“Carabas? What is that?”
The creature pointed at the gleaming white paste coating the inside of his helmet and boots. “This was developed long ago by the Marquis of Carabas so that his cat could walk on his hind legs and dance the jig. One can put a hoof or snout, large or small, into a glove or boot or hat of any size, and all will fit and move as it should. The white alchemy holds the limb, and you move it, and the thing moves as if it were human.”
“How do you fit such a big head into such a small helm?”
“It is elfish. Big and small are slippery concepts with them.”
“If you are not a knight, how were you able to keep true knights away?”
“Location, location, location!”
“What?”
“Oak is my friend, and my black lance was oak, and this mistletoe weed underfoot was conjured by oakwood nymphs to coat this hill. My skill at joust and blade is not great, but any who comes ahorse will trip on the weeds whereas this red steed is surefooted; any who comes afoot, I run down and trample. But now you have broken my black lance and my great black sword. With what can I ransom my life? I have no other treasures.”
“No crock of gold?”
“Am I a leprechaun? I never knew why they are so wealthy until I had to buy this dratted pair of boots from one of them. That leprechaun has all my gold!”
Gil looked at the glittering paste again. It seemed to be made of liquid diamond. The cabyll-ushtey was still talking. “That dratted leprechaun charged me an arm and a leg! I used to have three of each, you know.”
“Any food or provision in the stronghouse?”
“I crop the grass and eat the same hay as the red steed, when he is not looking.”
“Very well. I grant you your life on two conditions: first, that you give me Rabicane your steed, along with all his tack and gear.”
“Done!”
“Second, that you turn yourself in to the mercy of Alberec, King of the Summer Elfs, and tell him that you were overcome by the Swan Knight, whom you failed to bar from seeking the Green Chapel.”
“Done! But how shall I pass by the Anishinaabeg? They are no friends of the knights and marchwardens.”
Gil released the creature and stood. “That you must discover yourself. It is not my doing that you live in a dangerous land.”
Mr. Ed said, “I am a water horse and can pass unseen among them if I am allowed.”
Gil said, “Are you asking my permission?”
The cabyll-ushtey nodded its horse head. “You are my master now, Swan Knight, not the magician who called me and set me here.”
Gil said, “You may cast your charms and glamour to save your life or the life of another, but not for gain or pleasure or malice, nor may you play tricks on any baptized Christian or his children, nor harass nor harm nor annoy.”
The ears of Mr. Ed twitched. “What of infidels? May I bedevil them as I like?”
“And become a devil yourself? It would be wiser to use your powers to do good and become a saint instead.”
The creature merely laughed at that. “Well, well, if Ysbadden the King of Giants is agreeable, perhaps I would be as well, but what you seek is impossible, my new nameless master. Yonder stand the stairs leading to your death. Where in that upper land the chapel hides, no one says. Perhaps no one knows. I have never seen anyone, elf or man, come down those stairs again, save those who rejoiced at not finding any sign of the dread chapel. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. This is your last sunset.”
Gil felt a pang. While he had more questions for this creature, he did not know how much time was left. And the prospect of being dead before tomorrow night sapped his curiosity about this world and its miseries.
He wished he had a sword or lance to carry, but there was none to be had. Gil did not bother even to inspect the stronghouse.
Gil mounted Rabicane and bade him climb the giant stair.
Rabicane said, “You do not fear to ride me? Then are you a good knight, bold, true to your lord, and no dastard?”
“Serve me, and see.”
They reached the lowest stair. Rabicane paused, gathered his legs beneath him like a cat readying to pouch, and leaped upward.
Gil laughed and whooped like a maniac, for the fairy steed was indeed fast as an arrow and agile as an acrobat. Rabicane shot up the giant steps at two hundred miles an hour, bounding in immense leaps from rock to rock, traveling almost straight up, and the cloak and plume Gil wore, his belts and empty scabbard, and the skirts of the steed’s caparison hung streaming behind them in the wind like wings.
