He felt silly, floundering around in an indoor lake—an outdoor one was different, with minnows nipping one’s toes, and perhaps a squirrel for company, or a deer come to drink and wonder at the water-monster—and he did not dare stay long in the warm luxurious water, for he had a wakeful night before him. Just a moment he reconsidered the King’s offer of a night’s grace; regretfully he considered it, and then put it finally aside. He climbed out of the bath and unwound one of the long cream-colored towels that hung on a golden rack shaped like two mermaids holding hands. There were several of these towels, wrapped around the mermaids’ necks and lying across their outstretched arms, and the single one he held was big enough to wrap, he thought, all twelve Princesses in.
There was fresh clothing for him in the outer room: a dark red tunic and gold leggings and high soft boots—a soldier’s pay in a year’s time would not begin to account for the price of one of those boots—and a red cloak with a dark blue collar. He looked at the red cloak, lying in fluid ripples over the back of a silver chair, and then looked around for his bundle. He whirled the red cloak round his shoulder with a gesture, had he known it, that every high-blooded young nobleman had used before him, and picked up his bundle. It sighed at him.
The servant—if it was the same one: they were all white-robed and brown-haired and somber—appeared at the door as if he had waited for the chink of a belt-buckle as a summons to enter. That belt the soldier had found under the red cloak: the tails of two green dragons wound together at the small of his back, and their golden fangs locked in front. Their sapphire eyes glittered at him as he looked down at them. The bundle, hung idly over his wrist when he grasped the belt, shivered with impatience; and the serving man stepped through the door.
The soldier looked up and nodded; the man never quite met his eyes, but bowed his bow and turned again and left the room, and the soldier followed, his footfalls now as silent as the servant’s. This man led the way down a long corridor and up a flight of stairs that blazed with light as the Great Hall had; but at the top of these stairs the light abruptly ended. The servant seized a candelabrum from a niche at the stairhead and raised it high with a hand that did not tremble, and the light’s rays flew down the corridor as swift and straight as hawks. To the left was a plain wall, running from the stairhead to the end of the corridor, which was blind but for a tiny barred window a hand’s-breadth above man-level. “No escape that way,” thought the old campaigner’s part of the soldier’s mind. He looked left, at the wall: in it was set one door, only two steps from the head of the stairs where they stood. It was a door tall and broad, seven feet high perhaps and four wide, and bound with iron. There was no gap or break or fissure in it anywhere but for a keyhole so heavily wound around with iron that the opening seemed no thicker than a needle. From the keyhole a flake of white light shone from inside the door.
He looked to his right: here the wall was pierced by a series of arched windows, their lower edges at waist level, where one might rest elbows and gaze out, if one ever wished to linger in this weary spot. “But perhaps the view from these windows is very fine by day,” thought the soldier. “You can see what is coming up the river at you,” thought the campaigner. But now the windows were muffled in the shadows of a cloudy night. No star glittered; the very air seemed grey beyond the casement glass. “And,” thought the soldier, “the air must always seem grey in this place from the shadow of the iron-barred door of the Long Gallery, which looms behind you on the brightest of summer mornings.”
One of the shadows now moved and became the King; and the soldier realized that he had expected him to be here before himself. Something dark hung against his breast: as he came into the candlelight that swooped to touch the end of the hall but left the clouded windows to themselves, the soldier saw that at the center of the royal silken robes hung a small iron key. Its very refusal to glitter or shine made it catch the eye.
The King lifted the thin chain from around his neck, and slowly fitted the key into the lock. The light-flake disappeared; and then with a gentle chunk the lock turned, the door began to open, and an edge of light appeared instead around its frame. The servant stepped back, the soldier’s instincts, rather than his eyes or ears, told him; then in the background the shadows moved, and as the door swung fully open, the man set the candelabrum back in its niche and retreated down the stairs.
