This figure he was continually reshaping and realtering. The figure stood upon the margin of the pool; and near by were two stones overgrown with moss, and supporting a cross of old worm-eaten wood, which commemorated what had been done there.
One day, toward autumn, as Manuel was sitting in this place, and looking into the deep still water, a stranger came, and he wore a fierce long sword that interfered deplorably with his walking.
“Now I wonder what it is you find in that dark pool to keep you staring so?” the stranger asked, first of all.
“I do not very certainly know,” replied Manuel, “but mistily I seem to see drowned there the loves and the desires and the adventures I had when I wore another body than this. For the water of Haranton, I must tell you, is not like the water of other fountains, and curious dreams engender in this pool.”
“I speak no ill against oneirologya, although broad noon is hardly the best time for its practice,” declared the snub-nosed stranger. “But what is that thing?” he asked, pointing.
“It is the figure of a man, which I have modeled and remodeled, sir, but cannot seem to get exactly to my liking. So it is necessary that I keep laboring at it until the figure is to my thinking and my desire.”
“But, Manuel, what need is there for you to model it at all?”
“Because my mother, sir, was always very anxious for me to make a figure in the world, and when she lay a-dying I promised her that I would do so, and then she put a geas upon me to do it.”
“Ah, to be sure! but are you certain it was this kind of figure she meant?”
“Yes, for I have often heard her say that, when I grew up, she wanted me to make myself a splendid and admirable young man in every respect. So it is necessary that I make the figure of a young man, for my mother was not of these parts, but a woman of Ath Cliath, and so she put a geas upon me—”
“Yes, yes, you had mentioned this geas, and I am wondering what sort of a something is this geas.”
“It is what you might call a bond or an obligation, sir, only it is of the particularly strong and unreasonable and affirmative and secret sort which the Virbolg use.”
The stranger now looked from the figure to Manuel, and the stranger deliberated the question (which later was to puzzle so many people) if any human being could be as simple as Manuel appeared. Manuel at twenty was not yet the burly giant he became. But already he was a gigantic and florid person, so tall that the heads of few men reached to his shoulder; a person of handsome exterior, high featured and blond, having a narrow small head, and vivid light blue eyes, and the chest of a stallion; a person whose left eyebrow had an odd oblique droop, so that the stupendous boy at his simplest appeared to be winking the information that he was in jest.
All in all, the stranger found this young swineherd ambiguous; and there was another curious thing too which the stranger noticed about Manuel.
“Is it on account of this geas,” asked the stranger, “that a great lock has been sheared away from your yellow hair?”
In an instant Manuel’s face became dark and wary. “No,” he said, “that has nothing to do with my geas, and we must not talk about that.”
“Now you are a queer lad to be having such an obligation upon your head, and to be having well-nigh half the hair cut away from your head, and to be having inside your head such notions. And while small harm has ever come from humoring one’s mother, yet I wonder at you, Manuel, that you should sit here sleeping in the sunlight among your pigs, and be giving your young time to improbable sculpture and stagnant water, when there is such a fine adventure awaiting you, and when the Norns are foretelling such high things about you as they spin the thread of your living.”
“Hah, glory be to God, friend, but what is this adventure?”
“The adventure is that the Count of Arnaye’s daughter yonder has been carried off by a magician, and that the high Count Demetrios offers much wealth and broad lands, and his daughter’s hand in marriage, too, to the lad that will fetch back this lovely girl.”
“I have heard talk of this in the kitchen of Arnaye, where I sometimes sell them a pig. But what are such matters to a swineherd?”
“My lad, you are today a swineherd drowsing in the sun, as yesterday you were a baby squalling in the cradle, but tomorrow you will be neither of these if there by any truth whatever in the talking of the Norns as they gossip at the foot of their ash-tree beside the door of the Sylan’s House.”
Manuel appeared to accept the inevitable. He bowed his brightly colored high head, saying gravely: “All honor be to Urdhr and Verdandi and Skuld! If I am decreed to be the champion that is to rescue the Count of Arnaye’s daughter, it is ill arguing with the Norns. Come, tell me now, how do you call this doomed magician, and how does one get to him to sever his wicked head from his foul body?”
“Men speak of him as Miramon Lluagor, lord of the nine kinds of sleep and prince of the seven madnesses. He lives in mythic splendor at the top of the gray mountain called Vraidex, where he contrives all manner of illusions, and, in particular, designs the dreams of men.”
“Yes,
