He stood up, feeling as if his creaking bones might be heard by the waiting servants as the creaking mattress had been. He splashed his face with the water, then rubbed face and hands briskly with the towel. He pushed his shaggy hair back, knowing there was little else to be done with it. He looked up then, and the servants jerked their eyes away from the two heaps at the head of his cot and stared straight ahead of them. He wondered if these two men always waited on the third mornings of the Princesses’ champions; and if so, what they had seen before.
He leaned down to pick up the heavy goblet; the cloak of shadows, nothing but a bit of black cloth to the eye, held round its stem, and clutched his wrist as if for reassurance. The wine-sodden cloak he left lying as it was.
He turned to the waiting servants, and they led the way to the door of the Long Gallery, down the stairs, and along the hall to the high chamber the soldier had sat in for three cheerless feasts at the King’s right hand. Now the King sat in a tall chair at the end of this chamber; and his daughters stood on either hand. And around them, filling the hall till only a narrow way remained from the door to the feet of the King, were men and women who had heard of the new challenger come to try to learn how the Princesses danced holes in their shoes each night, locked in the Long Gallery by their father, who held the only key to that great mysterious door. And now they were come to hear what that hero had found.
The two servants that escorted him paused at the door to the great room, and made their bows; and the soldier went in alone. The subdued murmur of voices stopped at once upon his entrance. The hope and hopelessness that hung in the air were almost tangible; he could almost feel hands clutching at him, pleading with him. But he went on, much heartened; for the voices were real human voices, and he knew about hope and despair.
As he strode forward, one hand held to his breast with a thin shred of black dangling from the wrist and hand and what it held only a blur of shadows, someone stepped out of the crowd and stood before him. It was the captain of the guard, the man he called friend, however few the words they had actually exchanged; and in his hands he carried a bundle. This bundle he held out to the soldier, and the soldier took it; and he looked into his friend’s eyes and smiled. The captain smiled back, anxiously, searching his face, and stepped back then; and the soldier went on to where the King sat. There he knelt, and on the first step of the dais he set two shrouded things from his two hands.
Then he stood, and looked at the King, who, sitting in the high throne, looked down at him.
“Well,” said the King. He did not raise his voice, but the King’s voice was such of its own that it might reach every corner with each word, as the King chose. This “Well” now would ring in the ears of the man or woman farthest from him in this crowded room. “You have spent now three nights in the Long Gallery, guarding the sleep of my daughters, while for three more nights they have danced holes in their new shoes. Can you tell us how it is that every night, although they may not stir from their chamber, these new dancing slippers are worn quite through, and each morning beneath each bed is not a pair of shoes, but a few worn tatters of cloth?”
“Yes,” said the soldier. “I can.” His voice was no less clear than the King’s own; and a hush ran round the room that was louder than words. “And I will.” He bent and picked up the bundle that the captain had given him; and was surprised at the suppleness of his body, now that the waiting was finished.
“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 i
n 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.
But then too there was little time for thought, for what was certain was that the ground underfoot suddenly rose up to strike at those who had so long taken its imperturbability for granted. It rose up, and sank away again, and quivered alarmingly, and several people cried out, though none was hurt; a few stumbled and fell to their knees. A dull but thunderous roar was heard at some distance they could not guess at. A servant came in during the stunned silence following the half-believed shadow and the unknown roar, and explained, so far as he could; and bowed shakily, and went away again. The floor of the walled-in Long Gallery had collapsed, burying forever the entrance to the underground lake.
No one knew what the Princesses thought, and no one inquired. When any dared stop feeling themselves to be sure they were there, and not home in bed, and looking surreptitiously at those who stood around them, who were looking surreptitiously back, and free to raise their eyes and look at the royal daughters again, the Princesses’ faces were calm, their eyes downcast, as before. But those who stood nearest the soldier and the King and the twelve Princesses thought that the King and his daughters were whiter than they were wont to be. And yet at the same time there was something like the joy the soldier had seen pulling at the King’s face pulling as well at his daughters’ eyes and mouths and hands.
The soldier knew what had happened, and believed; he knew about nightmares. But he knew also that there were nightmares that happened when one was awake, which was a knowledge denied most of the quiet farm folk and city merchants present around him. And he was appalled at this shadow he had freed. He looked down at his feet. A wisp of black, gossamer thin, delicate as a lady’s veil, lay before him. He knelt to pick it up, and it stirred gently against his palm; and he heard as he knelt the King’s voice speaking to him.
“Can you tell us how you succeeded in this thing? How none tried to prevent you from going where you would?”
