A Wizard in Midgard

4

Magnus had to suppress the impulse to project a call to Herkimer on radio frequency out of sheer loneliness. If it hadn’t been for the road, he’d have found it hard to believe there were people on this planet, never mind the photographs he’d seen from orbit. Even then, the road might have been only an animal track, if it hadn’t been ten feet wide. It seemed unusually broad for a medieval road until Magnus remembered that giants might have laid it out. That gave him a strange chill down his spine. He found himself trying to believe giants were only fairy tales.

Well, true enough, these weren’t forty feet tall, and no human being could hide in their beer steins or spend the night in one of their gloves—but they were big enough to call giants. From what Magnus had seen in the orbital shots, though, this buffer zone between Midgard and the giants’ country might very well have had ordinary-sized people as well as giants walking about. It was barren enough, Heaven knew—a broad plain with knee-high grass, and a line of trees to his left that presumably shaded a watercourse. But there was genuine forest to his right; it seemed that the road had been built along some sort of natural boundary.

Then some people came around the bend, half a dozen in armor and with battle axes at their hips, with two adolescents along. Magnus was surprised that the bend was so close—it had looked much farther away, but the people made it seem much nearer.

Then he realized that it wasn’t the bend that was so close, it was the people who were so tall.

He stopped and stared, eyes wider and wider as the strangers came nearer and nearer. For the first time since his adolescent growth spurt, he found himself looking up at someone—up higher and higher. As they came close, their sheer size overwhelmed him—not just their height, though he only came up to the chest of the shortest grownup, and was still a head shorter than the boys. It was their mass that made him fee! so small, for each of the grown giants was easily twice as broad in the shoulder and hip as Magnus was. Their legs were virtual tree trunks, and their arms would have shamed a gorilla.

They weren’t looking any more friendly than that gorilla, either. The oldest man—at least, to judge by the gray in his hair-rested his hand on the haft of his axe and demanded, “Who are you, Midgarder? And why are you here?”

“My name is Gar Pike,” Magnus said, trying to imitate their accent.

The leader couldn’t help it; his face quirked into a smile. “Your parents didn’t really name you that!”

They hadn’t, so Gar decided on belligerence. “And what’s wrong with my name, I’d like to know?”

“Why, a gar pike is a big fish, and you’re scarcely a minnow!” the leader said.

It was the first time in fifteen years that anyone had called Gar small. He found he didn’t like it, especially since it was true, given the present company. “All right, Gar is short for Edgar, and Pike has been a family name for centuries.” He carefully didn’t say whose.

“Well enough, and pardon my rudeness,” the leader said gruffly. “I am called Gorkin. Why have you come to this no-one’s-land, Gar Pike?”

For a moment, Gar stood amazed by the giant’s courtesy—after all, it was himself who was the intruder. But he pulled himself together and answered, “I’ve come from far away, and the…” What had the giant called him? Midgarder, that was it! “…the Midgarders enslaved me. They said I was too tall, too close to being a giant.” He managed a sour smile. “They seem to have been mistaken.”

“Not so much as you might think,” Gorkin said. “We’ve children who grow no bigger than you, some even shorter. But you’re no child of ours, and far too small to become one of us.” He clapped one of the boys on the shoulder. “Jorak, now, he’s only fourteen, and already taller than you by a head. He’s due to grow two feet more at least, and fill out to a proper size—but how old are you, foreigner? Thirty, if you’re a day!”

“Well, I’m more than a day, that’s true,” Gar said slowly, “and you guessed well. I’m thirty-one.”

“Two in one day!” the woman beside Gorkin said—and Gar was amazed to realize she was indeed a woman. But her face was more finely featured than Gorkin’s, her hair flowed down around her shoulders, and her armor bore two huge bulges that Gar found not at all stimulating. He did wonder who the other of the “two in one day” was—and what. Gorkin shook his head sadly. “We can’t take you in, foreigner. For all we know, you might be spying for the Midgarders—and you’ve surely grown as much as you’re going to, at your age. Why, you’re almost small enough to be a Midgarder, and certainly as skinny. Besides, if you’re like the rest of your kind, you’ve been raised to hate and fear giants, and you’re too old to have a change of heart there.”

