“Or will?” Bekko gave him a wintry smile. “Perhaps indeed.”
He shrugged off the whole issue with a visible effort. “Well, there will be time for us all to talk of this in council. For now, the day begins. Shall we see what food there is with which to break our night’s fast?”
They left down the winding road that led up to the village, turning back several times to wave to the dwarves who stood thronging the gates, hands raised in farewell, Bekko, Retsa, and Saret at their front. Finally the curve of the road took them in among trees, and they turned away, Alea blinking moisture from her eyes. “How can I feel more welcome among dwarves than among my own kind?”
“Do you mean the bandits we visited?” Gar smiled. “Yes, they weren’t terribly hospitable, were they? Besides, we’d seen how well the giants respect their women, and the bandits didn’t look very good against them.”
“No,” Alea said, her voice hard, “they surely didn’t.”
She looked around at the trees and the empty road ahead, and suddenly felt a bleak despair seize her. To banish it, she said, “Well, we’ve seen Jotunheim, we’ve seen Nibelheim, and we’ve both seen far too much of Midgard. Where shall we go now?”
“Back to the clearing where we met the dwarves,” Gar answered.
Alea stared at him. “Why?”
“Because something is waiting for us there,” Gar said with absolute assurance.
Alea eyed him narrowly. “What’s this? More of your magic?”
Gar looked at her, astounded. “How did you know?” Alea hadn’t, she’d meant it in sarcasm, but wasn’t about to let him know that. Let him think she was the mindreader for a change. She kept her face carefully immobile and said, “How else could you know what lies in a clearing miles away?”
“So you guessed.” Gar smiled, his gaze warming. “Only it wasn’t just a guess, it was deduction—very clear thinking—from a few facts.”
His gaze was so admiring that Alea had to look away, shaken again. Any other man giving her that look would have been devouring her body with his eyes. Gar was admiring her mind. It was very flattering, and she was glad he wasn’t thinking of her figure. At least, she thought she was glad of it. She needed a change of subject. Not looking at him, she asked, “How can the dwarves so love children twice their size? Wouldn’t such offspring remind them too much of the ones who cast them out?”
“You’d think so, yes,” Gar agreed. “Maybe, though, the first dwarves were bound and determined not to treat their children the way their own parents treated them—and those children, when they grew up, never thought of not loving their offspring, no matter how big they grew.”
“I suppose that makes sense,” Alea said doubtfully, “but I suppose I’ve grown too hard in my heart to believe people do things only out of love, or a determination not to return cruelty for cruelty. Couldn’t there have been a more practical reason?”
“Of course there could.” Gar’s eyes warmed again.
Alea kept her eyes turned resolutely ahead. Then she realized with a bit of a shock that they were walking side by side, and she hadn’t even thought of being afraid. How long had that been going on?
“Perhaps it has something to do with the constant danger of those early years of exile,” Gar suggested.
“With wild pigs and bandits and wild dogs about?” Alea nodded. “Yes, I can see that people so small would have lived in constant fear. Their only protection would have been banding together, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes,” Gar said, “and every dwarf lost would make the group that much less able to protect itself. Life probably became very, very precious to them.”
“So precious that they cherished every single child,” Alea finished. “Perhaps that’s also how the male dwarves came to respect their women so well.”
“They certainly needed every single pair of hands to be stay alive,” Gar agreed. “Gender would have mattered less than number and social skills. Interesting how much stronger and more important the goddesses were in their version of the Ring of the Niebelung, wasn’t it?”
So, chatting about safe topics, they made their way off the road, through the trees, and finally to the meadow where the wild pigs had attacked them.
There, Alea halted, staring in amazement and fear, for the clearing was filled.
It was huge, it was golden, and it filled the clearing all by itself. It was, Alea thought, like a huge wagon wheel with a great soup bowl upside down to cover the spokes and the hub, and another beneath it. There seemed to be windows up high, there toward the center, and strange lumpy things with holes in them here and there—but what attracted her attention most was the ramp that led up into the doorway that opened in its underside.
Finally she found her voice. “Was this what you knew was here?”
“Yes,” Gar told her. “It’s a ship for sailing between the stars.”
The implications hit her like a hammer blow, but they roused too much fear. She would have to get used to them. For the moment, to hide that fear, she thrust them aside and concentrated only on the anger, the very rightly deserved anger. “Why didn’t you warn me?”
Gar was silent.
“Because you wanted to scare me,” Alea said, letting the anger show, letting more of it show as she turned to face him. “You wanted me to be afraid, wanted me to run screaming away. Didn’t you?”
“I knew you wouldn’t run,” Gar said. “You’ve proved your courage time and again. But if you were going to be afraid of me, of what I am, this was the time to learn that. If you were going to turn away from me in disgust and loathing, this was the time to learn that, too.”
He was trying to hide it, anyone else would have seen only a granite face, but Alea had been traveling with him too long to be deceived by that basilisk countenance. She frowned, looking more closely, her own fear and anger receding as she stared into his eyes, saw the bitter determination there, the courage to face the truth. Compassion flooded her, and for the very first time, she reached up toward his cheek, almost touched it, held her hand a hair’s breadth away. “Why would I loathe you? You, who have fought to defend me, listened to my grief, offered more comfort than I was willing to take! How could that disgust me?”
Relief lightened his eyes, but he was still braced, still cautious, even though he smiled. “Let’s go inside, then.”
He started up the ramp, but she stared at him, appalled. “Can you just walk away from it? Can you talk to these people about peace and harmony, can you tell me you’ll free the slaves, and just walk away and not do it?”
“It has begun,” Gar told her, “but it will take a hundred years or more to complete. Come inside, and look and listen at what is happening in your world.”
But Alea stood rigid as the implications of that ship came crashing back in on her, no longer to be ignored. “How do you know what is happening?”
Gar turned back, gazing down at her gravely. “Because the dwarves weren’t the only ones to dream last night. The slaves in Midgard dreamed of the Wizard too, and he told them to band together, fight their way free if they had to, and flee to the dwarves or the giants, whichever was closer.”
“How do you know this?” Alea asked in a harsh whisper. Gar only gazed down at her, his face drawn, his eyes bleak. “Because you are the Wizard!” she hissed. “You really can do magic, and you planted that dream in everyone’s mind!”
“One for the giants, one for the bandits, one for the dwarves, one for the slaves, and one for the Midgarders,” Gar confirmed. “The Midgarders alone refused to believe any of it, or to talk to their neighbors about it. They will, though. They’ll remember, and when things start to change, they’ll begin to believe. At the very least, they’ll tell it to their children as a fairy tale—and the children will remember it when they’re grown, when they need it.”