The Knight

Chapter 45. The Cottage In The Forest

l spent the rest of that day doing something I had never done before, something I would have sworn on a stack of bibles that I would never do. I had seen a stone table at Sheerwall where they sacrificed before a war or battle, and I built one as much like it as I could beside that pool, carrying stones all day while Gylf hunted, and fitting them together sort of like a puzzle. I got it finished just before dark.

Next morning I collected a lot of deadwood, enough for a really big fire—that was a lot easier than the stones had been. I could break most of the pieces I found over my knee, and if I could not I laid them down so that they could not move when I hit them, and whacked them with Sword Breaker. Then Gylf and I went hunting together. He had brought in a partridge and a marmot the day before, but we were after something big for the sacrifice. Just about the time the sun touched the treetops we got a real nice elk. No antlers, of course, at that time of year; but it was a big bull just the same. If it had been in antler, they would have been good ones. I saw it on a ridge about two hundred yards away. My bowstring had about driven me crazy the night before, giving me other people’s dreams; and I had been thinking of throwing it away. When I saw the elk I got glad I had it very fast. My arrow flew like lightning, catching the elk in back of the shoulder about halfway down. It ran like the wind at first, but Gylf got out in front and turned it, heading it back toward our table until it fell the last time.

I am big, thanks to Disiri, and lots of people have told me how strong I am; but I was not strong enough to carry that elk. I had to drag it, with Gylf pulling with his teeth over the tough parts. Finally I gave up. I told Gylf we couldn’t do it, and we would have to take part to eat and leave the rest. Then he got big and black, and picked up the elk like a rabbit, and carried it for me. The funny thing was that I could tell even when he was big like that, that he was afraid I would be mad. I was not. Scared, sure. But not mad.

We got the elk up on the wood on the table, and covered it with more wood. Then we praised the gods of Kleos, both of us, and I set the wood on fire. It was only Gylf and me, but I had never felt as good about anything as I did that night.

When I finally got to sleep, it was the same thing it had been the night before. I was somebody, then somebody different, and then somebody new. Sometime I was back with you and Geri, only all of us were older. To tell the truth, I was glad when Uri woke me up. I knew I should be mad, but I could not hack it. She said, “You spoke while you slept, Lord. I thought this best.”

I told her yes, I had been a little girl that they were going to operate on, only I knew the anesthetic would not work on me and I would feel everything. “Okay, what is it?”

Baki bowed. “We have done as you bid us, Lord.”

Uri nodded. “I have found your servant Svon, and Baki your servant Pouk.” I said that was swell, and I would go in the morning.

“To your servant Svon, Lord? Or to your servant Pouk?”

“They’re separated?”

“Even so.” Baki pointed. “Your servant Pouk is two days’ ride north along the road we followed until you went alone into this forest, Lord.”

I knew I was going to have to leave the pool—I had known that all along—but I did not like it. “Where’s Org?” I asked.

Uri said, “Your servant Org is with Svon, Lord.”

“I see. Master Agr gave me a charger, a chestnut stallion called Magneis. Where is he?”

Baki said, “I know him well, Lord. He is with your servant Pouk, Lord. All the horses are.”

“Then I had better go to Pouk first. Which way to the road? Will I find him if I follow it north?”

“I cannot say, Lord. He will travel the faster, I believe. But no doubt he will halt when he reaches the mountains.”

“He’ll halt a lot sooner than that,” I said, “if you tell him to. Find him again, and tell him I said for him to turn back south.”

Both shook their heads. “He will not believe us,” Uri declared. “He has not seen us, and will in no way trust us.”

Baki said, “He will chant spells against us that may well destroy us, Lord. Will you send us to our deaths?”

I laughed. “Are you telling me that Pouk—Pouk, of all people—knows spells that will work against you Aelf?”

Uri looked around to make certain no one was listening, and spoke in a guilty whisper. “He is ignorant, Lord, and ignorant people are dangerous. They credit their spells.”

Baki added, “He is of the old gods, Lord, even as you. His kind has not forgotten.”

“You’ve got to obey us.” It was a new thought for me.

“Yes, Lord. Even if we have fed you, we must. As you obey the Overcyns, Lord.”

That was a barbed remark if there ever was one. We obeyed the Overcyns, mostly, only when we were afraid we could not get away with not obeying. I had been here long enough to see quite a lot of that.

The upshot was that I told them to go south and stay in Mythgarthr with Svon and Org while Gylf and I went after Pouk and the horses. Then I went back to sleep and slept like a baby.

While we were tramping through the woods next morning, Gylf wanted to know how it was that Pouk got all the horses.

“He and Svon fought,” I said, “and Pouk won. He let Svon keep his money and his weapons, but he took the horses, Svon’s included, and the camping gear.”

“No sword.”

I shook my head. “Right, Pouk doesn’t have one. But there’s a woman with him, that’s what Uri and Baki said, and she’s got a sword. She had the point at Svon’s neck after Pouk knocked him down. That’s what they said.”

