The Knight

“We live wherever we are,” they said, “and Kelpie is our name.” They lit up for me then, slender, pretty girls that seemed like they were made of blue light. They made me look at their gills and tails, and they had long curved claws that looked as sharp as the fishes’ teeth.

Chapter 22. Garsecg

At the mouth of an underwater cave we found the old man who had promised to cure me. He made the Kelpies go away, and I was kind of glad. I wanted to know where we were, and he said it was Aelfrice. “I am not the oldest of my kind,” he told me, “nor the wisest. Yet I know many things. I am Garsecg.” Later I found out it was not his real name; but then I believed him, and I still think Garsecg when I think of him; so it is what I am going to call him. I asked how he was going to cure me.

“I ca

I said no.

“Watch.”

The bubbles came faster, and stones were thrown up, and there was a rumble underneath the stone like thunder. White-hot rock roared up from the seafloor so that great white clouds of steam belched up and all the fish and crabs and things ran away, everything except us.

That went on for a long time; gradually all the noise trailed off into a sound like a giant asleep, like Gilling dying down there in a bed as big as a lot of people’s houses. The rock stopped flowing up and got hard. We went up to look, and it was a whole island of rock with a sort of basin in the middle. Some seabirds had started nesting there, and the sea lapped at the gray-rock beach all around it like a cat laps cream.

Grass started growing there, then trees. The trees sent roots way down deep looking for fresh water, following little cracks and splitting them. For maybe a second I saw Disiri ru

New birds—birds Disiri had brought—nested in her trees, nuts fell off them, and crabs came ashore to eat the nuts. Garsecg caught one and ate it the way you would eat a praline, but I was worried about their pinchers.

The island got more and more beautiful, and smaller and smaller, until it sunk in the sea and the waves closed over it, and it was like it had never been there at all. “Now you have seen a rent in the sea,” Garsecg told me. “Have you seen a crag die?”

I said no, and we swam again. When we got to the crag that was going to die, we climbed up it, up the sheer rock, and stood on the top.

There had been a wind the whole time, getting worse all the time. Pretty soon it roared so loud you could not hear yourself think. The waves got bigger and bigger until every wave that hit the crag was like a railroad train, and the spray hit us too, and sometimes the water at the top washed right over us. The crag shook, and there were boulders in those big waves, boulders that hit like hammers and then fell back into the sea for the next wave to pick up. Once on Halloween I had thrown gravel at windows; this made me think of that, but when I was doing it I had never known how horrible it really was, and now I felt like I was out there under the sea, still a kid throwing rocks. It got so bad we had to back off the crag, way back onto solid land. Even there the wind made me think of a knight, a big knight on a big horse riding among little ordinary people like Garsecg and me and slashing left and right. I know it sounds crazy, but that is the way I thought.

The water came up, the same way it had a hundred times before. It covered the crag, but when it went away this time the whole crag was gone.

I went out to the edge and looked down. It was not easy to keep my balance in that wind, but I did it—I had to—and down at the bottom you could see what was left, a little less each time a wave smashed into the beach. Garsecg came and stood beside me. After a minute he held out his hand, cupped, so I could see what was in it. At first I thought there was nothing. It was water. Just water. He asked if I understood.

I said, “I think so.”

He waited a long time before he said, “The island?”

“I have to be like the sea, isn’t that right? It waits, it runs out the clock and closes over the torn part.”

“The crag?”

“Water is nothing, but water with energy is stronger than stone. Is that the right answer?”

Garsecg smiled. “Come with me.”

We went back to the sea, swimming up at the top this time, jumping with its waves or letting its currents carry us. “Your blood is the sea,” Garsecg told me. I did not get that for a long while, but as we swam on and on it began to make sense. First I thought it was crazy, then I thought he might be right after all, then I knew he was right—I could feel the sea inside of me exactly like I felt the sea outside of me. After that we kept on swimming, until knowing that the sea and I made one thing became part of me. It is still part of me, and still true. The Kelpies and the other Sea Aelf say it is like that for them too; but they are lying. For me it is really true, like it is for Kulili. I can be all su

Finally I said to myself, “By the power of the sea life left the sea. They were able to leave it because they took it with them. I was a sea-creature in Mother’s womb, and she was a sea-creature inside her mother, and I will be a sea-creature as long as I live. The king must know, exactly the way I do, because he put a nykr on his shield.”

“He is my brother,” Garsecg said.

We were both swimming hard, but I looked around at him, surprised. “Can you hear my thoughts?”

“Sometimes.”

“You’re an Aelf. Isn’t the king a human man?”

“He is.”

I thought about that for a long time, and got nowhere with it. Garsecg must have been able to hear some of it, because he said, “When a man of my kind takes a woman of your kind, she may bear a child.” Still not understanding, I said, “All right.”

“Every child has something of its father and something of its mother as well; save for monsters, every child is of the male kind or the female kind nevertheless.”

We stopped to rest, floating on our backs in the clear sea. I said, “I took an Aelf woman—a woman I really truly love like nobody else on earth.”

“I know it.”

“Will we have children?”

“I ca

“Suppose we do.” These were things I had not thought about before. “If it’s a boy, will it grow up to be a human man?”

“Or an Aelf man. Until the child is born, there is no knowing.”

“What if it’s a girl?”

“The same. The king’s royal father lay with a woman of my race, even as you with your Aelfmaiden.”

I saw then that Garsecg did not really know everything, and to tell the truth I felt good about it.

“Of their union three children were born, one of my kind and two of yours.”

“Three?”

Garsecg nodded. “Our sister’s name is Morcaine.”

When we started off again, I thought we were going to swim a long way like we had before. Now I can see Garsecg wanted to rest before we got where we were going. He knew about the stairs, and he knew we might have to fight. The Khimairas would not recognize him, and he would not be able to tell them who he was. Anyway, I was just getting warmed up again when he stopped and pointed. “That is the isle your mariners call Glas,” he said, and pretty soon we were there and climbing over slick sharp rocks that shone crimson, gold, and scarlet in the sunshine, with a lot of other colors, more beautiful than I could ever make you believe it was.