Mark finished off what little food he had left, and too another long drink from the stream. About to push on again, he hesitated, and, without quite knowing why, once more unwrapped the blade. Some part of his mind wanted to look at it again, as if the morning sunlight on the sword might reveal something to negate or at least explain the horror of yesterday.
There was still no trace of rust to be seen, and the sword and its wrappings were now completely dry. How should he try to carry the thing today? When Mark stood the weapon upright on the path, point down, and stood himself beside it, the sword's pommel reached as high as his ribcage. The weapon was just too long for him to carry about handily, and far too sharp… Mark was momentarily distracted when he looked at the decorations going round the hilt and handle, white on black. He could remember sleepy evenings at home, in the dwelling-rooms beside the creaking mill, when Jord had sometimes allowed the children to take the sword down from the wall and in his presence look it over. Sometimes the children and their mother, interested also, had speculated on what the pattern of the decorations might mean. Mark's father had never speculated. He'd never spoken much about the sword at all, even at those relaxed times. Nor had Jord ever, not in Mark's hearing anyway, said anything directly about the great trial through which the sword had come to him. Nothing about how Vulcan had taken his right arm off, or with what implement, or what explanation, if any, the god had given for what he did. That was one scene that Mark had always forbidden his own imagination to attempt.
The inlaid decoration, white on black, going round the handle of the sword, had always suggested to Mark a crenelated castle wall seen from the outside. Or perhaps it was the wall of a fortified town. Mark had heard of cities and big towns that boasted defensive walls like that, though he'd never come very close to seeing one. Castles of course were a different matter. Everyone saw at least one of those, at least once in a while.
There was the name, of course: Townsaver. And, in one spot on the handle, just above the depicted wall, there was a small representation of what might very well be intended as a swordblade. It looked as if some unseen hand inside the town or castle were brandishing a sword…
Mark came to himself with a small start. How long had he been standing here on the pathway gazing at the thing? Even if this weapon was the magical handiwork of a god, he couldn't afford to spend all day gawping at it. Hurriedly he performed his simple packing-up, and once more got moving upstream.
Several times during the morning's travel that followed, the unhandy burden threatened to unbalance Mark's steps when he was wading. And it kept snagging itself by cloth or cord on bushes beside the path. That morning, for the first time, the idea suggested itself to Mark that he might be able to rid himself of the sword and not have to carry it any farther. He could find a deep pool somewhere in which to drown it, or else hide it in a crevice behind a waterfall — by now he'd come upstream far enough for waterfalls. The idea was tempting, in a way. But Mark soon rejected it. Disposing of this sword would not, could not, be as easy as throwing away a broken knife. He did not know yet, perhaps would not yet allow himself to know, what he meant to do with it finally. But he did know that something more than simply discarding it was required of him. Besides, he'd seen often enough the successful working of finding-spells, the minor enchantments of a local part-time wizard. If that country fellow could locate wedding rings down wells, and pull lost coins out of haystacks, what chance would Mark have of hiding a great sword like this one from the real wizards that the Duke must be able to command.
Toward midday, Mark cautiously moved out of the riverbank thickets, and entered high empty pasture land for long enough to stalk and kill a rabbit. He felt proud of the efficiency of this hunt, for which he needed only one clean shot. But as he released the bowstring he saw for one frightening moment the falling seneschal…
The food, familiar hunter's fare cooked on a small fire, helped a great deal. It strengthened Mark against the pointless tricks of his shocked imagination, against struggling in his mind with events over which he now could have no control. He told himself firmly that he should instead be consciously deciding where he was going to go.
But he had still reached no such decision when he finished his meal, put out his little fire, and moved on. He knew that if he continued to follow the river upstream for another full day, he'd be quite close to the village in which his father had grown up… the place where Jord had worked as a two-armed black smith, and from which he'd been summoned one dark night by a god, to trade his right arm for this cursed weapon. Mark felt sure that village was not where he was really headed now.
All right, he'd wait to think things out. He'd just keep going. When plans were really needed, they'd just have to make themselves.
As the sky began to darken with the second nightfall of Mark's journey, he looked up through the screen of riverbank trees to see the glow of sunset reflected on the slowly approaching mountains. Those mountains were near enough now to let him see how steep and forbidding their slopes were — especially up near the top, up there where gods and goddesses, or some of them anyway, were said to dwell. The darkness of the sky deepened, and the pink glow faded from even the highest peaks. Then Mark saw what he'd seen only a time or two before in all his life: sullen, glowing red spots near the summits, what folk called Vulcan's fires. Those fires as he saw them now were still so far away as to be part of another world.
