It lasted a long way, this black swath beneath the sun. It led them out of the dragon’s immediate field, away from his mailed and glittering coils. The dragon lay well behind them, his eyes upon Roche-de-Frêne. Roche-de-Frêne itself, now, was distant.
But the venom of the dragon had been spread wherever his length had passed. Not alone here, by the brook Saint Laurent, but all around now, as far as the eye could see, stretched blackening and desolation. All was overcovered with the writing of war. The princess of the land had ceased to weep. She viewed ruin with the face of a sibyl.
In the mid-afternoon they came upon knights resting by a great stone, in a ring of trees with russet leaves. These hailed the jongleur and the woman with him—when they saw what manner of penitent was the latter they crossed themselves and let her stay without the ring, seated among stones some distance from it. But they and their squires listened to Garin’s singing.
He sang for them a many songs, for when one was done they clamoured for another. Then they gave him largesse, and would have constrained him to turn and go with them to the host of Montmaure, where would be employment enough, since Count Jaufre nor no one else had many jongleurs of such voice and skill! Though they knew it not, voice and skill served him again when he turned them from constraining to agreement to let him go his way, on pilgrimage with her who sat among the stones. They made him sing again, and then, as all rested, they asked questions as to the host through which he had come. He knew, from this dropped word and that, that they were knights of Aquitaine, riding to join that same Jaufre.
With their squires they numbered but twelve in all. Food and wine were taken from the lading of a sumpter mule and placed upon the ground. They gave the jongleur a generous portion, consented to his bearing to the penitent of the cross, the Unfortunate his sister, portion of his portion. Returned, he asked of one of the squires with whom he ate, where was Duke Richard? He was at Excideuil.
“They say,” said the jongleur, “that he and Count Jaufre laugh and sigh in the same moment.”
“It was once so,” answered the squire and drank wine.
“Is’t not so now?”
The other put down the wine cup. “Did you make poesy, jongleur, as well as you sing it, I could give you subjects! Songs of Absence, now. Songs of a subtile vapour called Difference, that while you turn your head becomes thick and hard!—Perhaps they think that they yet laugh and sigh in the same moment.”