Wizards’ Worlds (61 page)

Who can describe such a woman as Dagmar with words? She was not beautiful; no, seldom
is it that great beauty brings men to their knees. Look at the portraits of your historical
charmers, or read what has been written of Cleopatra, of Theodora and the rest. They
have something other than beauty, these fateful ones: a flame within them which kindles
an answer in all men who look upon them. But their own hearts remain cold.

Dagmar walked with a grace which tore at you, and when she looked at one sidewise.
. . . But who can describe such a woman? I can say she had silver, fair hair which
reached to her knees, a face with a frost white skin, but I cannot so make you see
the Dagmar Llov that was.

Because of his leadership in the underground, Ivor was a hero to us. In addition,
he was good to look upon: a tall whip of a man, brown, thin, narrow of waist and loins,
and broad of shoulder. He had been a huntsman of the Count’s, and walked with a forester’s
smooth glide. Above his widely set eyes his hair grew in a sharp peak, giving his
face a disturbingly wolfish cast. But in his eyes and mouth there was the dedication
of a priest.

Being what she was, Dagmar looked upon those eyes and that mouth, and desired to trouble
the mold, to see there a difference she had wrought. In some ways Ivor was an innocent,
but Dagmar was one who had known much from her cradle.

Also, Ivor was now the great man among us. With the Count gone, the men of the valley
looked to him for leadership. Dagmar went to him willingly and we sang her bride song.
It was a good time, such as we had not known for years.

Others came back to the valley during those days. Out of the black horror of a Nazi
extermination camp crawled a pale, twisted creature, warped in body, perhaps also
in mind. She who had once been the Countess Ana came
quietly, almost secretly, among us again. One day she had not been there, and the
next she was settled in the half-ruinous gate house of the castle with old Mald, who
had been with her family long before her own birth.

The Countess Ana had been a woman of education before they had taken her away, and
she had not forgotten all she had learned. There was no doctor in the valley; twenty
families could not have supported one. But the Countess was versed in the growing
of herbs and their healing uses, and Mald was a midwife. So together they became the
wise women of our people. After a while we forgot the Countess Ana’s deformed body
and ravaged face, and accepted her as we accepted the crooked firs growing close to
the timberline. Not one of us remembered that she was yet in years a young woman,
with a young woman’s dreams and desires, encased in a hag’s body.

It was late October when our fate came upon us, up river in a power boat. The new
masters would set in our hills a station from which their machines could spy upon
the outer world they feared and hated; and to make safe the building of that station
they sent ahead a conqueror’s party. They surprised us and something had drained out
of the valley. So many of our youth were long since bleached bones that, save for
a handful, perhaps only the number of the fingers on my two hands, there was no defiance;
there was only a dumb beast’s endurance. Within three days Colonel Andrei Varoff ruled
from the castle as if he had been Count, lord of a tired, cowed people.

Three men they hauled from their homes and shot on the first night, but Ivor was not
one. He had been warned and, with the core of his men, had taken again to the mountains.
But he left Dagmar behind, by her own will.

Mald and the Countess were warned, too. When Varoff marched his pocket army into the
castle, the gate house was deserted; and those who thereafter sought the wise women’s
aid took another path, up into the black-green of the fir forest and close to a long
stone partly buried in the
ground within a circle of very old oaks, which had not grown so by chance. There in
a game-station hut, those in need could find what they wanted, perhaps more.

Father Hansel had been one of the three Varoff shot out of hand, and there was no
longer an open church in the valley. What went on in the oak glade was another matter.
First our women drifted there, half ashamed, half defiant, and later they were followed
by their men. I do not think the Countess Ana was their priestess. But she knew and
condoned. For she had learned many things.

The wise women began to offer more than just comfort of body. It was a queer wild
time when men in their despair turned from old belief to older ones, from a god of
love and peace, to a god of wrath and vengeance. Old knowledge passed by word of mouth
from mother to daughter was recalled by such as Mald, and keenly evaluated by the
sharper and better-trained brain of the Countess Ana. I will not say that they called
upon Odin and Freya (or those behind those Nordic spirits) or lighted the Beltane
Fire. But there was a stirring, as if something long sleeping turned and stretched
in its supposed grave.