When it was fully dark, Mark burrowed into a thicket, and contrived for himself a kind of nest to sleep in. For a moment that evening, just as he was dozing off, he thought that he heard his father's voice, calling to him, with some urgent message…
Throughout the next day, Mark continued as before to work his way upstream. The way grew steeper, the going slower, the land rockier and rougher, the country wilder, trees scarce and people even more so. On that day, though he peered more boldly than before out of the riverside thickets, Mark only once saw distant workers in a field, and no one else except a single fisherman. He was able to spot the fisherman in time to detour round him without letting the man suspect that anyone else was near.
That afternoon, two full days since he'd fled his home, Mark saw certain landmarks — a distant temple of Bacchus, an isolated tabletop butte — that assured him he was now quite near the village in which his father had been born. Some few of his father's kinfolk still lived there, and it was necessary now for Mark to think about those relatives. The angry riders of the Duke might well have reached them already, might have established a watch over every house in all the land where they thought the fugitive would be likely to turn for help. And now, for the first time, one clear idea about his destination did come to Mark: safety for him could lie only outside the Duke's territory, in that strange outer world he'd never visited.
But there was something else, besides distance and dangers, that still lay between him and that possibility of safety. He had, he discovered now, a sense of terrible obligation, connected of course with the sword. The obligation was unclear to him as yet, but it was certain.
Mark held to his course along the river, and did not approach his father's old village closely enough to see what might be going on there. On what he could see of the nearby roads, there were no swift riders, no signs of military search, and his repeated scanning of the sky discovered no flying beasts that might be looking for him. But Mark kept mainly to the concealing thickets, and traveled quickly on.
When the last sunset glow had died on the third evening of his flight, he raised his eyes again to the mountains ahead of him. Again he saw, more plainly now than ever before, the tiny, fitful sparks of Vulcan's fires.
On this third night the air of the high country grew chill enough to keep Mark from sleeping soundly. He wrapped himself in the sword's covering, but built no fire, for fear of guiding his still hypothetical pursuers to him. The next morning, wet from a light drizzle, he climbed wearily on. The country round him grew ever wilder, more alien to what he knew. He continued to follow the river as it carved its way across a high plain, then up among a series of broken foothills. Mark's head felt light now, and his stomach painfully empty. On top of each shoulder he had a sore red spot, worn by the cord from which the sword was slung.
Near midday, with timberline visible at what appeared to be only a small distance above him, Mark came upon a small shrine to some god he did not recognize. He robbed it of its simple offerings, dried berries and stale bread. As he ate he tried to compose a prayer to the anonymous god of the shrine, explaining what he'd done, pleading his necessity. He might not have bothered with the prayer were he not getting so close to the gods' high abode. Even here, so close, he was not entirely sure that the gods had either the time or the inclination to notice what happened at small shrines, or to hear small prayers.
Maybe tomorrow he'd be high enough on the mountain to get some direct divine attention. At any previous time in Mark's life, such a prospect would have frightened him. But, as it was, the shock that had driven him from his home still insulated him against the theoretical terrors that might appear tomorrow.
Not far above the shrine, the Aldan had its origin in the confluence of two brooks, both of which flowed more or less out of the north. At their junction Mark tried his luck at fishing, and found his luck was bad. He grubbed around for edible roots, and came up with nothing that he could eat. He searched for some fresher berries than the shrine had provided, and found a few that birds had spared. If any human dwelling had been in sight he would have tried his skill at burglary or begging to get food. But there was no such habitation to be seen on any of the vast hills under the enormous sky, and Mark was not going to turn aside now to look for one.
He spent the fourth night of his journey, sleeping little, amid a tumble of huge rocks at timberline. Tonight the lights of Vulcan's forge-fires appeared to Mark to be almost overhead, startlingly near and at the same time dishearteningly far above him. Near midnight some large animal came prowling near, staying not far beyond the glow of a small fire that Mark had built in a sheltering crevice. When he heard the hungry snuffling of the beast he unwrapped Townsaver and gripped the hilt of the weapon in both hands. No sound came from the blade, and the air around it remained clear and quiet. Mark could feel no hint of magical protection in its steel, yet in the circumstances the simple weight and razor sharpness of it were a considerable comfort.
In the morning there were no animals of any kind in sight, nor could Mark even find a significant track. The air at dawn was bitter cold but almost windless. During the night Mark had wrapped himself again in the sword's cloth, but now he swathed the weapon again and tied it for carrying. Then he climbed, heading up between foothills, following a dry ravine, moving now on knees that quivered from his need for food. Once he was moving, he was no longer quite sure just how he'd spent the night just past, whether he'd slept at all or not. It seemed to him quite possible that he'd been walking without a pause since yesterday.
