Gene Wolfe - The Wizard

“The promise, by all means.”

“Unwise. Here is my news. Baki says you were looking for your squire and the fat man’s clerk. If you still want them, they are defending a little place called Redhall. We last met near there.”

I nodded, unable to speak.

“There are two hundred attacking it, and more coming. It is already full of women and children who fled them. You may know some of the women.” I asked who they were.

“I paid no heed to them, and would not have known the fat man’s clerk if I had not spoken to the boy. Toug?”

“Wistan,” I said. “Toug’s Sir Svon’s squire. Or he used to be.”

“I doubt it matters. Do you care about the big women more than you care about me?”

“I care for no one as I care for you.”

She laughed, delighted. “I enthrall you. Wonderful! My reputation remains intact. Are you going?”

“No! I’m going to Aelfrice with you, forever.”

She stepped into the moonlight, naked and infinitely desirable. “Come then.” Her hand closed on mine. “Leave the others to their deaths. They die soon in any case.”

Until then I had not known we stood upon a hilltop; the ground ahead fell gently; jeweled air shimmered not far down the slope. “I can’t,” I said.

Disiri sighed. “And I cannot love you as you love them. Will you come if I promise to try? To try very hard?”

“I can’t,” I repeated. “Not now.”

“I will tire of you. I know you know. But I will come back to you, and when I come back we will know such joy as no one in either world has ever known.”

She must have seen my answer in my eyes, because she vanished as she spoke. The hill vanished with her, and I stood on level ground.

Uns and Galene were sleeping when I returned to the fire. “Wistan and Payn are at my manor of Redhall,” I told the Earl Marshal. “It’s besieged. I’m going to help them.”

The old helm stood before the fire in the place where I had been sitting before I left it. I sat beside it, put it on, and removed it at once.

“How do you know?” the Earl Marshal asked.

“Disiri just told me.”

He said something else then, but I did not answer and I no longer recall what it was.

I tapped the old helm. “I wasn’t wearing this.”

The Earl Marshal raised an eyebrow. “Of course not.”

“I’m glad I wasn’t. Very glad. Are you going?”

“To Redhall with you? The queen said specifically that Payn was there?” I nodded.

“Then I am. I must.”

I had hoped he would not, and had planned to send Uns and Galene away with him. I made it clear that I had no reason to believe Payn and Wistan were there beyond Disiri’s assertion, and warned him that no Aelf could be trusted.

“I loved his mother,” the Earl Marshal said. “I loved her very much. I couldn’t marry her. She was a commoner, one of Mother’s maids. I’ve never told anyone this.”

I said he need not tell me.

“I want to. If I die and you find Payn alive, I want you to know. She became pregnant and hid in the forest, half a day’s ride from Sevengates. I gave her money and bribed my father’s foresters to bring her food. Sometimes I went to see her.” His face writhed. “Not nearly often enough.”

Setting the old helm on my head once more, I beheld such suffering as I hope never to see again.

“She was four days in labor. She could not deliver. A forester had fetched his wife, and when she stopped breathing Amabel opened her and took out my son.”

I removed the helm. “You’re torturing yourself. It’s of the past, and not even Overcyns can change what’s past.”

“They adopted Payn for my sake, the forester and his wife. Their names were Hrolfr and Amabel, rough people but goodhearted. Payn was thirteen when my father ascended, and after that I was able to see that he received an education. When His Majesty raised me to office, I made him one of my clerks. I could’ve given him a farm, but I wanted him by me. I wanted to see him and speak to him daily. To advise him.”

The old helm fascinated me. When I wore it, our fire was only a fire, but the stars!

“My wife has born no child, Sir Able, and I’ve had no lover save Wiliga. You understand why, I feel sure. I’ve never told Payn I’m his father, but I believe he must have guessed long ago.”

Reaching Redhall we hid in the forest, weaving fruitless plans and hoping for some means of crossing the besiegers’ lines and scaling the wall. While the Osterlings built catapults and a siege tower on wheels, Uns wove snares of vines and willow twigs. He caught conies and a hedgehog, and Galene found berries which were not poisonous, though sour. Without that food we would have starved.

The Osterlings were their own provisions. When they had nothing left, they attacked; those killed or sorely wounded became food for the rest. They used scaling ladders, and it was by these that we hoped to mount the wall.

“Darkness and rain would favor us,” the Earl Marshal said, not for the first time. “It seldom rains at this season, but the moon is waning.”

“So’s us,” Uns remarked dolefully.

“You can eat me when I die,” Galene declared quite seriously, “but I won’t die so you can eat me.”

That decided me. I had given my oath to the Valfather indeed; I would break it, only by a trifle, and take whatever punishment he imposed. I spoke to Skai when none of the rest could hear me. Clouds arrived to blind the moon at my order, and autumn’s chill crept south from Jotunland in servitude to me.

“Here you are!” Galene grasped my arm. “We’ve been looking everywhere. This’s the time.”

Stealthily we left the forest, the Earl Marshal behind me, Galene behind him, and Uns behind her armed with a stout staff. Rain pierced the blind dark, delighting us.

We were nearly close enough to steal a ladder when the gate of Redhall swung wide and its defenders rushed upon their foes. Tree-tall women overturned the tower on wheels, sending it crashing down on the huts the Osterlings had built. The ropes of catapults were cut and axes laid to their timbers. A great golden knight, a hero out of legend, led the attackers, fearless and swift as any lion. I shouted “Disiri!” as I fought, and saw the moment at which he heard my cry and understood what it portended, and his joy, and how he raged against the Osterlings then. His sword rivaled the lightning, and his shout of Idnn! its thunder. My blade rose and fell, slashed and thrust beside his, and as in Thortower, it seemed to seek, tasting the blood of each who fell, and springing away dissatisfied. I fought in our van at first, and afterward before our van, for that sword drew me forward, thirsty and seeking, slew contemptuously, and sprang away.

There came new thunder, a black storm that raged across the field raining blood. I knew his voice and called Gylf to me, as tall at the shoulder as any black bull, with eyes that blazed like suns and fangs like knives.

I would have said I was weak with hunger, and that the sea Garsecg had waked in me could lend me no strength. It was long coming, but came when a chieftain of the Osterlings barred my path. His armor was savage with spikes, and he wielded a mace of chains with three stars. They outreached my shield as a man reaches over a hedge and knocked me flat in the mud. I rose as the sea rises, saw him for the horror he was, and I drove the stolen sword into his throat as Old Toug might have dispatched a hog. How many fell after that I cannot say; but the rest fled, so that what had begun as a sally ended as a victory, the first of Celidon in that war.

Dawn came, yet the storm still blew so dark we scarcely knew it. Every knight who reads this will say we ought to have mounted and ridden in pursuit of our foe. We did not. We had few horses, those we had were thin and weak, and we staggered with fatigue. I took off the old helm, for the sweat was pouring down my face, there in the rain and the cold; and by gray light I saw the field of battle for what it was not, mud and water before the gate of Redhall, littered everywhere with the leaves and sticks of the fallen huts, with chips and notched timbers and the pitiful bodies of the slain. And the rain beat upon their faces and the faces of the wounded alike, on men and women who screamed and moaned and tried to rise. Some went among the wounded Osterlings and slew them, but I did not.