The soldier straightened up once more, holding the terrible goblet, empty now, chaste and still, in one hand, and the little bit of black in the other. “An old woman gave me a cloak,” he said slowly. “A black cloak, to make me invisible; for I told her where I was bound, and why; and though I had done her but a small service that any might have done in my place, she wished to give me this gift.” He looked up, met the King’s eyes. “And she warned me not to drink the wine the Princesses would offer me when I lay down in my corner of the Long Gallery; and warned me too that not to drink might be more difficult than it seems to tell it.”
“This cloak,” said the King. “Where is it now?”
“I do not know,” said the soldier, and the hand not holding the cup closed gently around the shred of black rag that was a cloak no longer.
The King stood up from his throne then and stepped down till he stood on the floor next to the soldier; and in his eyes was the gladness the soldier had seen flare up when first he began his story; but there was no attempt to moderate or conceal it now, and it struck the soldier full in the face. And something like that joy—for a poor and weary soldier has little knowledge of joy—rose up in the soldier’s heart. And he thought as he had thought three nights before: “This is the commander that I fought for, although I did not know it; I am glad that I have been permitted to meet him.” But as he looked upon the King’s face now, he thought that the drinking of their sovereign’s health was not a wasted tradition at all. Years fell away from the soldier as he stood smiling at his commander, and certain memories he had never been able to shut out of his dreams went quietly to sleep themselves. The goblet dropped from his hand without his knowing. It fell to the floor with a dull and heavy clang; and not one eye followed it, for all were looking at the King and the man who had returned him his happiness. The goblet was forgotten; and much later, the servants who came to set the room to rights did not find it, although several of them knew it should be there to be found.
Then the King said so that all the people might hear: “You know the reward for the breaking of this spell: you shall marry one of my daughters, and she shall be Queen and you King after me, and the eldest of your children shall sit on the throne after you.”
The soldier found that he was looking over the King’s shoulder, and his eyes, without his asking them to, found the down-turned face of the eldest Princess. As her father finished speaking she looked up, and met the soldier’s gaze; and then he knew that the odd stirring beneath his breast bone that he had felt in the face of the King’s happiness was joy indeed, for it welled up so strongly it could not be mistaken.
“Give me the eldest,” he heard his voice say, “for I am no longer young.”
And the eldest Princess stepped forward before her father had the chance to say yea or nay, and walked to him, and held out her hand to him; but he did not realize till her fingers closed around his that he had reached out his hand to her.
The people cheered; the soldier heard it, but did not notice when it first began. The Princess’s eyes, that looked into his now so clearly and peacefully, were an unusual color, a sweet lavender that was almost blue; and in them he read a wisdom that comforted him, for it held a sense of youth that had nothing to do with years.
He did not know what it was the Princess saw as she looked at him that made her smile so wonderfully; but he thought he might learn, and so he smiled back.
EPILOGUE
THE WEDDING was celebrated but a fortnight later; time enough only to invite everyone, not only those who lived in the city or nearby, but those who lived far up in the mountains, those even who lived beyond the kingdom’s borders who would reach out to grasp the hand of friendship thus offered, and come and da
nce at the wedding. There was barely time enough for all the barrels of wine and of flour and sugar, and haunches of beef and venison, and all the fruits that the city and the ships at its docks might furnish, to be brought to the castle and dealt with magnificently by the royal cooks. And all the time that the cooks were baking and stewing and roasting and arranging, all the seamstresses and tailors were sewing new gowns and tunics, and the jesters studied new tricks, and the theatrical troupes went over new sketches, and the musicians unearthed all the dancing music they had once played with such delight, and learned it all over again, but even better than before. It was the grandest wedding that all the people in a country all working together might bring about; and there was help from neighboring countries and their kings too, whether they could attend or not, for many were glad to see their old friend restored to happiness. And there were a number of noble sons thoughtfully dispatched to look over the eleven other Princesses. And the gaiety was such that people felt quite free to compliment all the Princesses on how beautifully they danced; and if perhaps the eldest danced the best of all, seven of her sisters were nonetheless betrothed by the end of the week’s celebration, and the other four by the time she and her new husband returned from their bridal trip.
The youngest Princess married the captain of the guard. Once this might have been thought too lowly a match for a royal Princess; but her fiancé had been seen to be the right-hand man of the new Crown Prince.
And an ostler who had once told a restless soldier the story of the twelve dancing Princesses came to the wedding by special invitation, which included a horse from the royal stables to ride on; and this ostler later admired all the King’s stable and stud so intelligently that room was found for him there. And by the time he had taught thirty-two young Princes and forty-seven young Princesses how to ride and drive and take proper care of their horses, he was Master of the Stable and ready to retire.