by Gene Wolfe
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 cannot tell you how I knew then that I was going to lose even the memory of her. But I did.
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 stunned. A thousand memories washed over me like the warm blue waves of that crystal sea—the laughing Kelpies who had carried me to Garsecg’s cave, the drowning island, the long, swift swim that brought us to the Tower of Glas.
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.
Your mind plays strange tricks on you—that is what I told myself. I could read Aelf writing, though I had just about forgotten I could write it. Now that I knew I could, I could see that it must have been one of the things I learned in Aelfrice before I came out in Parka’s cave. The Aelf had wiped a lot of things out of my memory—who knows why? All my memories of that time had been erased. But they had not wiped out what I was supposed to say to somebody about their troubles and the injustices they had suffered. I could not remember any of the details, but they had to be there just like the shapes of the Aelf letters. “They sent you with the tale of their wrongs and their worship,” Parka had told me. When they had left their message, they must have left what I had learned about their writing, too. Maybe they had to.
By the time I had thought all that, I was back at the well. I knew I would have to reach bottom this time if I wanted my mail back. I would have to give it everything I had—every last ounce. A good dive to start with, jumping as high as I could and breaking the water like an arrow to get as deep as possible.
I made a good dive and swam down until my ears ached, but there was nothing but water ahead when I had to come up.
After sight-seeing around the grotto a while to warm up and catch my breath, I picked out a nice smooth stone almost too heavy to carry and jumped into the well holding it. Down and down it carried me until the light vanished. Here there was (it seemed to me) a new quality to the water—it was still cold, and still very different from even the coldest, wettest air. But it was not suffocating anymore. It was water that had stopped trying to drown me.
I was so surprised, and so scared, that I let go of the stone, drifting up at first, then swimming upward with all my might when the tiny circle of blue light that was the top of the well showed again.
This time I shot out of the water, chilly and ti
red but not exactly breathless. That was Aelfrice down there, I told myself. The water in Aelfrice knows who I am.
The pool I had dived into on the Isle of Glas had its bottom in Aelfrice, I remembered. So had the sea, or that was how it seemed when the Kelpies had dived into it with me. So had the pool into which the winged man had sunk, for that matter. There was no reason this well should not take me to Aelfrice too, although I suspected it would not take everyone there.
“But I’m not everyone, after all.” This time I chose two smaller stones, nicely rounded.
Something moved in the chill, blind depths. I could not feel it, but I felt the little currents it made. And then, with the outstretched hands that held my ballast stones, I felt something new. Rough and hard. Flexible. Letting go of one stone, I grabbed it, then dropped the other.
My return to the surface hurt like the devil. Again and again I just about let go of the slimy, shapeless thing that held me back. From its weight and feel, I was sure it was the hauberk of double mail I had taken from Nytir, although there seemed to be something else caught in it—something long, awkward, stiff and bumpy.
At the surface at last, and grasping the well’s edge with one hand, I heaved the whole mess up and out onto the rough floor of the grotto, foundering in the process but bobbing up once my arm was free. About ready to drop, I climbed out of the well, carried up by a sudden surge of rising water, an uprush that seemed to have become a lot stronger since the last time I paid attention to it.
When I climbed out of that well and shook myself as dry as I could, combing water from my hair with my fingers, the ringing in my ears made me deaf to the music echoing faintly through the grotto. I shivered and gaped and spat, shaking my head.
Then I heard it.
Eerie and splotched with sour chords, sinking and rising again, foreign and familiar all at once, it snapped like a flame, then sang the way a swan sings when a hunter’s arrow takes her life. It scared me half to death—but it made me homesick for someplace I could not remember.
I ran around the altar to the passage where I had left my clothes. Lights no bigger than lightning bugs danced a long, long way down.
As quickly as I could, I dressed myself again, forcing my feet into my wet boots, although it felt as if I might break every bone in them.
The hauberk I had brought up from the bottom of the well was tangled with water-weeds and filthy with mud. I rinsed it in the cold, clear water that would become the Griffin. A sword belt of fine metal mesh was linked to it; and a gem-encrusted scabbard hung from the belt. I drew the blade halfway to look at it. It was black, but mottled with silver in a way that made me think of a knife I saw in Forcetti.
I turned it over. Was it really mottled? Or marked? Or just darkened by years underwater? Sometimes I seemed to see writing there, other times, none. The hilt might have been gold or bronze, a little green now with corrosion.
A thousand clear voices had joined the music—a chant like the chants in church. As quickly as I could, I pulled on the hauberk, finding it lighter than I remembered.
I had left my own sword belt behind. I was running to get it when the well erupted. Water swamped the floor, and spray rose to the lofty ceiling. From that eruption a snout like the bottom of a wreck emerged; and seeing it I hid in one of the smaller openings, a little cave in which I knelt behind a rock and wrapped the mesh sword belt around me, unriddling the jeweled catch a lot faster than I had any right to expect.
When I looked up again, the dragon’s head was above water. Its scales seemed black in the dim light; its eyes were of a blackness to turn all ordinary black to gray, the kind of black that drinks up every spark of light.
Coil by coil it rose, and I believe it would have spread its wings if it could; but wide and lofty as the grotto was, it was not big enough for that. Half open, the wings filled it, so that it seemed for a minute or more to have been hung with curtains of thin black leather—curtains hanging from cruel, curved claws as black as ebony.
