The Witch-Woman Trilogy

  When his servants had departed earthward, to work the will of Sargatanet among mankind, and to stir up in human hearts the doubtfulness and the discontent which endlessly oppressed the heart of Sargatanet, then the gaunt master of the Waste Beyond the Moon bent down toward where Madoc and Ettarre stood at his ankle. He heard the plea of Madoc, and he heard the threats of Madoc, impartially; and Sargatanet shrugged his winged shoulders.

  “That which is written by the Norns,” said Sargatanet, “cannot be evaded. The Norns have written all Earth’s history, they have recorded its Contents and its Colophon also. No man nor any god may alter any word of that which the Gray Three have written. For one, I would not grieve if such an evasion were possible, because Ettarre has now been my scholar and my prisoner for some 592 years. And you know what women are. That is why I do not bother to criticize seriously the writing of the three Norns.”

19. THE NATURE OF WOMEN

  Then Madoc said: “I am not certain that I do know what women are; but I know their ways are pleasant. Their lips have been dear to me. They have yet other possessions in which I have taken delight. A woman is a riddle without any answer; she is not mere bed-furnishing; she is a rapture very brightly colored; .she is a holiness which I am content to adore without understanding: and among all women who keep breath in them Ettarre has not her equal.

  “And besides,” Madoc continued, “Ettarre is more durable than are other women; for she is more than 592 years old; and never in the moon would you suspect it. Hers and hers only, it has been remarked by the diffident voice of understatement, is that perfect beauty of which all young poets have had their fitful glimpses. Her beauty is ageless. Her beauty has in it no flaw. And so, even if the completeness of the beauty of Ettarre may demolish commonsense, yet a generous-minded person will be ready to condone its excesses. A generous-minded person will concede, without any cowardly beating about the bushes of reticence, that among all women who keep breath in them Ettarre has not her equal.”

  Sargatanet replied: “Do you please stop talking. For we know what poets are; and all we immortals know what women are. But we cannot do anything whatever about it.”

20. LOVE SCORES A POINT

  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