35. Guivric’s Journey

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CERTAINLY Guivric the Sage, who cared only for himself, did not neglect this matter. The prim and wary man armed, and rode eastward, beyond Megaris; and fared steadily ever further into the East, traveling beyond the Country of Widows and the fearful Isle of the Ten Carpenters. Then, at Oskander’s Well, Guivric put off material armor. He put off even his helmet, and in its stead he assumed a cap of owl feathers. He passed through arid high pastures, beyond the wall of the Sassanid, he rubbed lemon juice upon his horse’s legs and rode unmolested through the broad and shallow lake, and thus came to the Sylan’s House. And all went well enough at first.

Guivric had feared, for one thing, that the Norns would forbid his entering into the mischancy place: but when he had tethered safely the fine horse which Guivric was never again to ride upon, he found that the gray weavers did not hinder him. They had not ever, they said, planned any future for Guivric: and it was all one to them whether he fared forward to face his own destruction or intrepidly went back to living with his wife.

“But do you not weave the sagas and the dooms of all men?” he asked of them.

“Not yours,” lean Skuld replied, looking up at him with pallid little cold bright eyes.

Guivric thus passed the haggard daughters of Dvalinn; and the proud man went onward, disquieted but unhindered. And in the gray anteroom beyond, were the progenitors of Guivric disporting themselves, each in the quaint manner of his bygone day, and talking with uneager and faded voices about the old times.

Since none of these ancestors had ever heard or thought of Guivric, they gave scant attention to him now. And to see them was upsetting, somehow. One of these strangers had Guivric’s high thin nose, and another just his long thin hands, and another his prim mouth, and another his excellent broad shoulders. Guivric could recognise all these fragments of himself moving at random about the gray room. He knew that, less visibly but quite as really, his tastes and his innate aversions—his little talents and failings and out-of-date loyalties, his quickness at figures, his aptitude for drawing, his tendency to catch cold easily, and his liking for sweets and highly seasoned foods,—were all passing about this gray room.

A compost of odds and ends had been patched together from these unheeding persons; that almost accidental patchwork was Guivric: the thought was humiliating. There was, he reflected, in this gray room another complete Guivric, only this other Guivric was not entire, but moved about in scattered fragments. That thought, appeared to a peculiarly self-centered person like Guivric, rather uncomfortable.

So Guivric went beyond his ancestors. Without delay the proud man passed stiffly by the inconsiderate people whose casual amours had created him, and had given him life and all his qualities, without consulting his preference or his convenience, or even thinking about him.