The Broken Sword (30 page)

“To me, to me!” Valgard’s voice boomed over the waning battle. “Hither, trolls, and fight!”

Skafloc heard and wheeled his horse around. He saw the changeling stand huge in the gateway, smeared with blood from helm to shoon, a ring of elven dead before him. A dozen or so trolls were trying to reach him and make a death-stand.

And he was the worker of every harm-It might have been the sword Tyrfing that laughed with Skafloc’s lips. Valgard, Valgard, your weird is upon you! And Skafloc spurred his horse forward.

Riding, he thought for an eyeblink that he saw a hawk lift from somewhere seawards and wing toward the moon. A chill struck into his bones, and he knew with a part of him that he was fey.

Valgard saw him coming and grinned. The changeling braced back against wall and raised his axe. The black stallion bore down on him. He swung as never before. The weapon clove the horse’s skull.

That weight could not be stopped by anything less than the wall itself. When the stallion crashed, the stones shook.

Skafloc flew from the saddle. Elf-lithe, he twisted in midair to land on his feet. But he could not keep from striking the wall and rebounding into the gate passage.

Valgard wrenched his axe loose and ran to make an end of his foe. Skafloc had crawled away, out of the tunnel to the moonlit hillside beyond, at the foot of which were bay and sea. His right arm hung broken. He had cast aside his shield and gripped the sword left-handed. Blood dripped from his torn face and flowed down the blade.

Valgard stalked close. “Many things end tonight,” said he, “and your life is one of them.”

“We were born nigh the same night,” answered Skafloc. Blood ran from his mouth with the words. “There will not be long between our deaths.” He sneered. “When I go out, how can you, my shadow, stay?”

Valgard screamed and struck at him. Skafloc brought up the sword. The axe Brotherslayer hit that blade, and in a clang and crash and sheeting of sparks burst asunder.

Skafloc staggered back, caught himself, and lifted the sword anew. Valgard stalked empty-handed toward him, growling deep in his throat.

“Skafloc! Skafloc!”

At that cry Imric’s fosterling turned about. Up the road came Freda, stumbling, worn, bloody, in rags, but his Freda coming back to him. “Skafloc,” she called. “My dearest-”

Valgard rushed in and wrenched the sword from the hand of his unseeing foe. He swung the blade aloft and brought it down.

Howling, he raised the sword anew. Beneath the blood, it ran with unearthly blue fires. “I have won!” he shouted. “I am lord of the world and I tread it under my feet! Come, darkness!”

He hewed at the air. His hand, slippery with what it had been shedding, lost its grip. The sword twisted around and fell point foremost on him. That great weight knocked him from his feet, drove through his neck and into the earth. There he lay pinned with the blade gleaming before his eyes and his life rivering from his throat. He tried to haul it loose, and the edges opened the veins in his wrists. And that was the end of Valgard the Changeling.

Skafloc lay with cloven shoulder and breast. His face was wan in the moonlight. But when Freda bent over him, he could smile.

“I am sped, my darling,” he whispered. “You are too good for a dead man. You are too lovely to weep. Forget me-”

“Never, never.” Her tears fell on him like the rain of a morning in spring.

“Will you kiss me farewell?” he asked.

His lips were already cold, but she sought them hungrily. And when she had opened her eyes again, Skafloc was dead in her arms.

***

The first cold streaks of light were in the eastern sky when Imric and Leea came out. “Why heal the girl and take her home?” No joy of victory was in the elf woman’s tones. “Better send her in torment to hell. It was she who slew Skafloc.”

“It was his weird,” answered Imric. “And helping her is the last thing we can do for him. If we elves do not know the thing called love, still, we can do that which would have gladdened a friend.”

“Not know love?” murmured Leea, too softly for him to hear. “You are wise, Imric, but your wisdom has its bounds.”

Her gaze went to Freda, who sat on the rime-white earth with Skafloc cradled in her arms. She was singing him to sleep with the lullaby she had thought to sing to their child.’

“Happier was her fate than mine,” said Leea.

