The Witch-Woman Trilogy

(First Impression)

  Printed in the United States of America By the Plimpton Press, Norwood, Massachusetts

For

Robert M. McBride

this brief and somewhat tragic tale, to

commemorate our long and rather

comical association

Synopsis

  From Antan behind the moon delay

  What line of hidden white-robed life, beyond

  Old Jurgen’s judging, in that Eve’s high wand

  Taboos all music, if but as eagles may?

  Figures of love, these sonnets’ souls repay

  Proud earth with gallantry; and rivet Eve

  With something about merchants—to reprieve

  With silver, and with jewels, Ecben’s way.

  Grandfathers wake, with prayer-books and cords,

  The cream of chivalry; and stallions rightly

  Deride the shadow of a lineage, lords

  To domnei’s straws of vanity; while nightly

  The jest of Lichfield moves toward place and power

  The certain town’s end of a neck’s last hour.

Words for the Intending Reader

  NOBODY will think, I hope, that I pretend to have invented this story. Those who are familiar with the earlier works of Felix Kennaston will of course recognize that one encounters hereinafter the Norrovian legend upon which is based The King’s Quest. There has never been, though, so far as I am aware, any prose version made in English; and in taking over this story from Garnier’s anthology, Kennaston necessarily introduced many and frequent changes prompted by the demands of Spenserian verse. Moreover, Kennaston—with, as I think, unwisdom—has toiled to prettify the tale throughout, and to point, a bit laboriously, an apologue which in the story’s original form simply does not exist. I may at least assert that in The Way of Ecben (which “teaches “nothing whatever) I have clung rigorously to the queer legend’s restrained, and quite unfigurative, first shaping.

  —This, too, under some duress. The tale is so brief that in recording it the temptation was ever present to pad here and there, and to enlarge upon one or another detail, with the wholly pardonable design of rewarding each possible purchaser with the average amount of reading-matter to be found in the average novel of commerce. ... But in the outcome I have resisted that ever-present temptation. For Gamier knew his business; the thing as it stands is properly proportioned: and symmetry is, after all, one of the seven great auctorial virtues.

  Richmond-in-Virginia

  April, 1929

PART ONE: Of Alfgar in His kingdom

  “What the King Wishes, the Law Wills.”

Chapter I. The Warring for Ettaine

  IT IS an old tale which tells of the fighting between Alfgar, the King of Ecben, and Ulf, the King of Rorn. Their enmity took hold of them because they both desired that daughter of Thordis who was called Ettaine.

  Two kings desired her because of all the women of this world Ettaine was the most beautiful. It was the blue of her eyes, that had the brightness of the spring sky when there is no cloud anywhere between heaven and the heads of men, which caused the armies of Rorn and of Ecben to meet like thunder clouds. Blood was spilled everywhere because of that red which was in the lips of Ettaine. The golden flaming of her hair burned down into black cinders the towns of Rorn and of Ecben.

  Ulf’s fort at Meivod, it is true, withstood all besiegers: but Druim fell, then Tarba. Achren also was taken: its fields were plowed up and planted with salt. Then Ulf captured Sorram, through undermining its walls. But Alfgar took Garian by storm, and he burned this city likewise, after carrying from it a quantity of crossbows and tents and two wagon loads of silver.

  There was thus no quietness anywhere in that part of the world, because of the comeliness of Ettaine. For two kings desired her: and her color and her shaping thus became a lofty moral issue, with a rich flowering of tumult and of increased taxes, and of corruption and of swift death everywhere, and of many very fine patriotic orations.