“Beast of the sea,” Sir Constant says, quiet within thons Destrier Anatomical. The steed stands on the strand, clawed feet in a light stance, its two great armaments across its back — the long and short rifles — and at its hip also a sword. The Destrier breathes, deep and regular and easy, alert, repeating Constant’s voice through external resonating cavities, echoing along the beach. “Turn back.”
The thing that faces them walks somewhat like a man. It is grey, with the tough hide and blubber-shrouded roundness of a walrus or such, head merged necklessly into the bulk of its hunchbacked torso. Kelp-streamered and barnacled, ancient, it twists to the side to stare from one filmed and rheumy boggle eye. It speaks not. They rarely do.
“They name me the Hermit of the Long Shore,” Constant says. “When your like comes ashore, you blunder about and terrorise and die of dryness; and so, where I happen upon it at the onset, I ask this. None of it need happen. Turn back.”
The sea-beast opens its jaws. Conical fangs, top and bottom, glint in the weak sunlight as it honks, thunder-loud and wordless and melancholy. If there is any understanding in the beast, Constant cannot reciprocate it.
“Go back to the sea,” thon says.
The beast chuffs, breath steaming. The moment hangs. And then, as clumsily telegraphed and inevitable as a barroom belligerent’s soused bullrush grapple, it lunges.
It is a beast. Constant is a Knight of the Round. Thon pivots cleanly at the last instant, its bulk and grabbing hands rushing harmlessly past; and before it can recover from misdirected motion, thon smoothly draws the short gun, levels its massive calibre, and fires.
Ballistic thunder rolls across the sand, once only. The beast falls like a tree, ponderous and final.
The body of the beast lies across the Destrier’s shoulders, driving its footprints deep in the sand as Constant walks the long strand; the steed pants and growls with effort over the rocky promontories beyond. Finally, in a familiar pebbled cove, beside the beached bow end of some ship, long ago torn asunder and half-buried here, Constant sets the burden carefully down, and disembarks, stretching long legs. The drizzle is cold enough to sting like needles; fog is rolling in. On a rock beside the hulk sits a woman in widow’s weeds, legs crossed at the knee, bent over some task in her lap so that her brimmed hat somewhat shelters whatever she’s about.
Constant crosses to her, slow, feet crunching on the stones. An arm’s length from the tip of the woman’s shoes, thon kneels, and bows thons head.
“Witch,” thon says humbly.
“What do you bring me?” says the witch of the cove, in a tone as indifferent as the sea or hills. In her lap is some witchly thing, an assemblage of half a dozen tattered seagull wings and the eyes of creatures from the seabed. With needle and thread, she is stitching feathered skin shut around a smooth, round, fist-sized stone, carved with dreadful symbols and stained with the witch’s own blood.
“A beast of the sea,” Constant says, quiet and unmoving.
“A beast of the sea,” the witch repeats, tugging on her thread as if impatient. “And is that enough, do you think, to earn your keep for the night?”
Constant thinks so. “That is for you alone to say,” thon says, and waits as the witch finishes her seam, ties and snips her thread, and stows away her needle, driven through a fold of the cuff of her coat.
The witch stands, heaves the thing up to chest height, and holds it out at arms’ length between cupped hands. When she carefully removes her hands, it remains in the air; beginning to spin like some awful windmill, slowly at first, then faster and faster. A revolving blur, it rises, air singing raspily through its feathers.
“See to your cawr,” the witch says finally, when she’s had enough of watching it go, and Constant rises but leaves thons head bowed. There are umbilicals coiled beside the hulk like salt-crusted hawsers; thon sees thons Destrier attached, to be nourished and maintained, and follows where the witch went, ducking through a gap in the overturned hull’s planks. Within the sea-marred artificial cave of it, broken timber and canvas have been put to use to make a labyrinthine witchly lair; Constant picks between hanging bundles of dried and drying herbs, crystal-crowned piles of rocks, and wax-stopped bottles filled with sea or concoction.
Behind a still-sound fragment of bulkhead, where it is warmest and driest, the witch has a bed and a stone-ringed hearth. She sits on a timber ledge, facing the fire, hat set aside and face contemplative.
The witch, among her arts and works, has secreted within the hulk a Tree-of-Plenty. A dozen Destriers could quarter here, every day forever, and their knights as well; it would cost the witch nothing, make no scratch in her means to survive. It seemed strange to Constant, when first they met, that they should bargain and barter; but in thons long toil, up and down the coast, nothing but the sand and salt sea, thon has had pride washed away by the rain and solitude. To earn one’s welcome, thon thinks, to never take for granted, can be a fine thing — perhaps the purest, finest thing.
Thon will be fed. Thon will sleep. Eventually.
The witch twitches her left hand, where it trails by her side, and Constant approaches, soft and cautious. Ducks to thons knees, several paces away, and continues on them.
“Love me a little,” the witch says, looking at the fire as if Constant is not there, “as hounds do,” and Constant breathes reverently. Bracing thons limbs, thon leans forward, achingly careful not to familiarly brush against the witch in any unpermitted way. Thon touches thons nose-tip to the back of the witch’s cold, fine hand; traces the long bones of it, nuzzles the web between thumb and forefinger, emitting an involuntary whine of keenness.
The witch lifts a single fingertip, and Constant takes it between thons lips, holds it there, warms and reveres it. With the tip of thons tongue, thon softly strokes the witch’s work-calluses.
If thons fellow knights could see, the thought tickles, distantly; but less so, as time goes on, a habit only. What shame should Constant feel? What guilt should thon carry? Duty is done; the shore is defended, the realm protected. Is it so different, to be at the witch’s hand, as to be at the King’s beck and call? Thon’s mind no longer even completes the thought. If they could see — what?
Hound-content, Sir Constant kneels in the sand, thinks nothing; and only softly suckles.