Imric misunderstood her, wittingly or otherwise. He nodded. “Happier are all men than the dwellers in Faerie-or the gods, for that matter,” he said. “Better a life like a falling star, bright across the dark, than a deathlessness which can see naught above or beyond itself.” He looked to the sword, still flashing in the throat of its prey. “And I feel a doom creeping upon me,” he breathed. “I feel that the day draws nigh when Faerie shall fade, the Elfking himself shrink to a woodland sprite and then to nothing, and the gods go under. And the worst of it is, I cannot believe it wrong that the immortals will not live forever.”

He trod over to the blade. “As for this,” he told the dwarf thralls who followed him, “we will take it and cast it from us, well put to sea. I do not think that will do much good, though. The will of the Norns stands not to be altered, and the sword has not wreaked its last harm.”

He went with them in a boat to see that they did their work aright. Meanwhile Mananaan Mac Lir took away Freda and the body of Skafloc, that he might himself see to the welfare of the one and the honouring of the other. When Imric came back, he and Leea walked slowly into Elfheugh, for the winter dawn was about to break.

Here ends the saga of Skafloc Elven-Fosterling.

When Orm of Jutland heard the witch prophesy that his firstborn son would be reared in the Halfworld of the Elves, he did not believe there was truth in the curse. But Imric, the cold, clever, heartless elf-earl, for cryptic reasons of his own saw to it that the curse came true. Fathering a son on a female troll held captive in his dungeons, Imric exchanged the nonhuman babe for the true son of Orm the Jutlander.

Thus, while Valgard the Changeling was raised as Orm’s son in the Lands of Men, the true son of the Jutlander, Skafloc, was reared to manhood in the twilight fields and whispering woods of timeless and shadowy Faerie …

The author of this extraordinarily imaginative fantasy novel, Poul Anderson, is a tall, curly-headed, owlishly bespectacled and very youthful-looking man in his middle forties.

Anderson was born in 1926 in Bristol, Pennsylvania, of Danish parentage, which explains his unusual first name. Poul himself pronounces it to sound about halfway between “pole” and “powl”-but I have never met anyone except Poul himself who can quite pronounce it.

His father was an engineer, and as engineers go wherever they are needed, Poul was raised literally all over the place: in Bristol first, then in Port Arthur, Texas, as well as in Washington, D.C., Copenhagen, Denmark, and on a farm in Minnesota. He now lives in Orinda, California, with his wife, Karen and their teenage daughter, Astrid.

Anderson began writing while he was a student at the University of Minnesota, and he sold his first stories while still an undergraduate. This early success may have suggested that instead of becoming a scientist he was actually meant to be one of those very rare people, a born writer. Anyway, as Poul himself tells the story:

“At the University of Minnesota, I majored in physics, graduating with honors in 1948. But apart from a little assisting here and there, I have not worked in the field. What happened was that writing, which had been a hobby for a long time, began to pay off while I was in college with some sales to Astounding Science Fiction. I decided to take a year off, living by the typewriter … “

That “year off” has been going on now for twenty-two years; for, although he returned to college to follow up his B.S. in physics with some graduate work in mathematics and philosophy, Poul Anderson has been a writer first, last, and (let’s hope) always.

His first book, an admirable science fiction novel titled Brain Wave, was published by Ballantine Books in May, 1954. It’s a measure of the high esteem his friends in the science fiction world hold for Poul Anderson and his books that only five years after this first book was published, Anderson was hailed as Guest of Honour at the fifth World Science Fiction Convention, held at Detroit in 1959.

To a very large degree, most of Andersen’s work has been in science fiction. In the last sixteen years he has published something like thirty-eight books in the field, by my count. He has won recognition for his swashbuckling and imaginative novels-such as The High Crusade (favourably reviewed for the Book-of-the-Month Club)-and for his intelligent and carefully-plotted short stories, three of which have won him Hugo Awards as the best story of the year.

But Anderson refuses to be typed as “a science fiction writer.” He has turned to other fields and won considerable respect in them. In historical fiction, an area rather neglected in recent years, Anderson has published two adventure novels-The Golden Slave and Rogue Sword-and has written a third, a vast epic of heroic action in the age of the Vikings, which has yet to find a publisher.

