A Wizard in Midgard

2

Gar was certainly seeing the world of Siegfried, and was regretting every minute of it—but he and Herkimer had tried to reason out the social conditions on the plane from the evidence of what they had seen, until Herkimer had finally said, “There simply is not enough information to justify any conclusions about this culture, Magnus.”

“Other than that we need more information,” Magnus said with a wry smile. “Still, we’ve seen two battles producing dead bodies in a very short space of time. I think constant warfare is reason enough to help these people make a change in their form of government, don’t you?”

“Help, or incite?” The computer was capable of recognizing irony, if not actual humor. “Provisionally, I would have to agree. After all, you have engineered one peaceful revolution already—why not start a revolution to bring peace? But if the tallest and shortest of the Midlanders are really locked in to slavery and the misery that almost always accompanies it, I would say that was an even stronger reason.”

“War and slavery,” Magnus said grimly. “I’ve helped people who were worse off, but this is surely bad enough. Yes, I think it’s time for Gar Pike to conduct a fact-finding mission.”

And the first fact he had to find was whether or not the people of Siegfried were really as miserable as he thought—or if he was reading his own desire for purpose into their situation.

“Where do you wish to land, Magnus?”

“Near the border of the land of the medium-sized people,” Gar said. “Since they seem to be fighting both of the other nations, they should give me the best chance of understanding the whole situation at one experience.”

“You might not fit in,” Herkimer warned him, “and might not be accepted. In fact, they might take you for an enemy. After all, you are a giant among your own kind, or have been on every planet you have visited.”

Magnus was broad in proportion to his seven feet of height, constant exercise and martial arts practice having made him very muscular.

“I shall prepare the appropriate garments, Magnus,” the computer told him. “You will find them in the wardrobe of your sleeping chamber.”

“Thank you, Herkimer.” Magnus rose and went to his suite, to enjoy what might well be his last civilized shower for a very long time.

Dinner was served by two women from the farmhouse kitchen, from huge buckets carried by two of the oversized men. Gar expected the slaves to race clamoring to the doorway and fight one another to be first, but they only pulled wooden bowls from their pallets and lined up. Their eyes bulged and their mouths watered, but no one pushed his way past anyone else. Gar was especially surprised that none of the semi-giants kicked any of the small people out of line, and the few who tried it were shoved back into place and scolded soundly by the nearest of their fellow huge ones. Gar took his place at the end of the queue, even though his stomach growled and his mouth fairly ached with hunger—but he knew he had eaten better than any of them, and probably just as recently.

He studied the line, trying to figure out how they decided who had what place. He would have expected the smaller people to either have to accept last place, or to be allowed to go first, but they were sprinkled throughout the line. It wasn’t even big person/small person in alternation, but one here, two there, even three in one place. Finally he cracked the system—the ones in front were the oldest, with the youngest next; the middle-aged came last, forcing themselves to wait, presumably because the others needed their food more.

Finally Gar came up, and the server scraped the bottom of the bucket to come up with half a ladleful for him. She started to hold it out, then stared. “You have no bowl!”

“I’m new today,” Gar told her.

“Are you indeed!” She peered up at him, squinting—she was one of the small ones. “What’s your name, lad?”

“Gar,” he answered.

“Well, I’m Lalle.” The little woman turned to her partner, a woman two feet taller than herself. “Vonna, have we an extra bowl?”

“Always.” The big woman set down her ladle and fished an empty wooden bowl out of a huge pocket in her apron. She handed it to Gar. “Scrub it with sand when you’ve done, and keep it under your pillow! Here, now.” She scraped around the bucket with her ladle and plopped a half-dipper of porridge into his bowl. Lalle added her half dipper, and Gar thanked them numbly, then turned away, staring into his bowl and wondering how he was supposed to survive to do heavy work on a bowl of thickened pea soup.

He also wondered how he was supposed to eat it, but one look at his fellow slaves told him the answer. He sat down by the door and dipped two fingers into the mess, then stuck them in his mouth and sucked off the food. It was crude, but it worked. The porridge was, at least, reasonably tasteless. He reminded himself that it could have been worse. In fact, he was so hungry that it actually tasted good—or felt that way.

