The Saga of the Witcher

by Andrzej Sapkowski

  ‘The second example of woman’s omnipotence,’ continued Yarpen Zigrin, ‘is Geralt of Rivia, the Witcher.’

  Geralt pretended to be occupied with a snail. Yarpen snorted.

  ‘Having miraculously regained Ciri,’ he continued, ‘he lets her ride off, agreeing to another farewell. He leaves her on her own again, although, as somebody here rightly observed, the times are not too peaceful, for fuck’s sake. And said witcher does all that because that’s what a certain woman wants. The Witcher always does everything that that woman – known to society as Yennefer of Vengerberg – wants. And if only said Witcher got any benefit from it. But he doesn’t. Indeed, as King Dezmod used to say when looking into his chamber pot after completing a motion, “The mind is unable to grasp it”.’

  ‘I suggest—’ Geralt raised his cup with a charming smile ‘—we drink up and change the subject.’

  ‘Well said,’ said Dandelion and Zoltan in unison.

  *

  Wirsing brought to the table a third, and then a fourth great bowl of snails. Neither did he forget, naturally, about the bread and vodka. The diners had now eaten their fill, so it was no surprise that toasts were being drunk somewhat more frequently. Neither was it a surprise that philosophy crept into the discourse more and more often.

  *

  ‘The evil I fought against,’ repeated the Witcher, ‘was a sign of the activities of Chaos, activities calculated to disturb Order. Since wherever Evil is at large, Order may not reign, and everything Order builds collapses, cannot endure. The little light of wisdom and the flame of hope, the glow of warmth, instead of flaring up, go out. It’ll be dark. And in the darkness will be fangs, claws and blood.’

  Yarpen Zigrin stroked his beard, greasy from the herb and garlic butter that had dripped from the snails.

  ‘Very prettily said, Witcher,’ he admitted. ‘But, as the young Cerro said to King Vridanek during their first tryst: “It’s not a bad-looking thing, but does it have any practical use?”’

  ‘The reason for existence—’ the Witcher didn’t smile ‘—and the raison d’être of witchers has been undermined, since the fight between Good and Evil is now being waged on a different battlefield and is being fought completely differently. Evil has stopped being chaotic. It has stopped being a blind and impetuous force, against which a witcher, a mutant as murderous and chaotic as Evil itself, had to act. Today Evil acts according to rights – because it is entitled to. It acts according to peace treaties, because it was taken into consideration when the treaties were being written . . .’

  ‘He’s seen the settlers being driven south,’ guessed Zoltan Chivay.

  ‘Not only that,’ Dandelion added grimly. ‘Not only that.’

  ‘So what?’ Yarpen Zigrin sat more comfortably, locking his hands on his belly. ‘Everyone’s seen things. Everybody’s been pissed off, everybody has lost his appetite for a shorter or a longer time. Or lost sleep. That’s how it is. That’s how it was. And how it’s going to be. Like these shells here, I swear you won’t squeeze any more philosophy out of it. Because there isn’t any more. What’s not to your liking, Witcher, what doesn’t suit you? The changes the world’s undergoing? Development? Progress?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  Yarpen said nothing for a long time, looking at the Witcher from under his bushy eyebrows.

  ‘Progress,’ he said finally, ‘is like a herd of pigs. That’s how you should look at progress, that’s how you should judge it. Like a herd of pigs trotting around a farmyard. Numerous benefits derive from the fact of that herd’s existence. There’s pork knuckle. There’s sausage, there’s fatback, there are trotters in aspic. In a word, there are benefits! There’s no point turning your nose up at the shit everywhere.’

  They were all silent for some time, weighing up in their minds and consciences the various important issues and matters.

  ‘Let’s have a drink,’ said Dandelion finally.

  No one protested.

  *

  ‘Progress,’ said Yarpen Zigrin amidst the silence, ‘will eventually light up the darkness. The darkness will yield before the light. But not right away. And definitely not without a fight.’

  Geralt, staring at the window, smiled at his own thoughts and dreams.

  ‘The darkness you’re talking about,’ he said, ‘is a state of mind, not matter. Quite different witchers will have to be trained to fight something like that. It’s high time to start.’

  ‘Start retraining? Is that what you had in mind?’

