Multiverse: Exploring the Worlds of Poul Anderson Read online

  “Surprises.” Holger’s chuckle was mirthless. “Oh, you might say so. Yes, you just might.”

  Alianora heard the pain that lay under the laugh. “I would not hurt you for the world, Sir Holger,” she said, and came even closer than before to dear Holger. Theodo heard it whether she said it or not. He made a small noise down deep in his chest. She ignored it; she’d square things with him later. Meanwhile . . . “The world wags as it wags, not always as we wish it would. We move on. We change.” She waved at the impatiently waiting Einhard, Nithard, and Alianna. Alianna waved back.

  “Yeah. Right.” Holger’s forced smile likely masked tears. “Only I didn’t, did I? I spent all those years wandering from one world to the next, or else in some of the places between them all. I was going to get back here, and nothing was gonna stop me no matter what. And I don’t think I ever once stopped to wonder what in blazes you’d be doing. You were—”

  “In amber in your mind?” Alianora suggested. She had a bauble from Theodo, a tear of the sun with a tiny ant trapped inside forever.

  “Yes!” Agreement exploded out of Holger. “That’s it. That’s just it! And a whole fat lot of good seeing it now does me.”

  “Well, I am glad you came again,” Alianora said: one more thing she would have to set right with Theodo. But it was so, even if not the way Holger would have wanted. Like anyone else, she had her own measure of vanity.

  Nithard aimed a rather predatory grin at them. “Well, what were the lot of you going on about where we couldn’t hearken?”

  Deadpan, Holger answered, “What a rotten bunch of brats your mother’s gone and raised—what else?”

  Alianora’s second son opened his mouth, then wisely closed it again without saying anything more. Some scrapes you not only couldn’t win, you only made yourself look sillier when you tried. He at least had the sense to see as much.

  Alianna, now . . . Alianna batted her eyes at Holger and murmured, “Now, good sir knight, you don’t mean that of me?” in tones that should have been sinful if anyone but their intended victim heard them—and were bound to be sinful if he alone did.

  But Holger just threw back his head and laughed. All right, he’d been besotted for a little while, likely as much for what he remembered as for what he saw. As with any other man of his years, though, it was more his imagination that kindled than aught else.

  “You ought to go wash your mouth out with beer, young lady,” he said. “And if that doesn’t work, somebody needs to turn you over his knee and paddle you.”

  Alianna gaped. Then she looked miffed, as any witch might when one of her spells fell to pieces instead of working the magic she had in mind. And then, after a few tense heartbeats, she laughed, too: she was good-natured-Alianora’s good-natured daughter. If she didn’t quite know yet how to keep a man three times her age inflamed, then she didn’t, that was all. Just as well, too, Alianora thought.

  “I hope you’ll go on with your tales, Sir Holger,” Theodo said. “They do make the time spin by.” He said nothing, now, of not aiming them all at Alianna.

  “I can do that,” Holger said, but not before he held out the stoup once more to Alianora. “Will you give me a refill first?”

  “Surely,” she replied. “And after another tale or two, I think we shall pause to sup.”

  He sniffed and nodded. “Sounds like a plan. It’s starting to smell mighty good.”

  He’d always been full of such small bits of praise, thrown out not for the sake of flattery or seduction but simply because that was his way. It was, Alianora thought with a twisted smile of her own, one of the things that marked him as a man from another world.

  After she brought Holger the mug, she went back inside and fed the hearthfire a little more wood to keep the pease porridge above it bubbling. She tasted the porridge with a wooden spoon. In went a pinch of salt and a dash more fennel, but only a dash. It was getting there.

  Outside, her husband and her children broke into guffaws at something Holger said. Theodo wouldn’t have laughed unless the big man from another world wasn’t leering at Alianna while he talked. Alianora sighed as she picked up a loaf of brown bread. It wasn’t of the freshest—not expecting company, she’d baked day before yesterday—but it would serve.

