The Knight. Part 15

Sure, I could strut around and show off for them, but would I want to? If one was bad, I could smack him and make him cry. But I was a knight. What kind of victory would that be for a knight?

I decided I would just take care of the kids as well as I could, and I would hope that someday they would get older and be people I could really talk to. Maybe I nodded off then, or maybe I had already. Anyway I dreamed I was a kid again myself asleep on a hillside. In my dream, the flying castle crossed the sky over my head and made me remember how I used to live in a place where there were swords and no cars.

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I woke up because I had been about to fall and went to stand by Pouk. There was a dark cloud way in the west, and I saw a man riding down it. He looked really small because he was so far away, but I saw him as clearly as I have ever seen anything, a man in black armor on a big white horse--the horse's neck stretched out, and its open mouth and wild eyes. Its hooves just flying. Down the cloud and across the sea, lower and lower until it seemed like it was running over the crests of the waves.

"Look!" I yelled. "A man on horseback, there in the lowest stars. See him?" Pouk looked at me as if I had gone crazy.

Kerl sighted along my arm. "The Moonrider, Sir Able? You seen him?"

"I see him now."

"I never have." Kerl squinted and peered. "Some do, they say."

"Right there, two fingers above the water, where the bright star is." Kerl peered again, then shook his head. "I can't, sir. I've had Nur point like you and say he seen him plain as day, but I'm not one that has the second sight."

"I'm not, either."

From the wheel, Pouk said really soft, "You are, Sir Able, sir." I started to say how plain he was and anybody could see him, but all of a sudden I could not see him myself. After that I kept looking and looking. The moon was still like a s.h.i.+ning bow, but it was only like it. It was not one, not really. The stars were still there, reflected in the sea, and there were a few clouds and it was really beautiful. I sort of thought I would say here that there was n obody there, that it was all just empty. That would not be true. I knew there was somebody there, maybe a lot of somebodies. Only I could not see them. I must have looked for about an hour, and then the Aelf came. They were as solid and real as anybody there in the night, some with fishes' scales and some with fishes' tails. They were blue, dark blue, but it was not like a certain sky or anything. It was not navy blue or midnight blue or blue black, or anything like that. It was more like the color of deep, deep water than anything else, but that was not it either. It was their own color, and their eyes were like the yellow fire of the sun reflected in ice. They had lonely, lovely, piping voices, and they called out to each other, and to the sea and the s.h.i.+p. I knew most of the words they used, but I could not understand what they were saying and I cannot write it 149.

down, either.

I stood up, balancing on a merlon, and waved to them, yelling, "Over here!

I'm Able!"

They called to one another, pointing, and swam over to the s.h.i.+p, diving in and out of the water and leaping free of it, sometimes as high as the mainmast. Spreading fins like wings. I told Kerl to hang a rope over the side or something and he did, but not many of them used it. They just climbed up the sides, or else jumped up on the deck until there was a crowd of them there. I pulled off my s.h.i.+rt and the bandage so they could see my wound, and they came up on the sterncastle deck to look at it, asking questions without waiting for answers.

I had to guess at what to say; so I said I wanted to be cured and I would do anything for them if only they would do it. And if they could not, I would still do anything they wanted me to.

"No," they said. And, "No, no!" And, "No, no, no, brave sir knight. We could not ask you to fight Kulili for us until you were well and strong. Ill and weak you would surely die."

Another was almost like an echo. "Will surely die . . ." Then an old Aelf came; he looked like a man of thin blue gla.s.s, with wild white hair and a tangled blue beard to his knees. All the others stood aside--you could tell he was somebody. He took my face between his hands and looked way down into my eyes. I could not help looking into his when he did that, and it was like looking into a storm at midnight.

When he finally let my face go, it seemed like it had been a long, long time. Hours. "Come with us to Aelfrice" was what he said. "The sea shall heal your wound and teach you to be the strongest of your kind, a knight against whom no knight can stand. Will you come?"

I could not talk, but I nodded.

