Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

The children, with one accord, crouched behind the tamarisk hedge.

  ‘I don’t like the sound of those gates,’ said Jane. ‘Fancy being inside when they shut. You’d never get out.’

  ‘You’ve got an arch of your own to go out by,’ the Psammead put its head out of the basket to remind her. ‘Don’t behave so like a girl. If I were you I should just march right into the town and ask to see the king.’

  There was something at once simple and grand about this idea, and it pleased everyone.

  So when the work-people had passed (they WERE work-people, the children felt sure, because they were dressed so plainly — just one long blue shirt thing — of blue or yellow) the four children marched boldly up to the brazen gate between the towers. The arch above the gate was quite a tunnel, the walls were so thick.

  ‘Courage,’ said Cyril. ‘Step out. It’s no use trying to sneak past. Be bold!’

  Robert answered this appeal by unexpectedly bursting into ‘The British Grenadiers’, and to its quick-step they approached the gates of Babylon.

  ‘Some talk of Alexander,

  And some of Hercules,

  Of Hector and Lysander,

  And such great names as these.

  But of all the gallant heroes...’

  This brought them to the threshold of the gate, and two men in bright armour suddenly barred their way with crossed spears.

  ‘Who goes there?’ they said.

  (I think I must have explained to you before how it was that the children were always able to understand the language of any place they might happen to be in, and to be themselves understood. If not, I have no time to explain it now.)

  ‘We come from very far,’ said Cyril mechanically. ‘From the Empire where the sun never sets, and we want to see your King.’

  ‘If it’s quite convenient,’ amended Anthea. ‘The King (may he live for ever!),’ said the gatekeeper, ‘is gone to fetch home his fourteenth wife. Where on earth have you come from not to know that?’

  ‘The Queen then,’ said Anthea hurriedly, and not taking any notice of the question as to where they had come from.

  ‘The Queen,’ said the gatekeeper, ‘(may she live for ever!) gives audience today three hours after sunrising.’

  ‘But what are we to do till the end of the three hours?’ asked Cyril.

  The gatekeeper seemed neither to know nor to care. He appeared less interested in them than they could have thought possible. But the man who had crossed spears with him to bar the children’s way was more human.

  ‘Let them go in and look about them,’ he said. ‘I’ll wager my best sword they’ve never seen anything to come near our little — village.’ He said it in the tone people use for when they call the Atlantic Ocean the ‘herring pond’.

  The gatekeeper hesitated.

  ‘They’re only children, after all,’ said the other, who had children of his own. ‘Let me off for a few minutes, Captain, and I’ll take them to my place and see if my good woman can’t fit them up in something a little less outlandish than their present rig. Then they can have a look round without being mobbed. May I go?’

  ‘Oh yes, if you like,’ said the Captain, ‘but don’t be all day.’

  The man led them through the dark arch into the town. And it was very different from London. For one thing, everything in London seems to be patched up out of odds and ends, but these houses seemed to have been built by people who liked the same sort of things. Not that they were all alike, for though all were squarish, they were of different sizes, and decorated in all sorts of different ways, some with paintings in bright colours, some with black and silver designs. There were terraces, and gardens, and balconies, and open spaces with trees. Their guide took them to a little house in a back street, where a kind-faced woman sat spinning at the door of a very dark room.

  ‘Here,’ he said, ‘just lend these children a mantle each, so that they can go about and see the place till the Queen’s audience begins. You leave that wool for a bit, and show them round if you like. I must be off now.’

  The woman did as she was told, and the four children, wrapped in fringed mantles, went with her all about the town, and oh! how I wish I had time to tell you all that they saw. It was all so wonderfully different from anything you have ever seen. For one thing, all the houses were dazzlingly bright, and many of them covered with pictures. Some had great creatures carved in stone at each side of the door. Then the people — there were no black frock-coats and tall hats; no dingy coats and skirts of good, useful, ugly stuffs warranted to wear. Everyone’s clothes were bright and beautiful with blue and scarlet and green and gold.

