Lady of the Lake

by Andrzej Sapkowski

  ‘How?’

  ‘Phantoms,’ Nimue said not looking at her. ‘Visitors from other dimensions, other levels, other places, other times. Visions that transform one’s life. Transforms your life and your destiny… Without knowing. For them it is… just another place. The wrong place, wrong time. Who knows how many times…’

  ‘Nimue,’ Condwiramurs interrupted her with a forced laugh. ‘You recall that I’m the dreamer here. And you all of a sudden begin to divine. You were talking, like you saw it… in a dream.’

  The Fisher King, judging from the intensity of his voice and curses, failed to untangle the rope, and it broke. Nimue was silent, looking at the pictures. Ciri and the Unicorn.

  ‘It is true,’ she said at last, ‘I have seen this in my dreams. I have seen it in my dreams many times. And once while awake.’

  The journey from Czluchow to Malbork may under some circumstances take up to five days. And because Grand Master Winrich von Kniprode letter had to reach the addressee no later than the day of Pentecost, Heinrich von Schwelborn the knight was not slow and left the day after the Sunday of Exaudi Domine, to be able to travel safely and without any risk of delay. Slowly but steadily. The knight’s approach was greatly enjoyed by his company, six crossbowmen, commanded by Hasso Planck, the son of a baker from Cologne. The crossbowmen and Planck were more accustomed to these knights cursing, shouting and ordering them to ride their horses to death to arrive on time and then casting all the blame on their poor servants for any delays.

  It was cold, although it was cloudy. From time to time it drizzled, and fog rippled through the ravines. The hills covered in dense vegetation reminded the knight Heinrich of his native Thuringia. The crossbowmen sang at the rear the ballad of Walther von Vogelwiede and Hasso Planck dozed in the saddle.

  If you love a good woman

  It is the cure to all iniquity…

  The travel proceeded peacefully and who knows, maybe the end would have been peaceful if not for the fact that around noon the knight Heinrich saw at the bottom of the road, a shimmering lake. And since the next day was Friday and custom decreed that they fast from red meat, the knight ordered them to enter the water and look for fish.

  The lake was large, it even had an island. No one knew what its name was, but it was surely called Sacred. In this pagan country every second lake was called Sacred.

  The hooves of the horses crushed shells on the shore. The fog hung over the lake and the wilderness. There were no signs of boats or nets, not a soul. We will have to look elsewhere, Heinrich von Schwelborn thought. And if not, then so be it. We will eat what we have in our saddlebags, even the jerky, and we’ll confess to chaplain Malbork, who can grant us absolution for our sins.

  He was about to give the order when in his head, under his helmet, started a buzz. Hasso Planck released a sharp cry. Von Schwelborn looked in the same direction and crossed himself.

  He saw two horses – one white and the other black. In the next moment he noticed that the white horses head was domed with a twisted horn that rose from its forehead. He also realized that the black horse, actually a sable mare, had a girl sitting on it with grey hair which covered part of her face. The visions seemed not to touch either the land or the water, and he had the feeling that they were part of the mist that twisted above the surface of the lake.

  The black horse whinnied.

  ‘Ooops,’ the girl with the grey hair said quite clearly. ‘Ire lokke, ire tedd! Squaess 'me.’

  ‘Saint Ursula, Patroness…’ Hasso stammered, pale as death. The crossbowmen froze with open mouths, and made the sign of the cross in front of them.

  Von Schwelborn also crossed himself, and with a trembling hand drew his sword from its scabbard strapped to his saddle.

  ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God!’ he cried. ‘Stand with me!’

  Knight Heinrich did not bring shame to his ancestors that day, including Dietrich von Schwelborn, who valiantly fought against Damietta and was one of the few to not run away

  when the Saracens conjured and released a horse of black demons. Kicking his heels into his horse and remembering his ancestors, Heinrich von Schwelborn charged the apparition.

  ‘By the Order and Saint George!’

