they left the track that they had ridden the day before, barely taken
the smaller path that led after a few hundred yards to the cottage when
they found themselves stopped by huge chains that hung from tree to
tree. High into the trees went the chains above their heads where they
sat their horses, and a chain ran every six inches down to the very
ground: the road was well blocked.
Rodriguez and Alderon hastily consulted; then, leaving the horses with
Morano, they followed the chains through dense forest to find a place
where they could get the horses through. Finding the chains go on and
on and on, and as evening was drawing in, the two friends divided,
Alderon going back and Rodriguez on, agreeing to meet again on the path
where Morano was.
It was darkening when they met there, Rodriguez having found nothing
but that iron barrier going on from trunk to trunk, and Alderon having
found a great gateway of iron; but it was shut. Through the silent
shadows stealing abroad at evening the three men crashed their way on
foot, leading their horses, towards this gate; but their way was slow
and difficult for no path at all led up to it. It was dark when they
reached it and they saw the high gate in the night, a black barrier
among the trees where no one would wish to come, and in forest that
seemed to these three to be nearly impenetrable. And what astonished
Rodriguez most of all was that the chains had not been across the path
when he had feasted with the green bowmen.
They stood there gazing, all three, at the dark locked gate, and then
they saw two shields that met in the midst of it, and Rodriguez mounted
his horse and stretched up to feel what device there was on the beaten
iron; and both the shields were blank.
There they camped as well as men can when darkness has fallen before
they reach their camping-ground; and Morano lit a great fire before the
gate, and the smooth blank shields touching shoulders there up above
them shone on Rodriguez and Alderon in the firelight. For a while they
wondered at that strange gate that stood there dividing the wilderness;
and then sleep came.
As soon as they woke they called loudly, but no one guarded that gate,
no step but theirs stirred in the forest. Then, leaving Morano in the
camp with its great gate that led nowhere, the two young men climbed up
by branches and chains, and were soon on the other side of the gate and
pressing on through the silence of the forest to find the cottage in
which Rodriguez had slept. And almost at once the green bowmen
appeared, ten of them with their bows, in front of Rodriguez and
Alderon. "Stop," said the ten green bowmen. When the bowmen said that,
there was nothing else to do.
"What do you seek?" said the bowmen.
"The King of Shadow Valley," answered Rodriguez.
"He is not here," they said.
"Where is he?" asked Rodriguez.
"He is nowhere," said one, "when he does not wish to be seen."
"Then show me the castle that he promised me," said Rodriguez.
"We know nothing of any castle," said one of the bowmen, and they all
shook their heads.
"No castle?" said Rodriguez.
"No," they said.
"Has the King of Shadow Valley no castle?" he asked, beginning now to
despair.
"We know of none," they said. "He lives in the forest."
Before Rodriguez quite despaired he asked each one if they knew not of
any castle of which their King was possessed; and each of them said
that there was no castle in all Shadow Valley. The ten still stood in
front of them with their bows: and Rodriguez turned away then indeed in
despair, and walked slowly back to the camp, and Alderon walked behind
him. In silence they reached their camp by the great gate that led
nowhere, and there Rodriguez sat down on a log beside the dwindling
fire, gazing at the grey ashes and thinking of his dead hopes. He had
not the heart to speak to Alderon, and the silence was unbroken by
Morano who, for all his loquacity, knew when his words were not
welcome. Don Alderon tried to break that melancholy silence, saying
that these ten bowmen did not know the whole world; but he could not
cheer Rodriguez. For, sitting there in dejection on his log, thinking
of all the assurance with which he had often spoken of his castle,
there was one more thing to trouble him than Don Alderon knew. And this
was that when the bowmen had appeared he had hung once more round his
neck that golden badge that was worked for him by the King of Shadow
Valley; and they must have seen it, and they had paid no heed to it
whatever: its magic was wholly departed. And one thing troubled him
that Rodriguez did not know, a very potent factor in human sorrow: he
had left in the morning so eagerly that he had had no breakfast, and
this he entirely forgot and knew not how much of his dejection came
from this cause, thinking that the loss of his castle was of itself
enough.
