Multiverse: Exploring the Worlds of Poul Anderson (5 page)

Alianora could make that same guess. If the Powers Holger had bested here had their way, they would never want to see him again. And, even if they’d lost their war to rule this world wholly, their strength was not to be despised.

“I wonder that you succeeded in their despite,” she said, her voice softening a little.

“You’d better believe I did, kiddo. I don’t give up, no matter what.” He stuck out his chin. He was in good hard shape for a man his age—in extraordinary shape for a man his age—but the flesh under there still sagged. Well, so did the flesh under Alianora’s chin. The earth dragged you down towards it, and then it dragged you down into it, and then . . . you found out for sure what came afterwards.

“Thirty years. I was thinking on that earlier today,” Alianora said.

Holger nodded brusquely. “A devil of a long time,” he agreed. “I made it, though.” He looked at her as if she were the only thing in all the world—no, in all the worlds.

Once upon a time, that look would have melted her the way a mild spring morning melts the last winter frost. To a certain extent, it still did—but only to a certain extent. She was no longer who she had been in those dark and desperate days. Nor was he. She knew as much. She was far from sure he could say the same.

“So much time gone by,” she murmured.

“Not too much. We still have a good bit left,” he said.

She made herself meet that intent gaze. It wasn’t far removed from crossing swords. “Thirty years,” she repeated. “Thirty years of faring betwixt—amongst—the worlds for you.”

“I was always trying to get here,” Holger said. “Always.” The word clanged in his mouth.

Alianora nodded. “I believe you.” Even with the white tunic, she hadn’t flown so far as she used to do. After the war, the sullen, sulking, beaten Middle World was no longer such a welcoming place. Since Alianna took wing in her stead, she didn’t think she’d gone farther than a day’s walk from the village. As gently as she could, she asked, “In all your wanderings, did you never, ah, meet anyone who made you want to leave off and bide where you found yourself?”

He looked down at the ground once more: dull embarrassment this time. “I won’t lie to you. There’s been a girl or three. You know how things are.” He spread his hands. A swordsman’s calluses marked his right palm.

She did know how things were. A knight errant spent his nights erring—that was what they said, anyhow. How the woman he loved—the woman who loved him—felt when he did, he could always worry about later . . . if he worried about it at all.

Holger raised his big head. Fierce intensity filled his stare. “But there was never anybody else, babe. Never really. Never so it counted here—” He touched himself on the heart. “Only below the belt, if you know what I mean.” He chuckled.

Again, Alianora knew. Pity stabbed through her. “Why not, Holger?” she asked. “Why not, in heaven’s name? So many long, dry years . . . ”

She didn’t think he heard, or noticed, that last. “I’ll tell you why not. Because all I ever cared about in this miserable universe is you, that’s why. Because I aimed to go on till I found you, no matter what I had to do, no matter how long it took. And here I am.” His pride blazed like a forest fire.

Trying to deflect it seemed wisest. “All you ever cared for is me, say you? You know you speak not sooth. What of Morgan le Fay?”

He didn’t flinch. She wished he would have. “Well, what about her?” he said roughly. “That was a long time ago, and in another country, and besides, I hadn’t met you yet. I never would’ve busted my hump the way I did, fighting back to this world for the likes of
her
, and you can take that to the bank. But you, you’re worth it.”

He was convinced she was; she heard as much in his voice. He had to be, lest all he’d done and suffered this past half a lifetime turn to dust and blow away like fairy gold tried on an anvil of cold iron. “Surely life goes on wherever one wanders,” Alianora said. “Surely, had you sought, you would have found many, or one at least, not so very different from me.”

“No way. Not a chance.” Holger had vast reserves of stubbornness. Without them, he never would have won Cortana, never would have had the chance to scatter the host of Chaos before him. Now . . . Now he said, “You’re the one, the only one.”

“Oh, Holger.” Alianora tried to make him hear what he would not see: “I am no more the lass you wooed.”

He wasn’t listening. And he had his reasons: his eyes shifted away from her, and his yellow-callused hand dropped to the hilt of his sword. “Who’re these clowns?” he ground out. “They better make tracks, kid. They mess with me, it’s the last dumb stunt they ever pull.”

