by Gene Wolfe
Chapter 3. Spiny Orange
Bold Berthold was ill the next day and begged me not to leave him, so I went hunting instead. I was not much of a hunter then, but more by luck than skill I put two arrows into a stag. Both shafts broke when the stag fell, but I salvaged the iron heads. That night while we had a feast of roast venison, I brought up the Aelf, asking Bold Berthold whether he had heard of Aelfrice, and whether he knew anything about the people who lived there.
He nodded. “Aye.”
“I mean the real Aelfrice.”
He said nothing.
“In Irringsmouth, a woman told a story about a girl who was supposed to get married to an Aelfking and she cheated him out of her bed. But it was just a story. Nobody thought it was real.”
“Come here, betimes,” Bold Berthold muttered.
“Do they? Real Aelf?”
“Aye. ‘Bout as high as the fire there. Like charcoal most are, like soot, and dirty as soot, too. All sooty ‘cept teeth and tongue. Eyes yellow fire.”
“They’re real?”
He nodded. “Seven worlds there be, Able. Didn’t I never teach you?” I waited.
“Mythgarthr, this is. Some just say Land, but that’s wrong. The land you walk on and the rivers you swim in. The Sea ... Only the sea’s in between, seems like. The air you breathe. All Mythgarthr, in the middle. So three above and three under. Skai’s next up, or you can say Sky. Both the same. Skai’s where the high-flying birds go sometimes. Not little sparrows and robins, or any of that sort. Hawks and eagles and the wild geese. I even seen big herons up there.”
I recalled the flying castle, and I said, “Where the clouds are.”
Bold Berthold nodded. “You’ve got it. Still want to go to Griffinsford? Feeling better with this good meat in me. Might be better yet in the morning, and I haven’t gone over to look at the old place this year.”
“Yes, I do. But what about Aelfrice?”
“I’ll show you the pond where they threw fire at me, and the old graves.”
“I have questions about Skai, too,” I told him. “I have more questions than I can count.”
“More than I got answers, most likely.”
Outside, a wolf howled.
“I want to know about the Angrborn and the Osterlings. Some people I stayed with told me the Osterlings tore down Bluestone Castle.”
Bold Berthold nodded. “Likely enough.”
“Where do the Angrborn come from?”
“Ice lands.” He pointed north. “Come with the frost, and go with the snow.”
“Do they come just to steal?”
Staring into the fire, he nodded again. “Slaves, too. They didn’t take us ’cause we’d fought. Going to kill us instead. Run instead of fight, and they take you. Take the women and children. Took Gerda.”
“About Skai—”
“Sleep now,” Bold Berthold told me. “Goin’ to travel, stripling. Got to get up with the sun.”
“Just one more question? Please? After that I’ll go to sleep, I promise.”
He nodded.
“You must look up into the sky a lot. You said you’d seen eagles up there, and even herons.”
“Sometimes.”
“Have you ever seen a castle there, Bold Berthold?”
Slowly, he shook his head.
“Because I did. I was lying in the grass and looking up at the clouds—” He caught me by the shoulders, just the way you do sometimes, and looked into my eyes. “You saw it?”
“Yes. Honest, I did. It didn’t seem like it could be real, but I got up and ran after it, trying to keep it in sight, and it was real, a six-sided castle of white stone up above the clouds.”
“You saw it.” His hands were trembling worse than ever.
I nodded. “Up among the clouds and moving with them, driven by the same wind. It was white like they were, but the edges were hard and there were colored flags on the towers.” The memory took me by the throat. “It was the most beautiful thing I ever saw.”
* * *
Next morning Bold Berthold was up before me, and we had left his hide-covered hut far behind before the sun rose over the treetops. He could walk only slowly, leaning on his staff; but he lacked nothing in endurance, and seemed more inclined to talk while walking than he had been the night before. “Wanted to know about the Aelf last night,” he said, and I nodded.
“Got to talking about Skai instead. You must’ve thought I was cracked. I had reasons, though.”
