Quite Contrary by Richard Roberts Page A

her”
    “And Eric and Valdis will guard you,” Nall put in.
    I sighed. “If I tried to leave them behind they’d just follow me.”
    These people were impossible. Good thing I was leaving.



chewed on a hunk of leftover meat while Valdis and Eric and their folks did the instructions, and the good-byes, and the hugging. I kept myself on the other side of Valdis from her father.
    That worked just about not at all. Like they’d sent some kind of telepathic message, Valdis stepped aside and Magnus pounced on me. While my personal space was being violated and my ribs creaked, he whispered, “My daughter and Eric are young, but they’ll get you safely to the Sibyl. I promise she’ll have an answer. We’ll see each other again.”
    “No, we won’t,” I warned him when I could breathe. He was smart enough not to argue with me.
    Eric and Valdis set out, and I trailed after them. How they could tell one direction from another was beyond me. They lived in the flattest, greenest place I could imagine. I knew there were hills out there, but they weren’t big enough to show up on the horizon. I’d be seeing them soon enough. They were only a stretch of merciless boredom away.
    A good night’s sleep had done wonders for my legs, at least. They swung loose and pain free, letting me keep up with the much bigger kids. The scenery was nice, too. Okay, it was lots and lots of grass, but the place had a simple, natural charm rather than being grand and epic. Here and there a rock as big as a man would sit out on the flat meadow for no apparent reason. Gangs of sheep lurked in the distance, and a rabbit stampeded for the other side of creation every thirty seconds.
    Looking around kept me entertained for, what, ten minutes? I didn’t have a watch, but the pleasant scenery subsided in the tedium of walking. After a while, I got so desperate I asked, “What’s with the crossbow, anyway? I saw other axes and swords, but nothing like that.”
    Eric unslung it while he walked. He held the stupid thing like it was made of feathers. Oh, well. I didn’t want all the muscle that came with that strength anyway.
    “It’s not a Northern weapon. Valdis’s father captured it as loot in his youth and it sat in his smithy for years. It’s not worth anything much, but he wanted to remember what a strange weapon it was. It’s easy to fire, and if you hit, the arrow will go through steel, but you only get one shot. It came with a winding machine, and by the time it was ready to fire again the battle would be over. Then, he took it down to show me one day and I cocked it by hand. He gave it to me as a gift.”
    “What Eric’s leaving out is that we were getting desperate,” Valdis chimed in gleefully, “You’ve seen how hard he can hit with a hammer. Thor’s strength turned out to be less useful with other weapons. He blunts a regular sword or axe with one swing. If he throws an axe or a spear, it breaks into bits. He snaps regular bowstrings.”
    The heated stare he gave her turned her grin into a laugh “Oh, and his aim is terrible. At least with this, he can hit something.”
    He kept staring, and she kept grinning, and eventually he grinned, too.
    Then, things got boring again.
    By the time we stopped for lunch, the landscape had changed. We were leaving the flat grassland and seeing more rocks and moss. It still wasn’t as uneven as the spot where I’d fallen into the middle of Viking nowhere, but I could see steam plumes that suggested two more hot springs.
    “Where are we going?” I asked between lengthy attempts to chew tough salted fish.
    “We’re not sure. In the hills around here is a gorge. Apparently, you know it when you see it. Follow the gorge, and it leads to the Sibyl,” Valdis answered.
    “Who is … ?”
    “A legend by herself,” Eric filled in, “A witch. A hag. A giantess, maybe. Even the gods seek out a prophetess before any great quest so that they don’t flail around in ignorance.”
    After that, we