Octobers Baby Read Free Page B

in a minute.” He kissed his wife, left her in troubled thought.
    Adventures. She had enjoyed them herself. But no more. She had traded the mercenary days for a home and children. Only a fool would dump what they had to cross swords with young men and warlocks. Then she smiled. She missed the old days a little, too.
     
    II) A curious visitor
    Ragnarson clumped downstairs into the dining hall and peered into its gloomy corners. It was vast. This place was both home and fortress. It housed nearly a hundred people in troubled times. He shivered. No one had kindled the morning fires. “Ragnar! Where’s he at?”
    His son popped from the narrow, easily defended hallway to the front door. “Outside. He won’t come in.”
    “Eh? Why?”
    The boy shrugged.
    “Well, if he won’t, he won’t.” As he strode to the door, Ragnarson snatched an iron-capped club from a weapons rack.
    Outside, in the pale misty light of a morning hardly begun, an old, old man waited. He leaned on a staff, stared at the ground thoughtfully. His bearing was not that of a beggar. Ragnarson looked for a horse, saw none.
    The ancient had neither pack nor pack animal, either. “Well, what can I do for you?”
    A smile flashed across a face that seemed as old as the world. “Listen.”
    “Eh?” Bragi grew uneasy. There was something about this fellow, a presence...
    “Listen. Hear, and act accordingly. Fear the child with the ways of a woman. Beware the bells of a woman’s fingers. All magicks aren’t in the hands of sorcerers.” Ragnarson started to interrupt, found that he could not. “Covet not the gemless crown. It rides the head precariously. It leads to the place where swords are of no avail.” Having said his cryptic piece, the old man turned to the track leading toward the North Road, the highway linking Itaskia and Iwa Skolovda.
    Ragnarson frowned. He was not a slow-witted man. But he was unaccustomed to dealing with mystery-mouthed old men in the sluggish hours of the morning. “Who the hell are you?” he thundered.
    Faintly, from the woods:
    “Old as a mountain,
    Lives on a star,
    Deep as the ocean flows.”
    Ragnarson pursued fleas through his beard. A riddle. Well. A madman, that’s what. He shrugged it off. There was breakfast to eat and the ride to Mocker’s to be made. No time for crazies.
     
    III) Things she loves and fears
    Elana, who had overheard, could not shrug it off. She feared its portent, that Bragi was about to tie off on some hare-brained venture.
    From a high window she stared at the land and forest they had conquered together. She remembered. They had come late in the year to a land-grant so remote that they had had to cut a path in. That first winter had been cold and hard. The winds and snows pouring over the
    Kratchnodians had seemed bent on revenge for the disasters wrought there the winter previous, in Bragi’s last campaign. The blood of children and wolves had christened the new land.
    The next year there had been a flare-up of the ancient boundary dispute between Prost Kamenets and Itaskia. Bandits, briefly legitimatized by letters of marquee from Prost Kamenets, had come over the Silverbind. Many hadn’t gone home, but the land had also drunk the blood of its own.
    The third had been the halcyon year. Their friends Nepanthe and Mocker had been able to break loose and take a grant of their own.
    Things had turned bad again late in the fourth year, when drought east of the Silverbind had driven men from Prost Kamenets into a brigandry their government ignored as long as its thrust lay across the river. Near the rear of the house, the granary stood in charred ruins. A half-mile away the men were rebuilding the sawmill. There were contracts for timber to be delivered to the naval yards at Itaskia. Those had to be met first.
    Counting wives and children, there had been twenty-two pioneers. Most were dead now, buried in places of honor beside the great house. She and Bragi had been lucky, their only loss