CHAPTER 1
 
DEAR BEN
 
 
You must have stopped wondering what happened to me a long time ago; I know it has been many years. I have the time to write here, and what looks like a good chance to get what I write to where you are, so I am going to try. If I just told everything on a couple of sheets, you would not believe most of it. Hardly any of it, because there are many things that I have trouble with myself. So what I am going to do instead is tell everything. When I have finished, you still may not believe me; but you will know all that I do. In some ways, that is a lot. In others, practically nothing. When I saw you sitting by our fire—my own brother—there on the battlefield…Never mind. I will get to it. Only I think it may be why I am writing now.
Remember the day we drove out to the cabin? Then Geri phoned. You had to go home and did not need a kid around. So we said there was no reason for me to go too, I could stay out there and you would come back the next day.
We said I would fish.
That was it.
Only I did not. It did not seem like it was going to be much fun with you gone, but the air was crisp and the leaves were turning, so I went on a hike. Maybe it was a mistake. I went a long way, but I was not lost. Pretty soon I picked up a stick and hiked with it, but it was crooked and not very strong. I did not like it much and decided I would cut a good one I could keep out at the cabin and use whenever we were there.
I saw a tree that was different from all the others. It was not very big, and it had white bark and shiny leaves. It was a spiny orange tree, Ben, but I had never heard of them. Later Bold Berthold told me a lot. It was too big for me to cut the whole thing, but I found a branch that was almost straight. I cut off that and trimmed it and so forth. That may have been the main thing, my main mistake. They are not like other trees. The Mossmen care more about them.
I had gone off the path when I saw the spiny orange, and when I got to it I saw it was right at the edge of the woods, and past it were the downs. Some hills were pretty steep, but they were beautiful, smooth and covered with long grass. So I hiked out there with my new stick and climbed three or four hills. It was really nice. I found a little spring at the top of a hill. I had a drink, and sat down—I was pretty tired by then—and carved the stick some, making who-knows-what. Just whittling. After a while I lay down and looked at the clouds. Everybody has seen pictures in clouds, but I saw more that afternoon than I ever have before or since—an old man with a beard that the wind changed into a black dragon, a wonderful horse with a horn on its head, and a beautiful lady who smiled down at me.
After that, a flying castle, all spiky like a star because there were towers and turrets coming out of all its sides. I kept telling myself it had to be a cloud, but it did not look like a cloud, Ben. It looked like stone. I got up and chased after it, waiting for the wind to blow it apart, but it never did.
Night came. I could not see the castle any longer, and I knew I had to be a long way from our cabin. I started back across the downs, walking fast; but I got to walking down a slope that had no bottom. Somebody grabbed me in the dark, and somebody else caught my ankle when I slapped that hand away. Right then somebody said, “Who comes to Aelfrice!” I still remember that, and for a long, long time after that, that was all I could remember. That and being grabbed by a lot of people.
* * *
I woke up in a cave by the sea, where an old lady with too many teeth sat spinning; and when I had pulled myself together and found my stick, I asked where we were, trying to be as polite as I could. “Can you tell me what place this is, ma’am, and how to get to Griffinsford from here?” For some reason I thought Griffinsford was where we lived, Ben, and I still do not remember the real name. Maybe it really is Griffinsford. They are all mixed up.
The old lady shook her head.
“Do you know how I got here?”
She laughed, and the wind and the sea were in it; she was the spray, and the waves that broke outside her cave. When I talked to her, I was talking to them. That was how I felt. Does it sound crazy? I had been crazy since I was born, and now I was sane and it felt wonderful. The wind and the waves were sitting in that cave with me twisting thread, and nature was not something outside anymore. She was a big part of it, and I was a little part of it, and I had been gone too long. Later Garsecg said the sea had healed me.
I went to the mouth of the cave and waded out until the water came up to my waist; but the only things I could see were cliffs hanging over her cave, deep blue water farther out, gulls, and jagged black rocks like dragons’ teeth. The old woman said, “You must wait for the slack of the tide.”
I came back, sea-wet to my armpits. “Will it be long?”
“Long enough.”
After that I just leaned on my stick and watched her spin, trying to figure out what it was that she was turning into string and why it made the noises it did. Sometimes it seemed like there were faces in it and arms and legs coming out of it.
“You are Able of the High Heart.”
That got my attention, and I told her my old name.
Up to then, she had never looked away from her spinning. “What I say aright, do not you smite,” she told me.
I said I was sorry.
“Some loss must be, so this I decree: the lower your lady the higher your love.” She stopped spinning to smile at me. I knew she meant it to be friendly, but her teeth were terrible and looked as sharp as razors. She said, “There must be a forfeit for insolence, and since that’s how it usually is, that one shouldn’t do much harm.”
That was how I got my name changed.
She went back to spinning, but it looked like she was reading her thread. “You shall sink before you rise, and rise before you sink.”
It scared me, and I asked if I could ask her a question.
“It had best be, since you ask one. What do you want to know, Able of the High Heart?”
There was so much I could not get it out. I said, “Who are you?” instead.
“Parka.”
“Are you a fortune-teller?”
She smiled again. “Some say so.”
“How did I get here?”
She pointed with the distaff, the thing that held the stuff she was spinning, pointing toward the back of the cave, where it was all black.
“I don’t remember being there,” I told her.
“The recollection has been taken from you.”
As soon as she said it, I knew it was right. I could remember certain things. I could remember you and the cabin and the clouds, but all that had been a long time ago, and after it there had been a lot I could not remember at all.
“The Aelf carried you to me.”
“Who are the Aelf?” I felt I ought to know.
“Don’t you know, Able of the High Heart?”
That was the last thing she said for a long while. I sat down to watch, but sometimes I looked at the back of the cave where she said I had come from. When I looked away from her, she got bigger and bigger, so I knew there was something huge behind me. When I turned and looked back at her again, she was not quite as...