The Knight

“You don’t have to be afraid of them. They’re after fawns, and the new calves of the forest cattle. They won’t dare attack as long as I’m with you. I’m a knight too. I’m Sir Able.”

She huddled closer.

At dawn we found a path, and in the first long beams of the rising sun I recognized it. “We’re not far from Bold Berthold’s hut,” I told Disira. “We’ll go there, and even if Bold Berthold has nothing for us, you and Ossar can sit by his fire while I hunt.” Looking down at Ossar, I saw he was at her breast, and asked if she had milk.

“Yes, but I don’t know if it will last. I’m awfully thirsty and I haven’t eaten.

Just some gooseberries.”

We both drank deep at the crossing of the Griffin, and I shot a deer not a hundred strides after it, and merrily we came to Bold Berthold’s hut. He welcomed us and said he had thought, because of the wound that he had gotten from the Angrborn, that I was much too young to be his brother. Now he was glad to see I was as old as I ought to be, and bigger than I ought to be, too

(I was much larger than he was), and felt sure he was getting well at last. There was mead and venison (that some people would call tough, although we did not), and the last hoarded nuts to crack. Bold Berthold played with little

Ossar, and talked about how life had been when his brother was no bigger than

Ossar, and he himself (as he put it) only a stripling.

In the morning Disira begged to stay one more day; she was exhausted; her feet still hurt; and I, knowing how long our return to Glennidam was likely to be, said it would be all right.

I made myself new arrows that day, four for which I already had steel heads, and four more that I hoped to get heads for from the smith in her village. We slept under deerskins at Bold Berthold’s, and she crept under mine that night when Ossar and Bold Berthold were asleep. I did not betray Disiri, although I know Disira expected me to; but I put my arms around her and kissed her once or twice. That was what she wanted mostly: to be loved by somebody strong who would not hurt her.

Next day we stayed too, because I wanted to try my new arrows and hoped to get something Bold Berthold could eat when we were gone. The day after that we did not go because it rained. As we sat around the fire, singing all the songs we knew and talking when we felt like it, I said something about your mother and mine, Ben, and Bold Berthold hugged me and cried. I had already started to wonder if America had ever been real and not trust the life I remembered there with you (school and the cabin, my Mac and all that) and this made it worse. I lay down, and to tell the truth I pretended I was asleep, wondering if

I was not really Bold Berthold’s brother Able.

I was almost asleep when I heard Disira say, “I was all alone out there, and he came from nowhere, calling me. He’d been with the Queen of the Wood.

That’s what he said.”

Bold Berthold muttered, “Aye?”

“He calls himself a knight, but his bowstring talks to him in the dark, and he talks while he’s sleeping. He’s really a wizard, isn’t he? A mighty wizard. I see it every time I look into his face.”

“He’s a man like I was once,” Bold Berthold said, “and better than I was, and my brother. Go to sleep.”

So we slept, all four of us, until I woke up thinking that Disiri had called me.

I got up as quietly as I could, slipped out, and wandered through the rain and the mist calling for her. I saw strange faces peer up at me from the swirling waters of the Griffin and from a dozen ring-marked forest pools. More peeped from behind bushes or looked down from the leaves of trees—faces that might have come in a flying saucer, green, brown, black, or fiery. Glass faces too, and faces whiter than snow. Once I nearly shot a brown doe that got all smoky and turned into a long-legged girl; and many times I heard the howls of wolves, and once the nearer baying of something that was never a wolf.

But Disiri, the green woman I love, I never found.

Chapter 10. Frost

Days had passed while Toug and I had knelt in Aelfrice. Now weeks slipped by while Disira, her baby, and I remained with Bold Berthold. I hunted and he trapped, for he was clever at making snares. Disira swept and cleaned, skinned the game we got, stretched and tanned the hides, cooked, and played with Ossar. We were not husband and wife; but I might have had her, I think, at any time; and no passerby (had there been any) would have guessed that we were not.