Alianora turned to follow his gaze. One of the other women by the well must have hotfooted it back to the smithy. Alianora hadn’t noted anyone leaving, but to say she was distracted only proved the weakness of words. Here came Theodo, a heavy hammer clutched in his fist. Behind him strode Einhard and Nithard, one with an axe, the other with a cleaver.

“Hold!” Alianora spoke quickly to her kinsmen. “This is the famous Sir Holger, come to call after all these years.”

Einhard and Nithard broke into delighted grins. They knew she’d been friends with the paladin in the great days before they were born. Now at last they got to meet a hero in the flesh! Theodo’s face was a study. He knew rather more than they did, and liked what he knew rather less. So long as Holger was gone and stayed gone, it didn’t bother him—much. Now that he got to meet the hero in the flesh . . .

Seeing them lower their weapons, Holger also took his hand away from his sword, though not very far. He asked once more, “Who are these people?” This time, the question sounded cautious and formal rather than ferocious.

With relief, Alianora too chose formality: “Sir Holger, I have the honor to present to you my sons. The tall one is Einhard; the redhead, Nithard. With them stands my husband, Theodo.”

Her sons rushed up to clasp the hero’s hand. Theodo hung back a little, but only a little. He also set his hard palm against Holger’s. He didn’t pound the paladin on the back the way Einhard and Nithard did, or help try to lift him off his feet. The gray streaks in his beard excused his lack of youthful enthusiasm. Other things, perhaps, excused his lack of enthusiasm of any sort.

As for Holger . . . Alianora might have known—hellfire,
had
known—formality wouldn’t be enough. While the puppies pounded on him and Theodo gave him more restrained greeting, he looked like a man who’d just taken a boot in the belly out of nowhere.

When the commotion around him eased a little, he stared over at Alianora with that astonished disbelief still all over his face. “Your . . . sons?” he said. He might never have heard the word before.

“Aye,” Alianora answered stolidly.

“Your . . . husband?” By the way Holger said it, he had heard that word before, and didn’t fancy it a barleycorn’s worth. Theodo caught the same thing. He unobtrusively shifted the hammer from his left hand back to his right.

Alianora nodded. “Aye,” she said again. It was the truth. Why should she not repeat it? Why should she want to weep when she did?

“But how did that happen?” Holger asked, still lost, speaking as if of flood or fire or other natural catastrophe.

“How do you think?” For the first time, irritation rose against sympathy in Alianora. “You were
gone
, Holger. Gone off the battlefield. Gone from human ken. Gone from the ken of other folk, too, as I have reason to know. Even smarting from their loss, the Middle Worlders laughed that I should have looked for aught else. So I came hither one day, and I met Theodo, and this is all these years and three grown children later.” She raised her head and looked him full in the face. She’d essayed nothing harder since she last lay down in childbed, but she did it. “I would not change it now even if I could.”

Einhard and Nithard blinked at her. They understood that they didn’t understand everything that was going on. She sighed within herself. She would have a deal of explaining to do to them, and to Alianna. One of these days. Not today. Today had its own sorrows.

Theodo hung on to the hammer. How not? Alianora sometimes thought he set it down only to make love to her. Well, she never would have wanted a man who was not a willing worker. His grip eased a bit, though. He must have had his own fears about this moment, if it ever came. She’d slain some of them, at any rate.

“But . . . But . . . ” Holger gaped like a boated carp. “I never gave up looking for you, looking for a way back here. Never once, never for a minute, never in thirty years. Now I make it, and what do I find?”

“That life went on whilst you were busy with other things?” Alianora suggested. His gape only got wider. She sighed again, out loud this time. “Holger, how could I know what you strove for, there in your other world? Even did I know, how could I guess you’d succeed?”

“You should’ve.” Holger muttered to himself, scowling and shaking his head. He might bring out the words, but he had trouble believing them himself.

“Here. Wait.” Alianora began bringing up the bucket of water again. “Your coming fair made me forget why I was at the well. I aim to stew up a great kettle of pease porridge, for supper this even and for as long after that as it may last. Will you come home and eat with us?”

He grinned crookedly—more the expression she remembered him wearing than the loss and rage that had been chasing each other across his features. “Bread and salt, Carahue would say.”