I stopped for a minute to think about that, and then I said, “I believe she must be the woman who had the mule that Org ate.”

Gylf grunted. “Why’s she here?”

“Uri and Baki didn’t know. Or if they did, they weren’t telling.” Gylf did not ask about the things I had seen when I had looked into the pool. I do not believe he had seen them, and I had not told him about them. I asked Uri and Baki though, and they had admitted the dark thing I had seen was Setr, calling him Garsecg to make him sound less threatening. He was a new god, they said, and they had to obey.

We reached the War Way a little after noon, and walked up it all afternoon without seeing anybody, and camped beside it that night.

About the time sunrise should have come, it started to rain, and the rain woke me up fast. I was cold—it was the first time I had been cold in quite a while—and wet and shaking. And hungry, with nothing to eat and Gylf gone. I piled sticks on our fire and cussed the smoke, and tried to get as warm and dry as I could for quite a while.

Finally it got lighter. I put out the fire and went off down the road in the rain, knowing Gylf would catch up.

Which he did after two or three hours. But the weather got worse and worse. It rained all the time, sometimes a little and sometimes a lot. The rain washed away the smells of the animals, so Gylf could not catch anything. After days of that, I stopped being hungry and started getting weak, and I knew we had to hold up and hunt—and get something, too, or we would die.

The next day we did, a young aurochs, the first I had ever seen. Gylf pinned him, and I ran up and stabbed him in the neck with my dagger. They look a little like a bull and a little like a buffalo. The place where he died was about as bad as it could possibly be, a thicket at the bottom of a steep little hollow. I could have asked Gylf to carry the aurochs like he had the elk, but I did not. I hacked off a haunch, and carried it to a place where it might be possible for us to build a fire if we were really, really lucky. That haunch probably weighed about a hundred pounds or maybe a hundred and fifty but it felt like two tons by the time we found the place and I finally set it down. We built our fire and ate as much as we could hold, and listened to the wolves fighting over the rest.

A storm got me up the next morning, a real howler with driving rain and thunder walking from hill to hill. Trying to make a joke, I told Gylf I was afraid Mythgarthr was going to be dismasted.

“Like home,” he said; our fire was out, but his eyes glowed crimson every time the lightning flashed.

I said, “What do you mean, home? We never lived any place with weather as bad as this.”

“My mother. My brothers. My sisters, too.”

I wanted to know where it was, but he stopped talking. All right, I knew he meant Skai; but I wanted him to talk about it. He never would say much about Skai.

We sat out the whole day, waiting for the rain to stop, and when it got dark I heard them. I think that was the only time I ever did until I got to Skai myself. I heard the baying of a thousand hounds like Gylf, and the drumming of the hooves as the Valfather’s Wild Hunt swept across the sky. Gylf wanted to follow them, but I would not let him.

The weather was a little better the next day, but we could not find the War Way again. I knew we had turned west when we had left it to hunt, so we tried to walk east or northeast; but you could not see the sun so a lot of it was guesswork. Then too, there were about a hundred things in that forest to make us go south instead. Or north, or even west—thickets, tangles of briars, creeks high and fast with rainwater, and gulches.

Finally we hit a pretty good path and decided to follow it as long as it was not clearly going wrong. It ended at the door of a stone cottage that looked like it had been empty for years. Half the roof had fallen in. The shutters had fallen off or been blown off and were rotting in the grass and weeds. The door was open, hanging by one hinge.

“Nobody lives here,” I told Gylf. “Let’s stop and build a fire and hunt around for something to eat. Maybe we can get dry tonight.”

“Path,” he said.

“You’re right, somebody made the path. But he doesn’t live here. He couldn’t. Probably he just comes around sometimes to look at it.” I had no idea what for, but Gylf did not ask me.

“Knock,” he told me when I got to the doorway.

It seemed silly, but I did, tapping on the ruined door with the pommel of my dagger. There was no welcome and no challenge from inside. I knocked harder to show my heart was in it, and called, “Hello? Hello?”

Gylf had been sniffing. He said, “Cat.”

I looked around, surprised. “What?”

“Stinks. Cat’s in there.”

I stepped inside and said, “So am I.”

Gylf came in after me, and a big black cat at the far end of the room hissed loud enough to scare you and ran up the wall into the loft.

The fireplace was full of dead ashes, but there were a couple of dry logs beside it, and some dry leaves and sticks in the kindling box. I stood one log on end and hit it with Sword Breaker hard enough to split it.

“Good one!” Gylf growled; and right when he said it, it seemed like somebody else said, “Food ...” I looked around, but I did not see anyone.

I arranged the wood and the kindling, and got everything to burning good with my flint and firesteel. We had a little meat left from the aurochs. I got it all out and laid it on the hearth. “Take whatever you want,” I told Gylf, “as long as you leave a couple pieces for me.”

After that I went out into the rain again to cut a green stick.