Paul Edwin Zimmer - Ingulf the Mad

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NJUBLWQNEM 24-01-2003

Ingulf the Mad

By Paul Edwin Zimmer

The Sea-Elves

THE CITY OF the Sea-Elves stands alone—all but unknown in lands of men—by Y'Gora's

northern strand. There come the ships from beyond the world.

And there, one evening, came Ingulf of the Isles after long wandering, as the Twin Suns sank in

rainbow splendor. They had risen and set many times on his quest: long had he sifted legend and

myth, seeking a clue that would lead him here.

He heard the roar of surf hissing on the shore as he turned his horse's head toward the sea. White

towers rose in sight, and the unvisited city lay before him. Sea-wind stirred his copper hair: the

salt smell stirred his mind.

Waves of blood poured strongly through his veins: tiny chill thrillings swept over him. All the

days and dreary months of searching faded from memory, and instead it was a woman's face he

thought of, and the shape of a seal among great waves.

Ages ago, the folk of Tray Ithir that was his home, far away in the long chain of islands east of

Y'Gora, had beaten out the harvest with their great flails. But recent centuries had brought raiders

from the far north at harvest time, savage servants of

2 Paul Edwin Zimmer

the Demon-Lords of the icy waste, and so the great flails had found new work to do. So deadly

were they at this task that the men of Tray Ithir became far-famed warriors. Generations of the

Airarian Emperors, who rule many of the wide-scattered islands east of Y'Gora, as well as the

great Airarian peninsula that makes Y'Gora look on a map like a great cat's skull, with the Inner

Sea its open mouth, had sought the men of Tray Ithir to bring their war-flails into their armies.

Ingulf, son of Fingold, had followed this path. His father had been sword-master to his clan, and

his war-flail and skilled sword-arm won him some small fame in the Emperor's service.

When one raiding-season ended, he found himself in the dull and barren isles of the Scurlmard

chain, far to the north of his home, beyond the isles of the Curranach.

The folk of the Scurlmards wilt not hunt seals, for they say that the Sea-People travel in this

form.

But Ingulf laughed at such tales.

Boredom came upon him in the Scurlmards. He went hunting alone in his small boat. Hills of

water rose and fell about him: the Twin Suns were fiery eyes above the sea. Barren, stony islands

appeared and vanished behind restless, blue-green waves.

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He was returning to harbor with the few fish he had caught, when a long brown shape skimmed

up the side of a rippling wave.

A seal, he thought, and plied his oars. He was skilled at hunting in the water: he crept up on it and

laid down the oars and gripped his harpoon.

He stiffened, and raised the long straight shaft. The seal balanced on the crest of a wave. Ingulf

rose and threw, and the harpoon flew. It struck further back than he had planned, and the seal

wailed in a woman's voice.

His harpoon line tightened in his hand, and his boat was drawn swiftly through the water. A dip

in the waves showed him the rocks of a stony little island ahead.

The rope hummed. Black, jagged stone pierced the creamy water on either side, but the seal

swam safely through.

Ingulf the Mad 3

dragging the boat behind, toward a tiny gravel beach. A cave gaped in the cliff above.

A wave lifted the seal and laid her gently on the little beach. Ingulf jerked out his long dirk, ready

to leap from the boat; for a seal upon land is easy to kill.

But the brown shape reared up, and the seal-skin seemed to fall away. It was a woman there,

crying and tugging with slender white hands at the harpoon in her hip.

As he stared. Ingulf almost lost his life to the sea. Powerful currents seized the boat and whirled it

toward the rocks. He seized his paddle and drove the pitching boat to shore.

She let go the spear-shaft then, and tried to escape, but felt, with blood pouring over her white

legs.

He leaped from the boat and ran to her side. The ends of the long brown hair that was her only

garment were bright with blood. Huge eyes stared at him in wild terror.

He tried to speak soothingly as he wrestled with the harpoon, working the barb loose. Her pain

would haunt his nightmares forever.

Had it been her long brown hair he had seen in the water, and thought was a seal? It hung below

her waist.

His mind went round and round, numb with guilt. He got the harpoon loose, and she sobbed and

screamed with exhaustion while he tried to stop the blood.

That was the beginning of it all, and terrible it was. He bound up her wound as best he might,

stuttering helpless words of guilt and sorrow, and made her drink from the wineskin that was

slung on his back. She controlled her weeping at last, and gazed at him with eyes that were larger

and softer than the eyes of any woman of mortal blood.

But a strange thing it was, that he could never, afterward remember what color those eyes were.

Sometimes he seemed to remember that they had been gray as the sea at twilight, and then again

they would come into his mind a transparent blue, like the night sky between the stars, or again as

brown as her hair, or sometimes golden. . . .

