*
VII
Insects cried out in the ominous humidity, and the mud stuck to the three knights’ boots as they trodge through the dismal swamp. Loud squelching sounds erupted every time their greaves rose from the mire. Low hanging vines and over-grown plants impeded their way, camouflaged and difficult to see in the fragmented light that was like lightning falling upon a magic barrier made of mirth. The trees there were large, twisted with dark bark and swirled upwards with dense branches through the steamy air, blooming out into a menacing canopy. The spongey surface of the swamp was made both of muddy land and deep dark water, though it was all covered in the pale fuzz of moss and fungus and algae.
The swamplands about the Castle of the Fern were perilous to traverse, and the trio was forced to double back more than once to stay out of the doomful water that lay so still and stagnant, keeping them all on edge. Orange-and-azure Sir L’angoustier, in his anxiety, could hear only his own heavy breathing echoing about inside his helm as his eyes scanned the skin of the swamp for anything that he did not want to see.
On they strode, until night began ominously to fall. There was a far-off rumbling in the heavens and all the knights grew heavy with the notion that the sun might set with them still wandering about this melancholic environment. As the dimness of day shrank away, shadows swirled around their passage and placed them on unsteady footing.
Sir Sallimaide sighed, “We must turn back, or risk facing this place at night. Let us—” Yet suddenly, obscured so well in this darkness, an insidious unseen vine snagged upon his foot and caused him to flail briefly in the air before unceremoniously splashing directly into the bog-water. Sir Wander-Gogh reacted almost instantly, rushing to where the Frog Knight had fallen in, but so murky was the liquid that it rejected his sight. The Manta-Ray knew that there was no time for thought, that his companion’s heavy armor was a death sentence.
Below the surface Sir Sallimaide sank, and there he saw the other world submerged in gloomy waters. Joining with the subconsciousness of the very swamp, the man made from earth became earth again, organic and flowing in the fibers of the plants and in the veins of the animals, perceiving the thoughts of them all simultaneously. The swamp was old and tired, having existed since time immemorial, providing sustenance and shelter for all the forms of life that called it home. The swamp was feeling also the bodies of intruders: outsiders who were not connected to it. Yet now that Sir Sallimaide was connected, the swamp made a place for him and an offer to stay until the fraying edge of time. And then, the all-knowing mire suddenly felt one of these interlopers dive into its dark waters and — cough cough cough!
Sir Sallimaide spat out a quantity of the foul water and some decaying plant matter until finally he lay gasping upon his back, safe on the spongey ground. The Manta-Ray ripped Sir Sallimaide’s helmet off, then sat dripping wet and trying to catch his breath.
The Lobster wailed, “Sir Sallimaide! You gave quite a fright to we! Without a Vander-Gog’s reactions, then swamp would is have been your the tomb!”
“Then I am in his debt,” he croaked. “I must have missed the edge between murky water and swampy shore.”
“And surely none could blame you,” remarked umber-and-vert Sir Wander-Gogh. “This is a dark place, and when the swamp hungers it will ensnare any for whom it lusts. I wish we had brought your squire Hadely after all.”
“Yet he would hate this place.”
Sir L’angoustier holp Sir Sallimaide to his feet, and gave a soft chuckle that ominously failed to echo in the dead air. “You must admit it is a fitting for a Frog to end up in swamp.” Yet the situation was too dire for levity: Sir Wander-Gogh ability to navigate was crippled, Sir L’angoustier had not been paying attention to their direction, and Sir Sallimaide’s bearings had been erased with his drowning. When all were able to resume their feet they had no choice but to set out again searching — either for Sarah’s missing father or for some exit to the nocturnal boglands.
On and on wearily, the knights lost hope as the scant light vanished. Out came the cacophonous chorus of amphibian voices at their orgy of feeding and mating, competing with the other animals for volume. The trees began to creak and rumble as if they were displeased onlookers. Far off in the distance was the noise of a hunting owl that pierced the gloom of their predicament and directly shivered the knights’ spine marrow. Before long it was too dark to see; too black to make safe passage. All were uneasy about camping in such a place. There was such a stench of hopelessness about that Sir L’angoustier even began to foster regrets about following Sarah Bellum’s word so readily and blindly until, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted something in the distance.
