The Door in the Hedge (16 page)

“I thank you, good sir,” said the old woman. “And I beg you then, have the first draught; for I should be waiting a long time yet for my drink if I had to wait upon my own drawing of it. I believe the bucket grows heavier each day, even faster than the strength drains away from my old hand.”

The soldier pulled the knapsack from his shoulder, and from it took a battered tin cup: one of the scant relics of his Army days. He picked up the old woman's brown pottery cup from the edge of the well and dipped them both together; and as he handed her dripping cup to her he held his own; and they drank together.

The woman smiled. “Such courtesy demands better recompense than a poor old woman can offer,” she said. “Rest yourself in the shade of these trees a little while, at least, and tell me where so gallant a gentleman may be bound.” She looked straight at him as she spoke, and when he smiled at her words she must have noticed the strength and sweetness in his smile, for all the weariness of the face that held it; and certain it is that, as he smiled, he noticed the strange eyes of the woman who stared at him so straightforwardly. Her eyes were a blue that was almost lavender, and they held a calm that seemed to bear more of the innocence of youth than the gravity of age. And the lashes were long, as long as a fawn's, and dark.

“Indeed, I will be most grateful for a chance to sit out of the sun's light.” And they sat together on a rough wooden bench under a tree near the tiny cottage; and the soldier told the old woman of his journey, and, thinking of her strange eyes—for he spoke with his eyes on the ground between his knees—he also told her of its purpose, for the thought came to him that behind those eyes there might be some wisdom to help him on his way. In the pause that followed his telling, he offered her some of his bread and cheese, and they ate silently.

At last, and trying not to be disappointed by her silence, the soldier said that he would go on; for he could walk many more miles that day before he would need another meal, and sleep to follow. This much his soldier's training had done for him. And he stood up, and picked up his knapsack to tie it to its place on his back again.

“Wait a moment,” said the old woman; and he waited, gladly. She walked—swiftly, for a woman so old and weak that she had trouble drawing up her bucket from the well—the few steps to her cottage, and disappeared within. She was gone long enough that the soldier began to feel foolish for his sudden hope that she was a wise woman after all and would assist him. “Probably she is gone to find for me some keepsake trinket, a clay dog, a luck charm made of birds' feathers, that she has not seen in years and has forgotten where it lies,” he said to himself. “But perhaps she will give me bread and cheese for what she has eaten of mine; and that will be welcome; for cities, I believe, are not often friendly to a poor wanderer.”

But it was none of these things she held in her hands when she returned to him. It was, instead, a cape; she carried it spilled over her arms, and shook it out for him when she stood beside him again by the bench and the tree. The cape was long enough to sweep the ground even when she held it arm's-length over her head; and a deep hood fell from its collar. It was black with a blackness that denied sunlight; it looked like a hole in the earth's own substance, as if, had one the alien eyes for it, one could see into the far reaches of some other awful world within it. And it moved to its own shaken air, as if it breathed like an animal.

The soldier looked at it with awe, for it was an uncanny thing. The old woman said: “Take this as my gift to you, and consider your time spent telling me your story time spent well, for I can thus give you a gift to serve your purpose. This cloak is woven of the shadows that hide the hare from the fox, the mouse from the hawk, and the lovers from those who would forbid their love. Wear it and you are invisible: for the cloak is close-woven, finer than loose shadows, and no rents will betray you. See—” and the old woman whirled it around her own bowed shoulders, shaking the hood down over her bright eyes—and then the soldier saw nothing where she stood, or had stood, but the dappled, moving leaf-shade over the grass and wildflowers and the rough wooden bench. He blinked and felt suddenly cold, and then as suddenly hot: hot with the hope that blazed up in him and need not, this time, be quelled.

A whirling of air become shadow, become untouched entire blackness, and the old woman stood before him again, holding the cloak in her hands, and it poured over her feet. “—or not see,” she said, and smiled. “Take it.” She held it out to him. It was as weightless as the shadows it was made of, soft as night; he wound it gently round his hands, and it turned itself to a wisp like a lady's scarf; and gently he tucked it under a shoulder strap of his knapsack. It whispered to itself there, and one silken corner waved against his cheek.