When he was done, he followed the others outside to a sand heap where he scoured his bowl, then went back indoors. He was amazed to hear the slaves beginning to sing. It was a slow, mournful ballad, even as he would have expected, but it was full of the promise of the joys of tending the gardens of the gods amid the fragrance of fruits that made people always young, and where all work seemed play.

Gar listened, feeling his stomach sink. Were their lives so miserable that this was the golden afterlife that made the burden of existence bearable—an eternity of work for a kind master, in a garden where perfume induced euphoria? He shuddered inside at the thought.

Then a rough voice tore through the song. “Greta!”

The slaves fell silent on the instant, and the girl who had brought Gar his drink stood up, paling and backing away, hands out to defend. “Not me! It was only three nights ago!”

“So I find your body pleasing.” Kawsa strode into the slave barracks, two other overseers behind him, grinning eyes gleaming with lust. “Out, girl, and into the barn!”

“No!” Greta cried. “It’s not fair! Not so soon! Choose someone else!” She turned to her fellow slaves in appeal. “Someone who hasn’t been in a while, please!”

Stone-faced, Rega started to rise, but Kawsa just pushed her back down. “It’s you tonight, Greta lass, and none other! Come now!”

“No! I won’t!” Greta backed away, then suddenly bolted for the window.

Kawsa caught her in two strides, wrestling her down to the floor, then catching her wrists. She screamed and kicked, then managed to lever herself up enough to bite at his hands.

He dropped her with an oath, but one of the other overseers caught her wrists and another her ankles.

Kawsa nursed his bitten hand, growling, “Take her out and tie her to the post.” Then he kicked a very small boy nearby and said, “Run and fetch the steward.”

Eyes huge with fear, the boy ran out the door. “Everyone out!” Kawsa bellowed. “All of you! It’s been too long since you watched what happens to a slave who disobeys an overseer!”

They moved with the speed of fear, for all the overseers were red with anger and watching closely for an excuse. They gathered around the whipping post as Kawsa tied Greta’s wrists to it. She screamed and fought, of course, and another overseer had to hold her in place while Kawsa bound the rope tight.

As they finished, Steward Wulfsson came up. He was a thick, beefy man in early middle age with lowering brows and a fleshy face. “What’s the matter, Kawsa?”

“This woman Greta, your lordship.” Kawsa was breathing hard from binding the woman. “She refused an order, she argued.”

“He had me only three days ago!” Greta protested. “Not so…”

Wulfsson stepped up and, quite methodically, backhanded her across the mouth. “I don’t care what the order is or what your reasons—you don’t refuse one of my overseers! It’s the same as refusing me.” He looked her up and down, and his eye glinted. “Who knows? I may call for you myself, one of these nights.” Then he barked to Kawsa, “Bare her back and give me the whip!”

What followed was as ugly as anything Gar had seen, but he couldn’t look away, because the overseers paced along the semi-circle of slaves, snarling, “Look, damn your hides! If one of you tries to close your eyes, we’ll beat the lot of you!”

The overseers made lewd comments as they tore Greta’s tunic open along the back, and Wulfsson plied the lash himself, eyes glinting hotter with every scream. Gar warred within himself, weighing Greta’s pain against the freedom he might bring the whole country if he stayed undercover long enough to learn the bosses’ weaknesses. He had to do something, so he tried to pull the cat-of-nine-tails short with each stroke, but it wouldn’t obey his thoughts. In desperation, he tried to make the knots at Greta’s wrists untie themselves, but they barely twitched. His stomach sank as he realized the blow to his head had indeed done as much damage as he had feared. He could only hope it would heal, and quickly, for he was trapped here until it did.

When the whipping was done, Wulfsson tossed the whip back to Kawsa. “Here. Tell me when she’s recovered enough. Back to finish my dinner, now.”

He stalked away, and the overseers stepped aside to let the women slaves untie poor Greta and carry her sobbing into the barracks. The slaves turned and filed back inside, a silent, shaken crew.