As soon as I did, there were eight or ten Aelfmaidens tearing at my clothes. They took off my sword belt and Sword Breaker, and everything else, too, and as soon as they got down to bare skin they kissed it, giggling and elbowing each other and having a fine time. One grabbed my right hand and another one got my left, and one jumped up onto my shoulders. It seemed like she weighed no more than a few drops of water, and the long, thin legs she wrapped around my 150.

neck were as cold as dew.

All four of us jumped into the sea then. I did not mean to, but I did anyway. It was all really strange. There had been this greasy swell up where the s.h.i.+p was, but before we hit the sea was tossing waves, and they looked as clear as crystal--chimerical, like ghosts in sheets of snow-white foam, ghosts spangled all over with moonlight and reflected stars. There was a shock as if we were jumping into a cold shower, and a roar like a big wave hitting another head-on, and then we were down under all those waves.

"You will not drown," the one on my left told me, and giggled. I had not even been worrying, but I should have been.

"Not as long as we are with you, Sir Knight." That was the right-hand Aelf-maiden; she laughed, and the sound of it was like little naked kids playing in some pool the tide had left.

"But we will leave you!" It was the one on my shoulders who said that, and she pulled my hair a little bit to get me to pay attention. "It is what we do!" All three of them laughed and laughed at that. There was nothing cruel about the way they laughed, but there was nothing kind about it either.

"Ga.r.s.ecg will make us!" they said.

Strange fish swam all around us. Some of them looked dangerous and some looked very dangerous. I did not know who they belonged to then. Deeper down we lost the moon and the starlight, and the whole world of suns and moons and winds seemed really, really far away. I guess it was the way an astronaut must feel; he was so used to those things that he never thought they could be taken away, and when they are he must wonder how he got into this. I know I did.

Some of the fish down there had teeth like big needles, and a lot had spots or stripes on their sides that glowed red, yellow, or green. I saw an eel that looked like a rope on fire, and some other scary things, and finally I asked the Aelfmaidens if this was where they lived, because it did not seem to me that anybody would if they could live anywhere else.

"We live wherever we are," they said, "and Kelpie is our name." They lit up for me then, slender, pretty girls that seemed like they were made of blue light. They made me look at their gills and tails, and they had long curved claws that looked as sharp as the fishes' teeth.

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CHAPTER 22.

Ga.r.s.eCG.

A t the mouth of an underwater cave we found the old man who had promised to cure me. He made the Kelpies go away, and I was kind of glad. I wanted to know where we were, and he said it was Aelfrice. "I am not the oldest of my kind," he told me, "nor the wisest. Yet I know many things. I am Ga.r.s.ecg." Later I found out it was not his real name; but then I believed him, and I still think Ga.r.s.ecg when I think of him; so it is what I am going to call him. I asked how he was going to cure me.

"I cannot. The sea will heal you. Come with me, and I will show you." He took my hand, and the two of us swam to a place where the sea bottom was as warm as water in a bathtub, and steam bubbles blew mud and sand out of crevices. "You have a rent in your side," Ga.r.s.ecg told me. "Have you ever seen a rent in the sea?"

I said no.

"Watch."

The bubbles came faster, and stones were thrown up, and there was a rum-Gene Wolfe - The Knight 152 ble underneath the stone like thunder. White-hot rock roared up from the seafloor so that great white clouds of steam belched up and all the fish and crabs and things ran away, everything except us.

That went on for a long time; gradually all the noise trailed off into a sound like a giant asleep, like Gilling dying down there in a bed as big as a lot of people's houses. The rock stopped flowing up and got hard. We went up to look, and it was a whole island of rock with a sort of basin in the middle. Some seabirds had started nesting there, and the sea lapped at the gray-rock beach all around it like a cat laps cream.

Gra.s.s started growing there, then trees. The trees sent roots way down deep looking for fresh water, following little cracks and splitting them. For maybe a second I saw Disiri running naked through the trees. I wanted to run after her, but Ga.r.s.ecg held me and we sort of fought about it. That was the only time we ever fought.

