by Joan Grant
The flowers breathe out their perfume on the dusk,
And all is still, save the night-singing bird.
So sleep, my daughter, and close your drowsy lids;
Sleep with the world and let your spirit free.
And I curled up in my bed and tried to go to sleep very quickly so as to get to know more about the Dream Country.
CHAPTER FOUR
Neyah’s Newest Adventure
Sometimes Maata used to take Neyah and me for walks along the river bank. It was quite a long way from the palace, so we usually went as far as the river in a litter. We used to see the fishing boats and want to go on them, but Maata wouldn’t let us.
One day Neyah told me he wasn’t going to have Maata interfering with what he wanted to do, and if I liked, he would let me join in his newest adventure. And I said, “Of course I’d like. It wouldn’t be a proper adventure without me in it too.”
So the next morning we got up very early when it was only just beginning to get light, and we put on our very oldest clothes so as to look like village children. First we climbed over the wall of the vineyard and picked four of the best bunches of grapes. Neyah carried them, and I took some figs and put them in the napkin with the four little loaves of bread that I’d hidden in my room the night before.
We walked a very long way, until we came to the river. A little way along the bank there were some fishermen getting their boats ready. Neyah went up to the oldest of them and asked if he would exchange some fish for the grapes. The man said that he would, but that we were too early, for he was only just setting out to spread his nets. Neyah pretended to be very surprised and said sadly, “We will have to wait until you come back, for we dare not go home without fish, or our uncle will be angry with us.” And then he said, “Can my sister get into your boat just for a moment? She has always longed to go in one. And then we’ll just sit on the bank and wait until you come back.”
The fisherman seemed to be fond of children—he told us that he had five of his own. And he said, “If you are very good and sit in the bottom of the boat and don’t get in my way, you can both come with me.”
So we thanked him very much, and jumped in quickly, before he could change his mind.
The nets were piled up in the bottom of the boat and smelt very fishy. The boat was very clumsy. It had no paintings on it, and the sail was stained and patched; but the wind soon took us out into the middle of the river. The nets were thrown over the sides, and they trailed out beside the boat while it moved slowly downstream.
The fisherman was a very nice man. I didn’t like to ask him his name in case he asked us ours; and we hadn’t arranged what we should say. He let Neyah hold the steering oar for a bit, and I made a face at Neyah to remind him that he mustn’t show he knew how to do it, because we had both said we hadn’t been in a boat before. Then I asked the fisherman if he would sing us one of the songs we had heard from the bank, but never clearly enough to hear the words.
He had a nice voice, very loud and deep. The song didn’t have much tune, just two or three notes like a sort of chant.
O my net! swing widely for your master.
Call to the fish that you would give them shelter
From the monsters of the river.
O fish! leave the caverns of the reeds
And drowse in the shadow of my boat.
Blow softly, wind! so that my boat glides through the water
Quiet as a naked girl swimming at sunset.
O fish! hear me and join your brothers in my net
So that it be weighted with silver
So that all my family rejoice with me.
Then he called to the other man, who was right up in the front of the boat, hidden by the sail, and they started to pull in the nets, with Neyah and me helping. The fish poured over the side in a wriggling silver flood; they jumped and flapped against my legs and I would have liked to climb up on the side of the boat, only Neyah didn’t seem to be minding it. He was helping the men to sort the fish into different kinds and to put them into reed baskets. I think if there had been any eels, I would have had to get out of the way, but luckily there weren’t.
When we got back, there were several people on the bank waiting to get fish. For a moment I was afraid they might recognize us, but I looked at Neyah and was sure we were all right, because there were scales all stuck to his arms, and smears of fish blood on his forehead.
Neyah tried to give the fisherman the grapes as a present for taking us out in his boat, but he laughed very friendily and said, “You shall have four fine fish for the grapes, and two extra for helping me; and you can come out with me any time you like. Ask any fisherman where Das is, and they’ll always tell you where to find me.”
Then he threaded six fish on a reed through their gills and gave them to Neyah. We thanked him very much for everything and set off for home.
It seemed a much, much longer walk than it had on the way out. I got tireder and tireder, and the loop-thong of my sandal broke, and every time I walked it flapped, and then a stone got in and cut my foot. Neyah knew how tired I was, but he said it was just one of those things that thinking about made worse. And I said, “Well, you haven’t got a sore foot; and when I’ve got a sore foot it’s the thing I think about.”
And Neyah said, “If you fuss about a foot, you’ll never be able to come with me when I’m a warrior. Warriors are always getting spears stuck into them, and arrows, and quite often they get hit by maceheads, but they’re so brave they hardly notice it. They certainly don’t make a fuss.”
After that I would have gone on walking until my feet were worn right off. It must be much easier being born a boy, because then you don’t have to keep on pretending to be brave to get taken on adventures: you just go anyway.
Then Neyah said, “I’ll tell you a new story. Listen very hard and you’ll forget about being tired.
“In the middle of a garden there was a very large and beautiful pool. It was tiled in turquoise colour, and fresh water always ran into it through a little stone channel and out again through a grid at the other end.