“Rega!” Kawsa snapped.

The small woman stopped in her tracks and turned slowly to look up at the overseer with utter dread. “Yes, sir?”

“Into the barn and up to the hayloft with you, quickly!” Rega turned away toward the huge dark outbuilding with its lowing of cattle, her steps dragging.

Gar felt outrage and fury, the more bitter because he could do nothing to stop it. He went on in and sat down on his pallet. From farther down the darkened room, he could hear Greta’s voice, thick with sobs, saying fiercely, “I don’t care! I’d rather this than have to bed that beast again!” Then she broke off into more tears.

Gar reached out with his mind to try to speed the healing of her back, but could feel no response. In desperation, he let his awareness expand, feeling, listening, for Kawsa’s mind. He felt a huge surge of relief when he found it, glowing in the mental, darkness like a coal on the hearth, burning with lust and cruelty. He reached inside, found the ganglion that would give the signal to stop the the flow of blood in exactly the right place, thought hard at it—but the synapse functioned as smoothly as though his thoughts were nowhere near it.

As indeed they were not, for he could listen, could hear another’s thoughts, follow the nerve-signals down individual pathways—but his numbed brain couldn’t send out the impulse to change that path, to change anything. Magnus withdrew quickly, not wanting to hear. anything, to feel anything secondhand, feeling completely useless, completely alone, in the dark.

Someone started a slow and mournful song, almost a dirge. Others joined in, until half the slaves in the barracks were singing, adults and children all. A cry came from across the way, but they sang all the louder for it.

A hand grasped Gar’s shoulder, and his glance leaped up into the gloom, body tensing to fight—but the man’s eyes were only a little higher than his own, even though Gar was sitting while the other was standing, and the gaze was gentle and filled with pity. “First time you’ve ever had to witness something like this, is it, lad?”

“No,” Gar answered, “but it’s the first time I haven’t been able to do anything about it.”

He had never felt so helpless in his life.

When full darkness fell, and the gloom thickened so that he could scarcely see a foot in front of his face, Gar stretched himself out on his moldy pallet, writhed about to try to find a way for none of his bruises to come in contact with the straw, and listened to the sounds of the other slaves as he lay waiting for sleep. There was the muffled sobbing of Greta, Rega, and the other woman whom one of the overseers had chosen for a few minutes’ pleasure; there were snores from those who had been lucky enough to find slumber and, here and there, the gasps and little cries of delight of pairs of slaves who had found the only pleasure left to them. Gar reflected bitterly that Steward Wulfsson couldn’t even afford privacy for them, though they didn’t seem to need it.

A soft rustle of cloth near him made him look up to see a small woman folding her skirts to sit beside him, looking down with a quizzical smile. “I’ve been watching you all evening, stranger.”

“I’m Gar,” he whispered. “You?”

“Hilda,” she said. “Life’s bitter, lad. We, too, could find a little sweetness in it.”

“Thank you, but after what I’ve seen tonight, I’d hate myself if I reached out to touch a woman.” Gar groped to give her hand a quick squeeze anyway, then dropped it. “I’m surprised the steward allows his slaves to have any pleasures at all. Why doesn’t he just keep the men and women apart?”

“Why?” Hilda actually giggled. “Why, he can’t depend on enough free women bearing children who are too large or too small, lad. He has to make sure he’ll have more slaves tomorrow.”

“Breeding,” Gar said sourly.

“He calls it that,” Hilda told him. “We call it love.” She looked off into the darkness in disdain. “Poor fools out there—two couples trying to make normal babies, one a big woman with a small man, the other a small woman with a big man. Even if the babies do grow to Midgarder size, they’ll still be slaves.”

“Even though they look just like the masters?” Gar asked in surprise.

“Even though,” Hilda assured him. “They carry blood that might be a giant’s or a dwarf’s, after all. The son or daughter of a slave is still a slave.”

That left the question of why she had sought him out, but Gar had tact enough not to ask. “Poor souls,” he muttered. “Aren’t we all?” Hilda looked down at him again. “It surely seems to have taken you sorely, lad, watching Greta whipped. Have you never seen the like before?”