  She got out earthenware bowls, spoons shaped from horn, and one, for Holger today, of silver. That was another gift from Theodo, part of the family wealth and, even in these quiet times, a ward against werewolves. Not long ago, Holger had told of the one they’d tracked through Lourville, the town to the east. In those days, with the Middle World waxing strong, anyone even slightly susceptible to shapeshifting was likely to go were. Not so now. Still, silver kept virtues beyond value and beauty.

  One more taste. Alianora nodded again. “Yes, we’re ready,” she said to herself, and walked to the door. “Can we stop the yarns long enough to eat?”

  Trying to hold her sons back would have been harder. Stomachs with legs, that was what they were. Who was the king in fable who’d tried to hold back the tide? She couldn’t remember if that was Canute or Louis XIV. Whoever he was, he wouldn’t have had much luck with Einhard and Nithard, either.

  Holger raised an eyebrow when she handed him the silver spoon with his bowl. His forehead corrugated. Yes, the years had scored him, as they’d marked Alianora—as they marked everyone. “You’ve done well for yourselves,” he remarked: of course he’d understand what the precious metal meant.

  “Oh, tolerable. Tolerable,” Theodo said. He might be a smith, but he had a peasant’s dread of admitting success, much less boasting about it. You threw your luck away when you did anything so foolish.

  “Heh.” Holger’s single syllable said he understood that thinking down to the ground. He ladled porridge into the bowl and tore off a chunk of bread. Alianna had set out the honeypot beside the loaf. Holger grinned. “This is a feast!”

  “Pretty good, all right,” Einhard said. He was trying to eat and talk at the same time, and swallowed wrong.

  His father thumped him on the back till he quit coughing. “Greedy like a hog, you are,” Theodo said, but he couldn’t make himself sound as angry as he might have wanted to.

  Alianna said, “Sir Holger, you’ll have seen riches beside which a silver spoon will seem as nothing.”

  “If you own your wealth, that’s not so bad,” Holger answered with a shrug. “If it owns you, that’s not so good. I never had it in me to chase after gold or jewels or any of that nonsense. The treasure I was after—” He stopped short and upended his mug.

  A considerable silence followed. Alianora unhappily considered it. At last, picking his words with obvious care, Theodo said, “For whatever it may be worth to you, you have my sympathy.”

  “Sympathy? It’s worth its weight in gold,” Holger said. Theodo started to beam, then frowned a sudden, stormy frown instead. How much would a word weigh? But Holger held up his hand. “Peace, please. Just a smart-mouthed crack. I know your words were kindly meant.”

  After another, briefer, pause, Theodo dipped his head. “Aye, let it go.”

  “Thanks.” Holger ate a couple of more spoonsful of porridge. Then he said, perhaps as much to himself as to his companions, “It’s funny, you know, when you spend so long looking for somebody who’s all you ever wanted, and then you go and find her, and you see she’s already got everything she ever wanted, and it isn’t you.”

  A house, not one of the smallest and meanest in the village but not one of the finest, either? A garden plot? Chickens and ducks and pigs and a cow? Enough to eat, except at the end of the worst winters? Is this all I ever wanted? Alianora wondered.

  But that wasn’t what Holger was talking about, was it? A good, solid man with whom she’d made a life. Three children well on their way to turning into good, solid people themselves. A place where she belonged, where she fit in, if not perfectly, then better than well enough.

  When you got right down to it, what more could you want?

  “’Scuse me.”
Holger brushed past her to get to the beer barrel. He’d poured down a lot, and showed it very little. Well, there was a lot of him to soak up beer, and he’d always had that knack. Still, when he raised the stoup in salute, Alianora thought tears glittered for a moment in his eyes. “Here’s to all of you,” he said, and drank.

  “To you, Sir Holger . . . dear Holger.” Alianora returned the salute. “Without you, Chaos would have rolled over this land and swept all we have, all we’ve built, away for aye.” She drank to him. Theodo and the children followed her lead.

  “Yeah, well . . . ” A sigh gusted from Holger. “I wonder if the Powers here didn’t finally let me come back to rub my nose in what a useless thing a hero is a generation after his war ends. The world goes on without him. What was the point to any of it?”

  Alianora glanced at the kettle of pease porridge above the fire on the hearth. She took half a step toward Theodo, though she knew the motion would wound Holger. “This was the point,” she answered.

