The Boy Apprenticed to an Enchanter

by Padraic Colum

I made my way toward the tent where the kneading board was. And then I saw tents overturned and lying upon the ground. I saw the horses of the band straying over the plain. And when I looked to the citadel I saw it smoking with a fire that was burning it.

There was no stir in all the encampment. I knew then that an army had come and had attacked my master and his forty men in the time that I was following the Bird of Gold or coming back from the place where she had led me. I went amongst the tents and I saw that the men had been killed. And I saw the purple beard of my master, cut off by some insolent enemy and left lying upon the ground.

Then I ran over the trampled grass and made for the wilderness. And when I came into the wilderness I hid myself amongst the bushes that the Bird of Gold had flown into. I thought that a great army was pursuing me, and in truth I was very fearful.

III. How Bird-of-Gold Came to Her Fortune

I hid at the near side of the wilderness (said the girl, Bird-of-Gold), for I was too fearful to go back to the encampment and too fearful to go farther on. I ate the wild fruits that grew on the bushes, and at night I covered myself with dried leaves and branches and slept in a hole. I thought how he had been destroyed, that man whose good fortune had been above every one else’s good fortune, and I did not know how such a one as I could keep alive. I was fearful while I slept, and when I awoke and sat upon a heap of leaves in that empty wilderness I was most miserable. I remembered the writing on the pillar that told me to take the road to the right on the day I left my father’s hut and I put a curse upon the road I took. I cursed it because it had brought me, not to my fortune as the writing said it would bring me, but back to the hut I had left. And things were even worse with me from that time than they were before, for my return had brought me to the encounter with the King, and to the voyage with the captain of the King’s ships, and to the dangerous place where I was now.

But then I began to think that although that road had brought me to my father’s hut it had not brought me back to a life that was as it had been before. What had happened after I had come back to the hut had brought me farther away than that road could have led to. Perhaps the writing on the pillar was not lying, after all. It had said: They who take the road to the right will come at last to their fortune. Perhaps my fortune was farther away than I had thought.

Then I said to myself that my journeys were not yet ended, and that if I went on I should yet come to what the writing on the pillar had promised. I sat still for a while with this thought in my mind, and then I rose up and went through the wilderness, going straight on toward a star that was still in the sky.

I left the wilderness with its low shrubs at last, and I came out on a wide, green plain. Before going on that plain I ate again of the wild fruit that was on the bushes and I brought some of the wild fruit with me. I went on and on over the miles of grass. And when it was midday I saw a whiteness upon the plain before me.

I went toward that whiteness and in a while I saw that it was all in movement. There were white living creatures there. I went on, and I came near to where there was a hollow in the plain, and I saw in that hollow a mighty flock of ducks. They were tame, for they did not rise up and fly as I came near.

I looked on them with great astonishment. I had never seen so many ducks together. I looked them all over and I made a guess that there were a thousand ducks there. And I had never seen such beauty in ducks before. For these ducks were of a gleaming whiteness, and moreover they had a shapeliness that I had never seen in such creatures before. I thought and thought, but I could not think how they had come into this unpeopled plain in such a vast flock.