When they were all safely secured, the Bat-King went on before them and his people followed, leading their prisoners into the heart of the forest.
And there we must leave them, for we must return to the King, and hear what happened to him after his parting with the old man.
* * * * *
When he reached home, the King threw himself into his old pursuits as if nothing had happened; but his heart was so sore that they gave him little joy, and, instead of spending his spare hours in hunting with his lords and gentlemen, he only longed to be alone. When he had leisure he would ride off by himself for days at a time, searching for new scenes and new thoughts. He would go out across the borders of his kingdom, by towers and rivers and high castles, sometimes wandering through towns and sometimes passing nights alone in the waste places of the hills.
One evening he came to the foot of a chain of rocky mountains, and stopped, looking up at the crags which towered above his head. Their shapes were so weird that he wondered whether their spires and pinnacles had been carved out by human hands, or whether an earthquake had cast them up in the likeness of men’s work. A track wound up and disappeared among them, and he turned his horse’s steps into it.
He had reached a considerable height when he came suddenly to a chasm so deep that he could not see its bottom. The rock on either side was worn smooth, as though with the passing of many feet, and the opening was narrow enough for a man to stride across without difficulty. The horse stopped, and the rein being loose on his neck, snuffed delicately at the strange gash that divided his path; then he picked his way over it, snorting and cocking his ears. They were scarcely ten yards on the farther side when there was a loud cracking noise, and, looking back, the King saw that the chasm had split wider asunder and now yawned behind him like the mouth of a pit. The horse dashed forward, and had gone some distance before his rider could check him. When at last they stood still, they had come to a smooth face of high rock, with a wide ledge at its foot, over which the track went.
Crowning its summit, some feet above their heads, ran a battlemented wall, and on it sat a woman who looked down at the King while she supported herself with one white arm. Whirling vapour floated behind her, through which appeared the outline of a fantastic castle whose towers seemed to climb to heaven. Her hair was bound about with cords of silver and livid purple poppies. Their petals were dropping down and falling in the King’s path. A dull dark blue garment was wound round her which left only her bare arms free and trailed over the wall below her feet, mixing with her heavy plaits and the silver tassels at the ends of them.
She smiled, bending forward till she looked as though she must fall from her high place; she was like some great unearthly gull poised upon a wave’s crest.
“Soon it will be too dark to travel among these precipices,” she cried. “Come up, O King, before the light falls. The way winds up to my gates.”
And, indeed, the path took a turn at the end of the ledge, and, twisting like a ribbon, vanished in the vapour.