The Once and Future King

Chapter XV

The Siberian bogland, which they reached a few days later, was a bowl of sunlight. Its mountains still retained a lace-work of snow, which, as it melted, brought the little rivers down in a spate like ale. The lakes glittered under clouds of mosquitos, and, among the stunted birch trees round their margins, the amiable reindeer wandered curiously, snuffling at the goose-nests, while the geese hissed back at them.

Lyó-lyok settled down at once to build her nursery, although unmarried, and the king had time to think.

He was an uncritical man, certainly not a bitter one. The treachery to which he had been subjected by his human race had only just begun to weigh upon him. He had never put it in plain terms to himself: but the truth was that he had been betrayed by everybody, even by his own wife and by his oldest friend. His son was the least of the traitors. His Table had turned on him, or half of it had, and so had half the country for which he had been working all his life. Now they were asking him to go back into service for the men of treason, and at last he realized, for the first time, that to do so would mean his end. For what hope had he among mankind? They had murdered, almost invariably, every decent person who had spoken to them since the time of Socrates. They had even murdered their God. Anybody who told them the truth was the legitimate object of their treachery, and Merlyn’s sentence on himself was one of death.

But here, he realized, among the geese, to whom murder and treason were an obscenity, he was happy and at rest. Here there was good hope for a person with a heart. Sometimes a tired man who has a religious vocation to become a monk will feel an actual yearning for the cloister, for the place where he can expand his soul like a flower and grow towards his idea of good. That is what the old man felt with a sudden longing, except that his cloister was the sun-drenched bog. He wanted to have done with man, to settle down.

To settle down with Lyó-lyok, for instance: it seemed to him that a weary spirit might do worse. He began comparing her wistfully with the women he had known, not always to her disadvantage. She was healthier than they were, nor had she ever had the megrims or the vapours or the hysterics. She was as healthy as himself, as strong, as able on the wing. There was nothing that he could do, which she could not do: so that their community of interests would be exact. She was docile, prudent, faithful, conversable. She was a great deal cleaner than most women, because she spent one half of the day in preening herself and the other half in water, nor were her features disfigured by a single smear of paint. Once she had been married, she would accept no further lovers. She was more beautiful than the average woman, because she possessed a natural shape instead of an artificial one. She was graceful and did not waddle, for all the wild geese do their walking easily, and he had learned to think her plumage handsome. She would be a loving mother.

He found in his old heart a warm feeling for Lyó-lyok, even if there was little passion. He admired her sturdy legs, with the knob at the top, and her neat bill. It had serrations like teeth, and a large tongue which seemed to fill it. He liked her for not being in a hurry.

The nest-making enthralled her, which made him watch it with pleasure. It was not an architectural triumph, but it was what was needed. She had been fussy about the tussock which she meant to choose, and then, after the situation had been finally decided, she had lined the peaty hollow, which was like some soft damp brown and crumbled blotting-paper, or like the tan in a circus, with heather, lichens, moss, and down from her own breast. This was as soft as cob-webs. He had brought her a few bits of grass himself, as a present, but they had generally been of the wrong shape. In plucking them, he had discovered by accident the wonderful universe of the bog on which they walked.

For it was a miniature world, the same kind as the Japanese are said to make in bowls. No Japanese gardener has ever bred a stunted tree more like a real one than a stalk of heather is, with its regular knots along the stalk, like button-holes. There, at his feet, there were forests of gnarled trees, with glades and landscapes. There was the closest moss for grass, and an undergrowth of lichens. There were fallen tree trunks lying picturesquely, and even a strange kind of flower: a minute grey-green stalk, very dry and brittle, with a scarlet blob on the end of it, like sealing-wax. There were microscopic toadstools, except that their umbrellas turned upwards, like egg-cups. And through the desiccated sylvan scene there scuttled, for rabbits and foxes, beetles of a glossy blackness which looked oily, who adjusted their wings by twirling their pointed tails. These were the dragons of the enchantment, rather than the rabbits, and they were of endless variety: beetles as green as jewels, spiders as small as pin-heads, lady-birds like red enamel. In depressions of the peat, which was resilient to the foot, there were small pools of brown water populated by sea-dragons: newts and water-boatmen. Here, in the wetter soil, there was a riot of mosses, each differing from the other: some with thin red stalks and green heads, like a peculiar corn for the Lilliputians. There, where the heather had been burned by some natural agency such as the sun shining through a dew drop – and not by man, who chooses to burn his bogs in the springtime, when they are full of nesting birds – there was a desolation of charred stumps, with tiny snail-shells, bleached white, no bigger than peppercorns, also putty-coloured lichens like parched sponges, whose stalks were hollow when he broke them up.

And there was the vastness of it, on top of its microscopic size: there was the bog smell and the clean air, which tastes so much wider on bogs: there was the sun, positively pelting it with vigour, who only slept for a couple of hours at night: and, heaven defend us, there were the mosquitos!

He had often thought that it must be boring for a bird to sit on eggs. He now knew that Lyó-lyok would have a universe to watch before her, a whole world bustling beneath her nose.

He proposed himself one afternoon, not ardently, for he had known the world too long, but gently and hopefully, when they were on the dazzling lake. Its waters, in their frame of brown, reflected the sky to a tone of even deeper blue, as blue as a blackbird’s eggs without the spots. He swam towards her with his tail high in the water, his head and neck stretched flat, like a swimming snake. He told her of his sorrows, of his unworthy nature, and of his admiration. He told her how, by joining her, he hoped to escape from Merlyn and the world. Lyó-lyok, as usual, did not seem to be surprised. She too lowered her neck and swam towards him. He was very happy when he saw the douceness of her eyes.

But a dark hand came to fetch him, as you may have guessed. He found himself swept backwards, not on pinion, not migrating, but dragged down into the filthy funnel of magic. He snatched one floating feather as he vanished, and Lyó-lyok was before his face no more.