  The white unicorn reared back and the black mare danced. The girl, you could see at a glance was frightened as knight Heinrich rushed to the attack. God knows how it would have ended, all of a sudden a gust of wind brought a scrap of mist from the lake, and the vision vanished in a rainbow of colors like crushed stones or broken stained glass. The phantoms disappeared – the unicorn, the mare and the strange girl…

  The sorrel on which Heinrich von Schwelborn was mounted entered the lake with a splash, stopped and shook its head and snorted, chewing at the bit.

  Hasso Planck mastered the reluctant horse and headed for the knight. Von Schwelborn was breathing and wheezing, his eyes bulging like a fishes.

  ‘The bones of Saint Ursula, Saint Korduli and all the eleven thousand virgin martyrs…’ Hasso Planck managed. ‘What was it? Knight Heinrich? A miracle? A revelation?’

  ‘The devil’s work!’ von Schwelborn gasped, now only pale and trembling. ‘Black magic! Witchcraft! A damned thing, pagan and demonic.’

  ‘We’d better get out of her, Sir. The sooner… We are not far from Pelplin, let the church bells guide us…’

  In the same forest, on a hill, the knight Heinrich looked down one last time. The wind drove the fog back in places and the wrinkled surface of the lake became visible.

  Over the water circled a great eagle.

  ‘Wicked, pagan country,’ Heinrich von Schwelborn muttered. ‘Lot and lots of hard work await us; the law of the Teutonic Knights will finally drive the devil from here.’

  ‘Horsey,’ Ciri said reproachfully, and ironically at the same time. ‘I would not want to rush you, but I’m in a bit of a hurry to get to my world. My loved ones need me, you know. Instead we almost fall into a lake and see a man in funny clothes, then we see a band of dirty screamers with clubs and finally a madman with a cross! These are not my world or my time! Please try to get better. Please.’

  Ihuarraquax whinnied and nodded his horn and sent Ciri a mental idea. Ciri misunderstood. She had no time to thin since the inside of her skull was again flooded by a cold clarity, her ears buzzed and her body tingled.

  And again the darkness engulfed her.

  Nimue, laughing with delight, pulled the man’s hand, they both ran to the lake, dodging among the birches and alders. On the sandy shore, Nimue kicked off her sandals, lifted her dress and ran barefoot into the water. The man pulled off his shoes, but did not go into the water. He took off his cloak and carefully spread it on the ground.

  Nimue ran to him and hugged him around the neck. She stood on tiptoe, and even so the man had to bend deeply to kiss her. They did not call her Thumbelina for nothing, but now since she was eighteen and was accomplished in the magical arts, she only permitted her closes friends to call her that. And some men.

  The man, not taking his lips from Nimue’s, slid his hand behind her neck.

  Then it went quickly. They were both on the sand on his cloak. Nimue’s skirt was hiked up over her waist, her legs wrapped around the man’s hips and her nails dug into his shoulders and back. When he took her, as usual, he was too impatient, she gritted her teeth,

  but quickly caught up in the excitement of it. The man emitted ridiculous sounds. Over his shoulder Nimue watched slowly flying clouds of fantastic shapes.

  Something dimly rang like a bell under water. Nimue heard a murmur in her ears. Magic, she thought, and turned her head away from the face of the man. Standing by the shore – hanging above the surface, was a white unicorn. At his side was a black mare. In the saddle on the horse sat a girl…

  But I know this legend, the thought flashed through Nimue’s head. I know this story! When I was a child I heard this tale, from the old wandering storyteller… The Witcheress Ciri… The scar on her cheek… The black mare, Kelpie…
The unicorn… The Land of the Elves…

  The movement of the man, who was oblivious to the events going on, became more violent, and he issued funnier sounds.

  ‘Ooops,’ said the girl sitting on the black mare. ‘Another mistake! Not here, not at this time. To make matters worse, I think we arrived at the completely wrong time. Sorry.’

  The image faded and burst, exploding like painted glass, into a riot of rainbow luminescence, radiance and brightness, then everything disappeared.

  ‘No!’ Nimue cried. ‘No! Don’t disappear! Don’t run!’

  She straightened her knees and tried to break free of the man, but could not – he was more powerful than her and heavier. The man groaned and grunted.

  ‘Ooooh, Nime…Oooh!’

  Nimue screamed and sunk her teeth into his shoulder.

