Short Fiction by Poul Anderson (free ebook novel .txt) 📕

“I told you to stay in a safe place!” he raged. Huge and bloodsmeared, his lean face painted red by the rising fires, his eyes like green ice in the moonlight, he stood looking up at her.

Hildaborg laughed. “You’re still a poor fool, Alfric,” she said. “Could I stay at home while you were fighting for me?”

She took off her helmet. Her dark hair streamed down over his face as she leaned forward to kiss him.

In the sky, Dannos swept past Amaris and swung eastward toward the horizon.

Dawn came, chill and gray, full of weariness and the sobbing of women. Alfric stood leaning on a spear, atop the flat roof of Bronnes the merchant, and looked out over the city. A leather cloak hung from his broad shoulders against the thin bitter dawn-wind. His face was drawn into bleak lines.

To him came Hildaborg, lovely in the cold colorless light, her unbound locks floating in the breeze. He looked at her in a vague wonder as to how many women she really was. The passionate lover of the tavern, the haughty queen who had faced the captive guard and the captor priest, the wild war-goddess of the battle⁠—and now this girl, slim and fair and mysterious, with wind-cooled cheeks and a secret laughter behind her eyes⁠—which was the real one? Or were they all Hildaborg? And would he ever know?

She touched his arm. “We’ve won,” she whispered.

“Aye⁠—won,” said Alfric tiredly. “Won what? The Temple is down, but so is the palace, and there’s still riot and looting in the city.”

“It will pass. Victory was dearly bought, but now it is ours. And you, Alfric, are ruler of Valkarion.”

“I⁠—a heathen outlander?”

“After last night, the Household and the guards will follow you to hell and back. And the rest⁠—” she smiled shyly⁠—“will follow me, who follow you myself.”

“A big task. Too big, perhaps, for the son of an Aslakan peasant.” Alfric smiled crookedly down at Hildaborg. “ ’Tis more for you, who are born a queen. Best I continue my travels.”

“The queen,” she said firmly, “needs a king. You have come to the end of your wandering, Alfric.” She laughed, a clear beautiful sound in the quiet morning. “You have no choice, my dear. The Sibyl grudgingly admits that the Fortieth Dynasty, ‘sons of the heathen,’ will be among the greatest. But how can you have sons without⁠—”

Alfric grinned. “I surrender,” he said. “Who am I to challenge the Fates?”

Down in the street a hengist, escaped from his owner in the rioting, whinnied his greeting to the early sun.

“Yes, you’ll find almost anything man has ever imagined, somewhere out in the Galaxy,” I said. “There are so damned many millions of planets, and such a fantastic variety of surface conditions and of life evolving to meet them, and of intelligence and civilization appearing in that life. Why, I’ve been on worlds with fire-breathing dragons, and on worlds where dwarfs fought things that could pass for the goblins our mothers used to scare us with, and on a planet where a race of witches lived⁠—telepathic pseudohypnosis, you know⁠—oh, I’ll bet there’s not a tall story or fairy tale ever told which doesn’t have some kind of counterpart somewhere in the universe.”

Laird nodded. “Uh-huh,” he answered, in that oddly slow and soft voice of his. “I once let a genie out of a bottle.”

“Eh? What happened?”

“It killed me.”

I opened my mouth to laugh, and then took a second glance at him and shut it again. He was just too deadpan serious about it. Not poker-faced, the way a good actor can be when he’s slipping over a tall one⁠—no, there was a sudden misery behind his eyes, and somehow it was mixed with the damnedest cold humor.

I didn’t know Laird very well. Nobody did. He was out most of the time on Galactic Survey, prowling a thousand eldritch planets never meant for human eyes. He came back to the Solar System more rarely and for briefer visits than anyone else in his job, and had less to say about what he had found.

A huge man, six-and-a-half feet tall, with dark aquiline features and curiously brilliant greenish-grey eyes, middle-aged now though it didn’t show except at the temples. He was courteous enough to everyone, but shortspoken and slow to laugh. Old friends, who had known him thirty years before when he was the gayest and most reckless officer in the Solar Navy, thought something during the Revolt had changed him more than any psychologist would admit was possible. But he had never said anything about it, merely resigning his commission after the war and going into Survey.

We were sitting alone in a corner of the lounge. The Lunar branch of the Explorers’ Club maintains its building outside the main dome of Selene Center, and we were sitting beside one of the great windows, drinking Centaurian sidecars and swapping the inevitable shop-talk. Even Laird indulged in that, though I suspected more because of the information he could get than for any desire of companionship.

Behind us, the long quiet room was almost empty. Before us, the window opened on the raw magnificence of moonscape, a sweep of crags and cliffs down the crater wall to the riven black plains, washed in the eerie blue of Earth’s light. Space blazed above us, utter black and a million sparks of frozen flame.

“Come again?” I said.

He laughed, without much humor. “I might as well tell you,” he said. “You won’t believe it, and even if you did it’d make no difference. Sometimes I tell the story⁠—alcohol makes me feel like it⁠—I start remembering old times.⁠ ⁠…”

He settled farther back in his chair. “Maybe it wasn’t a real genie,” he went on. “More of a ghost, perhaps. That was a haunted planet. They were great a million years before man existed on Earth. They spanned the stars and they knew things the present civilization hasn’t even guessed at. And