Web of the Norns

VII

In the morning it was raining: Rain dripped steadily from the mouth of the shallow cave, making long soggy looking icicles that fell off with a crash, leaving the dripping rock bare for the formation of more icicles.

The fire had gone out and the warmth long departed from the rock. The damp reached up from the sodden ground through the worn animal skin that covered Grant and drew the warmth from his body. He pried open gummy eyes and stared at the dawn sky, grey and dripping. He tried to go back to sleep, but Aker must have heard his movements. A prehensil toe reached out and gouged him in the most sensitive part of his chilled anatomy.

"Get up and start the fire." The voice was muffled, but the meaning was clear. Grant groaned as he hauled his stiff form out of the covers.

The salamander burnt his finger instead of lighting the fire, and he pinched its tail in retaliation. He found a small log, back in a crevice of the cave, and dropped it on his toe and cursed with a growing fluency for at least ten minutes. In spite of this the fire was finally started, and Aker Amen pulled himself next to it and heated up a slab of ham. Grant followed suit, then turned back into his blanket and shivered with comfort, glad that it was raining. There was no going out into the icy rain and Grant wondered, if there had been no rain, could he have picked up the pack and continued? He answered himself. No!

After breakfast, Aker hummed a war song as he cleaned the matted blood and hair from the spikes of his mace, and told a few reminiscent tales of the skulls the mace had crushed. The rain continued, so he went on with each of his weapons and pieces of armour in turn, telling the stories they reminded him of as he cleaned them. The life of a free soldier was close to the life of a bandit, Grant decided as he listened. It was a carefree sort of telling, but incredibly villainous by civilized standards.

He crawled closer to the fire and wrapped himself more tightly in the blanket. Every joint creaked with the motion, and though he was almost as hot as a toasting ham slab, he continued shivering in spasms.

"You sick?” Aker eyed him sharply.

Grant came out with an excusing lie he had thought of to explain his faults, a lie that he considered more than half true. "No, just out of condition. Weak. I was. . a prisoner a long time and I've got soft." He paused, ashamed but pleased by the respectful attention visible in Aker Amen's face, then added with a burst of worried truth, "I can't see why I keep shivering. I'm not cold."

"Stiffening up," Aker said casually. "If you don't keep moving around you'll be as stiff as a timber brace by morning." He chuckled, and reached a long arm for a branch from the depleted fire stack. "When you come back from collecting firewood, we'll have a little sword practice."

With every muscle creaking in protest like a rusting puppet, Grant dragged himself out of his blanket to look for firewood in the cold rain. When he came back, drenched and shivering, Aker greeted him with a blow of a light stick he had fashioned from a branch, and handed Grant another to defend himself with. Aker amused himself by swinging slow motion blows at Grant and watching him scramble clumsily to parry or duck.

Thus the day passed, and it was probably the rain that gave Grant a chance to live and survive, for it rained the next day, too, and in the alternate drowsing by the fire and being prodded awake to seek firewood, in listening open-mouthed to Aker Amen's good-natured tales of thievery, rapine, loot and death, he gradually recovered from the exhaustion and cold-shock of the two days before. The shudders stopped, the weakness and stiffness passed and he ate more ravenously than ever in his memory, the meat going to fill some insatiable hollowness within.

Even as early as the second day, the thin muscles over his big-boned frame had begun to thicken, responding eagerly to the strains that, after a delay of years, had come to them as a cue for growth.

Grant did not appreciate the process; he only wanted to sleep and eat; and yet he had to busy himself collecting firewood. He picked up numerous small bruises around head and throat to the tune of Aker Amen's roaring laughter, until he learned to fend off the unexpected blows from the light stick in Aker Amen's hand. He was learning the elemental skills of handling a broadsword.

The muscles of his wrist and arm and shoulder were alerted by this unaccustomed stress and put in their share of call for more nourishment.

At the end of the second evening, Grant and Aker finished the remains of the second ham, and, for a tidbit, ate a squirrel which Grant had put an arrow through in the afternoon. The rain stopped, only the sound of dripping and running water was heard, and the air began to chill.

"Tomorrow we move," growled Aker, and put his sword carefully beside him as he lay down to sleep for with the rain stopped, the predators of the night would be abroad again.

"Where are we going?” Grant's question was muffled by the warm bearskin.

The other man had rolled up next to the fire. He raised his head for an instant, light from the fire glinting from his eyes. "We're going to a war of course, what else? It's going to be good. Wine and blood. Kill and be killed. Good, huh?"

The philosophy of these barbarians could not have been better expressed. Grant roused himself just long enough to answer, with a wry glimmer of irony. "Good, sure. . that's the only way to live — die." He sank back into a dreamless sleep.

The fire crackled and died. The only sound was the dry rustling of the dead leaves in the trees. The clouds blew away and the stars pierced the cold winter sky, sharp and diamond-like.

The next morning was clear and cold. Grant got up first without any prodding and, shivering, broke the stacked firewood free from the iced ground, and made a small fire. Aker sat up and began humming a battle chant as he buckled on his armour and hung his weapons at his belt.

The sight of the wicked instruments plus the memory of the past four days of bloodshed tended to make Grant thoughtful as he stowed away the contents of the giant pack. The idea of putting on that pack again merely to do murder or be murdered hardly seemed worth the struggle. If he were separated from Aker Amen he would not have to carry all that baggage.