  “I guess it was.” Holger sounded unconvinced, and who could blame him? Hero he might be—hero he was—but he had none of what Alianora enjoyed. He stared out through the doorway. Sunset reddened the light coming in. So too, perhaps, did escaping smoke from the cookfire. More got out through the hole in the roof above the hearth, but enough did linger to sting eyes and throats. Holger said, “I could show you a way to make all your smoke go outside: a chimney, it’s called.”

  “Another day, sir knight,” Theodo said, his eyebrows coming down and together at the strange word.

  Holger looked towards Alianora. She said, “Is it that you came here for?”

  “You know bloody well it isn’t.” He bared his teeth in another humorless smile. “But it seems to be about what I’m good for, doesn’t it?”

  Since Alianora had no answer to that, she spooned up some more porridge. The hard moment passed. Holger launched into another tale with the air of a man determined to push pain aside. Sunset gave way to twilight, which dwindled toward darkness. Shadows from the dying fire swooped around the walls.

  Alianora lit a fine beeswax candle, and then, after a little thought, a second. Hang the cost tonight! The tilt of her chin defied Theodo to say anything. He was a bold man, but—wisely—not so bold as that. Even the candles’ mellow glow could not come close to matching daylight, but it did help the red embers on the hearth.

  Holger got to the end of his story. He blinked, maybe noticing the darkness for the first time. A cricket chirped outside. “Well,” Holger said, as if it were a complete sentence. He blinked again. “We did walk past that tavern, right? You said a guy called . . . Gerold runs it.” He grinned, pleased he’d come up with the name.

  “Have we drunk the barrel dry?” Alianora squeaked in surprise. They’d applied themselves to it, aye, but that was a lot of beer.

  “I don’t think so,” Holger said. “But the tavern’ll have wine, won’t it? Other stuff folks here don’t fix for themselves, too. Gerold wouldn’t make his living if it didn’t.”

  “Well, aye. That’s so.” Theodo sounded grudging, and had his reasons: “Not the best crowd there—men who’d sooner guzzle than work, most of ’em. And always ’tis dearer to pay the taverner’s scot than to brew for yourself. Wine may be sweet, but beer does well enough.”

  “Don’t worry about that.” Holger slapped one of the cleverly made pockets on his blue trousers. Whatever was inside clinked sweetly. “I’m buying.”

  “Mrmm.” Theodo still hesitated.

  “We thank you, Sir Holger.” Alianora didn’t. “If you’re fain to fare to the tavern, thither we shall fare.” They all walked out into the night together.

  The tavern wasn’t far. Nothing in the village was far from anything else. Stars, a nail-paring of moon, and firelight leaking out between shutter slats and through badly chinked walls and spilling from partly open doorways kept darkness from being absolute. All the same, Alianora planted her feet with care, trying not to step in a hole or a puddle or anything nasty.

  A cat’s eyes glowed green, then vanished. A dog growled a warning that faded into a whine when it decided it didn’t want to take on so many humans after all.

  “Right over here, y’see?” Theodo said in a low voice that wouldn’t bother neighbors already abed. “Not so far from the well. It’s—” He grunted in surprise. “The shape of it’s wrong.”

  “Aye, it is,” Alianora agreed wonderingly. The tavern shouldn’t bulk so tall against the sky. It looked as if it owned two stories. She’d seen such things in her travels with Holger, but there wasn’t a building like that in the village . . . or there hadn’t been. The beam-ends of the roof were oddly and ornately carven.

  “I know that shape,” Holger breathed. “I wondered if the Old Phoenix would show up tonight. You don’t always find it, but sometimes it finds you.”

  “How do you mean?” Alianora asked.

  “It’s one of those places between the worlds that I was talking about. It doesn’t belong to any of them,” Holger answered. “I can’t explain it better than that. I don’t think anybody else can, either.”

  The door opened. For a moment, Walacho’s swag-bellied shape stood silhouetted against the light spilling out from within. It wasn’t what the village drunkard had expected. But if it wasn’t the tavern, it plainly was a tavern. That would do for Walacho. He waddled inside.