The light seemed too white and pure for candlelight, as it flooded out and swept around the soldier and the King; but perhaps this was due to the snowiness of the linen it reflected. Twelve white-hung beds stood, their heads to the far wall, in a long line down the Gallery; and six Princesses in long white nightgowns with fragile lace at the wrists and throats sat on the counterpanes, or on stools, and had their hair brushed by their white-gowned sisters. No one spoke: the air was stirred only by the soft crackle of comb-teeth and fingers through long sleek hair. The soldier thought confusedly of barracks; and then he blushed like a boy at his first dance, and his feet would not cross the threshold. He could not do what he had come so far to try; it was not right, and what he had heard could not be. He looked at the warm gleam of their foreheads and checks, the gentle rise and fall of the white nightgowns as they breathed, and watched the murmur of the light in the waves of hair, and was certain that it was all the most terrible of mistakes. These girls were not haunted. They were too beautiful and too serene.
Too calm. He remembered the youngest Princess at the banquet none enjoyed; and then her father stepped around him till he could look in his eyes, and waved him across the doorsill. This time his feet agreed, if reluctantly, to take him forward. Perhaps he heard, or perhaps he imagined, the King whispering, “Godspeed”; and then he did hear the door close behind him. For a moment even the hands twisting the heavy falls of hair were still, so the closing of the door spoke in perfect silence. The soldier heard no sound at all of the turning of the key; but he was no less certain that the key had turned, bolting him and twelve Princesses into the Gallery for the night. His pulse pounded so it threatened to obscure his sight as well as his hearing. Perhaps the Princesses’ young ears caught a sound his cannon-hardened ones could not: for as he was thinking all this, and feeling his heart beating in his throat, twelve Princesses sighed and bowed their heads, and stared at white laps and white hands for a moment, and then took up again the movements the King and the soldier had interrupted so recently.
Several turned their eyes slowly toward the soldier; their faces were without expression as they gazed at him, but with an expressionlessness that he did not like. The eyes glittered like the eyes behind masks. If they had been men, he would be watching their hands, waiting for the quick hard appearance of hidden knives: and then he did look at the hands of the Princess nearest him, and saw them clenched in her lap. The pale purity of her skin was pulled taut and unhappy across the frail knuckles; and his own face softened. When he looked at their faces again, the expressionlessness now seemed that of a burden almost too heavy to bear, and the glitter in their eyes that of unshed tears.
Then the Princess he remembered, who had sat across from him at dinner, approached him; and he saw the same wistful smile hesitantly curl her lips and drop away again at once. He followed her to the end of the Gallery, listening to the slightest rustle of her long white skirts; and he noticed suddenly and with a shock he could not explain that her feet were bare.
There was a screen set up in the farthest corner, next to the windowless end of the long chamber. Behind it, next to the narrow wall, was a low cot, with blankets and pillows. The Princess gestured toward it, bowed her head to him briefly, and left him. He turned to catch a glimpse of her bare heels as she vanished beyond the screen.
He sat heavily down and stared at his feet in their fine boots. His bundle lay on the cot beside him and rested against his knee. He found himself thinking of his age, turning the years over, one by one, in his mind, like the leaves of a book. His eyes slowly focused on a lamp that stood by the screen on a little three-legged table
, with a tinder-box beside it; but he made no move toward it.
He looked up to see the eldest Princess framed by the light that flowed around the edge of the screen. He could not see her face, but he was sure it was she, as he had recognized her as she sat beside him at dinner. He wondered if his silent understanding of these Princesses was true; and if it was, was it an omen for good or ill? The Princess held a goblet in her hand; her arm was held out in a graceful curve, and the white sleeve fell back to reveal her slim forearm. She held the goblet high, as if it were a victory chalice, and the soldier was reminded of old statues he had seen, of the goddess of war: thus she might carry the severed head of the conquered hero, beautifully and pitilessly. The Princess offered him the goblet, and he took it, and found it surprisingly heavy. “Drink, and be welcome,” she said, but there was no warmth or greeting in her voice.