“I have a weak stomach,” Gar explained.

“Well, let it heal, and seek me out when it does,” Hilda sighed. She touched his hand, a light caress, then slipped off into the night.

Gar let her go, realizing why she had come, why the slaves went on making babies even though they knew the children would grow into misery like their own—because he had never felt so bitterly alone as he did that night.

By the time he went to sleep, Magnus had learned all he needed to know to justify overthrowing Midgard’s government. He wasn’t sure what that government was, but he felt totally justified in conquering the country—as bloodlessly as possible, of course, but he doubted how bloodless that could be. The depth of anger and hatred in the slaves was hidden, but very great.

That anger, though, was completely directed toward the masters, and only struck at other slaves in brief flashes, the sort of quarrels that are bound to crop up between people anywhere who are forced to live too closely together. Gar was amazed that the men didn’t try to browbeat the women, especially seeing how the overseers exploited them—but perhaps that was why: the slave men, sickened by the bullying, were determined not to imitate it.

He was also astounded to see that the big slaves didn’t try to beat the small ones—that, in fact, all the slaves seemed to cling together for comfort, regardless of size or gender. He wondered if it might be because they shared a common bond of suffering; semi-dwarf and demi-giant united in misery, and in the need to care for one another in order to survive.

Of course, it also might have been that they were simply too tired to try to intimidate one another, but Gar doubted that; he had seen people in very deprived circumstances still trying to bully their fellows.

There was no question about the overseers’ power, though. Each of them took a different woman every night, and during the day, seemed to be alert for the slightest excuse to strike a slave. They always found excuses to yell, to insult, to browbeat, and seemed to enjoy every minute. As his concussion healed, Gar read their spirits more and more accurately, and realized that they did indeed enjoy their work. The position seemed to attract sadists.

He felt no compunction about reading their minds. There could be no doubt they were the enemy, or that he was at so severe a disadvantage that he would have to use every psi power he had to escape and stay free.

He also felt no compunction about rummaging around in Steward Wulfsson’s mind—there was no question that the man was an enemy, or that Gar would need every scrap of knowledge he could gain to topple the power structure of which Wulfsson was a part. He learned that Midgard was split into a dozen kingdoms, and that each king governed his own little domain as he wished—but that in practice, he followed the policies laid down by the Council of Kings. The Council ruled all year round, so the kings had to leave the day-to-day running of their kingdoms to their barons while they themselves lived in the capital. The barons, in turn, divided their holdings into twenty farms, each run by a steward.

Once a year, all the barons gathered in the capital for the Allthing, a legislative body that established policies for the Council to execute during the next year, and decided legal cases between noblemen.

Gar was amazed that there was even that much division of power, and wondered how it came to be—but Wulfsson’s mind seemed to be curiously empty of history, and historically empty of curiosity.

His concussion healed quickly, but it still took days—and during those days, Gar saw sights he would never forget. Overseers prodded him whenever he didn’t move fast enough to please them, which happened whenever they were bored. He talked back once, and a dozen overseers descended on him to beat him with sticks and iron-shod prods; reading their minds as he tried to block their blows, Gar realized they had been waiting for the new slave to try to stand up for himself.

Later in the day, he saw a man whipped for refusing to beat a woman when the overseers commanded it. That evening, Kawsa ordered Gar to take a load of wood up to the steward’s house, and Gar saw that the house staff, old male slaves and middle-aged women, were all hopeless, apathetic people who had only one emotion left—fear. The table servants had decent clothing; everyone else wore the same rags as the field hands.

By the end of the week, Gar decided he’d seen enough to be sure this regime had to be torn down, and had a notion that he himself would sponsor a tribunal for crimes committed under its aegis. He tested his powers, first on the weeds he was hoeing, and when the first yanked itself out of the ground, he felt a soaring jubilation. A few minutes later, he thought sleepy thoughts at Kawsa, and was rewarded with a series of yawns. That evening, when a skinny old man had to wrestle an armload of wood up to the steward’s house, Gar pushed the wood with his mind, and saw the man straighten in surprise, then walk with a lighter step all the way to the back door. Gar smiled, knowing his range might not be as far as it had been, but was definitely far enough. He searched Kawsa’s memories and found where his pack had been stored.

