The spring bubbled in a little glade, a clearing lit like an altar by the ever-ceremonious moon. So bright was the glade that Alobar could watch his shadow slide along the promenade of moss and kneel with him to drink. “Me and my shadow,” he said wistfully, anticipating the popular song by a thousand years. “Me and my—” What was that? His shadow had attracted a second, a companion, shadow, slightly smaller than itself though nonetheless human in shape. If his shadow was no longer alone, did that mean that he, too, enjoyed companionship? And if his shadow's shadow friend aimed a shadow spear, could Alobar conclude that a spear was pointed at him, as well?
Still on his knees, Alobar whirled and lunged at the place where the shadow had led him to expect he would find legs. Yes, those were legs he grabbed! He yanked them hard, hoping to upset the body they supported before it could shove a blade through one rack of his rib cage and out the other. He felt the spear point graze first his cheek and then his shoulder, as the being who wielded it crashed down on top of him. Alobar no longer knew how the shadows were behaving, but as for himself, there was an attacker straddling his head. Disgust mingled with fear as he labored to withdraw his face from his adversary's crotch. In the struggle, some part of him, most likely his nose, fired a message to his brain. The message contained a single word: female!
Alobar pulled himself free with such force that he fell backward into the spring. When he surfaced, spewing and sputtering, dead leaves and the addresses of a dozen hibernating frogs strewn throughout his beard, he found himself contemplating a spear tip again. This time, however, he could see the face of his assailant, and while he was no longer surprised that it was a woman, he was astonished that the woman was Frol.
Alobar's amazement was mild compared to Frol's. When she realized that she had tried to puncture her recently executed lord and husband, her young mind reeled at the potential redundancy, and she fainted straight away. Alobar revived her with water that he wrung from his clothing, and they spent a largely incoherent hour sorting things out.
Following her destruction of the prized mirror, only the intervention of the new king had prevented the clan from ripping Frol to shreds. It seemed the king desired to honor Alobar's precedence, desired to govern rather than merely rule (Alobar detected the influence of Wren), so he urged compassion, as he believed Alobar would have done, and reduced Frol's sentence to banishment. Moreover, as Frol was driven from the city in a blizzard of curses, his highness handed her his own spear, with which she might at least delay the dinner of the bears (Alobar could picture Wren whispering instructions in the freshly royal ear).
Five minutes or less was required by Frol to explain her presence in the forest. The remainder of the hour was taken up by Alobar's protests that he was not a specter. Slow to be convinced, Frol accepted Alobar's concreteness only after he produced the terminus of his urinary network and arced a stream in front of her. “Everyone knows that ghosts don't piss!” he exclaimed, and although she was unacquainted with that particular wisdom, it sounded too logical to be denied.
Upon those travelers who make their way without maps or guides, there breaks a wave of exhilaration with each unexpected change of plans. This exhilaration is not a whore who can be bought with money nor a neighborhood beauty who may be wooed. She (to persist in personifying the sensation as female) is a wild and sea-eyed undine, the darling daughter of adventure, the sister of risk, and it is for her rare and always ephemeral embrace, the temporary pressure she exerts on the membrane of ecstasy, that many men leave home. Alobar was presently in her arms, having made a sudden shift in direction due to Frol's heavy load — she was timed to give birth on the next full moon — and was now bearing west, after all, seeking a nearby haven where Frol might deliver, rather than the distant edge where he might test fate. On the surface, it seemed a less adventurous choice, yet the prospect of raising a family in Christiandom was far more challenging to Alobar than any potential combat with man or monster, and the very spontaneity of the decision inflated his humor. Thus, even though his back now was turned to the allure of the morning star, even though a stout breeze flattened his beard against his Adam's apple, even though his damp clothing clung to him like frost, he whistled from stump to rock as if he were a teakettle leading the pack in the annual pot-and-pan cross-country marathon.
Three days later, still whistling, pulling a stumble-footed Frol along, he entered the village of Aelfric. Abruptly the whistling stopped.
Aelfric was a huddle of hovels, an ugly little settlement of thatch and mud in which dwelt the peasants who farmed the manor of Lord Aelfric, whose imposing manor house loomed over the village, although it stood a quarter-mile away. Alobar's blue eyes scrutinized the rude peasant houses and the peasants themselves, bent and beat from a crowded calendar of toil; he examined the granite turrets of the manor house, surveyed the surrounding fields and woods. His toes curled nervously in his boots, but just when they were about to uncoil and propel him toward a scenic bypass of downtown Aelfric, his gaze settled on Frol's belly. He calmed his toes. He took Frol's hand. “Here we shall build our muddy nest,” he said.
The peasants received them warmly. Naturally, they were suspicious, but newly baptized, they were sensitive to the responsibilities of Christian charity. Recognizing in Alobar the mien of a warrior, they suggested that his proper employment would be as a vassal in the military service of Lord Aelfric. They were both amazed and gladdened when the stranger insisted on remaining among them. They could always use another strong back in the pitiless acres of Aelfric.
For his part, Alobar knew all too well how life would be in the manor house. He had been a mighty warrior, he had been an exalted king. Now it amused him to see what kind of serf he would make. Besides, for some reason — perhaps it was connected to the trauma of the white hair — he had grown tired of violence. “I sense that there are different sorts of battles to be fought,” he told Frol, “and I shall fight them for myself, not Lord Aelfric.”
Despite his reputation, Alobar had little fear of recognition. Aelfric was a mere forty miles west of his former castle, but there was not a single serf who had traveled more than ten miles from his or her birthplace. Once his beard was shaved, his hands callused, his body stooped to the processing of the harvest, not even the most cosmopolitan of the lord's knights would be able to identify him. Moreover, he was “dead.” “Long live death,” whistled Alobar as he winnowed grain from chaff.
To Frol, Aelfric presented a more difficult challenge. Pregnancy afforded a peasant woman no relief from work, not even in its final hours. Softened by the sables and scented pillows of the harem, Frol fainted two days in a row while pounding flax with heavy scrutchers. Thereafter, she was dispatched each dawn to the manor house, where she waited upon ladies. Ever spunky, Frol served without complaint, and the ladies soon learned not to trust her with breakables.
One night in bed, Alobar removed Frol's hands from his waist and lifted them temporarily above the rough blankets. Examining her stubby fingers, he said, “Here is where glassware comes to die.”
They fell asleep smiling. It is to erase the fixed smiles of sleeping couples that Satan trained roosters to crow at five in the morning.