The Queen of Air and Darkness Read online

  We shall do nothing of the sort, bonebrain, Morgarel’s answer slid through their heads. Not unless they attack us, and they will not unless we make them aware of us, and her command is that we spy out their purposes.

  “Gr-r-rum-m-m. I know deir aim. Cut down trees, stick plows in land, sow deir cursed seed in de clods and in deir shes. ’Less we drive dem into de bitterwater, and soon, soon, dey’ll wax too strong for us.”

  “Not too strong for the Queen!” Mistherd protested, shocked.

  Yet they do have new powers, it seems, Morgarel reminded him. Carefully must we probe them.

  “Den carefully can we step on dem?” asked Nagrim.

  The question woke a grin out of Mistherd’s own uneasiness. He slapped the scaly back. “Don’t talk, you,” he said. “It hurts my ears. Nor think; that hurts your head. Come, run!”

  Ease yourself, Morgarel scolded. You have too much life in you, human-born.

  Mistherd made a face at the wraith, but obeyed to the extent of slowing down and picking his way through what cover the country afforded. For he traveled on behalf of the Fairest, to learn what had brought a pair of mortals questing hither.

  Did they seek that boy whom Ayoch stole? (He continued to weep for his mother, though less and less often as the marvels of Carheddin entered him.) Perhaps. A birdcraft had left them and their car at the now-abandoned campsite, from which they had followed an outward spiral. But when no trace of the cub had appeared inside a reasonable distance, they did not call to be flown home. And this wasn’t because weather forbade the farspeaker waves to travel, as was frequently the case. No, instead the couple set off toward the mountains of Moonhorn. Their course would take them past a few outlying invader steadings and on into realms untrodden by their race.

  So this was no ordinary survey. Then what was it?

  Mistherd understood now why she who reigned had made her adopted mortal children learn, or retain, the clumsy language of their forebears. He had hated that drill, wholly foreign to Dweller ways. Of course, you obeyed her, and in time you saw how wise she had been…

  * * *

  Presently he left Nagrim behind a rock—the nicor would only be useful in a fight-and crawled from bush to bush until he lay within man—lengths of the humans. A rainplant drooped over him, leaves soft on his bare skin, and clothed him in darkness. Morgarel floated to the crown of a shiverleaf, whose unrest would better conceal his flimsy shape. He’d not be much help either. And that was the most troublous, the almost appalling thing here. Wraiths were among those who could not just sense and send thoughts, but cast illusions. Morgarel had reported that this time his power seemed to rebound off an invisible cold wall around the car.

  Otherwise the male and female had set up no guardian engines and kept no dogs. Belike they supposed none would be needed, since they slept in the long vehicle which bore them. But such contempt of the Queen’s strength could not be tolerated, could it?

  Metal sheened faintly by the light of their campfire. They sat on either side, wrapped in coats against a coolness that Mistherd, naked, found mild. The male drank smoke. The female stared past him into a dusk which her flame-dazzled eyes must see as thick gloom. The dancing glow brought her vividly forth. Yes, to judge from Ayoch’s tale, she was the dam of the new cub.

  Ayoch had wanted to come too, but the Wonderful One forbade. Pooks couldn’t hold still long enough for such a mission.

  The man sucked on his pipe. His cheeks thus pulled into shadow while the light flickered across nose and brow, he looked disquietingly like a shearbill about to stoop on prey.

  “—No, I tell you again, Barbro, I have no theories,” he was saying. “When facts are insufficient, theorizing is ridiculous at best, misleading at worst.”

  “Still, you must have some idea of what you’re doing,” she said. It was plain that they had threshed this out often before. No Dweller could be as persistent as she or as patient as he. “That gear you packed—that generator you keep running—”

  “I have a working hypothesis or two, which suggested what equipment I ought to take.”

  “Why won’t you tell me what the hypotheses are?”

  “They themselves indicate that that might be inadvisable at the present time. I’m still feeling my way into the labyrinth. And I haven’t had a chance yet to hook everything up. In fact, we’re really only protected against so-called telepathic influence—”

  “What?” She started. “Do you mean… those legends about how they can read minds too…” Her words trailed off and her gaze sought the darkness beyond his shoulders.

