The Very Best of F & SF v1 (58 page)

The other rider,
the one on the brown horse, answered her, “Or a bruise. Let me see.”

That voice was
lighter and younger-sounding than the woman’s voice, but I already knew he was
a man, because he was so tall. He got down off the brown horse and the woman
moved aside to let him pick up her horse’s foot. Before he did that, he put his
hands on the horse’s head, one on each side, and he said something to it that I
couldn’t quite hear.
And the horse
said something back.
Not like a neigh, or a
whinny, or any of the sounds horses make, but like one person talking to
another. I can’t say it any better than that. The tall man bent down then, and
he took hold of the foot and looked at it for a long time, and the horse didn’t
move or switch its tail or anything.

“A stone
splinter,” the man said after a while. “It’s very small, but it’s worked itself
deep into the hoof, and there’s an ulcer brewing. I can’t think why I didn’t
notice it straightaway.”

“Well,” the
woman said. She touched his shoulder. “You can’t notice everything.”

The tall man
seemed angry with himself, the way my father gets when he’s forgotten to close
the pasture gate properly, and our neighbor’s black ram gets in and fights with
our poor old Brimstone. He said, “I can. I’m supposed to.” Then he turned his
back to the horse and bent over that forefoot, the way our blacksmith does, and
he went to work on it.

I couldn’t see
what he was doing, not exactly. He didn’t have any picks or pries, like the
blacksmith, and all I’m sure of is that I
think
he was singing to the horse. But I’m not sure it was proper
singing. It sounded more like the little made-up rhymes that really small
children chant to themselves when they’re playing in the dirt, all alone. No
tune, just up and down,
dee-dah,
dee-dah, dee...
boring even for a horse, I’d have
thought. He kept doing it for a long time, still bending with that hoof in his
hand. All at once he stopped singing and stood up, holding something that
glinted in the sun the way the stream did, and he showed it to the horse, first
thing. “There,” he said, “there, that’s what it was. It’s all right now.”

He tossed the
thing away and picked up the hoof again, not singing, only touching it very
lightly with one finger, brushing across it again and again. Then he set the
foot down, and the horse stamped once, hard, and whinnied, and the tall man
turned to the woman and said, “We ought to camp here for the night, all the
same. They’re both weary, and my back hurts.”

The woman
laughed. A deep, sweet, slow sound, it was. I’d never heard a laugh like that.
She said, “The greatest wizard walking the world, and your back hurts? Heal it
as you healed mine, the time the tree fell on me. That took you all of five
minutes, I believe.”

“Longer than
that,” the man answered her. “You were delirious, you wouldn’t remember.” He
touched her hair, which was thick and pretty, even though it was mostly gray. “You
know how I am about that,” he said. “I still like being mortal too much to use
magic on myself. It spoils it somehow—it dulls the feeling. I’ve told you
before.”

The woman said “
Mmphh
,” the way I’ve heard
my mother say it a thousand times. “Well,
I’ve
been mortal all my life, and some days....”

She didn’t
finish what she was saying, and the tall man smiled, the way you could tell he
was teasing her. “Some days, what?”

“Nothing,” the
woman said, “nothing, nothing.” She sounded irritable for a moment, but she put
her hands on the man’s arms, and she said in a different voice, “Some days—some
early mornings—when the wind smells of blossoms I’ll never see, and there are
fawns playing in the misty orchards, and you’re yawning and mumbling and
scratching your head, and growling that we’ll see rain before nightfall, and
probably hail as well... on such mornings I wish with all my heart that we
could both live forever, and I think you were a great fool to give it up.” She
laughed again, but it sounded shaky now, a little. She said, “Then I remember
things I’d rather not remember, so then my stomach acts up, and all sorts of
other things start
twingeing
me—never mind what they are, or where they hurt, whether it’s my
body or my head, or my heart. And then I think,
no, I suppose not, maybe not.”
The tall man put his arms around her, and for a moment she rested
her head on his chest. I couldn’t hear what she said after that.

I didn’t think I’d
made any noise, but the man raised his voice a little, not looking at me, not
lifting his head, and he said, “Child, there’s food here.” First I couldn’t
move, I was so frightened. He
couldn’t
have seen me through the brush and all
the alder trees. And then I started remembering how hungry I was, and I started
toward them without knowing I was doing it. I actually looked down at my feet
and watched them moving like somebody else’s feet, as though they were the
hungry ones, only they had to have me take them to the food. The man and the
woman stood very still and waited for me.

Close to, the
woman looked younger than her voice, and the tall man looked older. No, that
isn’t it, that’s not what I mean. She wasn’t young at all, but the gray hair
made her face younger, and she held herself really straight, like the lady who
comes when people in our village are having babies. She holds her face all
stiff too, that one, and I don’t like her much. This woman’s face wasn’t
beautiful, I suppose, but it was a face you’d want to snuggle up to on a cold
night. That’s the best I know how to say it.

The man... one
minute he looked younger than my father, and the next he’d be looking older
than anybody I ever saw, older than people are supposed to
be
, maybe. He didn’t have
any gray hair himself, but he did have a lot of lines, but that’s not what I’m
talking about either. It was the eyes. His eyes were green, green,
green
, not like grass, not
like emeralds—I saw an emerald once, a gypsy woman showed me—and not anything
like apples or limes or such stuff. Maybe like the ocean, except I’ve never seen
the ocean, so I don’t know. If you go deep enough into the woods (not the
Midwood, of course not, but any other sort of woods), sooner or later you’ll
always come to a place where even the
shadows
are green, and that’s the way his eyes
were. I was afraid of his eyes at first.

The woman gave
me a peach and watched me bite into it, too hungry to thank her. She asked me, “Girl,
what are you doing here? Are you lost?”

