The Lily Hand and Other Stories by Ellis Peters Read Free Book Online Page A

imagined it. It was there, and it was alive.
    I don’t know what it is in a man that can drive him forward towards something that threatens and terrifies him. Not courage. Courage ought to be reasoning and reasonable, ought to have an objective. There was every reason in the world why I should turn and run for it, feeling the way I felt, and no reason at all why I should creep shivering through the wet bushes towards that lighted window.
    But that’s what I did. Curiosity must be a passion as strong and fundamental as love, to hold its own with the sort of panic terror I felt blazing up in me. I was incandescent with it, my erected hair giving off sparks into the darkness, all my skin tensed and burning with its heat. And yet I was crawling through the tangled branches, soaked, shuddering, my knees quaking under me, drawn to the window as to a magnet.
    The house waited for me, quiescent, biding its time. I reached out and touched the wall beneath the window, drew myself up, and looked into the room.
    There were six of them. In that little, wood-panelled, ancient brown room, six of them sat, some at a table, some with their backs to the green-tiled stove with its sunken radiation eyes. One of them was smoking a short briar pipe. One, the one I’d seen in the doorway, was just closing the door of the room behind him, and now I saw his face, and it was ugly, tragic, and ferocious. Two of the others were females. The word ‘women’ didn’t occur to me in connection with them. They were thick-bodied, neckless, with gross lips and broad noses. I swear not one of them was taller than the first.
    All the voids in my racial memory, all those dark hollows of ignorance that might so easily, so horribly be peopled after all, swelled into one darkness and filled the night for me. The antique darkness in which the enemy lurked still, and still was dominant, the territory where the daylight laws of reason and credibility were not current, gripped and held and contained me. For my reason denied this, but my senses recorded it. The forest house was full of dwarfs. The very air outside its confines was heavy with their tragedy and hatred.
    In the stories, you’ll remember, the hero still advances, that indestructible inquisitiveness overcoming his fear even when he knows his enemy. Now I know it can happen, because it went on happening to me. I’d seen them, and still there was something else I had to see. In that upstairs room, too, there was a subdued light burning. I felt along the wall until I reached the wooden staircase to the gallery, and step by step, clinging to the wood with cold hands, I climbed it, and edged my way to the window. The sill was low and one half of the window was slightly open so that a draught stirred the drawn curtains. I put my hand in, and parted the curtains an inch or two, just enough to peer in.
    A little lamp, heavily shaded, was burning on a small table beside the bed. It filled all the centre of the room, that bed, and its down quilt billowed like a white, bulbous cloud. Beneath the cloud a girl lay asleep.
    She lay on her back, her arms relaxed at her sides, her pure profile bright under the gleam of the lamp. The face was motionless, withdrawn from the world. Long dark lashes lay on the pale cheeks, the soft lips were raised tenderly to the leaning air. Over the pillow, over the bed, her long, long, golden hair streamed unbound. She was more beautiful than I can ever tell you, she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
    Her breathing was deep, regular, and slow, her face marble. She slept an unmoving, an enchanted sleep, there in the house of the enemy. And unless someone awoke her and took her away, there she would sleep for ever.
    I had no doubts left in me at all. There was no part of that nightmare of the war between the ancient and the new races that I could not believe. There were places, there were times in the darkness, when the old world reached out after