—Haggai, i, 4.
34.
Something Goes Wrong: and Why
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NOW the tale is of Guivric of Perdigon, more generally called the Sage, who in the days after Anavalt went into Elfhame was chief of the lords of the Silver Stallion who yet remained in Poictesme. And the tale tells how it appeared to Guivric of Perdigon that something was going wrong.
He had not anything tangible to complain of. There was, indeed, no baron in Poictesme more powerful and honored than was Guivric the Sage. He had no need to bother over any notions about Manuel which in no way affected the welfare of Guivric of Perdigon, and he had no quarrel with the more staid and religious ordering of matters which now prevailed in Poictesme. Guivric had, howsoever frostily, adapted himself to these times, and in them a reasonably staid and religious Guivric had, thus, thrived.
As Heitman of Asch, he still held as rigorously as he had held in Manuel’s heyday, the fertile Piemontais between the Duardenez river and Perdigon. He had money and two castles, he lived in comeliness and splendor, he had wisdom and a high name and the finest vineyards anywhere in those regions. He had every reason to be proud of his tall prospering son Michael, a depressingly worthy young warrior, whose superabundant virtues, modeled with so much earnestness after the Manuel of the legend, caused Guivric to regard the amours of Michael’s wife (and Manuel’s daughter) with quiet and unregenerate amusement. And Guivric got on with his own wife as well, he flattered himself, as any person could hope to do upon the more animated side of deafness.
Yet something, this prim and wary Guivric knew, was somewhere going wrong. Things, even such prosaic common things as the chair he was seated in, or his own hands moving before him, were becoming dubious and remote. People spoke with thinner voices: and their bodies flickered now and then, as if these bodies were only appearances of colored vapor. The trees of Guivric’s flourishing woodlands would sometimes stretch and flatten in the wind like trails of smoke. The walls of Guivric’s fine home at Asch, and of his great fort at Perdigon also, were acquiring, as their conservative owner somewhat frettedly observed, a habit of moving, just by a thread’s width, when you were not quite looking at them; and of shifting in outline and in station as secretively as a cloud alters.
Instability and change lurked everywhere. Without any warning well-known faces disappeared from Guivric’s stately household: the men-at-arms and the lackeys who remained seemed not to miss them, nor indeed ever to have known of those vanished associates.
And Guivric found that the saga which the best-thought-of local bards had compiled and adorned, under his supervision, so as to preserve for posterity’s benefit the glorious exploits and the edifying rewards of Guivric the Sage, was dwindling alike in length and in impressiveness. Overnight a line here and there, or a whole paragraph, would drop out unaccountably, an adventure would lose color, or an achievement would become less clear-cut: and the high and outrageous doings in which Guivric had shared as a lord of the Silver Stallion, these began, in particular, to become almost unrecognizable. At this rate, people would soon have no assurance whatever that Guivric the Sage had lived in unexampled heroism and respectability and had most marvelously prospered in everything.