"But it's nearly a month to Hallow E'en," said Fiona.

"You'll want every minute of it," said the bird. "Come on."

And they started off for the fairy ring, the woodc.o.c.k pattering along on his little feet at a pace which would have surprised anyone who had never seen a woodc.o.c.k do it.

"How come you to be doorkeeper?" asked Fiona, as they went.

"Hereditary," said the bird. "We used to go to all the lost lands, you know, like Lyonesse and Lemuria and Bresil and Atlantis. We still cross Ireland once a year and pa.s.s on into the Atlantic to salute the site of Plato's island, before we settle in Britain. And Fairyland is only another of the lost lands. Here we are."

They had come to the fairy ring.

"There's nothing more I can do now," said the woodc.o.c.k. "A straight step and a stout heart, my dear."

Fiona took the feather in her hand and stood in the fairy ring.

CHAPTER VII

FIONA IN THE FAIRY-WORLD

It was very, very dark. Fiona could not see her hand if she held it close before her eyes. It was just blackness. Only one thing broke it; far away--many miles it might be--was a tiny speck of white, like the point of a pin. All round her in the dark were little soft sounds; they brushed against her feet, and pa.s.sed before her face; little soft sounds, apparently without bodies. She held the tiny point-feather firmly in the fingers of her left hand, and touched it from time to time with her right, as she felt her way, one foot before the other--she could not walk--towards the point of light. And with her and about her went the small soft sounds; one would have said that they whispered and chuckled in the darkness.

How far and how long she went she could never guess; there was nothing by which to measure time or distance, and evidently she was not going to feel hunger or fatigue.

At last she became conscious of a change. The white speck of light was growing brighter and larger; and the small soft sounds were becoming tangible. One brushed past her face, and she felt it; she put out a hand, and there was a scuffing and chuckling, as if they were playing blind man's buff with her. Then the light began to take shape; it was a circular pool lying on the floor and wall of the avenue of blackness down which she was pa.s.sing; and it came from something on the other side. And the little soft sounds crowded round her; they laughed, they whispered, they clutched at her dress; they were trying to guide her in a certain direction. She tried to shake them off, and found that, though they could touch her, she could not touch them. And then she came into the pool of light.

The light came down a sort of short pa.s.sage between rocks, with a well-trodden floor; and at the end of it, not twenty yards from where she stood, she could see the fairy grotto. One grand white carbuncle, as big as an arc lamp, hung from the roof, filling the grotto with dazzling white light; and the radiance of the carbuncle was flung back in a million points of new splendor from the walls of the grotto, shifting and shimmering like the rainbow across a waterfall, ruby and orange, yellow and emerald, sapphire and violet, changing as each new facet came into play; for the walls of the grotto were set thick with cut jewels of every hue and color. A glorious sight it looked; and Fiona suddenly became aware that the soft things that clutched at her dress and the soft things that whispered in her ear, were all trying to draw her toward the beautiful grotto. But she felt her feather, and it pointed straight on into the dark. So she moved forward; and with the first step she saw the trap. The floor of the beautiful grotto yawned wide, showing the horrible abyss beneath it; and the darkness was full of soft flutterings, and the chuckling of mocking laughter.

But they touched her no more at the time; and suddenly the darkness fell away on each side like a wall, and she stepped out into daylight.

She was in the desert. The yellow burning sand stretched all round her, a ma.s.s of glittering particles that made the eyes sore; wave after wave, it went billowing away to the red burning hills that faced and flung back the burning sun. Mile after mile she stumbled along in that aching heat; and then, as she topped a great hillock of sand, she suddenly saw the fairy city. Very beautiful it looked, rose-pink on a wooded island in a fair lake of water, whose blue mirror gave back every trembling cupola and minaret; and toward it, down a broad track marked by tamarisk bushes, went a goodly company of merchants, with tinkling bells on their camels' necks and golden ornaments on their camels' heads, the company of a chief who rode ahead on a white Arab steed with his long jezail laid across his saddle-bow. Here could no doubt be; and Fiona all but stepped on to the broad path in the track of the caravan. But even as she turned she caught sight of the feather and checked herself just in time; and the beautiful city of mirage melted away, and there was no caravan there, but only sand marked by the bones of men, and in place of the tamarisk bushes were gray vultures feasting in a row. She followed the feather straight on across the burning desert; and on a sudden she walked out of the sand into shade.