He raised the goblet to his lips, but turned his head as he did, so she might see only his profile; and he poured the sweet-smelling wine gently down his back, and he felt the red cloak sag with it. “I thank thee, lady,” he said, “for wine and welcome.”
She bowed her head as her sister had done, but for the space of a minute or more; then she straightened herself abruptly, with a gesture he recognized from battlefields he and his fellows had won their weary way across, and left him without another word.
He sat looking after her for a moment, and then reached up to unfasten the dark red cloak. It was warm and wet to his fingers as he pulled it off; it came heavily now, sodden as it was, with none of the brisk furl and unfurl it had greeted him with when he picked it up first. He dropped it on the floor beside his cot; it steamed with the drugged wine, and he blinked as the clouds of it rose to his eyes.
He listened. The blood no longer pounded in his ears. The blaze of light from around the edge of the screen continued unwavering; and the silence was perfect. It waited. He wondered for what: and then he knew. So he sighed, and moved on the cot till it creaked; and as he did this, he opened his bundle, and lifted out the night-colored cloak the woman at the well had given him. He lay heavily down, full-length, on the cot, and noisily rearranged the linen-clad pillows with one hand; he held the cloak in the other, and it wrapped softly around his wrist and up his arm. Then he sighed once more, and lay still, crossing his hands on his breast. The cloak wandered over his shoulders and brushed his throat.
The silence still waited. The soldier snored once. Twice. A third time.
Then the rustling began: the sound of hasty bare feet, of skirts, of chest-lids almost silent but not quite; then of silks and satins and brocades, tossing together, murmuring over each other, jostling and sighing and whirling. And the sounds of bare feet were no more; instead the soldier, between snores, heard the sounds of the soles of exquisite little shoes: dancing shoes, made for princesses’ feet; and he knew that only haste, that caused even princesses to be careless of how they set their feet, enabled him to hear them at all. Then the soldier, with a last snore, stood up as softly as many years of the most dangerous of scouting missions had taught him, and whisked the black cloak around his shoulders. It blew like a shadow around him and settled without weight. Then he heard a laugh, low and brief, as if cut off, and not a happy laugh; a laugh from a heart that has not laughed for pleasure in a long time. It was the only voice he heard. He stepped around the screen.
The twelve Princesses huddled at the opposite end of the Long Gallery; and he walked toward them, softly as a scout in the enemy’s camp, softly as a fox in the chicken coop, softer still for what haunted things with quick ears might be listening. He heard a sound again like the lifting of a chest-lid; but this must be a massive chest, with a great lid. The Princesses all stood back and gazed toward the floor: there a great hatch had been uncovered, at the foot of the farthest bed, and beside it the eldest Princess knelt, with her hands at the edge of the trapdoor she had just raised. She stared downward with her sisters. The Princesses were all dressed in the loveliest of gowns; they shimmered like bubbles caught in the sun’s rays, that look clear as glass, but with every color finely in and through and over them, till the eye is dazzled. Like some faerie bubble the eldest Princess seemed as she rose to her feet and floated—down. Each of her sisters followed lightly after; and as the last bit of the rainbow skirt of the youngest disappeared through the trap, the soldier stepped down the dark stair behind her.
It was dark for only a moment. There was a light coming mistily from somewhere before them toward which they descended. It made its way a little even into the long black flight of stairs that sank below the King’s castle. The walls that clung close around those stairs were moist to the touch, as if they walked by the river. Down they went, and still farther down; the grey light grew a little stronger and the sullen air no longer felt like a cloud in the lungs. The soldier blinked, and looked at his feet, or where his feet should be, for he had forgotten his cloak; and at that he stumbled—and stepped on the hem of the youngest Princess’s dress. A tiny breathless shriek leaped from her, and she clutched at the glittering necklaces at her throat.
Her sisters paused and looked back at her, and the soldier recognized the same voice that had earlier laughed so mirthlessly. “Someone just stepped on the hem of my dress,” she said, trembling, but her hands still clutched at her jewels, and she did not, or could not, look behind her.
