• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 661 0

blue, and green, and thick with gold. The Royal Folk had taken on color too. He could see the milk-whiteness of their skins and the berry-red of their women’s lips, and how their hair shone like gold or copper. Their clothes were the green of water or the purple of lilac, as the trees are, half of them, they say, in the Lands beneath the hills. But that was not all, for all around, in the body of the castle, which had suddenly gone back in time and back to life, sat the human persons who had once dwelled there, kings and princes from countless centuries, in their finest finery. And the fey horses with human feet walked couthly up and down, white as snow, with silver manes, and the tiny little creatures bounced and rang against the walls like bells, and white dogs with crimson eyes and collars of gold lay still as statues.Yet one thing now was all the same with them. Every eye in that great place was fixed on Colum.

Colum was a handsome man, and used quite often to being made much of. He was accustomed to going into a room, or a dance hall, to a crowd of eyes that turned and whispers behind hands.

But never from such as these.

He turned to stone himself, stood there growing sober as a pain.

However, she, his Speir-Bhan, she turned and took both his hands in her cold-fire fingers.

“Now, Colum, it’s your night. Haven’t I told you. What is that you’re carrying?”

And looking down, Colum saw that now in his left hand, which she no longer held, was a small curved harp of smoothest brown wood, with silver pegs and strings the light had gilded.

“Fair miss,” said Colum, “if I’m here as the harper, you’d better know, I can play ‘Chopsticks’ on my granny’s piano, and that’s the sum of my parts.”

But she only shook her head.And by then, somehow, they had got to the centre of the room.

Directly before Colum on four great chairs knuckled with gold, sat two kings and two queens. No mistaking them, their heads were crowned. “I have never known enough of the history to describe those clothes they wore,” said Colum, “but I thought they were from the far-off past, before even the castle had come up there out of the rock. And one of the queens, too, she that had the creamy golden hair falling down to her little white shoes, I think she was not only earthly royal, but of the Royal Folk, too.”

“Well, Colum,” said the king to the right, “will you be after playing us anything, then?”

Colum swallowed.

Then he found his hands—the hands the Speir-Bhan had held—had each opened, like his neck, an eye—not visible, but to be felt.And he put both hands on the harp and a rill of music burst glittering into the many-colored room, and everywhere around was silence, as they listened.

This was the song that Colum sang, written as it is in his book:

Woman veiled with hair, shaming the gold of princes,

In your sun-bright tresses dwells

A flock of sun-bright cuckoos,

That will madden with jealous unease

Any man yearning to possess you.

So long and fair your streaming crown,

It is a golden ring,

And your face set in there like a pearl,

And your eyes like sapphires from a lake.

This is your finest jewelry,

These yellowest ringlets,

Which have caught me now in their chains,

Shackled, your thrall indeed.

No wonder then the cuckoo

Winters in the Underlands,

To sleep in the heaven

Of your veil of hair.

Colum struck the last chord. The silence stayed like deafness. And in the quiet, he heard over in his mind what he had sung—the musicality of his voice and art of his own playing—and the unwise-ness of his words that none could doubt he had addressed to a woman of Faerie, sitting by her lord.

Now is the time, thought Colum, to take my leave.

He had forgotten the right of harpers to praise the beauty of any woman, royal or not.

Then the applause came, hands that smote on tables, feet that stamped, and voices that called.He saw the Royal Ones were amused, not angry.

The king to the left got up.His tunic was the red of blood, and his cloak was made of gold squares stitched by scarlet thread to yellow.