THE BEAUTIFUL WOMAN WHO WOULD NOT BE TURNED ASIDE

INVOCATION

If it was given us to read your mind, O rhapsodic bard, what tales your thoughts could tell, the like of the old legends of the heroes of old! Though it is often enough the heroes fail. Tell us one thought out of them: the tale of the damsel unturning and yet many-perfidied, the unswerving beautiful lady.

I

There was a realm in it one time, and it was said of the people of it that they held more gold by the head than the people of any realm for a hundred horizons, whatever way you would go; and the weather in it was always fair, and the harvests always came in, and the bellies were always full and the children always laughing. The Fair Lady was over that realm from the day she first came into it in a canoe, one-and-sixty thousand risings of the morning star ago and three hundred and twenty besides, and stood at the end of the pier and gave out that she was Queen, and she holding a sceptre with a pear of glass on the head of it and a dark cord trailing from it in the mud behind her; and she laughed before any one else could laugh; and the sceptre — as we only learnt a hundred springs after, when she put the end of the cord into one of the newly invented “outlets” and the glass pear began to glow, and there was light in it — was a lamp. It was on account of the weather she was called Fair. And fair she was, at times when her people would as soon she was not.

She kept a hundred brave and honourable knights about her, and a hundred learned squires to wait on them, and damsels there were in the realm past counting. She had made it a hundred of each before ever there was need of it, and no one asked her why, for no one asked the Fair Lady why.

The year of that realm was reckoned in ten houses, and it was not the year of the sun. Five houses the star went before the sun and five it went after, and between the fives there were the dark passages, when it was in neither and nothing at all was marked. Why it was ten and not twelve nobody could tell you. It was ten in the time of their grandmothers. And five was the number they buried by, five nights of a wake and five flowers on the mound, and five fruits set out on a table at a wedding, and an oath was sworn on the five; and if you asked why five, they would look at you.

There was one story older in that realm than the Fair Lady, and it was the only thing that was. It was a story for children, and it went that the Star went down under the world one time and was eaten there, and came up again after, and does be going down and coming up yet. There was no more to it than that. No one in the realm thought it was about anything.

She kept no book of prophecies, the Fair Lady. If you asked her what would to-morrow bring, she would ask you back what was it was planted yesterday, and what road was after washing out, and who was owing grain to who, and what child was after taking the fever, and what promises were made already; and it was out of the like of those things she was used to tell the morrow.

II

There was an evil beast in it, with three red eyes, that put the terror on the Fair Lady’s realm for one-and-twenty years. It came out of the Kingdom of All Evils and presented itself at the Fair Lady’s castle. In the presence of the Fair Lady it gave out that it was hungry, and for what purpose it did not know. It knew only, it said, that the pangs in it had grown ever more agonising, and the Kingdom of All Evils had grown ever more barren, and it asked to be sated out of the plenty of the Fair Lady’s realm.

— I would give you bread out of our fields, said the Fair Lady, and fish out of our rivers and milk from our cows, to sate your hunger; but there is no appetite in any being the like of yours. To satisfy you my people would suffer, and that is a thing cannot be tolerated.

— Then I must eat by force, said the beast. And it gibbered that every thing that hungers, over all the realms, the fair ones and the grotesque, the thinking and the witless, with the same pangs in it as itself, would be driven to do the same.

The Fair Lady, and the weaker hand hers, put it to the beast then that it might feast off her realm, so long as the beast would swear a vow that within her realm not one of her people would be made dead by the beast direct. And the beast, and it cowardly in its desperation for a bargain with the Fair Lady, swore the vow.

III

First, the terrible hungering beast gave out that it was hungry for Flesh, and it flew across the realm and devoured one in every three of every farmer’s cattle and sheep and mules. It was satisfied for a time; but after the fall of four evening stars and the rising of three morning stars the beast declared again that it was hungry for Knowing, and it drank out of the minds of one in every three of the people, leaving them just enough to know the things that were before their eyes, but not themselves. The beast was satisfied for a time. But after that it let it be known that it was hungry for Names, and it drank the names out of one in every three of the people. From that day out every mother brought forth her children unnamed. They called them by many sounds, but there was no sound belonged to any one of them only, and no child, hearing itself called, could know for certain it was itself was being summoned.

This is what the eating of the Names was. Any word that would pick out the one person and no other, the beast let be said the once; and at the second saying it had the word, and the word died in the mouth that was saying it, and could not be got back. A name is such a word, and the names went first and went quickest. But a word need not be a name to be such a word. There was a blacksmith in the village had the one eye, and a woman called him the one-eyed blacksmith to her neighbour in the road, and the neighbour said it after her, and it was gone; and he was a blacksmith among the blacksmiths from that day. A pointing finger is such a word too, and that was learnt late and dear. What was left to the people was any word that might mean two: a knight, for there were a hundred; a squire, for there were a hundred; a damsel, for there were damsels past counting; a boy, a keeper, a mother. The people learnt to speak so, and this tale is spoken so, for it was spoken first in the years of the beast. Only two words in the realm were let stand that meant the one person: the Fair Lady’s, for she was sovereign, and the beast could not eat what was over it; and one other, that will be told.

And when the round of the three was done the beast was satisfied for a time, and then it was hungry for Flesh again, and the round went about a second time, and a third, one in three of what was left each time, year on year, for the one-and-twenty years; so that a house that was full at the start of it was not full at the end of it.

IV

There was a valley in that realm one time with a river through it and a weir on the river, and forty houses, and the whole living of them was the fish that came up. The Fair Lady measured the lot of that valley and it was ninety years, for a wood was after being cut above it and the silt was coming down, and silt is a thing you can hold in your hand and count. She gave out the year the fish would fail, and she arranged the going, and carts were sent, and land was found in the east, and it was good land, and it was all done before ever the last fish came up.