“In it there lived a lot of very, very fat contented fishes; and one little scarlet fish. The big fat fishes ate up all the flies and all the worms, and they took for themselves all the nicest shadow caves, which the lotus leaves made. But the poor little scarlet fish had very little to eat and no private place where he could sleep out of the hot sunshine. He couldn’t spend his time eating or being lazy in the shade, so he had to do a lot of thinking to keep himself from going sad. And he explored every bit of the pool until he knew just how many tiles were on the walls, and which lotus bud was going to open next.
“The fat fishes got greedier and greedier, and the little scarlet fish got thinner and thinner, until one day, when he was swimming past the grating, he knew that he was thin enough to swim right through it. It was rather a struggle getting through, and he lost quite a lot of his scales doing it, but at last he was free. He swam down the water-channels until he got to the great river; and he swam on and on down the great river until he came to the sea. And there he found lots of things that were very beautiful, and lots of things that were very frightening.
“Once he saw a fish so big that it could have drunk the whole of his home pool for breakfast and still have been thirsty. The great fish was swimming along with his mouth open, collecting his breakfast, just like a fisherman drawing in his net, and the poor little scarlet fish prayed very hard to the god of fishes; and the god heard him in spite of his being in such a dark place. And the god made the big fish have hiccoughs; and he hiccoughed the little scarlet fish back into the sea again.
“Then the little scarlet fish found a beautiful palace of coral in the dear, green depths of the sea; and beautiful little fishes with blue and gold spots brought him the most lovely fat worms on mother-of-pearl plates. He enjoyed it so much that he might have stayed there the rest of his life; but he wanted to go back to his own home pool and tell the fat fishes al
l the exciting things they were missing by being too big to go through the grating. So he left the sea and swam back up the river. And on the way he had many more adventures; and some were nearly as beautiful as the palace of coral, and some were nearly as dangerous as being swallowed by the great big fish. And he swam and he swam up the long river, and up the water-channels, until he came to his own grating, and now he was so thin from all his adventures, that he got through it quite easily.
“He thought everybody would be very surprised to see him again, but nobody had even noticed he had been away. He swam up to a big, very fat fish, who was the king fish of the pool, and he said, ‘Stop eating and blowing bubbles, and listen to me, you fat and foolish fish! I have come to tell you of all the wonderful things that happened to me on the other side of the grating; and I shall teach you to grow thin, so that you, too, may go upon the same journey and become as wise as I am.’
“The fat fish swam towards the grating, and when he saw the bars were so close together that not even one of his fins could go between them, he blew two bubbles, slowly and scornfully, and said, ‘Silly little scarlet fish! Do not disturb my meditations with your foolish chatter. I am much wiser than you are, for I am king of all the fish. How could you have got through the grating when even I cannot put a fin through it?’
“And the big fat fish swam back to the shadows under the lotus leaves. The little scarlet fish was very sad that nobody would listen to him; so he slipped through the grating and swam back towards the sea.
“Quite soon afterwards there was a drought, and the water-channel ceased to flow; the fish pool got lower and lower, and the fat fishes got more and more frightened, until they lay gasping in the mud at the bottom of the pool. And then they died.
“But the little scarlet fish was living very, very happily in the coral palace under the sea.”
It was such a lovely story that I had forgotten about my sore foot. When Neyah had finished, we were at the edge of the vineyards. I took off my sandals and walked along the water-channels beside the vines, and it washed the rest of the soreness out of my foot.
Then I remembered Maata and how cross she was going to be. So I said, “Neyah, do you think we should bury the fish or give them away to one of the gardeners, so Maata won’t know where we’ve been?”
And Neyah said, “No, it was such a good adventure I’m going to tell Father about it. And anyway, I want to send a present to the fisherman, because he was so nice to us—but we won’t let Maata see us till we find Father.”
We saw him coming out of the room that leads to the Hall of Audience. He still had on his ceremonial beard, which he wore only when sitting in judgment. It was fixed to the head-dress by two straps, hidden by the side-pieces. He took off his head-dress and gave it to the attendant, and said he was going for a bathe in the pool, and that we could go with him. He wasn’t surprised to see us, so Maata couldn’t have told him about losing us.
When we showed him the fish and told him all about our adventure, he wasn’t at all cross, although he did say we ought not to have gone out without telling somebody. And Neyah said, “I would have told Maata, but she would only have told me not to go, and I didn’t want to be rude and disobey her.”
And Father said we could eat the fish that evening. Then Neyah asked him if we could have a present for the boatman, and he said we could go to Nu-setees and ask him to make us something.
Nu-setees had a lovely little gold fish for wearing round the neck; and he scribed my name and Neyah’s on it.
Next morning we put on our best clothes and Harka took us in a chariot down to the river to give Das his present. When he realised who we were, he would have knelt upon the ground before us. But Neyah told him we were all fishermen together, and I tied the fish round his neck.
CHAPTER FIVE
Baby Lion
When I was six I wanted a baby lion.
I had a black hound-puppy and two pigeons and a quail with a broken leg. Maata said to me, “Lions are fit playmates for warriors, but not for children.”
