“You don’t have to fight anymore,” I said. “You can leave this rock now, live the easy life somewhere under a sun with a little heat in it.”
The giant looked at the sky as if thinking. “We have a legend of a place where the air is soft and the soil bursts open to pour forth fruit. I do not think I would like that land.”
“Why not? You think there’s some kind of kick in having things rough?”
He turned his head to look at me. “It is you who suffer hardship, Carl Patton. I am at home, whereas you endure cold and fatigue in a place alien to you.”
I grunted. Johnny Thunder had a way of turning everything I said back at me like a ricochet. “I heard there was some pretty vicious animal life here,” I said. “I haven’t seen any signs of it.”
“Soon you will.”
“Is that your intuition, or. . . ?”
“A pack of snow scorpions have trailed us for some hours. When we move out into open ground, you will see them.”
“How do you know?”
“Woola tells me.”
I looked at the big hound, sprawled out with his head on his paws. He looked tired.
“How does it happen you have dogs?”
“We have always had dogs.”
”Probably had a pair in the original cargo,” I said. “Or maybe frozen embryos. I guess they carried breed stock even way back then.”
“Woola springs from a line of dogs of war. Her forebear was the mighty courser Standfast, who slew the hounds of King Roon on the Field of the Broken Knife.”
“You people fought wars?” He didn’t say anything. I snorted. “I’d think as hard as you had to scratch to make a living, you’d have valued your lives too much for that.”
“Of what value is a life without truth? King Roon fought for his beliefs. Prince Dahl fought for his own.”
“Who won?”
“They fought for twenty hours; and once Prince Dahl fell, and King Roon stood back and bade him rise again. But in the end Dahl broke the back of the King.”
“So—did that prove he was right?”
“Little it matters what a man believes, Carl Patton, so long as he believes it with all his heart and soul.”
“Nuts. Facts don’t care who believes them.”
The giant sat up and pointed to the white peaks glistening far away. “The mountains are true,” he said. He looked up at the sky, where high, blackish-purple clouds were piled up like battlements. “The sky is true. And these truths are more than the facts of rock and gas.”
“I don’t understand this poetic talk,” I said. “It’s good to eat well, sleep in a good bed, to have the best of everything there is. Anybody that says otherwise is a martyr or a phony.”
“What is ‘best,’ Carl Patton? Is there a couch softer than weariness? A better sauce than appetite?”
“You got that out of a book.”
“If you crave the easy luxury you speak of, why are you here?”
“That’s easy. To earn the money to buy the rest.”
“And afterwards—if you do not die on this trek—will you go there, to the pretty world, and eat the fat fruits picked by another hand?”
“Sure,” I said. “Why not?” I felt myself sounding mad, and wondered why; and that made me madder than ever. I let it drop and pretended to sleep.
16
Four hours later we topped a long slope and looked out over a thousand square miles of forest and glacier, spread out wide enough to hint at the size of the world called Vangard. We had been walking for nine hours and, lift unit and all, I was beginning to feel it. Big Boy looked as good as new. He shaded his eyes against the sun that was too small and too bright in a before-the-storm sort of way, and pointed out along the valley’s rim to a peak a mile or two away.
“There we will sleep,” he said.
“It’s off our course,” I said. “What’s wrong with right here?”
“We need shelter and a fire. Holgrimm will not grudge us these.”
“What’s Holgrimm?”
“His lodge stands there.”
I felt a little stir along my spine, the way you do when ghosts come into the conversation. Not that ghosts worry me; just the people that believe in them.
We covered the distance in silence. Woola, the dog, did a lot of sniffing and grunting as we came up to the lodge. It was built of logs, stripped and carved and stained red and green and black. There was a steep gabled roof, slate-tiled, and a pair of stone chimneys, and a few small windows with colored glass leaded into them. The big man paused when we came into the clearing, stood there leaning on his stick and looking around. The place seemed to be in a good state of preservation. But then it was built of the same rock and timber as the country around it. There were no fancy trimmings to weather away.
“Listen, Carl Patton,” the giant said. “Almost, you can hear Holgrimm’s voice here. In a moment, it seems, he might throw wide the door to welcome us.”
“Except he’s dead,” I said. I went past him and up to the entrance, which was a slab of black and purple wood that would have been right in scale on the front of Notre Dame. I strained two-handed at the big iron latch, with no luck. Johnny Thunder lifted it with his thumb.
It was cold in the big room. The coating of hard frost on the purple wood floor crunched under our boots. In the deep-colored gloom, I saw stretched animal hides on the high walls, green and red, and gold-furred, brilliant as a Chinese pheasant. There were other trophies: a big, beaked skull three feet long, with a spread of antlers like wings of white ivory, that swept forward to present an array of silver dagger tips, black-ringed. There was a leathery-skinned head that was all jaw and teeth; and a tarnished battle ax, ten feet long, with a complicated head. A long table sat in the center of the room between facing fireplaces as big as city apartments. I saw the wink of light on the big metal goblets, plates, cutlery. There were high-backed chairs around the table; and in the big chair at the far end, facing me, a gray-bearded giant sat with a sword in his hand. The dog whined, a sound that expressed my feelings perfectly.
“Holgrimm awaits us,” Johnny’s big voice said softly behind me. He went forward, and I broke the paralysis and followed. Closer, I could see the fine frosting of ice that covered the seated giant, glittering in his beard, on the back of his hands, across his open eyes.
Ice rimed the table and the dishes and the smooth, black wood of the chairs. The bared short-sword was frozen to the table. Woola’s claws rasped loud on the floor as she slunk behind her master.
“Don’t you bury your dead?” I got the words out, a little ragged.
“His women prepared him thus, at his command, when he knew his death was on him.”
“Why?”
“That is a secret which Holgrimm keeps well.”
“We’d be better off outside,” I told him. “This place is like a walk-in freezer.”
“A fire will mend that.”
“Our friend here will melt. I think I prefer him the way he is.”
“Only a little fire, enough to warm our food and make a bed of coals to lie beside.”
There was wood in a box beside the door, deep red, hard as granite, already cut to convenient lengths. Convenient for my traveling companion, I mean. He shuffled the eight-foot, eighteen-inch diameter logs as if they were bread sticks. They must have been full of volatile resins, because they lit off on the first match, and burned with a roaring and a smell of mint and camphor. Big Johnny brewed up a mixture of hot wine and some tarry syrup from a pot on the table that he had to break loose from the ice, and handed me a half-gallon pot of the stuff. It was strong, but good, with a taste that was almost turpentine but turned out to be ambrosia instead. There was frozen bread and cheese and a soup he stirred up in the big pot on the hearth. I ate all I could and wasted some more. My large friend gave himself a Spartan ration, raising his mug to our host before he drank.
“How long has he been dead?” I asked.
“Ten of our years.” He paused, then added: “That would be over a hundred, League standard.”
“Friend of yours?”
“We fought; but later we drank wine together again. Yes, he was my friend.”
“How long have you been . . . alone here?”
“Nine years. Holgrimm’s house was almost the last the plague touched.”