One woman would not go. She did not dispute the measure. She said only that the weir was mended by her grandmother’s hands and her mother’s after, and that a thing you have mended is not the same as a thing you have. She stayed, and she mended it, and there was nothing coming up it to be caught.

The river had been what held the sea out of the valley. When the river went thin the sea came up the empty channel, quiet, over years, and the grass went and then the thorn and then the walls, and it all whitened. She was found white at the weir with the mending in her two hands, and she had not been dead long enough to fall.

And the Fair Lady put a name on her, and the name is on the valley yet, and the children of the realm are brought out along the ridge road to be shewn it. That is the one that stayed, they are told. That is what staying looks like. She wanted to keep an age, and she was made into the proof that ages end.

V

In a small village there was a handsome and honourable knight, that the Fair Lady had knighted on the two thousand nine hundred and twentieth of his squirehood into the ranks of her hundred, and he was loved, uncaused and without reason, by a beautiful damsel, many-minded and not to be turned, ——. The two of them were born on the one day the beast came, seven hours apart, and one house between them. In their youth, after a tumble in a field of lilies, the squire — as he was then — counted over every way he loved her; and he did not count them for praise, but to see what they cast out.

He loved the damsel because

i. she had straw hair as heavy as sleep, and under the fall of it every resolution in him went willingly under;

ii. her eyes were all pupil and no colour, so that a man looking into them found nothing to name, and only herself;

iii. of a ferocious look she had, that could make folly ashamed of itself, and sent a man’s hand up to his brows to count what was left;

iv. she could desire a thing fiercely and still ask was it right it should be hers;

v. she would not call his cowardice gentleness to spare him shame, nor his cruelty courage to keep his pride, and she could correct him without contempt;

vi. she desired along with him goods that neither of them could have alone: a just house, a generous table, children better taught than they had been themselves, and a village quiet enough that the doors might sleep unbarred;

vii. she knew him as an old wound knows the rain before the sky knows it.

— I love you, said she, and she kissed the squire.

The squire asked the damsel why did she love him, and she said:

— It is a property that is upon it.

VI

Between the house the knight was born in and the house the damsel was born in there was the one house, and it was the fullest house in the village. It had an orchard behind it and a long table in it and cousins at the table and servants behind the cousins; and a full house keeps an inventory, and so did that one, every beast in the byre and every chair at the board and every name in the house, written down. In that house, on the two thousand five hundred and fifty-fifth rising of the morning star after the day the beast came, a boy was born, and no name on him, for it was after the Names.

He was told what the house had been. He did not remember it, for there was nothing of it left to remember by the time he could remember; but the old people at the table would tell him the table was as long as this, and there were as many as this at it, and the orchard bore as much as this, and they would hold their two hands apart to shew him. And he was sorry after it as if he had been in it.

When he was five the round came to Knowing and it took his mother. She had been a woman that knew herself; she was a woman that knew the pot and the door and the child. She looked at him kindly. She did not know what she had been. He knew.

She would stand in the door of an evening and point at him where he sat in the yard, and say:

— You. In to your supper.

And if he did not come, and he did not always come, she would point again, and her arm would go wide of him and stand pointing at the air beside him, and she would look at her arm. He came in then.

It was his work in the house to lay the table in the evening, and every year he laid it shorter, and he could say without looking whose place it was he was not laying. He would say it to himself, going round: this one was the uncle’s, and this one was the cousin’s that went, and this one is my mother’s, that is at it still and is not at it. He read the inventory backward in the winter, from the end of it to the beginning, and it got fuller as he went, and he would put it down and take it up again. He decided at night to have done with it, and in the morning he laid the table short and named the places, for his hand had the habit of it before his head had the decision.

VII

The realm had the one book, and it was the tally of the risings of the morning star kept at the pier since the canoe, one-and-sixty thousand marks and three hundred and twenty besides, and a mark for every setting of the evening star alongside them, and the boy learnt to read it. There were two columns in it and they did not agree, and never had, and there was no one at the pier could tell him why; the morning marks ran ahead and fell behind and ran ahead again, and the men that kept it said only that it was kept so. He asked the once and was not answered and did not ask again, for he was not reading it for that. He read it backward first, for that was his habit. Then he read it forward, and there was nothing to read, for the marks stopped at yesterday; so he made marks of his own on a board, and they were the beast’s marks: one in three, and one in three of what was left, and one in three of that, and the round going about. He carried it out to the year the table would have one place laid, and he knew the year.

And he was growing, and a boy that is growing has to be something; and the village had trades in it, and roads out of it, and girls in it, and to take the one was to leave the rest lying. He would lie in the dark and the sum of the roads would come down on him, and the sum of the years to the one place, and the sum of the old people that would be gone before then, and the sum of himself gone after; and there was no bottom to it.

He could not loose an arrow that year. He would draw, and hold at the full of the draw, and the arrow would not go, for while it was on the string it might go anywhere and once it was off it could go the one place only; and he would hold till his arm went, and let down, and draw again, and let down, till the string had his fingers cut. The knight, that was a squire yet, saw him at it one day at the butts and said nothing.

There was a girl of the village that he was fond of, and a day she was at the well with a bucket too heavy for her, and he had the words ready to say, and he did not say them, and he did not take the handle either. A week after she was asked by another. He kept the moment before he did not say them, and he went back to it in the evenings, and each time he went back the bucket was heavier and the words were readier and he did not say them.

VIII

In the Fair Lady’s realm it was held that every hand belonged to the person at the end of it, and that no one person could say another’s yes or no. That was the whole of the law, or the whole of it every child knew.

And so the road over the gorge at the village lay on a bridge that was held up by seven ropes. Any six of them were strong enough to bear it while the seventh was mending. Every rope ended in a different house, and in every house one keeper kept one knife, so that no one person could let the bridge drop from under another; it could fall only when seven wills were agreed.