“It was all right,” I told him, “because I want to know about that, too.”
The almost invisible path we had been following had led us to a clearing; Bold Berthold halted, and pointed Skaiward with his staff. “Birds go up there. You seen them.”
I nodded. “I see one now.”
“They can’t stay.”
“If—One could perch on the castle wall, couldn’t it?”
“Don’t talk ‘bout that.” I could not tell whether he was angry or frightened. “Not now and maybe not never.”
“All right. I won’t, I promise.”
“Don’t want to lose you no more.” He drew breath. “Birds can’t stay. You and me can’t go at all. See it, though. Understand?”
I nodded.
He began to walk again, hurrying forward, his staff thumping the ground before him. “Think a bird could, too? Eagle can see better than you. Ever see a eagle nest?”
“Yes, there was one about five miles from our cabin.”
“Top of a big tree?”
“That’s right. A tall pine.”
“Eagle’s sitting there, sitting eggs, likely. Think it ever looks up ‘stead of down?”
“I suppose it must.” I was trotting behind him.
“Then it can go, if it’s of a mind to. The Aelf’s the same.” One thick blue-veined finger pointed to the earth. “They’re down there where we can’t see, only they can see us. You and me. Hear us, too, if we talk loud. They can come up if they want to, like birds, only they can’t stay.”
After that we walked on in silence for half an hour or so, I pursuing almost vanished memories. At last I said, “What would happen if an Aelf tried to stay here?”
“Die,” Bold Berthold told me. “That’s what they say.”
“They told you that? That they couldn’t live up here?”
“Aye.”
Later, when we stopped to drink from a brook, I said, “I won’t ask how they’ve been wronged, but do you know?”
He shrugged. “Know what they say.”
That night we camped beside the Griffin, cheered and refreshed by its purling waters. Bold Berthold had brought flint and steel, and I collected dry sticks for him and broke them into splinters so fine that the first shower of yellow sparks set them alight. “If there wasn’t no winter I could live so all my life,” he said, and might have been speaking for me.
Flat on my back after our meal, I heard the distant hooting of an owl, and the soughing of the wind in the treetops, where the first green leaves had burst forth. You must understand that at that time I believed I would be home soon. I had been kidnapped, I thought, by the Aelf. They had freed me in some western state, or perhaps in a foreign country. In time, the memories of my captivity would return. Had I been wiser, I would have stayed in Irringsmouth, where I had made friends, and where there might well be a library with maps, or an American Consul. As it was, there might be some clue in Griffinsford (I was not yet convinced that was not the name of our town); and if there were none, there was nothing to keep me from returning to Irringsmouth. Half destroyed, Irringsmouth remained a seaport of sorts. Maybe I could board a ship to America there. What was there to keep me from doing it? Nothing and nobody, and a ship sounded good.
“Who-o-o?” said the owl. Its voice, soft and dark as the spring night, conveyed apprehension as well as curiosity.
I too sensed the footsteps by which someone or something made its way through the forest, although one single drop of dew falling from a high limb would h
ave made more noise than any of them.
“Who-o-o comes?”
You would get married, and I would be in the way all the time until I was old enough to live on my own. The best plan might be for me to stay out at the cabin, for the first year anyway. It might be better still for me not to come home too quickly. Home to the bungalow that had been Mom and Dad’s. Home to the cabin where we had gone to hunt and fish before snow ended all that.
Yet it was spring. Surely this was spring. The stag I had killed had dropped his antlers, the grass in the forlorn little garden of Bluestone Castle had been downy and short. What had become of winter?
A lovely, pointed face lit by great lustrous eyes like harvest moons peered down into mine, then vanished.
I sat up. There was no one there except Bold Berthold, and he was fast asleep. The owl had fallen silent, but the night-wind murmured secrets to the trees. Lying down again, I did my best to recall the face I had glimpsed. A green face? Surely, I thought, surely it had looked green.
* * *
The old trees had given way to young ones, bushes, and spindly alders when Bold Berthold said, “Here we are.”
