The Knight

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.