New birds--birds Disiri had brought--nested in her trees, nuts fell off them, and crabs came ash.o.r.e to eat the nuts. Ga.r.s.ecg caught one and ate it the way you would eat a praline, but I was worried about their pinchers. The island got more and more beautiful, and smaller and smaller, until it sunk in the sea and the waves closed over it, and it was like it had never been there at all. "Now you have seen a rent in the sea," Ga.r.s.ecg told me. "Have you seen a crag die?"

I said no, and we swam again. When we got to the crag that was going to die, we climbed up it, up the sheer rock, and stood on the top. There had been a wind the whole time, getting worse all the time. Pretty soon it roared so loud you could not hear yourself think. The waves got bigger and bigger until every wave that hit the crag was like a railroad train, and the spray hit us too, and sometimes the water at the top washed right over us. The crag shook, and there were boulders in those big waves, boulders that hit like hammers and then fell back into the sea for the next wave to pick up. Once on Halloween I had thrown gravel at windows; this made me think of that, but when I was doing it I had never known how horrible it really was, and now I felt like I was out there under the sea, still a kid throwing rocks. It got so bad we had to back off the crag, way back onto solid land. Even there the wind made me think of a knight, a big knight on a big horse riding among little ordinary 153.

people like Ga.r.s.ecg and me and slas.h.i.+ng left and right. I know it sounds crazy, but that is the way I thought.

The water came up, the same way it had a hundred times before. It covered the crag, but when it went away this time the whole crag was gone. I went out to the edge and looked down. It was not easy to keep my balance in that wind, but I did it--I had to--and down at the bottom you could see what was left, a little less each time a wave smashed into the beach. Ga.r.s.ecg came and stood beside me. After a minute he held out his hand, cupped, so I could see what was in it. At first I thought there was nothing. It was water. Just water. He asked if I understood.

I said, "I think so."

He waited a long time before he said, "The island?"

"I have to be like the sea, isn't that right? It waits, it runs out the clock and closes over the torn part."

"The crag?"

"Water is nothing, but water with energy is stronger than stone. Is that the right answer?"

Ga.r.s.ecg smiled. "Come with me."

We went back to the sea, swimming up at the top this time, jumping with its waves or letting its currents carry us. "Your blood is the sea," Ga.r.s.ecg told me. I did not get that for a long while, but as we swam on and on it began to make sense. First I thought it was crazy, then I thought he might be right after all, then I knew he was right--I could feel the sea inside of me exactly like I felt the sea outside of me. After that we kept on swimming, until knowing that the sea and I made one thing became part of me. It is still part of me, and still true. The Kelpies and the other Sea Aelf say it is like that for them too; but they are lying. For me it is really true, like it is for Kulili. I can be all sunny and smiles for a long, long time. But I can rise up like when we fought the Angrborn at the pa.s.s. Giants ran from me then and the ones that did not died. Finally I said to myself, "By the power of the sea life left the sea. They were able to leave it because they took it with them. I was a sea-creature in Mother's womb, and she was a sea-creature inside her mother, and I will be a sea-creature as long as I live. The king must know, exactly the way I do, because he put a nykr on his s.h.i.+eld."

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"He is my brother," Ga.r.s.ecg said.

We were both swimming hard, but I looked around at him, surprised. "Can you hear my thoughts?"

"Sometimes."

"You're an Aelf. Isn't the king a human man?"

"He is."

I thought about that for a long time, and got nowhere with it. Ga.r.s.ecg must have been able to hear some of it, because he said, "When a man of my kind takes a woman of your kind, she may bear a child." Still not understanding, I said, "All right."

"Every child has something of its father and something of its mother as well; save for monsters, every child is of the male kind or the female kind neverth eless." We stopped to rest, floating on our backs in the clear sea. I said, "I took an Aelf woman--a woman I really truly love like n.o.body else on earth."

"I know it."

"Will we have children?"

"I cannot say."

"Suppose we do." These were things I had not thought about before. "If it's a boy, will it grow up to be a human man?"