IX

The seven ropes were made together and they had worn alike, but every keeper saw no rope only his own. When seven of the beast’s hirelings came with seven empty carts to take the winter grain and the seed for the spring, the damsel told them the village would give up the keys of the granary at noon, if the seven of them would cross over together.

Then she went to every keeper alone, for one person’s answer was not to be kept in another person’s house.

To the careful keeper she shewed the fraying of the rope. To the proud keeper she said no rope under his keeping should be the first to shame the village. To the keeper that was a father she pointed down at the children crossing the bridge below. To the close-fisted keeper she told the cost of a new bridge if one rope should break in the winter. To the dutiful keeper she said a knife was not put beside a rope to sleep there. To the fearful keeper she said six ropes were stronger than any cart that had ever crossed them. And to the keeper that loved the village best she said the grain would have need of the road before nightfall.

To every one she gave the reason that was in him already, and asked of him no thing he was not willing to do.

— One rope may be cut and six will hold, she said to each of them. At the noon bell, will you cut no rope only your own, so the frayed length of it may be mended?

Every one of them said yes, of his own free will.

When one of them asked what would the others do, she answered him:

— Their hands are their own. I will not speak for them.

Last of all she asked the squire, as he was then, to ring the bell when the seventh cart would come to the middle, saying the sound of it would call the village out to witness. Because he loved her, and because there was no lie in the words she spoke, he said yes.

X

At noon the carts came creaking on to the bridge. The squire watched the seventh come to the middle, and he rang.

To the keepers the bell meant Cut. To the hirelings it meant The keys are ready. To the village it meant Come and witness. To the damsel it meant all of them at once.

Every keeper knew the rope that was before his eyes; it was only the damsel knew the bridge.

Seven honest hands cut seven ropes, and the bridge went down into the gorge with six hirelings and the seven carts. The seventh hireling had looked back over his shoulder, and was the one step behind. So it was he lived, and after that they called him the last knave.

The village kept its grain.

XI

— We chose one rope apiece, the keepers cried. We did not choose those deaths.

— You chose the ropes, said the damsel. I chose the bridge.

— Then it was with our hands you chose it, said the squire.

There were some said she had made six men dead. There were some said she had not made them dead direct, for her hand had touched no rope. The word direct had been put into the Fair Lady’s bargain, and from that day it was in every mouth, with no two mouths setting the boundary of it in the same place.

There were some called her a saviour, because the grain was in it yet; and some called her a murderer, because six men were not. It was after this the people first put the name of perfidious on her, though there was no name in any one’s mouth for the taking of free hands and the putting of them to a hidden work.

From that day out, if any one asked the squire for his hand, he asked what work the hand was wanted for; and if any one asked a yes of him, he asked what whole the yes would be put in. He had rung one bell, and heard after what else it had said.

The last knave brought no grain back to the beast, but he brought it the tale of the Seven Ropes.

— I must drink the Knowing out of people before I can use them, said the beast. She used them, and left every drop.

From that day out it coveted her.

XII

It was a year after, in the same field of lilies where the squire had asked her Why?, that the two of them found themselves again. He asked her again:

— Why do you love me?

And she said:

— For the same reason that the rain, beyond the Fair Lady’s realm, falls on no man. I love you with the same why as these lilies, that toil not, and grow beautiful for all that.

The squire had finished his training at the harvest of that year, and was made the honourable knight, and every one expected he would marry the damsel inside a fortnight.

XIII

When the squire was made the honourable knight he took the boy to be squire to him, for a knight must have one, and the boy was thirteen, which was the age the knight had been when he went squiring, and the knight had seen him at the butts. He found a boy that would not eat what was before him for thinking of the table as it had been, and would not sleep for the sum of the years, and could not loose.

— In this realm, said the knight, every hand belongs to the person at the end of it. That is the whole of the law. The house was never yours nor any one’s; it was on the inventory, and an inventory is a ledger, and a ledger is a list of what is lent. You are grieving a debt as if it was a gift.

And he gave him a term for his mother: so many risings, and at the end of them the grief was to be out, as a lease is out, and he told him the day. That is the custom of the realm for grief, that it has a length to it, and the boy had not known there was a custom.

Then he took him to the butts.

— Draw, said the knight.

The boy drew.

— Where is the arrow?

— On the string.

— And the last one?

— In the bank.

— And the one after?

— In the quiver.

— Then you have one arrow, said the knight, that had rung a bell one time; and it is in your hand, and the mark of it is before your eyes. Loose it.

And the boy loosed it, and it went where he had looked, and he stood with the string humming and the arrow in the mark and his arm not shaking.

The knight did not look down the road behind him, that was all, and the boy rode after him and did as he saw done.

He slept that night the whole of the night, which he had not done in a year. His father and his mother looked at him in the morning across the table and they knew him, and he was easy in himself, and he laid the table without naming the places.

XIV

The knight called the damsel, and her wit and her love beside, no love of one reasonable soul for another, but a weight: the like of the love that bears the stone downward and the flame upward, that has an inclination in it but no judgment.

— That is not the love of a person, said the knight, but the motion of a thing. It is not choosing me you are; it is falling towards me. A beast is carried by its appetite and a stone by its weight, and neither the one nor the other can give a cause for where it goes. I will not be an alms to your heart, nor take to wife a woman that cannot name my desert. Name me one good in me for which I am worthy of your love.

— Because it is yourself you are, said the damsel.

— That is no cause at all.

— If a witch put a geis on you that you must love her, and love her though she turned cruel and false and hateful to you, what man of sound wit would praise you for holding to it? He would pity you the bondage and condemn her the craft. And what holiness comes on the same bondage because there is no witch in it to be found? A cause that is hidden is not a cause undone. A love is not made free because the hand that laid it cannot be named.