“I have words to send with you too,” said the old woman. “First: speak not of me, nor of this cloak,” and she looked at him shrewdly. “But you may guess that for yourself. You may guess this too: drink nothing the Princesses may offer you when you retire to your cot in the dark corner of the Long Gallery. It is a wonder and an amazement to me that the men before you have not thought of this simple trick; but it is said otherwise—and I, I have my ways of hearing the truth.”

“Perhaps it is the youth of those men,” said the soldier gravely; “for I have heard that all those who have sought this riddle and the prize have been young and fair to look upon. I have little of either youth or beauty to spend, and must make it up in caution.”

The old woman laughed oddly, and looked at him still more oddly, the leaf-shadow moving in her eyes like silver fish in a lake. “Perhaps it is as you say. Or perhaps it is something that stands with the Princess as she offers the drink; something that is loosened in that Long Gallery once the key in the door has turned and this world, our world, is locked away for the night's length.” There was something in her face like pain or sorrow.

“For this too I wish to say to you: the Princesses you must beware, for the spell they lie under is deep, and spell it truly is, but neither of their making nor their fault, and very glad they would be to be free of it, though they may stir no hand to help themselves.” The old woman paused so long that the soldier thought she might not speak again, and he listened instead to the shadowy whispering at his ear, and let his eyes wander to the path that would take him to the city, and to his chosen adventure and his fate.

“The story is this, as I believe it,” said the old woman; “and as I have told you, I have ways of hearing the truth.

“The Queen had the blood of witches in her,” she went on slowly, “and while the taint is ancient and feeble, still it was there; while the King is mortal clear through, or if there is any other dilution, it is so old that even the witches themselves have forgotten, and so can do nothing.

“The Queen was a good woman, and she was mortal and human, and bore mortal daughters. The drop of witch blood was like a chink in the armor of a knight rather than a poison at the heart. The knight may be valiant in arms and honor as was the Queen in honor and love; but the spear of an enemy will find the chink at last.

“There is a sort of charm in witch blood for those who bear it; a charm to make the spears that may fly go awry. But the charm weakens faster than the blood taint itself if the bearer chooses mortal ways and never leaves them.

“In the Queen there was something yet left in that charm. In her daughters—nay. And so when the Queen died, a witch seized her chance: that her twelve demon sons, who bear a taint of mortal blood as faint as the witch blood of the Queen's twelve daughters, those sons shall be tied to those daughters closely and more closely, till by their grasp they shall be drawn from the deeps where they properly live to the sweet earth's surface; and there they shall marry the twelve Princesses, and beget upon them children in whom the dark blood shall run hot and strong for many generations, and who shall wreak much woe upon simple men.

“Eleven years will it take for the witch's dark chain to be forged from Princes to Princesses, till the Princesses return one morning with the witch's sons at their sides; eleven years' dancing underground. And nine and a half years already have run of this course.”

The soldier grew pale beneath his sun-brown skin as he heard the old woman's words. “Do any but you know of this? You—and now I?”

The old woman shrugged, but it was half a shiver, the soldier thought, and wondered; for a wise woman usually fears not what she knows. “The Princesses know, but they cannot tell. The King knows not, for the knowledge would break him to no purpose, for the quest and the venture are not his. For the rest, I myself know not; those fools the King consulted when the trouble first began may know a little; but they knew at least not to tell the King anything he could not bear. And you are the only one I have told.” The old woman again lifted her long-lashed eyes to the soldier, and the silver fish in her lakewater eyes had turned gold with the intensity of her telling.

“And the Princesses can do nothing,” repeated the soldier, “nothing but watch the sands of their own time running out.” The soldier thought of battles, and how it was the waiting that made men mad, and that to risk life and limb crossing bloody swords on the battlefield was joyful beside it.

