Faith
Poul and Karen Anderson
Far northeast beyond the Storm Horse Mountains, Aeland was the poorest of the shires, scantily peopled, so seldom visited that it might almost have been a separate realm. Yet it was happy enough. Farms prospered along the River Luta. In places the sturdy, thatch-roofed earthen houses clustered together to make a hamlet. Timbermen and charcoal burners worked Isung Wood south of them, while miners dug metals in the Nar Hills on the northwest. Where Karumkill flowed into the Luta, Yorun town had arisen. Most nations would reckon it a village, but it had its halidom, assembly hall, market, and busy little industries. Three taverns were not too many.
North and east the fertile ground yielded to wasteland, well-nigh treeless, begrown with ling, gorse, tussocky grass, reeds around darkling pools. Flocks of wildfowl cruised its winds, some deer cropped beneath, some wolves preyed on them, otherwise only hare, fox, and lesser game found dwelling. As for men, a few shepherds grazed their beasts, a few hunters ranged about when they were not in the forest or the hills. None ever fared more than two or three days onward from the river valley: for yonder lay the marches of the Twilight.
Too remote and humble to draw either bandits or conquerors, Aeland provided modestly for itself, with a bit over to trade when a chapman had crossed the mountains and followed Isung Road to Yorun. Sometimes folk bickered, once in a while they feuded bitterly, but for the main part they were friendly and helpful to each other. The priest led them in rites, hallowed whatever required it, and the rest of the time plied an ordinary trade. The reeve presided over shire meetings, arrested and punished the very rare felon, and judged between such disputants as chose to go before him. He also collected the taxes, most of which went off to the King. That was a service less gratefully received. However, people were resigned to government, as they were to sicknesses, blights, and the withering of their strength with age. On the whole, theirs were agreeable lives and gentle endings.
Then the goblins came.
The hunter Oric brought the first news to Yorun. Tracking a stag over Mimring Heath, he spied from a distance a thing so strange that he veered toward it. Soon his hounds would follow him no more, but milled about howling dismally, no matter how he whistled and cursed. With the recklessness of youth he pushed on alone.
What he reached was a black stone fortalice. Doorless and seemingly windowless, it sprawled across an acre in a repellently irregular outline. The walls lifted about thrice his height to a roof of jagged slates. Towers stood as high again at the angles and corners, with chimneys between. No two were alike, thin or squat, crenellated or coned or domed in different styles, but all of them lumpy and hideous.
Wind blew chill, snickering in the whins, driving a low gray wrack before it that mingled with smoke from the chimneys. Oric got a smell of something roasting, which somehow made him feel less hungry than sickened. His nerve failed him and he withdrew.
At his campfire that evening, for a night’s sleep on the way home, he thought he glimpsed small misshapes running about at the flickery verge of sight, and thought he heard voices cackle and gabble. Certain was that his hounds whined and crowded around him, tails between legs. He slept only fitfully, ridden by nightmares.
“That is impossible,” declared the reeve after Oric told him. “Workmen would have been seen. You say you did not even notice tracks left by wagons or stone boats.”
“It is not impossible for such as come out of the Twilight,” said the priest softly. “We must go look.”
Led by these three, a band of the neighborhood’s braver men went forth. Mostly they armed themselves with knives, wood axes, scythes, flails, and the like. Here and there was a sword or a bill that someone’s great-grandsire had borne in the Margraves’ War. They found the ugly castle out on the heath and stood shivering in a thin rain. The reeve hallooed, sounded his horn, rode around the walls and hammered on them. Nothing responded.
Oric felt need to show he had regained courage. He had comrades boost him onto the roof. The slates cut his leather breeks and scored his hands as he crept up the steep pitch to a chimney that was not smoking. When he looked down it, heat parched his eyeballs. Hell-deep below him, coals glowed white under wavery blue flames. He crept back to report, “None will get in by that way.” His bloody palms became inflamed and took weeks to heal.
Nor could the rites of the priest do anything, then or ever.
The men returned to a sorrowful word. At several outlying farms, weanling infants had been stolen from their cradles. It appeared that although shutters were fastened on the inside, bolts had risen and an intruder that saw in the dark crawled through. Where ground was soft, it bore prints of small narrow feet with long talonlike toes. No hound would pursue those tracks, which presently lost themselves on the heath but pointed toward the castle.
The priest spent days and candlelit nights among his books. “I think that is a settlement of goblins,” he announced at length. “What they want children for, it is not good to know.”
During the months and years that followed, in dusk or by moonlight, folk fleetingly saw the creatures. Less often they heard gibbering or wicked laughter. The picture they fitted together piece by piece was of a thing upright, skinny-limbed, less than five feet tall. A big hairless head bore raggedy ears, monstrous nose, and eyes like glowing lanthorns. A flung stone, a cast spear, a shot arrow never struck.
The goblins did not attack grown humans. They stole grain from fields, fruit from orchards, young livestock from pastures, but such losses were bearable, no more than crows or wolves might take. What was cruel was the vanishing of babes. Parents could scarcely watch wakeful by turns every night, if they had a hard day’s work to do. Older children were apt to drowse off, or fled screaming when shutters flew open and a horrible face in the window mouthed at them. Dogs seldom dared bark. Only well-to-do households could pay for guards. It took just a minute for a goblin to lift an infant and be gone.
In the first year the Aelanders strove. Twice they made battering rams and tried to smash a way into the castle; but they merely splintered the timber. They searched and dug for the tunnels that the goblins must use to pass in and out, but never found other than badgers’ burrows, for no hound would sniff along goblin spoor and the wet parts of the heath broke any visible trails. They proclaimed aloud offers of gold, fine cloth, and similar wares, if the thieves would desist; raspy noises jeered reply. No trap or ambush caught a goblin, no horse ran one down before it had skipped from sight.
They sent messengers over the mountains to the King. In the second year, upon their third application, he dispatched a baron and men-at-arms. The baron had the folk build a mangonel and collect large stones before the castle. These missiles knocked hardly a chip loose; and at night the goblins gibed from beyond the firelight. “Men can no more cure this affliction than they can the plague,” decided the baron, and took his party back. The King instituted a new tax in the shire, for defense.
The goblins grew more brazen, or else more numerous. Now and then they were seen in the streets of Yorun itself, by the yellow luminance out of homes. From the town also they plucked infants, as well as from everywhere else in Aeland.
To be sure, this spread the loss wider, so that no one neighborhood suffered worse than a single bereavement in a year or three. Sickness laid more than that in the earth. If the hours between sunset and sunrise were haunted, people could go in groups, swinging lanthorns and talking loudly, and perhaps starry summer nights no longer turned lad and lass too rashly loving. If there was no more wish to kindle midsummer bonfires and dance till dawn, services in the halidom remained safe and were decorous. Hunters, herders, and others whose work kept them in the open could walk with a certain swagger. The rest learned to keep any bitterness behind their teeth, save when a man and his wife stood alone by an empty cradle.