  The market was brighter than you would think anything could be. There were stalls for everything you could possibly want — and for a great many things that if you wanted here and now, want would be your master. There were pineapples and peaches in heaps — and stalls of crockery and glass things, beautiful shapes and glorious colours, there were stalls for necklaces, and clasps, and bracelets, and brooches, for woven stuffs, and furs, and embroidered linen. The children had never seen half so many beautiful things together, even at Liberty’s. It seemed no time at all before the woman said —

  ‘It’s nearly time now. We ought to be getting on towards the palace. It’s as well to be early.’ So they went to the palace, and when they got there it was more splendid than anything they had seen yet.

  For it was glowing with colours, and with gold and silver and black and white — like some magnificent embroidery. Flight after flight of broad marble steps led up to it, and at the edges of the stairs stood great images, twenty times as big as a man — images of men with wings like chain armour, and hawks’ heads, and winged men with the heads of dogs. And there were the statues of great kings.

  Between the flights of steps were terraces where fountains played, and the Queen’s Guard in white and scarlet, and armour that shone like gold, stood by twos lining the way up the stairs; and a great body of them was massed by the vast door of the palace itself, where it stood glittering like an impossibly radiant peacock in the noon-day sun.

  All sorts of people were passing up the steps to seek audience of the Queen. Ladies in richly-embroidered dresses with fringy flounces, poor folks in plain and simple clothes, dandies with beards oiled and curled.

  And Cyril, Robert, Anthea and Jane, went with the crowd.

  At the gate of the palace the Psammead put one eye cautiously out of the basket and whispered —

  ‘I can’t be bothered with queens. I’ll go home with this lady. I’m sure she’ll get me some sand if you ask her to.’

  ‘Oh! don’t leave us,’ said Jane. The woman was giving some last instructions in Court etiquette to Anthea, and did not hear Jane.

  ‘Don’t be a little muff,’ said the Psammead quite fiercely. ‘It’s not a bit of good your having a charm. You never use it. If you want me you’ve only got to say the name of power and ask the charm to bring me to you.’

  ‘I’d rather go with you,’ said Jane. And it was the most surprising thing she had ever said in her life.

  Everyone opened its mouth without thinking of manners, and Anthea, who was peeping into the Psammead’s basket, saw that its mouth opened wider than anybody’s.

  ‘You needn’t gawp like that,’ Jane went on. ‘I’m not going to be bothered with queens any more than IT is. And I know, wherever it is, it’ll take jolly good care that it’s safe.’

  ‘She’s right there,’ said everyone, for they had observed that the Psammead had a way of knowing which side its bread was buttered.

  She turned to the woman and said, ‘You’ll take me home with you, won’t you? And let me play with your little girls till the others have done with the Queen.’

  ‘Surely I will, little heart!’ said the woman.

  And then Anthea hurriedly stroked the Psammead and embraced Jane, who took the woman’s hand, and trotted contentedly away with the Psammead’s bag under the other arm.

  The others stood looking a
fter her till she, the woman, and the basket were lost in the many-coloured crowd. Then Anthea turned once more to the palace’s magnificent doorway and said —

  ‘Let’s ask the porter to take care of our Babylonian overcoats.’

  So they took off the garments that the woman had lent them and stood amid the jostling petitioners of the Queen in their own English frocks and coats and hats and boots.

  ‘We want to see the Queen,’ said Cyril; ‘we come from the far Empire where the sun never sets!’

  A murmur of surprise and a thrill of excitement ran through the crowd. The door-porter spoke to a black man, he spoke to someone else. There was a whispering, waiting pause. Then a big man, with a cleanly-shaven face, beckoned them from the top of a flight of red marble steps.

  They went up; the boots of Robert clattering more than usual because he was so nervous. A door swung open, a curtain was drawn back. A double line of bowing forms in gorgeous raiment formed a lane that led to the steps of the throne, and as the children advanced hurriedly there came from the throne a voice very sweet and kind.

  ‘Three children from the land where the sun never sets! Let them draw hither without fear.’

