Then Sargatanet lifted the two lovers 592 feet, and through as many dead years, to the stone table beside his throne; and now before them lay open a book of which the pages were as tall as Sargatanet. This was the book in which the Norns had written the history of our world and all that has been upon Earth and all that will ever be.
“As I was saying,” Sargatanet continued, “we know what women are. They very certainly do not excel as creative writers. Their imagination needs chastening; their bent is toward the excessively romantic. Thus the gray ladies have written a great deal of nonsense, and they have permitted entirely too much to hinge upon love affairs. Nevertheless, no man nor any god may alter any word of the Norns’ out-of-date nonsense, of which all men and gods are a portion. So do these ladies keep the feminine privilege of the last word. And here it is written, plainly enough, that I shall retain Ettarre until the 725 years of her captivity are ended.”
Madoc walked far up the page to inspect that entry in the giant book. “There is no need,” said Madoc, “to alter any word.”
With that, he took out the quill pen which had fallen from the wing of the Father of All Lies, he stooped, and with this pen Madoc inserted after the digit seven a decimal point.
21. THE PEN OF THE CENSOR
And then of course—because whatsoever is written in the Book of the Norns must be fulfilled, and figures in particular cannot lie,—then a changing followed of all that which had been since seven years and three months after the beginning of Ettarre’s captivity in the Waste Beyond the Moon.
Everything which had existed upon Earth during the last 584 years passed very swiftly and confusedly before the eyes of Madoc, as these things swirled backward into oblivion, now that none of these things had ever happened.
Twenty generations of mankind and all their blusterings upon land and sea went by young Madoc in the appearance of a sandstorm. Each grain of sand was a town or, it might be, an opulent and famous city, just as that city had been builded laboriously and painfully by some twenty generations of a people’s cluttered, flustered, humdrum, troubleful, lumped hubbub, ungrudged because of that people’s high dreams.
All the toil and glory and folly and faith and irrational happiness of the many millions whom Madoc’s pen had put out of living had now not ever existed, because that which is written in the Book of the Norns must be fulfilled. And it was now written in this book that the bondage of Ettarre should endure for only seven and a quarter years.
22. NEAR YGGDRASILL
Not ever before had anybody essayed to cheat the Norns in quite this fashion: and so, from their quiet studio, by Yggdrasill, the Gray Three noticed this quaint expurgating of their work almost at once.
Verdandi, in fact, took off her reading glasses so as to observe just what was happening over yonder. “Oh, yes, I see!” she said comfortably. “It is only a poet altering the history of Earth.”
Her sisters glanced up from their writing: and they all smiled. Urdhr remarked, “These poets! they are always trying to escape their allotted doom.”
But Skuld looked rather pensively at each of the two other literary ladies before she said, “One almost pities them at times.”
Then Urdhr laughed outright. “My darling, you waste sympathy in this sweet fashion because we also were poets when we wrote Earth’s Epic. For myself, I grant we made a mistake to put any literary people in the book. Still, it is a mistake to which most beginners are prone: and that story, you must remember, was one of our first efforts. All inexperienced girls must necessarily write balderdash. So we put poets in that book, and death, and love, and common-sense, and I can hardly remember what other incredibilities.”
With that, they all laughed again, to think of their art’s crude beginnings.
23. THE CALL OF EARTH
A poet is bold. “There is no god in any current mythology who would have made bold to cheat the Norns,” said Sargatanet, with odd quietness.
Madoc replied, “My pen is almighty; my pen is equally good at music-making and at arithmetic.”
Sargatanet looked, for some while, with very pale blue eyes, at the two midgets down there beside his gold-sandaled feet. “Your pen makes music,” Sargatanet then said, “such as all men delight in. Yet it cannot make my music. Your pen cannot write down nor may it cancel any line of the music which I eternally devise to be an eternal vexing to every poet, no matter what may be his boldness.”
But, in the while that Sargatanet spoke such nonsense, Madoc had uplifted his Ettarre to the back of his hippogriffin. “I have done with all vexations!” Madoc cried out, as the glittering monster spread its huge white wings, and, flapping upward from behind the moon, plunged mightily toward Earth.
Thereafter the hippogriffin went as a comet goes, because its heart remembered that upon this Earth, among the dear hills of Noenhir, were its warm nest builded out of cedar trees and its loved mate brooding over her agate-colored eggs. And upon the monster’s back, exulting Madoc also passed with a high heart, toward his allotted doom.
PART FOUR. OF MADOC IN THE OLD TIME
Ils vécurent ainsi pendant quelque temps: et la plume noire lui donna de l’argent, du bien, tout ce qu’il faut pour vivre heureux dans le monde. Ensuite le chevalier Madoc partit encore pour voyager.
24. THE OLD TIME REITERATES
Thus it was that Madoc and his Ettarre returned to an Earth rejuvenated by Madoc’s pen, and lived in the old time which long and long ago had perished before the time of Madoc.
Now the Northmen ruled as lords of Noenhir, where the hippogriffin had left its riders. These Northmen were an unsophisticated and hardy people, exceedingly brave and chaste, whose favorite recreations were drunkenness and song-making and piracy.
They welcomed the singer who could make such comfortable and uplifting songs as Madoc wrote with the quill which had fallen from the wing of the Father of All Lies. Madoc sang to them about their own importance, about the excellence of their daily habits, and about the splendid and luxurious future which was in store for their noble Nordic race: he made for them that music which incites mankind toward magnanimity.
Under their winged helmets the ruddy faces of the attendant pirates were aglow with altruism and kindliness and every manner of virtue. In their thorps and homesteads they welcomed Madoc, and paid him well. So Madoc builded at Noenhir a fine wooden halclass="underline" he and his Ettarre began housekeeping: and Madoc had not anything to trouble him, and his fair wife’s embraces were now as dear to him as once had been the embraces of Ainath.
25. CONFECTIONER’S REPOSE
Madoc had not anything to trouble him. For many years he made his songs, and these songs made his hearers better and more happy. The only difference was that Madoc, now, had invested some little faith in his optimistic and uplifting songs; and much of what they said appeared to Madoc to be, quite possibly, almost true, here and there.
Madoc lived statelily, with all manner of comfort, in his broad hall, with dragons handsomely painted upon each end of it, and with a stout palisade of oak logs enclosing everything. The most prominent thieves and cutthroats in the country delighted to hear and to reward the singing of Madoc; Druids had crowned Madoc with the sacred mistletoe, as the king of skalds; the fame of Madoc was spread everywhither about the world: and the renowned poet had not anything to trouble him, and no heavier task confronted Madoc than to make praiseworthy music.