as they do now, and of the wizardry of Martin Sair.”
Hull made no answer, for Ormiston was at hand. The village was much like Norse save that it huddled among low hills, on the crest of some of which loomed ancient ruins. At the near side his companion halted, and Hull thanked him as he leaped to the ground.
“Where to?” asked the farmer.
Hull thought a moment. “Selui,” he said.
“Well, it’s a hundred miles, but there’ll be many to ride you.”
“I have my own feet,” said the youth. He spun suddenly about at a voice across the road: “Hi! Mountainy!”
It was a girl. A very pretty girl, slim waisted, copper haired, blue eyed, standing at the gate before a large stone house. “Hi!” she called. “Will you work for your dinner?”
Hull was ravenous again. “Gladly!” he cried.
The voice of the farmer sounded behind him. “It’s Vail Ormiston, the dotard eldarch’s daughter. Hold her for a full meal, mountainy. My taxes are paying for it.”
But Vail Ormiston was above much converse with a wandering mountain-man. She surveyed his mighty form approvingly, showed him the logs he was to quarter, and then disappeared into the house. If, perchance, she peeped out through the clearest of the ancient glass fragments that formed the window, and if she watched the flexing muscles of his great bare arms as he swung the axe—well, he was unaware of it.
So it happened that afternoon found him trudging toward Selui with a hearty meal inside him and three silver dimes in his pocket, ancient money, with the striding figure of the woman all but worn away. He was richer than when he had set out by those coins, by the blunt pistol at his hip, by the shiny steel bow and arrows, and by the memory of the copper hair and blue eyes of Vail Ormiston.
OLD EINAR
Three weeks in Selui had served to give Hull Tarvish a sort of speaking acquaintancy with the place. He no longer gaped at the sky-piercing ruins of the ancient city, or the vast fallen bridges, and he was quite at home in the town that lay beside it. He had found work easily enough in a baker’s establishment, where his great muscles served well; the hours were long, but his pay was munificent—five silver quarters a week. He paid two for lodging, and food—what he needed beyond the burnt loaves at hand from his employment cost him another quarter, but that left two to put by. He never gambled other than a wager now and then on his own marksmanship, and that was more profitable than otherwise.
Ordinarily Hull was quick to make friends, but his long hours hindered him. He had but one, an incredibly old man who sat at evening on the step beyond his lodging, Old Einar. So this evening Hull wandered out as usual to join him, staring at the crumbling towers of the Ancients glowing in the sunset. Trees sprung on many, and all were green with vine and tussock and the growth of wind-carried seeds. No one dared build among the ruins, for none could guess when a great tower might come crashing down.
“I wonder,” he said to Old Einar, “what the Ancients were like. Were they men like us? Then how could they fly?”
“They were men like us, Hull. As for flying—well, it’s my belief that flying is a legend. See here; there was a man supposed to have flown over the cold lands to the north and those to the south, and also across the great sea. But this flying man is called in some accounts Lindbird and in others Bird and surely one can see the origin of such a legend. The migrations of birds, who cross land and seas each year, that is all.”
“Or perhaps magic,” suggested Hull.
“There is no magic. The Ancients themselves denied it and I have struggled through many a moldy book in a curious, archaic tongue.”
Old Einar was the first scholar Hull had ever encountered. Though there were many during the dawn of that brilliant age called the Second Enlightenment, most of them were still within the Empire. John Holland was dead, but Olin was yet alive in the world, and Kohlmar, and Jorgensen, and Teran, and Martin Sair, and Joaquin Smith the Master. Great names—the names of demigods.
But Hull knew little of them. “You can read!” he exclaimed. “That in itself is a sort of magic. And you have been within the Empire, even in N’Orleans. Tell me, what is the Great City like? Have they really learned the secrets of the Ancients? Are the Immortals truly immortal? How did they gain their knowledge?”
Old Einar settled himself on the step and puffed blue smoke from his pipe filled with the harsh tobacco of the region. “Too many questions breed answers to none,” he observed. “Shall I tell you the true story of the world, Hull—the story called History?”
“Yes. In Ozarky we spoke little of such things.”
“Well,” said the old man comfortably, “I will begin then, at what to us is the beginning, but to the Ancients was the end. I do not know what factors, what wars, what struggles, led up to the mighty world that died during the Dark Centuries, but I do know that three hundred years ago the world reached its climax. You cannot imagine such a place, Hull. It was a time of vast cities, too—fifty times as large as N’Orleans with its hundred thousand people.”
He puffed slowly. “Great steel wagons roared over the iron roads of the Ancients. Men crossed the oceans to east and west. The cities were full of whirring wheels, and instead of the many little city-states of our time, there were giant nations with thousands of cities and a hundred million—a hundred and fifty million people.”
Hull stared. “I do not believe there are so many people in the world,” he said.
Old Einar shrugged. “Who knows?” he returned. “The ancient books—all too few—tell us that the world is round, and that beyond the seas lie one, or several continents, but what races are there today not even Joaquin Smith can say.” He puffed smoke again. “Well, such was the ancient world. These were warlike nations, so fond of battle that they had to write many books about the horrors of war to keep themselves at peace, but they always failed. During the time they called their twentieth century there was a whole series of wars, not such little quarrels as we have so often between our city-states, nor even such as that between the Memphis League and the Empire, five years ago. Their wars spread like storm clouds around the world, and were fought between millions of men with unimaginable weapons that flung destruction a hundred miles, and with ships on the seas, and with gases.”
“What’s gases?” asked Hull.
Old Einar waved his hand so that the wind of it brushed the youth’s brown cheek. “Air is a gas,” he said. “They knew how to poison the air so that all who breathed it died. And they fought with diseases, and legend says that they fought also in the air with wings, but that is only legend.”
“Diseases!” said Hull. “Diseases are the breath of Devils, and if they controlled Devils they used sorcery, and therefore they knew magic.”
“There is no magic,” reiterated the old man. “I do not know how they fought each other with diseases, but Martin Sair of N’Orleans knows. That was his study, not mine, but I know there was no magic in it.” He resumed his tale. “So these great fierce nations flung themselves against each other, for war meant more to them than to us. With us it is something of a rough, joyous, dangerous game, but to them it was a passion. They fought for any reason, or for none at all save the love of fighting.”
“I love fighting,” said Hull.
