Gene Wolfe - The Wizard

The door seemed to weigh nothing, and it may be that we stepped through without opening it.

Night blacker than the blackest night of storm enveloped us. I heard the rush of waters, as I had when I had breasted tides and dark, uncharted currents with Garsecg. There was a great pounding, swift and very deep. I tried to imagine what sort of creature might make such a noise, and the image that leaped into my mind was that of Org, green as leaves and brown as bark, alone in a forest clearing and pounding the trunk of a hollow tree with a broken limb. Under my breath I murmured, “What’s that?” And Lynnet heard me and said, “It is my heart.” As soon as she spoke, and I knew she was right and wrong, that it was my own heart, not hers. For a long time we walked through that dark, and I timed my steps and my movements to the thuddings of my heart.

The darkness parted, as at the word of the Most High God. What had been dark was pearly mist, and I saw that there was grass, such lush grass as horses love, underfoot; the mist spangled it with dew.

“This is a better place,” Lynnet told me; perhaps I did not speak, but I agreed. Sunbeams lanced the mist, and as it had made the dew, so it now made a colonnade of mighty oaks. She began to run. “Goldenlawn!” She turned to look back as she spoke, and I have, on my honor, never seen more joy than I saw in that wasted face.

Beside Sheerwall, the castle would have been an outwork—such a gray wall as a strong boy might fling stones over, a round keep prettily made, and a square stone house of four stories and an attic. It was, in short, such a castle as a knight with a dozen stout men-at-arms might have held against fifty or a hundred outlaws. Nothing more.

Yet it was a place very easy to love, and made me think, all the while that I was there, of the Lady’s hall in Skai. The Lady’s Folkvanger stands to it as a blossoming tree to a single violet, but they breathed the same air.

On its gates stood painted manticores. Their jaws held marigolds as the jaws of cows sometimes hold buttercups, and there were marigolds at their feet, and to left and right of them more marigolds, not painted but real, for the moat was as dry as Utgard’s and had been planted as one plants a garden, while manticores of stone stood before the gates.

There were servants and maiden sisters, fair young women who might have married in an instant, and anyone they chose. All were filled with wonder that Lynnet, whom they thought never to see again, should unexpectedly return; and after them, a grave old nobleman with a white mustache and the scars of many battles, and a gay gray lady like a wild dove, who fluttered all the while and moaned for joy.

“This is Kirsten,” Lynnet told me, “dear, dear Kirsten who died when I was fourteen, and my own dear sister Leesha who died in childbirth. Father, may I present Sir Able of the High Heart? Sir Able, this is my father, Lord Leifr.”

“Slain by the Frost Giants who stormed Goldenlawn,” Lord Leifr told me, smiling, and offered his hand.

“My mother, Lady Lis.”

She took my hand in both of hers, and the love in those fluttering hands and her small, shy face would have won me at once even if I had been ill-disposed to her and her husband. “May you stay with us a long, long while, Sir Able, and may every moment of your stay be happy.”

Soon came a banquet. It was night outside, and snowing, and when we had eaten and drunk our fill, and sung old songs, and played games, we walked in a garden bright with light and summer flowers. “This is mother’s grotto,” Lynnet explained, “a sort of pretty cave made by our gardeners. The fashion at court was to have a grotto when my parents married, a place where lovers could kiss and hold hands out of sight—and out of sun, too, on hot days. My father had it built to please my mother before he brought her here.”

It made me think of the cave in which I had lain on moss with Disiri, but I said nothing of that.

“Only I’m afraid of it, and I didn’t know I was until I started talking about it, I suppose because my sisters and I weren’t allowed in there when we were children. So I’m not going to go in, but you can if you’d like to see it.”

She plainly expected me to go, so I did. It was not that I imagined I might actually find Disiri there—I knew I would not. But the memory the grotto evoked was strong and sweet; and I hoped that if I went in, it might be stronger still. Filled with that hope, I descended the little stone stair, stepped across a tiny rivulet, and entered the grotto. There could be no dragon here, I knew, nor any well reaching the sea of Aelfrice. Nor was I wrong about those things.

In their places I found a floor of clean sand and a rough tunnel that seemed to plumb the secrets of the hill, and then a familiar voice that mewed, “Sir Able? Sir Able? It’s you, I know. I smell your dog on your clothes. Is this the way out?”

“Mani?” I stopped and felt him rub my leg. “I didn’t know you were in here. This is a strange place.”

“I know,” Mani told me. And then, “Pick me up.”

“Some of these people are dead, and it doesn’t seem to make any difference.” He only mewed in response to that; when I picked him up and carried him, he was trembling.

I will not speak of the time I spent in the grotto. The time of Skai is not the time of Mythgarthr, nor is the time of Aelfrice. The time of the Room of Lost Loves is different again, and perhaps not time at all, but merely the reflection of time. Etela said none of us had stayed inside long.

Mani raised his head and sniffed. Hearing him (he was cradled in my arms) I sniffed too. “I smell the sea.”

“Is that what it is? I’ve never been there. Your dog talks about it. I don’t think he liked it much.”

I said, “He was chained in Garsecg’s cave under the sea. I’m sure he didn’t like that.”

“That’s all right,” Mani told me, “it’s only wrong to confine cats.” He leaped from my arms; soon I heard him ahead of me: “There’s light this way, and water noise.”

Before long I could see it for myself and hear the surge and crash of waves. I felt that I was coming home.

The gray stones of the grotto appeared to either hand, and I (recalling its mouth and the rivulet across which I had stepped) paused to look behind me, for it seemed possible at that moment that I had become confused and was walking back the way I had come. Faint and far was the mouth behind me. Faint and far, but not nearly as faint or as far as it ought to have been. I had walked the better part of a league; and yet I could see the rough circle still, and glimpse rocks and ferns beyond it.

“There’s a woman here!” Mani called.

I knew then, and holding up Eterne I ran.

Parka sat spinning as before, but her eyes left the thread she spun for a moment to look up at me as she said, “Sir Able of the High Heart.”

I felt that I had never known what that phrase meant until I heard it in her mouth; I knelt and bowed my head and muttered, “Your servant always, My Lady.”

“Do you need another string?”

“No,” I said. “The one you gave has served me well, though it disturbs my sleep and colors my dreams.”

“You must put it from you when you sleep, Sir Able.”

“I would not treat them so, My Lady. They tell me of the lives they had, and hearing them I love my own more.”

“Why have you come?” she asked; I explained as well as I could, not helped by Mani, who interrupted and commented more often than I liked.

When I had finished, Parka pointed beyond the breakers.

“It is out there? What I seek?”

She nodded.

“I can swim,” I told Mani, “but I can’t take you. Nor can I take my sword or my clothes.”