The Knight twk-1

by Gene Wolfe

  I bowed, not really knowing whether I should or not. “It’s an honor to me just to talk to you, My Lord.”

  “My father was a prince, the younger brother of His Majesty’s father. It is no small distinction.”

  “I know that,” I said.

  “I myself am a mere baron, but my older brother is a duke. If he and his son were to perish, I would be duke in my turn, Sir Able.” I did not know what to say, so I just nodded.

  “A mere baron. And yet I have my cousin’s confidence. Thus I am sent to the King of the Angrborn bearing rich gifts, in the hope that my protestations will terminate his incursions. I do not tell you all this to boast, Sir Able. I have no need to boast, or even to impress you. I tell you so that you will understand that I know whereof I speak.”

  I nodded again. “I don’t doubt it, My Lord.”

  “I could name to you every knight of noble birth—and not the names merely, but the family connections and deeds of valor as well. Not of some. Not of most. Of all.”

  “I understand, My Lord.”

  “I am equally familiar with every young man of noble lineage who would be a knight. There is no nobly born knight in all Celidon named Able. Nor is there any nobly born youth of that name, whether aspirant to knighthood or not.”

  I should have caught on before that, but I had not. Now I finally got it. I said, “I’m not of noble birth, My Lord. I guess that beggar said I was? But he probably doesn’t know anything about me.”

  “Crol thought you noble. Did you sense it?”

  I shook my head. “I told him I wasn’t.”

  “He did. It was apparent in his behavior. Your lofty stature, your physique, and your face—your face most of all—might support a claim to nobility.”

  “Well, I won’t make one.” I felt like I did sometimes in school then, and it was hard not to fidget.

  “I was tempted to invite you to sit when Crol brought you in. I am tempted still.”

  That got me a nice smile from the daughter that meant she would not have minded.

  Beel coughed. “I will not, however, Sir Able. I ought to inform that as a matter of policy I almost never sit with my inferiors.”

  “It’s your table,” I said.

  “So it is. Sitting encourages familiarity, and I am forced to punish men whom I myself have corrupted.” Beel shook his head. “I have done that once or twice. I did not find it pleasant.”

  I said, “I bet they didn’t, either.”

  “True. But—”

  The daughter interrupted us. “May I pet your cat?” As soon as she said that, Mani came out from under the table and jumped into her lap.

  “I asked the man I questioned whether the noble knight of whom the beggar had spoken thought himself invincible.” I would have expected Beel to be angry then, but he was smiling while he waited for my answer.

  “It seems like a funny question,” I said. “I doubt if there’s any such knight, anywhere.”

  Here I have to stop to say that Beel’s pavilion was divided into halves by a curtain—more scarlet silk, but not as heavy as the outside stuff. I have to say it because Baki peeked around it and grinned at me.

  “I agree,” Beel was saying. “But my question only seems odd. I asked it because of something one of the sons of my kinsman Lord Obr had told me the day before.”

  I can be pretty stupid sometimes, but I got that one. “Squire Svon?”

  “Yes. I think you know him.”

  “He’s my squire, My Lord.”

  Beel shook his head. “Not if he has deserted you. He said that he had not, but it seemed to me otherwise.”

  “He didn’t.” I suppose that should have been hard to say, but it was not; I knew it was the truth and I wanted to get it out.

  “I am delighted to hear it. You are going to the Northern Mountains to take your stand in a pass. For how long, Sir Able?”

  “’Til there’s ice in the sea, My Lord. Ice in the Bay of Forcetti.”

  “Midwinter, in other words.” Beel sighed. “I would not have been astonished if you had told me Svon deserted you.”

  I shook my head. “He didn’t.”

  Beel sighed again and turned to his daughter. “He is a connection of your grandmother’s, a younger son of Lord Obr’s. Obr is your great-aunt’s nephew.” She nodded.

  “Young Svon told me certain things. It is unpleasant to question the veracity of those nobly born, but his—he ...”

  I waved it away. “I get it.”