  In another minute they were kneeling at the throne’s foot, saying, ‘O Queen, live for ever!’ exactly as the woman had taught them. And a splendid dream-lady, all gold and silver and jewels and snowy drift of veils, was raising Anthea, and saying —

  ‘Don’t be frightened, I really am SO glad you came! The land where the sun never sets! I am delighted to see you! I was getting quite too dreadfully bored for anything!’

  And behind Anthea the kneeling Cyril whispered in the ears of the respectful Robert —

  ‘Bobs, don’t say anything to Panther. It’s no use upsetting her, but we didn’t ask for Jane’s address, and the Psammead’s with her.’

  ‘Well,’ whispered Robert, ‘the charm can bring them to us at any moment. IT said so.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ whispered Cyril, in miserable derision, ‘WE’RE all right, of course. So we are! Oh, yes! If we’d only GOT the charm.’

  Then Robert saw, and he murmured, ‘Crikey!’ at the foot of the throne of Babylon; while Cyril hoarsely whispered the plain English fact —

  ‘Jane’s got the charm round her neck, you silly cuckoo.’

  ‘Crikey!’ Robert repeated in heart-broken undertones.

  CHAPTER 7. ‘THE DEEPEST DUNGEON BELOW THE CASTLE MOAT’

  The Queen threw three of the red and gold embroidered cushions off the throne on to the marble steps that led up to it.

  ‘Just make yourselves comfortable there,’ she said. ‘I’m simply dying to talk to you, and to hear all about your wonderful country and how you got here, and everything, but I have to do justice every morning. Such a bore, isn’t it? Do you do justice in your own country?’

  ‘No, said Cyril; ‘at least of course we try to, but not in this public sort of way, only in private.’ ‘Ah, yes,’ said the Queen, ‘I should much prefer a private audience myself — much easier to manage. But public opinion has to be considered. Doing justice is very hard work, even when you’re brought up to it.’

  ‘We don’t do justice, but we have to do scales, Jane and me,’ said Anthea, ‘twenty minutes a day. It’s simply horrid.’

  ‘What are scales?’ asked the Queen, ‘and what is Jane?’

  ‘Jane is my little sister. One of the guards-at-the-gate’s wife is taking care of her. And scales are music.’

  ‘I never heard of the instrument,’ said the Queen. ‘Do you sing?’

  ‘Oh, yes. We can sing in parts,’ said Anthea.

  ‘That IS magic,’ said the Queen. ‘How many parts are you each cut into before you do it?’

  ‘We aren’t cut at all,’ said Robert hastily. ‘We couldn’t sing if we were. We’ll show you afterwards.’

  ‘So you shall, and now sit quiet like dear children and hear me do justice. The way I do it has always been admired. I oughtn’t to say that ought I? Sounds so conceited. But I don’t mind with you, dears. Somehow I feel as though I’d known you quite a long time already.’

  The Queen settled herself on her throne and made a signal to her attendants. The children, whispering together among the cushions on the steps of the throne, decided that she was very beautiful and very kind, but perhaps just the least bit flighty.

  The first person who came to ask for justice was a woman whose brother had taken the money the father had left for her. The brother said it was the uncle who had the money. There was a good deal of talk and the children were growing rather bored, when the Queen suddenly clapped her hands, and said —

  ‘Put both the men in prison till one of them owns up that the other is innocent.’

  ‘But suppose they both did it?’ Cyril could not help interrupting.

  ‘Then prison’s the best place for them,’ said the Queen.

  ‘But suppose neither did it.’

  ‘That’s impossible,’ said the Queen; ‘a thing’s not done unless someone does it. And you mustn’t interrupt.’

  Then came a woman, in tears, with a torn veil and real ashes on her head — at least Anthea thought so, but it may have been only road-dust. She complained that her husband was in prison.

  ‘What for?’ said the Queen.

  ‘They SAID it was for speaking evil of your Majesty,’ said the woman, ‘but it wasn’t. Someone had a spite against him. That was what it was.’

  ‘How do you know he hadn’t spoken evil of me?’ said the Queen.

  ‘No one could,’ said the woman simply, ‘when they’d once seen your beautiful face.’

  ‘Let the man out,’ said the Queen, smiling. ‘Next case.’

