He stood where he had first stepped out of the boat, and felt as he stood that his legs would snap if he moved them; then they began to tremble, and he sat heavily down, and leaned against one of the lantern pillars, and for the first time he wondered why he had come, why he should wish to break the enchantment that held the Princesses captive. Captive? The magnificence of this castle was far greater than the simple splendor that the Princesses’ father owned. He looked up from the foot of his pillar. He could not see the low green sky against the lanterns’ brilliance, and such was the power of this place he was now in that he almost wondered if he had imagined it; this palace could not exist beneath that sightless sky.
His eyes went back to the tall castle, smooth as opal, with the flashing figures passing before its wide doors, and the light flooding over all. He thought again of the unearthly beauty of the man who had danced with the youngest Princess, and knew without thinking that the other eleven were as handsome. He remembered the weary old woman at the well, the shabbiness of her hut and her gown—how could she know the truth of what she said? She could never have seen this place.
The soldier shut his eyes. Then for the first time he heard the music, as if hitherto his mind had been too dazzled by what his eyes saw; but now the music glided to him and around him, to tell him even more about the wonder of this island in a black lake. This music was as if the sweetest notes of the sweetest instruments ever played were gathered together for this one orchestra, for this single miraculous castle at the heart of an endless black sea.
He bowed his head to his knees and sighed; and the cloak of shadows loosened a little from his shoulders and crept over his arms and neck as if to comfort him. Then he felt an irregular hardness against his chest and remembered the branch of the jewel tree. He drew it out and gazed at it, turning it this way and that in the abundant white light; and it sparkled at him, but told him nothing. He put it away again and felt old, old.
“And if I do this thing,” he thought suddenly, “not only will they never see this castle of heart’s delight again, nor their handsome lovers; but—one of them must marry me.
“Not the youngest,” he thought. “At least not the youngest.”
He tried to remember seeing her in her father’s hall, to remember the feeling he had had then of an unnatural quietness in her, in her sisters: and he thought, indeed it was a hard thing to live by day on earth, when the mind is full of the splendors of this place; splendors only seen the night before and in the night to come. Soon, the old woman had said, soon the Princesses would open their father’s world to this one, and dwell freely in both, forever, with their bright-faced princes. Soon.
The soldier had no idea how long he sat thus, back against a lantern post, knees drawn up and head bowed. But he stirred at last, looked up, stood; faced the castle as if he would walk into it boldly. But as he looked through the gates, he saw several of the dancing pairs halt: not the ones wearing greens and blues and reds, but the ones brilliant in black and white, moonlight and darkness. Three of them; then four—six, seven, nine. Twelve. Other dancers whirled by, careless of any who must stop, and the music continued, eerie and marvelous, without pause or hesitation. But twelve couples slowly separated themselves from the crowd and made their way toward the pier where twelve black skiffs and a sad and weary soldier waited.
The soldier stepped into the last skiff with the youngest Princess as he had done before; and again he stood amidships and stared out over the bow. But his thoughts lay in the bottom of his mind without motion, and he saw little that his eyes rested on. Occasionally he touched the branch of the jewel tree with his fingers as if it were some charm, some reality in this land of green sky: the reality of a world whose trees budded gems.
The black boats grounded softly on the lake shore, their wakes scratching at the land. The soldier stepped out and followed the Princesses up the long stair. He did not turn back to catch any last glimpse of the black boats and their shadowed captains: nor did any of the Princesses. He saw instead, as he looked ahead of him, an occasional dainty foot beneath its skirt, leaving a step behind to reach a step above: and in a quick flash of delicate soles he could see the slippers were worn through, till the pink skin showed beneath.
The heavy trapdoor at the end of the stair still stood open, and a blaze of candles greeted them as they drew near, though the tall candles they had left were now near guttering. The soldier wondered that his breath slid in and out of his breast so easily, after bending and straightening his stiff legs up so many stairs: and thought perhaps it was but more of the enchantment of the land of green sky, of gemmed trees and black water, and a white castle upon an island.
The soldier slipped through the Princesses who stood around the hatch in the Long Gallery, gazing down for one last look at the land they lived in each night, before the eldest Princess knelt and closed it. The door fell shut like a coffin-lid, with the same rough whisper it spoke upon opening. The soldier made his way down the Long Gallery to his screen and his cot; and he pulled off the cloak of shadows, which sighed and then went limp in his hands as if it too were sad and exhausted. He lay down silently upon his cot, the cloak bundled beneath his ear, the jeweled branch protected by the breast of his tunic, and he turned his back to the Princesses’ Gallery and faced the blind wall, so that any that might choose to spy upon their spy could not notice the curious bulge it made.
And he felt, rather than saw, that the eldest Princess came and looked upon him. He could feel the shadow of her lying gracefully across his legs, and feel the silence of her face, the sweep of her glance. Then she went away, as straight and proud as he had seen her when she brought him the wine.
PART TWO
THE SOLDIER awoke late that morning as though he were climbing out of a pit, hand over hand. He was stiff, as with battle, but the stiffness was not so much that of the muscles as of the mind: the reluctance to rise and look upon yesterday’s battlefield, though you bore no mark yourself; to look upon the faces of those who had been your friends and had been killed, and upon those belonging to the other side, whom you and your friends had killed. And upon those of that other army who returned in the morning as you were doing, to bury their dead, their living faces as stiff as your own.
But the soldier, lying in his cot at the end of the Long Gallery, with his night cloak under his ear, awoke to a terrible sense of not knowing where he was. Having clambered up and out of the pit of sleep, he peered over the edge, blinking, and did not recognize what he saw.