Dagmar, for all her shrewd egotism (and egotism such as hers is dangerous, for it
leads a man or woman to believe that what they wish is right), was a daughter of the
valley. She was moved by the old beliefs; and because she had her price, she was convinced
that all others had theirs. So at night she went alone to the hut. There she watched
until the Countess Ana left. It was she who carried news and a few desperately gained
supplies to those in hiding, especially Ivor.

Seeing the hunched figure creep off, Dagmar laughed spitefully, making a secret promise
to herself that even a man she might choose to throw away would go to no other woman.
But since at present she needed aid and not ill-will, she put that aside.

When the Countess was out of sight, Dagmar went in to Mald and stood in the half-light
of the fire, proud and
tall, exulting over the other woman in all the sensual strength and grace of her body,
as she had over the Countess Ana in her mind.

“I would have what I desire most, Andrei Varoff,” she said boldly, speaking with the
arrogance of a woman who rules men by their lusts.

“Let him but look on you. You need no help here,” returned Mald.

“I cannot come to him easily; he is not one to be met by chance. Give me that which
will bring him to me by his own choice.”

“You are a wedded wife.”

Dagmar laughed shrilly. “What good does a man who must hide ever in a mountain cave
do me, Old One? I have slept too long in a cold bed. Let me draw Varoff, and you and
the valley will have kin within the enemy’s gate.”

Mald studied her for a long moment, and Dagmar grew uneasy, for those eyes in age-carved
pits seemed to read far too deeply. But, without making any answer in words, Mald
began certain preparations. There was a strange chanting, low and soft but long, that
night. The words were almost as old as the hills around them, and the air of the hut
was thick with the scent of burning herbs.

When it was done Dagmar stood again by the fire, and in her hands she turned and twisted
a shining, silken belt. She looped it about her arm beneath her cloak and tugged at
the heavy coronet of her braids. The long locks Mald had shorn were not missed. Her
teeth showed in white points against her lip as she brought out of her pocket some
of those creased slips of paper our conquerors used for money.

Mald shook her head. “Not for coin did I do this,” she said harshly. “But if you come
to rule here as you desire, remember you
are
kin.”

Dagmar laughed again, more than ever sure of herself. “Be sure that I will, Old One.”

Within two days the silken belt was in Varoff’s hands,
and within five Dagmar was installed in the castle. But in the Colonel she had met
her match, for Varoff found her no great novelty. She could not bend him to her will
as she had Ivor, who was more sensitive and less guarded. But, being shrewd, Dagmar
accepted the situation with surface grace and made no demands.

As for the valley women, they spat after her, and there was hate in their hearts.
Who told Ivor I do not know, though it was not the Countess Ana. (She could not wound
where she would die to defend.) But somehow he managed to get a message to Dagmar,
entreating her to come to him, for he believed she had gone to Varoff to protect him.

What that message aroused in Dagmar was contempt and fear: contempt for the man who
would call her to share his harsh exile and fear that he might break the slender bond
she had with Varoff. She was determined that Ivor must go. It was very simple, that
betrayal, for Ivor believed in her. He went to his death as easily as a bullock led
to the butcher, in spite of warnings from the Countess Ana and his men.

He slipped down by night to where Dagmar promised to wait and walked into the hands
of the Colonel’s guard. They say he was a long time dying, for Andrei Varoff had a
taste for such treatment for prisoners when he could safely indulge it. Dagmar watched
him die; that, too, was part of the Colonel’s pleasure. Afterward there was a strange
shadow in her eyes, although she walked with pride.

It was two months later that she made her second visit to Mald. But this time there
were two to receive her. Yet in neither look, word, nor deed, did either show emotion
at that meeting; it was as if they waited. They remained silent, forcing her to declare
her purpose.