The thought came to him with a twinge, for he liked the big soldier, and had a hunch the soldier liked him — that the rough treatment he was getting, by the standards of these people, was an extreme of good natured protection.

The big soldier finished stowing away his deadly arsenal and kicked the fire down into the snow. "Let's go."

Grant stood up beside the pack and cleared his throat. "Er. . Aker. I've decided to try some other way of life. . I mean… I'm not so good as a fighter. . You don't need me along."

His big decision made no observable difference to Aker. The soldier hooked a giant hand through one of the pack-straps and lightly swung it across his shoulder.

"Fine by me, only watch out for Berl-Cats. And Holy Men. The woods are full of them. And if you get clear of the woods, don't go near the peasants. They don't like strangers. If they catch a stranger they stick a big sharp pole through his bottom, and stand him out in the fields to dry out for a scarecrow."

The last words were a little indistinct as Aker was trudging off rapidly down the trail. Grant, who always had a pictorial mind, quickly followed.

Aker turned at his hail and dropped the pack on the ground, then went on without slowing his pace. With an inward groan, Grant slipped the straps into the well-worn grooves on his shoulders, and found with surprise that the burden was not nearly as heavy as he had expected. Perhaps because of the peculiarly vivid alternative Aker Amen's remark had conjured up, but more likely because the ham was now eaten and gone. Grant thought he saw a tilt to the back of Aker's head which meant a big grin was on the front of it.

The trail wound out of the trees to the edge of the cliff again and steepened, going down its face toward the trees of the valley.

At the last turning, Aker suddenly became wary. "This place stinks like an ambush. I'll see what's below."

With Grant standing back and covering him with a nocked arrow, Aker spent a seemingly interminable time crawling up to the edge of the cliff with a branch in front of his face and peering down. Apparently satisfied, he crawled back, then went a little way down the bend of the trail.

Grant slipped the pack off his back and stretched his shoulder muscles. Nothing moved below. Aker had stopped on a little ledge and was again peering into the depths below.

Grant yawned, and turned his head automatically at a slight movement to his right, then went rigid as one of the hideous Berl-Cats came out of a cave.

It had not seen him yet, but he could see the nose and whiskers twitching, following some scent. There was a clink of metal from the trail below. The beast looked up alertly, the ears turned in the direction of the sound. With one bound it was at the edge. Aker was on the ledge twenty feet below, his broad back turned helplessly toward the animal.

With the utmost silence, Grant raised his bow. The string was taut and he was sighting down the arrow as the animal's legs tensed to leap. The range was short and the twang of the bowstring and the chunk of the arrow came as one sound. The cat made a small mew of pain as its foreleg was pinned to its ribs. It had leaped as he fired.

Grant saw a perfect example of the reflexes needed to survive in this barbarian world. At the sound of the bowstring, Aker's head had jerked up, and at the sound of the cat's cry, the big man in the leather armour leapt back and had his sword out and braced, blade slanting up, ready to impale anything that landed on him.

If the big cat had landed on Aker, it would have been spitted. It tried hard to do just that, but it could not change its course in midleap. Snarling and twisting and clawing towards him in the air, it passed through the spot where Aker had been, caught with its good foreleg on the edge of the drop, was over-balanced by the failure of its wounded foreleg, and twisted with an outraged mewling over the edge. There was a crash and a sound of rolling and sliding and scrabbling down through the brush.

Aker wiped the hilt of his sword before returning it to his scabbard, and looked up at Grant with more respect than before. "A fair shot, Granto." He waved Grant after him and moved towards the valley.

With caution, alert for the wounded cat, they filed down the path to the trees.

The snow began again, and soon filmed everything in white. The woods ended at the edge of a cleared field and they climbed an embankment onto a rutted farm road. The road swung through the fields and passed close by a sod-covered stone house.

Grant watched it nervously and found his suspicions justified as four bearded men, followed closely by a shrieking woman, ran through the doorway. They howled crude obscenities and swung a wicked assortment of flails and scythes over their heads. It was a starling sight, and Grant flinched back. Aker seemed to find it neither frightening nor interesting. He stood quietly, a bored sneer on his lips, as they approached.

The screaming men were just a few yards away when he whipped out his long sword and bellowed a terrible war-cry. The great weapon flashed just once, and the flails of the first pair were hacked in two. They stared stupidly for a long instant and then fled, howling a more despondent note this time. Long before they had resumed the safety of the house, Aker had turned his back and continued his interrupted course down the road.

The episode reminded Grant again of the value of swordsmanship. He picked up a stick and, as he trudged down the road, swung at every mark that caught his eye, trying to learn to gauge a swing from any angle to hit the spot precisely, imagining the spot as an enemy. It made the time pass entertainingly, and again he felt that sharpening of the senses, almost exhilaration, that seemed to have something to do with the steady exercise and something to do with the clean whiteness of the landscape and much to do with a feeling of irresponsibility.

They stopped at noon by a frozen stream and made a lunch from an unspeakable lump of bread dredged from the depths of the pack. Aker kicked a hole in the ice and they mixed a drink in the horn cups; half spring water and half wine. It was an invigorating and thirst-quenching drink, particularly since the water seemed to be carbonated and flavoured. Grant smacked his lips over it and made no attempt to understand the geological impossibility that produced it.