The Forge in the Forest (43 page)

"We have some reason to hope," said Elof, and as they climbed, he told them of the meeting on the bare hilltop.

"You actually heard them talk?" marveled Ils. "Talking as we do?"

"I don't know what I heard!" confessed Elof. "Whether it was true speech, or… I don't know. But the meaning, that I am sure of. Louhi took it as an insult that he addressed her in human form. But I think, I am sure, somehow, that it was so I could hear and understand."

"Couldn't all have been just you dreaming, could it?" Roc asked. "Had some funny ones myself, on an empty gut…"

Elof smiled ruefully. "Dream, or vision, or whatever, how can I tell? But something happened, of that I am sure; a search, an encounter. And that we were shielded, and she misled into thinking we had already quit the Ice…" Then he fell silent, gazing at the rubble beneath his feet. "Aye, I am sure. See here, here in all this deathly Waste!" There, and all the way downhill to the very edges of the Ice, wherever there was a scrap of shelter among the barren soil, tiny stars of bright hue had sprung up. Where the Wanderer had trodden, the King's Hill was carpeted with flowers.

"Spring comes!" said Elof. "As he promised, even to this ruined place. It is not wholly conquered!"

"Not yet!" said Ils. "Not yet!"

They rested for a few precious moments at the foot of the hill, watching light climb up behind the gray clouds eastward, and they ate the last of their provision to fortify themselves for the coming dash. Elof sat silent, for a thought had come to him in the middle of his tale, the memory of words he had hardly taken in. "Kermorvan," he said suddenly, "if what you said is true, then this is about as far as we might have come, if we had had no hindrance! If we had been traveling for all those months we lingered in the Forest!"

Kermorvan frowned. "You would say that he repaid the time the Forest took from us? It could be, I suppose…"

"Yes! As he cleared our way through the western Forest, because Niarad had forced us ashore too early."

Ils nodded. "
What men have from me
…That must be what he meant, mustn't it?"

"Some of it, at any rate," said Kermorvan thoughtfully. "He may also have been warning us we could expect no more help for now."

"That was my thought also," said Elof.

"Might be a relief!" growled Roc. "His brand of help's a whit hard to handle; I'd sooner fend for myself. Short of any more spooks at my shirttails, that is!" he added hastily.

"I am inclined to agree with you," said Kermorvan, very gravely. "Given that small exception!" They laughed, and it was as if that living sound was answered. Molten gold spilled suddenly across the rims of the charcoal clouds, and then burst between them as a river through a crumbling wall. Long beams lanced out across the lifeless landscape, playing over the curve of the hill as a hand might caress a cheek, warming and gladdening. And from the south came a breeze that was not yet turned cutting and cold, and carried still some faint benison from warmer lands. Kermorvan sprang up, and threw back his cloak. "That is our sign! Let us not waste a second of it!" He strode out onto the Ice, and Ils after him. Elof hesitated, and Roc watched him keenly.

"Something the matter?"

Elof stretched out a foot, like a hesitant swimmer, half believing he would have grown immune to the pain by now. But at the first touch of the Ice agony lanced up his leg, and he stumbled. Roc ran to help, but Elof shook him off and staggered on, probing within himself for the source of that pain as a surgeon might search a wound. Like a thin blade it flickered and stabbed at him, striking in one place and then another as he sought to guard it; he was like a swordsman set against an opponent who could toy with him, as Kermorvan once had. But against it, as against Kermorvan, he set the smith's strength in him, and looked through the pain, past it, as he might look past the sting of forge-sparks in the finishing of some fine work. When Ils and Kermorvan looked back in concern, he stiffened his back, swung his pack about him casually, and even managed to force a smile.

