When she saw him she said, ‘Peterkin, thou art quite young.’
Then he said to her, ‘Dost thou remember telling me to tarry here?’
As she pressed and broke through the branch, she, too, fell and died.
He came where his father’s palace stood and looked about him. There was no palace, no anything. And he fell to marvelling: ‘God, Thou art mighty!’ He only recognised his father’s well, and went to it. His sister, the witch, when she saw him, said to him, ‘I have waited long for you, dog.’ She rushed at him to devour him, but he made the sign of the cross and she perished.
And he departed thence, and came on an old man with his beard down to his belt. ‘Father, where is the palace of the Red King? I am his son.’
‘What is this,’ said the old man, ‘thou tellest me, that thou art his son? My father’s father has told me of the Red King. His very city is no more. Dost thou not see it is vanished? And dost thou tell me that thou art the Red King’s son?’
‘It is not twenty years, old man, since I departed from my father, and dost thou tell me that thou knowest not my father?’ (It was a million years since he had left his home.) ‘Follow me if thou dost not believe me.’ [[62]]
And he went to the cross of stone; only a palm’s breadth was out of the ground. And it took him two days to get at the chest of money. When he had lifted the chest out and opened it, Death sat in one corner groaning, and Old Age groaning in another corner.
Then what said Old Age? ‘Lay hold of him, Death.’
‘Lay hold of him yourself.’