Both boys glanced up at him, then looked away, sheepish and guilty.

“They were both raised as Midgarders,” Gorkin explained, “but they’re young enough to learn they’ve had lies poured into their ears from their cradles.”

“But I never saw this man before, not in my village or any where in the barony!” Jorak protested.

“Nor me,” Rokir said, “and my barony was one over from his.”

“His accent is strange,” the woman pointed out.

“It is that,” Gorkin admitted. “Might be you’re from far away indeed, foreigner.”

“Yes, and you believe it, Gorkin,” the woman said, “so you’d be calling him ‘stranger,’ not ‘foreigner.’ ”

“Peace, good Morag,” Gorkin grumbled. “What I believe of him and how I may treat him have to be two different things. You know the law.”

“Yes, and know there’s reason behind it,” Morag sighed. She said to Gar, “I regret it, foreigner, but we can’t risk a spy coming into our town to creep out and let a Midgard army in. Besides, if we took you, we’d have to take that woman we just left on the road, too, and the next one we found, and the next and the next. First thing, there’d be more Midgarders than giants, and we’d have to flee our own homes.”

“I understand, I understand.” Gar stood amazed at the kindness of these people, who actually apologized for not giving hospitality to a potential enemy!

“You go on back to Midgard, and tell them the giants threw you out,” Gorkin said gruffly. “Likely they’ll find you a place among them then.”

“Yes, as a slave,” Jorak said darkly.

“Might be, might be,” Gorkin agreed heavily. “Still, that’s better than wandering the wild lands with everyone’s spear against you, isn’t it?”

“No!” both boys said together, and Gorkin looked down at them, amazed.

“They’re right,” Gar said. “I’ve seen what slaves go through in Midgard. I was lucky to escape. Better to have everyone’s sword against me in the wild. After all, out here, I’m allowed to fight back.”

“Is it so bad as that?” Gorkin asked, shaken, then shook his head in sorrow and anger. “And they call themselves the only human folk, these Midgarders!” He look down at Gar, deeply troubled. “We’ll bid you farewell, then, foreigner, and wish you well, but that’s all we can do.”

“Why, fare you well too, then,” Gar said, “and may your gods smile upon you.”

The giants all stared at him in surprise. Then Gorkin broke into a smile. “A Midgarder wishing a blessing on us! Might be hope for this world yet! Well, stranger, may all your gods smile on you, too!”

They went past, and some turned back to wave. Gar returned the wave, staring after them, feeling numb and very unreal. He had to remind himself that he hadn’t just lived through a dream, that these were genuine people who had talked to him, actual giants, or as close to the fairy-tale variety as anyone could ever be.

He forced himself to turn away and start walking again, in the direction from which the giants had come. Go back to Midgard? That would have been extremely foolish. Still, Gar very much wanted to do just that—go back to Midgard, and start preaching. If he were going to have a chance of ending the constant wars, he would have to gain the acceptance of all three nations. The giants had been so polite that he thought they would at least listen to any ideas he gave them, but if the Midgarders were so fanatical as to cast out their own children for growing too big, seven-foot-tall Gar was going to find it almost impossible to manage even a parley.

He reflected that Dirk Dulaine, his erstwhile companion, would have been welcome in Midgard society, and could have brought Gar in as his simpleton slave, a role Gar had played with Dirk more than once—but Dirk wasn’t here, and Gar would have to find a way to the Midgarders’ ears on his own. That reminded him of good times with his friend, of shared dangers and shared glory, and of his bittersweet joy at seeing Dirk marry the woman he loved, then the poignancy of their goodbye as Gar left their planet, alone. He felt a pang of loneliness, and wished he could find love as Dirk had, but knew he was too big, too taciturn, too ominous, too homely, and too reticent.

He wondered what had happened to the cheerful outgoing teenager he used to be, then remembered the kaleidoscope of women who had used him as targets for cruelty, or to make their lovers jealous, or for social climbing. On reflection, he wasn’t surprised the cheery boy had gone underground, and was more sure than ever that he would never find a mate.

