The Sterkarm Handshake Read Online Free PDF

for the diners, was set across the hall at right angles to the others. Andrea sat there, alone. Her hostess, Isobel, had harried her son and husband off on some errand as soon as they’d swallowed their last mouthful, and then had disappeared herself. Ever since Andrea had brought them the news that “Elf-Windsor” was coming to visit the next day, Isobel had been in a fret.
    Sweet Milk had kept Andrea company at first, but then he’d gone away too. At least that had given her a few minutes to write down what he’d told her, in the notebook taken from her pocket. She’d had to hold it awkwardly in one hand while writing with the other, because the boards of the trestle table were too greasy to rest the book on. The Sterkarms used thick squares of stale bread for plates, and the gravy soaked through.
    Sweet Milk’s story was exactly the sort of firsthand account she needed for the book she planned to write when she went home: an account of the Sterkarms’ way of life. Even if she never got it published, it ought to help her get a post in some university’s anthropology department.
    The chance to live with the Sterkarms had been one she’d just had to grab. The job had seemed fated to be hers. She’d only heard about the job by chance, and then had almost not bothered to apply. But she’d been almost at the end of her studies and beginning to look around for work. She thought her Danish had swung it for her—her mother was Danish, and she could speak a reasonable Danish herself. She never would have been able to pick up the Sterkarms’ thick dialect so quickly otherwise.
    Of course, she was a dimension removed from her own world, so this wasn’t the sixteenth century of her own timeline—if she’d understood the scientific explanations at all correctly. But, she’d been assured, the two dimensions were so close, there was no essential difference. “The dimensions diverge inasmuch as Anne Boleyn wore a red dress to her execution in one, and a pink dress in the other” had been one rather distasteful explanation. The scientists had been more interested in whether oil, gas and gold had exactly the same properties in both dimensions.
    But to be in the sixteenth century, even if a dimension removed from her own. To be talking with sixteenth-century people, seeing how they lived at first hand, experiencing it herself. She could never think about it for more than a couple of seconds at a time because it made her dizzy. If she ever let herself truly feel how incredible, how miraculous—the technology! The implications!—then she was sure her mind would fly to bits.
    She wished she could think as the Sterkarms did: that all she had done was to step over the magical boundary between Elf-Land and Man’s-Home. In an odd way they feared the Time Tube as magical and supernatural while, at the same time, regarding it as entirely natural. But then, so much of their world was inexplicable to them. They didn’t understand why the sun and moon rose and set or moved across the sky, or what dreams were, or why people fell sick. The arrival of the Elves was just one more inexplicable thing that they had no choice but to accept as true. She made a note.
    She read again through the notes she’d just made.
    Sweet Milk told me when he was about ten, reivers came and burned down his family’s home. He thinks they were Grannams, probably on way home from reiving Sterkarms. They came on SM’s little holding and took the chance to reive a few more goats and sheep. Sweet Milk, his mother & siblings ran away, watched riders by light of burning house. Sweet Milk’s father stayed behind, very foolish if brave. When family went back next day, father was dead. Sweet Milk says his body torn all to pieces, so many lances had been driven through him. Tears ran down into his beard as he told me this. The Sterkarms aren’t at all ashamed to show their