The Knight

When my meat was about done, I said, “I know there’s somebody in here. I’m a knight, and my word means a lot to me. Whoever you are, I don’t want to hurt you. If you’d like this nice piece I barbecued, just come out and say hello, and I’ll give it to you.”

Nothing.

I looked around carefully after that, the room being lit up by the fire and a whole lot brighter than it had been when we came in. There was nobody there but Gylf and me, and no furniture or anything that somebody might be hiding behind.

I bit off a piece of meat, chewed, looked around some more, and thought. Nobody was out on the path. I put my head out the one little window and looked around, and there was nobody there either. A dark doorway led to a little back room. There was an old string bed in there falling apart, with nothing on it but a bundle of dirty rags. “If there wasn’t anybody here,” I said out loud, “my dog would talk to me. But since you want to hide, I’m not going to look for you. I’d like to eat and dry my clothes. Is that okay? As soon as the rain lets up, we’ll go. No hard feelings.”

Nobody said anything, but Gylf went to the door and wagged his tail, which meant that he would like to leave right now. I said, “You’re not tied up, are you? If you want to go I’m not about to stop you.”

He went back to his corner.

“Is this somebody who might hurt us?” I asked him. He shut his eyes.

“Up to you.” I put the last piece of meat on my stick. “You won’t talk to me? All right, I’ll stop talking to you.”

That meat was just about done when somebody whispered, “Please ... ?”

I looked around. “If you’d like some of this, come and get it.” (You used to say that when you were dishing up, remember?)

“Please ... ?”

That time I knew where the whisper was coming from. There was somebody in that back room after all. I took the meat in there. “Are you too sick to walk?”

Nobody answered, but the bundle of rag on the bed moved. I held out the meat, and all of a sudden I was as scared as I had ever been in my life.

“I ... Thank you. You ... kind to an old woman.” Here there is something I know you will never believe. It was the rain outside talking. The way the drops hit made the words. They said, “Her blessing ... wherever ...”

I crouched down beside the bed thinking I was letting the whole thing spook me, that there was somebody there—that there had to be—who needed help.

“I ... bless. Curse.”

I said, “How about if I pull off a little piece for you?”

“Never die ...”

I thought that might be a yes, so I pulled off a little bit of the meat. A mouth—a hole, really—opened in the rags. I put that little piece of meat into it. Her head came out of the rags after that. Only her head. It rolled to a place where the strings were broken and fell through onto the floor, and that piece of meat I had pulled off fell out of the mouth.

I will never forget that. I wish I could. I have tried to, but no go. It is always there.

Picking up that head was as hard as anything I have ever done, or almost. I did it just the same. The skin was like old leather; it did not feel dirty, or anything like that. I carried it back into the other room to show Gylf, and because of the firelight I had a better look at it in there. There were still a few dirty gray hairs on it, but the eyes were gone.

“This was talking to me, too,” I told him. “I don’t think it’s going to talk any more, though. When I put some meat in its mouth it found out it was dead, or anyhow that’s what it seems like. So it’s gone, and you can talk now.”

I really thought he was going to. That was why I said it. But what he really did was get up and go out into the rain.

I had been going to throw the head into the fire. That had been in the back of my mind all the time, but I did not do it. I set it down on the hearth and went to the door so I could wash my hands with rain, and I just kept going—out into the rain with Gylf.

―――

It finally stopped a little before sundown. I took off my clothes and wrung them out. They had been pretty dirty, but the rain had given them a good washing and washed me too. “My armor’s going to rust,” I told Gylf, “but there’s nothing I can do about that. Sand will take the rust off, if we ever find any. And oil will keep it from rusting more. Oil or grease, if we can’t find oil.” I was shivering.

“Fire?” That was the first time Gylf had talked since he had clammed up in the cottage.

“If I can find stuff dry enough to burn. I’ll look.”

“I’ll hunt,” Gylf told me.

I said go ahead, but keep an eye out for the road.

He started to leave, and an idea hit me. “Wait. You weren’t talking to that dead person, were you? Because if you had been, you’d have told me when I brought in the head. So who was it?”

He would not look at me.

“I thought that’s who it had been. But the voice you talked to was inside. When she talked the voice was outside, the raindrops talking for her somehow. Besides, the voices weren’t the same. Okay, if you weren’t talking to the dead person, who was it?”