The Knight

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 cannot. The sea will heal you. Come with me, and I will show you.” He took my hand, and the two of us swam to a place where the sea bottom was as warm as water in a bathtub, and steam bubbles blew mud and sand out of crevices. “You have a rent in your side,” Garsecg told me. “Have you ever seen a rent in the sea?”

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 running naked through the trees. I wanted to run after her, but Garsecg held me and we sort of fought about it. That was the only time we ever fought.

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 sunny and smiles for a long, long time. But I can rise up like when we fought the Angrborn at the pass. Giants ran from me then and the ones that did not died.

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 cannot say.”

“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.

“Do they call it Glas because it’s made of glass?” I asked him.

He shook his head. “It is not, but of fire opal.”

“The dragon stone.”

He would not look at me. “Who told you that?”

It had been Bold Berthold, and I called him my brother. “He’s dead now, I think.”

“Wise Berthold. If you do not know him dead, let us hope that he lives.”

I told Garsecg how I had searched for Bold Berthold’s body without finding it.

“Many have searched for this isle, but those who search for it never find it. More than a few have sighted it by chance, however, and a handful of mariners have landed here.”

I had the feeling Garsecg knew more about that than he was telling, so I asked what happened to them.

“Various things. Some returned safely to their ships. Some perished. Some remain with us, and some went to other places. Do you see the tower?”

I did, and it was huge. Somebody had built a skyscraper all by itself way out on that little island, and at first I thought why did they have to make it so high? Because there was nothing else out there to crowd it. Only there was. It was the sea. The island was not really very big, so if you wanted to put a big building on it, it had to go straight up.

It did. It was round, and only a little wider at the bottom, and it went up and up like a needle, taller than the tallest mountain.

“The builder was of the sixth world, which is Muspel,” Garsecg said. “My people build nothing like it unless they must. Would that they did! From this tower Setr sought to overawe this sphere, which you call the World Below.”

I said we called it Aelfrice mostly.

Garsecg nodded. “He built smaller towers as well, his strongholds on many coasts. My sister dwells in one when she chooses.”

“But you don’t?”

“I could if I wished.” Garsecg stood up on what I had thought was just another slick rock, and walked away. When I could not see him, I heard him say, “How is your wound?”

I felt for it, but I couldn’t find it.

“Healed?”

When I caught up with him, I said, “There’s a scar, but it’s closed and it’s not sore.”

“The scar will fade. For a time, a gull might have seen rocks below the water.”

“I get it. Am I really the strongest knight in the whole world now?”

“That is for you to say.”

“Then I am.” I did not feel any stronger when I said it, but I knew I was very, very strong and very, very fast. Exactly how strong and how fast I did not know. I also knew that some of that was what Disiri had done, and some came from the sea—from learning how it was, and that it was in me, tides of blood pounding the beaches of my ears. But some was just me, and in fact the part about the sea was just me, too; that had been there all the time, although I had not known it.

I stopped thinking about all that stuff because I had seen the stair. On that skyscraper it looked like a cobweb, stretching up and up to a sort of crevice way up high. The sun on that stair and the wall made them look like they were on fire. You wished you had really dark sunglasses or maybe welding glasses. I squinted and shielded my eyes and all the rest, but it did not bother Garsecg.

“Here Setr gathered all the greatest weapons of our world, in order that we might not resist him. He who could sunder mountains would not permit us so much as a dagger. Yet in the end we drove him out.”

I wanted to know if Garsecg thought he would come back.

“He does return at times, then flies again before we can muster our forces. Would you drive us from your Middle World if you could, Sir Able?”

I thought of Disiri, and I made my no as strong as I could get it.

“Many would. Many strive against us even now. Yet we would return someday. It is the same for Setr.”

“All those weapons you were talking about, are they still there?”

Garsecg nodded. “We have been pillaging his trove a thousand years, and the weapons we have taken from it are scattered throughout the worlds.”

“Then they’re gone.”

The next time Garsecg said something, his voice was so low I could barely hear him. He said, “The trove is hardly diminished.”