  “So does Idnn, I’m sure,” Beel said, and turned back to her. “He was squire to a certain Sir Ravd, a knight of high repute. He is said to have deserted him on the field of battle. I am not saying he did so—I doubt that he did. But his character is such that the lie could be believed. You understand?”

  The daughter (that was Idnn) said, “You must have known him better than my father, Sir Able. Do you believe it?”

  I said, “No, My Lady. I don’t believe things like that unless I see proof, and nobody seems to have any.”

  Beel’s thin smile was back. “I asked him what he was doing among these unpeopled hills, as anyone would. He told me a great deal, not all of which I credited. For one thing, he told me he had been made squire to a peasant now called a knight.”

  He waited for me, but I stayed quiet.

  “You are, of course, of gentle birth, Sir Able?”

  “I’m not. I won’t go into my family—you wouldn’t believe me if I did. But basically, Svon’s right.”

  Beel’s eyes got just a little bit wider.

  “I want to say this, though. Please listen. I really am a knight, and I haven’t told you a single lie. I didn’t lie to your herald either. Or to the sergeant that brought me to him.”

  Gylf pushed against my leg then to show that he was on my side.

  “This puts things in a new light.” Beel clapped, and the mousy-looking servingman scampered in right away.

  “We’ve kept Sir Able standing much too long, Swert. Fetch another chair.”

  The servingman nodded and ran off to get one.

  Beel said, “I want to make certain there is no mistake. Your father was a peasant.”

  “My father sold hammers and nails. Things like that. He died while I was young, so I have to say I never really knew him. But I know what my brother said, and what other people have said. If we were back home, I could show you where his store was.”

  “Good. Good! And how did you learn the secret arts? May I ask that? Who taught you?”

  I said, “Nobody, My Lord. I don’t know anything about magic.”

  Idnn giggled.

  “I understand. One takes certain oaths, Idnn. Oaths one dares not break.” Beel smiled at me. “I am an adept myself, Sir Able. I will question you no more, if you do not question me. I might say, however, that young Svon himself had noticed certain—irregularities is too strong a word, perhaps. Certain phenomena, while in your company.”

  The servingman came back with a folding chair, very pretty, with silver fittings. He opened it up and set it at the table where I would be across from Idnn. Beel nodded and I sat down, taking it easy because I was not sure the chair would hold me. Gylf lay down next to me.

  “I spent much of my boyhood in a peasant’s house,” Beel told me. “It was my nurse’s, outside my father’s castle of Coldcliff. When my older brothers were at their lessons in the nursery, my nurse would take me home so that I might play with her own children. We had great games, and ran through the wood. And fished, and swam. Doubtless it was much the same for you.”

  I nodded, remembering. “Yeah, I did all that, and I lay on my back in the grass, sometimes, to watch the clouds. I don’t think I’ve done that since I came here.”

  Beel turned to Idnn. “It’s good for you to hear all this, though you may not think so now.”

  She said, “I’m sure it is, Father.”

  “You see our peasants plowing and sowing, and their women spinning and so forth, hard work that lasts from the rising
of the sun until its setting in many cases. But you need to understand that they have their own prides and their own pleasures. Speak kindly to them, protect them, and deal fairly with them, and they will never turn against you.”

  “I’ll try, Father.”

  He turned back to me. “I must explain to you what has been running through my mind. This hill country is by no means safe, and the mountains will be worse. We have Sir Garvaon and his archers and men-at-arms to protect us. But when I saw you, I was minded to keep you with me. A young knight—and more than a knight—brave and strong, would be a welcome augment to our force.”

  “It’s really nice for you to say that,” I began, “but—”

  “Examining you more closely, however, I feared you might prove overly attractive to Idnn.”

  I felt my face get hot. “My Lord, you do me too much honor.”

  His thin smile came again. “Of course I do. But so might she.” He glanced sidelong at her. “Idnn’s blood was royal, not so long ago. Now it represents the cream of the nobility. Soon she will be a child no more.”

  Thinking how it had been with me I said, “For her sake, I hope she stays right where she is a while longer.”

  “As do I, Sir Able. When I had considered those things, I thought to give you the horse you asked of me and hurry you on your way.”

