The Knight. Part 56

She called, "Sheath your sword and lay these specters before they harm us. And please--I beg this--free me."

I spoke to one of the phantom knights. (He had removed his helm, and there was sorrow in his face, Ben, to tear your heart.) "Who are you?" I asked.

"Should I do as this woman advises? On my honor, I won't send you away without thanking you." They gathered around me, muttering that they had done no more than their own had required. Their voices were dry and hollow, as though a clever showman pulled a string through a gourd to make it talk.

"We are those knights," the knight I had spoken to said, "who bore Eterne unworthily."

"You would be wise," another told me, "to do what she wishes. But unwise to 471.

trust her."

From the altar, the woman called, "Cut me free and give me a drink. Have you wine?"

The phantom knights and I spoke further; I will not tell you what we said now. Then one brought a skin like a wineskin that the Aelf had dropped. He pulled the stopper and poured some into the little cup that was the other end of the stopper. That is how those things are made in Aelfrice. It was strong brandy, as its fumes told me; I had no need to taste it.

I wiped Eterne clean with the hair of a dead Aelf and returned her to her scabbard, thinking to take the wineskin--and the knights vanished. Picture a hall lit by many candles. A wind sweeps it, and at once the flame of every candle is put out. That was how it was with them.

The skin fell to the stony floor of the grotto and most of the brandy was wasted, though by s.n.a.t.c.hing it up I managed to save a little. That little I carried to the woman on the altar, and when I had fetched my old sword belt and cut her free with my dagger, I poured it into the cup and gave it to her. She thanked me and thrust her finger into it. At once it burned blue, and she downed it fire and all.

"Good lord!"

That made her smile. "Say, 'good knight.'" She stroked my cheek. "I am no lord, Sir Knight. No lady, either. Are you a subject of my brother's?" I said I was a knight of Sheerwall.

"You are, and when we meet again you will bow to me while I smile oh, so coldly!" Her breath was heavy with brandy. "But we are not at court--what are you doing?"

I was taking off my cloak to give to her. "It's still wet," I warned her.

"I will dry it." She left the altar then, slender and swaying like a willow in a storm, and let me put it about her shoulders. I am accounted tall, but the cloak that fell to my ankles failed to cover her knees.

"We will both be wetter than that cloak, Your Highness, before we are out of this place."

She held up the empty skin. "They brought this for me." She laughed as she tossed it aside, and her laughter was lovely and inhuman. "Ah, the tenderness of my old guardians! 'Let her be stupefied, and happy, until Grengarm's jaws close 472.

upon her.' I wish we had more arrack."

I searched for another skin, but she stopped me. "There is no more, more's the pity--it would have dried you. As for me, I will not be wet, and before I go I will confide to you, my kind knight, a great secret." She leaned toward me, and whispered, "Had he who turned that altar devoured me, he would have been as real here as in Muspel."

At the final word my cloak slumped, empty, to the stone floor, and the dead Aelf with it.

Outside, the sunlit gorge held no one save myself. I climbed out of the stream slowly, choosing every hand-and foothold, conscious only that I did not want to fall back into the water--no matter what else might happen, I did not want to fall back into the water. The thing I remember best about that time (almost the only thing I remember at all) is how tired I was.

At our camp, where we had built our fire and tied the lame white stallion Lord Beel had given me, I had rags and a flask of oil. I wanted to get them and oil the strange mail I had pulled out of the well. I remember looking at it in the sunlight and noticing that every fifth ring was gold. I wanted to oil my dagger, too, and Sword Breaker, which I had carried with me; most of all, I wanted to care for Eterne. I would have to draw her to clean and oil her blade, and the phantom knights would come. I knew that, and tried to think of some way to prevent it, but could not. I was worried about the scabbard, too. It was of gold set with precious stones; but I knew there would have been a lining of some kind, probably wood, and I was afraid it had rotted away.

Behind me, the great, deep, lisping voice of the griffin rumbled, "Would you see him? Look west."

I looked at the griffm instead. Stared, in fact. He was all white save for his beak, his claws, and his wonderful golden eyes. "Look west," he said again. At last I did. There was a storm gathering in the west, thunderheads pluc king at the sun; against the darkness of the storm, something flew that seemed darker still.

"Yes. Will you spare him?" From his roost upon the cliff, the griffm dropped into the ravine, and his weight shook the earth. "Or will you destroy him?"

"I can't," I said. "I would kill him if I could." 473.

"I fly as swift as he, and swifter. Will you go?" The eagle face loomed over me, and the claws gripping the rocks of the gorge might have held me as a child holds a doll.

Ravd had not been among the phantom knights who had fought beside me, but it seemed to me that Ravd's phantom stood behind me as I said, "I will." The griffm nodded, one solemn bowing of his great, grim head. I waited, wanting to rest and knowing that I was going into the fight of my life instead; and he did something that surprised me as much as anything that happened in the grotto. Turning to look down the gorge, he called, "Toug!" Toug appeared so quickly that I knew he must have been watching us from some hiding place. "Here's your bow, Sir Able," Toug said, "and your arrows are in here, and here's your helmet. You left that, too."

I took them, and gave him Sword Breaker and my old sword belt. "You can speak again."

"Yes, Sir Able, because you got it. Got the sword. I've been waiting, he'd a lready talked to me--" I turned again to stare at the griffm.

"Yes, him, and he said I could go if it was all right with you because he saw I wanted to so much only I couldn't answer, and then I could, and we knew you'd gotten it then and it was going to be all right. So can I, Sir Able? Can I go with you?"

