The Knight. Part 1

Gene Wolfe.

The Knight.

THE RIDERS.

Who treads those level lands of gold, The level fields of mist and air, And rolling mountains manifold And towers of twilight over there?

No mortal foot upon them strays, No archer in the towers dwells, But feet too airy for our ways Go up and down their hills and dells.

The people out of old romance, And people that have never been, And those that on the border dance Between old history and between Resounding fable, as the king Who held his court at Camelot.

There Guinevere is wandering And there the knight Sir Lancelot.

And by yon precipice of white, As steep as Roncesvalles, and more, Within an inch of fancy's sight, Roland the peerless rides to war.

And just the tip of Quixote's spear, The greatest of them all by far, Is surely visible from here!

But no: it is the Evening Star.

--LORD DUNSANY.

CHAPTER 1.

DEAR BEN.

Y ou must have stopped wondering what happened to me a long time ago; I know it has been many years. I have the time to write here, and what looks like a good chance to get what I write to where you are, so I am going to try. If I just told everything on a couple of sheets, you would not believe most of it. Hardly any of it, because there are many things that I have trouble with myself. So what I am going to do instead is tell everything. When I have finished, you still may not believe me; but you will know all that I do. In some ways, that is a lot. In others, practically nothing. When I saw you sitting by our fire--my own brother--there on the battlefield . . . Never mind. I will get to it. Only I think it may be why I am writing now.

Remember the day we drove out to the cabin? Then Geri phoned. You had to go home and did not need a kid around. So we said there was no reason for me to go too, I could stay out there and you would come back the next day. We said I would fish.

17.That was it.

Only I did not. It did not seem like it was going to be much fun with you gone, but the air was crisp and the leaves were turning, so I went on a hike. Maybe it was a mistake. I went a long way, but I was not lost. Pretty soon I picked up a stick and hiked with it, but it was crooked and not very strong. I did not like it much and decided I would cut a good one I could keep out at the cabin and use whenever we were there. I saw a tree that was different from all the others. It was not very big, and it had white bark and s.h.i.+ny leaves. It was a spiny orange tree, Ben, but I had never heard of them. Later Bold Berthold told me a lot. It was too big for me to cut the whole thing, but I found a branch that was almost straight. I cut off that and trimmed it and so forth. That may have been the main thing, my main mistake. They are not like other trees. The Mossmen care more about them. I had gone off the path when I saw the spiny orange, and when I got to it I saw it was right at the edge of the woods, and past it were the downs. Some hills were pretty steep, but they were beautiful, smooth and covered with long gra.s.s. So I hiked out there with my new stick and climbed three or four hills. It was really nice. I found a little spring at the top of a hill. I had a drink, and sat down--I was pretty tired by then--and carved the stick some, making who-knows-what. Just whittling. After a while I lay down and looked at the clouds. Everybody has seen pictures in clouds, but I saw more that afternoon than I ever have before or since-- an old man with a beard that the wind changed into a black dragon, a wonderful horse with a horn on its head, and a beautiful lady who smiled down at me.

After that, a flying castle, all spiky like a star because there were towers and turrets coming out of all its sides. I kept telling myself it had to be a cloud, but it did not look like a cloud, Ben. It looked like stone. I got up and chased after it, waiting for the wind to blow it apart, but it never did. Night came. I could not see the castle any longer, and I knew I had to be a long way from our cabin. I started back across the downs, walking fast; but I got to walking down a slope that had no bottom. Somebody grabbed me in the dark, and somebody else caught my ankle when I slapped that hand away. Right then somebody said, "Who comes to Aelfrice!" I still remember that, and for a 18.long, long time after that, that was all I could remember. That and being grabbed by a lot of people.

I woke up in a cave by the sea, where an old lady with too many teeth sat spinning; and when I had pulled myself together and found my stick, I asked where we were, trying to be as polite as I could. "Can you tell me what place this is, ma'am, and how to get to Griffinsford from here?" For some reason I thought Griffinsford was where we lived, Ben, and I still do not remember the real name. Maybe it really is Griffinsford. They are all mixed up. The old lady shook her head.

"Do you know how I got here?"

She laughed, and the wind and the sea were in it; she was the spray, and the waves that broke outside her cave. When I talked to her, I was talking to them. That was how I felt. Does it sound crazy? I had been crazy since I was born, and now I was sane and it felt wonderful. The wind and the waves were sitting in that cave with me twisting thread, and nature was not something outside anymore. She was a big part of it, and I was a little part of it, and I had been gone too long. Later Ga.r.s.ecg said the sea had healed me.

I went to the mouth of the cave and waded out until the water came up to my waist; but the only things I could see were cliffs hanging over her cave, deep blue water farther out, gulls, and jagged black rocks like dragons' teeth. The old woman said, "You must wait for the slack of the tide." I came back, sea-wet to my armpits. "Will it be long?"

"Long enough."

After that I just leaned on my stick and watched her spin, trying to figure out what it was that she was turning into string and why it made the noises it did. Sometimes it seemed like there were faces in it and arms and legs coming out of it.

"You are Able of the High Heart."

That got my attention, and I told her my old name.

