Feast of the Elfs

by John C. Wright

  At his feet was a stream. Ruff jumped to the water and began lapping it up.

  Gil staggered a few steps toward the water, panting. His vision swam.

  Bertolac said, “Was there something you wanted, squire?”

  “Yes, sir,” Gil managed to gasp. “Request permission to faint….”

  The permission must have been granted because the ground swung up and hit him in the face, and his armor clanged about him. Gil tightened his fingers on the hilt of his sword and scabbard, and, just before consciousness slipped away, wondered in what country he was now, whether this was Earth at all.

  It went dark, but he could still hear. Bertolac sighed, just a small sound of disappointment. The hound Vertifran sniffed curiously at Gil’s ear and said, “He is stronger than an elf but has less stamina. Maybe a Nibelung?”

  Bertolac said, “You trying to sniff out his secrets, Vertifran? It does not matter what he is or where he is from if he cannot perform. I will see him dead before I see him shame me, bury the body beneath some ground where no ghosts walk, and send a changeling in his place to die in his stead in a year.”

  Gil did not wait for his vision to return. He thought it would be easier, this time, coming to his feet than it had been last night, beneath the tree, when the snow and cold had sapped all his strength.

  It was not any easier.

  But he did it. It took an eternity, but he did it. Gil stood, swaying, his ears ringing, waiting for his eyesight to clear.

  3. Uffern House

  The first four weeks were the roughest, and Gil had hardly any sleep the whole time. He was overworked, over-harassed, called, commanded, struck, slapped, and tormented with every cruelty a harsh taskmaster could devise. And it was too cold to sleep at night. New Year’s Day came and went without his noticing it.

  Uffern House consisted of a mansion housing three knights and a staff of Night World servants and human slaves, some of whom were housed in outbuildings on the hillside. Gil and seven other squires were kept in a wooden barracks at the foot of the hill, hard by the training ground. There were a line of floor pallets on which to sleep, a chest larger on the inside than on the outside in which to stow gear, a single communal chamberpot, and three lamps. One was lit for light, one was lit when smoking tobacco was permitted, and one was lit when returning to one’s true form was permitted. The whole barracks was draftier by night and stuffier by day than the stalls where the horses were kept.

  Gil was aghast and a little embarrassed when a small troll-face creature showed up at the barracks every day to carry off the chamber pot. Apparently, there were some tasks too humble even for squires to do. The creature’s name was Dilk.

  Gil’s life consisted of three things.

  The first thing that made up his life was the practice yard, which included the mess tent, the archery range, and the quintain.

  The quintain was simply a pivoting arm standing upright on a sawhorse. One side of the arm was the target, shaped like a shield, and the other was a sandbag dangling from a short chain. When an awkward, overworked, and sleep-deprived squire on an ill-tempered palfrey took a run at the quintain, he would, if he could concentrate and keep his aim, strike the target with the lance that was too big and heavy for him, whereupon the arm would turn on its pivot, and the sandbag would clout the hapless squire from the side or from behind and send him toppling from the horse into the mire and manure of the practice yard, to the neverending amusement of the knights supervising this particular form of devilry.

  The second part of Gil’s life was the combination of not getting enough sleep, and doing too much washing, wood-chopping, and cleaning.

  The third was writing letters to his mother, which he wrapped up and gave to Ruff to mail. How he managed to buy stamps and find a mailbox, Gil never asked. Ruff suggested opening a post office box in the nearest human town beyond the swamp, but without any money, and being a dog, he could not think of a way to do it. So Gil had no way to receive any return letters.

  There was no free time and no place to go had there been. Gil learned the stench and location of every bog pool within several miles radius of the house, usually by falling into them. Gil learned to hate the sight of crooked and ancient trees, whose branches were shrouded with hanging moss, and learned to hate the sound of moisture dripping, steadily as a ticking clock, small green drops into midge-infested green ponds.

