A Dreamers Tales | Page 5

of Kings."
And gladly thereunto the young man consented. And the Princess
spoke to him, and asked him his name. And he told her that his name
was Athelvok, and great joy arose in him at the sound of her voice. And
to the three kings he promised to set out on the third day to scale the
slope of Poltarnees and to return again, and this was the oath by which
they bound him to return:
"I swear by the Sea that bears the worlds away, by the river of Oriathon,
which men call Ocean, and by the gods and their tiger, and by the doom
of the worlds, that I will return again to the Inner Lands, having beheld
the Sea."
And that oath he swore with solemnity that very night in one of the
temples of the Sea, but the three kings trusted more to the beauty of
Hilnaric even than to the power of the oath.
The next day Athelvok came to the palace of Arizim with the morning,
over the fields to the East and out of the country of Toldees, and

Hilnaric came out along her balcony and met him on the terraces. And
she asked him if he had ever slain a gariach, and he said that he had
slain three, and then he told her how he had killed his first down by the
pool in the wood. For he had taken his father's spear and gone down to
the edge of the pool, and had lain under the azaleas there waiting for
the stars to shine, by whose first light the gariachs go to the pools to
drink; and he had gone too early and had had long to wait, and the
passing hours seemed longer than they were. And all the birds came in
that home at night, and the bat was abroad, and the hour of the duck
went by, and still no gariach came down to the pool; and Athelvok felt
sure that none would come. And just as this grew to a certainty in his
mind the thicket parted noiselessly and a huge bull gariach stood facing
him on the edge of the water, and his great horns swept out sideways
from his head, and at the ends curved upwards, and were four strides in
width from tip to tip. And he had not seen Athelvok, for the great bull
was on the far side of the little pool, and Athelvok could not creep
round to him for fear of meeting the wind (for the gariachs, who can
see little in the dark forests, rely on hearing and smell). But he devised
swiftly in his mind while the bull stood there with head erect just
twenty strides from him across the water. And the bull sniffed the wind
cautiously and listened, then lowered his great head down to the pool
and drank. At that instant Athelvok leapt into the water and shot
forward through its weedy depths among the stems of the strange
flowers that floated upon broad leaves on the surface. And Athelvok
kept his spear out straight before him, and the fingers of his left hand
he held rigid and straight, not pointing upwards, and so did not come to
the surface, but was carried onward by the strength of his spring and
passed unentangled through the stems of the flowers. When Athelvok
jumped into the water the bull must have thrown his head up, startled at
the splash, then he would have listened and have sniffed the air, and
neither hearing nor scenting any danger he must have remained rigid
for some moments, for it was in that attitude that Athelvok found him
as he emerged breathless at his feet. And, striking at once, Athelvok
drove the spear into his throat before the head and the terrible horns
came down. But Athelvok had clung to one of the great horns, and had
been carried at terrible speed through the rhododendron bushes until the
gariach fell, but rose at once again, and died standing up, still

struggling, drowned in its own blood.
But to Hilnaric listening it was as though one of the heroes of old time
had come back again in the full glory of his legendary youth.
And long time they went up and down the terraces, saying those things
which were said before and since, and which lips shall yet be made to
say again. And above them stood Poltarnees beholding the Sea.
And the day came when Athelvok should go. And Hilnaric said to him:
"Will you not indeed most surely come back again, having just looked
over the summit of Poltarnees?"
Athelvok answered: "I will indeed come back, for thy voice is more
beautiful than the hymn of the priests when they