After dark, he tested his dexterity by thinking a kink into a particular tube in Kawsa’s anatomy, and was rewarded by hearing a curse from the hayloft across the yard. There was also the sound of a slap, unfortunately, but only one, and a few minutes later, Kawsa came storming out of the barn, face red with fury. The woman who had been his night’s choice came out soon after, dazed by her escape.

Gar lay on his pallet, tense with excitement and anticipation. His brain was healed, and he was ready.

The planet had three moons, though none was as bright as Terra’s. When all three were in the sky together, they gave quite a bit of light indeed. Gar had already pegged the hour of the first one’s rising, and slipped out in the full darkness of early night, while only the stars held the sky. The overseer on watch wasn’t Kawsa, unfortunately, but Gar had his grudges with all of them by now, so any one would do. As the man crossed the barnyard, Gar willed him to look away from the shadow where the giant crouched, then thought of sleep, of the softness of a bed, of its warmth and coziness, of how wonderful it would feel to nod off…

He jerked his head upright; it had been a long day, and his spell was working on himself. But it worked on the overseer, too; the man paused to yawn, then leaned against the side of the barracks. He yawned again and again; his head nodded, then jerked upright, his eyes blinking; but he yawned yet again, nodded some more, then slipped to the ground, not even waking enough to notice he had fallen.

Gar stepped over to take the man’s cloak, hat, and prod. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but it would have to do. Then he slipped into the shadows, going from outbuilding to outbuilding until he was catfooting past the steward’s house. He stopped to take his pack from the toolshed, then crept onward.

When he came to the road, he paused. He had never been out this way before; the slaves always went to the fields behind the house, and Gar had a vague notion the crops across the road belonged to someone else. He called to mind the photo-map he had studied in orbit, remembered where the sun rose, and turned to his right, following the road to the east, hunched over under the cloak, tapping with the staff as though he were an old man, trying to look no taller than five and a half feet.

It almost worked. But as he passed the next farmhouse, a voice out of the night snapped, “Who goes there?”

“It’s a slave!” someone shouted from the other side of the road. “A big one, trying to hide his inches!”

Then they hit him, half a dozen at least, furious blows of iron-shod prods, shouting in anger.

This time, though, Gar was ready for them. He set a bubble of mental force around himself; it wasn’t strong enough to stop the blows, but it slowed them enough so that their hurt was minor, and so that Gar could block some, then return them with harder blows of his own. He parried an overhand blow, kicked the man in the stomach, whirled around and jumped high to kick another man in the chest and struck downward to crack a third over the head. As he landed, though, a blow from behind made his head ring; he fell to his knees, groping frantically for the man’s mind, lashing out with the outrage and anger of a week, only a week…

He heard the strangled cry even as he pushed himself to his feet. He stepped over the body toward the lone overseer who still stood, backing away from him, the whites showing all around his eyes in terror, shouting, “What did you do to him? What did you do?”

Gar reached out for the man, who turned and ran. Gar thought of stumbling, toes catching against the opposite ankle, and the man went down in a tangle. Before he could even cry out for help, Gar let a burst of illumination explode in the man’s mind and savored his lapse into unconsciousness. Then he took the man’s sword and hid it under his own cloak.

Lamps were lighting up in the farmhouse, and voices were calling in alarm. Gar stepped back into the shadows and thought very intensely into the mind of each man who was still alive—five out of six wasn’t bad. A few minutes later, he relaxed, then slipped away to find a brook he could wade. The men would wake, he knew, and all tell the same story of the bear who had come out of the night and fought in eerie silence, striking down overseer after overseer—and if one had mysteriously died without a mark on him, well, no one could be surprised that he had died of sheer fright.

For himself, Gar wouldn’t mourn the man. It was a week for firsts in his life—he felt not the slightest hint of remorse.