She was out in the forest. Huge trees rose like the pillars of a cathedral nave, branching far above her head and shutting out the daylight; and up their trunks ran starred creepers of every hue, fighting their way up to the sun. Down from the branches hung orchids of all fantastic shapes, in long still streamers, and great moon moths fluttered round them, taking their joy in the dim light. And the farther she went the thicker grew the forest, and the more oppressive the airless heat. Trailing plants ran across her feet and tried to trip her up; the great trunks closed together till there was barely room to force a way between; the thorns of the creepers tore at her flesh, and instead of the beautiful orchids there came on the trees huge funguses red as blood. And the small soft voices began again; they had caught her up; the forest was full of the same little sounds which she had heard before, whispering and chuckling and fingering her dress. And then, just as it seemed impossible to fight a way farther through the dense jungle, she came to the open glade. Full of gra.s.s and flowers and sunshine it was, and across it ran a gurgling brook, crossed by a little plank bridge; a sweet breeze moved the gra.s.s, and beyond the brook two little spotted deer were feeding; far in the distance were tiny peaks of snow. The soft fingers were all tugging at Fiona's dress, impelling her down the glade; but she had had ample warning of those soft fingers, and she saw that the feather pointed straight on through the tangled forest. And even as she moved she saw that the little bridge was the back of a great water-python; and the fingers loosed their hold of her dress, and the air was full of soft whisperings and laughter. And she walked straight on into the tangled thicket before her; and the forest parted to right and left, and she walked out.

She was in a fair country of green gra.s.s and temperate airs, where the path lay true and straight before her through vineyards and groves of oranges. Here and there a cherry tree swung its crown of white blossom above her head, or a cypress stood up tall and straight as a sentinel on duty. Purple flags bloomed under the rocks, and on a clump of brown orchises sat two little jewelled b.u.t.terflies, burnished green as old copper; up the path of the sunlight came a swallowtail with its stately glancing flight. Everything spoke to her here of fair peace and security; and when she heard the air still rustling with little soft sounds and chuckles, and knew that they had followed her, she began to wonder how it was that, now that she knew their ways, they should think it worth while. And they were becoming most active. The soft sounds brushed all round her; the soft fingers grasped her arms; tiny weightless bodies behind her seemed to be impelling her forward.

And then before her she saw the inevitable two paths: the broad flat path that pa.s.sed through a fair orchard of lemon trees, where the sunlight threw chequers on to the gra.s.s beneath, starred with scarlet and purple anemones; and the narrow stony track, terribly steep, which toiled away up the bare hillside in heat radiated from the rocks.

Never had the soft sounds been so insistent; a myriad gentle hands were trying to steer her, even to push her by force, toward the lemon trees. She saw the folly of them so very clearly; and her foot was actually raised to take the first step up the hill path, when she felt the feather turn of itself in her hand, and she became ice from head to foot as she realized that she had all but destroyed herself by despising her opponents. They had striven this time to force her into the _true_ path, believing that she would certainly take the opposite one.

She saw now the end of the fatal hill path, the sudden crumbling precipice which flung men on to pointed rocks far below; and the air behind her became full of woe, voiceless wailings and silent howls of rage, and she saw what she had fought against; a troop of small formless black things, like immature bats, with pale fingers, that fled moaning down the path of the sunlight. She knew now that they would not vex her again.