Up to then, she had never looked away from her spinning. "What I say aright, do not you smite," she told me.

I said I was sorry.

19."Some loss must be, so this I decree: the lower your lady the higher your love." She stopped spinning to smile at me. I knew she meant it to be friendly, but her teeth were terrible and looked as sharp as razors. She said, "There must be a forfeit for insolence, and since that's how it usually is, that one shouldn't do much harm."

That was how I got my name changed.

She went back to spinning, but it looked like she was reading her thread.

"You shall sink before you rise, and rise before you sink." It scared me, and I asked if I could ask her a question.

"It had best be, since you ask one. What do you want to know, Able of the High Heart?"

There was so much I could not get it out. I said, "Who are you?" instead.

"Parka."

"Are you a fortune-teller?"

She smiled again. "Some say so."

"How did I get here?"

She pointed with the distaff, the thing that held the stuff she was spinning, pointing toward the back of the cave, where it was all black.

"I don't remember being there," I told her.

"The recollection has been taken from you."

As soon as she said it, I knew it was right. I could remember certain things. I could remember you and the cabin and the clouds, but all that had been a long time ago, and after it there had been a lot I could not remember at all.

"The Aelf carried you to me."

"Who are the Aelf?" I felt I ought to know.

"Don't you know, Able of the High Heart?"

That was the last thing she said for a long while. I sat down to watch, but sometimes I looked at the back of the cave where she said I had come from. When I looked away from her, she got bigger and bigger, so I knew there was something huge behind me. When I turned and looked back at her again, she was not quite as big as I was.

That was one thing. The other one was that I knew that when I was little I had known all about the Aelf, and it was all mixed up with somebody else, a li ttle girl who had played with me; and there had been big, big trees, and ferns a 20.lot bigger than we were, and clear springs. And moss. Lots of moss. Soft, green moss like velvet.

"They have sent you with the tale of their wrongs," Parka said, "and their wors.h.i.+p."

"Wors.h.i.+p?" I was not sure what she meant.

"Of you."

That brought back other things--not things, really, but feelings. I said, "I don't like them," and it was the truth.

"Plant one seed," she told me.

For a long time, I waited for her to say something else, waiting because I did not want to ask her questions. She never did, so I said, "Aren't you going to tell me all those things? The wrongs and the rest of it?"

"No."

I let out my breath. I had been afraid of what I might hear. "That's good."

"It is. Some gain there must be, so this I decree: each time you gain your heart's desire, your heart shall reach for something higher." I had the feeling then that if I asked more questions I was not going to like the answers. The sun stretched out his hands into our cave and blessed us both, or that was the way it seemed; then he sank into the sea, and the sea tried to follow him. Pretty soon the place where I had stood when I had waded out was hardly wet at all. "Is this the slack of the tide?" I asked Parka.

"Wait," she said, and bit her spinning through, wound a piece of it from her bobbin onto her hand, bit it off, and gave it to me, saying, "For your bow."

"I don't have a bow."

She pointed to my stick, Ben, and I saw it was trying to turn into a bow. There was a bend at the middle; except for that it was completely straight, and because I had whitded on the big end, both ends were smaller than the middle. I thanked her and ran out onto what had turned into a rough beach under the cliff. When I waved good-bye, it seemed like the whole cave was full of white birds, flying and fluttering. She waved back; she looked very small then, like the flame of a candle.

South of the cave I found a steep path to the top of the cliffs. At the top there were ruined walls, and the stump of a tower. The stars were out by the 21.time I got there, and it was cold. I hunted around for a sheltered spot and found one; after that, I climbed what was left of the tower.

The tower had stood on a rocky island connected to the mainland by a spit of sand and rocks so low it was nearly under the water even at low tide. I must have stared at the waves breaking over it in the starlight for five minute s before I felt sure it was there. It was, and I knew I ought to get off the island while I still could, and find a place to sleep on sh.o.r.e.

I knew it, but I did not do it. For one thing, I was tired already. Not hungry and not particularly thirsty, but so tired that all I really wanted was to lie down somewhere. The other was that I was afraid of what I might find on sh.o.r.e, and what might find me.

Besides, I needed to think. There was so much I could not remember, and what I could remember (you, Ben, and the cabin, and the house where we lived, and those pictures you have of Mom and Dad) was a long, long time ago. I wanted to try to remember more, and I wanted to think about what Parka had said and what it might mean.

So I went back to the sheltered place I had found among the blue stones and lay down. I was barefoot, and it seemed to me while I lay there that I should have had hiking boots, and stockings. I could not remember what had become of them. I was wearing a gray wool s.h.i.+rt without b.u.t.tons and gray wool pants with no pockets, and that did not seem right either. I had a belt, and a little leather pouch hanging from it by its strings; but the only things in it were Pa rka's bowstring, three hard black seeds, and a little knife with a wooden ha ndle and a wooden scabbard. The knife fit my hand like it belonged there, but I did not remember it at all.

CHAPTER 2.

THE RUINED TOWN.