  4. The Servants

  From time to time Gil was called into the manor house to do some task there. The place was gorgeous to the eye, decorated in gems and silver and fine woven cloths, but oddly uncomfortable, even for the aristocratic knights.

  The elfs did not seem to believe in things like running water or thermostats. When the air was cold, a knight ordered the servants to hang up tapestries, or kindle fires, or breathe out fire. When, months later, the air grew hot, a knight ordered the servants to fan him. When a knight wanted a bath, servants heated water in a kettle over a chimney stove and drew water from the stream which flowed past the foot of the hill, bringing the buckets one by one all the way up the grassy slope. When he wanted light, either a pisky shed it, or the knight had the witch conjure it from the air. There were cooks and kitchen maids a-plenty, but no dishwashing machines.

  The witch was a toothless old hag in a dark hood with dark eyes filled with sorrow and helpless rage. In her keeping were the dovecote, where the doves were kept, and the dream library, where dreams were kept. The doves carried messages by day and the dreams by night.

  The old witch had an apprentice who slept in the dovecote. This was a nervous girl with frizzled and fly-away red hair, thin-faced and freckled like a strawberry, who, as far as Gil could see, was fully human. The name assigned to her was Foxglove. Gil had few chances to speak with the witch’s apprentice, and she was afraid to tell him her real name, or perhaps she had forgotten it.

  The stream was fresh and potable and near the hill’s foot, but slowed and darkened and sank in a maze of bug-haunted rivulets and inky pools into the marshy land beyond, a place of tall grass, cattails, quicksand, and Bald Cypress groves. Gil would come daily to pound the laundry of the older squires against the rocks, scrub and soap and pound again.

  Some of the laundrywomen were also elfs. Others were not. These were old ladies in skirts and aprons and white lacy caps. They did laundry in the same fashion as he did, scrubbing with a washboard and tub at the riverside and stringing the fabric on a line to dry, but at the hour opposite his, so Gil never saw them up close.

  He was not sure what he would have done had he seen them up close because he was sure they were human beings.

  Ruff confirmed this for him. They were women who were either reported as missing or thought to be insomniacs in the human world, or perhaps victims of UFO abductions. They were summoned nightly by the Black Spell to do work at the mansion and banished, unthanked, back to sickbed or jail cell or asylum, retirement home or gutter, or wherever the elfs saw fit to store their slaves when not needed, with no memory of their labors, merely the weariness. Any who woke partly from the spell to recall, as if in a dream, the nightmare of thralldom, a second elfin charm surrounding the victim would make anyone who heard their tales disbelieve them immediately, discount them as madness, and forget the tales quickly.

  5. The Masters

  Weeks turned into months. A dozen times a day he told himself he could, should, and must quit, simply flee into the surrounding swampland, and foreswear the elfs, for he had no desire for knighthood after all.

  But then, when he noticed he had learned the trick of falling asleep instantly whenever there was available bunk-time and coming awake instantly, alert and ready for more chores, more tilting, more currying, more washing, more whatever, he counted and found he was only wishing to quit half a dozen times a day. By the end of a month, it was down to only three times a day.

  The curious thing was that even when he was insulted or beaten, it was always with a certain courtesy and formality. Bertolac could cuss him out when he
failed some training task without ever once using a swear word; but Gil told himself to lookup the word “jackanape” if he ever got back to human civilization.

  There were two other knights aside from Bertolac living in Uffern House, a Sir Dwnn son of Dygflwng, and a Sir Iaen son of Iscawin. Sir Dwnn was the archery master and had the peculiarity that he could swell up to the size of a tree and radiate such heat that everything around him would remain dry when it rained. Sir Iaen taught horsemanship, and his peculiarity was that he was every bit as good a guide in lands he had never seen as in his own country.

  Gil could not pronounce either of their names to save his life. He avoided extra punishment by calling them Sir Dune and Sir Yen, and that seemed close enough.

