“None shall want her mate.”
—Isaiah, xxxiv, 16.
42.
Generalities at Ogde
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NOW the tale tells that it was in the winter after Guivric’s encounter with the Sylan that Kerin of Nointel returned into Poictesme to become yet another convert to the great legend of Manuel; and tells also of how for the first time men learned why and in what fashion Kerin had gone out of Poictesme.
Therefore the tale harks back to very ancient days, in the May month which followed the passing of Manuel, and the tale speaks of a season wherein it appeared to Kerin of Nointel that he could understand his third wife no better than he had done the others. But for that perhaps unavoidable drawback to matrimony, he was then living comfortably enough with this Saraïde, whom many called a witch, in her ill-spoken-of, eight-sided home beside the notorious dry Well of Ogde. This home was gray, with a thatched roof upon which grew abundant mosses and many small wild plants; a pair of storks nested on the gable; and elder-trees shaded all.
It was a very quiet and peaceful place, in which, so Kerin estimated, two persons might well have lived in untroubled serenity, now that the Fellowship of the Silver Stallion was disbanded, and a younger Kerin’s glorious warfaring under Dom Manuel was done with forever.
Mild-mannered, blinking Kerin, for one, did not regret Dom Manuel’s passing. The man had kept you fighting always, whether it was with the Easterlings or the Northmen, or with Othmar Black-Tooth or with old yellow Sclaug or with Manuel’s father, blind Oriander. It was a life which left you no time whatever for the pursuit of any culture. Kerin liked fighting, within moderation, with persons of admitted repute. But Kerin, after four years of riding into all quarters of the earth at the behest of this never-resting Manuel, was heartily tired of killing strangers in whom Kerin was in no way interested.
So, upon the whole, it was a relief to be rid of Manuel and to be able once more to marry, and to settle down at Ogde in the eight-sided house under the elder-trees. Yet, even in this lovely quietude, the tale repeats, the third wife of Kerin seemed every night to bother herself, and in consequence her husband, about a great many incomprehensible matters.