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 children 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. (sullen,” 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.
A bustling followed, rearrangement, settling down to listen, coffee cups
refilled and brandy offered on the side. The boy explained, “The last
line is the chorus. Everybody join in, right?” Clearly he too hoped thus
to bleed off some of the tension. Cathar-
sis through music? Sherrinford wondered, and added to himself:
No; exorcism.
A girl strummed a guitar. The boy sang, to a melody which beat across
the storm noise:
“It was the ranger Arvid rode homeward through the hills among the
shadowy shiverleafs, along the chiming rills.
The dance weaves under the firethorn.
“The night wind whispered around him . with scent of brok and rue.
Both moons rose high above him and hills aflash with dew.
The dance weaves under the firethorn.
“And dreaming of that woman who waited in the sun, he stopped,
amazed by starlight, and so he was undone.
The dance weaves under the firethorn.
“For there beneath a barrow that bulked athwart a moon, the Outling
folk were dancing in glass and golden shoon.
The dance weaver under the firethorn.
“The Outling folk were dancing like water, wind and fire to frosty-
ringing harpstrings, and never did they tire.
The dance weaves under the firethorn.
“To Arvid came she striding from where she watched the dance, the
Queen of Air and Darkness, with starlight in her glance.
The dance weaves under the firethorn.
“With starlight, love and terror in her immortal eye, the Queen of Air
and Darkness-”
“No!” Barbro leaped from her chair. Her fists were clenched and tears
flogged her cheekbones. “You can’t-pretend that-about the things that
stole Jimmy!”
She fled from the chamber, upstairs to her guest bedroom.