So with downcast head he sat empty and hopeless, and the little camp
was silent.
In this mournful atmosphere while no one spoke, and no one seemed to
watch, stood, when at last Rodriguez raised his head, with folded arms
before the gate to nowhere, the King of Shadow Valley. His face was
surly, as though the face of a ghost, called from important work among
asteroids needing his care, by the trivial legerdemain of some foolish
novice. Rodriguez, looking into those angry eyes, wholly forgot it was
he that had a grievance. The silence continued. And then the King of
Shadow Valley spoke.
"When have I broken my word?" he said.
Rodriguez did not know. The man was still looking at him, still
standing there with folded arms before the great gate, confronting him,
demanding some kind of answer: and Rodriguez had nothing to say.
"I came because you promised me the castle," he said at last.
"I did not bid you come here," the man with the folded arms answered.
"I went where you bade me," said Rodriguez, "and you were not there."
"In four weeks, I said," answered the King angrily.
And then Alderon spoke. "Have you any castle for my friend?" he said.
"No," said the King of Shadow Valley.
"You promised him one," said Don Alderon.
The King of Shadow Valley raised with his left hand a horn that hung
below his elbow by a green cord round his body. He made no answer to
Don Alderon, but put the horn against his lips and blew. They watched
him all three in silence, till the silence was broken by many men
moving swiftly through covert, and the green bowmen appeared.
When seven or eight were there he turned and looked at them. "When have
I broken my word?" he said to his men.
And they all answered him, "Never!"
More broke into sight through the bushes.
"Ask them" he said. And Rodriguez did not speak.
"Ask them," he said again, "when I have broken my word."
Still Rodriguez and Alderon said nothing. And the bowmen answered them.
"He has never broken his word," every bowman said.
"You promised me a castle," said Rodriguez, seeing that man's fierce
eyes upon him still.
"Then do as I bid you," answered the King of Shadow Valley; and he
turned round and touched the lock of the gates with some key that he
had. The gates moved open and the King went through.
Don Alderon ran forward after him, and caught up with him as he strode
away, and spoke to him, and the King answered. Rodriguez did not hear
what they said, and never afterwards knew. These words he heard only,
from the King of Shadow Valley as he and Don Alderon parted: ".... and
therefore, señor, it were better for some holy man to do his blessed
work before we come." And the King of Shadow Valley passed into the
deeps of the wood.
As the great gates were slowly swinging to, Don Alderon came back
thoughtfully. The gates clanged, clicked, and were shut again. The King
of Shadow Valley and all his bowmen were gone.
Don Alderon went to his horse, and Rodriguez and Morano did the same,
drawn by the act of the only man of the three that seemed to have made
up his mind. Don Alderon led his horse back toward the path, and
Rodriguez followed with his. When they came to the path they mounted in
silence; and presently Morano followed them, with his blankets rolled
up in front of him on his horse and his frying-pan slung behind him.
"Which way?" said Rodriguez.
"Home," said Don Alderon.
"But I cannot go to your home," said Rodriguez.
"Come," said Don Alderon, as one whose plans were made. Rodriguez
without a home, without plans, without hope, went with Don Alderon as
thistledown goes with the warm wind. They rode through the forest till
it grew all so dim that only a faint tinge of greenness lay on the dark
leaves: above were patches of bluish sky like broken pieces of steel.
And a star or two were out when they left the forest. And cantering on
they came to Lowlight when the Milky Way appeared.
And there were Dona Mirana and Serafina in the hall to greet them as
they entered the door.
"What news?" they asked.
But Rodriguez hung back; he had no news to give. It was Don Alderon
that went forward, speaking cheerily to Serafina, and afterwards to his
mother, with whom he spoke long and anxiously, pointing toward the
forest sometimes, almost, as Rodriguez thought, in fear.
And a little later, when the ladies had retired, Don Alderon told
Rodriguez over the wine, with which he had tried to cheer his forlorn
companion, that it was arranged that he should marry Serafina. And when
Rodriguez lamented that this was impossible he replied that the King of
Shadow Valley wished it. And when Rodriguez heard this his astonishment
equalled his happiness, for he marvelled that Don Alderon should not
only believe that strange man's unsupported promise, but that he should
even obey him as though he held him in awe.
