent human being could do such things. The consensus, of course, was that he wasn’t decent at all—but someone said sagely, “Well, the Scarlet Company will do for him,” and everyone else agreed, their faces clearing, as they nodded and said in many words how they could leave General Malachi to the Scarlet Company.

As their hosts led them back to their cottage, Gar noticed a man stopping by the box on the post but it wasn’t a bit of copper he dropped in, it was a white chip of wood with some marks on it. Gar listened to his thoughts and was surprised to feel the man’s satisfaction at that overbearing Orlo having his comeuppance. Intrigued, Gar wished he could stay to see who emptied the box.

When the cottage was quiet and Alea and Gar lay on opposite sides of the hearth on pallets of clean straw covered with sheepskins, she thought as clearly as she could,

What else was I supposed to do, then? I had to make the story one they would accept!

You did beautifully, Gar assured her, and pardon my laughter. It was a most amazing transformation. I can hardly wait to hear your version of Ragnorak.

Alea felt a bit better about it. She told herself it was only because such an exchange of thoughts was a useful exercise in telepathy; she had practiced daily with Gar aboard ship, but this was a very different order of things indeed.

No doubt I shall have Heimdall play his horn for a dance, and have Tyr teach the Fenris Wolf to sit up and shake paws. Alea’s thought had a sardonic overtone. Still, I cannot help but wonder what sort of land this is if they do not know what theft is, nor wish to hear of strife between two villages.

A pleasant relief from most of the worlds I have visited, Gar thought. One grows tired of bloodshed—very tired indeed. But what do you make of their insistence that Odin had no right to give orders to Thor, once he was grown?

I rather agree with it, Alea thought back, and even more with the notion that Freya had as much business being in the story as Odin. I would guess these people are pagans of a sort, but rather more efficient about it than my own people.

If they are content with only one god and one goddess, certainly, Gar thought back. Of course, the irreverent might say they were too poor to afford more.

Irreverent indeed! Alea thought indignantly. I will be interested in learning more about their religion. From what I’ve seen here, I would guess the god and goddess are evenly matched. Did you notice that both men and women tilled the fields, and both seemed to prepare dinner?

I did notice, Gar thought. Perhaps they’re doing something radical, such as deciding that the one who has more talent for cooking should prepare the meals.

Or perhaps they simply take turns! Alea snapped in return, then wondered why his statement irritated her. Quite possibly, Gar agreed. In any event, if they believe parents should not command their children once they are grown and think men and women should be equal in authority, I cannot help but think this is a most astonishingly egalitarian society.

If there is a government, Alea said, it is a government of equals.

That is, at least, the theory of democracy, Gar said, though if these people have a central government over all the villages, I certainly saw no sign of it today.

Well, when they’ve never heard of a king and think it odd that someone would give orders to others, I would doubt they have any government at all.

There must be one somewhere, Gar thought, and Alea peered between her lashes to see his face screwed up in concentration. No society can survive without a government.

A village can, Alea reminded him, only a hundred people or so. When everyone knows everyone else, they need only sit around and talk over their issues.

Yes! A government! Gar exulted. A town council! Alea smiled, amused. Well, if that’s all you need, I’m sure you’ll find many of them in this land.

I would like something a bit more elaborate, Gar confessed.

But what of the bandits? Alea frowned. Don’t these people understand how much of a threat General Malachi is? They seem to be quite content to leave him to the Scarlet Company, whatever and whoever it is, Gar thought grimly. I just hope he doesn’t do too much damage before they learn otherwise.

Alea shuddered and forced her thoughts into less troubling channels. Odd that these people don’t think of the bandits as stealing.

No, Gar agreed. When a bandit does it, they call it plundering, and I suppose that is different from one of your fellow villagers taking something that belongs to you.

And when bandits fight villagers, they call it bullying. Alea mused. True enough, but I think it misses the horror of what a band of brutes like that can do.

May their god and goddess grant they never learn!

I think we may have to take a hand with that, Alea answered. Who knows? Perhaps we only thought it was our idea to come here at this time.

Perhaps so. But Gar’s tone was amused. All we can do is try to achieve harmony with whatever Power there is and trust that we will act as it wishes.

Alea frowned, wondering if he was mocking her—but there was too much sincerity behind the terms he used and too much uncertainty as to what form that Power took. A mocker would have given them a name and form to lampoon.

Somewhat reassured, she settled herself for sleep and thought, Well, perhaps we can’t do anything about it, but talking makes the troubles seem smaller.

A problem shared is a problem halved, Gar agreed. Good night, Alea.

Good night, Gar. Alea smiled as she curled a little tighter on her pallet and, before sleep claimed her, wondered why the conversation had been so reassuring.

The villagers were troubled to see Gar and Alea leave the next day and reminded them several times to beware of General Malachi. They did make sure the peddlers carried a good lunch with them, though.

They left a little after dawn, so they were several miles away when the bandit patrol found them in midmorning.

Gar heard their thoughts several miles away, of course, and told Alea, but didn’t start fully cringing until they were only half a mile distant. She could hear their thoughts clearly and didn’t like what she heard when they came in sight of her.

There were six of them, and the leader cried “Halt!” as he drew up in front of her. One of his men stopped beside him, but the other four went past her, two taking up station behind the pair, with one to either side.

“No seven-footer here, Sergeant,” one of the men pointed out.

Gar stared up at him fearfully, then frowned, pointing from one horse-hoof to another and saying, “One … two … three … five … six … No!” He turned his finger back to the first horse and started over. “One … two … three … four … six … No! One … two … three … four … six … No…”

“What’s the feeb doing?” the sergeant demanded irritably.

“Counting feet,” Alea explained. “You said there was no seven-footer here. Please excuse my brother, Sergeant. His brain never grew much.”

The other riders were grinning, but the sergeant looked disgusted. “Tell him he can stop—that we were looking for a man who’s seven feet tall, not one who has seven feet.” He looked Alea up and down and grinned slowly. “You’re tall enough, though. Not seven feet maybe, but not far short either.”

“I’m not a man,” Alea said quickly.

“No, she sure ain’t—is she, Sergeant?” the rider beside him asked, and the others chuckled.

“They don’t see so many women,” the sergeant explained. “You’re a bit tall for my taste, but we got to take what we can get.” He leaned down to hook a finger under her chin and lift; her skin crawled at his touch. “General Malachi says we can take what tolls we want from anyone on the roads.”