Don Rodriguez; Chronicles of Shadow ValleyDunsany, Lord
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Don Rodriguez; Chronicles of Shadow Valley
Dunsany, Lord
Fantasy fiction, English; Magicians -- Fiction; Spain -- Fiction
A clump of trees stood right ahead of their way; they passed round it;
and Castle Rodriguez came all at once into view. Serafina gasped
joyously. Rodriguez saw its towers, its turrets for archers, its
guarded windows deep in the mass of stone, its solemn row of
battlements, but he did not believe what he saw. He did not believe
that here at last was his castle, that here was his dream fulfilled and
his journey done. He expected to wake suddenly in the cold in some
lonely camp, he expected the Ebro to unfold its coils in the North and
to come and sweep it away. It was but another strayed hope, he thought,
taking the form of dream. But Castle Rodriguez still stood frowning
there, and none of its towers vanished, or changed as things change in
dreams; but the servants of the King of Shadow Valley opened the great
door, and Serafina and Rodriguez entered, and all the hundred bowmen
disappeared.
Here we will leave them, and let these Chronicles end. For whoever
would tell more of Castle Rodriguez must wield one of those ponderous
pens that hangs on the study wall in the house of historians. Great
days in the story of Spain shone on those iron-barred windows, and
things were said in its banqueting chamber and planned in its inner
rooms that sometimes turned that story this way or that, as rocks turn
a young river. And as a traveller meets a mighty river at one of its
bends, and passes on his path, while the river sweeps on to its estuary
and the sea, so I leave the triumphs and troubles of that story which I
touched for one moment by the door of Castle Rodriguez.
My concern is but with Rodriguez and Serafina and to tell that they
lived here in happiness; and to tell that the humble Morano found his
happiness too. For he became the magnificent steward of Castle
Rodriguez, the majordomo, and upon august occasions he wore as much red
plush as he had ever seen in his dreams, when he saw this very event,
sleeping by dying camp-fires. And he slept not upon straw but upon good
heaps of wolf-skins. But pining a little in the second year of his
somewhat lonely splendour, he married one of the maidens of the forest,
the child of a bowman that hunted boars with their king. And all the
green bowmen came and built him a house by the gates of the park,
whence he walked solemnly on proper occasions to wait upon his master.
Morano, good, faithful man, come forward for but a moment out of the
Golden Age and bow across all those centuries to the reader: say one
farewell to him in your Spanish tongue, though the sound of it be no
louder than the sound of shadows moving, and so back to the dim
splendour of the past, for the Senor or Senora shall hear your name no
more.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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