The Knight

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

“Nobody lives here,” I told Gylf. “Let’s stop and build a fire and hunt around 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, “Hello? Hello?”

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.

Chapter 46. Mani

Cutting 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.