And on the next day Rodriguez spoke with Dona Mirana as they walked in
the glory of the garden. And Dona Mirana gave him her consent as Don
Alderon had done: and when Rodriguez spoke humbly of postponement she
glanced uneasily towards Shadow Valley, as though she too feared the
strange man who ruled over the forest which she had never entered.
And so it was that Rodriguez walked with his lady, with the sweet
Serafina in that garden again. And walking there they forgot the need
of house or land, forgot Shadow Valley with its hopes and its doubts,
and all the anxieties of the thoughts that we take for the morrow: and
when evening came and the birds sang in azaleas, and the shadows grew
solemn and long, and winds blew cool from the blazing bed of the Sun,
into the garden now all strange and still, they forgot our Earth and,
beyond the mundane coasts, drifted on dreams of their own into aureate
regions of twilight, to wander in lands wherein lovers walk briefly and
only once.
THE TWELFTH CHRONICLE
THE BUILDING OF CASTLE RODRIGUEZ AND THE ENDING OF THESE CHRONICLES
When the King of Shadow Valley met Rodriguez, for the first time in the
forest, and gave him his promise and left him by his camp-fire, he went
back some way towards the bowmen's cottage and blew his horn; and his
hundred bowmen were about him almost at once. To these he gave their
orders and they went back, whence they had come, into the forest's
darkness. But he went to the bowmen's cottage and paced before it, a
dark and lonely figure of the night; and wherever he paced the ground
he marked it with small sticks. And next morning the hundred bowmen
came with axes as soon as the earliest light had entered the forest,
and each of them chose out one of the giant trees that stood before the
cottage, and attacked it. All day they swung their axes against the
forest's elders, of which nearly a hundred were fallen when evening
came. And the stoutest of these, great trunks that were four feet
through, were dragged by horses to the bowmen's cottage and laid by the
little sticks that the King of Shadow Valley had put overnight in the
ground. The bowmen's cottage and the kitchen that was in the wood
behind it, and a few trees that still stood, were now all enclosed by
four lines of fallen trees which made a large rectangle on the ground
with a small square at each of its corners. And craftsmen came, and
smoothed and hollowed the inner sides of the four rows of trees,
working far into the night. So was the first day's work accomplished
and so was built the first layer of the walls of Castle Rodriguez.
On the next day the bowmen again felled a hundred trees; the top of the
first layer was cut flat by carpenters; at evening the second layer was
hoisted up after their under sides had been flattened to fit the layer
below them; quantities more were cast in to make the floor when they
had been gradually smoothed and fitted: at the end of the second day a
man could not see over the walls of Castle Rodriguez. And on the third
day more craftsmen arrived, men from distant villages at the forest's
edge, whence the King of Shadow Valley had summoned them; and they
carved the walls as they grew. And a hundred trees fell that day, and
the castle was another layer higher. And all the while a park was
growing in the forest, as they felled the great trees; but the greatest
trees of all the bowmen spared, oaks that had stood there for ages and
ages of men; they left them to grip the earth for a while longer, for a
few more human generations.
On the fourth day the two windows at the back of the bowmen's cottage
began to darken, and that evening Castle Rodriguez was fifteen feet
high. And still the hundred bowmen hewed at the forest, bringing
sunlight bright on to grass that was shadowed by oaks for ages. And at
the end of the fifth day they began to roof the lower rooms and make
their second floor: and still the castle grew a layer a day, though the
second storey they built with thinner trees that were only three feet
through, which were more easily carried to their place by the pulleys.
And now they began to heap up rocks in a mass of mortar against the
wall on the outside, till a steep slope guarded the whole of the lower
part of the castle against fire from any attacker if war should come
that way, in any of the centuries that were yet to be: and the deep
windows they guarded with bars of iron.
