David Drake - Balefires

"God damn if you didn't kill it," Sparrow whispered, gazing in wonderment at the new crater. There was no longer any light but that of the hooked moon to silver the carnage and the surprising number of Forest Guards straggling back from the jungle to which they had fled. Some were beginning to joke as they picked among the bodies of their comrades and the dancers.

"I didn't kill anything," Dame Alice said. Her voice was hoarse, muffled besides by the fact that she was cradling her head on her knees. "Surgeons don't kill cancers. They cut out what they can find, knowing that there's always a little left to grow and spread again…"

She raised her head. From across the clearing, Colonel Trouville was stepping toward them. He was as dapper and cool as always, skirting the gouge in the center, skirting also the group of Baengas with a two-year-old they must have found in one of the huts. One was holding the child by the ankles to drain all the blood through its slit throat while his companions gathered firewood.

"But without the ones who worshipped it," Dame Alice went on, "without the ones who drew the kernel up to a growth that would have been… the end of Man, the end of Life here in any sense you or I-or those out there-would have recognized it… It'll be more than our lifetimes before Ahtu returns. I wonder why those ones gave themselves so wholly to an evil that would have destroyed them first?"

Sparrow giggled again. Dame Alice turned from the approaching Belgian to see if the source of the humor showed on the gunman's face.

"It's like this," Sparrow said. "If they was evil, I guess that makes us good. I'd never thought of that before, is all."

He continued to giggle. The laughter of the Baengas echoed him from the clearing as they thrust the child down on a rough spit. Their teeth had been filed to points which the moonlight turned to jewels.

The Song of the Bone

I read a two-volume translation of the Finnish epic Kalevala in Viet Nam. "The Song of the Bone" is set in Norway in Viking times, but a wedding feast from the Kalevala is the genesis of this story.

I didn't write "The Song of the Bone" till after I'd gotten back to the World. I didn't have a potential market. Because I was pretty depressed about the piece when I finished it I didn't try to send it anywhere. (I was pretty depressed about most things at the time, frankly. It was some years before I was able to look straight at Nam, and a very long time before that didn't make life even more depressing. I'm not sure I'm out of that stage quite yet.)

Stuart David Schiff, an army dentist who'd just been assigned to Ft. Bragg in Fayetteville, came to a Sunday afternoon get-together at the home of the Murray brothers, collectors extraordinaire, in Durham. Stu was planning to start a small-press fantasy/horror magazine to replace The Arkham Collector. Part of his reason for doing so was that he'd been art editor on Meade Frierson's huge 1971 fanzine HPL and didn't feel that he'd gotten proper recognition for his work. By doing the production himself, he'd keep that from happening again.

Stu wanted fiction, but he didn't plan to pay for it. I gave him "The Song of the Bone," but I told him I thought he was making a mistake: free fiction was generally going to be worth what he paid. I thought my story was valueless, which was the only reason I was giving it to him.

Stu took the piece, but much more important he took my advice: after the second issue of Whispers he began paying a penny a word for stories. We're both convinced that the decision to pay for fiction is the reason that Whispers was there to keep alive the fantasy/horror short-story genre during the 1970s.

The difference between low pay (and a penny a word was as good as some professional SF magazines were paying at the time) and no pay was the difference between being a professional and being a dilettante. That was important to some of us, me included, even though it was nearly a decade before I even dreamed of making a living from writing fiction.

On the next issue I became Stu's assistant editor. Throughout Whispers' run, I read all the fiction that came to the magazine, sending on the ones I thought were publishable to Stu. It was a frustrating job, but I'm glad I did it. Mr. Derleth had spent more time on me than I was worth. I couldn't repay him, but I could pass the effort on.

Olaf was king in Drontheim and prayed to the White Christ, but there were other gods still in the upcountry and it was to them that Hedinn and his wife sacrificed in the evening. Finished, they waited a moment to watch the clouds that piled up high over the tops of the firs. Hedinn smiled as the first of his cows walked across the clearing toward the cattle shed, the rest following in a silent procession. On the left side pattered a black mongrel which snapped at the nose of a cow that began to stray, and at the end of the line shambled Gage the herdsman, almost lost in the gloom of the forest behind him.

"He doesn't have a staff,"Gudrun said to her husband. "How does he keep them in line like that?"

Hedinn shrugged."He seems to whistle at them. He's got forest blood in him, you know, and they can do things with animals. Mostly the dog does the work anyway."

The herdsman turned toward the couple and, though darkness and distance hid his features, Gudrun shuddered. "Ugh," she said, "I wish we didn't have to look at him. Why don't you sell him to a trader?"

"Now, Sweetning," Hedinn said, stroking his wife^' s fine hair with affection, "he's a good herdsman despite his looks. And we'd never get a worn kettle for him, you know."

The dog had waited for his master at the shed door. They entered together, Gage closing the door behind them.

"He sleeps with the cows, then?" Gudrun asked in surprise.

"In a corner of the cowshed," her husband agreed. "He and his dog together. And he eats any scraps the cook cares to give him. He's really no trouble for the work he does," Hedinn concluded complacently, "if you can learn to stand his face, Darling."

Gudrun laughed and patted her husband's arm. "Other men don't matter at all, Sweetning, no other men."

"Ooh, Gudrun, how do I look?"Inga asked, pirouetting in a blue embroidered dress that showed her buxom charms to the full above a belt of copper disks. Gudrun leaned back against the wall and stared critically at her sister-in-law. The girl's thick braid was hanging loose, not gathered about her head, and it shone in the lamplight. A few strands had become tangled in Inga's necklaces of facetted tin beads.

"Here now," said Gudrun, freeing the hairs, "you mustn't throw yourself around like that or you'll not be fit to meet Bjorn. You must not dishonor the house or your brother."

"Oh, tush," the younger girl complained, "they'd never notice, they'll be so drunk by now. Why couldn't Bjorn have seen me while he was still able to see?"

"The brideprice had yet to be discussed," Gudrun chided. "It wouldn't have been proper. And no matter who can appreciate it, you must look your best for your husband."

"Oh, I do want to be pretty," Inga answered petulantly, "but I don't think Bjorn wants a wife who's just a stick doll and sits in the corner doing nothing. You know," the girl added with a speculative grin, "they say he really is a bear, just like his name. All rough and strong…"

Gudrun nodded sternly to silence the girl."You're as ready as you can be," she said, "and the men are waiting."

The two women stepped out into the warm May darkness where the sliver moon hid in the overcast. The summer kitchen blazed with light and servants trotted between it and the main hall. Two empty tuns of mead stood outside the open main door already. It was difficult to believe that the roisterers could possibly have put away that much liquor and still down the quantities of venison being carried in.