He did not understand a word of the hymn, nor the music either, but he asked, “Are the young women to be veiled or unveiled?”
“Need you ask?” said the King with one of his great laughs, jerking his thumb in my direction. “Do you think I want my queen frightened out of her senses? Veils of course. And good thick veils too.” One of the other girls tittered, and I think that was the first time I clearly understood that I am ugly.
This made me more afraid of the Stepmother than ever. I thought she would be crueller to me than to Redival because of my ugliness. It wasn’t only what Batta had said that frightened me; I had heard of stepmothers in plenty of stories. And when the night came and we were all in the pillared porch, nearly dazzled with the torches and trying hard to sing our hymn as the Fox had taught us to — and he kept on frowning and smiling and nodding at us while we sang, and once he held up his hands in horror — pictures of things that had been done to girls in the stories were dancing in my mind. Then came the shouts from outside, and more torches, and next moment they were lifting the bride out of the chariot. She was as thickly veiled as we, and all I could see was that she was very small; it was as if they were lifting a child. That didn’t ease my fears; “the little are the spiteful,” our proverb says. Then (still singing) we got her into the bridal chamber and took off her veil.
I know now that the face I saw was beautiful, but I did not think of that then. All I saw was that she was frightened, more frightened than I — indeed terrified. It made me see my father as he must have looked to her, a moment since, when she had her first sight of him standing to greet her in the porch. His was not a brow, a mouth, a girth, a stance, or a voice to quiet a girl’s fear.
We took off layer after layer of her finery, making her yet smaller, and left the shivering, white body with its staring eyes in the King’s bed, and filed out. We had sung very badly.
Chapter Two
I can say very little about my father’s second wife, for she did not live till the end of her first year in Glome. She was with child as soon as anyone could reasonably look for it, and the King was in high spirits and hardly ever ran across the Fox without saying something about the prince who was to be born. He made great sacrifices to Ungit every month after that. How it was between him and the Queen I do not know; except that once, after messengers had come from Caphad, I heard the King say to her, “It begins to look, girl, as if I had driven my sheep to a bad market. I learn now that your father has lost two towns — no, three, though he tries to mince the matter. I would thank him to have told me he was sinking before he persuaded me to embark in the same bottom.” (I was leaning my head on my window-sill to dry my hair after the bath, and they were walking in the garden.) However that might be, it is certain that she was very homesick, and I think our winter was too hard for her southern body. She was soon pale and thin. I learned that I had nothing to fear from her. She was at first more afraid of me; after that, very loving in her timid way, and more like a sister than a stepmother.
Of course no one in the house went to bed on the night of the birth, for that, they say, will make the child refuse to wake into the world. We all sat in the great hall between the Pillar Room and the Bedchamber, in a red glare of birth-torches. The flames swayed and guttered terribly, for all doors must be open; the shutting of a door might shut up the mother’s womb. In the middle of the hall burned a great fire. Every hour the Priest of Ungit walked round it nine times and threw in the proper things. The King sat in his chair and never moved all night, not even his head. I was sitting next to the Fox.
“Grandfather,” I whispered to him, “I am terribly afraid.”
“We must learn, child, not to fear anything that nature brings,” he whispered back.
I must have slept after that, for the next thing I knew was the sound of women wailing and beating the breast as I had heard them do it the day my mother died. Everything had changed while I slept. I was shivering with cold. The fire had sunk low, the King’s chair was empty, the door of the Bedchamber was at last shut, and the terrible sounds from within it had stopped. There must have been some sacrifice too, for there was a smell of slaughtering, and blood on the floor, and the Priest was cleaning his holy knife. I was all in a daze from my sleep, for I started up with the wildest idea; I would go and see the Queen. The Fox was after me long before I reached the door of the Bedchamber. “Daughter, daughter,” he was saying. “Not now. Are you mad? The King — “
At that moment the door was flung open and out came my father. His face shocked me full awake, for he was in his pale rage. I knew that in his red rage he would storm and threaten, and little might come of it, but when he was pale he was deadly. “Wine,” he said, not very loud; and that too was a bad sign. The other slaves pushed forward a boy who was rather a favourite, as slaves do when they are afraid. The child, white as his master and in all his finery (my father dressed the younger slaves very fine) came running with the flagon and the royal cup, slipped in the blood, reeled, and dropped both. Quick as thought, my father whipped out his dagger and stabbed him in the side. The boy dropped dead in the blood and wine, and the fall of his body sent the flagon rolling over and over. It made a great noise in that silence; I hadn’t thought till then that the floor of the hall was so uneven. (I have re- paved it since.)
My father stared for a moment at his own dagger; stupidly, it seemed. Then he went very gently up to the Priest.
“What have you to say for Ungit now?” he asked, still in that low voice. “You had better recover what she owes me. When are you going to pay me for my good cattle?” Then, after a pause, “Tell me, prophet, what would happen if I hammered Ungit into powder and tied you between the hammers and the stone?”
But the Priest was not in the least afraid of the King.
“Ungit hears, King, even at this moment,” he said.
“And Ungit will remember. You have already said enough to call down doom upon all your descendants.”
“Descendants,” says the King. “You talk of descendants,” still very quiet, but now he was shaking. The ice of his rage would break any moment. The body of the dead boy caught his eye. “Who did that?” he asked. Then he saw the Fox and me. All the blood rushed into his face, and now at last the voice came roaring out of his chest loud enough to lift the roof.
“Girls, girls, girls!” he bellowed. “And now one girl more. Is there no end to it? Is there a plague of girls in heaven that the gods send me this flood of them? You — you — “ He caught me by the hair, shook me to and fro, and flung me from him so that I fell in a heap. There are times when even a child knows better than to cry. When the blackness passed and I could see again, he was shaking the Fox by his throat.
“Here’s an old babbler who has eaten my bread long enough,” he said. “It would have paid me better to buy a dog as things turn out. But I’ll feed you in idleness no longer. Some of you take him to the mines tomorrow. There might be a week’s work in his old bones even now.”
Again there was dead silence in the hall. Suddenly the King flung up his hands, stamped, and cried, “Faces, faces, faces! What are you all gaping at? It’d make a man mad. Be off! Away! Out of my sight, the whole pack of you!”
We were out of the hall as quick as the doorways would let us.
The Fox and I went out of the little door by the herb-garden on the east. It was nearly daylight now and there was a small rain beginning.
“Grandfather,” said I, sobbing, “you must fly at once. This moment, before they come to take you to the mines.”
He