Queen Of Air & Darkness Read online

  experience with interstellar visitors earlier in their history. Ours is

  scarcely the sole race that has spaceships. However, I told you I don't

  theorize in advance of the facts. Let's say no more than that the Old

  Folk, if they exist, are alien to us."

  "For a rigorous thinker, you're spinning a mighty thin thread."

  "I've admitted this is entirely provisional." He squinted at her through

  a roil of campfire smoke. "You came to me, Barbro, insisting in the

  teeth of officialdom that your boy had been stolen, but your own talk

  about cultist kidnappers was ridiculous. Why are you reluctant to admit

  the reality of nonhumans?"

  "In spite of the fact that Jimmy's being alive probably depends on it,"

  she sighed. "I know." A shudder. "Maybe I don't dare admit it."

  "I've said nothing thus far that hasn't been speculated about in print,"

  he told her. "A disreputable speculation, true. In a hundred years,

  nobody has found valid evidence for the Outlings being more than a

  superstition. Still, a few people have declared it's at least possible that

  intelligent natives are at large in the wilderness."

  "I know," she repeated. "I'm not sure, though, what has made you,

  overnight, take those arguments seriously."

  "Well, once you got me started thinking, it occurred to me that

  Roland's outwayers are not utterly isolated medieval crofters. They

  have books, telecommunications, power tools, motor vehicles; above

  all, they have a modern science-oriented education. Why should they

  turn superstitious? Something must be causing it." He stopped. "I'd

  better not continue. My ideas go further than this; but if they're

  correct, it's dangerous to speak them aloud."

  Mistherd's belly muscles tensed. There was danger for fair, in

  that shearbill head. The Garland Bearer must be warned. For a minute he

  wondered about summoning Nagrim to kill these two. If the nicor jumped

  them fast, their firearms might avail them naught. But no. They might

  have left word at home, or- He came back to his ears. The talk had

  changed course. Barbro was murmuring, "-why you stayed on Roland."

  The man smiled his gaunt smile. "Well, life on Beowulf held no challenge

  for me. Heorot is-or was; this was decades past, remember-Heorot was

  densely populated, smoothly organized, boringly uniform. That was partly

  due to the lowland frontier, a safety valve that bled off the dissatisfied.

  But I lack the carbon dioxide tolerance necessary to live healthily down

  there. An expedition was being readied to make a swing around a number

  of colony worlds, especially those which didn't have the equipment to

  keep in laser contact. You'll recall its announced purpose, to seek out new

  ideas in science, arts, sociology, philosophy, whatever might prove

  valuable. I'm afraid they found little on Roland relevant to Beowulf. But I,

  who had wangled a berth, I saw opportunities for myself and decided to

  make my home here."

  "Were you a detective back there, too?"

  "Yes, in the official police. We had a tradition of such work in our family.

  Some of that may have come from the Cherokee side of it, if the name

  means anything to you. However, we also claimed collateral descent from

  one of the first private inquiry agents on record, back on Earth before

  spaceflight. Regardless of how true that may be, I found him a useful

  model. You see, an archetype-"

  The man broke off. Unease crossed his features. "Best we go to sleep," he

  said. "We've a long distance to cover in the morning."

  She looked outward. "Here is no morning."

  They retired. Mistherd rose and cautiously flexed limberness back into his

  muscles. Before returning to the Sister of Lyrth, he risked a glance

  through a pane in the car. Bunks were made up, side by side, and the

  humans lay in them. Yet the man had not touched her, though hers was a

  bonny body, and nothing that had

  passed between them suggested he meant to do so.

  Eldritch, humans. Cold and claylike. And they would overrun the.beautiful

  wild world? Mistherd spat in disgust. It must not happen. It would not

  happen. She who reigned had vowed that. .

  The lands of William Irons were immense. But this was because a barony

  was required to support him, his kin and cattle, on native crops whose

  cultivation was still poorly understood. He raised some Terrestrial plants

  as well, by summerlight and in conservatories. However, these were a

  luxury. The true conquest of northern Arctica lay in yerba hay, in

  bathyrhiza wood, in pericoup and glycophyllon, and eventually, when the

  market had expanded with population and industry, in chalcanthemum for

  city florists and pelts of cage-bred rover for city furriers.

  That was in a tomorrow Irons did not expect that he would live -l to see.

  Sherrinford wondered if the man really expected anyone ever would.

  The room was warm and bright. Cheerfulness crackled in the fireplace.

  Light from fluoropanels gleamed off hand-carven chests t and chairs and

  tables, off colorful draperies and shelved dishes. The outwayer sat solid in

  his high seat, stoutly clad, beard flowing down his chest. His wife and

  daughters brought coffee, whose fragrance joined the remnant odors of a

  hearty supper, to him, his :s guests and his sons.