The shape of the castle showed itself clearly now, rising on each side
of the bowmen's cottage and behind it, with a tower at each of its
corners. To the left of the old cottage the main doorway opened to the
great hall, in which a pile of a few huge oaks was being transformed
into a massive stair. Three figures of strange men held up this ceiling
with their heads and uplifted hands, when the castle was finished; but
as yet the carvers had only begun their work, so that only here and
there an eye peeped out, or a smile flickered, to give any expression
to the curious faces of these fabulous creatures of the wood, which
were slowly taking their shape out of three trees whose roots were
still in the earth below the floor. In an upper storey one of these
trees became a tall cupboard; and the shelves and the sides and the
back and the top of it were all one piece of oak.
All the interior of the castle was of wood, hollowed into alcoves and
polished, or carved into figures leaning out from the walls. So vast
were the timbers that the walls, at a glance, seemed almost one piece
of wood. And the centuries that were coming to Spain darkened the walls
as they came, through autumnal shades until they were all black, as
though they all mourned in secret for lost generations; but they have
not yet crumbled.
The fireplaces they made with great square red tiles, which they also
put in the chimneys amongst rude masses of mortar: and these great dark
holes remained always mysterious to those that looked for mystery in
the family that whiled away the ages in that castle. And by every
fireplace two queer carved creatures stood upholding the mantlepiece,
with mystery in their faces and curious limbs, uniting the hearth with
fable and with tales told in the wood. Years after the men that carved
them were all dust the shadows of these creatures would come out and
dance in the room, on wintry nights when all the lamps were gone and
flames stole out and flickered above the smouldering logs.
In the second storey one great saloon ran all the length of the castle.
In it was a long table with eight legs that had carvings of roses
rambling along its edges: the table and its legs were all of one piece
with the floor. They would never have hollowed the great trunk in time
had they not used fire. The second storey was barely complete on the
day that Rodriguez and Don Alderon and Morano came to the chains that
guarded the park. And the King of Shadow Valley would not permit his
gift to be seen in anything less than its full magnificence, and had
commanded that no man in the world might enter to see the work of his
bowmen and craftsmen until it should frown at all comers a castle
formidable as any in Spain.
And then they heaped up the mortar and rock to the top of the second
storey, but above that they let the timbers show, except where they
filled in plaster between the curving trunks: and the ages blackened
the timber in amongst the white plaster; but not a storm that blew in
all the years that came, nor the moss of so many Springs, ever rotted
away those beams that the forest had given and on which the bowmen had
laboured so long ago. But the castle weathered the ages and reached our
days, worn, battered even, by its journey through the long and
sometimes troubled years, but splendid with the traffic that it had
with history in many gorgeous periods. Here Valdar the Excellent came
once in his youth. And Charles the Magnificent stayed a night in this
castle when on a pilgrimage to a holy place of the South.
It was here that Peter the Arrogant in his cups gave Africa, one Spring
night, to his sister's son. What grandeurs this castle has seen! What
chronicles could be writ of it! But not these chronicles, for they draw
near their close, and they have yet to tell how the castle was built.
Others shall tell what banners flew from all four of its towers, adding
a splendour to the wind, and for what cause they flew. I have yet to
tell of their building.
The second storey was roofed, and Castle Rodriguez still rose one layer
day by day, with a hauling at pulleys and the work of a hundred men:
and all the while the park swept farther into the forest.
And the trees that grew up through the building were worked by the
craftsmen in every chamber into which they grew: and a great branch of
the hugest of them made a little crooked stair in an upper storey. On
the floors they laid down skins of beasts that the bowmen slew in the
forest; and on the walls there hung all manner of leather, tooled and
dyed as they had the art to do in that far-away period in Spain.
When the third storey was finished they roofed the castle over, laying
upon the huge rafters red tiles that they made of clay. But the towers
were not yet finished.
At this time the King of Shadow Valley sent a runner into Lowlight to
shoot a blunt arrow with a message tied to it into Don Alderon's
garden, near to the door, at evening.
And they went on building the towers above the height of the roof And
near the top of them they made homes for archers, little turrets that
leaned like swallows' nests out from each tower, high places where they
could see and shoot and not be seen from below. And little narrow
passages wound away behind perched battlements of stone, by which
archers could slip from place to place, and shoot from here or from
there and never be known. So were built in that distant age the towers
of Castle Rodriguez.