She pa.s.sed on through the lemon orchard, and out on to a bare hillside, rough with stones and dotted here and there with great oak trees; plants of asphodel were thrusting their blossoms up among the coa.r.s.e tufts of gra.s.s, and far below, in all its laughing splendor, lay the sea. And as she turned the shoulder of the hill she saw the temple, a fair Doric temple of gray marble, standing in lonely beauty among the scattered oak trees. Its metopes were carved with the figures of G.o.ds and heroes of an older day, and round it ran a frieze of warriors who fought with Amazon women. The singing was just over, it seemed; and the double choir of white-robed girls, who had been giving strophe and antistrophe of some festival ode, had broken into groups, these playing at ball, those reclining in the shade or strolling about with their arms round each other's waists. In her chair in the cool portico sat the fair-faced matronly priestess, still crowned with red roses, and before her two little boys poured wine into a crystal goblet. And as she saw Fiona she rose from her chair and greeted her by name, calling her happy that she had now come safely through the path of danger and that her troubles were ended.

"Come here to us," she said, "and rest, for it is but a little way now that you must go, and there is ample time; slake your thirst at this crystal goblet, and lie awhile in the shade, while these maidens crown you with flowers."

But Fiona had learnt her lesson, and she looked at her feather; and the feather pointed straight along the hillside. So she pa.s.sed on without a look or a word; and as she pa.s.sed came a noise as of the earth opening; and the pillars of the temple bowed themselves, and the middle of the building collapsed stone by stone, till only the outer columns remained among a ma.s.s of fallen blocks, and triglyph and metope and sculptured frieze lay in fragments about them. And among the ruins a red fox with two cubs sat and snarled, as she watched a company of toads crawling in the dust; and of that fair scene all that had not changed was the pallid asphodel, the asphodel whose home is in those other meadows where walk the pallid dead.

And as Fiona pa.s.sed on, the hillside itself dissolved in mist, and there before her lay the fairy grove. And the guardian of the grove, with white beard sweeping the ground, and old trembling hands, came out to meet her. And she showed him her feather, and from his belt he drew out and held up its fellow; and she knew that the path of danger was over.

"No one has come through by the way you have come for more years than my old memory can follow," he said. "They always fail at the lemon orchard. How did you escape?"

And Fiona told him how the feather had turned in her hand of itself.

The old man bowed almost to the ground.

"That was the direct grace of the King," he said. "You must be a person of the greatest consequence."

And when Fiona said, "I am just an ordinary girl," he again bowed low and said: "Young lady, I take leave to doubt it."

Then he gave Fiona her directions for finding the King, and warned her that she must not loiter in the fairy grove, for the fairies were already gathering for All Hallows E'en.

So Fiona walked swiftly through the grove, not seeing one half of its beauties, though she would have loved to have lingered among the trees. For in the grove grew every tree and plant famous in legend or in history, of which not the tenth part can be told here. There was the Norse ash, whose roots bind together the framework of the earth; there the Irish hazel, of whose nuts could a man but taste he would know all knowledge and all wisdom; there the African pomegranate, but for whose sweetness the Corn-spirit would have disdained to stay beneath the earth, and the race of men would have perished. There stood Deborah's terebinth and Diotima's plane, and the Bo-tree beneath whose branches Gautama Buddha sought and found the path of Enlightenment. There grew the paper-reeds of Egypt, the repository through many centuries of a whole world's learning, the paper-reeds that grow no longer in their old home, even as the prophet Isaiah foretold; and there the clove, for whose perfumed pistils great nations had warred together and brave men died under torture. There stood the English trees, the oak and the white acacia, which had built the three-deckers for the greatest sea captain the world has seen.

