The Knight. Part 34

"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 311.

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 Ga.r.s.ecg to make him sound less threatening. He was a new G.o.d, 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 312.

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 gra.s.s and weeds. The door was open, hanging by one hinge.

"n.o.body lives here," I told Gylf. "Let's stop and build a fire and hunt around 313.

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, "h.e.l.lo? h.e.l.lo?" 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.

314.

CHAPTER 46.

MANI.

C utting a stick probably did not take me very long, but standing out there in the rain and the cold, when I knew, there was a fire in the cottage, it seemed like forever. I got one and ran back in, and it seemed to me I could hear somebody talking that shut up as soon as I came through the door.

Two of the pieces of meat I had laid on the hearth were gone. I picked up one of the others and put it on my stick and held it over the fire, trying to dry myself at the same time. Gylf came over and lay down, and I said, "Who were you talking to?"

He shook his head and went over to the dry corner and lay down there.

"You know," I said, "sometimes I wish you were just a regular dog that couldn't talk. If you were, I'd never be mad at you for not talking. Like now. You know there's somebody else in here with us, and I know it too. Only you won't tell me."

He did not say anything; I would have been surprised if he had. When my meat was about done, I said, "I know there's somebody in here. I'm a knight, and my word means a lot to me. Whoever you are, I don't want to hurt you. If you'd like this nice piece I barbecued, just come out and say h.e.l.lo, 315.

and I'll give it to you."

Nothing.

I looked around carefully after that, the room being lit up by the fire and a whole lot brighter than it had been when we came in. There was n.o.body there but Gylf and me, and no furniture or anything that somebody might be hiding behind.

I bit off a piece of meat, chewed, looked around some more, and thought. n.o.body was out on the path. I put my head out the one little window and looked around, and there was n.o.body there either. A dark doorway led to a li ttle back room. There was an old string bed in there falling apart, with nothing on it but a bundle of dirty rags. "If there wasn't anybody here," I said out loud, "my dog would talk to me. But since you want to hide, I'm not going to look for you. I'd like to eat and dry my clothes. Is that okay? As soon as the rain lets up, we'll go. No hard feelings."

n.o.body said anything, but Gylf went to the door and wagged his tail, which meant that he would like to leave right now. I said, "You're not tied up, are you?

If you want to go I'm not about to stop you."

He went back to his corner.

"Is this somebody who might hurt us?" I asked him. He shut his eyes.

"Up to you." I put the last piece of meat on my stick. "You won't talk to me?

All right, I'll stop talking to you."

That meat was just about done when somebody whispered, "Please . . . ?" I looked around. "If you'd like some of this, come and get it." (You used to say that when you were dishing up, remember?) "Please . . . ?"

That time I knew where the whisper was coming from. There was somebody in that back room after all. I took the meat in there. "Are you too sick to walk?" n.o.body answered, but the bundle of rag on the bed moved. I held out the meat, and all of a sudden I was as scared as I had ever been in my life.

"I . . . Thank you. You . . . kind to an old woman." Here there is something I know you will never believe. It was the rain outside talking. The way the drops. .h.i.t made the words. They said, "Her blessing . . . wherever . . ." I crouched down beside the bed thinking I was letting the whole thing spook me, that there was somebody there--that there had to be--who needed 316.

help.

"I . . . bless. Curse."

I said, "How about if I pull off a little piece for you?"

"Never die . . ."

I thought that might be a yes, so I pulled off a little bit of the meat. A mouth--a hole, really--opened in the rags. I put that little piece of meat into it. Her head came out of the rags after that. Only her head. It rolled to a place where the strings were broken and fell through onto the floor, and that piece of meat I had pulled off fell out of the mouth.

I will never forget that. I wish I could. I have tried to, but no go. It is always there.

Picking up that head was as hard as anything I have ever done, or almost. I did it just the same. The skin was like old leather; it did not feel dirty, or an ything like that. I carried it back into the other room to show Gylf, and because of the firelight I had a better look at it in there. There were still a few dirty gray hairs on it, but the eyes were gone.

"This was talking to me, too," I told him. "I don't think it's going to talk any more, though. When I put some meat in its mouth it found out it was dead, or anyhow that's what it seems like. So it's gone, and you can talk now." I really thought he was going to. That was why I said it. But what he really did was get up and go out into the rain.

I had been going to throw the head into the fire. That had been in the back of my mind all the time, but I did not do it. I set it down on the hearth and went to the door so I could wash my hands with rain, and I just kept going--out into the rain with Gylf.

It finally stopped a little before sundown. I took off my clothes and wrung them out. They had been pretty dirty, but the rain had given them a good washing and washed me too. "My armor's going to rust," I told Gylf, "but there's nothing I can do about that. Sand will take the rust off, if we ever find any. And oil will keep it from rusting more. Oil or grease, if we can't find oil." I was shivering.

"Fire?" That was the first time Gylf had talked since he had clammed up in the cottage.

"If I can find stuff dry enough to burn. I'll look." 317.

"I'll hunt," Gylf told me.

I said go ahead, but keep an eye out for the road.

He started to leave, and an idea hit me. "Wait. You weren't talking to that dead person, were you? Because if you had been, you'd have told me when I brought in the head. So who was it?"

He would not look at me.

"I thought that's who it had been. But the voice you talked to was inside. When she talked the voice was outside, the raindrops talking for her somehow. Besides, the voices weren't the same. Okay, if you weren't talking to the dead person, who was it?"

Gylf had left before I finished. I cussed a little, calling him a stiff-necked fool dog and so on; and when I finally shut up, somebody who sounded scared sort of whined, "It was I."

I grabbed for Sword Breaker, but there was n.o.body around.

"You have wonderful muscles," the new voice said. "Do you stretch a lot?" I nodded, still looking around and not seeing anybody.

"So do I. I can show you a kind of tree that will burn when it's wet. Would you like to see it?"

I had been trying to decide whether it was a woman or a man; but the voice could have been either one, and there were tones in it that did not sound like a real person at all. I said, "Yes, we could really use wood like that. Please show me where it is."

"It's not much farther than you could roll a ball." The soft voice had gotten fretful, like a tired little kid. "Do you think we could dry ourselves in front of the fire?"

I said, "Sure. I'm going to put my boots on, but I'll leave my armor and clothes here. Is that okay?"

He did not say anything, so I said, "Listen, you don't have to do this if you don't want to, but could you maybe let me in on what you and Gylf were talking about back there?"

"He doesn't like me."

I was pulling on my boots. That is never much fun, but now my feet were wet and so were they, and it was flat mean. When I got the left one on, I said, "I'm sorry to hear that."

318.

"How do you feel? About me, I mean." It was a purling, puling, mewling sort of a voice, and sometimes it reminded me of seagulls.

I did not like it much, but I had the feeling I would get used to it pretty soon. Besides, it was going to show me that wood, so I said, "Really friendly. If you're right and this kind of tree you're talking about will burn for us, hey, I'll be your friend for as long as you want me."

"Do you mean it?" It was a little closer now.

"Absolutely." I was getting my other boot on.

"You were kind to the witch, but I'm not dead."

"I didn't know she was dead 'til afterward," I said. "I didn't know she was a witch, either. Gylf and I thought she was still alive, because of the path."

"Oh, she got up and went out sometimes."

That shook me, and he saw it. He laughed. It was not a nice laugh, and was not like any other laugh I ever heard in my life.

When I stood up, he said, "It's called pitch pine. Did you mean that? About being friends? You'll have to whittle some shavings first. I never promised you wouldn't have to do that, you know."

"No problem."

"About being friends," he asked, "was that serious?"