He has also written children’s books (such as The Fox, the Dog, and the Griffin, retold from an old Danish fairy tale), and book-length nonfiction (for example, Is There Life on Other Worlds?). He is also the author of three mystery novels: Murder in Black Letter, Murder Bound, and Perish by the Sword, which won him Macmillan’s first annual Cock Robin Award in 1959,

But, even taking all his versatility into account, I believe it honestly could be said that Poul Anderson’s real love is the romantic adventure fantasy laid in the ancient world. He is one of the early members of the Hyborian Legion, a loosely organized but devout club of enthusiasts of the famous Conan stories of the late Robert E. Howard; Anderson’s translations of saga verse from the Old Norse have appeared in the Legion’s fascinating magazine, Amra, almost from its founding.

He also belongs to one of the smallest and most exclusive writer’s clubs on earth today-S.A.G.A., otherwise known as The Swordsmen and Sorcerers’ Guild of America, Ltd.-whose membership is strictly limited to the authors of the Sword and Sorcery genre of fantasy. (So exclusive is S.A.G.A., by the way, that it has only eight members: Poul Anderson, Lin Carter, L. Sprague de Camp, John Jakes, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, Andre Norton, and Jack Vance).

Anderson, his wife and daughter also belong to a most unusual organization called The Society for Creative Anachronism, Inc., a rather enormous group of people interested in Medievalism who regularly hold tournaments and revels in antique costume. The Society began first on the West Coast, but interest has since spread all across the country. The original group organized “The Kingdom of the West,” and has since issued charters to a group of interested co-Medievalists in the New York/New Jersey area (known as “The East Kingdom”); and a new kingdom, called most appropriately “The Middle Kingdom” has since begun functioning in the Midwest, centering around Chicago.

These tournaments, by the way, are serious and very beautiful. Of course, the contestants do not fight with weapons of edged steel, but their wooden weapons are strong, heavy and most carefully made, and can lay the unwary or unskilled flat-and very often do; therefore, those who wish to fight in a Society tourney must sign a waiver of liabilities in case of injury. While Society members may adopt various titles of nobility (within certain limits) knighthood itself must be earned in combat on the field of honour. And in the Kingdom of the West, Poul Anderson is known as Sir Bela of Eastmarch. Members may also register coats-of-arms with Society heralds: Sir Bela, for instance, bears the arms azure, two suns or in pale, with saltier argent.

Despite his deep and sincere enthusiasm for the genre, Poul Anderson has not written very extensively in the adult fantasy field. This is probably due to the fact that magazine editors and publishing houses have come to think of him by now as primarily a science fiction writer, as much as it is due to the even more unfortunate fact that until very, very recently there was little chance if any of getting an original fantasy novel into print in this country. The astounding success of Professor Tolkien’s The Lard of the Rings, and the more recent establishment of Ballantine’s Adult Fantasy Series may correct this long-standing prejudice against the genre.

But Anderson has produced two brilliant, delightfully swashbuckling fantasy novels-the earliest being the book you presently hold in your hands. The Broken Sword was first published in 1954, the same year as Andersen’s first science fiction novel, Brain Wave. His only other book-length venture into the imaginary world of fantasy-an excellent novel called Three Hearts and Three Lions-was serialized in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1953; issued in hardcover form by Doubleday in 1961; and done in paperback by Avon Books in the same year. It has recently been reprinted, and thus it is readily available in one or another of these editions.

The Broken Sword, however, is obscure-all but unknown. It was published at the very beginning of Anderson’s career by a rather small publishing house, Abelard-Schuman. In the sixteen years since that small printing first appeared, it has never been republished; and until now it has somehow persistently been overlooked by the paperback editors. But novels as superlatively imaginative and entertaining as The Broken Sword have a way of lingering in the minds of their readers. I have been unable to get the fabulous world of Valgard and Skafloc out of my mind since I first read this book; and I have been trying to bring the novel to the attention of publishers for years. I feel very happy that, in my capacity as Editorial Consultant to Ballantine’s Adult Fantasy Series, I am at last able to make myself heard with some authority. Poul. Anderson has rewritten and revised The Broken Sword for this first paperback edition. It’s difficult to improve a book as good as this one, but he has learned quite a lot about the art of writing in the last sixteen years, and his repolishing has added new luster to one of the best fantasies of recent decades.