  They lay side by side on the crumpled cloak, sweaty and anxious. Nimue looked back at the lakeshore. The waves gave off an off-white foam. The reeds bent in the wind. The colorless, bleak emptiness that remained after the lost legend.

  Tears flowed down Nimue’s face.

  ‘Nimue… Is something wrong?’

  ‘Yes, there was…’ She clung to him, but still looked at the lake. ‘Don’t talk. Hold me and say nothing.’

  The man smiled.

  ‘I know what happened,’ he said boastfully. ‘The earth moved, right?’

  Nimue smiled sadly.

  ‘Not only the earth,’ she said after a moment. ‘Not only the earth.’

  A flash. Darkness. The next place.

  The place was gloomy, sinister and repulsive.

  Ciri involuntarily hunched in her saddle. She was shaken, both physically and mentally. Kelpie’s horseshoes rang on something flat and smooth, durable and as hard as rock. After a long time gliding in oblivion where everything was soft, the mare whinnied and began to pull violently to one side; smashing her hooves into the hard rock with such a staccato that Ciri’s teeth rang.

  The second shook was from a smell. Ciri gasped ad covered her mouth and nose with her sleeve. She could feel her eyes immediately fill with tears.

  Around her floated an acid, corrosive, dense stench, it was choking and disgusting and she could not remember ever smelling anything like it. What it was – was the stench of decay, cadaverous, the final stench in the chain of degradation and degeneration, the smell of

  ruin and destruction, and she felt that whatever was rotting had smelt no better when it had been alive. Even at its heyday.

  She bent over with her gag reflex, which she could no longer suppress. Kelpie snorted and tossed her head. The unicorn, who appeared beside them, sat on his haunches, jumped and kicked. The impact with the hard surface was answered with a loud echo.

  Around them, the night was dark and wrapped them in a choking haze. Ciri looked up to get their bearings by the stars, but above her head was nothing but a black vault, just above the horizon was illuminated by the red glare of distant fires.

  ‘Ooops,’ she said, when she grinned she felt a sticky, acidic moisture on her lips ‘Brrrr. Wrong place, wrong time. In the literal sense!’

  The unicorn snorted and shook his head, his horn moved in a short arc.

  The floor grating under Kelpie’s hooves was rock, but a strange, and unnaturally even which gave off an intense smell of burning ash and dirt. It took a while before Ciri realized the maybe it was a road. She was getting the most agonizing shock with each step, therefore she turned Kelpie towards the verge lined with something that was perhaps once trees, but now only looked like mutilated skeletons, from which hung tattered shreds which reminded her of the remnants of rotten shrouds.

  The unicorn warned her with a whinny and a mental signal. But it was too late.

  The dead trees began to slope down and ended at a deep escarpment. Ciri screamed and kicked her heels into the mare’s sides. Kelpie strained muscles were bunching up and her hooves were crushing what was covering – or basically consisted of the slope – garbage, mostly some weird empty containers. These containers did not crumple under the horseshoes, but broke as if disgustingly soft, like big fish bladders. Each of them gurgled softly and emitted a smell that nearly knocked Ciri out of the saddle. Kelpie, neighing furiously, stomped up the dump towards the road. Ciri, choking from the stench, clung to the mare’s neck.

  The made it. The hardness of the unpleasant road was greeted with an odd mixture of joy and relief.

  Ciri was still shaking as she looked down the hill. The escarpment ended at a black lake at the bottom. Its surface was glossy and motionless, as if there was no water, but was filled with pitch. Behind the lake, past mounds of ash and slag heaps the sky glowed with distant fires.

  Above the horizon ruddy columns of smoke were rising.

  The unicorn snorted. Ciri wanted to rub her watery eyes on her sleeve, but found that the entire sleeve was covered with dust. A layer of dust also covered her thighs, saddle and Kelpie’s neck and mane. The smell was unbearable.

  ‘How disgusting,’ she muttered. ‘Revolting… Let’s leave. Let’s leave quickly, Horsey.’

  The unicorn pricked up his ears.

  Only you can make that happen. Do it.

  ‘Me? Alone? Without your help?’