  But outside, wind hooted, lightning flared, thunder bawled, rain crashed on

  roof and walls and roared down to swirl among the courtyard cobblestones.

  Sheds and barns crouched against hugeness beyond. Trees groaned, and did

  a wicked undertone of laughter run beneath the lowing of a frightened

  cow? A burst of hailstones hit the tiles like knocking knuckles.

  You could feel how distant your neighbors were, Sherrinford

  thought. And nonetheless they were the people whom you saw

  oftenest, did daily business with by visiphone (when a solar storm

  didn't make gibberish of their voices and chaos of their faces)

  or in the flesh, partied with, gossiped and intrigued with, inter-

  a

  ,s

  married with; in the end, they were the people who would bury you.

  The lights of the coastal towns were monstrously further away.

  William Irons was a strong man. Yet when now he spoke, fear was in

  his tone. "You'd truly go over Troll Scarp?"

  "Do you mean Hanstein Palisades?" Sherrinford responded, more

  challenge than question.

  "No outwayer calls it anything but Troll Scarp," Barbro said.

  And how had a name like that been reborn, light-years and centuries

  from Earth's Dark Ages?

  "Hunters, trappers, prospectors-rangers, you call themtravel in those

  mountains," Sherrinford declared.

  "In certain parts," Irons said. "That's allowed, by a pact once made

  'tween a man and the Queen after he'd done well by a jack-o'-the-hill

  that a satan had hurt. Wherever the plumablanca grows, men may fare,

  if they leave man-goods on the altar boulders in payment for what

  they take out of the land. Elsewhere" -one fist clenched on a chair arm

  and went slack again-" 's not wise to go."

  "It's been done, hasn't it?"

  "Oh, yes. And some came back all right, or so they claimed, though
>
  I've heard they were never lucky afterward. And some didn't; they

  vanished. And some who returned babbled of wonders and horrors, and

  stayed witlings the rest of their lives. Not for a long time has anybody

  been rash enough to break the pact and overtread the bounds." Irons

  looked at Barbro almost entreatingly. His woman and children stared

  likewise, grown still. Wind hooted beyond the walls and rattled the

  storm shutters. "Don't you."

  "I've reason to believe my son is there," she answered.

  "Yes, yes, you've told and I'm sorry. Maybe something can be done. I

  don't know what, but I'd be glad to, oh, lay a double offering on

  Unvar's Barrow this midwinter, and a prayer drawn in the turf by a

  flint knife. Maybe they'll return him." Irons sighed. "They've not done

  such a thing in man's memory, though. And he

  could have a worse lot. I've glimpsed them myself, speeding madcap

  through twilight. They seem happier than we are. Might be no

  kindness, sending your boy home again."

  "Like in the Arvid song," said his wife.

  Irons nodded. "M-hm. Or others, come to think of it."

  "What's this?" Sherrinford asked. More sharply than before, he felt

  himself a stranger. He was a child of cities and technics, above all a

  child of the skeptical intelligence. This family believed. It was

  disquieting to see more than a touch of .their acceptance in Barbro's

  slow nod.

  "We have the same ballad in Olga Ivanoff Land," she told him, her

  voice less calm than the words. "It's one of the traditional ones -

  nobody knows who composed them-that are sung to set the measure of

  a ring dance in a meadow."

  "I noticed a multilyre in your baggage, Mrs. (sullen," said the wife of

  Irons. She was obviously eager to get off the explosive topic of a

  venture in defiance of the Old Folk. A songfest could help. "Would

  you like to entertain us?"

  Barbro shook her head, white around the nostrils. The oldest boy said

  quickly, rather importantly, "Well, sure, I can, if our guests would like

  to hear."

  "I'd enjoy that, thank you." Sherrinford leaned back in his seat and

  stoked his pipe. If this had not happened spontaneously. he would

  have guided the conversation toward a similar outcome.

  In the past he had had no incentive to study the folklore of the

  outway, and not much chance to read the scanty references on it since

  Barbro brought him her trouble. Yet more and more he was becoming

  convinced that he must get an understanding-not an anthropological

  study, but a feel from the inside out-of the relationship between

  Roland's frontiersmen and those beings which haunted them.

  A bustling followed, rearrangement, settling down to listen, coffee cups

  refilled and brandy offered on the side. The boy explained, "The last

  line is the chorus. Everybody join in, right?" Clearly he too hoped thus

  to bleed off some of the tension. Cathar-

  sis through music? Sherrinford wondered, and added to himself:

  No; exorcism.

