The Knight

At sunset, they offered me my choice of the fish we had caught for my help. I told the young one (not a lot older than me) that I would take it and share with his family if his wife would cook it, because I had no place to stay. That was okay, and when our catch had been sold, we carried the best fish and some others that had not sold into a crowded little house maybe twenty steps from the water.

After dinner we told stories, and when it was my turn I said, “I’ve never seen a ghost, unless what I saw today was one. So I’ll tell you about that, even if it won’t scare anybody like the ghost in Scaur’s story. Because it’s all I’ve got.”

Everyone seemed agreeable; I think they had heard each other’s stories more than once.

“Yesterday I found myself on a certain rocky island not far from here where there used to be a tower—”

“It was Duke Indign’s,” said Scaur; and his wife, Sha, “Bluestone Castle.”

“I spent the night in the garden,” I continued, “because I had something to do there, a seed I had to plant. You see, somebody important had told me to plant a seed, and I hadn’t known what she meant until I found seeds in here.” I showed them the pouch.

“You chopped down a spiny orange,” Sha’s grandfather wheezed; he pointed to my bow. “You cut a spiny orange, and you got to plant three seeds, young man. If you don’t the Mossmen’ll get you.”

I said I had not known that.

He spat in the fire. “Folks don’t, not now, and that’s why there’s not hardly no spiny oranges left. Best wood there is. You rub flax oil on it, hear? That’ll protect it from the weather.”

He held out his hand for my bow, and I passed it to him. He gave it to Scaur. “You break her, son. Break her ‘cross your knee.”

Scaur tried. He was strong, and bent my bow nearly double; but it did not break.

“See? You can’t. Can’t be broke.” Sha’s grandfather cackled as Scaur returned my bow to me. “There’s not but one fruit on a spiny orange most times, and not but three seeds in it. You chop down the tree and you got to plant them in three places, else the Mossmen’ll come for you.”

“Go on, Able,” Sha said, “tell us about the ghost.”

“This morning I decided to plant the first seed in the garden of Bluestone Castle,” I told them. “There was a stone bowl there that held water, and I decided I would plant the seed first and scoop up water for it. When it seemed to me I had watered it enough, I would drink what was left.”

They nodded.

“I dug a little hole with my knife, dropped a seed into it, replaced the earth—which was pretty damp already—and carried water for the seed in my hands. When there was standing water in the hole, I drank and drank from the bowl, and when I looked up I saw a knight standing there watching me. I couldn’t see his face, but he had a big green shield with a dragon on it.”

“That wasn’t Duke Indign,” Scaur remarked, “his badge was the blue boar.”

“Did you speak to him?” Sha wanted to know. “What did he say?”

“I didn’t. It happened so fast and I was too surprised. He—he turned into a sort of cloud, then he disappeared altogether.”

“Clouds are the breath of the Lady,” Sha’s grandfather remarked. I asked who that was, but he only shook his head and looked into the fire. Sha said, “Don’t you know her name can’t be spoken?”

―――

In the morning I asked the way to Griffinsford, but Scaur said there was no town of that name thereabout.

“Then what’s the name of this one?” I asked.

“Irringsmouth,” said Scaur.

“I think there’s an Irringsmouth near where I live,” I told him. Really I was not sure, but I thought it was something like that. “It’s a big city, though. The only really big city I’ve been to.”

“Well, this’s the only Irringsmouth around here,” Scaur said. A passerby who heard us said, “Griffinsford is on the Griffin,” and walked away before I could ask him anything.

“That’s a stream that flows into our river,” Scaur told me. “Go south ’til you come to the river, and take the River Road and you’ll find it.”

So I set out with a few bites of salt fish wrapped in a clean cloth, south along the little street behind the wattle house where Scaur and Sha lived, south some more on the big street it led to, and east on the highroad by the river. It went through a gap without a gate in the wrecked city wall, and out into the countryside, through woods of young trees where patches of snow were hanging on in the shadows and square pools of rainwater waited for somebody to come back.