There was that great traveller, the mulberry, which had left its home on the Yangtse to follow the old Silk Route across Asia; which had crossed the stony Gobi, where wild camels run and the Djinn light their lamps at night to decoy travellers; which had seen the Khotan girls wading knee-deep in the Khotan River, searching for the previous white jade which should make G.o.ds for China, as erstwhile for Nineveh and Troy; which had skirted the wandering lake of Lop-nor, and had tarried awhile in old dead cities, now buried under the sands of the dreaded Taklamakan; which had seen the turquoise mines of Khora.s.san, and voyaged on the broad Oxus stream, till from Iran its way lay clear to the west. There grew the cedars of the Atlas, which had aided their great mountain to support the sky, and had sailed south with Hanno to the Guinea Gulf, to bring home those gorilla hides which lay on the altar of Melcarth at Carthage; and there the most famous of all the trees of the forest, the proud cedars of Lebanon, which had once exulted with their voices over the fall of the king of a.s.syria, which had built for Solomon his temple and his house for the daughter of Pharaoh, and which had given to the princes of Tyre the ships in which, greatly daring, they had ranged the three seas, bringing home the gold of India and the silver of Spain and the tin of Cornwall, the wealth of the east and the west, myrrh and frankincense and purple dye, ivory and apes and peac.o.c.ks. And last of all was the twisted gray olive, beloved of gray-eyed Pallas Athene, the symbol of all that raises man above the savage, the tree in whose train, as it moved out from its home in Asia, had grown up all the civilizations that ringed the Mediterranean.

So Fiona pa.s.sed through the grove and came out on a broad place of gra.s.s, and right before her stood the fairy ring. But not such a one as the ring on Glenollisdal which she knew. This ring was of vast size, and round it grew in a circle huge red toadstools splotched with white, the red toadstools from which the witches of Lapland had used to brew philtres of love and death. But vast as it was, it could not hold all the creatures that swarmed round it. It was a gathering such as Fiona had never dreamt of. On the outskirts stood an innumerable host of little strange beings, of every sort and shape, elves and brownies, gnomes and pixies, trolls and kobolds, goblins and leprechauns; and the babel of them as they whispered together was like the noise of a flock of fieldfares. And within them and around the ring itself stood the fairies.

All the lost peoples and nations and languages, it seemed, were there in miniature; everyone that Fiona had ever heard her father speak of, and many another of which even he knew nothing. There were fairies of the Old Stone peoples, brave-eyed, clad in pelts of the saber-tooth, bearing the blade-bones of bisons on which were carved pictures of the mammoth and the reindeer. Fairies from Egypt, clad in fine white linen with girdles of topaz and aquamarine, with fillets round their brows from which the golden uraeus lifted its snake's head, bearing blossoms of the blue lotus. Fairies from Babylon, glowing in coats of scarlet or of many colors, their eyes deep with immemorial learning, bearing clay tablets on which were signs like the footprints of birds. Fairies from Crete, light of foot in the dance, in flounced skirts adorned with golden b.u.t.terflies, crowned with yellow crocuses and bearing vases on which were painted the creatures of the sea, nautilus and flying fish and polyp. Fairies of the Iberians, black-haired and black-eyed, clad in black cloaks, small and shy and dusty, bearing ingots of tin. Fairies from Cappadocia, in peaked shoes, and pelisses of lion's skin trimmed with the fur of hares, moving to the clash of cymbals, bearing grapes and ears of corn. Fairies from Mexico, with heavy cheek bones, resplendent in mantles woven of the plumage of the quetzal bird, carrying bricks of gold. Fairies from Ethiopia, black as the black diamond, clad in leopard skins and plumed with the feathers of ostriches, carrying tusks of ivory. Fairies from the land of Sheba, well skilled in riddles, in cloaks of camel's hair buckled with clasps of onyx, bearing caskets of agate filled with spices. Buddhist fairies of the Naga race, with the sevenfold cobra's hood springing from their shoulders and shadowing them, languorous and heavy-eyed, carrying crimson water lilies. Fairies from Cambodia, in stiff dresses of cloth of gold, with gilded faces and scarlet eyebrows, bearing paG.o.da bells which tinkled. Fairies of the Golden Horde, bandy-legged, with pug noses and slits of eyes, clad in dyed sheepskins and carrying the tails of horses. Fairies of the Picts, tattooed to the eyelids, their plaids dyed with crotal and the root of the yellow iris, wearing badges of mountain fern or bog-myrtle and bearing jars of heather ale.

