And then (as he thought) he woke up again. The hour seemed to be a little before dawn. There was a lightness in the air and the surface of the lake was blanketed in grey mist. Aldred felt cold, cramped and stiff from sleeping on the ground. He sat up and saw Swin not far away, standing at the lake’s edge as if he had stayed up, stood watching the waters of Aduchel, all night long. Aldred called out a cheerful greeting. It was ignored.
The woods were silent.
For a moment, in his dream, if it was a dream, Swin’s form became indistinct in the mist, grey and inhuman as Baranithron’s cloak. Aldred felt a new bite of the old terror. He jumped up, trotted over to Swin and tugged sharply at his arm. Swin looked down and smiled at him, and Aldred felt reassured. This was no nightmare. But something strange was now happening: vague lines, thin bands of slightly darker grey were approaching out of the mist: wavelets in the flat calm water, big slow ripples that rolled towards the shore with a glimmering darkness of their own.
‘What is it?’ Aldred breathed.
‘I don’t know,’ was the low answer. ‘My eyes are too dim. What do you see?’
The first ripples were reaching the shore. In a leisurely peaceful manner they broke and subsided in the clear shallows, with the very faintest of splashes among the rounded and many-coloured stones. And something, yes, something or someone dark was approaching over the lake.
‘It’s not a boat,’ said Aldred, fearfully clutching Swin’s hand; ‘Is it people? Three or four people walking on the water?’
The sound of louder rippling came to them out of the mist.
‘Can you see them yet?’ asked Swin. ‘Might they be wraiths?’
The dark shapes drew nearer. Swin screwed up his eyes. Then he gave a little grunt – accepting, half-rueful, half-amused. ‘They’re her fingers,’ he said.
And Aldred’s hair stood on end as he saw that the tall figures with pointed heads were indeed the fingers of a huge black hand, standing up out of the water as far as the wrist – turning – and beckoning.
‘Ah,’ said Swin. He began unhesitatingly to walk forward into the water. Aldred clung to him, trying to prevent him, shouting and crying and imploring him to wake up; but he might as well have tried to prevent a landslide. After a dozen steps into the deepening water, Swin gave a hard, backward push with the palm of his hand: forced to let go, Aldred shot backwards and fell.
Swin walked on at the same steady pace.
Soon, submerged waist-deep, he began to fade into the mist. The hand was a dark blur.
And then, out of the mist, came a quiet splash.
Aldred sat shivering on the dewy grass. This seemed like a better course of action, despite the intense discomfort, than running back to the camp and wildly announcing that Lord Eofor had decided to drown himself. And so he remained where he was, sitting there and waiting without much hope.
Meanwhile Swin ignored the chill of the rising water and walked on towards the enormous hand. Suddenly it reached and clutched towards him. His waist was taken into its grasp – cold, strong, rock-hard. He was drawn downwards. There were bubblings and gurglings, but he could still breathe, for he was now within the hollow of two hands tightly cupped and sealed.
Down, down, down: until the diving-bubble melted away, and the skin of the palms became an earthen floor, and he found himself within an underground chamber. There was a faint flickering light, more crimson than firelight. There were round squat pillars, stone walls beyond them, weapons glinting on the walls. And there She was, Yabeth herself, beyond the pillars, advancing towards him.
Neither the beautiful impassioned deity of his first vision nor the impressive giantess of the second, she now manifested herself as a furious female dwarf. She was two feet shorter than Swin; her hair writhed about her head and her face was hidden in blackness of deepest shadow. She rushed up to him and kicked his shin with her bare foot. The blow was extraordinarily painful, like being struck with the edge of a heavy wooden board. In disbelief, he hopped away and bent down to nurse his shin; she promptly came after him and gave him two heavy, stunning slaps, one on the right cheek, one on the left. While he was still staggering back and hesitating, reluctant to raise his hand against a lady – never mind a goddess! – she seized his hair with both hands and gave it a terrific jerk. She was strong. He was forced sideways and downwards; his feet spun round and he fell. Next moment she was sitting on top of him, her buttocks massive and hard like weights on his chest, her breasts hard and small, her nipples crudely carved, wooden stubs. From below he could see her face a little better. It was horribly disfigured, the black skin overgrown with giant warts. She went on persistently slapping his face.
‘Get off me, you bitch!’
She would not. There was nothing for it but an actual fight. Swin exerted himself and began to wrestle with Yabeth. He twisted violently, hove her off him and then jumped on her in his turn. As he fought, some words that Bryd had spoken came into his mind: She is angry with you, but she is also patient and eager and loving. He thought of a few dry words with which to retort on Bryd, if ever he should see her again; but meanwhile he must struggle against his adversary. Man and Goddess wrestled together like children, without skill or science or intention of inflicting harm; soon the closeness of their bodies was imbued with a kind of intimacy; and the bout ended with him sitting on top of her, kneeling on her forearms and pulling back her hair. Although she still squirmed beneath him, it was evident that he had won.
A childish form of words came back to him: ‘Say surrender!’
But she would not. Her lips were thin, wooden, tight-closed.
‘What is it then?’ he asked in exasperation, tightening his grip on her hair and her knobby ears, trying to stop her head jerking from side to side. ‘You got me down here! What for?’
Cleanse the Temple.
Her lips had not moved. The voice was low and tense. As in his previous visions, the Earth itself seemed to have spoken.
‘The Temple? The Erumar? How?’
Third and last command. Cleanse the Temple. Third and last command. Cleanse the Temple. Third and last...
The words were fading in his head; she herself was fading, sinking away from him, subsiding into the earth.
She had gone. But a new radiance was stealing through the chamber. A gleam shone forth, the light seemed to stand within the hall like a tall candle or shaft of sunlight. A little dazed, Swin looked around the room; he hurried along the wall. There, in a recess, shining by its own light, was an ancient sword, scabbardless, its edges bright and unrusted; the serpentine pattern of the twisted and hammered rods was luminously exact; the hilts were of gold set with red and green gems. He grasped the hilts. The sword at once came away from whatever had been supporting it. The blade was long, the whole thing heavier than any sword he had handled before, but its weight satisfied his arm. He questioned it, speaking the words aloud:
‘What is your name?’
No voice answered, but in the same moment his memory plucked a name out of legend. And at once there came from above him a murmur, a thunder and then a sudden descent of water. The hall in which he stood was being dissolved. He had bare time to thrust the sword into his belt before being overwhelmed by the deluge. He launched himself upward and struck out vigorously.
In our world half an hour had passed. The sky was turning blue. Aldred was still sitting by the lake. Dulinir had found him there, and then more knights and thanes had gathered. Swin’s return thus had many witnesses.
He walked out of the water and set foot upon the shore. His beard was wet, and his locks lay entwined about his shoulders, and water dripped from the gleaming blade of the sword Dagoruth; but above the knee his clothes were dry, as if he had just landed from a boat. Sterner and mightier than Kedral of old, he came and stood before his men, and they bowed down to him or knelt in homage. For a glory was about him, and the sun was shining through the mist, and birds were singing.