  There had been a third knight there in the first two weeks after Gil’s arrival. One of the servants washing his clothing, not a human slave who worked by day but an elf maiden who did her chores by night, found blood seeping from his garments, and she began to keen and wail, before foretelling the third knight’s death. And he vanished, either having fled without first asking leave or spirited away unseen by his murderer in another place or world.

  Gil never discovered the missing knight’s name. The serving girl’s name was Gwennmwswgl Bansidhe of the White Moss; another name he could not pronounce. He called her Gwen.

  The three ill-tempered palfreys in the stable set aside for the squires to train on were named Hwydydwg, Drwdydwg, and Llwyrdydwg, yet for some reason, Gil had no trouble with their names at all.

  He called them High, Dry, and Low for short, talked to them about their troubles, told them jokes and riddles, and asked them polite questions about any aches and the conditions of their hoofs, which he took pains to clean correctly even when another squire was assigned that duty. He was also the only squire who was never bucked off, or bitten, or kicked.

  In addition to the palfreys set aside for the squires to train on, there were two Coursers and a Destrier, with glossy coats and fierce eyes, kept in the higher stables, as well as three jennies, a half-tamed gryphon named Gwenglear, and an elf named Selyf son of Smoit who had been turned into a mule.

  Sir Dwnn was peppery and erratic and delighted in giving squires contradictory orders so that he always had an excuse to punish failure. He played favorites and simply decided Gil was his least favorite no matter what so that even if Gil executed a maneuver, mucked a stall, mopped a floor, scaled a wall, or shot an arrow into a pikestaff in the exact same fashion as the others, he was punished and they rewarded.

  Sir Iaen never raised his voice or altered his tone, and he gave orders in precise detail, expecting them to be carried out in the same detail, just as given. His method was to give tasks it was possible to do but to leave the squires no time in which to do them. If they seemed too close to finishing on time in a satisfactory fashion, he merely added more to the task roster the next day.

  Gil could not read the curlicue squiggles of the elf-writing, which, unlike human writing, would change shape depending on whether you looked at it straight on or from the corner of your eye, but he kept Ruff nearby to translate the task roster for him.

  6. The Squires

  The squires consisted of two purebred elfs as slender as girls but as quick as snakes; a bald boy who wore goggles and had the power of levitation; a surly dark-skinned lad who kept raw meat in a serpent-leather bag which was his prize possession; a seven-foot-tall boy with one eye on the front of his skull and one eye on the rear; a swarthy, squat, and slab-faced lad half Gil’s size and twice his strength; and a handsome lad with the curling golden locks and eyes of piercing blue. From his hair and skin a cold but refreshing tingle seemed to come like wind from a distant snowpeak.

  Ruff identified their race as a Strega, a Fir Bolg, a Fomor, a Nibelung, and Vanir; and Ruff only expressed surprise at seeing a Vanir since they were a people who usually kept apart from elfs due to some ancient enmity between the races.

  On the first day, practically the first hour, the other squires knew what had befallen Gil at the Christmas Feast. Each of them, in his own way, made it clear he would not befriend the doomed boy or even take the trouble to learn his name. They called him manadh-mlwyddyn, which meant “Year-to-Live” in their particular elf dialect.

  In addition to all his other chores and duties, it was the custom here that an elder squire could command any younger to act as his personal servant, doing anything from blacking boots to brushing clothes to bringing tea to cooking breakfast. Gil, as the least senior boy here, suddenly found himself with seven taskmasters, ranging from the unreasonable to the malicious.

  There was only a week of pleasant springtime weather. The week before it was bitterly cold at night; the week after it was ferociously hot during the day, and swarms of insects plagued Gil until a group of polite birds asked if they could eat the midges and mites bothering him.

