The Witch-Woman Trilogy

  But Madoc one day put aside his harp, he removed an amorous countess from about his neck, and he went alone out of Netan’s shield-hung hall. All at that banquet were applauding Madoc; but through the shouting he could hear a skirling music which derided his patriotic perjuries: and Madoc knew that the fatherland he was praising showed as an unimportant pimple on the broad face of the world, and that its history, or the history of any other people, was but a very little parenthesis in Earth’s history.

5. SOME VERY ANCIENT GAMES

  So Madoc fled from the cultured court of Netan, where the superb emotions of patriotism were denied him by that music which a pallid and pestiferous witch was devising in the Waste Beyond the Moon. He fled southward, into the fertile land of Marna.

  In a green field, beneath a flowering apple tree, a young woman was playing at chess against a veiled opponent. His face could not be seen, but the gray hand with which he now moved a bishop had four talons like the claw of a vulture. The woman was clothed in blue: about her yellow hair she wore a circlet of silver inset with many turquoises, and about her wrists also were bands of silver, and in her face was the bright pride of youth.

  At the sight of Madoc this woman arose, she smiled, and in a clear sweet voice she cried out the magic word of the south, saying, “Berith!”

  The veiled man was not any longer there, but beyond the apple tree you saw a thin gray wolf running away very swiftly.

  The lovely girl then told young Madoc that she was Ainath, the queen over all this country, and he told her that he was a wandering minstrel. Ainath in reply said she did not know much about music, but she knew what she liked, and among the things that she especially liked was the appearance of Madoc.

6. LEADS TO A COFFIN

  Nor did Madoc dislike the appearance of Ainath. Nowhere in her appearance could he find any flaw: she was, indeed, so confident of her perfection that she hid from him no portion of her loveliness, and she refused to cheat him by leaving his knowledge superficial.

  Her generosity and her fond loving ways led Madoc quite to overlook, if not entirely to condone, this queen’s alliance with the Old Believers, when Madoc by-and-by had found out the nature of Ainath’s veiled opponent and what game it was that Ainath played within reach of the fiend’s talons.

  Meanwhile with Madoc she played other games, night after night, inside the carved and intricately colored sarcophagus in which, when the time came, Queen Ainath must be laid away under the dark and fertile land of Marna; for it was the intent of this far-seeing queen to make of her coffin a hospitable place, and to endear it with memories of countless frolics and of much loving friendship, so that (when the time came) she might lie down in her last home without any feeling of strangeness about her being there yet again, or any unwelcome association of ideas.

  Now it was Madoc who, for the while, assisted Ainath in this poetic wise plan, and with all the vigor which was in him he set lovingly to work to keep that coffin dear to her.

7. REWARD OF THE OPTIMIST

  Now also, for Queen Ainath, and for the shepherds who served Ainath, young Madoc wrote noble songs. It was not of any local patriotic prevarications that Madoc sang in the green fields of Marna, but of an optimism which was international and all-embracing.

  “This is a fair world,” sang Madoc, “very lovingly devised for human kind. Let us give praise for the excellence of this world, and—not exactly this morning, but tomorrow afternoon perhaps, or at any rate, next week—let us be doing exceedingly splendid things in this world wherein everything is ordered for the best when you come to consider matters properly.”

  The kindly shepherd people said, as they cuddled each other in pairs, “This Madoc is the king of poets, sweetheart, for he makes us see that, after all, this world is a pretty good sort of place.”

  But Madoc looked with dismay upon their smirking faces, which seemed to him, beneath their hawthorn garlands, as witless as were the faces of their sheep: and upon the face of Madoc there was no smirk. For all the while that he made his benevolent music he could hear another music, skirling: and this other music derided the wholesome optimism which was in the singing but not in the parched heart of Madoc, and this other music called him, resistlessly, toward his allotted doom.

PART TWO. OF MADOC IN THIS WORLD

  Je t’ai secrètement accompagné partout, dans les luttes et dans les combats, sur les routes, dans les rues et partout: ma musique t’a préservé des atteintes et des agréments et des illusions du monde.