34.Something Goes Wrong: and Why
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NOW the tale is of Guivric of Perdigon, more generally called the Sage, who in the days after Anavalt went into Elfhame was chief of the lords of the Silver Stallion who yet remained in Poictesme. And the tale tells how it appeared to Guivric of Perdigon that something was going wrong.
He had not anything tangible to complain of. There was, indeed, no baron in Poictesme more powerful and honored than was Guivric the Sage. He had no need to bother over any notions about Manuel which in no way affected the welfare of Guivric of Perdigon, and he had no quarrel with the more staid and religious ordering of matters which now prevailed in Poictesme. Guivric had, howsoever frostily, adapted himself to these times, and in them a reasonably staid and religious Guivric had, thus, thrived.
As Heitman of Asch, he still held as rigorously as he had held in Manuel’s heyday, the fertile Piemontais between the Duardenez river and Perdigon. He had money and two castles, he lived in comeliness and splendor, he had wisdom and a high name and the finestvineyards anywhere in those regions. He had every reason to be proud of his tall prospering son Michael, a depressingly worthy young warrior, whose superabundant virtues, modeled with so much earnestness after the Manuel of the legend, caused Guivric to regard the amours of Michael’s wife (and Manuel’s daughter) with quiet and unregenerate amusement. And Guivric got on with his own wife as well, he flattered himself, as any person could hope to do upon the more animated side of deafness.
Yet something, this prim and wary Guivric knew, was somewhere going wrong. Things, even such prosaic common things as the chair he was seated in, or his own hands moving before him, were becoming dubious and remote. People spoke with thinner voices: and their bodies flickered now and then, as if these bodies were only appearances of colored vapor. The trees of Guivric’s flourishing woodlands would sometimes stretch and flatten in the wind like trails of smoke. The walls of Guivric’s fine home at Asch, and of his great fort at Perdigon also, were acquiring, as their conservative owner somewhat frettedly observed, a habit of moving, just by a thread’s width, when you were not quite looking at them; and of shifting in outline and in station as secretively as a cloud alters.
Instability and change lurked everywhere. Without any warning well-known faces disappeared from Guivric’s stately household: the men-at-arms and the lackeyswho remained seemed not to miss them, nor indeed ever to have known of those vanished associates.
And Guivric found that the saga which the best-thought-of local bards had compiled and adorned, under his supervision, so as to preserve for posterity’s benefit the glorious exploits and the edifying rewards of Guivric the Sage, was dwindling alike in length and in impressiveness. Overnight a line here and there, or a whole paragraph, would drop out unaccountably, an adventure would lose color, or an achievement would become less clear-cut: and the high and outrageous doings in which Guivric had shared as a lord of the Silver Stallion, these began, in particular, to become almost unrecognizable. At this rate, people would soon have no assurance whatever that Guivric the Sage had lived in unexampled heroism and respectability and had most marvelously prospered in everything.
And it was all quite annoying. It was as though Guivric, or else each one of his possessions and human ties, were wasting away into a phantom: and neither alternative seemed pleasant to consider.
Guivric locked fast the doors of the brown room in which now for so many years he had conducted his studies and his thaumaturgies. He set out a table, the top of which was inscribed with three alphabets. He put on a robe of white: about his withered neck he arranged a garland of purple vervain such as is called herb-of-the-cross. From seven rings he selected—becausethis day was a Sunday,—the gold ring inset with a chrysolite upon which was engraved the figure of a lion-headed serpent.
When this ring had been hung above the table, with a looped red hair plucked long ago from the tail of a virgin nightmare, and when the wan Lady of Crossroads had been duly invoked, then Guivric lighted a taper molded from the fat of Saracen women and of unweaned dogs, and with the evil flaming of this taper he set fire to the looped hair. The red hair burned with a small spiteful sizzling: the gold ring fell. The ring rolled about upon the table, it uncoiled, it writhed, it moved glitteringly among the characters of three alphabets, passing like a tortured worm from one ideograph to another, and it revealed to Guivric the dreadful truth.
The Sylan whom people called Glaum-Without-Bones was at odds with Guivric. This was not a matter which anybody blessed with intelligent self-interest could afford to neglect.