  A girl strummed a guitar. The boy sang, to a melody which beat across

  the storm noise:

  "It was the ranger Arvid rode homeward through the hills among the

  shadowy shiverleafs, along the chiming rills.

  The dance weaves under the firethorn.

  "The night wind whispered around him . with scent of brok and rue.

  Both moons rose high above him and hills aflash with dew.

  The dance weaves under the firethorn.

  "And dreaming of that woman who waited in the sun, he stopped,

  amazed by starlight, and so he was undone.

  The dance weaves under the firethorn.

  "For there beneath a barrow that bulked athwart a moon, the Outling

  folk were dancing in glass and golden shoon.

  The dance weaver under the firethorn.

  "The Outling folk were dancing like water, wind and fire to frosty-

  ringing harpstrings, and never did they tire.

  The dance weaves under the firethorn.

  "To Arvid came she striding from where she watched the dance, the

  Queen of Air and Darkness, with starlight in her glance.

  The dance weaves under the firethorn.

  "With starlight, love and terror in her immortal eye, the Queen of Air

  and Darkness-"

  "No!" Barbro leaped from her chair. Her fists were clenched and tears

  flogged her cheekbones. "You can't-pretend that-about the things that

  stole Jimmy!"

  She fled from the chamber, upstairs to her guest bedroom.

  But she finished the song herself. That was about seventy hours later,

  camped in the steeps where rangers dared not fare.

  She and Sherrinford had not said much to the Irons family, after

  refusing repeated pleas to leave the forbidden country alone. Nor had

  they exchanged many remarks at first as they drove north. Slowly,

  however, he began to draw her out about her own life. After a while

  she almost forgot to mourn, in her remembering of home and old

  neighbors. Somehow this led to discoveries=that he, beneath his

  professional manner, was a gourmet and a lover of opera and

  appreciated her femaleness; that she could still laugh and find beauty in

  the wild land around her-and she realized, half guiltily, that life held

  more hopes than even the recovery of the son Tim gave her.

  "I've convinced myself he's alive," the detective said. He scowled.

  "Frankly, it makes me regret having taken you along. I expected this

  would be only a fact-gathering trip, but it's turning out to be more. If

  we're dealing with real creatures who stole him, they can do real harm.

  I ought to turn back to the nearest garth and call for a plane to fetch

  you." '

  "Like bottommost hell you will, mister," she said. "You need

  somebody who knows outway conditions, and I'm a better shot than

  average."

  "M-m-m . . . it would involve considerable delay too, wouldn't it?

  Besides the added distance, I can't put a signal through to any airport

  before this current burst of solar interference has calmed down."

  Next "night" he broke out his remaining equipment and set it up. She

  recognized some of it, such as the thermal detector. Other items were

  strange to her, copied to his order from the advanced apparatus of his

  birthworld. fie would tell her little about them. "I've explained my

  suspicion that the ones we're after have telepathic capabilities," he

  said in apology.

  Her eyes widened. "You mean it could be true, the Queen and her

  people can read minds?"

  "That's part of the dread which surrounds their legend, isn't it?

  Actually there's nothing spooky about the phenomenon. It was

  studied and fairly well defined centuries ago, on Earth. I daresay the

  facts are available in the scientific microfiles at Christmas Landing.

  You Rolanders have simply had no occasion to seek them out, any

  more than you've yet had occasion to look up how to build power

  beamcasters or spacecraft."

  "Well, how does telepathy work, then?"

  Sherrinford recognized that her query asked for comfort as much as it

  did for facts and he spoke with deliberate dryness: "The organism

  generates extremel
y long-wave radiation which can, in principle, be

  modulated by the nervous system. In practice, the feebleness of the

  signals and their low rate of information transmission make them

  elusive, hard to detect and measure. Our prehuman ancestors went in

  for more reliable senses, like vision and hearing. What telepathic

  transceiving we do is marginal at best. But explorers have found

  extraterrestrial species that got an evolutionary advantage from

  developing the system further, in their particular environments. I

  imagine such species could include one which gets comparatively little

  direct sunlight-in fact, appears to hide from broad day. It could even

  become so able in this regard that, at short range, it can pick up man's

  weak emissions and.make man's primitive sensitivities resonate to its

  own strong sendings."

  "That would account for a lot, wouldn't it?" Barbro said faintly.

  "I've now screened our car by a jamming field," Sherrinford told her,

  "but it reaches only a few meters past the chassis. Beyond, a

  scout of theirs might get a warning from your thoughts, if you knew

  precisely what I'm trying to do. I have a well-trained subconscious

  which sees to it that I think about this in French when I'm outside.

  Communication has to be structured to be intelligible, you see, and

  that's a different enough structure from English. But English is the

  only human language on Roland, and surely the Old Folk have learned

  it."