The wind of alienation blew through him—he was an absurd figure, for what purpose could he have in life? He remembered his boyhood on the medieval planet of Gramarye and his leave-taking, then the aimless wandering that had led him to join SCENT, his outrage at the team’s heartless manipulation of a backward planet’s culture without regard to human rights, and his own decision to work for those rights among oppressed people, solo, then with Dirk, now solo again.

But he also remembered the planets he had put on the road to forms of government of their own choices, the lives he had saved that he knew about and the many, many he had probably saved but didn’t know about, and felt a renewed strength to go plodding on toward old age and death. His life would serve some purpose, after all, and who knew? There might still be some bits of pleasure in it, too.

Alea dried her tears, telling herself that she had to go on, that life would somehow prove worth living. She didn’t believe herself, but generations of women had drummed that idea into their daughters, and old women had told them it had proved true for them. Life had good times and bad times, and sometimes it was so bad that you couldn’t believe it would ever be good again—but it would, if you could just hang on.

She sighed, braced her tree-branch staff, and pushed herself to her feet again. At least the giants had left her food and drink. She couldn’t believe how kind they had been, how horribly the grown-ups had lied to her as a child!

Could they have lied about the bad times passing, too? Alea shoved the thought to the back of her mind—it wouldn’t bear thinking about. You had to go on, that was all, because if you gave up, if you just crawled into a hole and died, then life certainly couldn’t ever get better, could it? No, all in all, it was worth the gamble. She decided to go on a little farther yet.

At least the giants’ wallet and aleskin had strings for holding them to the belt—strings to them, but straps to her. She slung them over her shoulders and set off down the road, determined to find some place she could be happy, some place where life could have meaning. She couldn’t be the only slave who had ever escaped, after all—in fact, she’d heard stories about escapees who’d fled to the northern wasteland, and never been brought back. Of course, those stories also said the runaways lived by robbing travelers, even by eating them, but considering how badly the tales had lied about the giants, there was every reason to think they’d lied about the escapees too. She decided to take a chance on the North Country.

She stopped to look at the sun and take her bearings. It was ahead of her and off to the right, still well before noon, so her road was angling toward the north anyway, and away from Midgard. She saw a bend to the left in the distance, which meant the road would turn even further toward the north. She set off, resolving to find people of her own kind if she had to walk ten years to do it.

After ten minutes, the exhaustion hit her. A dizzy spell seized her, and she stopped in the roadway, leaning on her staff and waiting for the world to steady itself, hoping it would. She realized she was worn out both emotionally and physically, for she’d been walking all night. Daylight was her time to hide and sleep, and. she’d just started dozing when Jorak and Rokir had shaken her awake. She knew she should find another tree and hide for the day, but she didn’t want to stay where the boys had gone crashing through the roadside brush to find her, and the Jotuns had refused her. What with their tracks and the boys’, her trail was far too clear—any band of slave-hunters would see her footprints in the roadside dust, and would follow her to her tree.

The dizziness passed, and Alea forced herself to start walking again, down the middle of the road where the clay was packed hard and wouldn’t show her tracks. There was a chance that the slave-hunters would find her before she found another safe tree, but it was less than the chance that the marks of her struggle with the boys, and the tracks of the giant patrol, would reveal her old hiding place. She had to find another tree large enough to hide in and a quarter mile or more from the scene of the scuffle. She watched her feet, forcing them to move until she could trust them to keep going, then looked up and was surprised to see that the bend in the road was there already.

She was even more surprised when the half-dozen Midgarders came around that bend and saw her.

Their dogs started baying and howling on the instant, and the men shouted and came running, hands out to catch her. They didn’t ask her business or her name—her size alone was enough to tell them what she was, easily a head taller than any of them, so she couldn’t be anything but a runaway slave. They would worry whose she was after they’d bound her. They swarmed around her.

Alea swung her staff desperately, managing to knock one man in the head and jab another in the belly before one of them chopped viciously with a cudgel, and her staff broke with a loud crack. She swung the butt of it in despair, but another man seized her wrist and a third caught her around the waist, crowing with victory. Alea screamed and kicked back.