One of the gardeners, Pakeewi, was my friend. He had only one eye and he had lost three fingers on his left hand, fighting for my father in the south. He worked in the vegetable garden, which was some way from the palace. Maata had a brother who worked there also, being the Overseer of the Gardeners; and while she talked to him, Pakeewi would tell of his travels to Neyah and me. He told us many stories of our father’s deeds in battle. But when we asked Father about them, he laughed and said that, if reality were like a figurine, Pakeewi’s stories were like the giant shadow that a lamp would throw of it upon a wall.
There was a little mud-brick house where Pakeewi kept his garden tools, and here he let us keep the animals that we were not allowed to take home. I had a horned toad, and two white rats with pink eyes, and a little jerboa, which had big gentle eyes and sat on its hind legs when I talked to it. Neyah kept a young wild-cat, which he was trying to tame, in a box with wooden bars in front of it; and he had a yellow sand-snake. I thought he was very brave to play with it; and so did he.… “I want a baby lion! If I had a baby lion and it grew into a very big lion and it still slept in my room, no boy could say I wasn’t brave because I wouldn’t play with snakes.”
Pakeewi had a son called Serten, who was one of the boys who ran with the hunting-dogs; I had told him how much I wanted a baby lion, and he had promised to bring me one next time a wild lioness had to be killed for getting savage and left a cub.
One day I went to see Serten, and I found him sitting on the edge of a stone trough, polishing a bit of harness. When he saw me he looked round to see that no one was watching, and then he beckoned me to follow him quietly. He took me to an empty stable, and there, in the far corner, I saw a big mongrel bitch suckling a tiny lion cub with her own two puppies. It was very small, and its eyes were still shut. I stroked its dappled, golden wool. And I made Serten promise to bring it to me when I was alone for the night.
When Maata was putting me to bed, she seemed to take even longer than usual over combing my hair; but at last she left me. Nothing happened for such a long time that I was sure Serten had forgotten his promise. Then I heard a soft tapping on the shutter. I ran over to the window and saw Serten with the lion puppy in his arms. He handed it up to me and it whimpered a little; but it was very sleepy, and soon it curled up beside me under the warm cover of my bed.
When all was quiet, I did our secret whistle for Neyah. I must have woken him, for he came in looking very sleepy and rather cross. “Neyah, I’ve got a lion in my bed.”
“Don’t be silly, you’re wide awake.”
“It’s not a dream-lion, it’s a down-here lion.” He still didn’t believe me, so I pulled the cover off and showed it to him.
And he said, “Where did you get it?”
I told him; and then I said, “It’s very brave of me to like lions sleeping on my bed!”
“Well, it’s only a very little lion.”
“It’ll soon be a very big lion, and it will bite anyone who’s ever horrid to me.”
“They won’t let you keep it when it’s got its real teeth.”
“Well, your snakes haven’t got any sting.”
And Neyah said, “That only makes you twice as cowardly not to touch them.” And I got so angry, I cried.
Then Neyah was very nice and said he was sure it was a very fierce lion to anyone but me. And he sat on my bed and told me a story about a monkey and a crocodile until I went to sleep.
And this was the story of the monkey and the crocodile:
Long, long ago there was a family of monkeys who lived at the top of a tall tree in the middle of a forest. There was a mother monkey and a father monkey, two little girl monkeys and a little boy monkey. The two little girl monkeys were very good, and listened to all their mother told them: of how to swing by their tails, and how to keep to the thin branches, which wouldn’t bear the weight of any dangerous animal that might hurt them. She taught them what fruit to eat, and what t
hings would make them sick, and how to comb their fur with their fingers so that their coats should be smooth and tidy.
But the little boy monkey wouldn’t listen to her, for he thought he was the cleverest monkey in the whole forest. He was too grand to play with his sisters, and he used to go for walks by himself on the tops of the trees.
One day, in the middle of the forest, he found a big clearing where there lived a lot of human beings. He thought they must be a very royal sort of monkey that he had never heard of before, and he said to himself, “These are my proper companions, and I will try to be just like them.”
He saw that they hadn’t got any tails, so he put his own tail over his arm as though he were carrying something. But because he was used to having it to climb with, he often fell out of trees and bumped himself quite badly. But that didn’t teach him anything. And he saw, also, that the human beings had no fur on their bodies, and he tried to pluck out his coat so as to look more like them. But he made himself so sore, and the bare patches felt so cold, that he stopped doing that.
Then one day he saw one of the human beings alone in the forest. And he went up to him and said, “I should like to join your tribe of monkeys.”
Now the human being was a very wise man, who knew the speech of animals, and he said, “We are not monkeys, we are men.”
And the monkey said, “Well, I want to be a man too.”
And the wise man said to him, “The time will come when all the animals in the forest will be men. Do not be impatient. When your time is ready you shall leave the companionship of monkeys and know the loneliness of man. Learn all there is to be learned as a monkey, and in so doing you will learn wisdom more speedily. And stop carrying your tail over your arm! If you do not use what the Gods have given you, one day you shall weep the lack of it.”
This made the monkey very cross, for he still thought that men were a very special tribe of monkeys who considered themselves too grand to play with him—just as he was too grand to play with his sisters. And he chattered very rudely at the wise man and ran away into the forest.
