Anderson, Poul Corr

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his head. Auri lay naked and unbothered. He ought to have taken in one of the tavern keeper's children,
rather than her; but she needed his presence, in this world of iron and cruelty, more than they needed the
roof.
Another bolt clove the sky. Thunder crashed in its wake. For an instant, Jesper Fledelius' battered
countenance made a gargoyle in the doorway. Sightlessness returned. The wind yammered.
"Understand," the Dane said earnestly, "I am a good Christian man. I'll have naught to do with that
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Lutheran heresy the Junkers and their toy king are foisting on the realm, and surely not with the
heathendom of the witches. Yet there is white magic as well as black. Is there not? And it was ever old
custom to leave offerings for the unseen ones. They do not really invoke Satan, those poor ignorant
peasants who gather on May Eve and tomorrow. Nor yet the false gods you may read of in the
chronicles of Saxo Grammaticus. Viborg was onceVebj�rg, Holy Mount. Where the cathedral now
stands was a sanctuary ancient before Odin led his folk in from the East. Spirits of earth and water may
not a man appeal to them without grave sin? These days, the peasant has often none else to turn to." He
shifted on the damp dirt. "However, I myself am only in touch with the Coven, I do not belong to it."
"I understand," Lockridge said.
He believed he spoke truth, and saw more than he uttered. Dim and enormous, the pattern had begun to
grow before him.
Man's history was the history of religion.
What Auri had, who slept so peacefully here among thunders, and Auri's people, and the Indians he had
seen in Yucatan, and every primitive race he knew of whose culture had not taken a completely
perverted turn was wholeness of spirit. It was purely a question of taste whether that made up for all
they lacked. The fact remained, they were one with earth and sky and sea in a way that those who set the
gods apart from themselves, or who denied any gods, could never be. When the Indo-Europeans
brought their patriarchal pantheon to a land, they brought much that was good; but they created a new
and lonely kind of man.
There was no sharp dichotomy. The old ones endured. After a time, they blended with the aliens,
transfigured them, until ageless forms stood clear again and only names had changed. Dyaush Pitar, with
his sun chariot and battle axe, became Thor, whose car was drawn by honest earthy goats and whose
hammer brought the rain which was life. No blood was offered the Redbeard; he was himself a yeoman.
And when Odin, one-eyed wolf god to whom the warlords gave men, fell before Christ and lived in
memory as no more than a troll Thor called himself St. Olaf, Frey was St. Erik whose wagon was
drawn out each spring to bless the fields, and She took on the blue mantle of the Virgin Mary. And
always and forever there were the little gods, sprites, hobgoblins, leprechauns, mermaids, so much in the
world that they were not even called gods, whom men made into signs of help and harm, love and fear,
every wonderful mystery and fickleness which was life.
Lockridge was agnostic himself (child of a sad, brain-heavy and gut-light time which he now saw must
not have long to live) and passed no opinions on the objective truths involved. As far as he knew, Mary
might be the actual Queen of Heaven, the Triple Goddess only an early intuition of her. A sensible man
like Jesper Fledelius could believe that. Or both might be shadows cast by some ultimate reality; or both
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might be myth. What mattered in history was not what men thought but what they felt.
And into this great slow conflict and interweaving of two world-views the time war had entered. Rangers
engineered the march of the war making tribes and their militant gods; Wardens found secret ways to
keep what was old and make the invaders over into its image. Rangers urged on the tomahawk people,
who obliterated the cult of the passage grave; but Neolithic herdsmen became Bronze Age farmers and
seafarers, and the sun was no longer a fire spirit but earth's guardian and fructifying husband.
Christendom entered, with books and logic and the first god who ever punished incorrect beliefs about
his own nature and erelong the people's hearts belonged to Mary. The Reformation brought back
Jehovah, armed with a terrible weapon against instinct the printing press but religion itself was subtly
divided, discredited, emasculated, until the world five or six hundred years hence felt its-own barrenness
and yearned for a faith which went deeper than words. Lockridge looked into the century after his own
and did not see science triumphant; he saw men gathered on hills in the name of a new god or of an
ancient one reborn.
Or a goddess?
"How did she come to you?" he asked.
"Well, now." Fledelius' voice rumbled hoarse, coarse, and reverent. "The story is a bit long. You must
know, I am was the squire near Lemvig, as my fathers before me since the first Valdemar. That's a
poor district, we Fledeliuses were never of the high haughty houses, we were close to our peasants; and
in Jutland to this day the commons are more free than in the islands, where serfs may be bought and sold.
On my grounds there is ak�mpeh�j " I know that dolmen, Lockridge thought in eeriness "where
folk were wont to make little offerings. They spoke of wonders glimpsed from time to time, strange
comings and goings, I know not what. But if the priest said naught, who was I to meddle with old usage?
Bad luck comes from such. The Lutherans will learn that, to the land's sorrow.
"So. I fought in the wars. Let me say naught against my lord King Kristiern. Sweden was his by right
going back to Queen Margrete, and I call Sten Sture a traitor that he raised the realm against Danish rule.
Yet . . . I am no milksop, understand, I've split my share of pates . . . yet when we entered Stockholm,
pledges of amnesty had been given; and still bodies were piled high and headless, like cordwood, those
freezing days. So with some heartsickness. I returned home and vowed I'd stay on my own sandy acres.
My wife died too well, she was a good old mare, she was, and our only son studying in Paris and no
doubt looking down on me who can scarcely write my name.
And then one summer eve, when I walked the fields by that curious dolmen, She came forth."
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From his clumsy words, as he struggled to describe her, Lockridge knew Storm Darroway again.
Witch or saint or eternal spirit of the land, I cannot say what She is. Belike She put a spell on me. What
of that? She sought not to lure me from Christian practice, rather She told of matters I'd not known
about, like the Coven, and warned of troublous times to come. And She showed me wonders. This poor
old brain cannot well grasp Her notion about travelling from past to future and back; but are not all things
possible under God? She gave me gold, which I had sore need of after being so long in the wars with so
little plunder. But chiefly I serve for Her own sake and the hope of one day seeing Her anew.
"My duty is light. I am to be at the Inn of the Golden Lion each All Hallows Eve for twenty years. You [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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