“I would bear a son.” She began as one giving an order. Only—confronted by those unchanging
faces she faltered and lost some of her assurance. She might even have turned and
gone had the Countess Ana not spoken in a cool and even voice.

“It is well known that Varoff desires a son.”

Dagmar responded to that faint encouragement. “True! Let me be the one to bear the
child and my influence over him will be complete. Then I can repay—it is true, you
frozen faces!” She was aroused by the masks they wore. “You believe that I betrayed
Ivor, not knowing the whole of the story. I have very little power over Varoff now.
But let me give him a son; then there will be no limit on what I can demand of him—none
at all!”

“You shall bear a son; certainly you shall bear a son,” replied the Countess Ana.
In the security of that promise Dagmar rejoiced, not attending to the finer shades
of meaning in the voice which uttered it.

“But what you ask of us takes preparation. You must wait and return when the moon
once more waxes. Then we shall do what is to be done!”

Reassured, Dagmar left. As the door of the hut swung shut behind her, the Countess
Ana came to stand before the fire, her crooked shape making a blot upon the wall with
its shadow.

“She shall have a son, Mald, even as I promised, only whether thereafter she will
discover it profitable—”

From within the folds of her coarse peasant blouse, she brought out a packet wrapped
in a scrap of fine but brown-stained linen. Unfolding the cloth, she revealed what
it guarded: a lock of black hair, stiff and matted with something more than mud. Mald,
seeing that and guessing the purpose for which it would be used, laughed. The Countess
did not so much as smile.

“There shall be a son, Mald,” she repeated, but her promise was no threat. There was
a more subtle note, and in the firelight her eyes gleamed with an eagerness to belie
the ruin of her face.

Within two days came the night she had appointed and Dagmar with it. Again there was
chanting and things done in secret. When Dagmar left at dawn she smiled a thin smile.
Let her but bear a child and they would see, all
would see, how she would deal with those who now dared to look crosswise after her
and spit upon her footprints! Let such fools take heed!

Shortly thereafter it became known that Dagmar was with child. Varoff could not conceal
his joy. During the months which followed he made plans to send her out of the valley,
that his son might be born with the best medical care; and he loaded her with gifts.
But the inner caution of an often-disappointed man made him keep her prisoner.

Dagmar did not leave the valley. She could not make the rough trip by river and sea.
The road over the mountain was but a narrow track, and just before Varoff prepared
to leave with her there was such a storm as is seldom seen at that time of year. A
landslide blotted out the road. The Colonel cursed and drove his own soldiers and
the valley men to dig a way through, but even he realized it could not be cleared
in time.

So he was forced to summon Mald. His threats to her were cold and deadly, for he had
no illusions concerning the depth of the valley’s hatred. But the old woman bore his
raving meekly, and he came to believe her broken enough in spirit to be harmless.
Thus, though he still suspected her, he brought her to Dagmar and bade her use her
skill.

For a night and a day Dagmar lay in labor, and what she suffered must have been very
great. But greater still was her determination to be the one to place a living son
in the arms of Andrei Varoff.

In the evening the child was born, its thin cry echoing from the walls of the ancient
room like the wail of a tormented soul. Dagmar clawed herself up.

“Is it a boy?” she demanded hoarsely.

Mald nodded her white head. “A boy.”

“Give him to me and call—”

But there was no need to complete that order for Andrei Varoff was already within
the chamber and Dagmar greeted him proudly, the baby in the curve of her arm. As
he strode to the bedside she thrust away the swaddling blanket and displayed the tiny
body fully. But her eyes were for Varoff rather than for the child she had schemed
to make a weapon in her hand.

“Your son—” she began. Then something in Varoff’s eyes as he stared down upon the
child chilled her as if naked steel, ice cold, had been plunged into her sweating
body.

For the first time she looked upon the baby. This was her key, a son for Varoff.

Her scream, thin and high, tore through the storm wind moaning outside the narrow
window. Andrei loomed over her as she cowered away from what she read in his eyes,
in the twist of his thick lips.