The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (Vintage International) Read Online Free Page B

but the sky and the sea solid with feathers, and every feather a soul, so it was he said, after.
    And he said to the dancing child, ‘Shall we put to sea in this boat?’
    And the thing was still and would not answer.
    And he said, ‘So far I have come, and I am very greatly afraid, but if I may come to her, I will go on.’
    And the little thing said, ‘Wait.’
    And he thought of her among all the others out on the water, with her thin white face and her flat breast and her starved mouth, and he called after her ‘Wait,’ and her voice howled back like an echo,
    ‘Wait.’
    And he stirred the air, that was full of things, with his arms, and shuffled his clever feet among the dust of the dead on the boards of that boat, but all was heavy, and would not move, and the waves went rolling past, one after another, after another, after another. Then he tried to jump in, he says, but could not. So he stood till dawn and felt them come and go and well in and draw back and heard their cries and the little thing that said,
    ‘Wait.’
    And in the dawn of the next day he came back to the village a broken man. And he sat in the square with the old men, he in the best of his manhood, and his mouth slackened and his face fell away and mostly he said nothing, except ‘I can hear well enough’ or otherwise ‘I wait,’ these two things only.
    And two or three or ten years ago he put up his head and said, ‘Do you not hear the little thing, dancing?’ And they said no, but he went in, and made his bed businesslike, and called his neighbours and gave Jeanne the key to his sea-chest and stretched himself out, all thin as he was and wasted, and said, ‘In the end I waited longest, but now I hear it stamping, the little thing is impatient, though I have been patient enough.’ And at midnight he said, ‘Why, there you are, then,’ and so he died.
    And the room smelled of apple blossom and ripe apples together, Jeanne said. And Jeanne married the butcher and bore him four sons and two daughters, all of them lusty, but ill-disposed for dancing.

The Story of the Eldest Princess
     

     

     
    The Lady with the Rooks
, Edward Calvert, 1829
     
    O nce upon a time, in a kingdom between the sea and the mountains, between the forest and the desert, there lived a King and Queen with three daughters. Their eldest daughter was pale and quiet, the second daughter was brown and active, and the third was one of those Sabbath daughters who are bonny and bright and good and gay, of whom everything and nothing was expected.
    When the eldest Princess was born, the sky was a speedwell blue, covered with very large, lazy, sheep-curly white clouds. When the second Princess was born, there were grey and creamy mares’ tails streaming at great speed across the blue. And when the third Princess was born, the sky was a perfectly clear pane of sky-blue, with not a cloud to be seen, so that you might think the blue was spangled with sun-gold, though this was an illusion.
    By the time they were young women, things had changed greatly. When they were infants, there were a series of stormy sunsets tinged with sea-green, and seaweed-green. Later there were, as well as the sunsets, dawns, where the sky was mackerel-puckered and underwater-dappled with lime-green and bottle-green and other greens too, malachite and jade. And when they were moody girls the green colours flecked and streaked the blue and the grey all day long, ranging from bronze-greens through emerald to palest opal-greens, with hints of fire. In the early days the people stood in the streets and fields with their mouths open, and said oh, and ah, in tones of admiration and wonder. Then one day a small girl said to her mother that there had been no blue at all for three days now, and she wanted to see blue again. And her mother told her to be sensible and patient and it would blow over, and in about a month the sky was blue, or mostly blue, but only for few days, and streaked, ominously, the