Shortly he came upon a small spring that gave him good water to drink. He took this discovery as a good omen, drank deeply, and pressed on.
All streams were behind him now, as far as he could tell. He kept following what looked like an ill-defined trail up through the ravine. Often he wasn't sure that he was really following a trail at all. By now he was unarguably on the slopes of the mountain itself, but so far the climbing was not nearly as difficult as he had feared that it might be. There were no sheer cliffs or treacherous rockslides that could not be avoided. Even so, the going soon became murderously hard because of sheer physical exhaustion.
Mark considered ways to lighten the load that he was carrying. But it consisted of only a few things, none of which he felt willing yet to leave behind. The idea that he might be able to discard the sword, somehow, along the way had itself already been discarded. The sword was connected with his goal, and it would go with him to the end. At one point, with his head spinning, he did decide to divest himself of bow and quiver. But he changed his mind and went back for them before he'd gone ten steps.
The climb became a blur of weariness and hunger. At some timeless bright hour near the middle of the day Mark was jarred back to full awareness of his surroundings by the realization that he'd run into a new feature of the mountain. Just ahead was the bottom of a cliff face, very nearly vertical, a surface that he was never going to be able to climb… gradually he understood that there was no need for him to try.
He was standing on a high, irregular shelf of black rock, with the wind howling around him. But the day was still clear, and the afternoon sun on his back was comfortingly warm. The sun had warmed the black rocks here considerably, even if the deeper shadows still held patches of snow, and there was a chill in the wind that played endlessly in the fantastic chimneys of the cliff. Mark stood still for a time, still holding the sword and bearing his other burdens, slowly getting his breath back after the long climb. In some of the chimneys he could hear a roaring that was deeper than the wind, a noise that he thought was coming up from somewhere far below.
Mark was wondering which of the chimneys might hold fire, when his attention was caught by a place he saw at the rear of the rocky shelf, just at the angle where the clifface went leaping up again. There were signs of old occupancy back there. Mark's eye was caught by scattered, head-sized lumps of some black and gnarled substance. The lumps were of an unfamiliar, off-round shape. He went to one and prodded it with the soft toe of his hunter's boot. The object was hard, and very massive for its size. Mark slowly understood that the lumps were metal or ore that had been melted and then reformed into rough blobs.
He stood now in the very rear of a shallow half-cave in the face of the rising cliff, in a place where the sun struck now and the wind was baffled. Here there were old, cold ashes, from what must have been a very large wood fire. The ashes looked too old, Mark thought, to have any connection with the fires he'd seen up here during the last few evenings. Anyway, he d assumed, from the stories he'd heard, that what people called the lights of Vulcan's forge were something to do with earthfire, volcanic, whether or not it was the god in person who raised and tended them. Yet plainly someone had once built a large blaze, deliberately, here in this broad depression in the rock floor against the cliff. The stain of its smoke still marked the natural chumney above. The tone of the old soot was a different darkness from that of the rock itself.
In front of the abandoned fireplace Mark slumped to his knees, then let himself sink back into a sitting position. The air up here was thin, and stank of sulphur. It frosted the lungs and gave them little nourishment. At least his stomach had now ceased its clamoring for food; he had reached an internal balance with his hunger, a state almost of comfort… with a mental snap he came back to full alertness, finding himself sitting quietly on stone. Had he just started to fall asleep or what?
He didn't see what difference it would make if he did doze off for a rest. But no, there was something to do, something to be decided, now that he was here. He ought to see to that first, think about it a little at least. He'd come up here for some vital reason… ah yes, the sword. When he had warmed himself a little more, he'd think about it.
Still sitting in the faint sun-warmth of the high, sheltered place, Mark slowly began to notice how much unburned wood was lying about nearby. There were large chips and roughly broken scraps, and the half-burnt ends of logs that must once have been too big for a man to lift. He realized that he needed heat. He wanted a fire, and so he painfully began to gather and arrange wood in the old fireplace.
It should have been an easy matter to build a fire using this available material, but weakness made it hard. Drawing his hunter's knife, Mark tried to shave tinder and fine kindling but his hands were shaky, and the blade slipped from the half-frozen wood. He tried the sword and found the task much easier despite its weight and size. With the sword held motionless, its point resting on the ground and the hilt on his bent knee, Mark could draw any chunk of wood against the edge and take off shavings as thin and fine as he wanted. Then when he had his tinder and his kindling ready, his flint struck a fat spark from the rough flange of the sword's steel hilt.
The fire caught from that first spark. It burned well-alrhost magically well, Mark thought. Larger fragments soon fed it into respectable size and crackling strength. Then, after he'd rested and warmed himself a little more, he took his hunter's cup and gathered some snow from a shaded crevice, to melt and heat himself some water for a drink. Now, if only he had a little food… Mark cut that thought off, afraid the hunger pangs would start again.
