A Dreamers Tales | Page 7

left the Inner Lands before him; none of them wished to
return to the people who had not seen the Sea; many of them had
forgotten the three little kingdoms, and it was rumoured that one man,
who had once tried to return, had found the shifting, crumbled slope
impossible to climb.
Hilnaric never married. But her dowry was set aside to build a temple
wherein men curse the ocean.
Once every year, with solemn rite and ceremony, they curse the tides of
the Sea; and the moon looks in and hates them.

BLAGDAROSS
On a waste place strewn with bricks in the outskirts of a town twilight
was falling. A star or two appeared over the smoke, and distant
windows lit mysterious lights. The stillness deepened and the loneliness.
Then all the outcast things that are silent by day found voices.
An old cork spoke first. He said: "I grew in Andalusian woods, but
never listened to the idle songs of Spain. I only grew strong in the
sunlight waiting for my destiny. One day the merchants came and took
us all away and carried us all along the shore of the sea, piled high on
the backs of donkeys, and in a town by the sea they made me into the
shape that I am now. One day they sent me northward to Provence, and
there I fulfilled my destiny. For they set me as a guard over the
bubbling wine, and I faithfully stood sentinel for twenty years. For the
first few years in the bottle that I guarded the wine slept, dreaming of
Provence; but as the years went on he grew stronger and stronger, until
at last whenever a man went by the wind would put out all his might
against me, saying, 'Let me go free; let me go free!' And every year his
strength increased, and he grew more clamourous when men went by,
but never availed to hurl me from my post. But when I had powerfully
held him for twenty years they brought him to the banquet and took me
from my post, and the wine arose rejoicing and leapt through the veins
of men and exalted their souls within them till they stood up in their
places and sang Provençal songs. But me they cast away--me that had
been sentinel for twenty years, and was still as strong and staunch as
when first I went on guard. Now I am an outcast in a cold northern city,
who once have known the Andalusian skies and guarded long ago

Provençal suns that swam in the heart of the rejoicing wine."
An unstruck match that somebody had dropped spoke next. "I am a
child of the sun," he said, "and an enemy of cities; there is more in my
heart than you know of. I am a brother of Etna and Stromboli; I have
fires lurking in me that will one day rise up beautiful and strong. We
will not go into servitude on any hearth nor work machines for our food,
but we will take out own food where we find it on that day when we are
strong. There are wonderful children in my heart whose faces shall be
more lively than the rainbow; they shall make a compact with the North
wind, and he shall lead them forth; all shall be black behind them and
black above them, and there shall be nothing beautiful in the world but
them; they shall seize upon the earth and it shall be theirs, and nothing
shall stop them but our old enemy the sea."
Then an old broken kettle spoke, and said: "I am the friend of cities. I
sit among the slaves upon the hearth, the little flames that have been
fed with coal. When the slaves dance behind the iron bars I sit in the
middle of the dance and sing and make our masters glad. And I make
songs about the comfort of the cat, and about the malice that is towards
her in the heart of the dog, and about the crawling of the baby, and
about the ease that is in the lord of the house when we brew the good
brown tea; and sometimes when the house is very warm and slaves and
masters are glad, I rebuke the hostile winds that prowl about the
world."
And then there spoke the piece of an old cord. "I was made in a place
of doom, and doomed men made my fibres, working without hope.
Therefore there came a grimness into my heart, so that I never let
anything go free when once I was set to bind it. Many a thing have I
bound relentlessly for months and years; for I used to come coiling into
warehouses