“For what?” Helga found her voice, staring as though Alea were mad. “For walking free? For fighting off men who would have raped you, if they’d had the chance? Go along with you!”
“I think we had better,” Gar said. “We don’t seem to be welcome here any more.”
“How could you think to be, preaching such nonsense as you did!” Elsa exclaimed.
But Helga touched her arm. “She told us the truth—women can learn how to protect themselves.”
Elsa stared at her, then turned back to Alea, and her gaze verged on awe. “That’s right… We’ve seen it ourselves, that much was true…”
“How much else of what she said was the truth?” Sigurd wondered.
“I think we had better leave and let them work out the answer to that by themselves,” Gar said softly into Alea’s ear.
“Just a moment.” Alea advanced on the women, pulling out her belt knife.
They moaned and shrank away, ready to run.
Alea stepped past them to the roast. She carved a huge thick steak and carried it back to Gar, speared on her knife. “Loot.”
Gar grinned. “Yes, they did offer us dinner, didn’t they?” He tipped an imaginary hat to the women. “Thank you for your hospitality. I’m sorry we can’t stay to enjoy it to its fullest. Good night, now.”
“Good night,” Alea echoed, then marched off into the forest, letting Gar do the catching up for once.
They stopped an hour later at a cave Gar had somehow found in a hillside, where he lit a small and almost smokeless fire. As they waited for the steak to warm, Alea asked, “How did you manage to knock them all out?”
“Magic, as I told you,” Gar said.
“The same magic that made their staves crumble to dust?”
“Not quite, but close,” Gar told her. “I wasn’t joking. Still, I made it look as though I were knocking each of them on the head with my staff. The women won’t think it was a spell, and the men will take better care of their weapons in the future.”
Alea shivered against a sudden chill that had nothing to do with the temperature of the night. “How did you do it?” Gar closed his eyes. “I’m picturing an object. Close your eyes and tell me what you see.”
With misgivings, Alea closed her eyes—and saw Gar’s face. She dismissed it impatiently, thought of darkness, an overcast night sky, saw dark clouds.
Then an image appeared in front of those clouds, murky and misty, but it seemed to gel, to harden, to become clear… “An instrument of some sort,” she said. “It has a pinchwaisted body and a long neck, with one … two… six strings.”
“It’s called a guitar,” Gar said softly, “and you don’t have them in Midgard, nor anywhere else in the world, as far as I know. Yes, that is what I was thinking of. You have the talent to do magic yourself, Alea, though how much talent, I don’t know yet. Do you want to learn?”
The answer leaped up with savage eagerness, but she held it back, afraid—of the power of that magic, of the unknown… But not, strangely, of Gar.
“I’ll have to think about it,” she said.
“As you will.” The words practically purred with approval. “Well, enough of such airy nonsense. Let’s see to that steak, shall we?”
As she settled herself for sleep, Alea reflected on her luck, and found herself struggling to believe it. She had found a companion, a friend, who seemed to value her as a person more than as a woman, but there were hints that he appreciated her femininity too, femininity that she’d scarcely known she still had, for the boys of her village had never seemed to notice it once she grew taller than they. Moreover, and more amazingly, he gave her the honor and respect he would have given another man, treated her as an equal, never even seemed to think that she was anything else. He had protected her, hunted for her, nurtured her, soothed her fears, given her more self-respect than she had ever thought to have again—and was now offering to teach her magic!
There was no need of it, she told herself. He was magic enough in himself.
Not that she was about to let him know that, of course.
She woke with the sun, feeling sluggish, and went to feed the fire, wondering why she felt so lethargic. Gar rolled out of his blanket and sat up as she was hanging the kettle over the flames. She looked at his face and, for some reason, had a dim memory of the Wizard looking rather disgusted.
Suddenly she knew why. “I wonder if the bandits dreamed of the Wizard last night.”
“They did,” Gar said, with complete certainty, “and he showed them the Great Monad and explained it to them, but they argued with him every inch of the way. The more ridiculous their stand became, the harder they fought.”
Alea looked at the fire. “They’d rather die than give up believing they’ve become supermen, wouldn’t they?”
“I think they would,” Gar said, with wonder and delight. “How did you know?”
“I talked to their women.” Alea stilled, frowning into the fire. “I nearly said ‘wives,’ but I don’t think any of them are.”
“Not legally, perhaps, but most of them are in fact.”
“The men treat them as housekeepers and whores!”
“That’s what the men want to believe,” Gar agreed, “but the women have become more to them, much more, and I think they’re about to find that out.” He looked around, peering upward. “I’ve become turned around in the dark. Which way is east?”
They had been hiking for another six weeks when the pigs attacked.
The cunning beasts waited until they were squarely in the middle of a meadow with no nearby trees to climb. Then they seemed to materialize from the grass and came squealing from all sides, the boars in the lead. They had gone back to nature in good form, growing tusks and shaggy coats.
Alea whipped about back to back with Gar out of sheer reflex, her staff up and ready. All he had time to say was, “Don’t let them near! Scare them if you can!”
Good advice, Alea thought with exasperation, but how was she supposed to do that? She held her stick by the end and swung it in desperation—and saw what he meant. The pigs were shrewd; they saw the staff coming and leaped back from it. But as soon as it was past, they sprang in..
Well, there was a way to deal with that. Alea set up the figure-eight pattern Gar had shown her, and the pigs shied away, then started in, but the butt of the staff came back to crack very satisfyingly over one’s head. It stumbled back and fell, and three others fell on it instantly, squealing and fighting for cannibal rights.
But they had stopped the staff just long enough. From the other side, a boar shot in to rip Alea’s skirt with a toss of its head. She felt the pain in her leg and screamed in fear-born anger, whirling her staff to crack its head. It stumbled back and fell, but she was paying attention to the left again, and kept the figure-eight going. The pigs shied away, but an old sow grunted, and by Thor’s goats, they all seemed to relax and settle down. With a sinking heart, she realized they were waiting for her to tire.
They were right, too. She couldn’t keep the pattern going all day. In desperation, she slowed before she had even begun to be winded—and sure enough, two boars sprang in, one from each side.
Alea swung the stick so fast it blurred. It jarred against the right-hand porker and rebounded; she used the energy of that bounce to crack the other across the muzzle. Both squealed and retreated, giving her injured looks as though to say she had broken the rules.
She intended to. She intended to break a lot of rules, especially since she had seen what they had done to one of their own fallen. She slowed the stick again, and two pigs started forward, then hesitated. She slowed the stroke even more, but they only glared at her, waiting.
Behind her, she heard crack after crack mixed with wild squealing, and knew Gar was using the animals’ treacherous instincts to the fullest. She was glad she couldn’t see what was happening.