The Keeper | Page 4

the crypt.
The dogs looked up as he approached. They knew that he wanted to lift the cover, but
they were comfortable and had to be coaxed to leave it. He laid aside the deerskins. The
stone slab was heavy, and he had to strain to tilt it up. He leaned it against the wall, then
picked up the lumicon and went down the steps into the little room below, opening the
wooden chest and getting out the bundle wrapped in bearskin. He brought it up again and
carried it to the table, from which Dranigo and Salvadro were clearing the dishes.
"Here it is," he said, untying the thongs. "I do not know how old it is. It was old even
before the Ice-Father was born."
That was too much for Vahr. "See, I told you he's crazy!" he cried. "The Ice-Father has
been here forever. Gorth Sledmaker says so," he added, as though that settled it.
"Gorth Sledmaker's a fool. He thinks the world began in the time of his grandfather." He
had the thongs untied, and spread the bearskin, revealing the blackened leather box, flat
on the bottom and domed at the top. "How long ago do you think it was that the
Ice-Father was born?" he asked Salvadro and Dranigo.
"Not more than two thousand years," Dranigo said. "The glaciation hadn't started in the
time of the Third Empire. There is no record of this planet during the Fourth, but by the
beginning of the Fifth Empire, less than a thousand years ago, things here were very
much as they are now."
"There are other worlds which have Ice-Fathers," Salvadro explained. "They are all
worlds having one pole or the other in open water, surrounded by land. When the polar
sea is warmed by water from the tropics, snow falls on the lands around, and more falls in
winter than melts in summer, and so is an Ice-Father formed. Then, when the polar sea is
all frozen, no more snow falls, and the Ice-Father melts faster than it grows, and finally
vanishes. And then, when warm water comes into the polar sea again, more snow falls,
and it starts over again. On a world like this, it takes fifteen or twenty thousand years
from one Ice-Father to the next."
"I never heard that there had been another Ice-Father, before this one. But then, I only
know the stories told by the old men, when I was a boy. I suppose that was before the
first people came in starships to this world."
The two men of Dremna looked at one another oddly, and he wondered, as he unfastened
the brass catches on the box, if he had said something foolish, and then he had the box
open, and lifted out the Crown. He was glad, now, that Salvadro had brought in the new

lumicon, as he put the box aside and set the Crown on the black bearskin. The golden
circlet and the four arches of gold above it were clean and bright, and the jewels were
splendid in the light. Salvadro and Dranigo were looking at it wide-eyed. Vahr Farg's son
was open-mouthed.
"Great Universe! Will you look at that diamond on the top!" Salvadro was saying.
"That's not the work of any Galactic art-period," Dranigo declared. "That thing goes back
to the Pre-Interstellar Era." And for a while he talked excitedly to Salvadro.
"Tell me, Keeper," Salvadro said at length, "how much do you know about the Crown?
Where did it come from; who made it; who were the first Keepers?"
He shook his head. "I only know what my father told me, when I was a boy. Now I am an
old man, and some things I have forgotten. But my father was Runch, Raud's son, who
was the son of Yorn, the son of Raud, the son of Runch." He went back six more
generations, then faltered and stopped. "Beyond that, the names have been lost. But I do
know that for a long time the Crown was in a city to the north of here, and before that it
was brought across the sea from another country, and the name of that country was
Brinn."
Dranigo frowned, as though he had never heard the name before. "Brinn." Salvadro's eyes
widened. "Brinn, Dranigo! Do you think that might be Britain?"
Dranigo straightened, staring, "It might be! Britain was a great nation, once; the last
nation to join the Terran Federation, in the Third Century Pre-Interstellar. And they had a
king, and a crown with a great diamond...."
"The story of where it was made," Rand offered, "or who made it, has been lost. I
suppose the first people brought it to this world when they came in starships."
"It's more wonderful than that,