There was no town. No town at all.
“Right here,” he waved his staff, “right there’s where the street run. Houses on this side, back to the water. On that other, back to the fields. This right here was Uld’s house, and across from it Baldig’s.” He took me by the hand. “Recollect Baldig?”
I do not remember what I said, and he was not listening anyway. “Uld had six fingers, and so’d his daughter Skjena.” Bold Berthold released my shoulder. “Pick up my stick for me, will you, stripling? I’ll show where we met ’em.”
It was some distance away, through bushes and saplings. At last he stopped to point. “That was our house, yours and mine. Only it used to be Pa’s. Recollect him? Know you don’t recollect her. Ma got took ‘fore you was ever weaned. Mag, her name was. We’ll sleep there tonight, sleep where the house stood, for the old times’ sake.”
I had not the heart to tell him I was not really his brother.
“There!” He led me north another hundred yards or so. “Here’s the spot where I first seen Schildstarr. I’d boys like you to shoot arrows and throw stones, but they run, all of ’em. Some shot or threw first, most just run soon as the Angrborn showed their faces.”
He had stayed, and fought, and fallen. Conscious of that, I said, “I wouldn’t have run.”
He thrust his big, bearded face into mine. “You’d have run too!”
“No.”
“You’d have run,” he repeated, and flourished his staff as if to strike me.
I said, “I won’t fight you. But if you try to hit me with that, I’m going to take it away from you and break it.”
“You wouldn’t have?” He was trying not to smile.
Having convinced myself, I shook my head. “Not if they had been as tall as that tree.”
He lowered his staff and leaned on it. “Wasn’t. Up to that first big limb, maybe. How you know you wouldn’t run?”
“You didn’t,” I said. “Aren’t we the same?”
* * *
Long before sundown we had cleared a space to sleep in where the old house had stood, and built a new fire on the old hearth. Bold Berthold talked for hours about the family and about Griffinsford. I listened, mostly out of politeness at first; as the shadows lengthened, I became interested in spite of myself. There had been no school, no doctor, and no police. At long intervals, travelers had crossed the Griffin here, wading through cold mountain water that scarcely reached their knees. When the villagers were lucky, they had sold them food and lodging; when they had been unlucky, they had to fight them to protect their homes and herds.
If the Angrborn had been giants, the Osterlings who sometimes came in summer had been devils, gorging on human flesh to restore the humanity they had lost. The Aelf had come like fog in all seasons, and had vanished like smoke. “Mossmen and Salamanders, mostly,” Bold Berthold confided. “Or else little Bodachan. They’d help sometimes. Find lost stock and beg blood for it.” He bared his arm. “I’d stick a thorn in and give a drop or two. They ain’t but mud, that kind.”
I nodded to show I understood, although I did not.
“You was here with me then, only you didn’t talk so high. Pa raised me, and I raised you. You got to feeling like you was in the way, I’d say, ’cause of me runnin’ after Gerda. Prettiest girl ever seen, and we had it all planned out.”
I did not have to ask what happened.
“You went off, and I thought you’d be back in a year or two when we got settled. Only you never come ’til now. How’d you like it where you was?”
I tried to recall, but all that I could think of was that the best times in my life had come when I had been able to get out under the sky, out on a boat or among trees.
“Nothing to say?”
“Yes.” I showed him the arrowheads I had saved. “Since we’ll have a few more hours of daylight, I’d like to fit new shafts to them.”
“Old ones broke?”
I nodded. “When the stag fell. I was thinking that if I could find more wood of the same kind as my bow, my new shafts wouldn’t break.”
“You’d cut one, for a couple arrows?”
I shook my head. “I’d cut a limb or two, that’s all. And if I could find one of last year’s fruits, I’d plant the seeds.”
Laboriously he climbed to his feet. “Show you one, and it ain’t gone.”