— And think what you do to me besides. You would honour the bare fact of me, and you have bought it dear, for you have made every thing that is mine count for nothing. My truth cannot commend me to you, nor my lying condemn me. My courage gains nothing and my cruelty loses nothing. What I have done for you weighs no more than what I never did. If nothing that I am can speak for your love, in what way is your love an honour done to me? I am only the peg your heart hangs on.

— Is it for nothing you would marry me? said the knight.

— For nothing only yourself. I would be one flesh with you the while we live, as the Fair Lady’s fairness is made flesh here in the realm: with witness, and with history, and with the announcing of it.

— Then I will marry you, the knight answered her, when you name me one cause, or when the star of the morning and the star of the evening are the one star.

Every one in the road took that for a way of saying never, and so did he that said it.

The squire stood by through the whole of it, holding the mare, and said nothing, for it was not his to say.

XV

The evil beast had coveted the damsel, cunning and unturning as she was, since the day of the Seven Ropes: for her beauty, and for the use of her mind, and so with cause and in judgment. And being jealous of the heroic knight that she loved without cause, it stole her away to its den. There was no one to bear witness to the theft; but the third eye of the beast, the dull pink one, skewered on a sewing-needle and lying on the damsel’s bed, left no question at all who it was had carried her off.

XVI

The knight, and he bent on vengeance, swore he would rescue the damsel in her distress from the evil beast.

XVII

At the dawn of day the Fair Lady of the realm bade the brave knight farewell, and of her own free gift bestowed on him a sword sharp enough to pierce the hide of the beast — and that hide was as strong as steel, and had gone unpierced in all the years of its tyranny — and armour strong enough to withstand the claws of the beast, under the morning star.

XVIII

The honourable knight rode across the realm towards the den of the beast, and the stars rising to keep the track of his road, and the squire behind him on a pony with the gear. He was a comfort to the knight on the road, that boy: he asked nothing about what was behind them and nothing about what was before, and he had the fire lit before the knight was down from the mare.

Through all the provinces every hireling of the beast fled at the sound of the hooves of his grand mare. The last of them fled farthest, but he looked back twice, being the man that had lived once by looking back.

— Let them, said the squire. They are not before us.

On the last road out of the Fair Lady’s realm, in the path before him, the knight saw a bear, and she giving milk to her cubs. The bear let a great yawp out of her in his direction. But he was ever devoted to his damsel and he would not be cowed, and so he took the longer road round the bear.

XIX

The last road out of the Fair Lady’s realm runs down to a river, and the river is the marches, and on the far bank of it the Fair Lady’s weather stops. They came to it in the afternoon and made their camp on the near bank, for the mare was tired; and it was there the squire felt rain, the first of his life, for there had never been rain in the realm. It came over the water and fell on him on the near bank, on no man in particular, and he laughed, and could not have said why.

There was a girl on the far bank. She was of the lands beyond, and she had a name, for the beast had never eaten across the water; and she called it over the river to him, and he heard it, and that was the first he knew of a person that could be sure she was the one called. She had hung a pear of withy on a bush on her bank for a mark and she called to him could he hit it. It was a long shot, and the wind was across the water. He drew and loosed with no hitch in it, and the arrow went over the river and through the withy pear, and she clapped her two hands. Then he tied a sound to a second arrow, a sound he made up on the bank, and shot it over to her; and she read it off the shaft and called it back across the water at him, and he knew it was himself was called, for there was no one else in the world had that sound.

He could shoot to her, and he could not cross to her, and he loved her from the near bank, and he was happy, and it was the happiest he had ever been.

He did not sleep that night, and it was for happiness. He lay on the near bank with the rain on his face and the sound going over and back across the water in his head, and the knight slept, and the mare slept. In the morning they went down a mile to the ford and crossed there, and she was not on that bank nor on any bank, and he did not look for her; the ford was wet stones, and he looked at the stones.

XX

Travelling on through the farther lands beyond the realm, the knight came on a lioness and she in the pains of birth, and he did not stop, for no lesser beast could stop his quest, and he bade his mare leap over the lioness where she lay in her labour. The squire leapt his pony after, and he was the one of the two of them that looked down, going over, at what she had brought forth.

XXI

Farther on there was a wolf at the side of the road, and an old wolf lying by it on the stones with its ribs going and its breath coming ragged, and the wolf beside it had its head up and was baying, and did not stop for the horses.

The knight rode on. The squire drew rein. He was well fed that day and well slept, and the road had been good, and he sat his pony and looked at the two of them, and he spoke, and this is what he said.

— Would that I could speak to you. I would tell you that death is nothing to be feared, for where you are it is not, and where it is you will not be. I would tell you that nothing is being taken from you, for there was nothing standing still in it to be taken; it was a passing that had a shape for a while, and the shape is going out of it, and that is what a shape is. I would tell you to lie down by it now and to be close to it, and to be close to it because it is going, for an evening is not the poorer for the morning that is coming after; an evening is what it is on account of the morning coming. There is no other thing to be done but the thing that is being done. Lie down by it and attend.

The wolf went on baying. The squire sat a moment longer, and then he rode after the knight.

— It should not have spent itself, said the knight, when the boy came up with him. A beast that gives out all it has ends as that one is ending. That is all there is to be said of it.

He said nothing else for a mile.

XXII

At the fall of dusk the knight, and a long road behind him, came to a mountain at the edge of the Kingdom of All Evils, with a dark forest on the sides of it and a tower of stone on the crag of it and a lake at the foot of it. He left the squire at the lake with the mare and told him to wait, and he went up through the forest to the tower, and he faced the beast in its power and its terror under the evening star.

XXIII

The damsel, bruised and pale, waved down to the knight from her prison in the tip-top of the tower, through the steel bars of the one window of the prison-spire, and her two hands red with the blood of the eye of the beast; and she, by good fortune, beautiful yet in the vespertine light.