“No, I’m not,” I
mumbled with my mouth full. “I just don’t know where I am, that’s different.” They
both laughed, but it wasn’t a mean, making-fun laugh. I told them, “My name’s
Sooz, and I have to see the king. He lives somewhere right nearby, doesn’t he?”

They looked at
each other. I couldn’t tell what they were thinking, but the tall man raised
his eyebrows, and the woman shook her head a bit, slowly. They looked at each
other for a long time, until the woman said, “Well, not nearby, but not so very
far, either. We were bound on our way to visit him ourselves.”

“Good,” I said. “Oh,
good.”
I was trying to sound as grown-up as they were, but it was hard,
because I was so happy to find out that they could take me to the king. I said,
“I’ll go along with you, then.”

The woman was
against it before I got the first words out. She said to the tall man, “No, we
couldn’t. We don’t know how things are.” She looked sad about it, but she
looked firm, too. She said, “Girl, it’s not you worries me. The king is a good
man, and an old friend, but it has been a long time, and kings change. Even
more than other people, kings change.”

“I have to see
him,” I said. “You go on, then. I’m not going home until I see him.” I finished
the peach, and the man handed me a chunk of dried fish and smiled at the woman
as I tore into it. He said quietly to her, “It seems to me that you and I both
remember asking to be taken along on a quest. I can’t speak for you, but I
begged.”

But the woman
wouldn’t let up. “We could be bringing her into great peril. You can’t take the
chance, it isn’t right!”

He began to
answer her, but I interrupted—my mother would have slapped me halfway across
the kitchen. I shouted at them, “I’m
coming
from
great peril. There’s a griffin nested in the Midwood, and he’s
eaten Jehane and Louli and—and my Felicitas—” and then I
did
start weeping, and I
didn’t care. I just stood there and shook and wailed, and dropped the dried
fish. I tried to pick it up, still crying so hard I couldn’t see it, but the
woman stopped me and gave me her scarf to dry my eyes and blow my nose. It
smelled nice.

“Child,” the
tall man kept saying, “child, don’t take on so, we didn’t know about the
griffin.” The woman was holding me against her side, smoothing my hair and
glaring at him as though it was his fault that I was howling like that. She
said, “Of course we’ll take you with us, girl dear—there, never mind, of course
we will. That’s a fearful matter, a griffin, but the king will know what to do
about it. The king eats griffins for breakfast snacks—spreads them on toast
with orange marmalade and gobbles them up, I promise you.” And so on, being
silly, but making me feel better, while the man went on pleading with me not to
cry. I finally stopped when he pulled a big red handkerchief out of his pocket,
twisted and knotted it into a bird-shape, and made it fly away. Uncle Ambrose does
tricks with coins and shells, but he can’t do anything like that.

His name was
Schmendrick, which I still think is the funniest name I’ve heard in my life.
The woman’s name was Molly Grue. We didn’t leave right away, because of the
horses, but made camp where we were instead. I was waiting for the man,
Schmendrick, to do it by magic, but he only built a fire, set out their
blankets, and drew water from the stream like anyone else, while she hobbled
the horses and put them to graze. I gathered firewood.

The woman,
Molly, told me that the king’s name was Lír, and that they had known him when
he was a very young man, before he became king. “He is a true hero,” she said, “a
dragonslayer, a giantkiller, a rescuer of maidens, a solver of impossible
riddles. He may be the greatest hero of all, because he’s a good man as well.
They aren’t always.”

“But you didn’t
want me to meet him,” I said. “Why was that?”

Molly sighed. We
were sitting under a tree, watching the sun go down, and she was brushing
things out of my hair. She said, “He’s old now. Schmendrick has trouble with
time—I’ll tell you why one day, it’s a long story—and he doesn’t understand
that Lír may no longer be the man he was. It could be a sad reunion.” She
started braiding my hair around my head, so it wouldn’t get in the way. “I’ve
had an unhappy feeling about this journey from the beginning, Sooz. But
he
took a notion that Lír needed
us, so here we are. You can’t argue with him when he gets like that.”

“A good wife isn’t
supposed to argue with her husband,” I said. “My mother says you wait until he
goes out, or he’s asleep, and then you do what you want.”

Molly laughed,
that rich, funny sound of hers, like a kind of deep gurgle. “Sooz, I’ve only
known you a few hours, but I’d bet every penny I’ve got right now—aye, and all
of Schmendrick’s too—that you’ll be arguing on your wedding night with whomever
you marry. Anyway, Schmendrick and I aren’t married. We’re together, that’s
all. We’ve been together quite a long while.”

“Oh,” I said. I
didn’t know any people who were together like that, not the way she said it. “Well,
you
look
married. You sort of
do.”

Molly’s face
didn’t change, but she put an arm around my shoulders and hugged me close for a
moment. She whispered in my ear, “I wouldn’t marry him if he were the last man
in the world. He eats wild radishes in bed.
Crunch, crunch, crunch,
all night—
crunch, crunch, crunch
.” I
giggled, and the tall man looked over at us from where he was washing a pan in
the stream. The last of the sunlight was on him, and those green eyes were
bright as new leaves. One of them winked at me, and I
felt
it, the way you feel a
tiny breeze on your skin when it’s hot. Then he went back to scrubbing the pan.

“Will it take us
long to reach the king?” I asked her. “You said he didn’t live too far, and I’m
scared the griffin will eat somebody else while I’m gone. I need to be home.”

Molly finished
with my hair and gave it a gentle tug in back to bring my head up and make me
look straight into her eyes. They were as gray as Schmendrick’s were green, and
I already knew that they turned darker or lighter gray depending on her mood. “What
do you expect to happen when you meet King Lír, Sooz?” she asked me right back.
“What did you have in mind when you set off to find him?”