  ‘Not entirely. Being a witcher doesn’t interest me any longer. I’m retiring.’

  ‘Like hell!’

  ‘I’m totally serious. I’m done with being a witcher.’

  A long silence fell, broken only by the furious meowing of the kittens which were scratching and biting one another under the table, faithful to the custom of that species, for whom there’s no sport without pain.

  ‘He’s done with being a witcher,’ Yarpen Zigrin finally repeated in a drawling voice. ‘Ha! I don’t know what to think about it, as King Dezmod said when he was caught cheating at cards. But one may suspect the worse. Dandelion, you travel with him, spend a lot of time with him. Is he showing any other signs of paranoia?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ Geralt was stony-faced. ‘Joking aside, as King Dezmod said when the guests at the banquet suddenly began to go blue and die. I’ve said what I intended to say. And now to action.’

  He picked up his sword from the back of the chair.

  ‘This is your sihill, Zoltan Chivay. I return it to you with thanks and a low bow. It has served. It has helped. Saved lives. And taken lives.’

  ‘Witcher . . .’ The dwarf raised his hands in a defensive gesture. ‘The sword is yours. I didn’t lend it to you, I gave it. Gifts—’

  ‘Quiet, Chivay. I’m returning your sword. I won’t need it any longer.’

  ‘Like hell,’ repeated Yarpen. ‘Pour him some vodka, Dandelion, because he sounds like old Schrader when a pickaxe fell on his head down a mine shaft. Geralt, I know you have a profound nature and a lofty soul, but don’t talk such crap, please, because, as it’s easy to see, neither Yennefer nor any other of your magical concubines are in the audience; just us old buggers. You can’t tell old buggers like us that your sword’s not needed, that witchers aren’t needed, that the world’s rotten, that this, that and the other. You’re a witcher and always will be—’

  ‘No, I won’t,’ Geralt responded mildly. ‘It may surprise you old buggers, but I’ve come to the conclusion that pissing into the wind is stupid. That risking your neck for anybody is stupid. Even if they’re paying. And existential philosophy has nothing to do with it. You won’t believe it, but my own skin has suddenly become extremely dear to me. I’ve come to the conclusion it would be foolish to risk it in someone else’s defence.’

  ‘I’ve noticed.’ Dandelion nodded. ‘On one hand that’s wise. On the other—’

  ‘There is no other.’

  ‘Do Yennefer and Ciri,’ Yarpen asked after a short pause, ‘have anything to do with your decision?’

  ‘A great deal.’

  ‘Then everything’s clear,’ sighed the dwarf. ‘Admittedly, I don’t exactly know how you, a professional swordsman, intend to sustain yourself and intend to organise your worldly existence. Even though, however you slice it, I can’t see you in the role of, let’s say, a cabbage planter, nonetheless one must respect your choice. Innkeeper, if you’d be so kind! This is a Mahakam sihill sword from the very forge of Rhundurin. It was a gift. The receiver doesn’t want it, the giver may not take it back. So you take it, fasten it above the fireplace. Change the name of the tavern to The Witcher’s Sword. May tales of treasure and monsters, of bloody wars and fierce battles, of death, be told here on winter evenings. Of great love and unfailing friendship. Of courage and honour. May this sword cheer up the listeners and inspire the storytellers. And now pour me vodka, gentlemen, for I shall continue talking, shall present profound truths and diverse philosophi
es, including existential ones.’

  The cups were filled with vodka silently and solemnly. They looked into each other’s eyes and drank. No less solemnly. Yarpen Zigrin cleared his throat, swept his eyes over his audience and made certain they were sufficiently rapt and solemn.

  ‘Progress,’ he said with reverence. ‘will lighten up the gloom, for that is what progress is for, as – if you’ll pardon me – the arsehole is for shitting. It will be brighter and brighter, and we shall fear less and less the darkness and the Evil hidden in it. And a day will come, perhaps, when we shall stop believing at all that something is lurking in the darkness. We shall laugh at such fears. Call them childish. Be ashamed of them! But darkness will always, always exist. And there will always be Evil in the darkness, always be fangs and claws, death and blood in the darkness. And witchers will always be needed.’

  *

  They sat in reflection and silence, so deeply plunged in their thoughts that the suddenly increasing murmur and noise of the town – angry, baleful, intensifying like the buzzing of annoyed wasps – escaped their attention.