XXIV

The beast, terrible and full of its own importance, was gloating until the knight drew the Fair Lady’s sword out of the sheath. At the sight of the Fair Lady’s weapon the beast was cowed, and went back three steps.

XXV

With the advantage of arms on his side, the knight, serene and devoted, was exulting already in the death that was coming on the beast. Behind the knight, and he all but victorious, the hireling of the beast that they called the last knave — the one that had fled at the coming of the knight and had come back after — came out from behind a tree of the shadowy forest and stole towards the back of the knight, that could not see him.

The knight could not hear the lilting warnings of the good damsel, nor the thin silent sounds of her, and her words whipped away on the high wind. She had been a whisperer from her youth, and the knight had no experience only of the loud; he had rung a bell at her word one time, and had not learnt yet to hear the word beneath the sound.

XXVI

In the small moment before the knight would bring the sword down into the savage heart of the beast, the hireling struck him with a brigand’s dagger. The dagger broke in pieces on the Fair Lady’s armour, that no thing could pierce, and the hireling fled again, as they do.

XXVII

The last knave had fled from the beast once, too. Before it ate his name off him he had a wife that was called Anastasia. Her name it ate more slowly. Evening after evening it took a sound from her, and morning after morning she rose up beside him with less in her of what he had called her the night before. At the last she rose up, and Ann was what was in it.

When the beast came back that evening, the husband that had no name begged it to leave her the last sound, the one that says a person is in it.

The beast asked what would he give. He offered it his service. The beast swore.

Its other hirelings it paid in gold; him it paid by leaving Ann as she was, and his own word it let stand with hers, for that was in the bargain; so that the two of them were the only two in the realm could say the one another, and they said it every evening across the supper. That is the other word that was let stand.

There had been words for the six men that went down with the Seven Ropes once too, and mouths that said them; but no word of theirs came up out of the gorge, and no one in this tale knows what they were. There was one person in the realm was told them, the once, and the tale does not say here who it was.

The beast had learnt the damsel’s craft out of the tale the last knave brought it. It did not drink the Knowing out of him, and it did not take his hand from the end of his arm. It found the one thing he would not be turned aside from, and set its own work beyond that thing.

Ann was before his eyes. It was only the beast knew the bridge.

So it was that he fled when he could and came back when he must. Through the dark wood the last knave was racing to be home in time for his supper with Ann.

XXVIII

The knight turned in his surprise at the distraction, and the beast took its chance of the weakness and, with its terrible strength, swept its claws at him, and knocked the Fair Lady’s sword out of the hands of the unfortunate knight that had been all but victorious, and up into the air; and the brute strength of it sent the Fair Lady’s sword up, and up, past the very spire of the tower that pierced the sky, until at the height of its going it stood upon the evening star; and there it stayed the whole of the night.

XXIX

The beast, witless and murderous, stood over the knight that had been all but victorious. It had seen the dagger break, and it knew its claws would not get the knight with injury. It reasoned, in the ruddy discernment it had, that it would swallow the knight whole instead, armour and man, and choke him, armoured and entombed, in the miasma of its belly.

XXX

The beast that was beyond men unhinged its jaws, and shewed a great sweeping whirlwind of the teeth of all the lesser beasts of the realm, the tooth of the wolf and the bear and the lion and the shark storming down into the throat of it; and it bade the knight go in.

I ask you now, would the great power of the beast not put the terror on you? Would the dread of the beast not fall on you? But the knight, that had his wits about him, was not cowed, and he did not obey.

So the beast took him. It closed its jaws on him, armour and man, and he was in it; and it had the whole night before it, and it lay down at the foot of the tower with him in the throat of it, and set to the swallowing of him as it did every thing, a little at a time, and never enough.

And all the night the teeth put it to him. They were the teeth of the bear and the lion and the wolf, and they came at him in the dark of the throat one after the other, and each had its question, and he had no answer to any of them.

— Whose milk was that? said the bear’s tooth. Did you fill the young ones? Was it for her sake you took the long road round, or for your own?

— Were you there when she brought them forth in the road? said the lion’s. Can you number the months she carried them? She cried out under your mare going over. What was it she said?

— Was it for you the wolf cried out? said the wolf’s. Did you set it crying? Was that grief made for a man to ride past?

And when he had no answer the teeth said it for him:

— They were not in your road. You were in theirs.

XXXI

The evening star went down behind the Kingdom of All Evils with the sword standing on it, and there was no star in the sky; and then the morning star rose on the other side, and the sword came down out of it. That was the night the two columns at the pier came level, and there were three in the world knew it, and two of the three were at the foot of that tower.

It came down into the one window of the prison-spire, and the damsel caught it by the hilt as it passed, and her two hands red with the blood of the beast’s eye. The bars of the window were steel, and the hide of the beast was as strong as steel, and the Fair Lady had said the sword would go through the hide of the beast; and it went through the bars in three strokes.

There was no bell this time, and no seven knives, and no other hand put to a hidden work. The two hands under the falling sword were hers, and they knew the whole.

She went out of the window and down the whole height of the spire with the sword before her, and she chose the place, and the place was the beast’s back where the neck of it goes into the shoulders, and the sword went in there and on, to the savage heart.

The beast opened its jaws, and the knight came out of them, armour and man, on to the grass; and the beast lay down on the grass after him, and it was dead.

In all the years of it there was not one of the Fair Lady’s people made dead by the beast direct; and here was the beast made dead by one of the Fair Lady’s people, direct, and no vow about it.

— You asked me was it for nothing, said the damsel. It was for nothing. I am the cause. I fell where I chose.

The knight said nothing. He had had questions put to him the whole of the night, and now he had an answer, and it was not to any of them.

She wiped the sword on the grass.

XXXII

At the foot of the mountain the squire had the whole of the night too. He had been told to wait. To wait is to look up the road for a thing that is coming, and he had not looked up a road in a year, and he could not begin; so he looked at the mare till there was no more of the mare to look at, and then he looked at the lake.