  “That’s—”

  “But a peasant!” Beel’s smile was wider than it had been. “A peasant lad could not hold the smallest attraction for the great-granddaughter of King Pholsung.”

  Idnn’s left eyelid sort of drooped when he said that. He did not see it because he was looking at me, but I did.

  “Therefore, Sir Able, you are to remain with us for as long as we have need of you. Sir Garvaon’s pavilion will hold one more cot. It must, and Garvaon himself will welcome a companion of his own rank, I know.”

  “My Lord, I can’t.”

  “Can’t ride with us, and eat good food, and sleep like a human being?”

  Idnn added her acoustic guitar to her father’s gargly tenor. “For me, Sir Able? What if I’m killed because you weren’t with me?”

  That made it rough. “My Lord, My Lady, I promised—no, I swore—that I’d go straight to the mountains to take my stand, as His Grace Duke Marder and I had agreed.”

  “And stay there,” Beel said, “until midwinter. Nearly half a year, in other words. Tell me something, Sir Able. Were you riding swiftly when you came to us? Did you gallop up to this pavilion and leap from the saddle to stand before me with Master Crol?”

  “My Lord—”

  “You had no horse. Isn’t that the fact? You came to me to borrow one.”

  Not knowing what to say, I nodded.

  “I am offering to give you one. Not a loan, a gift. I will give it on the condition that you will travel with my daughter and me until we reach the pass you intend to hold. I ask you this single question. Will you travel faster by riding with us, or by walking alone? Because you must do one or the other.”

  Mani poked his head above the table to grin at me, and I wanted to kick him.

  Chapter 49. The Sons Of The Angrborn

  U pward, always upward sloped the land that day and the next, and as day fol lowed day I came to understand that we were among the towering, rocky hills which I had glimpsed a time or two from the downs north of the forest in which I had lived like an outlaw with Bold Berthold, and that the true mountains, those mountains of which we had scarcely heard rumors, the mountains that lifted snow-covered peaks into Skai, were still before us, and still remote.

  Then I left the War Way and Beel’s lumbering train of pack horses and mules, and rode up one of those hills as far as the white stallion he had given me could carry me, and dismounted when my stallion could go no farther, and tied him to a boulder and scrambled up to the summit. From there I could see the downs, and the dark forest beyond them, and even glimpse bits of the silver thread that was the Griffin. “Tomorrow I’ll find the spring it rises from,” I promised myself, “and drink from the Griffin in honor of Bold Berthold and Griffinsford.” I did not say that to Gylf, because Gylf had stayed behind to guard my stallion. Or to Mani, because Mani was riding with Idnn, tucked into a black velvet bag, generally with his head and forelegs sticking out. I would have said it to Uri and Baki if I could, but I had not seen either of them since Baki had peeked around Idnn’s curtain.

  I said it to myself, as I said, and even though I knew how foolish it was, I did not laugh. The wind was cold enough up there to make me wrap myself in the gray boat cloak Kerl had kept for me and pull up the hood, and blowing hard enough to make me wish the thick wool was thicker, too; but I stayed up there for more than an hour looking, and thinking about the kid I used to be, and what I was now. I was all alone, the way I used to be when I told Bold Berthold I was going hunting and wandered off hunting memories through the forest and sometimes out to the edge of the forest and onto the downs, where I always sighted elk but the elk were always too far.

  All right, I was not going to write this, but I will. When I had been up there a long time and settled everything in my mind, I remembered Michael; and I tried to call Disiri to me the way he had called the Valfather. It did not work, and I cried.

  The sun was low in the west by the time I got back to Gylf and the stallion. “They went on,” Gylf said, and I knew he meant that the last mule and the rear guard—I was supposed to be bossing the rear guard—had passed him on the road below a long time ago.

  I said I knew it, but that we would catch up to them pretty quick. “Want me to scout?”

