Gene Wolfe - The Wizard

Gylf had located the boar; his snarls and the angry grunts of the boar rode the soft night wind.

Jotunland, I thought. This’s Jotunland. Empty and cold and a little too dry.

Bold Berthold had spoken of digging deep wells, wells whose fearful construction required months, wells that failed even so in dry years, of carrying bucket after weary bucket into the fields, and of vicious fights between Angrborn over access to wandering brooks that never reached the sea.

So that was another puzzle. Large and strong as the Angrborn were, they might have lived anywhere. Why did they choose to live here?

Had the gods of Skai indeed driven the Giants of Winter and Old Night from the sun? Or had those Giants chosen their abode? Knights like Svon and Garvaon and Woddet had never driven the Angrborn north of the mountains, surely.

The snarling hound and the angry boar were nearer now, and I had reached a strip of moonlit water. Somewhere along here, Gylf would drive the boar into the shallows, then out again onto the other bank, if the boar still lived.

If Gylf had dodged the boar’s slashing tusks up to that point. An arrow here might end the hunt, or as good as end it. I nocked a shaft and relaxed for a second or two to look up at the moon. It was beginning to snow, even while the moon still shone, so that the silver light seemed wrapped in mist, beautiful and threatening. We had traveled slowly, and would travel slower still tomorrow; and though we had not been comfortable, we would be less comfortable still. Who would want to live here?

The boar, obviously. But I knew the boar must die.

There would be meat tomorrow. Meat not only for Gylf and me, but for Bold Berthold, Gerda, and Uns. Meat even for the hulking young man who had crept so near our camp. The young man (call him by his name, I told myself, he has one) his suffering mother had named Heimir in the hope endearing him to the Angrborn, the young man who lay starving in his cave in the hills.

A man of his size, a man who might weigh half as much as Cloud, would require a lot of food, food difficult to find in this barren land. True Angrborn were even larger and could eat only because slaves worked their farms.

Dog and boar were nearer now; I heard saplings break, an angry pop-pop-pop my ears accepted as a single sound.

Quite suddenly it came to me that King Arnthor would have been wiser to send the Angrborn bread and cheese. Then that Lord Beel’s embassy was doomed, that the Angrborn could never stop raiding the south for slaves because the Angrborn would starve without slaves—that no Angrborn could grow or kill enough for himself, a wife, and a child or two. They were too big and needed too much.

One never saw their wives anyway.

The boar broke cover and the arrow went back to my ear and sped away. The boar, black as tar in the moonlight, snapped at its shoulder, splashed through the shallows to midchannel, turned to defy Gylf, fell to its knees, and rolled on its side.

The water carried its body a step or two from the point at which it had died, but no farther.

Gylf emerged from dark undergrowth. “Good shot!”

“Thanks.” I unstrung my bow and slung it behind me. “Did he hurt you?”

“Never touched me.” Gylf waded into the water to drink.

Skinning and gutting the boar took an hour or so. I cut off the head and forelegs (one of which Gylf claimed) and got the rest up on my shoulder. Our return was slower than our departure had been, but the distance was not great.

“Talking.” In order to speak, Gylf had let the foreleg fall. Instinctively, he put a paw on it. “Hear ’em?”

I shook my head.

“Don’t know her.” He picked up the foreleg and trotted forward.

She rose as Gylf approached the fire, and for a moment I felt she would never stop rising—tousled blond hair that hung to her shoulders, a lean face that seemed all jaw and eyes, a neck as thick as my thigh, wide sloped shoulders and high breasts half hidden by a scrap of hide. Arms thick and freckled, fingers tipped with claws. Long waist, broad hips under a ragged skirt, and massive legs with knees so skinned and bony that I noticed them even by firelight.

“Hello,” she said in a voice deeper than a man’s. “Are you Sir Able? Hello. I’m Hela, her girl. She said it would be all right. Is that food?”

Gerda stood too, her head below her daughter’s waist. “You’re not mad are you, sir? I—I shouldn’t of, I know. Only she—she’s still...”

“Your child.”

“Yes. Yes, sir. My baby, sir.” This last was said without a hint of irony.

Uns sat up and goggled at Hela.

Berthold had clambered to his feet and was groping with both hands. “Hela? Hela?”

Hela took a step backward, although she was a full three heads the taller.

“Bert won’t harm a hair of you,” Gerda told her softly.

“Hela.” A groping hand found her. “I’m your father, Hela. Your foster father. Didn’t Gerda never speak of me? Bold Berthold?”

I laid the boar’s body on the ground beside the fire.

“You were gone ‘fore I got to Bymir’s, and Bold Berthold that was, was gone too. Blind Berthold now. It’s what they did. But the same that was, Hela. The same as loved your ma long ago.”

She crouched and embraced him.

“Ah, Hela,” Berthold said softly. “Ah! Ah, Hela!” There was no tune to these words, yet they were music.

“Maught us cook a bit a’ dat, sar?” Uns was at my side, holding green sticks.

“I’d think you’d want to go back to sleep.”

“I’se main hungert, sar.” When I hesitated, he added, “Won’t take but wat ya let me.”

“Take all you want. Will you cook some for Berthold?”

“Yessar. Glad ta. Fer her, ta, sar,’n she’ll want a sight a’ feedin’.”

“She will, I’m sure. But she can cook it for herself. If she is to eat with us she must work with us, and it will be better if we make that clear from the start.”

“Fer ya, ter, sar. Be a honor fer me, sar.”

“If Hela can cook her own meat, so can I.” I unslung my bow, sat down before the fire, and accepted a stick. “Cut me some of that pork, will you?”

“Yessar. Ain’t slept, has ya, sar?”

“No, and I should. I will when I’ve eaten something.”

Yet when Uns, Berthold, and Gerda slept once more, and even Gylf slept, lying upon his side and snoring, and of all those with me only new-come Hela remained awake, squatting at the fire with a piece of pork twice the size of my fist on her stick, I sat up with her, questioning her now and again, and often falling silent to consider her replies.

“I’m not a maid of my tongue,” she said, “to prattle pretty words and please men’s ears. If I were, I’d soon be snug in a house, with hags and slaves like this fresh father to wait on me, and an ox for supper when I wished it.” She laughed, and I saw that her teeth were twice the size of mine. “But I’m as you see. As you hear, sir knight. What Frost Giant would be hot to take me to wife? They like their own, stealing into their beds from Jotunhome. Else southern maids of poppet size, with clever little hands and honeyed lips. ‘Oh, oh, you are so great! Ravish me!’ So I sought men my size in the Mountains of the Mice, and found them, too, served as maid serves man, and was paid in blows.”

“Did they drive you out?” I asked her.

“Hunted me, rather. You noted my knife?”

I nodded.

“He did not.” Hela laughed loud and deep. “In the south, they say, there are some called men who pale at sight of naked steel. Fops and fools! ‘Tis not that knife that takes life.”

“How old are you, Hela?”

“Sage enough to know a cat from a catamite. Are you troubled that I’ve come running to Mother, sir knight?” She took her meat off the stick, sampled it, wiped her mouth on her arm, and licked her fingers.