She was standing in the middle of the room, her hands outstretched before her, walking almost toe to toe towards the stone hearth and chimney set in the north wall.
“Elayeen!” he gasped, and hurried forward.
“No!” she cried, “Leave me alone!” and he froze, stunned.
“Allazar… he wants his notebook…”
“Then take it to him, G’wain, and leave me be.” And she kept walking slowly towards the unlit fireplace.
Gawain found the wizard’s bag where he’d left it hanging on the back of a chair, and stepped quietly to stand a short distance from his lady.
“E, what are you doing?” he whispered.
“Trying to find my way around the room by myself!” she said, harshly, and whipped her head around to gaze angrily at the sound of his voice. Then her eyebrows raised in sudden surprise. She lowered her arms, and turned towards him. “G’wain, am I facing you now?”
“Yes,” he replied, and his heart began to beat faster, hope beginning to blossom.
But then she turned, slowly, a little at a time, moving her head this way and that, and then back towards him. She turned a full circle and faced him once more.
“And now, G’wain?”
“Yes!” and his heart beat harder.
But Elayeen turned once more to face the fireplace, raised her hands in front of her again, and began slowing inching towards it. “Take Allazar his notebook, miheth. It may help to quieten him.”
Gawain sighed. He had been dismissed, and knew it. Suddenly deflated, he nodded uselessly, and then quietly let himself out of the room to return to Allazar’s bedside.
“Mi scribendana.” The wizard smiled when Gawain fished the book from its resting-place between the wrapped remains of sandwiches, and the joy which infused the two words made him sound like a child receiving a long yearned-for birthday pony.
“Yes, wizard, your scribendana.”
Allazar squirmed beneath the bedclothes and for a fleeting moment Gawain thought the wizard was having some kind of convulsion, until he realised that in fact Allazar was attempting to transfer the staff from his right hand side to his left.
“By the Teeth, wizard, you have my permission to release the stick! I didn’t mean for you never to let go of it when I named you its keeper!”
But the wizard either ignored Gawain, or defied him. It wasn’t until the staff had been moved from one side of the bed to the other and the notebook transferred to the wizard’s right hand that Allazar seemed to relax. Then, with his left arm, and to Gawain’s astonishment left leg, wrapped around the staff, Allazar flipped the pages of his notebook until two blank leaves faced him, and made the universal sign for a pen or writing implement.
Once again Gawain rummaged in the wizard’s bag, and retrieved a stub of a pencil not much longer than his thumb. He handed this to Allazar who promptly wrote:
I understand everything you say
“Well if that’s true, Allazar, understand this: you’ve been hurt, a head injury. Your words are mostly meaningless to all of us, the healer is concerned for your brains and you are to remain in this bed until some kind of sense returns. Do you understand that, wizard, or am I going too fast for you?”
Allazar simply underlined his first sentence.
“Oh. Well then, Elayeen is blind. I… I don’t know how to comfort her, Allazar. I try, but… the circle has robbed her not only of sight, but also the elven throth that was between us. There is no longer any black in her hair, nor mine. We smote Morloch, Allazar, we smote him so hard, but now, I do not know what to do…”
Wait Allazar scribbled urgently.
“You think it temporary? You saw something in the runes? You have some knowledge?”
Wait
“Dwarfspit, Allazar, wait for what?”
Suddenly the wizard snapped his head to the right, past Gawain sitting on the bed, and stared at the blank wall, clutching the staff tighter as though fearing its imminent theft. His eyes rolled back in his head and he mumbled something incoherent. After a few moments, his senses seemed to return, and he scribbled hastily again.
I hear voices they talk to me filling my head
“What voices, Allazar? Whose? I hear nothing, see nothing.”
They are not for you to hear remember the circle
“Remember what about the circle?” Gawain reached down to grip the wizard’s arm, “Dwarfspit Allazar I need you! Elayeen needs you! What are you trying to tell me?”
Great sorrow seemed to wash over the wizard’s face, and then pity, and finally great frustration before he drew in a shuddering breath and wrote in the notebook once more:
Adjectives
“I don’t understand.”
This time Allazar simply drew two bold underlines beneath the word ‘wait’.
“Easy for you to say, you one-eyed mumbling whitebeard bastard. You’re not the one who caused all this.”
But Allazar jerked again, staring this time to the left, his eyes wide, and he seemed to struggle to speak. Finally he managed three words:
Friyenheth Ceartus Omniumde!
And then he sighed, his eyes rolled back, and he mumbled, and slept.
Gawain waited a while, watching the wizard mumbling in his sleep, clutching the staff and the notebook, the pencil lying on the sheets by Allazar’s right hand. Gawain picked it up, gently took the notebook and read the scribbled messages the wizard had scrawled. Wait, with its double underline, gave him great cause for hope, as did the fact that Allazar clearly did understand all that was being said in the common tongue around him. At least he did until the strange ‘voices’ seemingly drew him away from this world.
He tucked the pencil into the spine of the notebook, and then wedged the book itself between the wizard’s left arm and his chest, so it would be to hand when Allazar next woke, should he need it.
Feeling completely at a loss, Gawain decided he should tell Elayeen what had occurred, and the wizard’s instructions to ‘wait’. That one word suddenly seemed to possess great importance for the King of Raheen, particularly when a vision of his beloved inching blindly towards the crumbling edge of the cliffs of the Sea of Hope pressed unbidden to the forefront of his mind.
He left the sleeping wizard and returned to his own room, only to find Elayeen standing this time in the corner to the left of the door, facing the wall like a naughty child in school.
“Elayeen…”
“Hush.”
“What?”
“Hush. Take off your boots and don’t say a word.”
“May I know why?”
“Which part of ‘hush’ don’t you understand, G’wain?”
Filled with the conviction that the strange madness which had befallen Allazar in the circle had now spread to his beloved, Gawain simply did as he was told, and pulled off his boots to stand quietly by the door in his stockinged feet.
“Have you done it?”
Gawain didn’t answer.
“Have you done it, Gawain?” Elayeen asked again, sternly.
“Which part of ‘hush’ don’t you understand?” Gawain grumbled. “Yes, I have.”
“Good. Now. As silently as possible I want you to move and go and stand somewhere in the room. I will count to five, slowly, and then I will turn, and try to point my finger at you. If I succeed, you will say ‘yes’, and that’s all. And then we shall proceed again. Is that clear?”
Gawain’s heart lurched. “Your sight is returning!” he gasped.
But Elayeen let out an angry sigh and balled her fists. “G’wain please, just do as I say I beg you!”
“Sorry… I’m sorry. Of course.”
“You remember what you have to do? It’s important, you mustn’t make a sound.”
“Yes.”
Elayeen began counting. Feeling distinctly idiotic but with the word wait blazing in his mind’s eye, Gawain lifted his knees and crept silently, though somewhat comically, to stand by the window.