“O see it there!” he exclaimed, pointing far off to the left through a net of vines. When they looked, much to their bewilderment, the knights beheld an unearthly green glow hinting from beyond a thicket.
“Do you think it safe to approach?” asked Sir Sallimaide in a stunned whisper.
“We cannot make a stay,” snapped the Lobster, drawing from its sheath his strange curved brand against the swamp itself. Both the Frog and the Manta-Ray found themselves in agreement with him despite the goosebumps inspired by the distant ghostly luminance. Carefully through the mire and towards the eerie glow they made their way, but at every step their minds bade them to conceded to the blackness. As vines and branches parted in the passing of them, the shape of the unearthly light began to emerge until each knight saw that it was a single leafless tree — trunk and branches brilliant with green light — that fought the darkness of the swamp. They halted in awe and considered their options and the strange implications of finding such a sight on such a night.
“This tree,” whispered Sir Wander-Gogh, “must have somehow sucked a peculiar nutrition from the soil. Yet how does it glow so bright? How could this occur? Surely it is an omen.”
“An omen for good or ill?” said the forlorn Frog.
“That I do not know. Mayhaps both.” The trio crept closer, doing their best to soften the clanking of their armor, and they continued in this fashion until their vision began to improve in the area illuminated by the phosphorescent branches. The weight of the moment pressed on Sir L’angoustier’s breastplate and shortened his breathing. He roech his arm out towards the luminous bark, but Sir Wander-Gogh slapped aside the gauntlet of the french knight.
“That may not be wise,” exclaimed the nervous Manta-Ray.
As they both examined that glowing miracle, Sir Sallimaide took to sulking on a tree stump off to the side, on the very fringes of darkness. He was cold and wet, and the swamp was full of an absence of cheer for him. His mind was occupied with the things he had seen below, now as if in a dream. It was not that the glow was uninteresting to him, but that he somehow felt far too melancholy to be excited by it. His head was heavy, and his face felt flushed. He looked to the animated Manta-Ray and Lobster arguing over the source of the glow and of the wisest course of action. Instead of irate, the Frog felt strangely tired and wanted to take this opportunity to set a camp now that they had found some illumination. He laboriously dragged himself to his feet to join the others but felt a strange tugging sensation upon his ankle. He roech down to disentangle himself from the bothersome root, only to discover —
“Sir Wander-Gogh!” he cried with slight straining notes of panic rising in his voice. “Sir L’angoustier! To me!” and their weapons were drawn in a flourish of scraping sounds as they sprinted to where the Frog struggled. The tree’s vibrant aura reflected off Sir L’angoustier’s immaculately polished armor and, for an instant, they all saw the decrepit clawed hand hooked onto Sir Sallimaide’s left greave. With a fierce kick of the Frog’s powerful hind-leg he was free and he leapt back, unsheathing his brand in a fluid motion. But no bog-fiend leapt at them from the blackness of the swamp, and it seemed for a moment that their fright was ill placed. Silence hung in the swamp as thick and laden as the perilous stormclouds that hang around the falls of Beth Esda. It was Sir Wander-Gogh who lined his shield up with the glow and the stump, and in that small reflected beam they were able to see that there was indeed a withered hand, joined to an equally withered arm. Sir Sallimaide furrowed his sweaty brow. The beam of light travelled down the length of a blackened mud-covered body dislodged in the viscous bog.
“Sacre bleu!” cried Sir L’angoustier as his companions gasped.
Sir Wander-Gogh hooked his hands under the corpse’s shoulders with haste and dragged him out of the mire. They all circled to have a good look as the figure was laid on the ground. It was plain that he had been a knight once for he wore the ancient armor of a high-ranking Crusader, and his were robes decayed past the point of legibility. He had a long scraggly beard that was unkempt and looked as if it was tangled with mosses; it grew nearly to the rusted buckle of his sword-belt. The wild night grew louder as the swarms of infernal forgotten swamp creatures sang of their hunger and the loneliness of their being.
Spiraling into despair Sir Sallimaide moaned, “O and we shall end up like this poor soul, trapped here forever!” He sank to the oozing ground. “Perhaps we shall survive,” he whispered to his plated knees, but even his own lips did not believe the breath that passed between them.