"May I," I said, and felt Ravd's hand upon my shoulder, though not even I could see him.

We rode the griffin's neck, both of us, half buried in his white feathers to keep out the cold, me before and Toug behind. "You will be a knight if you live," I told him over the roar of the beating wings, "after this, no other life is possible for you."

"I know," Toug said. His arms were about my waist, and he clung as tightly as a limpet.

I felt the spirit of prophecy come upon me, the spirit that comes to those about to die. "You will be a knight," I repeated, knowing that in his heart Toug--a boy now verging on manhood--was a knight already. "But nothing you do as a knight will be as great as this. You begged a boon, which I granted. Now I in my turn beg a boon of you."

474.

"Yes, Sir Able." His teeth chattered. "Anything."

"Say, 'granted, whatever it may be.' "

"Granted, whatever it may be," he repeated. "Just don't ask me to jump." He was looking down at the slate-green sea so far below.

"I want you to have this griffin painted on your s.h.i.+eld. Will you do that?"

"You--you should have it, Sir Able."

"No. Will you not grant my boon?"

"Yes, Sir Able. I--I will."

The griffin looked back at us, then down; and following the direction of his gaze I saw Grengarm in the sea.

Like a thunderbolt, the griffin dove with outstretched claws; and Grengarm dove too, diving as the whale dives, but not before my arrow found him. We skimmed the waves; and I, seeing them and feeling their warm salt breath upon my face, loved them as a man loves a woman.

"He must rise to breathe," the griffin told us. His words were timed to the beating of his wings, each syllable the thunderous downstroke that kept us up.

"But the time may be long, and when he rises he will be far away." We rose too, slowly and by wide circlings,' and the air about us grew cool again. "If he rises by night," I said, "we won't see him."

"I will see him," the griffin promised us.

The sun was low and dim when the griffin dove again and my arrow caught Grengarm behind the head.

The third time he surfaced, at an hour when the sun was hidden behind the western isles, he did not dive but beat his vast black wings against the tossing waves and rose into the air as a pheasant rises before dogs. Long we pursued him and high we rose, and saw a million stars under us like diamonds cast on a blanket of cloud.

Between the moon and the Valfather's castle we overtook our prey. Griffin and dragon met in a battle only one could survive, at a height so great that the castle (whose s.h.i.+ning towers rise from all six sides so that to the undiscerning it appears a spiky star) looked far larger than dark Mythgarthr. Its battlements were lined with men who watched and cheered; and every window of every tower displayed a fair face.

475.

As Grengarm's fangs closed on the griffin's throat, I scrambled from griffin to dragon with the wind of their wings singing in my ears, the sword Eterne in my hand, and a score of phantom knights blown like brown leaves around me. And I drove that famous blade to the hilt where my arrow had shown the way, and felt Grengarm die beneath me. His thundering wings grew flaccid, and the griffin, unable to bear him up, released his grip. As we fell, I pulled Eterne from the grievous wound that she had made and washed her in the wind, scattering drops of the dragon's blood across the sky.

And I sheathed her, thinking that though I perished the sword and scabbard should remain together.

It was at that moment, when the phantoms had vanished, that Grengarm turned his terrible head toward me, craning it upon a neck a thousand times mightier than any crane's, and opened his maw wide. And I, staring into it as into the face of death, understood certain things that had been hidden. A galloping horse dove for me as I stared, its silver-shod hooves driving it earthward more swiftly than even the griffin's wings. The maiden who rode that horse s.n.a.t.c.hed at me and missed her grip; but a second rode hard behind her, and a third hard behind the second, shouting for joy as she galloped down the starry sky and las.h.i.+ng her steed with its reins; and this third maiden caught me up, one strong arm across my back and beneath my own right arm, and set me on the saddle before her as I myself had set Toug, when Toug could not speak. I looked back at her; and I saw that though I might be counted a fighting man to match the best, my head was no higher than her chin.

"Alvit am I!" the maiden shouted. "Your name you need not tell! We know it!"

So low had we come that the clouds were above us, and up a lofty mountain of cloud Alvit's white steed cantered, never stumbling and never tiring. From the summit of that cloudy mountain it launched itself again on hooves that drummed a road of air.

"This is the finest thing in the world," I said, and thought that I spoke solely to myself, words to be lost in the swift wind of the white steed's pa.s.sing. But Alvit said, "It is not, but a thing outside the world. Love you a good fight, Sir Able?"

"No," I said, and looked squarely into my own soul. "I fight when honor says 476.

I must, and with everything I've got. And I win whatever way I can." She laughed and held me tighter, and her laughter was that strange and thrilling sky-sound men hear sometimes and puzzle their heads over afterward.

"That is enough for us, and you are a man after my heart. Will you defend us from the Giants of Winter and Old Night? Will you, if we lead you in battle?"

"I will defend you against anything," I told her, "and you don't have to lead me. n.o.body does. I'll lead myself, and fight on, when any leader you may give me falls."

Bending over me, she kissed me as the last syllable left my lips; and it was such a kiss as I had never known, and will never feel again, a kiss that turned all my limbs to iron and lit a fire behind my ribs.

Soon after, her steed rolled over as it ran in a most peculiar way, and it could be seen that the Valfather's castle, which had seemed to be above it, was in fact beneath it; and in a moment more its silver shoes rang on the crystal cobbles of a courtyard.