"Or an Aelf man. Until the child is born, there is no knowing."

"What if it's a girl?"

"The same. The king's royal father lay with a woman of my race, even as you with your Aelfmaiden."

I saw then that Ga.r.s.ecg did not really know everything, and to tell the truth I felt good about it.

"Of their union three children were born, one of my kind and two of yours."

"Three?"

Ga.r.s.ecg nodded. "Our sister's name is Morcaine."

When we started off again, I thought we were going to swim a long way li ke we had before. Now I can see Ga.r.s.ecg wanted to rest before we got where we were going. He knew about the stairs, and he knew we might have to fight. The Khimairas would not recognize him, and he would not be able to tell them who he was. Anyway, I was just getting warmed up again when he stopped and 155.

pointed. "That is the isle your mariners call Glas," he said, and pretty soon we were there and climbing over slick sharp rocks that shone crimson, gold, and scarlet in the suns.h.i.+ne, with a lot of other colors, more beautiful than I could ever make you believe it was.

"Do they call it Glas because it's made of gla.s.s?" I asked him. He shook his head. "It is not, but of fire opal."

"The dragon stone."

He would not look at me. "Who told you that?"

It had been Bold Berthold, and I called him my brother. "He's dead now, I think."

"Wise Berthold. If you do not know him dead, let us hope that he lives." I told Ga.r.s.ecg how I had searched for Bold Berthold's body without finding it.

"Many have searched for this isle, but those who search for it never find it. More than a few have sighted it by chance, however, and a handful of mariners have landed here."

I had the feeling Ga.r.s.ecg knew more about that than he was telling, so I asked what happened to them.

"Various things. Some returned safely to their s.h.i.+ps. Some perished. Some remain with us, and some went to other places. Do you see the tower?" I did, and it was huge. Somebody had built a skysc.r.a.per all by itself way out on that little island, and at first I thought why did they have to make it so high?

Because there was nothing else out there to crowd it. Only there was. It was the sea. The island was not really very big, so if you wanted to put a big building on it, it had to go straight up.

It did. It was round, and only a little wider at the bottom, and it went up and up like a needle, taller than the tallest mountain.

"The builder was of the sixth world, which is Muspel," Ga.r.s.ecg said. "My people build nothing like it unless they must. Would that they did! From this tower Setr sought to overawe this sphere, which you call the World Below." I said we called it Aelfrice mostly.

Ga.r.s.ecg nodded. "He built smaller towers as well, his strongholds on many coasts. My sister dwells in one when she chooses."

"But you don't?"

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"I could if I wished." Ga.r.s.ecg stood up on what I had thought was just another slick rock, and walked away. When I could not see him, I heard him say, "How is your wound?"

I felt for it, but I couldn't find it.

"Healed?"

When I caught up with him, I said, "There's a scar, but it's closed and it's not sore."

"The scar will fade. For a time, a gull might have seen rocks below the water."

"I get it. Am I really the strongest knight in the whole world now?"

"That is for you to say."

"Then I am." I did not feel any stronger when I said it, but I knew I was very, very strong and very, very fast. Exactly how strong and how fast I did not know. I also knew that some of that was what Disiri had done, and some came from the sea--from learning how it was, and that it was in me, tides of blood pounding the beaches of my ears. But some was just me, and in fact the part about the sea was just me, too; that had been there all the time, although I had not known it.

I stopped thinking about all that stuff because I had seen the stair. On that skysc.r.a.per it looked like a cobweb, stretching up and up to a sort of crevice way up high. The sun on that stair and the wall made them look like they were on fire. You wished you had really dark sungla.s.ses or maybe welding gla.s.ses. I squinted and s.h.i.+elded my eyes and all the rest, but it did not bother Ga.r.s.ecg.

"Here Setr gathered all the greatest weapons of our world, in order that we might not resist him. He who could sunder mountains would not permit us so much as a dagger. Yet in the end we drove him out."

I wanted to know if Ga.r.s.ecg thought he would come back.