The Knight

Thunrolf got mad then. He called them poltroons and cowards, and I could see they wanted to kill him for it, but even so there was no one who would let him put the other gyve on him.

About then I looked down again, and Pouk was gone. I could not see him at all, and I knew he had gotten his rock loose and tried to climb up holding on to it, and had fallen down deeper than ever.

I grabbed on to Thunrolf’s arm then. “I’m going,” I told him. “You can put the other one on me.”

“No,” he said, “one of these cravens must go with you. I want to see—and I want them to see—who turns back first.”

They would not even start, and I told him so and climbed over the edge. He still had the other end of my chain and one of the men-at-arms grabbed it too, and they stopped me. It was going to be a tough climb with two hands, and I knew that if I tried to pull them in, more would grab hold.

“This is your last chance,” Thunrolf told his knights, “your final opportunity. Speak now.”

I stuck my head up over the edge and yelled, “Put it on my other hand! I’ll go!”

I have been awfully surprised here, and more than just once or twice. I know I have said that already, and it is the truth. That was one of them, because Thunrolf put that gyve on his own wrist and snapped it shut, gave his knights one last look, and climbed down with me.

As we went deeper and deeper the air got hotter and hotter and it was harder and harder to breathe. There was smoke in it, and we coughed a lot. I knew there was a good chance we would both die, and I did not want to.

(This is one of those places where it is hard to tell the truth. It may be the hardest of all. I think it is. I went outside and walked around and looked at the sea and the mountains and the beautiful place where we live. If Disiri or Michael had been there I would have talked to them about it, but they were not, and I had to decide for myself. I have, and this is the truth.)

If the Mountain of Fire had been a volcano like we have back home I would never have done it. I knew it was not, and that was one thing that kept me going. I knew that there was another world under Aelfrice, and that it was the sixth world and was called Muspel. I knew that the hole in the middle of the Mountain of Fire went there, and that was where the fire we saw was, and where the smoke was coming from.

So that was one thing. The other one was that I did not think we would have to go clear down to Muspel. Pouk had stopped partway the first time, so I thought he had probably stopped partway again, which was wrong. When Thunrolf got to coughing bad and wanted to go back up, I kept hustling him along. I knew he was trying to tell me that he would have me killed, and sometimes he was able to get most of it out. But I pretended I could not understand and kept pulling the chain on our wrists and telling him to keep moving.

After a while the hole started opening out again, and we were not climbing down the inside of a mountain anymore, we were climbing down a cliff. Thunrolf fell again. He had fallen a dozen times, but that was the worst. I caught the chain, and he was hanging by it. While I was trying to work him over where he could find a toehold, I saw Pouk far below us, with one of the dragons of Muspel coming for him.

I do not believe any two men ever went down a cliff any faster than Thunrolf and I did after that. We got to the bottom and I yelled to Pouk, and I yelled at the dragon, and that was when Thunrolf drew his sword and tried to kill me. I caught his wrist and bent his arm back and he dropped the sword.

This is hard to put down on paper because it happened so quickly. I could not watch the dragon while I was wrestling Thunrolf, but I knew it was coming for Pouk and coming fast. I wanted that sword. I knew I had been saying I would never use one until I got the one Disiri was going to find for me, but I wanted it anyway. That sword seemed to be our only hope, and if Thunrolf had it instead of me he was going to kill me with it and not the dragon.

He dropped it, as I said, and it fell into a crevice in the rock. There was fire coming out of that crevice, and it had fallen so far in I could not see it. I turned as quickly as I could, and the dragon had Pouk pinned under one of its forefeet. Think of a big snake, a crocodile as big as a boat, and one of those flying dinosaurs. Mix all the worst parts together and that is the way a dragon looks. It is worse than any of them, and worse than all of them at once.

I picked up a stone. It was almost too hot to hold, but I threw it. The dragon hissed like a steam pipe and opened its mouth wide, and Garsecg’s face was in there instead of a tongue. He said, “Sir Able, why war you against me?” It was still his voice, but it sounded like a whole rock band.

I explained that Pouk was my friend, and said that if he killed Pouk he was going to have to kill me, too.

“If I do not?” Garsecg smiled, there in the dragon’s mouth. His face was three times the size that it had been.