He led me into the brush, and kneeling felt through the grass until he discovered a small stump. “Spiny orange,” he said. “You planted it ‘fore you went away. It was on my land, and I wouldn’t let nobody cut it. Only somebody done, when I wasn’t looking.”
I said nothing.
“Thought it might have put up shoots.” He rose again with the help of his staff. “They do, sometimes.”
I knelt, took one of the two remaining seeds from my pouch, and planted it near where the earlier stump had grown. When I rose again, his face was streaked with tears. Once more he led me away, then stopped to wave his staff at the wilderness of saplings and bushes that stretched before us. “Here was my barley field. See the big tree way in back? Come on.”
Halfway there he pointed out a speck of shining green. “There it is. Spiny orange don’t drop its leaves like most do. Green all winter, like a pine.”
Together we went to it, and it was a fine young tree about twenty-five feet high. I hugged him.
It seems to me that I should say more about the spiny orange here, but the truth is that I know little. Many of the trees we have in America are found in Mythgarthr too—oaks and pines and maples and so on. But the spiny orange is the only tree I know that grows in Aelfrice too. The sky of Aelfrice is not really strange until you look closely at it and see the people in it, and (sometimes) hear their voices on the wind. Time moves very slowly here, but we are not conscious of it. Only the trees and the people are strange at first sight. I think the spiny orange belongs here, not in Mythgarthr and not in America.
Chapter 4. Sir Ravd
“Lad!” the knight called from the back of his tall gray. And again, “Come here, lad. We would speak to you.”
His squire added, “We’ll do you no hurt.”
I approached warily; if I had learned one thing in my time in those woods with Bold Berthold, it was to be chary of strangers. Besides, I recalled the knight of the dragon, who had vanished before my eyes.
“You know the forest hereabout, lad?”
I nodded, giving more attention to his horse and arms than to what he said.
“We need a guide—a guide for the rest of this day and perhaps for tomorrow as well.” The knight was smiling. “For your help we’re prepared to pay a scield each day.” When I said nothing, he added, “Show him the coin, Svon.”
From a burse at his belt the squire extracted a broad silver piece. Behind him, the great bayard charger he led stirred and stamped with impatience, sn
orting and blowing through its lips.
“We’ll feed you, too,” the knight promised. “Or if you feed us with that big bow, we’ll pay you for the food.”
“I’ll share without payment,” I told him, “if you’ll share with me.”
“Nobly spoken.”
“But how can I know you won’t send me off empty-handed at the end of the day, with a cuff on the ear?”
Svon shut his fist around the scield. “How do we know you won’t lead us into an ambush, ouph?”
“As for the cuff at sunset,” the knight said, “I can give you my word. As I do, though you’ve no reason to trust it. On the matter of payment, however, I can set your mind at rest right now.” A big forefinger tapped Svon’s fist; when Svon surrendered the coin, the knight tossed it to me. “There’s your pay for this day until sunset, nor will we take it from you. Will you guide us?”
I was looking at the coin, which bore the head of a stern young king on one side and a shield on the other. The shield displayed the image of a monster compounded of woman, horse, and fish. I asked the knight where he wanted me to take him.
“To the nearest village. What is it?”
“Glennidam,” I said; I had been there with Bold Berthold.
The knight glanced at Svon, who shook his head. Turning back to me, the knight asked, “How many people?”
There had been nine houses—unmarried people living with their parents, and old people living with their married children. At a guess, three adults for each house ... I asked whether I should include children.
“If you wish. But no dogs.” (This, I think, may have been overheard by some Bodachan.)
“Then I’ll say fifty-three. That’s counting Seaxneat’s wife’s new baby. But I don’t know its name, or hers either.”
“Good people?”
I had not thought so; I shook my head.
“Ah.” The knight’s smile held a grim joy. “Take us to Glennidam, then, without delay. We can introduce ourselves on the road.”
“I am Able of the High Heart.”
Svon laughed.
The knight touched the rim of his steel coif. “I am Ravd of Redhall, Able of the High Heart. My squire is Svon. Now let us go.”