T he sun woke me. I still remember how warm it felt, and how good it was to be warm like that, and away from the sound of other people's voices and all the work and worry of other people's lives, the things the string kept telling me about; I must have lain in the sun for an hour before I got up. I was hungry and thirsty when I did. Rainwater caught by a broken fountain tasted wonderful. I drank and drank; and when I straightened up, there was a knight watching me, a tall, big-shouldered man in chain mail. His helm kept me from seeing his face, but there was a black dragon on top of his helm that glared at me, and black dragons on his s.h.i.+eld and surcoat. He began to fade as soon as I sav him, and in a couple of seconds the wind blew away what was left. It was a long time before I found out who he was, so I am not going to say anything about that here; but I do want to say something else and it will go here as well as anywhere.

23.That world is called Mythgarthr. I did not learn it 'til later, but there is no reason you should not know it now. Parka's cave was not completely there, but betweenMythgarthr and Aelfrice. Bluestone Island is entirely in Mythgarthr, but before I drank the water I was not. Or to write down the exact truth, I was not securely there. That is why the knight came when he did; he wanted to watch me drinking that water. "Good lord!" I said, but there was no one to hear me.

He had scared me. Not because I thought I might be seeing things, but because I had thought I was alone. I kept looking behind me. It is no bad habit, Ben, but there was n.o.body there.

On the east side of the island the cliffs were not so steep. I found a few mussels and ate them raw. The sun was overhead when two fishermen came close enough to yell at. I did, and they rowed over. They wanted to know if I would help with the nets if they took me on board; I promised I would, and climbed over the gunwale. "How'd you get out there alone?" the old one wanted to know.

I wanted to know that myself, and how come they talked funny; but I said, "How would anybody get out there?" and they seemed willing to leave it at that. They split their bread and cheese with me, and a fish we cooked over a fire in a box of sand. I did not know, but that was when I started loving the sea. At sunset, they offered me my choice of the fish we had caught for my help. I told the young one (not a lot older than me) that I would take it and share with his family if his wife would cook it, because I had no place to stay. That was okay, and when our catch had been sold, we carried the best fish and some others that had not sold into a crowded little house maybe twenty steps from the water.

After dinner we told stories, and when it was my turn I said, "I've never seen a ghost, unless what I saw today was one. So I'll tell you about that, even if it won't scare anybody like the ghost in Scaur's story. Because it's all I've got." Everyone seemed agreeable; I think they had heard each other's stories more than once.

"Yesterday I found myself on a certain rocky island not far from here where there used to be a tower--"

"It was Duke Indign's," said Scaur; and his wife, Sha, "Bluestone Castle." 24."I spent the night in the garden," I continued, "because I had something to do there, a seed I had to plant. You see, somebody important had told me to plant a seed, and I hadn't known what she meant until I found seeds in here." I showed them the pouch.

"You chopped down a spiny orange," Sha's grandfather wheezed; he pointed to my bow. "You cut a spiny orange, and you got to plant three seeds, young man. If you don't the Mossmen'll get you."

I said I had not known that.

He spat in the fire. "Folks don't, not now, and that's why there's not hardly no spiny oranges left. Best wood there is. You rub flax oil on it, hear? That'll protect it from the weather."

He held out his hand for my bow, and I pa.s.sed it to him. He gave it to Scaur.

"You break her, son. Break her 'cross your knee."

Scaur tried. He was strong, and bent my bow nearly double; but it did not break.

"See? You can't. Can't be broke." Sha's grandfather cackled as Scaur returned my bow to me. "There's not but one fruit on a spiny orange most times, and not but three seeds in it. You chop down the tree and you got to plant them in three places, else the Mossmen'll come for you."

"Go on, Able," Sha said, "tell us about the ghost."

"This morning I decided to plant the first seed in the garden of Bluestone Castle," I told them. "There was a stone bowl there that held water, and I decided I would plant the seed first and scoop up water for it. When it seemed to me I had watered it enough, I would drink what was left." They nodded.

"I dug a little hole with my knife, dropped a seed into it, replaced the earth-- which was pretty damp already--and carried water for the seed in my hands. When there was standing water in the hole, I drank and drank from the bowl, and when I looked up I saw a knight standing there watching me. I couldn't see his face, but he had a big green s.h.i.+eld with a dragon on it."

"That wasn't Duke Indign," Scaur remarked, "his badge was the blue boar."

"Did you speak to him?" Sha wanted to know. "What did he say?"

"I didn't. It happened so fast and I was too surprised. He--he turned into a sort of cloud, then he disappeared altogether."

25."Clouds are the breath of the Lady," Sha's grandfather remarked. I asked who that was, but he only shook his head and looked into the fire. Sha said, "Don't you know her name can't be spoken?"

In the morning I asked the way to Griffinsford, but Scaur said there was no town of that name thereabout.

"Then what's the name of this one?" I asked.

"Irringsmouth," said Scaur.

"I think there's an Irringsmouth near where I live," I told him. Really I was not sure, but I thought it was something like that. "It's a big city, though. The only really big city I've been to."

"Well, this's the only Irringsmouth around here," Scaur said. A pa.s.serby who heard us said, "Griffinsford is on the Griffin," and walked away before I could ask him anything.