  I thought about that while I rode down the hill. I had been alone for quite a while and had enough of it. I wanted company and somebody to talk to. But I knew Gylf pretty well by that time, and I knew he did not volunteer to go hunting or protect something, or anything else, unless he was pretty sure it ought to be done. So he had heard something or seen something or most likely smelled something that worried him. Naturally I started listening, and sniffing the wind, and all that, even though I knew perfectly well that his ears were sharper than mine and I might as well not have had a nose.

  “Want me to?”

  So he was really worried. “Yeah,” I said, “go right ahead. I’d appreciate it.” As soon as I said that, he was off like an arrow. It was a brown arrow at first, but a black arrow before it had gone very far. Then I heard him baying as he ran, that deep bay you hear from clear up in Skai, when the lead hound is all alone out in front of the pack and even the Valfather on his eight-legged hunter cannot keep up.

  He woke the thunder. You will say no way, but he did. It boomed way off among the real mountains; but it was there, and getting closer. I wanted to spur my stallion then, but he was still picking his way among the rocks. Finally, just to make myself feel better, I told him, “Go as fast as you can without breaking your legs or mine. I don’t think a broken leg’s going to be much help out here.”

  He nodded like he understood. I knew he did not, but it was nice just the same. Mani liked to brag and he liked to argue, and right then I liked my white horse a lot better.

  “Hey,” I said, “I get to do all the talking. Cool!”

  His ears turned to me. I think it was his way of saying that he was a good listener.

  As soon as he had grass under his hooves, I gave him the spurs (gilded iron spurs that Master Crol had found somewhere for me) and he galloped hard until we got to the War Way, and harder after that, up and up through a cleft that seemed just about as high as that hilltop I had been on, and then along a narrow gorge until I caught the rumble of stones. I pulled up sharp when I heard that, because I already had a pretty fair idea what it might be.

  The side of the gorge was a shorter climb than the hill had been, but I was tired already, it was cold, and the first stars were coming out. I could not see handholds, and when I did they were usually just shadows or something. I had to feel my way up, and it seemed like it was taking hours.

  The stones rumbled again when I w
as about halfway up. Then it got quiet. Somebody gave a wild yell. That must have been quite a way off, but it seemed closer because of the way it bounced from rock to rock. The moon rose. For some crazy reason I looked at it; and when I did the flying castle passed in front of it, black against the white face of the moon and looking like a toy. Back then I was not even sure it was the Valfather’s (which it is), but seeing it like that helped a lot. I know you will say there is no sense to it, but it did. I was the sea, and I was looking up at the moon and that six-faced castle and reaching for it with big foaming waves like white hands. And bang! I was at the top with my fingers all torn up and the blood running off them a little and there was war in the wind and it was too dark to shoot a bow. I sprinted down that way, jumping over cracks and down little cliffs and nothing in the world was going to stop me.

  Then a hairy hand about as big as the blade of a spade did it. Two hands picked me up, but my left arm was free and I stuck my dagger into that big man’s neck before he could throw me over the cliff. When he fell it was like a tree falling, and we both ended up too close to the edge, with him bleeding and thrashing around and trying to get up. I got up first and hit him in the head with Sword Breaker, and heard the bone break under the blow. He fell back down after that, and he never moved again.

  Down below someone was shouting, “Finefield! Finefield!” I guess I recognized Garvaon’s voice, because I knew it was him and figured it must be the name of his manor. I did not have one, so I yelled, “Disiri! Disiri!” so Garvaon would know I was up there helping.

  After that Disiri! was always what I yelled whenever I fought. I may not remember to write that down every time I talk about fighting, but that was the way it was. When I got to Skai (let me say this before I forget) I did it there too. Finally Alvit asked what it meant and I could not remember. After that I tried and tried. It hurt, way down deep.

  Naturally when I was running along the top of the cliff I did not know any of that. Pretty soon I came up to three of the biggest men I had ever seen. They were rolling a boulder to the edge. Sword Breaker got the first one in the forehead—that was about as high as I could reach—when he turned to look at me. A rock hit my steel cap and knocked it off. I think I sort of stumbled around a little after that. Somebody grabbed my wrist and I cut with my dagger and he let go. I remember seeing his knee as high as my crotch, and hitting it with Sword Breaker for all I was worth.