The Knight

They called to one another, pointing, and swam over to the ship, diving in and out of the water and leaping free of it, sometimes as high as the mainmast. Spreading fins like wings. I told Kerl to hang a rope over the side or something and he did, but not many of them used it. They just climbed up the sides, or else jumped up on the deck until there was a crowd of them there.

I pulled off my shirt and the bandage so they could see my wound, and they came up on the sterncastle deck to look at it, asking questions without waiting for answers.

I had to guess at what to say; so I said I wanted to be cured and I would do anything for them if only they would do it. And if they could not, I would still do anything they wanted me to.

“No,” they said. And, “No, no!” And, “No, no, no, brave sir knight. We could not ask you to fight Kulili for us until you were well and strong. Ill and weak you would surely die.”

Another was almost like an echo. “Will surely die ...”

Then an old Aelf came; he looked like a man of thin blue glass, with wild white hair and a tangled blue beard to his knees. All the others stood aside—you could tell he was somebody. He took my face between his hands and looked way down into my eyes. I could not help looking into his when he did that, and it was like looking into a storm at midnight.

When he finally let my face go, it seemed like it had been a long, long time. Hours. “Come with us to Aelfrice” was what he said. “The sea shall heal your wound and teach you to be the strongest of your kind, a knight against whom no knight can stand. Will you come?”

I could not talk, but I nodded.

As soon as I did, there were eight or ten Aelfmaidens tearing at my clothes. They took off my sword belt and Sword Breaker, and everything else, too, and as soon as they got down to bare skin they kissed it, giggling and elbowing each other and having a fine time. One grabbed my right hand and another one got my left, and one jumped up onto my shoulders. It seemed like she weighed no more than a few drops of water, and the long, thin legs she wrapped around my neck were as cold as dew.

All four of us jumped into the sea then. I did not mean to, but I did anyway. It was all really strange. There had been this greasy swell up where the ship was, but before we hit the sea was tossing waves, and they looked as clear as crystal—chimerical, like ghosts in sheets of snow-white foam, ghosts spangled all over with moonlight and reflected stars. There was a shock as if we were jumping into a cold shower, and a roar like a big wave hitting another head-on, and then we were down under all those waves.

“You will not drown,” the one on my left told me, and giggled. I had not even been worrying, but I should have been.

“Not as long as we are with you, Sir Knight.” That was the right-hand Aelf-maiden; she laughed, and the sound of it was like little naked kids playing in some pool the tide had left.

“But we will leave you!” It was the one on my shoulders who said that, and she pulled my hair a little bit to get me to pay attention. “It is what we do!”

All three of them laughed and laughed at that. There was nothing cruel about the way they laughed, but there was nothing kind about it either.

“Garsecg will make us!” they said.

Strange fish swam all around us. Some of them looked dangerous and some looked very dangerous. I did not know who they belonged to then. Deeper down we lost the moon and the starlight, and the whole world of suns and moons and winds seemed really, really far away. I guess it was the way an astronaut must feel; he was so used to those things that he never thought they could be taken away, and when they are he must wonder how he got into this.

I know I did.

Some of the fish down there had teeth like big needles, and a lot had spots or stripes on their sides that glowed red, yellow, or green. I saw an eel that looked like a rope on fire, and some other scary things, and finally I asked the Aelfmaidens if this was where they lived, because it did not seem to me that anybody would if they could live anywhere else.

“We live wherever we are,” they said, “and Kelpie is our name.” They lit up for me then, slender, pretty girls that seemed like they were made of blue light. They made me look at their gills and tails, and they had long curved claws that looked as sharp as the fishes’ teeth.

Chapter 22. Garsecg

At the mouth of an underwater cave we found the old man who had promised to cure me. He made the Kelpies go away, and I was kind of glad. I wanted to know where we were, and he said it was Aelfrice. “I am not the oldest of my kind,” he told me, “nor the wisest. Yet I know many things. I am Garsecg.” Later I found out it was not his real name; but then I believed him, and I still think Garsecg when I think of him; so it is what I am going to call him. I asked how he was going to cure me.