The Knight

They said I could not go up unless Lord Thunrolf said it was all right. I said fine, where is he? Of course he was up quite a ways in the castle they called the Round Tower, so I got to see a lot while they were taking me up to him. It was beautiful and scary, both at once. You looked up and up, and what you mostly saw was towers and more towers, and walls one on top of the other, and big spaces of bare rock. There were flags on the tallest towers, the king’s flag, and Lord Thunrolf’s, and the banners of some of the knights that were knights banneret, and the pennants of the other knights. There were shields hung on the battlements of the towers, too, with each knight’s arms on them. The stone everything was built of had been quarried right there on the mountain, and it was of all sorts of colors, mostly red and black and gray. And up above everything was the top of the mountain, with snow on it and smoke coming up out of the snow. Black smoke that drifted up and up into Skai as if the dragons of Muspel were trying to smoke out the Valfather and the other Overcyns. I will never forget it. It was a steep climb, but after a while it got cooler and there was a lot more wind, and before we had gone halfway I felt like I understood why Thunrolf bunked up there where he did instead of down in the lowlands. There were no more bugs, either.

With only one road going up to the top, it was pretty clear the Osterlings could not take back the Mountain unless they took all the fortifications along that road, one after another, or starved out the garrison. I never even tried to find out how much food and water they had up there, but Thunrolf told me there were big cisterns cut into the rock, and since it rained a lot they were generally full. But storming the walls and towers looked about as bad to me as storming the Tower of Glas. Back then I did not know that the Osterlings were going to take it away from us, or that we were going to take it back. If you had told me I was going to be the one that gave the order to give it up and retreat south, I would have said you were crazy.

Building more walls and more towers was the main thing Thunrolf and his men did there when Pouk and I were there the first time. They built up all the walls more and built new ones. The men-at-arms had to work on them some, and they had hired local people too. The knights bossed the job, and Thunrolf bossed the knights. Knights are not supposed to work with their hands, just fight and train to fight. I thought I knew about that from certain things I had picked up on in Irringsmouth, but I never really knew how strong it was until we got to Forcetti.

Anyway, they were taking every place where the road was narrow and the mountainside was really rough, and building walls with gates for the road, and towers so archers could shoot down on everybody. They had started at the bottom, and they were working their way up.

We got to the big tower and climbed four or five flights of stairs to get to the floor where Thunrolf was. Then we had to wait and wait. We had eaten a couple of mangos each on the cart, but that seemed like it had been years ago. We were both hungry, and really thirsty.

Every so often somebody would come and talk to one or the other of us, asking who we were and what we wanted. I was tired and did not pay a whole lot of attention when they were talking to Pouk, and maybe that was a mistake. Finally I told him to go off and find us some food and something to drink, and after that I waited by myself. It got later and later, and I wondered whether Thunrolf or somebody would let us stay overnight and give us a place to sleep.

I was about to try leaving to see if anybody would stop me when a serving-man came out and told me to come in. I had seen him before, he had been in and out of that room where Thunrolf was half a dozen times. But this time he had a kind of smirk when he looked at me. I did not like it, but I could not do anything about it, so I followed him inside.

Thunrolf was sitting at a table with a bottle of wine and some glasses on it. I had told the servingman my name, and he told Thunrolf. Thunrolf told me to sit down and motioned to the servingman to pour me some wine, which I thought was nice of him. He was a tall man with long legs. Most men his age have beards or mustaches, but he did not, and looking at him I decided he probably drank too much and did not eat enough.

“So, you’re a knight.”

I said yes.

“Here on a ship bound for Forcetti. You’ve come a long way out of your way.”

I tried to make a joke out of that. “I generally try to go straight to the place

I’d like to get to, but I don’t seem to be good at it.”

He frowned. “Has no one taught you to say My Lord when you speak to a baron?”