He was not alone in his troubles. The rising sun struck fierce reflections off the Ice, light that seared streaks of color across their sight, and troubled Ils worst of all: she pulled her hood low to shadow her eyes, but ere long she was all but blind. Her folk, as she remembered, were accustomed to wear a kind of visor or eyemask with thin slits when they crossed such bright places. But they had none, nor anything to make one save a thin silken scarf; with that bound about her eyes she could see enough to guide her own steps. Despite all, though, they made better time than they had feared, for the Ice proved less arduous than they remembered. Here at its southern border it did not press hard up against a mountain wall, as in the north; it lay thinner upon the land, and the moraines and crevasses were further apart, shallower and more eroded, easier to cross and climb. The spring sun gave the travelers warmth and softened the glassy compacted snow of the glacier's surface, but not to deep dangerous slush as it would in the brief days of high summer. They had meltwater to drink, flowing by them in fast rills and streamlets, though they had to warm it in their flasks awhile. Nonetheless it was a wearying land to cross, and Elof and Ils could hardly enjoy even the scant rest Kermorvan allowed them. At length, as the sun fell away into afternoon, he called out and pointed. The white Wastes ahead had suddenly ceased to seem infinite. At the boundary between bright Ice and sullen sky a thread of darkness had appeared, thin and wavering, and with even a few steps forward it thickened and grew more distinct.

"Land!" cried Roc. "Open land! That's the end of the Ice!"

Elof had to fight down the urge to run; in his excitement he lost the reins of his pain, and felt it all the more keenly anew. They could not hurry, as it turned out, for even with the scarf across her eyes Ils' sight was failing rapidly and she could scarcely keep up their former pace; it was some hours before they came to their goal.

All this time the land opened out before them. At first they saw only a flat country, dark and indistinct, spattered and threaded here and there with gleaming surfaces, snow or water or mire, there was no telling which. It seemed all too like the heart of Taoune'la to the west, though still infinitely more inviting than the Ice. But as they drew nearer the rim of the glaciers, they saw the first distant signs of the transformation the changing season would bring. Plaintive cries echoed down the wind; arrows of gray geese beat across the glistening clouds, settling in great flocks upon the bright waters southward. "But no nearer," Kermorvan sighed hungrily. "So close to the rim the meltwaters must be too cold. Still, we may find hardier creatures to hunt. On now to the end!"

But when at last they neared the margins of the surface Ice, they halted in bafflement and dismay. Thin though the Ice was, its shattered margin stood still a tower and fortress above the lands; beneath their feet it fell away in an unclimbable precipice. Its few breaches led down to perilous-looking slopes of snow-clad rocks and scree such as the Raven had set them down in. Elof tipped down a small stone, and almost at once they had the doubtful pleasure of seeing a whole segment of the slope go bounding and thundering away into shadow. Silently they looked at one another, and at the rapidly sinking sun, and turned to search elsewhere.

Strangely enough, it was Us, blinded as she was, who found their way down. As they passed across a wide promontory in the cliffs she exclaimed that the Ice sounded hollower beneath her feet, and then that she could hear running water echoing up from beneath. She insisted they follow it. The sound of the water led them some little way along the cliff to the edge of a deep fissure, almost invisible from the Ice behind. And when they peered over, they knew they had found their climb.

It was as if some great worm had gone burrowing through the Ice, leaving behind it a wide round tunnel with sides as smooth as green glass, which now spilled a small stream out into the fissure. This had evidently once been part of the tunnel, but had worn so wide that the roof had collapsed. Now the floor was eaten away into a fantastic labyrinthine set of falls that wove away down the steep slope toward its shadowy foot, and made a passable stair.

"But what did the eating?" puzzled Roc, as they lowered themselves gingerly down the glassy surface; he had elected to take the lead, to hammer out handholds with his mace. "Not that piddling little trickle, surely?"

"Hardly!" said Elof, forgetting the new pain each handhold cost him as he gazed in deep wonder at the weird fluted shapes in the cleft, columns and stairs and baths through which the brown streamlet leaped and chuckled like some merry child, mocking greater waterfalls. "If this much water comes through in the first days of sun, it must be a great cascade by high summer."

"You don't know the half of it, young human!" said Ils wryly from above his head. "So much ice melts that the sheer weight of its flow can drive tunnels like these uphill, or dam up behind rockfalls and send them spilling out across the land ahead, to shatter and flood and finally to freeze. But to the glacier that much water's nothing, less than the sweat on our brows. To the Ice as a whole it's less still, because as much or more will come back in the winter as rime and snow. Three great rivers we've seen since we left my mountains, and it's the meltwater that feeds them all."