Chapter Five: The House of Hospitality
1. The Upper World
As they mounted the stairs, the cliff grew taller. The cliff had seemed perhaps fifty feet tall when looking up from the bottom, no taller than a four-story building. But as Rabicane leaped from one stone landing to the next, up switchback after switchback of stairs built for some race taller than man, the cliff seemed to rise and become larger. Clouds hung against its side, as if against the side of a mountain.
Going upward through the clouds, Rabicane was more cautious, leaping only nine yards at a footstep, not a hundred, for the cloud was a fog bank around them. When they emerged from the top, the air was warm and pure. Gil heard a strange, pure, lingering note as if from a harp with crystal strings echoing down from the wide blue sky above.
At the top of the stairs were two white columns of stone, cracked and dull with age, and the bolts and hinges of some great gates that had once been there hung from the upper and lower parts of the column. Rabicane trotted over the threshold, blowing, sides heaving, head erect and proud.
They stood atop a wall twenty yards wide. On the far side of the wall, three giant steps led down to a green field.
Gil said, “Well done, Rabicane. This was some elfish trick, I assume. It would have taken me forever to climb those stairs!” He looked out and saw from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. He saw the curve of the Earth as a blue line of haze tracing the horizon.
“This is not normal,” said Gil. “But my eyes are immune from deception. So this has to be real.”
Rabicane said, “Time and distance bend for elfs, but not for men. Whither away?”
Gil said, “I was hoping for some bird or beast to tell me.” He turned and looked.
Gil could not make sense of the countryside. He saw patches of snow here and there on the ground, and granite outcroppings pale with frost, and the air was sharp with chill; but the tableland was green with summery grass, spangled with small white flowers of a kind Gil did not recognize. Copses of small fruit trees, white with the blossoms of early spring, climbed in gentle hills toward a distant cliff, as gray and stern as the one they had just climbed. There was not a bird in the air, not so much as a rustle in the grass.
Rabicane said, “I am a beast. Ask me.”
Gil said, “What is this place? What season is this?”
Rabicane said, “Duke Astolpho once flew to the Moon, where all ghosts and lost things hide, to find the scattered wits of Roland when Roland was mad. He passed through this region. We are above the height where seasons hold sway.”
Gil said, “We cannot be in outer space. It would be vacuum.”
Rabicane said, “Vacuum no doubt in places where no spirits of the air, no sylph, has thickened the aether and make it wholesome to breathe. How else could the Vanir ride their chariots to Venus for their hunts, or Carter and his sons be brought alive to Mars to fight the beside the Hrossa and Seroni against the Thither Folk, Tharks, and Argzoon?”
Gil said, “A mermaid told me once that Mars and Venus were dead, inhabited by the ghosts of evil beings.”
“For all parts men can reach, she speaks true. But there is a third hemisphere to Mars also, and to Venus, just as this world, and many hemispheres reaching out from Jupiter and Saturn into many realms and dimensions, and living things hide there, unseen. You believe in elfs, do you not?”
Gil said, “Look, I have seen elfs. But Martia
ns? Come on.”
“Atop a Brobdingnagian pile taller than all mountains is not the place to stand, youth, if you wish your skepticism toward unknown wonders to provoke no laughter! Have you counted every star, and know each mystery creation hides, and therefore know what cannot be? My master flew to the moon on the same hippogriff that carried Lessingham to Mercury. Would you call a Duke a liar?”
Gil felt bad being rebuked by a horse. “So where are we now?”
“Ontario. This is merely a place whose roof is in the upper airs. There be a dozen such on Earth: Olympus and Othrys, Helicon and Helgafell , K’un-Lun and Nandaparbat, Shangrila and Sumaru, Mount Athos and Mount Graham, and Uluru, the accursed rock where dwells the Serpent Being. The great southern mountain in the hemisphere of ghosts which Dante climbed is the tallest, but greater hands than those of Brobdingnag wrought there. The elfs hide the upper reaches of such high places, above the seasons, as they wanted to hide Tahiti so that man would not see and smell and know such kindly weather and good air and remember Eden.”