There was an itch on him, at the small of his back, where he could not see it and could not well reach it. He got his hand round to it and scratched, and for the length of a breath that was a pleasure, and then the itch was there again under the scratching, and wider. It would pass, he said to himself, for every thing passes; and it passed, and there was another under it, and that one would pass too, and he saw the row of them going off out of sight.

He said to himself to be close to it because it was going, and he was close to it, and there was nothing in a chafe on the back to be close to; a thing would want to be fair for that, and a chafe is not fair. He said to himself that death was nothing, and it was nothing, and it was not death was at him. He had put down what was behind him and what was before him, and his hand had not put down the wanting of the itch to stop, and it was scratching.

He looked into the lake. His face was in it, and it was his mother’s face, that knows what is before its eyes; he looked at it a long time and it did not know him.

He had not slept two nights, the one for happiness and the one for this, and he tried to go under by counting the breaths of the mare, and he lost the count at four, and began again, and lost it.

He knew it was a small thing. He tried to make it a large thing, so as to have something to cry about that was fit to be cried about, and he could not; it was a chafe and a bad night and a face, and that was the whole of it, and that was worse. He went down on his knees at the edge of the water and he cried, and the star went down, and the other star rose, and he did not look up at it.

That is how they found him at the coming of the day, the knight walking and the damsel with the sword: a boy on his knees at the water, crying, and the mare eating.

— Why are you crying? said the knight.

— I have an itch, said the squire, and the more I scratch it the worse it is. I looked in the lake and my face was ugly to me. I did not sleep on the road, and now I am not able to fix my mind on any one thing, and I am tired out. I cannot go back for anything, and I cannot go on to anything, and if the whole of a life is what is under the hoof, and this is what is under the hoof, then it is not a life a person could bear, and that is what has me crying.

The knight did not answer him. He put his hand in under the boy’s shirt at the small of his back and felt about, and he found a burr caught in the cloth there, a seed with hooks on it, out of the forest, and he worked it loose and pulled it out and held it up for the boy to see.

The damsel looked at him kneeling there, and she said he had grown into a handsome young man.

The itch stopped. He looked into the lake, and the face in it was the face of a handsome young man, for that was what had been said of it. He got up off his knees and he was happy. He went and saw to the mare, and he said the mare would want water before the road, and he would see to it; and he did.

XXXIII

The road home was long, and the three of them went down it, the knight walking and the squire walking and the damsel on the mare with the sword across her knees.

On the second day a stone got into the squire’s shoe. He stopped and shook it out and went on, and it was there again, or another was, and by the evening there was a blister risen on his heel, and it broke, and the stocking took to it. He said nothing, for the crying at the lake had been answered, and a thing is only answered the once; and he had nothing at all of his own only what two people had said of him at a lake, and he was minding it. He was civil the whole of the next day, and helpful, and he had the fire lit before he was asked, and he was very quiet behind it.

The damsel looked at him once. The knight said would he take the mare for a mile, and he said no, he was grand.

XXXIV

They came home with the beast dead, and the realm found out what it could do.

It was a child found it, saying its brother’s name at it twice for badness, and the second time the name did not die. Then it was every one. The village stood in the road till dark saying who the one another were, for the pleasure of the second saying. The one-eyed blacksmith got his eye back, that is the saying of it, and he cried in the road.

The last knave came in out of the wood with Ann, and the two of them stood at the edge of it and said to each other what they had said every evening for one-and-twenty years, and it was no different to them, and they went home.

The squire’s heel skinned over in the time a heel takes.

XXXV

The banns were called for the knight and the damsel the three weeks, with witness, and with history, and with the announcing of it, as she had asked; and on the day the Fair Lady came down out of the castle to the village, and the hundred brave and honourable knights with her, and the hundred learned squires, and the people stood back off the road to let her by.

— I made these before any of ye were born, said the Fair Lady, and I could not spend them till now.

She took the squire first, and she took his two hands.

— There is nothing in you but what the day puts in you. Rain on you and you are glad of it; take the rain off you and you are not; and there is no third thing under that holds when the weather goes off you. That is not a want in you. It is the whole make of you.

— You are watered out of the sky and you are watered out of the crock at the hearth where you sleep, and it is all the one watering to you, and I am not saying it against you. I am saying what is in you.

— Cut a tree across and the years are in it, the wet ones wide and the dry ones narrow, and there is no tree yet put down a better year than the year it had. You are Treo of Wet Years and Dry.

He knew the sound. It was the sound he had made up on the bank of the river and tied to an arrow, and the Fair Lady had had it by her since before he was born.

Then, having a word that was his, he did what a person does that has a word. He used it.

— You knew, said Treo. You knew before the canoe. You knew the year it would come and the year it would go, and you made the bargain, and one in three of us went into it, and you let it run.

— I did, said the Fair Lady. And I made ye a hundred knights and a hundred squires before ever it came, so there would be some way left of speaking to ye after. And I carried this — she had the sceptre in her hand, with the pear of glass on the head of it — a hundred springs with the cord of it in the mud, for I knew the year it would light.

— And I did not let it run. There was a thing coming that would have had the whole of ye, and I put a bargain between it and ye, and what came through was one in three. You are counting what was taken. I counted what was not, and there is no way on this earth to shew a person the year that did not happen.

— That is the whole of what I have for you. There is no other account.

And he stood there with it.

She took the knight next. He had the book in his two hands, and she put one hand over each of them.

— You would not take a thing on trust if the whole realm stood surety for it. It is an account you want, and it is an account you have always wanted, and there was never yet a thing given to you that you did not go looking for the price of it after.

— You had a bell rung one time and you are paying for the sound of it still. You would sooner be owing than be given. You keep a book. I keep one. It is the one trade, and mine is the longer.