Kermorvan, who was guiding her down, shook his head in dismayed wonder. "We know too little of this. If the last Kings of Morvan had had the counsel of the duergar, they would not have reckoned too little of the menace of the Ice, and so saved more from the ruin. Great evil indeed has come from the sundering of our folk!"

"From the sundering of all kindreds," said Elof thoughtfully. "The Elder Folk from the Younger, north from south, dying Morvan from newborn Bryhaine. The Powers, even, from men. Wisdom is not passed on, and must be bought anew, and ever more dearly."

"There speaks as true a wisdom as any!" said Ils forcefully. "But who shall bring it to an end?"

"Who indeed?" said Elof, guiding Ils across from one steep icewall to another, and becoming thoroughly entangled as he sought to lead her limbs to Roc's footholds.

"Well, that is hardly the way!" she protested darkly. "Have a care where you lay your hands!" Roc and Kermorvan chuckled.

"Bear up!" said Roc, clambering down onto the rim of an ice basin. He peered over the edge, and added, "If you'll forgive the words! There's not so far to go now!"

"All the more reason to make haste!" said Kermorvan, swinging himself after Ils.

So they slipped and scrambled down the last stages of the fall, only to find that its foot tumbled down over an ice-sheathed boulder in which Roc could cut no proper holds. Bracing himself, Elof pressed flat to the Ice and fought to keep his limbs steady as its bitter flame burned into him and knotted his muscles. He climbed jerkily, like some cunning automaton of lever and cog, and indeed agony was stripping him of thought and feeling. He hardly noticed when the icy fallwater splashed across him, when his feet and fingers began to slip, when at last they slid free and he fell into air. A moment free from pain was almost as agonizing in its suddenness, then came the kiss of soft snow and the jarring slam of the stone beneath. But it was mild, bearable, compared to what had passed, and he lay there laughing weakly until Roc and Kermorvan had made Ils safe and hurried to help him up. "At least you'd only a step or two to go!" said Roc, as they dusted him off: Elof did not tell him that for all he had known then, or cared, it could have been one or a hundred.

He had been at the end of his strength, but the moment he was free of the Ice it returned to him very quickly. They had come down upon a rockfall like the rest, but less steep and unstable. The stream chattered away among the heaps of snow-clad rock, and they decided to follow its course downward. Across the snowfield it led them, and at last out of the lowering shadow of the icecliffs above.

It was only then, on the brink of a long slope, they turned and looked back. Ils tore the bandage from her bloodshot eyes, and gazed with the rest upon the bulwark and rampart of their foe.

In looming heights of strength, dazzling as gilded steel in the light of the sinking sun, those cliffs arose across the skies of the ruined land of Morvan from east to west unbroken, unbreached, buttressed by immense ridges of fallen rock, whole ranges of rubble hills. A strength and fortress, it seemed, that mere men should not dream of resisting, could not hope to challenge. "Yet we passed beneath you, over you, through you!" said Kermorvan softly. "We came back to Morvan. And we won free. Free, and with a prize of infinite worth!" Then he drew the sword Elof had made him, and cried in a great voice in the two tongues of his folk, "
Morvan Morlanhal! Morvan shall arise!"

Word and blade together sparkled defiance in the free air before those sullen faces of ice and shattered stone. As the last echoes died he turned the sword gracefully in his hand and slid it back into its scabbard. "It is a lord of Morvan tells you!" he muttered. Then he turned his face from his lost domain, and strode down the slope. The others followed quietly, and let him be, and it was not until much later that he spoke again.

By that time they had reached the end of the slope. Their little stream joined with another and larger, a black seam of meltwater wavering away through thinner, softer snow, down toward the more level lands below. They followed the larger stream, which was joined by others and itself flowed into a river of some width. This was still partly frozen over, but now the meltwater below and sun above were swelling it, straining the Ice and cracking it into great loose floes that ground and splintered against each other with creaks and crashes and the musical splintering of glass. Along its bank the snow was turning soft and patchy; here and there plant stems protruded through it, chiefly gnarled patches of willow scrub. On some of these the first soft catkins were appearing, and as the trav-