The man’s crow turned to a howl, and the hands let go of her waist. She lashed about her with the butt of her stick and kicked at the shins of the men in front of her. One went reeling, hands pressed to his head. Another fell back, hopping and howling. More hands seized her wrists and her waist, though. Then a rope whipped about her torso, pinioning her arms, and another man caught her leg. She howled in anger and horror, kicking at him, but he stepped to the side, holding the leg up.

A heavier man, with a bruise from her staff already purpling on his forehead, shouldered his way through to her and cracked a slap across her face. Alea screamed and, as the hand came back, bit at it, but the man yanked his hand aside and slammed a fist into her stomach. She doubled over in agony, struggling for the breath that wouldn’t come, but he yanked her chin up and stared into her face—face to face, for he was a good foot shorter than she.

“Six and a half feet, big dark eyes, straight nose, brown hair—this is the one that ran from Karke Village, right enough,” the slave-hunter said. “Back you go to your owners, woman, and harshly may they punish you.”

Breath came back in a rush. Alea used it for a wordless shout and lunged at the man, lashing out with her free foot. He cracked another slap across her face and snarled, “We can hurt worse than you, my lass!”

“We should, too,” one of the other men growled. “She’s given me a harsh knock, and I’ll be limping for a week!”

“You’re right there, Harol,” the leader said with an ugly glint in his eye. “After all, we have to take her back to her village for judgement, but no one says what kind of condition she has to be in when she gets there—and she has to be taught not to run, doesn’t she?”

“She does!” One of the men moistened his lips, eyes greedy. “And what’s the worst hurt you can give a woman, eh?” The others answered with a shout of agreement. Someone caught at Alea’s free foot, but she screamed in terror and kicked, wrenched a wrist free, and lashed out with a fist. It connected, but the men roared and descended on her in a body. She fought desperately, afraid of death but suddenly not caring, as long as the nightmare didn’t happen again.

But they were falling back away from her, something was making dull thudding sounds, and men were crying out in rage and alarm. As breath came back, Alea saw a huge man laying about with a proper quarterstaff, knocking her tormentors aside. They shouted with anger and leaped away from the madman, and she saw her chance. She scrambled to her feet and ran toward the trees.

“Catch her!” the leader bellowed.

Alea heard feet pounding behind her, but she heard something crack too, then heard the knocking of wood against wood, and the trees closed mercifully about her as she ran, gasping and sobbing, trying to find a tree big enough, a cave deep enough, anywhere to hide, to be safe.

Behind her, Gar laid about him with his staff, taking his share of knocks but dealing out five for each one he received. More importantly, though, he reached out with his thoughts and struck terror into the minds of each of the hunters. One or two had the courage to come back at him a second time, though dread was surging up from their stomachs. The rest ran, howling in sheer terror, away from Gar and from the poor woman they’d been wrestling.

“Giants!” someone shouted. “Giants!” But none seemed to remember that they’d been trained to fight the huge man.

Gar lashed out at the last two with virtual explosions of panic as his staff whirled to strike first one, then the other. They spun away, fear finally mastering them, and ran down the road, back the way they had come.

Gar stood watching them go, chest heaving with exertion, filled with the elation of victory, even if he’d had to cheat a bit—but when it was one man against half a dozen, using projective telepathy to scare them into running was fully justified. He was quite willing to let them think he was a small giant. After all, by the time they reached home, he would have grown three feet in their memories anyway.

They went around the bend in the road and were gone from his sight, and from his mind, too. Gar looked around for the woman they’d been manhandling. He didn’t see her and, all things considered, he didn’t blame her, either. He went on the way he’d been going, noticing where her tracks ran off the road, then where her steps began to shorten. She had run to hide in the woods—wise, under the circumstances. He hoped she was good at covering her trail, for the hunters had dogs. True, with the scare he’d given them, they might not stop running till they were home—but then again, they might. In fact, they might even try to cover up their fear with anger, and come back to take, revenge on the vulnerable one.

Of course; they wouldn’t try to attack her if Gar were with her, or even nearby.

He had a notion he’d have to settle for nearby—after the shock the woman had just suffered, she wouldn’t be likely to trust any man again. She’d seemed unusually brave, though, fighting back every inch of the way. She hadn’t caved in for a second.