Sir L’angoustier began to weep softly. “How can I be shall die here, trapped in miserable swamps, trapped inside miserable England! I spit on you Happy Land! I wish for a home of my ancestors: O hills boasting of a vineyards ripe with wine flowing — the place of where my youth was been!” And he too sank to his knees in the mud.
Though Sir Wander-Gogh may have fared no better emotionally, and was equally afraid, his knees remained strong and his will did not waver. He closed his lids so lightly that they were only as thin as paper over his most precious seeing orbs, and he drew in a slow breath through his nostrils. And he tasted the air and knew that it was good and that this did not have to be the end. It was difficult even to live, and these depths came to signify for him the heights that could be roech. His lungs expanded as he envisioned his inhale containing all the life giving matter and whatever love he could find around him. He loved these knights, his companions, even if they constantly berated the flaws in him which he was most self-conscious about. And even he loved this dead man despite never having known him. Humans were human after all, and humans have to look after one another. His nose tasted all of this in the air he intook, and he held that breath and those feelings inside him for as long as he was able. And he heard the soft sobs of his friends and felt the heavy pressure of death about them — the darkness and evil and sorrow of the swamp and its inhabitants — but he was able to let all of that go as he exhaled their malevolence all away. In its place, in his body, there was left only an unwavering sense of calm, like the ocean seen from a drifting gull, endless and eternal and impartial. And a sort of clarity took hold of the Manta-Ray’s mind and he knew that even if they were to die here it would be both useless and draining to simply collapse and lie with this corpse.
It was thus that he cried, “Up! Up, Sir Knights!” They stirred not, so he approached and jostled each from reveries of pity. “Rise, Sir Sallimaide! Sir L’angoustier! You tadpole! You shrimp! Come. This night is far from over, and we are not yet without hope. Are we?”
“Oui, of what this hope you speak?” spat Sir L’angoustier. The crustacean’s voice shook like an opera singer’s vibrato. “We are a lost. And all around is too wet us for any fires. We shall be the feast for swamp, and we shan’t even have notice of enemy the arriving!”
Yet Sir Sallimaide raised his ponderous head and gestured with his eyes. “The tree.” His obvious wisdom dawned over them again, and Sir L’angoustier set off at once to take refuge in the unearthly aura.
Sir Wander-Gogh said “O, let us bring this poor dead knight as well into the light. Perhaps we can give him a proper burial to-morrow if ever we see it. A fallen knight deserves at least as much as that.”
Yet as he moved closer to the corpse, an instant gasping noise exploded from the area, rasping like the dirt under the earth, and the dead man began to wretch and gag and cough swamp-water into his impossibly long beard. Sir L’angoustier leapt three feet into the air in shock, and Sir Wander-Gogh had drawn his axe in a flash. But wits returned to the Manta-Ray quickly and he rushed forward to kneel at the un-dead man’s side. He turned him over to let the fluids flow from his mouth and not choke him, and before long the spasms were replaced by a feeble wheeze barely loud enough to be heard over the choir of unseen insects.
“Sir Sallimaide, help me!” cried the Manta-Ray. Both knights dragged the living burden under the protection of the glow, on their way passing a clump of brambles that the Lobster hid behind.
As they dragged the old revived knight into the iridescence they were able to see him in full: the long brown hair tinged rootlike with white, the creased and gnarled wrinkles upon his skin as pale as plant-life. The drowned man began again to stir with the three knights peering intently at him as he issued another deep gurgling rasp muffled by his enormous beard.
Sir Wander-Gogh leaned in to hear the man’s words, and he hearkened for a moment before saying, “Of course. Sir Sallimaide, help me to prop him up.” They grabbed the old man’s shoulders and leaned him in a half sitting position against the root-work of a nearby ordinary tree. Sir Wander-Gogh unhooked a skin of pure water from his belt and brought it to the old man’s cracked lips.
As wary Sir L’angoustier examined the ancient knight, his eyes shot wide with recognition. To the corpse he whispered, “Are you her daughter?”
After three deep draughts from the skin, the drinker pushed it away. Streams of water trickled down his mossy beard, but much of his humanity had returned.
