“At the foot of the eldest Princess’s bed is a door of stone that rises from the floor. Each night the Princesses descend through that door, and down a long stairway cut in the rock there. At first these stairs are dark, the ceiling low and dank; but then the way opens on a cliff-face that the stairs walk still down; and this open way is lined to the cliff’s foot with jeweled trees. On the first night as I followed the Princesses I broke a branch of one of these jeweled trees.” And he opened the first bundle and held the branch aloft, and the wicked gems in the smooth white bole glittered and leaped like fire; and a sigh wove through the crowd. The soldier had faced the King as he spoke, although he fixed his eyes on the King’s hands as they lay serenely in his lap; now he saw them clench suddenly together and he raised his eyes to look at the King’s face and saw there a sudden joy he could not quell for all his kingdom leap out of his eyes, not as a king but a father. The soldier noticed also that while the line of Princesses was now motionless, the hand of the youngest had risen and covered her face.
He drew his gaze back up the row to the eldest, but she stood quietly, her hands clasped before her and her eyes cast down.
“At the foot of the cliff,” said the soldier, “there is a dark shore that edges a lake; and the waters of this lake are black, and—” there was a pause just long enough to be heard as a pause, and the soldier continued: “—and the waters of that lake do not sound as the waters of our lakes sound as they lap upon the shore.”
He stooped and laid the jeweled branch on the second step of the dais, this but one step below the one on which the King’s feet rested. It flickered at him as if its gems were winking eyes. As he straightened he found he had turned himself a little, facing more nearly toward where the eldest Princess stood than her father’s throne; but he did not change his position again.
“At the edge of that lake are twelve boatmen, sculling their twelve lean black boats. The twelve captains wear black, and the oars are as black as the hulls. The twelve Princesses embark upon these boats, and are carried far—I know not how far, for what passes for sky in this underground place is dim and green, and soon darkens to the color of the lake itself as the boats pass over the water. Then a great palace looms up upon what is perhaps an island, or perhaps a promontory of some dark land on the far side of that lake; I only can tell you that the boats dock near the courtyard of this great palace, and the courtyard is ablaze with lights, as are the magnificent rooms within; but if one passes through those vast chambers to look upon the far side of the castle, for all the brilliance of the light, the shadows creep in close, and are absolute no farther than a strong arm’s stone’s throw from the palace gates. Nothing like moon or star shines overhead.
“In these dazzling rooms your Princesses dance through the earth’s night, partnered by the black ferrymen: but these have thrown off their black cloaks for the dancing, and are as dazzling in their beauty as the rooms that contain them—near as dazzling perhaps as the Princesses themselves.” The soldier spoke these words with no sense of paying a compliment, but merely as a man speaks the truth; and a few of the oldest members of the audience forgot for a moment the wonder of the story he told, and looked at him sharply, and then smiled.
“There is a splendid throng in those great ballrooms; one does not know where to look, and wherever one’s eyes rest, the magnificence is bewildering, as is the grace of the dancers. There is always music during those long hours that the Princesses dance their slippers to pieces; the music reaches out to greet those who touch the pier after the journey across the water; nearly it lifts one off one’s feet, whatever the will may say against it. But behind the music is silence, and something more than silence; something unnameable, and better so. And I heard no one of those dancers within those halls and that music ever address a word to another.
“Three nights I followed the Princesses to this place, walking down the stairs behind them, standing in the bottom of the twelfth black boat with a Princess before me and a captain behind; three nights I followed them again back to the castle of their father, and ran ahead of them at the last, to be lying snoring on my bed when they returned.” But he spoke no word, yet, of how this was accomplished without any knowing.
“On the third night at the palace I brought something away with me.” He bent again, and picked up the shapeless blur of shadows. He peeled the whispering rag away, and let it fall to his feet, where it lay motionless; but he was not unaware of its touch, and he wondered at its uncommon stillness. He held the goblet up as he had held the branch, and those whose eyes followed it in the first moments thought it was as if the unshielded sun shone in the room, and before their eyes colors shifted and swam, and they could not see their neighbors, but seemed for that moment to be in a castle beyond imagining grander than their King’s proud castle, surrounded by a crowd of people unnaturally beautiful.
But the vision cleared and the soldier spoke again, and those who had seen something they had not understood in the sudden brilliance of the thing he had held up to them listened uneasily, but knowing that what he said was true. “This goblet is from the shadow-held palace underground, where the Princesses dance holes in their shoes.” He lowered the goblet, and looked into it. The black water shifted as his hand trembled, and the surface glittered like the facets of polished stone. The noise of the water as it touched the sides was like the distant cries of the imprisoned. “In it I dipped up some of the water of that lake I crossed six times.”
As he said this, the cries seemed suddenly to have words in them, as once he had heard the water talking secrets to the shore; but this time, in earth’s broad daylight, he was horribly afraid of the words he might hear, that they might somehow harm his world, taint the sky and the sunlight. And he held the cup abruptly away from him, as far as his arm would reach. The water rose up to the brim and spilled over, with a nasty thin shriek like victory; and it fell to the floor with a hiss. Where it fell there rose a shadow, and the shadow seemed dreadfully to take shape; and the people who stood watching moaned. The soldier stood stricken with the knowledge of what he had done; the King made no sign.
The shadow moved; it ebbed and rose again, bulking larger in the light; and a leg of it, if it was a leg, thrust back, feeling its way. It touched the discarded cloak crouched at the soldier’s feet.
And the shadow was gone as if it had never been. Most of those who had seen it were never sure of what they saw; some, who knew about the nightmares where an unseen Thing pursues without reason or mercy, believed in this waking Thing more easily; but in later years remembered only that once they had had a nightmare more terrible than the rest, and there was no memory of what had happened the day that the twelve dancing Princesses’ enchantment was broken. But about the soldier’s tale all remembered his description of the underground land the Princesses had been bound to for so many nights with a deep-felt fear that could not entirely be accounted for in the words the soldier used.