— There is a day of the accounts for every one, and you have been keeping yours since you were a boy in case it came early. You would rather have the reckoning than the mercy. You are Reckon of the Thousand Thousand.

There was a book found in the knight’s saddlebag that morning that no one had known was in the world. He had kept it eight years. Every line in it was a cause, and every cause picked out the one woman and no other, and none of it had ever been said aloud, for a thing written and not spoken is said the once only, and he had found that out and told no one. He had never stopped at seven. There were hundreds in it, numbered, and the later ones argued against the earlier, and the whole of it was a case for why she was worthy to be loved; and it was the one room in the realm where a person could be the one person, and he had kept it under the bed. He had brought it to give her.

When she was done he looked at it and said it was straw. He set it down on the wall, and it was let lie there. The damsel’s hair was straw under the sun, and heavy, and neither of them looked at it.

XXXVI

The Fair Lady turned to the damsel and put out her hands and opened her mouth, and there was a snip.

She had the shears out of her workbasket, the same basket the sewing-needle had come out of, and she had them open and shut again before the Fair Lady had the first sound out, and it was loud, and every one in the road heard it, and the Fair Lady stopped.

— You will not, said the damsel.

— And before you put a word on me I will tell ye what was done in that tower, with witness, and with history, and with the announcing of it, for that is what I asked for and this is the day I am getting it.

— It had a rite. That is the thing none of ye know and I did not know it either till I was in it. It was not hungry in that tower. It was working, and it had the steps of the work by heart, and it kept them in their order as a priest keeps them. The last knave sat by me and held the bowl, and I do not hold it against him, for it had Ann before his eyes, and it was only the beast knew the bridge.

— There was five seeds in the bowl and five is the number, and I knew what five was for before ever it opened its mouth. Five houses of the year, and half the year is five, and any child in this realm could count it and not one of ye ever has.

— The first I took up out of the bowl myself, for it was a story I had off by heart. It was the woman that stayed at the weir. I was nine years of age when they walked me out the ridge road to look at her, and I went home that evening and put the dwale in my eyes, and I have put it in every morning since, and now ye know why, and I will come back to that.

— The second I swallowed, and it went down badly. It was the woman that opened the seed-grain in the hard winter and fed eleven children that were inside the measure, and every one of the eleven lived, and the year after took three times what the winter would have taken, and she was given the counting of them, and she walked west when she was done and lay down in the salt valley. There is a word made out of her name and it means a soft fool that makes a famine.

— The third I gagged on. It was the man that wrote down her way of working and taught it free in nineteen villages, and said there is no mystery in it, the morrow is in the fields and any one of ye can read it. He made his forecast on the diggings and he was right, and the timber was in the market to shore them, and the price of it low. She never said one word against him. She never said his name. She bought the timber. The workings came down on him and nine of his students in front of half a village, and what the realm took out of it was not that the reading belonged to her but that the reading cannot be done at all; and they burnt his papers themselves, with their own free hands, and no one has tried it since.

— The fourth was put past my teeth. It was the keeper of the marks at the pier, that kept it thirty-two years and never missed a dawn, and would not train the one that was to come after him, and said: I will not spend the end of my years making a hand that is not my hand. He is called the keeper that lost the count. He lost nothing. The four years after him lost it, and they were not his doing and could not have been.

— And the fifth it put in with its fingers, and it opened my jaw to do it, and I will tell ye why that one was last. It was the man that stood up in the road and asked her, in a level voice, how do you know. He did not say she was wrong. He said he had never seen the working. And she shewed him. She gave him the whole of it and left nothing out, and the working had himself in it: the road he was standing in, and the question he was after asking, and the answer she was in the middle of giving, and what he would do after, and the day. He was not struck dumb. His tongue was in his head. But a man cannot say a sentence he has already heard himself say, and every word he went to speak was a quotation before it was out of him, and he lived nineteen years more and did every thing she had recited at the hour she had recited it, and he never said one word again.

— Now. That is the seed that is put in last, and it is put in last because of what it takes off you. I was standing in a tower with a thing about to ask me for a yes, and there is one question a person ought to ask in that place and it is how do you know; and I could not ask it, for I had just been fed the man that asked it. If I asked for the working the working would have my yes in it, and my yes would be a quotation, and I would have said it before I said it.

— Then it asked me. And I will say for it that it was a good offer and I would have ye hear the whole of it. It said: be my hand in the realm, and use them whole as you used the seven, and I need never eat again, and one in three are spared, and not a soul will know. That is the offer. Turn it over. It is the same bargain that was made at the castle one-and-twenty years ago, and the only difference in it was the price was me.

— So here is what I did, and it is the only thing I ever did that I would do again the same. Before ever it asked me, in the dark, I said the word. I said yes and yes and yes till there was nothing left in it, till it was a hiss with no more in it than a kettle, and that is a thing the beast could not do for itself, for that word picks out nobody and it could not eat it. I hollowed it with my own mouth.

— And when it asked, I gave it the rite. I said the words it wanted in the order it wanted them: let it be done to me. And the words were true and the tense was a lie, for I had it decided already what I was going to do, and a yes out of a woman that has decided is not a receiving, it is a performance of a receiving. It is liturgical, that thing. It checks the words. It swore, and it was fed nothing at all.

— That is what was lying at the foot of this mountain with a man in its throat: a thing that was starving while it swallowed. The sword did not kill a beast in its health. I want that said, for there is a woman here will tell ye she knew the year, and she did, and I am not disputing her the year.

— And there is not one of ye understood a word of that. I knew there would not be. I said it anyway, for it is said now and it is said before witness, and that is the whole of what I came down this road for.

— You have a name for every thing that is going to happen, and you have none for me, for I am not a thing that is going to happen. You are called Fair after the weather. I will be called Beautiful, and it is not after the weather. It is after what I did.

