The Knight

It was still dark when I woke, but no longer quite so dark as night should have been once the moon had set. Toug crouched weeping on the other side of the fire, a small fire now, although there were a score of charred stubs around it.

Rising, I gathered them up and tossed them into the flames. “What are you afraid of?” I asked; and when he made no gesture in reply, I sat down beside him and put my arm over his shoulders. “What’s the matter?”

He pointed to his mouth.

“You can’t talk. Do you know why you can’t?”

Sobbing, he nodded and pointed to my side.

“Did Disiri do this to you?”

He nodded again; and after that, I sat up with him until the renewed fire had very nearly burned itself out; and since he could not talk, I talked a good deal, all about Disiri and my most recent adventures. At last I said, “You wanted me to go into the mountain where the dragon is. Was that because Disiri told you you’d be able to speak again if I did?”

He picked up a scrap of charred wood and smeared a long mark on a flat stone, with a smaller one across it.

“The sword?”

He nodded.

“You’ll be able to talk again if I can get Eterne?”

Nodding vigorously, he smiled through his tears. His eyes shone.

I rose. “You stay here. You’ll have to look after my horse, but you can use my blankets. Don’t touch my bow or my quiver. You grew up in the forest, didn’t you? Of course you did. You ought to know how to set snares. You must be hungry, and now that the bread and cheese are gone we don’t have anything here.” I stopped for a minute to think things over, then added, “I wouldn’t try to get back to Aelfrice, if I were you.”

The carved griffin’s face (when I reached it and could inspect it by daylight) was even larger than I had imagined, huge, ancient, and weatherworn. That great beak might have crushed a bus, and its bulging, staring, frightful eyes were a good half bowshot up the cliff face. Something about those eyes troubled me, so that I studied them for quite a while before shrugging and seating myself on a stone to pull off my boots and stockings. Those eyes had been trying to tell me something, but I was pretty sure I would never understand it.

The Griffin raced out of the griffin’s mouth, icy cold and foaming. Even though the water seldom reached my knees, I was forced to tuck my boots into my belt and cling to every little handhold I could find on the side so that I could work my way up the slope against the current. When it seemed that I had gone a long way into the mountain, I stopped and looked back. The circle of daylight that was the carved griffin’s mouth seemed as distant and as precious as the America I still thought of now and then, a lost paradise that faded with each struggling step I managed.

“A knight,” I told myself, “doesn’t bother to count the enemy.” Another step, and another. “But I wish I’d found Disiri—that I could see her once more before I go.”

Ben, I ca

Later, when the daylit opening seemed no bigger than a star, I said, “I wish Gylf were here.”

There was light ahead. I hurried forward, fighting a stream that was deeper but less swift—and plunged into dark water, stepping into a well that I had failed to see and sinking at once under the weight of my mail. Fighting it like a maniac, I pulled it through my sword belt and over my head and sent it plunging to the bottom before I realized I was in no danger of drowning. I could not breathe under the water, but I had no need to. I swam back to the surface (it seemed very remote) and pulled myself out, spitting water and shivering.

When I got my breath, I found that the wide chamber in which I huddled was not entirely dark. Two apertures high in its wall—the griffin’s eyes—admitted faint beams of daylight, and those beams focused on an altar, small and very plain, some distance from it.

Finding that I was still alive and in urgent need of exercise to warm myself, I got up and went over to look at it. The side facing me was featureless smooth stone, the top equally plain, and dampened by slow drops that fell like rain from the ceiling. The other side had been carved, however; and though the thin daylight from the griffin’s eyes did not find its incised curls and flourishes, I traced them with my fingers: Kantel, Ahlaw, Llo ... Call and I will come.

“I can’t read,” I told myself, “not the way they talk here or the way they write what they say. So how come I can read this?” And then, “These are Aelf letters!”

I stood up, half stu

Call and I will come.

“Then call I do,” I said. It sounded louder than I had intended it to, and echoed and reechoed through the chamber. “I call upon the griffin, or on who-ever’s altar this may be.”

My words died away to a murmur.

And nothing happened.

I went back to the well from which the little river we called the Griffm rose. There was no sword, no griffm, and no dragon in the grotto in which I stood; but my boots were in there, somewhere down in that well, with my stockings still stuffed down in them. They were floating between the surface and the bottom, very likely. My mail was in there too—on the bottom, beyond doubt.

I took off my sword belt, wiped Sword Breaker and my dagger as well as I could, and stripped. Trying to remember the swing of the sea, I dove in.

The water was bitterly cold but as clear as crystal, so clear that I could see a little bit by the dim light from the grotto. Way down where the light had just about faded away, something dark floated past my face. I grabbed at it, and it was a boot. I relaxed and let the current carry me up.

With a triumphant roar I broke the surface. I threw my boot out of the well, pulled myself up, and sat shaking on its edge. If I had found one boot, I might be able to find the other. If I found them both, it might be possible to get back my mail.

I got up and emptied the water from the boot I had rescued. My stocking was still in it. I wrung it out and carried it and all my clothes to the driest place I could find, a point some distance behind the altar where the grotto narrowed and slanted down into the earth. After spreading my shirt and trousers there, I dove into the well once more.

This time I was not so lucky, and came back to the surface empty-handed. Pulling myself up, weary and freezing, I decided to make a thorough examination of the grotto before diving again. It would give me time to catch my breath and to warm myself somewhat.

The dark passage behind the altar descended steeply for the twenty or thirty steps I followed it, and was soon darker than the wildest night. A dozen other murky openings in the walls of the grotto led into small caves, all of them more or less damp. Grengarm, I decided, probably had a den in the roots of the mountain, down the long passage. Grengarm would not be able to see me, and that was surely good. I, on the other hand, would not be able to see Grengarm either.

Shuddering at the recollection of Setr, I dove again, swimming down until I thought my lungs would burst and at last catching hold of something that seemed likely to be a stick of sodden driftwood.

At the surface, it turned out to be my other boot. I felt like a kid at Christmas. I was so cold and weak that I was afraid for a minute that I would not be able to pull myself out of the well, but I danced on the damp stone floor of the grotto and even tried a few cartwheels before wringing out this stocking and laying it beside the first one.

Those stockings were in the entrance to the passage behind the altar, as I said; looking down it, I found it was not quite so dark as I had imagined. Thinking things over, I decided that I had remembered the utter blackness fifteen or twenty yards farther, and had transferred it to the entrance.