39.One Warden Left Uncircumvented
══════════════════════════════════════════════════
BESIDE the next door lay a huge white stallion. And as Guivric approached this door, it opened. Through the brown curtains came that ambiguous young man called Horvendile, with whom Guivric, off and on, had held considerable traffic during a forty years’ practice of thaumaturgies.
The stallion now arose, before Guivric could walk widdershins about him, and the stallion went statelily away. And Horvendile gazed after the superb beast, rather wistfully.
“He, too,” said Horvendile, “goes as a phantom here. Is it not a pity, Guivric, that this Kalki will not come in our day, and that we shall not ever behold his complete glory? I cry a lament for that Kalki who will some day bring back to their appointed places high faith and very ardent loves and hatreds; and who will see to it that human passions are never in a poor way to find expression with adequate speech and action. Ohé, I cry a loud lament for Kalki! The little silver effigies which his postulants fashion and adore are well enough: but Kalki is a horse of another color.”
“I did not come into this accursed place to talk about horses and nightmares,” replied Guivric, “but to attend to the righting of the wrongs contrived by one Glaum-Without-Bones, who is at odds with me, and who has perverted my saga.”
Now Horvendile reflected for an instant. He said, “You have then, after so many years, come of your own will into the East, just as I prophesied, to face the most pitiable and terrible of all things?”
Guivric answered, guardedly, “I cannot permit my saga to be perverted.”
Horvendile said then: “Nevertheless, I consider the saga of no lord of the Silver Stallion to be worth squabbling over. Your sagas in the end must all be perverted and engulfed by the great legend about Manuel. No matter how you may strive against that legend, it will conquer: no matter what you may do and suffer, my doomed Guivric, your saga will be recast until it conforms in everything to the legend begotten by the terrified imaginings of a lost child. For men dare not face the universe with no better backing than their own resources; all men that live, and that go perforce about this world like blundering lost children whose rescuer is not yet in sight, have a vital need to believe in this sustaining legend about the Redeemer: and the wickedness and the foolishness of no man can avail against the foolishness and the fond optimism of mankind.”
“These aphorisms,” Guivric conceded, “may be judicious,they may be valuable, they may even have some kernel somewhere of rational meaning. But, in any case, they do not justify my living’s having been upset and generally meddled with by a lecherous and immodest Sylan who goes about wearing not even a skeleton.”
Horvendile replied: “I can see no flaw in your way of living. You are the chief of Emmerick’s barons now that Anavalt is gnawed bones in Elfhame: you have wealth and rather more than as much power as Emmerick himself, now that your son is Emmerick’s brother-in-law, and poor Emmerick is married to a widow. You are a well-thought-of thaumaturgist, and you are, indeed, excelled in your art by nobody since Miramon Lluagor’s death. And you have also, they tell me, a high name for wisdom and for learning now that Kerin has gone down under the earth. What more can anybody ask?”
“I ask for much more than for this sort of cautious and secondary excellence.” Guivric seemed strangely desperate. He spoke now, with a voice which was not in anything prim and wary, saying, “I ask for the man whom I can hate, for the priest whom I can believe, and for the woman whom I can love!”
But Horvendile shook his red curls, and he smiled a little cruelly. “Successful persons, my poor careful Guivric, cannot afford to have any of these luxuries. And one misses them. I know. The Sylan too is,in his crude and naïve way, a successful person. He is now almost human. He cherishes phantoms, therefore, and I suspect these phantoms have been troubling you with their nonsense, since it is well known that all illusions haunt the corridors of this mischancy place into which phantoms alone may enter.”
“Yet I have entered it,” Guivric pointed out.
“Yes,” Horvendile said, non-committally.
“And I now enter,” Guivric stated, “to the heart of it, to match my thaumaturgies against the Sylan’s magic.”