“And what are you thinking?” he said at last.
“You already know or you would not ask,” replied the soldier. “I’m thinking that I would like to see the city of our King, the King in whose Army I labored so long and for so little. And I’m thinking that I would like to find out the secret of the shoes that are danced to pieces every night, and so win a Princess to wife and a kingdom after.” He smiled at the ostler, hoping to win an answering smile. “It is perhaps my only chance to try to see the ways of the Army hierarchy set to rights.”
The ostler slowly shook his head without smiling, but he said no word to dissuade him. “Good luck to you then, my wild and wandering friend. But if your luck should not be good, then come back here, and we’ll try to save you with good horses and good beer. They can if anything can.”
“I have little enough heart left in me now,” said the soldier lightly. “The King is welcome to the rest, for I’ll not miss it.”
And on the next morning the soldier set out.
PART ONE
HE WENT still downhill, but more purposefully; and the bundle across his shoulders was a little stouter; thanks to the ostler. He cut himself a green walking-stick by the bank of the brook his path led him beside; and the sap ran over his hand, and the sweet sharp smell of it raised his spirits. He whistled as he walked, Army songs, songs about death and glory.
The sun was high in the sky and the place of his waking miles behind him when the soldier began to look around him for somewhere to sit and eat his lunch; he hoped for a stream of clear mountain water; if luck was with him he would find a wide-branching tree at its edge to sit beneath, for the sun grew hot, and shade would be welcome. The soldier’s boots began to scuff up the dust of the lowlands as the hard rocky earth of the mountains was left behind him. He had passed through several villages on his long morning’s walk, for the villages sat close together at the mountains’ green feet. But as he looked around now for his stream and his tree, he saw grazing land, with cows and sheep and horses on it, and fields of grain; and far off to his left he could see the hard shining of the river that led to the capital that was also his path’s end. But there were few houses. He looked ahead, and saw a small grove of trees, and quickened his step, anticipating at least their leafy shadow, and perhaps a pool of water.
As he approached he heard an odd creaking noise that began, and stopped, and began again; but the trees hid from his sight anything that his eyes might discover to explain it. When his way led by them at last, he saw a small hut nestled within the grove, and before it and near his path stood a well. An old woman stood at the well, winding up the rope with a handle that creaked; and she paused often and wearily, and as the soldier watched, she, unknowing, stared into the depths of the well and sighed.
“May I help you?” said the soldier, and strode forward; and he seized the handle from the brown wrinkled hand that gladly gave it up to him, and wound the handle till the bucket tipped past the stone lip of the well; and he pulled it out, brimming, and set it on the ground.
“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.