  They barely noticed as a first, a second and a third shape stole along the silent and empty lakeside boulevard.

  Just as a roar exploded over the town, the door to Wirsing’s inn slammed wide open and a small dwarf rushed in, red from effort and panting heavily.

  ‘What is it?’ Yarpen Zigrin lifted his head.

  The dwarf, still unable to catch his breath, pointed towards the town centre. His eyes were frantic.

  ‘Take a deep breath,’ advised Zoltan Chivay, ‘and tell us what’s going on.’

  *

  It was later said that the tragic events in Rivia were an absolutely chance occurrence, that it was a spontaneous reaction, a sudden and unpredictable explosion of justified anger, springing from the mutual hostility and dislike between humans, dwarves and elves. It was said that it wasn’t the humans, but the dwarves who attacked first, that the aggression came from them. That a dwarven market trader had insulted a young noblewoman, Nadia Esposito, a war orphan, that he had used violence against her. When, then, her friends came to her defence, the dwarf mustered his fellows. A scuffle broke out and then a fight, which took over the whole bazaar in an instant. The fight turned into a massacre, into a massed attack by humans on the part of the suburbs occupied by non-humans and the district of Elm. In less than an hour, from the time of the incident at the bazaar to the intervention by sorcerers, a hundred and eighty-four individuals had been killed, and almost half of the victims were women and children.

  Professor Emmerich Gottschalk of Oxenfurt gives the same version of events in his dissertation.

  But there were also those who said something different. How could it have been spontaneous, how could it have been a sudden and unforeseeable explosion, they asked, if in the course of a few minutes from the altercation at the bazaar, wagons had appeared in the streets from which people began to hand out weapons? How could it have been sudden and justified anger if the ringleaders of the mob – who were the most visible and active during the massacre – were people no one knew, and who had arrived in Rivia several days before the riots, from God knows where? And afterwards vanished without trace? Why did the army intervene so late? And so tentatively at first?

  Still other scholars tried to identify Nilfgaardian provocation in the Rivian riots, and there were those who claimed it was all concocted by the dwarves and elves together. That they had killed each other to blacken the name of the humans.

  Utterly lost among the serious academic voices was the extremely bold theory of a certain young and eccentric graduate, who – until he was silenced – claimed that it was not conspiracies or secret plots that had manifested themselves in Rivia, but the simple and indeed universal traits of the local people: ignorance, xenophobia, callous boorishness and thorough brutishness.

  And then everybody lost interest in the matter and stopped talking about it at all.

  *

  ‘Into the cellar!’ repeated the Witcher, anxiously listening to the quickly growing roar and yelling of the mob. ‘Dwarves into the cellar! Without any stupid heroics!’

  ‘Witcher,’ Zoltan grunted, clenching the haft of his battle axe. ‘I can’t . . . My brothers are dying out there . . .’

  ‘Into the cellar. Think about Eudora Brekekeks. Do you want her to be a widow before her wedding?’

  The argument worked. The dwarves went down into the cellar. Geralt and Dandelion covered the entrance with straw mats. Wirsing, who was usually pale, was now white as cottage cheese.

  ‘I saw a pogrom in Maribor,’ he stammered out, looking at the entrance to the cellar. ‘If they find them there . . .’

  ‘Go to the kitchen.’

  Dandelion was also pale. Geralt wasn’t especially surprised. Individual accents were sounding in the hitherto indistinct and monotonous roar that reached their ears. Notes that made the hair stand up on their heads.

  ‘Geralt,’ groaned the poet. ‘I’m somewhat similar to an elf . . .’

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  Clouds of smoke billowed above the rooftops. And fugitives dashed out of a narrow street. Dwarves. Of both sexes.

  Two dwarves dived into the lake without thinking and began to swim, churning up the water, straight ahead towards the middle. The others dispersed. Some of them turned towards the tavern.

  The mob rushed out of the narrow street. They were quicker than the dwarves. Lust for slaughter was winning out in this race.

  The screaming of people being killed pierced the ears and made the coloured glass in the tavern’s windows jingle. Geralt felt his hands begin to shake.

