_Orion Appoints a Whip_
And many times again, while the winter wore away, Orion went back again
with his hounds to that wonderful boundary, and waited there while the
earthly twilight faded; and sometimes saw the unicorns come through,
craftily, silently, when our fields were still, great beautiful shapes
of white. But he brought back no more horns to the castle of Erl, nor
hunted again across the fields we know; for the unicorns when they came
moved into our fields no more than a few bare paces, and Orion was not
able to cut one off again. Once when he tried he nearly lost all his
hounds, some being already within the boundary when he beat them back
with his whip; another two yards and the sound of his earthly horn could
never more have reached them. It was this that taught him that for all
the power that he had over his hounds, and even though in that power was
something of magic, yet one man without help could not hunt hounds, so
near to that edge over which if one should stray it would be lost
forever.
After this Orion watched the lads at their games in evenings at Erl,
till he had marked three that in speed and strength seemed to excel the
rest; and two of these he chose to be whippers-in. He went to the
cottage of one of them when the games were over, just as the lights were
lit, a tall lad with great speed of limb; the lad and his mother were
there and both rose from the table as the father opened the door and
Orion came in. And cheerily Orion asked the lad if he would come with
the hounds and carry a whip and prevent any from straying. And a silence
fell. All knew that Orion hunted strange beasts and took his hounds to
strange places. None there had ever stepped beyond the fields we know.
The lad feared to pass beyond them. His parents were full loth to let
him go. At length the silence was broken by excuses and muttered
sentences and unfinished things, and Orion saw that the lad would not
come.
He went then to the house of the other. There too the candles were lit
and a table spread. There were two old women there and the lad at their
supper. And to them Orion told how he needed a whipper-in, and asked the
lad to come. Their fear in that house was more marked. The old women
cried out together that the lad was too young, that he could not run so
well as he used to, that he was not worthy of so great an honour, that
dogs never would trust him. And much more than this they said, till they
became incoherent. Orion left them and went to the house of the third.
It was the same here. The elders had desired magic for Erl, but the
actual touch of it, or the mere thought of it, perturbed the folk in
their cottages. None would spare their sons to go whither they knew not,
to have dealings with things that rumour, like a large and sinister
shadow, had so grimly magnified in the hamlet of Erl. So Orion went
alone with his hounds when he took them up from the valley and went
eastwards over our fields where Earth's folk would not go.
It was late in the month of March, and Orion slept in his tower, when
there came up to him from far below, shrill and clear in the early
morning, the sound of his peacocks calling. The bleat of sheep far up on
the downs came to wake him too, and cocks were crowing clamourously, for
Spring was singing through the sunny air. He rose and went to his
hounds; and soon early labourers saw him go up the steep side of the
valley with all his hounds behind him, tan patches against the green.
And so he passed over the fields we know. And so he was come, before the
sun had set, to that strip of land from which all men turned away, where
westward stood men's houses among fields of fat brown clay and eastward
the Elfin Mountains shone over the boundary of twilight.
He went with his hounds along the last hedge, down to the boundary. And
no sooner had he come there than he saw a fox quite close slip out of
the twilight between Earth and Elfland, and run a few yards along the
edge of our fields and then slip back again. And of this Orion thought
nothing, for it is the way of the fox thus to haunt the edge of Elfland
and to return again to our fields: it is thus that he brings us
something of which none of our cities guess. But soon the fox appeared
again out of the twilight and ran a little way and was back in the
luminous barrier once more. Then Orion watched to see what the fox was
doing. And yet again it appeared in the field we know, and dodged back
into the twilight. And the hounds watched too, and showed no longing to
hunt it, for they had tasted fabulous blood.
Orion walked along beside the twilight in the direction in which the
fox was going, with his curiosity growing the more that the fox dodged
in and out of our fields. The hounds followed him slowly and soon lost
their interest in what the fox was doing. And all at once the curious
thing was explained, for Lurulu all of a sudden skipped through the
twilight, and that troll appeared in our fields: it was with him that
the fox was playing.
"A man," said Lurulu aloud to himself, or to his comrade the fox,
speaking in troll-talk. And all at once Orion remembered the troll that
had come into his nursery with his little charm against time, and had
leaped from shelf to shelf and across the ceiling and enraged
Ziroonderel who had feared for her crockery.
"The troll!" he said, also in troll-talk; for his mother had murmured it
to him as a child when she told him tales of the trolls and their
age-old songs.
"Who is this that knows troll-talk?" said Lurulu.
And Orion told his name, and this meant nothing to Lurulu. But he
squatted down and rummaged a little while in what answers in trolls to
our memory; and during his ransacking of much trivial remembrance that
had eluded the destruction of time in the fields we know, and the
listless apathy of unchanging ages in Elfland, he came all at once on
his remembrance of Erl; and looked at Orion again and began to cogitate.
And at this same moment Orion told to the troll the august name of his
mother. At once Lurulu made what is known amongst the trolls of Elfland
as the abasement of the five points; that is to say he bowed himself to
the ground on his two knees, his two hands and his forehead. Then he
sprang up again with a high leap into the air; for reverence rested not
on his spirit long.
"What are you doing in men's fields?" said Orion.