Sea-green, many-colored, and fiery were the marching, singing Aelf who poured from the passage to hail Grengarm; but black was the robe of the bound woman they laid on his altar: long and curling black hair that did not quite veil her nakedness. Under it, her skin was as white as milk.
I stared, dazzled by her beauty but by no means sure she was human.
One of the Aelf, robed and bearded, indicated her by a gesture, made some speech to Grengarm that was lost in the music and the singing, and fell to his knees, bowing his head to the rocky floor.
Grengarm’s mouth gaped, and a voice like a hundred deep drums filled the whole grotto. “You come with spears. With swords.” The curved fangs his open mouth showed plainly were longer than those swords, and as sharp as any spear. “What if Grengarm finds your sacrifice unworthy?”
The singers fell silent. The harps and horns and flutes no longer played. From far away came the thud of mridangas, the chiming of gold thumb cymbals, and the jingle of sistra. My heart pounded, and I knew then that I had danced once like the dancers that were coming.
These were Aelfmaidens, twenty or more, naked as the woman on the altar but crowned with floating hair, leaping and turning, dancing each to her own music, or perhaps all dancing to a music beyond music, to a rhythm of sistrum, cymbal, and mridanga too complex for me to understand. They twirled and dipped, stepped and capered as they played; and I saw Uri among them.
Folding his wings, Grengarm moved the way a big snake moves, advancing toward the altar. The dancers scattered, and I, almost unconsciously, drew the sword I had just found.
A phantom knight stood before Grengarm as soon as my blade cleared the scabbard, a knight holding his sword above his head and shouting, “Cease! Cease, worm! Or perish.”
Chapter 69. Grengarm
T he dragon reared as a cobra rears, and wings smaller than the great wings on its back stood out upon its neck. “Who has overturned your stone, shade, that you should rise to oppose Grengarm?”
“What stone was overturned,” the phantom knight replied, “that you have seeped from beneath it, shadow?”
Still on his knees, the robed and bearded Aelf called, “This is none of our doing, Lord. I see the hand of Setr in it.”
“Setr’s hand is stronger.” Grengarm might have been amused. “Shade, wraith knight, what will you do if I burn hyssop? Or call the gods of your dead? Would not a puff of my breath disperse you?”
I knew what sword I held, as sword in hand I rose from my hiding place. “He’d call on his brother knight!”
Grengarm moved more quickly than I would have believed possible, his strike preceded by a sheet of fire the way the bray of a trumpet precedes the charge. I thrust, both hands on the hilt—and half blind with fire and smoke heard my blade rattle among his fangs—slashed and slashed, and slashed again, the dark two-edged brand slicing flesh and splitting scale and bone with every stroke.
Knights fought shoulder-to-shoulder with me who were almost real, staunch men whose eyes looked full upon the face of Hel; but behind Grengarm, and at his flanks, the Aelf fought for him with spear, shield, and slender Aelfsword, and fell bleeding and dying just as men in battle die.
Grengarm gave way, and would have dived into the well, but I and a score of knights barred his path. Like lightning he turned aside—
And vanished. Blood ran from the mouth of a piteous dwarf who scutded toward the rushing water. I sprang after him. Fire checked me. He plunged into the Griffin and was gone.
The Aelf fought on, but the phantom knights closed about them with war cries the eldest trees were too young to have heard. From the depths of time rose the thunder of hooves.
Eterne shattered Aelfswords and split heads until the last Aelf alive fled down the dark passage; panting, I turned to the woman on the altar.
An Aelf as gray as ash sawed at her bonds with a broken sword. His head had been nearly severed, and blood dribbled from his fingers to redden her milky skin and raven hair; yet he worked away, turning this w
ay and that to bring the cords in view.
She called, “Sheath your sword and lay these specters before they harm us. And please—I beg this—free me.”
I spoke to one of the phantom knights. (He had removed his helm, and there was sorrow in his face, Ben, to tear your heart.) “Who are you?” I asked. “Should I do as this woman advises? On my honor, I won’t send you away without thanking you.”
They gathered around me, muttering that they had done no more than their own had required. Their voices were dry and hollow, as though a clever showman pulled a string through a gourd to make it talk.
“We are those knights,” the knight I had spoken to said, “who bore Eterne unworthily.”
“You would be wise,” another told me, “to do what she wishes. But unwise to trust her.”
From the altar, the woman called, “Cut me free and give me a drink. Have you wine?”
The phantom knights and I spoke further; I will not tell you what we said now. Then one brought a skin like a wineskin that the Aelf had dropped. He pulled the stopper and poured some into the little cup that was the other end of the stopper. That is how those things are made in Aelfrice. It was strong brandy, as its fumes told me; I had no need to taste it.
I wiped Eterne clean with the hair of a dead Aelf and returned her to her scabbard, thinking to take the wineskin—and the knights vanished. Picture a hall lit by many candles. A wind sweeps it, and at once the flame of every candle is put out. That was how it was with them.
The skin fell to the stony floor of the grotto and most of the brandy was wasted, though by snatching it up I managed to save a little. That little I carried to the woman on the altar, and when I had fetched my old sword belt and cut her free with my dagger, I poured it into the cup and gave it to her.