  The unicorn nodded his horn. Ciri scratched her head, sighed and closed her eyes. She concentrated.

  First, she felt only suspicion, uncertainty and fear. But soon her mind was awash in a cold light – the light of knowledge and power. She had no idea where this source of knowledge and the wellspring of power had come from, but she knew she could. She could if she wanted to.

  Once again she looked at the motionless dead lake, the steaming heap of waste and the skeleton of trees. In the distance the sky was illuminated by the glow of fires.

  ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘This is not my world.’

  The unicorn whinnied eloquently. She understood what he wanted to say.

  ‘And if it’s is mine,’ she wiped her eyes and nose with a handkerchief, ‘then I hope that it is infinitely far away in time. Either it’s the distant past, or…’

  She stopped.

  ‘The past,’ she said dully after a moment. ‘I believe this is the past.’

  The heavy rain which greeted them at their next jump was a welcome blessing. The downpour smelled of mud, grass and summer and quickly washed away the dirt and dust from the dead world.

  After sometime, however, the long cleansing became unbearable. Water spilled down Ciri’s collar, it soaked her to the skin and started to make her uncomfortably cold. Therefore she quickly jumped from the wet place.

  Because it was also not the right place or time.

  The next place was very warm, an intense heat prevailed there, so Ciri, Kelpie and the unicorn dried very quickly and the water vanished off of them like vapor from a teapot. They were in a heath ravaged by the sun on the edge of a forest. They could immediately see it was a great forest, a dense forest, wild and incredibly thick.

  In the throbbing heat, Ciri hoped this might be the forest of Brokilon and finally a known location.

  They rode slowly around the edge of the forest. Ciri looked for anything that could determine where they were. The unicorn snorted, lifted his horned lead and looked around, sniffing. He was restless.

  ‘Do you think, Horsey,’ she said, ‘that they can chase us?’

  His snort was clear and unambiguous, even without the telepathy.

  ‘Have we not managed to escape far enough yet?’

  The thought that he sent her she didn’t understand. Not far away and not close? What does that mean? The Spiral? What spiral?

  She did not understand what he meant. But she understood his anxiety.

  The hot heath was not the right place and not the right time.

  They realized that night, when the heat had yielded and in the sky over the forest appeared not one moon, but two. One large and one small.

  The next place was at the edge of a sea, on a very steep cliff from which doves were spread
out on strangely shaped rocks. The wind smelled of the ocean, shrieking terns, gulls and petrels and white layer covered the rocky terraces. The sea reached to the horizon, framed by dark clouds.

  Down on a stony beach, Ciri could suddenly distinguish the skeleton of a giant monstrous fish head partly buried in the gravel. The teeth that protruded from the white jaw were over three feet in length and the jaw itself gave the sense that one could going riding through the portal of the ribs without ever touching the head or spine.

  Ciri was not sure if this was her world or her time as there were fish like that there as well.

  They walked along the edge of the cliff. Seagulls and albatrosses did not seem frightened at all, they did not move out of the way, they even pecked and slashed their beaks at Kelpie

  and Ihuarraquax. Ciri knew that these birds had never seen a horse or unicorn. Or humans either.

  Ihuarraquax snorted, shook his head and horn and was visibly uneasy.

  He turned out to be correct. Something snapped, like the sound of torn fabric. The gulls rose with a shriek and a flutter, covering everything instantly in a cloud of white feathers. The air over the cliff suddenly trembled and became cloudy and broke like glass.

  From the crack and darkness emerged riders. Behind them blew coats, whose color resembled the reflection in the sky from the setting sun.

  Dearg Ruadhri. The Red Riders.

  Even before the screaming birds and the warning neigh, Ciri, Kelpie and the unicorn turned to flee. But the air had already cracked on the other side of them and from the crack spilled riders. The pursuers formed a semicircle around them and closed, pushing Ciri closed to the abyss. She screamed and pulled her sword from its sheath.

  The unicorn sent her a strong signal that pierced her brain like a needle. Ciri understood immediately. He showed her the way. There was a hole in the skirmish line. The unicorn whinnied menacingly and threw himself against the elves.