The Last Battle by C. S. Lewis Read Free Book Online Page A

Eustace.

    “Aye, lad,” said Tirian. “No Narnian Dwarf smithied that. ’Tis mail of Calormen, outlandish gear. I have ever kept a few suits of it in readiness, for I never knew when I or my friends might have reason to walk unseen in The Tisroc’s land. And look on this stone bottle. In this there is a juicewhich, when we have rubbed it on our hands and faces, will make us brown as Calormenes.”
    “Oh hurrah!” said Jill. “Disguise! I love disguises.”
    Tirian showed them how to pour out a little of the juice into the palms of their hands and then rub it well over their faces and necks, right down to the shoulders, and then on their hands, right up to the elbows. He did the same himself.
    “After this has hardened on us,” he said, “we may wash in water and it will not change. Nothing but oil and ashes will make us white Narnians again. And now, sweet Jill, let us go see how this mail shirt becomes you. ’Tis something too long, yet not so much as I feared. Doubtless it belonged to a page in the train of one of their Tarkaans.”
    After the mail shirts they put on Calormene helmets, which are little round ones fitting tight to the head and having a spike on top. Then Tirian took long rolls of some white stuff out of the locker and wound them over the helmets till they became turbans: but the little steel spike still stuck up in the middle. He and Eustace took curved Calormene swords and little round shields. There was no sword light enough for Jill, but he gave her a long, straight hunting knife which might do for a sword at a pinch.
    “Hast any skill with the bow, maiden?” said Tirian.
    “Nothing worth talking of,” said Jill, blushing. “Scrubb’s not bad.”
    “Don’t you believe her, Sire,” said Eustace. “We’ve both been practicing archery ever since we got back from Narnia last time, and she’s about as good as me now. Not that either of us is much.”
    Then Tirian gave Jill a bow and a quiver full of arrows. The next business was to light a fire, for inside that tower it still felt more like a cave than like anything indoors and set one shivering. But they got warm gathering the wood—the sun was now at its highest—and when once the blaze was roaring up the chimney the place began to look cheerful. Dinner was, however, a dull meal, for the best they could do was to pound up some of the hard biscuit which they found in a locker and pour it into boiling water, with salt, so as to make a kind of porridge. And of course there was nothing to drink but water.
    “I wish we’d brought a packet of tea,” said Jill.
    “Or a tin of cocoa,” said Eustace.
    “A firkin or so of good wine in each of these towers would not have been amiss,” said Tirian.

Six

A GOOD NIGHT’S WORK

    ABOUT FOUR HOURS LATER TIRIAN flung himself into one of the bunks to snatch a little sleep. The two children were already snoring: he had made them go to bed before he did because they would have to be up most of the night and he knew that at their age they couldn’t do without sleep. Also, he had tired them out. First, he had given Jill some practice in archery and found that, though not up to Narnian standards, she was really not too bad. Indeed she had succeeded in shooting a rabbit (not a Talking rabbit, of course: there are lots of the ordinary kind about in Western Narnia) and it was already skinned, cleaned, and hanging up. He had found that both the children knew all about this chilly and smelly job; they had learned that kind of thing on their great journey through Giant-Land in the days of Prince Rilian. Then he had tried to teach Eustace how to use his sword and shield. Eustace had learned quite a lot about sword fighting on his earlier adventures but that had been all with a straight Narnian sword. He had never handled a curved Calormene scimitar and that made it hard, for many of the strokes are quite different and some of the habits he had learned with the long sword had now to be unlearned again.