…’
This brought them to the threshold of the gate, and two men in bright armour suddenly barred their way with crossed spears.
‘Who goes there?’ they said.
(I think I must have explained to you before how it was that the children were always able to understand the language of any place they might happen to be in, and to be themselves understood. If not, I have no time to explain it now.)
‘We come from very far,’ said Cyril mechanically. ‘From the Empire where the sun never sets, and we want to see your King.’
‘If it’s quite convenient,’ amended Anthea.
‘The King (may he live for ever!),’ said the gatekeeper, ‘is gone to fetch home his fourteenth wife. Where on earth have you come from not to know that?’
‘The Queen then,’ said Anthea hurriedly, and not taking any notice of the question as to where they had come from.
‘The Queen,’ said the gatekeeper, ‘(may she live for ever!) gives audience today three hours after sun-rising.’
‘But what are we to do till the end of the three hours?’ asked Cyril.
The gatekeeper seemed neither to know nor to care. He appeared less interested in them than they could have thought possible. But the man who had crossed spears with him to bar the children’s way was more human.
‘Let them go in and look about them,’ he said. ‘I’ll wager my best sword they’ve never seen anything to come near our little – village.’
He said it in the tone people use for when they call the Atlantic Ocean the ‘herring pond.’
The gatekeeper hesitated.
‘They’re only children, after all,’ said the other, who had children of his own. ‘Let me off for a few minutes, Captain, and I’ll take them to my place and see if my good woman can’t fit them up in something a little less outlandish than their present rig. Then they can have a look round without being mobbed. May I go?’
‘Oh yes, if you like,’ said the Captain, ‘but don’t be all day.’
The man led them through the dark arch into the town. And it was very different from London. For one thing, everything in London seems to be patched up out of odds and ends, but these houses seemed to have been built by people who liked the same sort of things. Not that they were all alike, for though all were squarish, they were of different sizes, and decorated in all sorts of different ways, some with paintings in bright colours, some with black and silver designs. There were terraces, and gardens, and balconies, and open spaces with trees. Their guide took them to a little house in a back street, where a kind-faced woman sat spinning at the door of a very dark room.
‘Here,’ he said, ‘just lend these children a mantle each, so that they can go about and see the place till the Queen’s audience begins. You leave that wool for a bit, and show them round if you like. I must be off now.’
The woman did as she was told, and the four children, wrapped in fringed mantles, went with her all about the town, and oh! how I wish I had time to tell you all that they saw. It was all so wonderfully different from anything you have ever seen. For one thing, all the houses were dazzlingly bright, and many of them covered with pictures. Some had great creatures carved in stone at each side of the door. Then the people – there were no black frock-coats and tall hats; no dingy coats and skirts of good, useful, ugly stuffs warranted to wear. Everyone’s clothes were bright and beautiful with blue and scarlet and green and gold.
The market was brighter than you would think anything could be. There were stalls for everything you could possibly want – and for a great many things that if you wanted here and now, want would be your master. There were pineapples and peaches in heaps – and stalls of crockery and glass things, beautiful shapes and glorious colours, there were stalls for necklaces, and clasps, and bracelets, and brooches, for woven stuffs, and furs, and embroidered linen. The children had never seen half so many beautiful things together, even at Liberty’s.
It seemed no time at all before the woman said:
‘It’s nearly time now. We ought to be getting on towards the palace. It’s as well to be early.’
So they went to the palace, and when they got there it was more splendid than anything they had seen yet.
For it was glowing with colours, and with gold and silver and black and white – like some magnificent embroidery. Flight after flight of broad marble steps led up to it, and at the edges of the stairs stood great images, twenty times as big as a man – images of men with wings like chain armour, and hawks’ heads, and winged men with the heads of dogs. And there were the statues of great kings.
Between the flights of steps were terraces where fountains played, and the Queen’s Guard in white and scarlet, and armour that shone like gold, stood by twos lining the way up the stairs; and a great body of them was massed by the vast door of the palace itself, where it stood glittering like an impossibly radiant peacock in the noon-day sun.
All sorts of people were passing up the steps to seek audience of the Queen. Ladies in richly-embroidered dresses with fringy flounces, poor folks in plain and simple clothes, dandies with beards oiled and curled.
And Cyril, Robert, Anthea and Jane, went with the crowd.
At the gate of the palace the Psammead put one eye cautiously out of the basket and whispered:
‘I can’t be bothered with queens. I’ll go home with this lady. I’m sure she’ll get me some sand if you ask her to.’
‘Oh! don’t leave us,’ said Jane.
The woman was giving some last instructions in Court etiquette to Anthea, and did not hear Jane.
‘Don’t be a little muff,’ said the Psammead quite fiercely. ‘It’s not a bit of good your having a charm. You never use it. If you want me you’ve only got to say the name of power and ask the charm to bring me to you.’
‘I’d rather go with you,’ said Jane. And it was the most surprising thing she had ever said in her life.
Everyone opened its mouth without thinking of manners, and Anthea, who was peeping into the Psammead’s basket, saw that its mouth opened wider than anybody’s.
‘You needn’t gawp like that,’ Jane went on. ‘I’m not going to be bothered with queens any more than it is. And I know, wherever it is, it’ll take jolly good care that it’s safe.’
‘She’s right there,’ said everyone, for they had observed that the Psammead had a way of knowing which side its bread was buttered.
She turned to the woman and said, ‘You’ll take me home with you, won’t you? And let me play with your little girls till the others have done with the Queen.’
‘Surely I will, little heart!’ said the woman.
And then Anthea hurriedly stroked the Psammead and embraced Jane, who took the woman’s hand, and trotted contentedly away with the Psammead’s bag under the other arm.
The others stood looking after her till she, the woman, and the basket were lost in the many-coloured crowd. Then Anthea turned once more to the palace’s magnificent doorway and said:
‘Let’s ask the porter to take care of our Babylonian overcoats.’
So they took off the garments that the woman had lent them and stood amid the jostling petitioners of the Queen in their own English frocks and coats and hats and boots.
‘We want to see the Queen,’ said Cyril; ‘we come from the far Empire where the sun never sets!’
A murmur of surprise and a thrill of excitement ran through the crowd. The door-porter spoke to a black man, he spoke to someone else. There was a whispering,