“That’s the Moor’s custom, not mine, but I think it a good one,” Alianora answered. After you ate with someone, trying to cut out his liver ought to be bad form.

“He’s probably got himself a harem.” Holger’s grin widened. “Song girls and dancing girls and girls to peel grapes for him and drop them into his mouth. Oh, and about fifty-eleven kids, too. I bet he’s fat, but happy.”

“It would not surprise me. He always fancied the good things in life,” Alianora said.

“Well, so did I.” Holger looked straight at her.

More than anything else, that was what made her say, “Theodo, why don’t you close the smithy, and you and the boys come home with us? ’Tis a holiday—an unlooked-for holiday, which makes it but the sweeter.”

“Aye, I’ll do it,” Theodo said at once. He didn’t want Alianora alone with Holger. She didn’t want—she didn’t think she wanted—that, either. Her feelings for him might be buried, but they lay restless in the grave. Best give them no chance to see light of day once more. And also best to give no one here the least excuse to think of scandal. Some of the women would regardless; they were made so. But no one else ought to be able to hearken to their vinegar tongues.

“Not a great big place, is this?” Holger remarked as they walked back to the house. He carried the water bucket. Theodo gave him a quizzical look when he lifted it, but at Alianora’s quick gesture lowered his eyebrows and kept quiet. Holger had always been full of such small, strange courtesies.

“Grandest village for twenty miles around,” Nithard said proudly. Holger nodded, polite as an elflord. If he also smiled for one brief moment, Alianora was pretty sure she was the only one who noticed.

She stirred the peas and strewed in salt. After adding the fennel—its spicy scent made her nostrils twitch—she cut the pork into little cubes. It went into the kettle, too.

“Will you chop some more firewood for me?” she asked Theodo.

“Aye.” He went out to do it without a backward glance. Einhard and Nithard chaperoned Alianora better than well enough, even if they didn’t realize that was what they were doing. They wanted every cut and thrust of Holger’s adventures in this world, in the one where he’d spent some years, and in the others he’d passed through on his long, roundabout journey back here. To help loosen his tongue, they broached a barrel of beer Alianora hadn’t planned on opening so soon.

Holger was a good talespinner, of the kind who could laugh at himself and his blunders: one more thing Alianora recalled from bygone days. She’d lived through some of his stories, and heard others before—how they came back! Others still were new to her. The feathered demons—or were they pagan gods?—who ate hearts and drank blood made her shiver in spite of herself.

Theodo had come back in with an armload of wood. Alianora scarcely noticed. Her husband got caught up in Holger’s latest tale, too. When the knight paused to wet his whistle, Theodo asked, “This is truth, not just a yarn spun for the sake of yarning?”

“Truth.” Holger signed himself to show he meant it. “Oh, sometimes neatened up a bit for the sake of the story, and maybe the way I remember it now isn’t exactly the way it happened then, but . . . close enough for government work, they say in the other world where I lived a long time.”

The phrase sounded odd to Alianora, but Theodo grasped it at once. “That is truth,” he agreed gravely. “As near as a mortal man’s likely to come to it, any road.” He took up the beechwood dipper and poured himself a stoup of beer.

Holger refilled his own mug, not for the first time. He sipped appreciatively. “Mighty fine stuff,” he said.

“I have a charm against souring I got years ago in the Middle World,” Alianora said. “It works as well on this side of the border, so there must be no harm in it.”

“Not unless you’re the wrong kind of
microorganism
.” That last must have been a word from some other world, for it meant nothing to Alianora—nor, plainly, to her kinsmen. Holger took another pull at the beer. “I saw a tavern near the well,” he said. “If you can brew like this, I’m surprised you don’t run it out of business.”

“We would never do that!” Theodo sounded shocked. “Gerold needs must make his living, too.”

“Besides, brewing a barrel of beer now and again is one thing. Brewing enough for a thirsty village, that’s summat else altogether,” Alianora added.

“Mm, I shouldn’t wonder if you’re right,” Holger said after a little thought. “You always did have a good head on your shoulders, and not just for looks.”

Alianora’s cheeks heated. Theodo scowled. Then Einhard, not noticing anything amiss, said, “Sir Holger, will you speak more of these . . . Nasties, did you call ’em?”