But whatever color they were, he would see those eyes looking at him for the rest of his days.

4 Paul Edwin Zimmer

He built a fire, and brought from the boat those few fish he had caught, along with his fur-lined

cloak to cover her. The Twin Suns settled into the sea. She ate the fish he cooked, and slept

wrapped in his cloak, while he sat and piled driftwood on the fire until he fell asleep with his

back against the stone.

A time of happiness came with the sunlight into the cave, for then she spoke to him, and her

voice in speech seemed more beautiful than any song.

Her name was Airellen, the daughter of Falmoran, and she had never before spoken to a mortal.

Something she told him of that strange city by the waves where men do not go, and more of the

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green mystery of the sea, though all she said was to him a maze of strange names and riddles. But

her eyes glowed on him, and he was happy.

He found himself trying to tell her of Tray Ithir and his people, but now they seemed drab and

colorless, and his tongue stumbled into silence. Then he tried to tell her of the battles he had seen

in the service of the Emperor, but it came to him that he was boasting, and he was silent once

more.

Yet he lived as in a fever of happiness, hunting for shellfish in the shallow water, tending the fire

each night while she slept.

It came to him more than once that he should take her to Lonnamara in his boat, to the healer

there; but when he spoke of this to her, he found himself lost in her wide eyes, while she told

some tale of marvels that he could never afterward recall.

The thought faded from his mind. The days passed, and her wound healed, while he served her in

a joy that seemed half-dream.

He loved her. He knew that he loved her, and he tried in vain to make himself speak of it. But

when her eyes turned upon him, he could not.

Far more swiftly than mortal flesh, her wound healed. A terror came upon him then. Soon she

would be able to return to her own people. He tried to picture life without her, and a hostile,

empty future rose before him.

In a panic, then, he rushed to tell her of his love—and failed, his will drowning in the oceans of

her eyes.

Out of her sight, he could think again, and his resolve

Ingulf the Mad 5

returned. He fell to shaping words into a speech that would make his feelings clear to her, and he

rehearsed it again and again to himself as he gathered driftwood on the beach.

But when he tried to say these carefully-chosen words to her, again he found himself silent before

those huge and beautiful eyes, while she spoke to him of persons and places that were but a

tangle of names he did not know.

He found himself dazed outside the cave, and realized he still had not spoken. He rushed back

inside, the vision of the empty world he had foreseen a terror within him, and clenching shut his

eyes he forced his lips to move—not in the careful words he had labored on, but wild,

stammering words.

Her small breasts moved in a sigh.

"But you are a mortal man," she said. "The old songs of my people say that when a mere handful

of decades have passed, your youth and strength and beauty will fall from you, and you will

wither like a leaf, and die. 1 have no need of sorrow. Let us part as friends, and let me remember

you as you are now."

She rose from where she was sitting, and tried to walk by him to the mouth of the cave. But he,

stammering words he could never remember after, seized her arm; thinking only that he could

never, ever live without her.

Her wide eyes filled with the same terror they had held when he had leaped with his knife from

the boat. Suddenly her beauty flared around him; his passion burst and drained away in an instant

of unendurable ecstasy, and he fell stunned to the floor.

He lay helpless as she limped past him, out of the cave and down to the sea. He tried to raise

himself, to follow her, fighting his weakness, but could not even crawl.

Then the sweetness of her singing was like an icy wave in his blood, as she walked singing into

the sea, and he heard the words of her song—

But mortals turn to dust and bone And leave you crying all alone . . .

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Mastering his weakness, he dragged himself to the mouth of the cave. But all he saw was a seal

skimming over the crest of the waves.

Paul Edwin Zimmer

Far had he journeyed since he had lurched at last from the cave, where he had lain mindless for

two days. A madness had driven him to his boat, a madness to find that secret city and harbor of

the Sea-Elves, where men do not go.

In Elthar, where the Guardians of the World watch over Y'Gora, and where dwell yet survivors of

those first Elves who came to the world in the Age of Terror to join the battle against the Dark

Powers, he got little help. It were best, he was told, that Mortal Men stay away from the Sea-

People, for so little do they know of men that they do not realize how dangerous magic can be to

them. For the Elves live by magic, and strong spells are nothing to them.

Tales were told him of men who wandered for years witless, lost in lovely dreams that Elves had

woven for them, to ease, as they thought, the burden of mortal life.

But such tales did not turn the son of Fingold from his purpose. The Sages of Elthar shook their

heads.

"He, too, has been touched by an Elf," they said.

He had told none his own story. But ancient maps and curious scraps of legend gave him hope,

and he left Elthar. He tried to charter a boat to search the northern coasts, but none would consent

to sail into those waters. Slave galleys of Sarlow hunted there, and sailors told of seeing white

ships with glowing sails, and one of a far glimpse of white towers. But mortal ships avoided those

waters, unless driven there by the lawless wind.