He sat on the rocky ground with the unwrapped sword beside him, sipping heated water. And found himself staring at large symbols, markings so faint that he hadn't noticed them at first, painted or somehow outlined on the rock of the shallow caves rear wall. Several of the symbols had been partially obscured by the old stains of smoke. There were in all about a dozen of the signs, all of them drawn with inhumanly straight, geometrical sides; and the lines of one of them, Mark realized, formed the same design that appeared on the hilt of the sword. He took up the sword again and looked at it carefully to make sure.
After that he continued to stare at the wall-signs, with the feeling that he was on the verge of extracting some important meaning from them, until he was distracted by a sound. It was not the wind, or his own fire, but the deep chimney-roaring, louder than before, rising below the never-quite-ceasing whine of wind. It was too breathlessly prolonged to be the voice of any animal or human. The furnaces of Vulcan, Mark thought. The forge-fires. Whatever they really were, they were burning still, somewhere near to where he was sitting. And this old wood-fire place in front of him was… that thought would not complete itself.
Mark's sun-shadow on the face of the cliff before him was reaching higher, and he knew that behind him the sun was going down. He thought: I won't live through this night up here; the cold if nothing else will kill me. But in spite of approaching death — or perhaps because of it — he felt a strong and growing conviction that he was going to see Vulcan soon. And somehow neither death nor the gods were terrible; the shock of watching his father and his brother die still numbed Mark's capacity for terror. Now he understood that ever since he'd picked up the sword from the village street he'd been meaning to confront Vulcan with it. To confront him, and… and maybe that would be the end.
Trying to gain strength, Mark built up his fire again, with larger chunks of wood. Then he curled up in front of it, as if he could absorb its radiant energy like food. Again he had the sword's cloth wrapped round his own body as a blanket.
The next time he awoke, he was cold and stiff, and the world was totally dark around him except for a million stars and the brightly winking embers of his fire. Slowly and painfully Mark turned over on his bed of rock, twisting his aching body to get the nearlyfrozen half of it toward the fire. His face and the backs of his hands felt tender, as if they'd been almost scorched when the flames were high. But they began to freeze as soon as they were turned away from the remaining warmth. Mark knew he ought to make himself stand up, move his arms and walk, and then build up the fire again. He knew it, but he couldn't seem to get himself in motion. Deep in the middle of his body he could feel a new kind of shivering, and now he was almost completely sure that he was going to die tonight. Still the fact had very little importance. Get up and tend the fire, and it will save you.
Startled, Mark raised his head, croaked out a halfformed question. The words had come to him as if in someone else's voice, and with the force of a command. He could not recognize the voice, but it made a powerful impression. Now, once he'd moved his head, the rest was possible. He sat up, rubbing his arms together, preparing himself for further effort. Now his arms were able to move freely. And now he forced himself to rise, swaying on stiffened knees, but driving his legs, torso, everything into activity. Halfparalyzed with cold and stiffness still, he gathered more wood and fed the flames when he had blown them back to life.
Then, Mark lay down near the new flames, wrapping hiself in the blanket again. He rubbed his face. When he took his hands down from his eyes, a circle of tall, silent figures was standing around him and the fire. They were too tall to be human. Mark, too numb to feel any great shock, looked at what he could see of the faces of the gods. He wondered why he could not recognize Ardneh, to whom his mother prayed so much, among them.
One of the goddesses — Mark couldn't be sure which one she was — demanded of him: "Why have you brought that sword back up here, mortal? We don't want it here."
"I brought it for my father's sake." Mark answered without fear, without worrying over what he ought to say. "This sword maimed him, years ago. It's killed him now. It's killed my brother, too. It's driven me away from home. It's done enough, I'm getting rid of it."
This caused a stir and a muttering around the circle. The faces of the gods, shadowed and hard for Mark to see, turned to one another in consultation. And now the voice of a different deity chided Mark: "It was time enough, in any case, for you to be leaving home. Do you want to be a mill-hand and a rabbit-hunter all your life?"
"Yes," said Mark immediately. But even as he gave the answer, he wondered if it were really true.
Another god-voice argued at him: "The sword you have there has done hardly anything as yet, as measured by its capabilities. And anyway, who are you to judge such things?"
Another voice chimed in: "Precisely. That sword was given to Jord the smith, later Jord the miller, until you, mortal, or your brother had it from him. It's yours now. But you can't just bring it back here and be rid of it that way. Oh, no. Even leaving aside the question of good manners, we…"
And another: "…cant just take it back, now that it's been used. You can't bring a used gift back."