  One dwarf was literally torn apart, rent into pieces. Another, thrown onto the ground, was turned into a shapeless, bloody mass in a few moments. A woman was stabbed with pitchforks and pikes, and the child she had defended until the end was trampled, crushed under the blows of boot heels.

  Three of them – a dwarf and two dwarf women – fled straight towards the tavern. The crowd raced after them, yelling.

  Geralt took a deep breath. He stood up. Feeling on him the terrified eyes of Dandelion and Wirsing, he took the sihill, the sword wrought in Mahakam, in the very forge of Rhundurin, down from the shelf over the fireplace.

  ‘Geralt . . .’ the poet groaned pathetically.

  ‘Very well,’ said the Witcher, walking towards the exit. ‘But this is the last time! Dammit, it really is the last time!’

  He went out onto the porch and jumped straight down from it, filleting with a rapid slash a roughneck in bricklayer’s overalls who was aiming a blow with a trowel at a woman. He cut off the hand of the next one, who was grasping the hair of another woman. He hacked down two men kicking a dwarf on the ground with two swift, diagonal slashes.

  And he entered the crowd quickly, spinning around in half-turns. He cut with wide blows, apparently chaotically – knowing that such strokes are bloodier and more spectacular. He didn’t mean to kill them. He just wanted to wound them.

  ‘He’s an elf! He’s an elf!’ yelled someone in the mob savagely. ‘Kill the elf!’

  That’s going too far, he thought. Dandelion perhaps, but I don’t resemble an elf in any way.

  He spotted the one who had shouted, probably a soldier, because he was wearing a brigantine and high boots. The Witcher wormed his way into the crowd like an eel. The soldier shielded himself with a javelin held in both hands. Geralt cut along the shaft, chopping off the soldier’s fingers. The Witcher whirled, bringing forth shrieks of pain and fountains of blood with the next broad stroke.

  ‘Mercy!’ an unkempt young man with crazy eyes fell on his knees in front of him. ‘Spare me!’

  Geralt spared him, stopped the movement of his arm and sword, using the momentum intended for the blow to spin away. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the unkempt youth spring to his feet and saw what he was holding. Geralt interrupted the turn to spin back the other way. But he was stuck in the crowd. He was stuck in the crowd
for a split second.

  All he could do was watch as the three-fanged fork flew towards him.

  *

  The fire in the grate of the huge hearth went out, and it grew dark in the hall. The strong wind gusting from the mountains whistled in the cracks in the walls, wailed, blowing in through the draughty shutters of Kaer Morhen, the Seat of the Witchers.

  ‘Dammit!’ Eskel blurted out, stood up and opened the sideboard. ‘“Seagull” or vodka?’

  ‘Vodka,’ said Coën and Geralt as one.

  ‘Of course,’ said Vesemir, hidden in the shadows. ‘Of course, naturally! Drown your stupidity in booze. Sodding fools!’

  ‘It was an accident . . .’ muttered Lambert. ‘She was managing well on the comb.’

  ‘Shut your trap, you ass! I don’t want to hear your voice! I tell you, if anything’s the matter with the girl—’

  ‘She’s good now,’ Coën interrupted gently. ‘She’s sleeping peacefully. Deeply and soundly. She’ll wake up a bit sore, and that’s all. She won’t remember at all about the trance or what happened.’

  ‘As long as you remember!’ panted Vesemir. ‘Blockheads! Pour me one too, Eskel.’

  They were silent for a long time, engrossed in the howling of the wind.

  ‘We’ll have to summon someone,’ said Eskel finally. ‘We’ll have to get some witch to come. It’s not normal what’s happening to that girl.’

  ‘That’s the third trance already.’

  ‘But it’s the first time she’s used articulated speech . . .’

  ‘Tell me again what she said,’ ordered Vesemir, emptying the goblet in one draught. ‘Word for word.’

  ‘I can’t tell you word for word,’ said Geralt, staring into the embers. ‘And the meaning, if there’s any point looking for meaning in it was: me and Coën are going to die. Teeth will be our undoing. We’ll both be killed by teeth. In his case two. In mine three.’

  ‘It’s quite likely we’ll be bitten to death,’ snorted Lambert, ‘Teeth could be the downfall of any of us at any moment. Although if that prediction is a real prophecy you two will be finished off by some extremely gap-toothed monsters.’