  Before the door swung shut, Alianora glimpsed a bar, with a plump man—definitely not Gerold, who was on the lean side—standing behind it. In front were a few small tables. Walacho was heading towards one of them. At another sat . . . Alianora stiffened. Hair blacker than the night sky; a proud, harsh, beautiful face; long satin dress caressing every lush curve . . .

  “That’s Morgan le Fay!” she blurted, and knew not why she should sound so furious. Because the great sorceress had aged not a day these past thirty years? That should have been reason enough and more, but somehow her rage ran deeper yet.

  The way Holger said “Yeah” made her understand why. He went on, “I’m not surprised to see her there. She’s one the Old Phoenix would draw, sure as sure. And we’ve got a few things to talk about, the two of us. Uh-huh, just a few.”

  “Talk?” Alianora snarled the word, as if she’d been in the habit of transforming to cat herself rather than to swan.

  “Well, that, too.” Holger seemed sourly amused. “You don’t want me, but you don’t want me having fun with anybody else, either?”

  “Not with her!” Alianora said. “When did she bring you aught but grief?”

  “There were times, back in the day. There sure were.” By the way he answered, he might not have thought of them for many a year, but that made the memories no less sweet.

  “Perhaps—for her purposes. Never for yours.” Alianora knew trouble when she saw it, no matter how seductive its package.

  “That could be,” Holger allowed, so he wasn’t altogether blind. No, not altogether. He made as if to bow to her in the darkness. “If you want to play nursemaid, you can come in with me.”

  “When I came out, would I come hither and not into one of your other worlds?” she asked. Would Walacho’s family have to make do without him, as if he’d gone into Elf Hill and emerged the next morning to find a hundred years gone in the wider world? They might prove better off, but that wasn’t the point.

  “You probably would. Most people do, most of the time,” Holger said.

  “That is not warrant enough,” Theodo declared. He wasn’t in the habit of speaking for Alianora; he’d learned she didn’t fancy it when he tried. He did it now, though, and she liked it fine. Her children stirred. The Old Phoenix and the idea of adventure drew them. Well, naturally adventure drew them—they’d never known much. Alianora had, and knew she’d had a bellyful.

  “I stay here,” she said. If her voice roughened, then it did, that was all. She reached out and took the knight’s hand. “Go where you would, dear Holger, and God keep you safe wherever it may be.” Anger and jealousy flared
once more. “Whatever else you do, mind yon witch!”

  “Oh, I will. I’m not always as dumb as I look—just most of the time. And I’ve got more miles on me now. I’m not likely to be so stupid that way as I might’ve been a while back. I hope.” Holger squeezed her hand hard. Then he leaned forward and brushed his lips across hers. “Good luck to you, kiddo, and to yours. You found what you were after. Me, I guess I’ve got to go look some more, don’t I?”

  He stumped toward the Old Phoenix, footfalls softening as he went away. When he opened the door, he stood limned for a moment by the light beyond him. He waved, once, then stepped inside. The door closed again before Alianora had to hear Morgan le Fay’s voice.

  She burst into tears anyhow. Theodo put his arm round her shoulder—less comfort than she would have liked, but as much as she could get. “If we’re not going in,” he said, “we’d better get back.”

  “Aye.” She nodded. He would feel the motion even if he couldn’t see it. “Let’s do that.”

  Alianora woke early, before anyone else in the house, after a night of confused dreams. For a moment, she wondered if everything that had happened the day before was only a dream. But no. That was real. She knew the difference.

  She tiptoed outside without disturbing her kin. It was still gloomy: twilight, with dawn coming but not yet come. She walked toward the well, far enough to discover that the tavern had its usual seeming once more. Someone sprawled asleep in front of the doorway; a tankard lay on its side near his head. Walacho: she knew his snores.

  No sign of Holger. Well, she hadn’t thought there would be. She turned around and went home.

  Alianna was up when she came in. Even in the dim light, her daughter’s eyes glowed. Alianora smiled to see her. She’d glowed like that herself, once upon a time. “Quite a day, yesterday,” she said.