Gene Wolfe - The Knight

As sleep came nearer and nearer, I tried to imagine one of the Angrborn plowing with oxen the way one of our farmers would with a toy tractor. Try as I might, I could not do it.

Water surged about me, carrying me with it. A school of fish like scarlet jewels passed, and met a second school of iridescent silver. They intermeshed, passed. The iridescent fish surrounded me, and were gone.

The girl-face of Kulili lay below me as an island must lie below a bird. Her vast lips moved, but the only sound was in my mind. I made them. I shaped them as a woman molds dough, taking something from the trees, something from the beasts that felled the trees, and something from myself.

I saw her hands then, hands knit of a million millions of thread-worms, and Disiri taking shape as they labored.

That dream was lost among other many others, dreams of death, long before my eyelids fluttered.

But not lost completely.

I woke at sunset, and in less than an hour I was riding north, with Gylf trotting beside the stallion. About the time the moon came up, I said, “I think I’ve got it. Not everything, but a lot of the things that were bothering me.”

Gylf glanced up. “About me?”

“Other stuff, too. I was thinking you only changed at night.”

“Mostly.”

“Yeah, mostly. But not always. Not when you and me and old man Toug fought the outlaws, for instance.”

We went on in silence, the stallion picking his way through the darkness as the moon through the cold sky.

“Do you remember your mother, Gylf? Do you recall her at all?”

“How she smelled.”

“You got separated from her, somehow. Do you remember anything about that?”

“Wasn’t to go.” Gylf’s deep voice sounded thoughtful. “Went anyhow.”

I thought of little kids at home. “You wandered off?”

“Couldn’t keep up. Brown people found me.”

“The Bodachan.”

He grunted assent.

“They bowed to me when they gave you to me. Remember? They tried to hide their faces.”

“Yep.”

“I think somebody in Aelfrice educated me, Gylf. I feel like I was taught a lot there. But I don’t know why, or what I learned.”

“Huh!”

“I don’t even know if I really learned it. Only I think the Bodachan educated you. Trained you, or whatever you’re supposed to say about that. Taught you to talk, maybe. And I think probably they told you about changing shape, how to do it, and you shouldn’t do it in the sunshine, not here in Mythgarthr.”

“Pigs.”

I reined up. “What did you say?”

“Pigs. Smell ’em?”

“Do you think they’re close?” I strained to look about me in the darkness, and sensed rather than saw that Gylf had lifted his head to sniff the wind.

“Nope.”

“We might as well go on,” I decided after a minute or two. “If we can’t ride through this country at night, we sure can’t ride through it in the daytime.”

When we had topped the next hill, Gylf remarked, “Like ’em.”

“The pigs?” I had been lost in my own thoughts.

“Aelf.”

“They were good to you then. I’m glad.”

“You, too.”

“You’ve had a rough time of it with me.”

“Just once.”

“In the boat?”

“In the cave.”

I rode in silence after that. There was a nightingale singing in the trees beside the river, and I found myself wondering why a bird that would be welcomed wherever it went would choose to live in Jotunland. It made me remember how I had stayed at the cabin so I would not get in your way. I had not minded it, and in fact I had liked it a lot; and that made me realize that I liked being by myself out there in Jotunland, too. People are all right, and in fact some are truly good; but you do not see the Valfather’s castle when you are with them.

Besides, it was good to be alone with Gylf again. He had been right about the forest, and I had not thought nearly enough about that while it was happening. I thought a lot then about how he had gotten bigger, and about riding on his back instead of the stallion’s. He was a big, big dog even when he was small, because it was the smallest he could make himself. If he could have, he would have been puppy-sized, like Mrs. Cohn’s Ming Toy. It seemed to me a dog—a big dog like Gylf—was the best company anybody could have.

I tried to think about who I would rather have with me than Gylf. Disiri, if she would love me. But what if she wouldn’t? Disiri was wonderful, sure, but she was hard and dangerous, too. She would not be with me again until I found Eterne, and maybe not then. I thought that if she felt about me the way I felt about her, she would stick with me every second.

Garvaon would have been all right, but no Garvaon was better, because he was really Setr. Idnn would have been a terrible worry. Pouk would not have been bad. He would have wanted to talk, and I would have had to shut him up—but I knew how to do that.

Finally I hit on Bold Berthold. He would have been perfect, and as soon as I thought of him, I missed him a lot. He had never been right the whole time I had known him, because of the way one side of his head was pushed in. He forgot things he should have remembered, and most of the time he walked like he was drunk. But when you were around him a lot you could see the person he had been, the man who had wrestled bulls, and there was an awful lot of that left. There had been no school where he grew up, but his mother had taught him. He knew a lot about farming and woodcraft, and about the Aelf, too. I had never asked him what I was supposed to say when I spoke for them, and now it was too late. But I felt like he might have known. Bold Berthold would have been perfect.

Ravd would have been wonderful too. Why did the best people I met have to die? That got me thinking about his broken sword—how I had picked it up and put it down again, and cried, and I thought that cave, where we had found Ravd’s broken sword, must have been the one Gylf meant. At last I said, “We’ve never been in a cave, except for the cave where the outlaws hid their loot, and we weren’t in there long. Were you thinking of the cable tier? That was pretty bad for both of us.”

“Just me,” Gylf explained. “You weren’t there.”

“Garsecg’s cave? I heard something about that. You were chained up in there?”

“Yep.”

So Garsecg had chained Gylf up like the Angrborn had, and for a while I wondered why Gylf had let either one of them do it. Finally I saw that he did not like to change into what he really was. He did it when he had to fight, but he would rather let somebody chain him up than change.

“Garsecg’s cave brings us back to shapechanging,” I said, “and your shape does change, but mostly you get bigger. Garsecg told me once that though the Aelf could change their shapes, they were always the same size.”

“No good.”

“Oh, I’m sure it can be nice. Uri and Baki can take flying shapes, and I’d love to be able to do that. But if it’s true, it isn’t what you do. We’re looking at different things that only seem to be about the same.”

I searched for an analogy. “When I first left the ship with Garsecg, there were these Kelpies, Sea Aelf, all around me. I was afraid I’d drown, and they said not to be afraid, that I couldn’t drown as long as I was with them.”

Gylf raised his head again, sniffing the wind.

“Later it was just Garsecg and me, but I still didn’t drown. After that, I dove into a pool on Glas. It went down into the sea, the sea of Aelfrice, and I was alone under the water until I found Kulili, but I still didn’t drown.”

“See the hedgerow?” Gylf inquired.

“I see a long, dark line,” I said. “I’ve been wondering if it was a wall.”