And it was all quite annoying. It was as though Guivric, or else each one of his possessions and human ties, were wasting away into a phantom: and neither alternative seemed pleasant to consider.
Guivric locked fast the doors of the brown room in which now for so many years he had conducted his studies and his thaumaturgies. He set out a table, the top of which was inscribed with three alphabets. He put on a robe of white: about his withered neck he arranged a garland of purple vervain such as is called herb-of-the-cross. From seven rings he selected—because this day was a Sunday,—the gold ring inset with a chrysolite upon which was engraved the figure of a lion-headed serpent.
When this ring had been hung above the table, with a looped red hair plucked long ago from the tail of a virgin nightmare, and when the wan Lady of Crossroads had been duly invoked, then Guivric lighted a taper molded from the fat of Saracen women and of unweaned dogs, and with the evil flaming of this taper he set fire to the looped hair. The red hair burned with a small spiteful sizzling: the gold ring fell. The ring rolled about upon the table, it uncoiled, it writhed, it moved glitteringly among the characters of three alphabets, passing like a tortured worm from one ideograph to another, and it revealed to Guivric the dreadful truth.
The Sylan whom people called Glaum-Without-Bones was at odds with Guivric. This was not a matter which anybody blessed with intelligent self-interest could afford to neglect.
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.