  These birds included an Ochre-bellied flycatcher, a Northern Beardless tyrnnulet, a Black-crowned tityra, a Tawny-throated leaftosser, and a Ruddy woodcreeper. They were shy of him, but a Speckled mourner spoke for them. Gil was glad to accept their help and to let them shade him and fan him with their wings. The other squires were nervous seeing these birds flock so close around Gil or fetch him a spent arrow or dropped cleaning rag, so Gil asked the birds to leave him to sweat like the others when he was on the training ground or when Bertolac or the two knights were watching.

  He also asked a nightjar to listen after sunset to the talk and gossip of the knights and other elfs, especially anything about him.

  Whenever the nightjar reported that Sir Iaen said Gil was being worked too hard by such-and-such a squire or Bertolac said it was “bad form,” Gil knew it was time to defy the older boy and to fight him.

  He had already fought each of the squires two or three times in the first two or three weeks because, one after another, either in soothing tones or imperious tones, each older boy told him it was against polite custom to say grace at meals. Gil said a prayer aloud at meals nonetheless even though the Vanir lad said it made the beer go flat, and the Owl-boy said it stung his ears.

  Gil won more fights than he lost against the Fomorian and Nibelung even though they were stronger than he, but he lost more than he won against the two elfin lads, who were quicker.

  Apparently, there was some unspoken tradition about what amount of hazing was allowed and what was too much. It was like an invisible line. Where the invisible line fell depended on a number of things, including the race and relative rank of the squires involved. A boy of an unknown race and lineage, Gil started with this invisible line allowing almost anything. His friends among the birds said the knights were sure he was a half-breed, human mixed with dwarf or eft, perhaps a Moth or Cobweb, who had really no right to be mingling with his betters.

  When one of the squires slipped a poisonous snake into his bedsheets one night, Gil politely asked the snake to gather some of his cousins and friends and to return to the squire who had sent him. One of the boys was in the sick house that next day, and Gil had to take on his chores as well as his own, but he could not stop smiling.

  After that, the invisible line seemed to move. The gossip now was that since no one knew his parentage, it was best to assume he was of noble blood, a jinn, or a Nephilim.

  7. Lessons

  They were taught how to scrub and wear their armor. As if he were child again, Gil had to learn how to stoop and rise and stand and walk and run. Gil was embarrassed to discover that knights wore diapers.

  “In combat,” said Sir Bertolac, “Your body is wiser than you and will expel all uncleanness before any wounds are received. Vision and hearing will close in to a narrow scope, that you may see only what is needed to keep you alive. Your heart will speed, and time will slow.”

  The training was in horsemanship, sword, battleaxe, mace, dagger, and lance. The swordplay was with sword-shaped wooden batons, called “wasters”, which still hurt when they struck and could break bones.

  Before Gil ever set foo
t in a stirrup, he was required to fight on piggyback, at first being the horse, with another squire on his back digging heels into his ribs, and then being the rider. Then there was also swimming, throwing stones and javelins, wrestling, and scaling walls in full armor.

  Every fourteen days the knights went out with hounds at their heels or hawks on their wrists, squires trudging dutifully behind, either deeper into the swamp, or on the hillsides beyond the swamp, or on the mountain beyond the hills, or in the arid wastelands on the far side of the mountains, where haunted pyramids and windowless towers brooded above a desert of cactus and thorny trees.

  The arts of hunting were useful for honing many aspects of knightly life, from the hardihood of long marches to the making of camp to the patience of stalking prey, the use of horn calls to coordinate maneuvers, and learning to know and use the lay of the land.

  The house at times seemed to be closer to the mountain pass, and at other times farther, sometimes deep in the swamp, and sometimes near the edges, so that Gil never formed a clear idea of how far away the western hills were.

  Gil from the first was the star pupil during these expeditions. Tree roots would not trip him, thorns not stab, and birds and rodents would tell him how to read the spore or simply say which way the deer, rabbit, possum, or fox had run. Sometimes the deer being chased would simply run toward Gil and come and put his head in Gil’s lap. When that happened, Gil felt honor bound to let the creature escape even though it meant he would be punished with mockery and extra duties.