Gene Wolfe - The Knight

“Yes, Lord. I am your slave, Lord. Your most humble worshipper.”

“You’ll tell Garsecg when you return to Aelfrice. Don’t you and Baki meet with him there, to report on me?”

“Lord, I have no choice!”

I shrugged. “Where’s Baki?”

“Still scattering the mules, Lord.” Uri sounded very, very relieved. “There remain a few the Angrborn have not yet caught. She affrights them in various ways, as I did where they were more. We also took the forms of donkeys and other things to lead the Angrborn astray.”

“What will she do when the last is caught?”

“Come here, Lord, to tell us so.”

“Good. Bold Berthold, is that the house of your owner to the north?”

“Must be. No others ’round here.”

Gerda added, “Yes, sir. Bymir’s his name, a harder master no one never found.”

“Has this Bymir no cattle? I saw no barn.”

Bold Berthold chuckled. “Eyes don’t know ever’thing, sir knight. Cow shed and barn’s on the other side of the house. House’s big, but the cows ain’t.”

“I understand. Who milks them?”

“I do, sir.”

“That’s good. Gylf and I are tired and hungry. So is my horse. We’re going to sleep in that barn. Don’t tell your master.”

“No, sir.”

“We’ll go now, and take Uri with us. When you get home, I want you to find some food for us. Can you do it?”

“Yes, sir. An’ I will.”

“Thanks. We’ll leave in the morning, and we won’t take anything else or do any harm while we’re there.”

Gerda said, “What about us, sir?”

“I have to go to Utgard for Pouk and Ulfa. I told you about that. When I’ve got them, we’ll come back this way and take you south with us.”

“You’re a good man! I knew it soon as I saw the old lady with you, sir.”

“Can’t pay,” Bold Berthold muttered. “Wish I could.”

“You’ll pay with the food from your master’s kitchen.” I had not understood Gerda and decided to ignore it. “Let go of Uri now.”

Bold Berthold did, and Uri skipped from the shadow of the pine into the moonlight. “Thank you, Lord!”

“You’re welcome. Go and have a look at that farm for us. Then come back and tell me about it.”

The lame stallion had strayed quite a way down the hillside while we talked, but Gylf caught it without much trouble. When we were some distance from the hilltop (and about half a mile from Bymir’s hulking farmhouse) he said, “Which one’s really me?”

I asked what he was talking about.

“You said about Garsecg. He isn’t real here.”

“That wasn’t quite it.” I considered what I ought to say. “Do you remember the man with wings?”

“Sure!”

“You liked him.”

“A lot!”

“Then maybe you noticed that the log he sat on didn’t seem as real as he did. Neither did the pool, or the woods. It wasn’t that they weren’t real, and it wasn’t that they had changed, either. Mythgarthr hadn’t changed, but he was more real than Mythgarthr, or anything in it. When Uri and Baki come here from Aelfrice, they seem like they’re as real as we are. But they’re not, and when the sun hits them, you see it. When Garsecg came here, you could see it even at night.”

Gylf trotted on in silence for a minute or two; then he asked, “Is it the way I am now? Or is it the way I am when we fight?”

“I don’t know. I understand a lot more of this than I used to, but I don’t understand it all. Maybe I never will.”

“Do I seem realer like this? Or the other way?”

“Maybe you’re real both ways. I know you want to talk about you, but I’m going to talk about Garsecg some more, because I don’t understand you and I never have. But I think I’m beginning to understand him better than I did at first. You got him to heal me. Did you like him?”

“Nope. Not much. But they said he could do it.”

“He said he didn’t. He said the sea healed me. But later on, when I was hurt in Sheerwall, Baki did it. You weren’t there then.”

“Nope.”

“I bit her and drank her blood. It sounds horrible when I say it like that.”

“Not to me,” Gylf declared.

“Well, it does to me. Only when we did it, it wasn’t really horrible at all. It was nice, and I understood the Aelf better afterward. Maybe Garsecg couldn’t have come up here at all if his father hadn’t been human. Was it the Kelpies who told you to find Garsecg? It must have been.”

“Yep.”

“Maybe they bit him, when they were hurt. Did I ever tell you about the dragon? I mean, about Garsecg’s turning into one?”

Gylf looked up in surprise. “Wow!”

“Yes, it jolted me, too. But when I had time to think about it more, which wasn’t ’til we separated, it surprised me a lot more. We were on a really narrow staircase, and the Khimairas were diving down at us to knock us off, Uri and Baki and a bunch of others.”

Gylf grunted to show he appreciated the seriousness of that situation.

“Dragons can fly. There were pictures in Sheerwall, one on one of those embroidered wall hangings they had and one on a big flagon that Duke Marder drank out of at dinner. They had wings, both of them.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Besides, I know Setr can. I’ve seen him do it. So if Garsecg could turn into a dragon, which he did, why not a big dragon with wings? He could have chased the Khimairas. You can’t change yourself like that, can you? Besides getting a lot bigger and fiercer the way I’ve seen?”

“Nope.” Gylf stopped, one forefoot up, to point with his nose at the enormous steeple-roofed house of rough boards we were headed for. “Maybe we should go ’round.”

I thought, then shook my head.

The interior of the barn was as black as pitch, but Gylf’s nose found corn for the white stallion, and the stallion, almost as quickly, found a water trough for himself; I removed his saddlebags, saddle, and bridle. And while I was searching for a place to put them, by sheer good luck I bumped into the ladder to the hayloft. Moonlight crept in there, so that after the blind dark below it seemed bright enough to read in. I forked down half a cartload of hay for Gylf and the stallion, took off my boots, and fell asleep as soon as I lay down.

Thunder woke me up—thunder, lightning, and driving rain that came through every crack in the roof of the barn. I sat up, afraid and not knowing what had happened, and the next time the lightning flashed I was looking squarely into the ugly face of the Frost Giant I had seen years ago beside the Griffin—the giant whose face and towering stature had sent me running back to

Bold Berthold’s to warn him.

“Thought I wouldn’t see your horse’s tracks.”

The giant’s voice was deep and rough, and would have been terrifying if heard thus suddenly on a sunny summer day. It suffered now in comparison to the thunder. “Thought the rain’d wash ’em out, didn’t you?”

I shook my head, yawned, and stretched. He wanted to talk before he fought, and that was fine with me. “I didn’t know it was going to rain, and didn’t care whether you saw my horse’s hoofprints or not. Why should I?”

“Sneaking. Hiding.”

“Not me.” I rose and dusted off the hay in which I had slept, wondering all the while where Gylf was. “Traveling late is what you mean. I’ve got urgent business with King Gilling, and I rode ’til my horse was fit to drop. If you had been awake, I’d have begged food and accommodation from you, but your lights were out. I came in here and did what I could. Can you spare a bite of breakfast?”

The lightning flashed again, and I realized with a sort of sick relief that his head was not severed and standing on the floor before me, but thrust up the hatch in the floor.