  He leaned forward. His tone lost its clipped rapidity, grew earnest and soft. “Barbro, you’re racking yourself to pieces. Which is no help to Jimmy if he’s alive, the more so when you may well be badly needed later on. We’ve a long trek before us, and you’d better settle into it.”

  She nodded jerkily and caught her lip between her teeth for a moment before she answered, “—I’m trying.”

  He smiled around his pipe. “I expect you’ll succeed. You don’t strike me as a quitter or a whiner or an enjoyer of misery.”

  She dropped a hand to the pistol at her belt. Her voice changed; it came out of her throat like knife from sheath. “When we find them, they’ll know what I am. What humans are.”

  “Put anger aside also,” the man urged. “We can’t afford emotions. If the Outlings are real, as I told you I’m provisionally assuming, they’re fighting for their homes.” After a short stillness he added: “I like to think that if the first explorers had found live natives, men would not have colonized Roland. But too late now. We can’t go back if we wanted to. It’s a bitter-end struggle, against an enemy so crafty that he’s even hidden from us the fact that he is waging war.”

  “Is he? I mean, skulking, kidnapping an occasional child—”

  “That’s part of my hypothesis. I suspect those aren’t harassments, they’re tactics employed in a chillingly subtle strategy.”

  The fire sputtered and sparked. The man smoked awhile, brooding, until he went on:

  “I didn’t want to raise your hopes or excite you unduly while you had to wait on me, first in Christmas Landing, then in Portolondon. Afterward we were busy satisfying ourselves that Jimmy had been taken further from camp than he could have wandered before collapsing. So I’m only now telling you how thoroughly I studied available material on the… Old Folk. Besides, at first I did it on the principle of eliminating every imaginable possibility, however absurd. I expected no result other than final disproof. But I went through everything, relics, analyses, histories, journalistic accounts, monographs; I talked to outwayers who happened to be in town and to what scientists we have who’ve taken any interest in the matter. I’m a quick study. I flatter myself I became as expert as anyone—though God knows there’s little to be expert on. Furthermore, I, a comparative stranger to Roland, maybe looked on the problem with fresh eyes. And a pattern emerged for me.

  “If the aborigines had become extinct, why hadn’t they left more remnants? Arctica isn’t enormous, and it’s fertile for Rolandic life. It ought to have supported a population whose artifacts ought to have accumulated over millennia. I’ve read that on Earth, literally tens of thousands of paleolithic hand axes were found, more by chance than archaeology.

  “Very well. Suppose the relics and fossils were deliberately removed, between the time the last survey party left and the first colonizing ships arrived. I did find some support for that idea in the diaries of the original explorers. They were too preoccupied with checking the habitability of the planet to make catalogues of primitive monuments. However, the remarks they wrote down indicate they saw much more than later arrivals did. Suppose what we have found is just what the removers overlooked or didn’t get around to.

  “That argues a sophisticated mentality, thinking in long-range terms, doesn’t it? Which in turn argues that the Old Folk were not mere hunters or neolithic farmers.”

  “But nobody ever saw buildings or mac
hines or any such thing,” Barbro objected.

  “No. Most likely the natives didn’t go through our kind of metallurgic-industrial evolution. I can conceive of other paths to take. Their full-fledged civilization might have begun, rather than ended, in biological science and technology. It might have developed potentialities of the nervous system, which might be greater in their species than in man. We have those abilities to some degree ourselves, you realize. A dowser, for instance, actually senses variations in the local magnetic field caused by a water table. However, in us, these talents are maddeningly rare and tricky. So we took our business elsewhere. Who needs to be a telepath, say, when he has a visiphone? The Old Folk may have seen it the other way around. The artifacts of their civilization may have been, may still be unrecognizable to men.”

  “They could have identified themselves to the men, though,” Barbro said. “Why didn’t they?”

  “I can imagine any number of reasons. As, they could have had a bad 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 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 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 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 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 them—travel 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—“is 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 child
ren 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. Cullen,” 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.