Read Multiverse: Exploring the Worlds of Poul Anderson for Free Online

collections Kaleidoscope, Down in the Bottomlands (and Other Places), and Atlantis and Other Places, and, as editor, The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century, The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century, The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century, and, with Martin H. Greenberg, the Alternate Generals books. His most recent books include the novels The Big Switch and Supervolcano! He won a Hugo Award in 1994 for his story, “Down in the Bottomlands.” A native Californian, Turtledove has a Ph.D. in Byzantine history from UCLA, and has published a scholarly translation of a 9th-century Byzantine chronicle. He lives in Canoga Park, California, with his wife and family.
    In the autumnal story that follows, a bittersweet return to the world of Anderson’s landmark fantasy novel Three Hearts and Three Lions, he shows us that sometimes you can’t go home again, even if you want to more than anything else in the world.

    Alianora carried a bucket to the well in the tiny green at the heart of the village. She needed the water. She’d used what there was in the house the night before to soak green and yellow peas. She aimed to cook up a big pot of pease porridge, and enliven the flavor with chopped onion, bits of salt pork and some fennel she’d got from a wandering trader.
    Her long wool skirt almost stirred up dust as she walked along. Most village women embroidered flowers or bright birds on their linen tunics. She’d ornamented hers with dragons. Maybe—no, surely—they talked about her behind her back. Well, that was all right. They gossiped about one another the same way. And she joined in. In a place where great things never happened, what could you do but go on about small ones?
    She knew about great things. She’d lived through a dragon’s onslaught, something of which few mortals could boast. (Not that she did boast—what point to it?) She’d met elflords and sorceresses and high nobles of the human kind as well . . . and here she was, wed to the smith who’d forged the iron hoops that bound the bucket’s oaken staves.
    Sometimes she wondered whether the war against Chaos that had engulfed the whole world thirty years before was meant to bring nothing more splendid than countless villages, all of them places where great things never happened, scattered through plains and forests. But what better result could the war have birthed? If ordinary folk were able to live ordinary lives free from anything worse than ordinary fears, didn’t things wag the way they should?
    She smiled when she passed the smithy. Theodo waved back through the open door. He was never too busy to look out whenever someone went by. Part of that came from having two strapping sons learning the trade. Part sprang from life in a place like this. Anything that chanced was perforce noticeable and interesting, because not much did.
    The smile stayed on Alianora’s face as she walked on. Theodo was a good man, a kind man. He’d never struck her in anger, never once. He’d clouted Einhard and Nithard only when they’d really and truly earned it. His hands might be scarred and callused and hard, but they were gentle in the quiet dark. A good man. A kind man. Perhaps not the most exciting man God ever made, but . . .
    “I’ve had enough excitements, enough and to spare,” Alianora whispered fiercely. Her own work-roughened hands tightened on the bucket’s handle. Having magic-dashing cold iron in the family, so to speak, wasn’t such a bad thing even today.
    No, not half. The blue gloaming that warded Faerie folk from the daylight they could not bear had retreated many leagues after Chaos’ latest grand assault on the lands of Law went awry. Yet still you could see it on the horizon from here. It had even moved forward again, a little, once or twice, in the years since then. Law’s nature, after all, was to forget and to forgive. Chaos did neither, it seemed, and found more agents within Law’s borders to work