“The air here is cold.”
“It is not natural for this elevation, but a curse. Someone seeks to hinder your way.”
“Is this the air that strengthens eyesight?”
“Not so. That is from higher yet, if Astolpho told true and I recall aright. Those peaks are shorn from their roots and are as mountains above all clouds.”
“What prevents them from falling?”
“What prevents the orbicular Earth from falling? Horses do not fret about such questions or answer them.”
“What is that noise? It sounds like ringing chimes.”
Rabicane said, “Perhaps it is the turning of the crystals spheres of Heaven! Astolpho told me of it.”
Gil felt that very strange moment experienced only by certain scientists or prophets or poets who unexpectedly discover that the shape of the universe is like nothing they had previously believed. But then he said, “No, I think it is the sound of water flowing. The top of the waterfall is near. Let’s head that way.”
Rabicane leaped the twenty feet to the green grass. The moment his hoof touched the grass, the warm, fresh air turned cold and bitter, as if he had fallen into a meat locker. It was still fresh and pure in his nostrils and lungs, like air that had never known the touch of pollution, but now bitterly cold.
Rabicane thundered across the lawns. It had taken hours for Gil to walk and stalk across a hilly country from the foot of the waterfall to the foot of the stair. For Rabicane to cross green turf as flat as a park meadow took moments. The stream passed between two statues, moss-grown and weathered with age, depicting squat beings with heavy heads in postures of despair. The huge wall ringing this upper landscape grew out of the spine of the two statues. The water ran past their feet and flung itself into the air and down into an abyss of clouds.
The water here was white and swift, running between banks of set stone. There were no fish here, no one Gil could question, or, for that matter, eat. His stomach rumbled querulously.
“I hope he offers me one last meal,” he said. Then, “Let us try going upstream!”
Rabicane looked at the stream and snuffled in his nostrils. “I see no stream.”
“This creek, or whatever you want to call it. If the Green Knight drinks or takes baths or washes anything, he should be within walking distance of fresh water.”
Rabicane cantered along the side of the flowing water. In the distance were gray cliffs.
2. Upriver
Hours passed. The sun was in the west and below the lip of the upper meadowlands. There were no clouds above, but the sky was the deep purple that only astronauts or high-flying pilots saw.
Gil said aloud, “I don’t get it. This cannot be an illusion, but it cannot be the truth either. No mountain along the East Coast reaches such elevations, and I doubt even the highest peak in the Rockies or the Andes could either. This must be some parallel dimension or something.”
Rabicane said, “No mountain this.”
“Then what it is?”
“A tower, as I said.”
“What?”
The steed snorted. “Saw you not the cyclopean blocks in the wall as we passed up the stair? From the feel under my hoof, I know that under this soil is roof, not bedrock. This is but a rooftop garden. That which you called a stream is a gutter. This pile was built by the Sons of Brobdingnag.”
Gil said, “Then is this whole place the Green Chapel? Are we on the roof?” He looked at the cliffs in the distance ahead of them, which, now that he knew what he was looking at, seemed very much like a wall with crenelated battlements, more imposing than the Great Wall of China, old and sagging in places and overgrown with trees and bushes that hid the straight lines and sharp angles of craftsmanship. He said, “Or is that the roof? Maybe we should head there.”
Rabicane said, “Sunset is soon. Even I, with my great speed, could not reach there before dusk, nor am I sure of foot enough to climb such a wall in the dark of night. It will also grow as we try to climb; this is the nature of the masonworks of Brobdingnag.”
“Where to then? I have only today and tomorrow to find the guy who is going to cut off my head. So we need to hurry. It is as if the Green Knight was trying to make this hard!”
Rabicane said, “I scent woodsmoke and meat frying. Someone beyond those trees is camped.”
It was true. Gil spied a thin trickle of smoke rising against the purple sky.