— There is a poison grows in the ditch and the country people call it the dwale, and I have been putting it in my own two eyes every morning since I was nine years of age, so there would be nothing in me for any one to name. He looked into me and found nothing to name and he took me for it, and the taking was mine.

— You give the one name to the one person. I will take two, for that is what is given to a thing that grows. I am the Beautiful Lady, and I am Dwale of Many Perfidies, and ye put the second of them on me yourselves.

— You measure and I cut. That is two trades, and it is not one of them over the other. I am no subject of yours. I am your sister.

— I knew the year the beast would die, said the Fair Lady. I knew a sword would be wanted, and I made it, and I gave it out.

— You knew a sword would fall, said the Beautiful Lady. You did not know whose two hands would be under it.

— I did not, said the Fair Lady.

— But hear the rest of it, for you have told them yours. I made a hundred knights before there was any need of a hundred knights. I carried a lamp a hundred springs that could not light. I made a sword before there was a thing wanted killing, and I made three names before there was a mouth in this realm to wear one. You call that knowing. I call it knowing. There is nothing else on this earth to call it, and I will grant you before the hundred that there is no way to tell it from the other thing from where you are standing.

— And I will tell ye the half of the law ye were never taught as children, for ye had the first half of it out of me and ye may as well have the whole. A yes belongs to the one that says it. Its meaning belongs to the one that hears it. That is the whole of the law, and it is what let the bell ring, and it is what let that thing in the tower swear, and it is what lets me stand here and say I did nothing to any of ye.

— I made three names to-day. In the time that is coming there will be a name made for every child in this realm before ever it is born, and no person here will be met by a stranger again. I began with the three of ye because ye were the first that would grow into them.

— Then you did not prevent a fall, said the Beautiful Lady. You chose who falls. The ones that went into it are the pit the rest of us were kept out of, and I have their words in my mouth and I cannot say one of them.

XXXVII

Then the vow was put to them whole, with no clause of it kept behind the words and no meaning saved for another mouth.

— There is no counting the whole world, said Reckon, and I will not try it. Take the realm only. Say there is a thousand thousand souls in it. That is a number a man can hold in his two hands.

— I put seven reasons on that number, one laid on the last, and every reason cast out what did not answer to it; and at the end of the seven there was one left standing, and it was you. That is the working. It is on the wall there and it is straw, and the working was good.

— And I do not say the seven make you yourself. I say only that, laid together, they can belong to no one else living. You say: because it is myself I am. I say: I have divided the world away until that saying has the one bearer in it.

— You told me your love was like the lilies of the field, that toil not and are beautiful for all that. But it was yourself called the lily beautiful. The lily never said it. Tread it into the mire under your heel and it will toil no more than it did before; and the darnel in the same ditch toils none either, and you have no love at all for the darnel. So it is not the not-toiling you love it for. The beauty is in the lily as it stands before your eye, and it is partly in the lily and it is partly in the looking.

— Take a shred off the lily and a shred off the darnel, no broader than a grain of wheat, and lay the two of them on a board. Who will tell you which is which, only a woman that knows herbs? Let them grow out whole — blade and stalk and flower and the smell of it, root and season and the manner of its growing — and the difference gathers on the difference till there is no one alive would take the one for the other. The little shred does not carry the whole flower in it, cut in it like a mark cut in a tally.

— Nor does a drop of your blood cry out that it is yours. Set it beside mine, or beside a hart’s, and that secret you-ness you talk of will not rise up out of it and name its mistress.

— It is in the whole of you I find you. In the face and the voice, the wit and the wrath, the mercy and the memory; in what you have done, and in what was done to you, and in what has gone between the two of us. And these things do not stand between me and you. They are the roads you came into the world by, where I could meet you.

— I never knew a bare you, stripped of every quality, and put reasons on you after. I knew you by meeting you, and what I know I know after the meeting and by the marks it left on me.

— And there are marks on you now that no other woman could carry, though she borrowed your face and every virtue in your heart. She would not be the woman that said those words to me in the lily field. She would not be the one I answered as I answered. She would not be the one that has come by this road with me to this hour.

— The first stirring of a love may come from where it likes. A dream may give it, or the look of an eye, or a cause so small that neither of us will ever know it. But the first stirring is no virtue. A geis can stir a man. What makes the thing mine is that I looked at it after, and at you, and judged would I stand by it.

— So there is my cause, and no cause holds the whole of you. There is my judgment, and my judgment did not make you. And there is my freedom: not that my heart was never moved before my reason spoke, but that, being moved, I have answered for the movement.

— I have heard what she said about the five houses and I was not asleep for it. I am not taking the half of her. There is no half of her. It is the whole gathered or it is nothing, and that is my own argument and I will not run from it in front of the hundred.

— I choose you. I choose my love of you. And I choose, if you will have me, to wed you.

Reckon said his then, in the form of the realm: that he took her, by right and by desert, before the hundred and before her that was over the realm, with witness and with history, and that he would answer for it.

And the Beautiful Lady did not say that she did. She said:

— I am the yes that is.

— And it is not yes to you, and I will have that said before the hundred and not whispered after. Every yes I ever gave in my life was to a thing standing in front of me, and a yes with a thing in front of it belongs to whoever put the thing there. This one has nothing in front of it. It is to what I cannot see and could not be shewn. It is the only one I will ever get to give free, and I am spending it here.

Five seeds is five houses. For the five houses of the evening half of every year she belongs Below, and keeps the hunger of the thing she killed, and she is the one in that realm can use a person whole and leave every drop. She said it out in the road at her own wedding, plain, and it went over the whole of them like weather. Reckon heard it. He had divided a thousand thousand and he took what was left standing, the two halves of it, and he did not look away while she said it.

And the Fair Lady laughed before any one else could laugh, as she had laughed at the end of the pier, and then every one laughed after her. Treo danced, with his shoes off and left by the door, and his heel whole, and the road long; and he was happy; and they lived happily ever after.