Gene Wolfe - The Wizard

“Your lance bid fair to split my helm,” I told him. “You dropped the point.”

“Of course, of course. I wanted to test you, not blind you.” Marder caught sight of Berthold, and his face fell. “I beg pardon, sir knight. I did not intend to offend.”

“Ain’t but a poor man, sir.”

“All these people.” Marder looked around in some confusion. “This—this toplofty maid. And over there, the biggest man I’ve ever seen.”

“My brother, Your Grace, and by Your Grace’s leave a true man, though not supple-tongued. Yonder stands another noble knight, Your Grace, good Sir Leort of Sandhill.”

Uns whispered in her ear.

“This trusty servingman has named the maiden with him, that I may make her known to you, Duke Marder. She is Lord Beel’s lady daughter, called Idnn.”

Idnn herself came forward, smiling and offering her hand to Marder. “We meet rough, Your Grace. Let’s not meet wrong, too. We are Idnn, Queen of Jotunland.”

The hour was just past dawn. “Small enough there can’t but one get in at a time, Sir Svon,” the sergeant said as he hurried along, “an’ I’ve three bowmen there an’ two swords.”

Nodding, Svon limped after him, with Toug in his wake.

The men-at-arms held drawn swords; the bowmen had arrows ready. All seemed vastly relieved by Svon’s arrival. When the sergeant threw wide the iron door, Toug understood. That doorway would allow two knights to stride through abreast, or let a mounted knight to ride through with head unbent; but the Angrborn in the freezing passage beyond it had to stoop, and looked too big to enter. His great, bearded face was like the head of a war drum, scarred, pocked, and dotted with warts; his nose had been broken, and his eyes blazed. Seeing him, Toug drew Sword Breaker.

“Who is your king?” Svon demanded.

“Gilling.” It might have been a war drum that spoke. “Gilling’s true king,blood a’ the right line a’ Bergelmir.”

Although Toug had been watching his eyes, fascinated and terrified, he could not have said whether he lied.

“So say we all,” Svon told him. “Enter, friend.”

“What about the rest?”

“Tell them to return tonight.”

“I’m Schildstarr. Tell the king.”

“His Majesty is sleeping,” Svon replied stiffly “Do you wish to enter—alone—or do you not?”

“I’ll tell ’em.” Schildstarr took a step back. “You better shut this door.”

It swung shut with a clang, and two bowmen heaved the great bar into place.

“Did their king really marry Lady Idnn?” The sergeant whispered, although it seemed impossible for Schildstarr to overhear even if he had crouched with an ear to the door.

Svon nodded, his face expressionless.

“By Thunor!”

“She’s nursing him,” Toug ventured, “with slave women and her maids to help, because it can’t be easy to take care of someone as big as he is. I feel sorry for her—we all do.”

Svon told him, “Fetch Thiazi.” Toug lit a torch in the guardroom and hurried away.

The knee-high steps of the lightless stair that led (through stone enough for a mountain) to the upper levels seemed interminable; the pulse in his wound and the labored scrape of his boots mocked him with his own fatigue.

After a hundred steps or more, he heard feet other than his own, and though he told himself that it was the echo of his own steps returned from the upper reaches of the stair, he soon realized that it was not. Someone or something was descending, moving lightly from step to step.

The air grew colder still, and though he drew the thick cloak Idnn had provided around him, it had lost its warmth. Seeing Mani’s emerald eyes on the step above, he guessed what those eyes portended. “It’s her, isn’t it? It’s the witch.”

“My beloved mistress,” Mani announced solemnly.

“That’s what you call Lady Idnn.”

“Queen Idnn is my beloved mistress too,” Mani explained. “My loyalty to both is boundless.”

A voice from the dark asked, “Would you see her?” It might almost have been the voice of the wind outside, had it been possible for that wind to make itself heard.

“Yes.” Toug leaned against the wall, wishing he could sit. “If we’ve got to talk again, that might be better.”

An Idnn who was not Idnn descended the stairs, more visible than she should have been by the smoky light. “King Gilling is a beast.” The false Idnn spoke as winter speaks. “He must not possess me—that I have come to tell you. I bring Sir Able, and Sir Able may save me.”

“Sir Svon would,” Toug offered.

“So would you. You have not lain with a woman.”

Toug shook his head. “Not yet.”

“You speak truth. Is he truthful, Mani?”

“Oh yes!”

“I’ve seen it,” Toug explained. “I—know what to do.”

“You have not seen King Gilling receive a bride. He will lie upon his back, his member standing.”

Hesitantly, Toug nodded.

“Disrobed, I will love it as if it were a dwarfish man. I will draw staring eyes and a smiling mouth. I will anoint it with sweet oils, cozen and kiss it, beg its love. Gilling will reply, speaking for the dwarf I kiss. Erupting it will bathe me in semen, and I will praise and kiss the more, saying how happy it has made me and begging it not to go.”

“Lady Idnn will not do that.” Toug spoke as confidently as ever in his life.

“If I do not, or show disgust by any word or act, I will die,” the false Idnn told him. “I will not be the first to perish so, you may believe. Do you think she cannot bear him a child?”

Toug managed to say, “I don’t want to talk about this.”

“His semen will violate her. When she grows big with child, know you how big she will grow?”

The false Idnn began to swell. Toug shut his eyes but found he saw Idnn still, her body monstrous, misshapen, and surmounted by a weeping face. Unseen hands stripped away her clothing and opened her from breast to thigh. He pressed his hands to his eyes to shut out the blood; she writhed behind their lids, trembled, and lay still.

When he came to himself, he found he was sitting as he had wished, sitting on the cold and dirty floor of a landing, rocking and weeping.

“It hasn’t happened yet,” Mani told him; and Mani’s voice, not normally kind at all, was kinder than Toug had ever heard it. “It may never happen.”

“It won’t,” Toug declared through his tears. “I won’t let it. I’ll kill him. I don’t care if it’s murder, I’ll kill him.”

“It isn’t. Now pick up that torch, and puff the flame before it goes out.” Mani sprang from the last step to the landing, and to Toug’s surprise rubbed his soft, furry side against Toug’s knee. “It’s murder when I kill another cat, except in a fight. It would be murder for you to kill, oh, Sir Garvaon or Lord Beel, except in a fight. But King Gilling is no more like you than Org.”

Suddenly frightened, Toug rose. “Is he down here?”

“Org? Not that I know of.”

“But that’s what happened, right? When Sir Svon and Sir Garvaon fought the giants. Org was there, and he was pulling down the torches so the giants wouldn’t see him.”

Mani yawned, concealing his mouth with a polite black paw. “Certainly.”

“And he... Did he hold them from behind, or something? Was that how the knights won?”

“I don’t know. It became a riot in the dark.”

Toug scrambled up the step from which Mani had jumped. “I’ve got to get Thiazi. Sir Svon wants him.”

“Then get him, by all means. May I ride your shoulder?” Toug held out his free arm. “Come on.”

When they had climbed another score of steps, Toug asked, “Was it Org who stabbed the king?”