“The eldest, it is said,” the old woman said even more slowly, “has more of wit than her sisters; and yet even she cannot put out a hand to save herself one night's journey underground, nor even fail to give the man who would free her the drugged wine when he retires to his cot in the dark corner of the Gallery.” The old woman turned her eyes to the path the soldier would follow, that would lead him to the city, and the King's pale castle, and the twelve dancing Princesses.

He was miles down that road, the corner of the cloak of shadows caressing his cheek, before he thought to wonder if he had bade the old woman farewell. He could not remember.

He spent that night in the open, under the stars, at the edge of a small wood; and he ate his bread and cheese, and stared into the impenetrable forest shadows that were yet less black than his cloak. But when he lay down, he fell asleep instantly, with the instincts of an old soldier; and the same instinct gave him as much rest as he might have from his sleep, and swept his dreams free of demons and princesses and old women at wells. He dreamed instead of his friend the ostler, and of sharp brown beer.

He arrived at the capital city in the late afternoon of the following day. The streets were full of people, some shouting, some driving animals; some silent, some alone, some talking to those who walked beside them. The soldier had noticed, when he rose on the morning of this his last day's journey, that the ways he walked held more people than those he had trod recently; and there is a bustle and a stirring to city-bound folk that is like no other restlessness. By this if nothing else the country-wise farmer's son and old campaigner would have known his way.

He was one of the silent and solitary ones as he passed the city gates: at which stood guards, stiff and wordless as axles, staring across the gap they framed like statues of conquerors. He looked around him, and listened. The streets were wide and well paved, and he saw few beggars, and those quiet ones, who stayed at their chosen street corners with their begging-bowls extended and their eyes calmly lowered. The buildings were all several stories high; but there were many trees, too, green-leafed and full, and frequent parks, each with its titular statue of an historical hero. The soldier made his way slowly from the eastern gate, where he had entered, to the river, which lay a little west of the center of the city. At the river's bank he paused, then stepped off the path and went down to the very edge of the whispering water.

Here he saw the King's castle for the first time. It stood near the mouth of the river, on the far bank, so the river gleamed like silver before it, and behind it one caught the green-and-grey glitter of the sea, stretching out beyond the castle's broad grounds. The vastness of that glitter, reaching the horizon without a ripple, accepting the river's great waters without a murmur, made the castle seem a toy, and all the lands and their borders for which men fought, a minor and unimportant interruption of the tides. The soldier, staring, for a moment forgot his quest; forgot even his beloved mountains, and his twenty wasted years. He shook himself free, set himself to study the castle of the King, and of the twelve dancing Princesses.

It was high, many-towered, each tower at this distance seeming as slender as a racehorse's long legs. The castle walls were built of a stone that shone pale grey, almost phosphorescent in the sun's westering light; and as smooth and faultless as a mirror.

There was the path at the top of the riverbank, paved as a city street, but the soldier found that he did not want to take those extra steps away from the river and the castle and his fortune. All the steps he had taken so far were toward these things: he would not backtrack now, not even a little. So he took a deep breath and began walking along the grassy edge of the river, over hummocks of weed and grey stones hiding sly moss in their crevices, crushing wild herbs under his heavy boots till their scent was all around him, carrying him forward, pillowing his weary neck and shoulders and easing his tired feet. Thyme and sage he remembered from the stews his mother made, and for a few minutes he was young again; and those few minutes were enough to bring him to the wide low bridge that would lead him over the river to the castle gates.

The bridge was white and handsome, paved with cobblestones. But the stones were round and the foot slid queerly over them, the toe or heel finding itself wedged in a crack between one hump and another, waiting for the other foot to find a place for itself and rescue it, only to begin the uneasy process again. People did not talk much on the bridge, but kept their eyes on their feet, or their hands firmly on the reins and their horses' quarters under them; they could tell well enough where they were by the bridge's gentle arch that rose to meet them and then fell away beneath them till it left them quietly on the far bank. The soldier was accustomed to curious terrain, so he continued to gaze at the castle, although he was aware that his feet were working harder than they had been. At the far end of the bridge the road divided into three; the soldier was the only figure to turn onto the far right-hand way, which led to the castle.