So he rode north and east from Elthar, asking questions of the friendly forest Elves. Silence he

met most often, and a look of pity from star-keen eyes. But sometimes he got warnings, and some

of these had helped him to guess regions worth searching.

He wandered long in the great forests of the northern coast of Galinor, near the edges of the

Forest of Demons, and the western borders of the dreaded land of Sarlow. Once he escaped from

a Demon by sheer luck, and once had to fight his way out of an ambush of goblin rat-folk. Once

he blundered into a raiding party out of Sarlow, driving home their bound and weeping slaves.

The great iron blade of his flail had sung

Ingulf the Mad 7

a new song for them, and left bodies sprawled among the tangled roots of trees, and the slaves

weeping with joy.

South of him men dwelt in scattered farming villages, but along the coast he found only a single

tiny fishing village, whose people grew silent when he spoke to them of Elves, and ran away

when he asked if any had seen the white ships upon the ocean.

Hunters told him of paths in the forest where Elves had turned them aside. He found one of these

and followed it.

A voice hailed him from a tree. Looking up, he saw peering between the leaves the wide eyes of

an Elf.

"Turn back," the soft voice said. "This is no path for a Mortal Man to be taking."

"I have business with Falmoran of the Sea-Elves and his kin," Ingulf answered, his heartbeat

unnaturally loud. The wise eyes looked at him in grave silence.

"Ride on, then," the Elf said, after a time. "And may all powers protect you among my kinsmen

of the sea."

His quest ended, he sat on his horse and listened to the sad song the sea pours upon the shore.

The towers reared up, as white as bone. Tales said they shone at night. Sailors feared to see their

light.

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The Twin Suns vanished in the opal sea. Slowly the peacock colors of the afterglow dimmed.

In his mind, her eyes were on him.

He spurred the horse down the long green slope, toward the towers and the sea. He saw no shapes

on sand or stone between the towers; no sign that folk lived there, save that once he thought he

saw a hint of motion near the sea, where the docks would be. But the street toward which he rode

was empty.

Yet eyes were on him, ageless and bright.

Fiarril of the Sea-Elves stroked the strings of his harp.

"One comes," he said, "who has about him the sadness of Mortal Men."

His fingers moved with that sadness, and wrung it sobbing from the strings of his harp. But his

companion, Curulin, looked keenly at the man riding toward them through the dusk.

"There is more sadness than that upon him. ..." And

Paul Edwin Zimmer

dunlin's harp took up that sadness, fingers hunting across the strings for some precious thing that

had been lost.

The mourning sound of the strings reached Ingulfs ears, and he slumped in the saddle. Despair

choked him; his worst fears rose in his mind. He pulled the horse to a stop, seeing again terror in

her eyes, seeing her feet limping past, leaving him, leaving him forever. She might yet be far

away in the sea, or perhaps the dangers of the sea had taken her. . . .

"There was a joy in him too," said Fiarril. His fingers danced across the strings, in a shimmer of

delight and of love. "Listen! It is to a tryst that he comes!"

Ingulf pounded his heels into his horse's sides, urging him on. Like an echo of his elation the

music was around him, pulsing with the joy in his veins. Airellen! He would see her soon,

tonight. . . .

Against Fiarril's music the fingers of his companion played an undercurrent of lust.

Ingulf rode between tall towers, and in his mind her eyes glowed. Unseen Elves watched him

gallop through the twilight, their music all around him. White stone rang beneath the horse's

hooves. Wild music Filled him; and drunk with it, he spurred the horse recklessly.

The boom of the waves filled the streets like the snores of a giant.

He pulled his horse to a stop. All about him tall figures stared at him with huge eyes that were

inhumanly bright. There were women among them, slender, fine-boned—

Was she here? Airellen! Where was Airellen? He leaped from the saddle and ran into the crowd,

searching for her. Where was she? These were her kind, frail-boned, with wide eyes in fragile

faces, and hair like cloaks of shadow on their backs—but she was not among them. Emptiness

and longing battled the joyous music. Where was she?

Beautiful as these might be, none was she, none was Airellen, none could quench the longing in

him. The center of his life had been taken from him; the heart of the universe was gone! Where

was she? Where was she?

He ran, searching frantically through the crowd. Beautiful

Ingulf the Mad 9

inhuman face after face turned wide eyes on him, and was not hers. Panic filled him. Where was

she? Where was she?

Fiarril's fingers followed his mood, shifting to a mad quest across the strings.

Cold stars pricked through the sapphire of the sky. Was it the color of her eyes? He could not

remember, could not remember—

Where was she? Where was she?

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