Understanding the Lobster’s clue, Sir Sallimaide asked, “Who are you?”
And the newly-awakened knight coughed, “It has been long since mortal speech. I am…. Carboniferous. The Knight of the… of the…”
“The Knight of the Fern!” gasped the Frog and the Manta-Ray in unison.
Then the Manta-Ray said, “You are the great Sir Carboniferous? You are thought to be dead! Where have you been this entire age?”
The Fern Knight closed his eyes and thought, and when at last he spake his voice sounded weary and cold. “I have slept so long… Has it been as long as all that?” He swallowed feebly. “When I spaye the terrors our war had created, I came to this swamp to rest. Consciousness can be such a burden. I came here to return to nature for a while, and to shut out the misery and pain of what I had seen in the human world: misery and pain that I, in part, had caused. I slept as a part of the swamp, and I dreamed its long dream… I was the long slow hum of the earth. I let my consciousness flow into the planet itself, and let my body become the rain-damp soil. And you think I should have endured as a human instead.” Sir Carboniferous closed his sunken eyes, he seemed exhausted from the exertion of being audible. He was a man abruptly woken from a deep slumber and exhausted from the effort of his awakening. Sir Wander-Gogh decided that they had no choice but to spend the night in the midst of the hungry swamp, setting shifts and making camp close to the roots of the enchanted tree.
When at long last day did break over the swamp, the knights found it a quiet and disconcertingly uninhabited location, as if the biome was exclusively nocturnal. In the morning light no insect called, neither toad nor frog galumphed, and there were no other sights of life as the knights trodge on back to the castle.
Sir Wander-Gogh and Sir L’angoustier flanked Sir Carboniferous, aiding him in his amulation. They tried for all haste making their way out of the wasteland, dependent on the sun and its valuable blessings. The Knight of the Fern was far too exerted from all the business of walking around to speak for long with anyone, though they barraged him with questions. Sir L’angoustier was ever at the ready for foes in the sunlit silence of the swamp, and twice on the trek he unsheathed his curved sword at the bursting of unsuspecting bubbles. But the band arrove safely at mid-day to the welcoming halls of the Fern’s castle. Sarah herself sprinted across the drawbridge to meet them, not heeding the restrictions of her white samite gown, yet when she saw that they had brought Sir Carboniferous she became livid.
“It might interest you to know,” she said, “that my real father returned home last night. Do you think me a fool? That I might not know him when he returned? Who among you came up with the plan to convince me a stranger was my own father?” But Sir Wander-Gogh said no, explained that this was the great Sir Carboniferous, one of thirteen of the long-broken Knightly Order. And so Sarah apologized then, saying, “When you didn’t return at nightfall I feared for your safety, recalling how dangerous that place can be and sorry that I had sent you in.”
“We are all alright,” croaked Sir Sallimaide, “Though spending the night was dismal. What is the news with your father?”
“Well,” said she, “last night I lay half asleep in bed, pondering your peril, when the chains of this drawbridge brought me to wakefulness. With a candle I went to see who it was, and, well…” she shrugged. “I told you about his dreams… he claimed that one dream featured a tree that burned bright but was not consumed, thus did he go deep into the marsh seeking it. But alas, his path wove too wild and he became trapped in a mud-hole for hours. And then, as he says, he unstuck himself and returned home. Midnight came and went before he had arriven.”
“And where is he now?” asked Sir Wander-Gogh.
“He is sleeping. I told him that I would wake him when dinner is prepared. I beg of you all to stay, to meet the man.”
And it was then that the Manta-Ray stepped forward, taking Sarah’s hands and saying, “Indeed we shall stay, but fair Sarah Bellum I think you do not understand. This old man is the Knight of the Fern! Recall that fern emblazoned upon your banners? This man,” he presented the root-like Sir Carboniferous once more, “is your grandsire.”
“O!” It was all the maiden could gasp, and she drew close to lovingly inspect the man twined with roots and bits of bark. “O how can this be? O Grandsire! Where have you been all my life? How came you to be in that horrid bog”
Sir Carboniferous wheezed a smile then, musing, “I have a granddaughter…” And so it was that the ancient leafy knight and the young flowery maiden wept and embraced one another before the drawbridge to their ancestral castle.