Gar was surprised at the admiration he felt, and told himself he would have admired that kind of heart just as much in a man. Nonetheless, he decided to dally a while, to stroll down the road and take his time pitching camp. The woman would make an excellent ally, after all, if he could win her friendship. On every planet on which he’d landed, he had always tried to team up with a local—how else was he going to learn all the details that had developed since the last computer entry about the world? In most cases, that last datum had been entered hundreds of years before, and almost everything had changed since.

He definitely needed a local, and the woman was at least aware that he was on her side—if he could find her. In addition, if he really wanted to try to heal the wounds of this world, she might be the key to the puzzle of making peace between the three nations—dwarf, giant, and Midgarder.

He remembered how the situation had looked from the bridge of his spaceship in orbit, when he and Herkimer had been surveying the world via telephoto scanners, and he’d still been thinking of himself as Magnus. They’d watched Vikings battling giants, then dwarves battling Vikings, all in so short a period of time that Gar could only think the warfare was constant.

“So we have a land of pseudo-Teutonic Viking-type people of normal height,” he’d summarized to Herkimer, “with a land of dwarves to the west and a land of giants to the east, tundra to the north and an ocean to the south.”

“The Teutons seem to outnumber both other nations by a considerable margin,” Herkimer pointed out, “even if we don’t count their slaves.”

“Rather odd to leave your biggest men at home when you go off to war,” Magnus mused, “but the Teutons might figure that the big ones would be apt to desert to the giants—not surprising, considering how they’re treated at home. By the way, Herkimer, what was the name of this planet? Other than Corona Gamma Four, that is.”

“The records of the plans for the original expedition are more scanty than usual,” the computer told him, “but they do include the information that the intended local name for the planet was Siegfried.”

“So somebody was planning on the Teutonic theme from the beginning,” Magnus said. “Were they planning on breeding three separate sub-races, or was that an accident?”

“It could hardly have been an accident, Magnus,” Herkimer reproved. “The Terran government insisted on very stringent safety precautions for colonial expeditions, including having a gene pool large enough to prevent inbreeding.”

“Yes, even private expeditions had to pay lip service to the regulations, at least,” Magnus agreed. “If they didn’t have enough colonists, they had to bring frozen sperm and ova—but once they had landed on a new planet, there was no one to guarantee they would use what they had brought.”

“Surely you don’t think the original colonists actually planned this state of affairs!” “No, I think it far more likely that they had a horrible accident,” Magnus said, “something that killed off half the colonists or wiped out the gene bank—or that in spite of their precautions, genes linked up to cause unusual effects.”

He thought of his home planet, whose original colonists had contained an extremely high proportion of latent telepaths and other kinds of latent espers, though nobody had realized it at the time. Because of that, their descendants had more operant psi talents than all the rest of the Terran Sphere combined.

Magnus was proof of that himself. “Nature has strange ways of achieving remarkable surprises, and you can’t always foresee every problem. I’m voting for no malice intended by the original colonists, just inbreeding reinforcing genetic drift. After all, it makes sense that if a few giants were born, they’d want to marry other giants.”

“And dwarves would wish to marry other dwarves,” Herkimer agreed. “But why would they seek out separate territories?”

“That, I leave to normal human cussedness,” Magnus said. Now, Gar reflected that he had guessed more rightly than he knew, in using the word “cussedness.” Maybe “perversity” would be more fitting—but either way, if he really wanted to bring peace to this world, he needed a local ally, and Gar thought he might be able to forge an alliance with the woman he’d rescued—if he could win her confidence enough to talk with her. She would be a valuable information source and a possible peacemaker—but even if she weren’t, she was a person who needed help. He didn’t usually make a practice of adopting waifs and strays, but he had a notion this one needed a friend more than most.

Besides, he needed a friend, too—preferably one whose brain wasn’t made of silicon.

From her tracks, their direction, and the rate at which she’d been going plus the panic that had impelled her, Gar estimated where she would have gone to ground. He strolled along the road for another fifteen minutes, then stopped and looked around as though judging the place’s fitness for a campsite.

In reality, of course, he was listening with his mind.