Fairies of Britain, in deerskin cloaks fastened with brooches of enamel, with golden torques circling their throats, bearing sprays of mistletoe. Fairies of the Tuatha-de, with all the youth of the world in their eyes, clad in robes of saffron, crowned with rowans and bearing harps. Fairies from Greece, erect and lissom, beautiful as a sculptor's dream, crowned with wild olive and bearing each the roll of a book. Fairies of old England, in Lincoln green, with feathers of the gray goose in their caps, bearing bows of yew and branches of the may.

Fairies from Baghdad, radiant as visions of the night-time, their turbans and their crooked scimitars jewelled with rubies of Badakshan, bearing magic lamps. Fairies from Quinsay, dainty as porcelain, their silken robes embroidered with blossoms of the almond and the peach tree, bearing jars of coral lac wrought in the likeness of dragons, and on their heads the poppy flowers that bring sleep.

And in the middle of the ring stood a throne carved out of a single beryl, green as the sea; and on the throne sat the King of the Fairies, with eyes bright as the dawn and deep as the sea caves, in a cloak of Tyrian purple with clasps of amethyst. His crown and sceptre were of white gold, white gold which has long since perished out of the upper world, and in the end of his sceptre was set a double pentacle of clear crystal brought from the Island of Desire. And in the beryl throne, if he looked at it through the crystal, were shown to him the reflections of all things that he might wish to see. If he looked directly, he saw all that had happened in the world in the past; and if he reversed the crystal, he saw all that should happen in the future; but if he held the pentacle edgewise, then he saw the present, which no man ever sees, and was the greatest magic of all.

Round the throne stood his guards, black as Moors, in jackets and trousers of emerald green clasped with orange zircons; half of them bore trumpets of silver, and half of them carried spears with heads of green obsidian as sharp as steel. And on either side of the throne, on a stool, sat a strange creature, a little wizened elf with a large book on his knee. One wore a white cap, and he bore an inkhorn and a bundle of long quills; the other wore a black cap, and he bore a penknife.

Fiona edged herself as far forward as she could into the ring of strange beings, and found herself next an old Leprechaun with a face like a wrinkled apple, who seemed quite inclined to be friendly.

"A human!" he said. "We do not see as many as we used to. But they say there are two to be tried to-night. As you see, we have attempted something out of the ordinary in the way of a welcome." And he waved his arm proudly round the enormous a.s.sembly. "Had far to come?" he asked.

Fiona told him how long it had taken her.

"That's nothing," he said. "There are people here to-night who, as soon as the dance is over, will start travelling as fast as they can, and will only just arrive in time for next year's meeting. Good for the shoemaking trade!"

"Where do they try the prisoners?" she asked him.

"Here, in the ring," said the Leprechaun. "The King tries them.

There's the Public Prosecutor," and he pointed to a fairy of pompous aspect, with a hooked nose and a Roman toga, and a roll under his arm.

"He's a terrible fellow. And there's the King's Remembrancer, those two with the books."

"Why are there two?" asked Fiona.

"One to remember and one to forget, of course, stupid," said the Leprechaun. "Whereever were you educated? Do you think kings want to remember _everything_?"

"It must be very easy forgetting," said Fiona.

"Hardest job in Fairyland," said the Leprechaun. "I suppose you know lots of people with perfect memories; but you never knew one with a perfect forgetfulness, eh? Whitecap there only has to write his book up; but poor Blackcap--he's the one that forgets--his book is written up to start with, and he has to get the pages clean again with his penknife. He never gets them _quite_ clean. They say he has nightmare every night over the things he can't forget altogether."

The King had been talking to one of the officers of his guard. He now rose and held out his sceptre, and there was a great silence round the Fairy ring.