“Don’t be absurd,” said the eldest; her voice drifted back along the shadowy corridor, touching the walls, like a bird so long imprisoned it no longer seeks to be free, but flies only because it has wings. “That soldier drank the wine I gave him; you heard him snoring. You have caught your skirt on a nail.”
The soldier leaned against a dank wall, his heart pounding till he thought the fever-quick perceptions of the youngest Princess must hear it; but as her eleven sisters began their descent again she followed after, with only the briefest hesitation. One small hand clutched at her skirt, and pulled the edge up, so that it would not trail behind her; and she hurried to walk close at the heels of the eleventh Princess, as if she feared to linger; but not once did she look behind her.
Still they descended; but the dark walls rose up till the soldier could no longer see the ceiling; and these heavy brooding walls were now pierced with arches, and within the arches there were things that shimmered, red and green and blue and gold. The soldier peered into them as he passed; and then suddenly the walls fell away entirely, and still they descended, but the stairs were cut into what appeared to be a cliff of stone, black, with veins of silver and green; and the thin shining lines seemed to stir like snakes. And lining the stairs on either side were trees: but the trees were smooth and white, with a white that was frightening, for it was a white that did not know the sun; and in the strange branches of these strange trees, if trees they even could be called, grew gems, as huge and heavy as ripe plums and peaches. The soldier paused and thought: “A branch of a tree will help me tell my story to the King,” and he put a hand out, quickly, so his fingers touched the cool white bole before he was overcome again by the vertigo of not being able to see himself; and so his hand closed around a branch, and he did not fall. He let his fingers creep blindly to a twig’s end, and broke off a spray of young gems, delicate as rosebuds and no larger than the fingertips of the youngest Princess; but these rosebuds were purple and blue and the shifting greens of hidden mosses.
The crack of the breaking branch echoed terribly in that vast underground chamber; and again the youngest Princess shrieked, a high, thin, desperate sound. But this time she whirled around, her hands in fists, and her fists against her mouth, holding in the weeping. Her eyes stared back up, and up, the way they had come, and the soldier stood motionless, although he knew she could not see him. He held the branch as he had broken it, as if it still were a part of the tree; and he looked at the youngest Princess’s wide wild eyes, and he felt pity for her.
Then the eldest came back to her, and put an arm round her, and whispered to her, but the soldier could not hear what she said. B
ut her little sister slumped, and rested her head against the elder’s shoulder, and they stood so a moment. Then the youngest straightened up and dropped her hands, and they turned back to the other ten of their sisters, who were still looking up the long stair. “We will go on now,” the eldest said, like a general to his tired army.
The soldier slipped the branch under his cloak and followed. The cloak clung to his shoulders as if by its own volition; but he no longer heard its whispering, and it held to him closely, motionless, not as any other cloak would sway and swing to his own motion.
The soldier now turned his eyes back to the eldest Princess as she descended the stairs in small running steps; her sisters turned round as she passed them, but none stirred from their places till she was again at the bottom of the luminous rainbow line of them. And now the soldier saw that the stair was almost ended, and before them was a wide black lake: so wide he could not see to its far bank. He blinked, as if his eyes were somehow at fault; but they were used to the light of the upper earth, of sun and moon and stars, and they were unhappy and uncertain here. He squinted up toward the—ceiling? It was a dull green, like a pool that has lain in its bed too long undisturbed. As a ceiling, it was high and vast; as a sky, it was heavy and watchful. The soldier’s shoulders moved as if they felt the weight of it, and the cloak of shadows was wrapped around him almost as if it were afraid.
He let his feet take him gently down the last stairs; they were broad and low and smooth now, and any treachery they carried was not in their shape. As he reached the shore of the black lake he saw there were boats on the water, boats as black as the ripples they threw out, and at their sterns stood men with poles. He listened to the sound of the ripples as they lapped against the shore; and they sounded like no water he had ever heard before.