And one day four weeks from the felling of the first oak, the period of
his promise being accomplished, the King of Shadow Valley blew his
horn. And standing by what had been the bowmen's cottage, now all shut
in by sheer walls of Castle Rodriguez, he gathered his bowmen to him.
And when they were all about him he gave them their orders. They were
to go by stealth to the village of Lowlight, and were to be by daylight
before the house of Don Alderon; and, whether wed or unwed, whether she
fled or folk defended the house, to bring Dona Serafina of the Valley
of Dawnlight to be the chatelaine of Castle Rodriguez.
For this purpose he bade them take with them a chariot that he thought
magnificent, though the mighty timbers that gave grandeur to Castle
Rodriguez had a cumbrous look in the heavy vehicle that was to the
bowmen's eyes the triumphal car of the forest. So they took their bows
and obeyed, leaving the craftsmen at their work in the castle, which
was now quite roofed over, towers and all. They went through the forest
by little paths that they knew, going swiftly and warily in the
bowmen's way: and just before nightfall they were at the forest's edge,
though they went no farther from it than its shadows go in the evening.
And there they rested under the oak trees for the early part of the
night except those whose art it was to gather news for their king; and
three of those went into Lowlight and mixed with the villagers there.
When white mists moved over the fields near dawn and wavered ghostly
about Lowlight, the green bowman moved with them. And just out of
hearing of the village, behind wild shrubs that hid them, the bowmen
that were coming from the forest met the three that had spent the night
in taverns of Lowlight. And the three told the hundred of the great
wedding that there was to be in the Church of the Renunciation that
morning in Lowlight: and of the preparations that were made, and how
holy men had come from far on mules, and had slept the night in the
village, and the Bishop of Toledo himself would bless the bridegroom's
sword. The bowmen therefore retired a little way and, moving through
the mists, came forward to points whence they could watch the church,
well concealed on the wild plain, which here and there gave up a field
to man but was mostly the playground of wild creatures whose ways were
the bowmen's ways. And here they waited.
This was the wedding of Rodriguez and Serafina, of which gossips often
spoke at their doors in summer evenings, old women mumbling of fair
weddings that each had seen; and they had been children when they saw
this wedding; they were those that threw small handfuls of anemones on
the path before the porch. They told the tale of it till they could
tell no more. It is the account of the last two or three of them, old,
old women, that came at last to these chronicles, so that their tongues
may wag as it were a little longer through these pages although they
have been for so many centuries dead. And this is all that books are
able to do.
First there was bell-ringing and many voices, and then the voices
hushed, and there came the procession of eight divines of Murcia, whose
vestments were strange to Lowlight. Then there came a priest from the
South, near the border of Andalusia, who overnight had sanctified the
ring. (It was he who had entertained Rodriguez when he first escaped
from la Garda, and Rodriguez had sent for him now.) Each note of the
bells came clear through the hush as they entered the church. And then
with suitable attendants the bishop strode by and they saw quite close
the blessed cope of Toledo. And the bridegroom followed him in, wearing
his sword, and Don Alderon went with him. And then the voices rose
again in the street: the bells rang on: they all saw Dona Mirana. The
little bunches of bright anemones grew sticky in their hands: the bells
seemed louder: cheering rose in the street and came all down it nearer.
Then Dona Serafina walked past them with all her maids: and that is
what the gossips chiefly remembered, telling how she smiled at them,
and praising her dress, through those distant summer evenings. Then
there was music in the church. And afterwards the forest-people had
come. And the people screamed, for none knew what they would do. But
they bowed so low to the bride and bridegroom, and showed their great
hunting bows so willingly to all who wished to see, that the people
lost their alarm and only feared lest the Bishop of Toledo should blast
the merry bowmen with one of his curses.
And presently the bride and bridegroom entered the chariot, and the
people cheered; and there were farewells and the casting of flowers;
and the bishop blessed three of their bows; and a fat man sat beside
the driver with folded arms, wearing bright on his face a look of
foolish contentment; and the bowmen and bride and bridegroom all went
away to the forest.