Rabicane now broke into a trot, which was faster than the gallop of even prizewinning mortal horses. The green lawns and their many bright star-shaped flowers flew past under his hooves. Gil was delighted with the motion and the speed, and he laughed.
3. Red Light
The landscape fled by like a green army rushing backward. Gil still could not understand how he could be seeing cherry trees in blossom but be feeling the bite of the winter wind on his cheek.
Rabicane slowed down suddenly to a canter, and then a walk. The sky was darker now, though it was not yet night. Rabicane stopped at a large upright stone next to the river, marked with the image of a wheel with four spokes.
“Hist!” said Rabicane. “I spy a light. Could that be the chapel?”
Through the trees shined a light, but what he saw was not firelight or lamplight. It was bright, harsh, and garish, and as red as fresh lipstick: it was neon light.
Gil said, “I’ve never seen a church decked out with flashy neon lights. This could be anything. Let’s be careful.”
Rabicane’s deer-like hooves made little noise on the thick summery grass, and the hiss of the winter wind covered up the rustle of their approach.
The red light was coming from what looked like a drive-thru restaurant. It had a slanted red roof and an outdoor menu for in-car service, complete with microphone and service window, even though there was no road. There were plate glass windows bearing images of hamburgers and hotdogs, meatballs and fried food, cold soft drinks and foaming beer and rich milkshakes.
The neon sign read KNOCKERS.
Below that, a smaller sign read, Open 24/7. Come In and Knock Back a Few!
And an even smaller sign read, Monday night is knight night. Knights eat free!
Gil said, “I have gone mad.”
4. Knockers
There were two waitresses in front of the door. In the gloom, it looked like they were doing some lascivious hip-shaking dance, but, as Rabicane stepped closer, it seemed each waitress was playing innocently with a hula-hoop, wiggling energetically to get the hoop to orbit her waist. The waitresses wore tiny lace hats. Their uniforms were black with a white apron, and left their arms and legs bare, and were adorned with bows at the décolletage and derriere.
Gil trotted up. The two girls squealed, and giggled, and clapped their hands, but never stopped the hip-rotation of the hula-hoops. The one of the left, a blonde, said, “Welcome! Welcome to Knockers! We will knock you out with our low prices.”
Gil dismounted and threw his reins over the back of th
e brightly colored bench.
“Money I have none,” said Gil. “May I speak with the master of this house?”
The one on the right, a redhead, said, “You are in luck. Knights eat free on Monday!”
Gil said, “Thank you, miss, but I am no knight. As a squire only I serve my king, this one last night of service.”
The two hula hoop girls exchanged a knowing glance. Rabicane said softly, “They think you are an elf because you speak too politely and clearly to be human.”
Gil said, “I have heard elf food is venomous and addictive.”
Both girls laughed, and the redhead said, “Our fare meets all health regulation standards!”
Rabicane said, “Modest elf maidens would not behave so. These may be nymphs, summoned from the dreams of sleeping streams and meadows by a conjurer’s strange song.”
Gil said, “How can I tell?”
The blonde one (still shaking her hula hoop round and round) called out, “You cannot tell until you taste and know! Our fare is the finest in the land!”
The redhead called, “It will knock you out!”
Rabicane said, “Inquire of their names. If these are nymphs, they have no names until a human poet grants them one.”
Sliding glass doors opened, and a shapely brunette, dressed like the others, strode out the door. Her hair was piled atop her head in a bun or beehive, and she had a pair of eyeglasses shaped like half-moons perched on her nose.
She tilted back her head to look down her nose through her eyeglasses. “I am the hostess here, and I will be serving all your needs this evening. Did you say you wanted to see the manager?”
Gil said, “I seek the Green Knight of the Green Chapel.”
Now her head tilted forward so that she could stare over the tops of her glasses. “Well, you really do have to talk to the manager then. This way!”
Swan Knight's Sword (Moth & Cobweb Book 3) Page 8