"Playing" said Lurulu.
"What do you do in Elfland?"
"Watch time," said Lurulu.
"That would not amuse me," said Orion.
"You've never done it," said Lurulu. "You cannot watch time in the
fields of men."
"Why not?" asked Orion.
"It moves too fast."
Orion pondered awhile on this but could make nothing of it; because,
never having gone from the fields we know, he knew only one pace of
time, and so had no means of comparison.
"How many years have gone over you," asked the troll, "since we spoke in
Erl?"
"Years?" said Orion.
"A hundred?" guessed the troll.
"Nearly twelve," said Orion. "And you?"
"It is still to-day" said the troll.
And Orion would not speak any more of time, for he cared not for the
discussion of a subject of which he appeared to know less than a common
troll.
"Will you carry a whip," he said, "and run with my hounds when we hunt
the unicorn over the fields we know."
Lurulu looked searchingly at the hounds, watching their brown eyes: the
hounds turned doubtful noses towards the troll and sniffed enquiringly.
"They are dogs," said the troll, as though that were against them. "Yet
they have pleasant thoughts."
"You will carry the whip then," said Orion.
"M, yes. Yes," said the troll.
So Orion gave him his own whip there and then, and blew his horn and
went away from the twilight, and told Lurulu to keep the hounds
together and to bring them on behind him.
And the hounds were uneasy at the sight of the troll, and sniffed and
sniffed again, but could not make him human, and were loth to obey a
creature no larger than them. They ran up to him through curiosity, and
ran away in disgust, and straggled through disobedience. But the
boundless resources of that nimble troll were not thus easily thwarted,
and the whip went suddenly up, looking three times as large in that tiny
hand, and the lash flew forward and cracked on the tip of a hound's
nose. The hound yelped, then looked astonished, and the rest were uneasy
still: they must have thought it an accident. But again the lash shot
forward and cracked on another nose-tip; and the hounds saw then that it
was not chance that guided those stinging shots, but a deadly unerring
eye. And from that time on they reverenced Lurulu, although he never
smelt human.
So went Orion and his pack of hounds in the late evening homewards, and
no sheep-dog kept the flock on wolf-haunted wold safer or closer than
Lurulu kept the pack: he was on each flank or behind them, wherever a
straggler was, and could leap right over the pack from side to side. And
the pale-blue Elfin Mountains faded from view before Orion had gone from
the frontier as much as a hundred paces, for their gloomless peaks were
hid by the earthly darkness that was deepening wide over the fields we
know.
Homeward they went, and soon there appeared above them the wandering
multitude of our earth-seen stars. Lurulu now and then looked up to
marvel at them, as we have all done at some time; but for the most part
he fixed his attention on the hounds, for now that he was in earthly
fields he was concerned with the things of Earth. And never one hound
loitered but that Lurulu's whip would touch him, with its tiny
explosion, perhaps on the tip of its tail, scattering a little dust of
fragments of hair and whipcord; and the hound would yelp and run in to
the others, and all the pack would know that another of those unerring
shots had gone home.
A certain grace with a whip, a certain sureness of aim, comes when a
life is devoted to the carrying of a whip amongst hounds; comes, say, in
twenty years. And sometimes it runs in families; and that is better than
years of practice. But neither years of practice nor the wont of the
whip in the blood can give the certain aim that one thing can; and that
one thing is magic. The hurl of the lash, as immediate as the sudden
turn of an eye, its flash to a chosen spot as direct as sight, were not
of this Earth. And though the cracks of that whip might have seemed to
passing men to be no more than the work of an earthly huntsman, yet not
a hound but knew that there was in it more than this, a thing from
beyond our fields.
There was a touch of dawn in the sky when Orion saw again the village of
Erl, sending up pillars of smoke from early fires below him, and came
with his hounds and his new whipper-in down the side of the valley.
Early windows winked at him as he went down the street and came in the
silence and chill to the empty kennels. And when the hounds were all
curled up on their straw he found a place for Lurulu, a mouldering loft
in which were sacks and a few heaps of hay: from a pigeon-loft just
beyond it some of the pigeons had strayed, and dwelt all along the
rafters. There Orion left Lurulu, and went to his tower, cold with the
want of sleep and food; and weary as he would not have been if he had
found a unicorn, but the noise of the troll's chatter when he had found
him on the frontier had made it useless to watch for those wary beasts
that evening. Orion slept. But the troll in the mouldering loft sat long
on his bundle of hay observing the ways of time. He saw through cracks
in old shutters the stars go moving by; he saw them pale: he saw the
other light spread; he saw the wonder of sunrise: he felt the gloom of
the loft all full of the coo of the pigeons; he watched their restless
ways: he heard wild birds stir in near elms, and men abroad in the
morning, and horses and carts and cows; and everything changing as the
morning grew. A land of change! The decay of the boards in the loft, and
the moss outside in the mortar, and old lumber mouldering away, all
seemed to tell the same story. Change and nothing abiding. He thought of
the age-old calm that held the beauty of Elfland. And then he thought of
the tribe of trolls he had left, wondering what they would think of the
ways of Earth. And the pigeons were suddenly terrified by wild peals of
Lurulu's laughter.