  The next case was that of a boy who had stolen a fox. ‘Like the Spartan boy,’ whispered Robert. But the Queen ruled that nobody could have any possible reason for owning a fox, and still less for stealing one. And she did not believe that there were any foxes in Babylon; she, at any rate, had never seen one. So the boy was released.

  The people came to the Queen about all sorts of family quarrels and neighbourly misunderstandings — from a fight between brothers over the division of an inheritance, to the dishonest and unfriendly conduct of a woman who had borrowed a cooking-pot at the last New Year’s festival, and not returned it yet.

  And the Queen decided everything, very, very decidedly indeed. At last she clapped her hands quite suddenly and with extreme loudness, and said —

  ‘The audience is over for today.’

  Everyone said, ‘May the Queen live for ever!’ and went out.

  And the children were left alone in the justice-hall with the Queen of Babylon and her ladies.

  ‘There!’ said the Queen, with a long sigh of relief. ‘THAT’S over! I couldn’t have done another stitch of justice if you’d offered me the crown of Egypt! Now come into the garden, and we’ll have a nice, long, cosy talk.’

  She led them through long, narrow corridors whose walls they somehow felt, were very, very thick, into a sort of garden courtyard. There were thick shrubs closely planted, and roses were trained over trellises, and made a pleasant shade — needed, indeed, for already the sun was as hot as it is in England in August at the seaside.

  Slaves spread cushions on a low, marble terrace, and a big man with a smooth face served cool drink in cups of gold studded with beryls. He drank a little from the Queen’s cup before handing it to her.

  ‘That’s rather a nasty trick,’ whispered Robert, who had been carefully taught never to drink out of one of the nice, shiny, metal cups that are chained to the London drinking fountains without first rinsing it out thoroughly.

  The Queen overheard him.

  ‘Not at all,’ said she. ‘Ritti-Marduk is a very clean man. And one has to have SOME ONE as taster, you know, because of poison.’

  The word made the children feel rather creepy; but Ritti-Marduk had tasted all the cups, so they felt pretty safe. The drink was delicious — very cold, and tasting like lemonade and partly like
penny ices.

  ‘Leave us,’ said the Queen. And all the Court ladies, in their beautiful, many-folded, many-coloured, fringed dresses, filed out slowly, and the children were left alone with the Queen.

  ‘Now,’ she said, ‘tell me all about yourselves.’

  They looked at each other.

  ‘You, Bobs,’ said Cyril.

  ‘No — Anthea,’ said Robert.

  ‘No — you — Cyril,’ said Anthea. ‘Don’t you remember how pleased the Queen of India was when you told her all about us?’

  Cyril muttered that it was all very well, and so it was. For when he had told the tale of the Phoenix and the Carpet to the Ranee, it had been only the truth — and all the truth that he had to tell. But now it was not easy to tell a convincing story without mentioning the Amulet — which, of course, it wouldn’t have done to mention — and without owning that they were really living in London, about 2,500 years later than the time they were talking in.

  Cyril took refuge in the tale of the Psammead and its wonderful power of making wishes come true. The children had never been able to tell anyone before, and Cyril was surprised to find that the spell which kept them silent in London did not work here. ‘Something to do with our being in the Past, I suppose,’ he said to himself.

  ‘This is MOST interesting,’ said the Queen. ‘We must have this Psammead for the banquet tonight. Its performance will be one of the most popular turns in the whole programme. Where is it?’

  Anthea explained that they did not know; also why it was that they did not know.

  ‘Oh, THAT’S quite simple,’ said the Queen, and everyone breathed a deep sigh of relief as she said it.

  ‘Ritti-Marduk shall run down to the gates and find out which guard your sister went home with.’

  ‘Might he’ — Anthea’s voice was tremulous—’might he — would it interfere with his meal-times, or anything like that, if he went NOW?’

  ‘Of course he shall go now. He may think himself lucky if he gets his meals at any time,’ said the Queen heartily, and clapped her hands.

  ‘May I send a letter?’ asked Cyril, pulling out a red-backed penny account-book, and feeling in his pockets for a stump of pencil that he knew was in one of them.