Tristan and Iseult Read Online Free

tears trickled through his fingers. ‘I will do as you ask,’ he said. ‘But if you do not come back, I too shall have lost a son. Who shall comfort me?’
    The boat was made ready and cushions spread in the bottom of it; and on the cushions they laid Tristan with his harp beside him, and food and drink for a few days. And again, folk gathered on the shore, mourning; and at the turn of the tide they pushed the boat out into the surf. For a long while it swung to and fro, and then the scour of the ebb tide caught it and swept it out round the headland into the open sea.
    Soon Tristan was out of sight of land, alone with the waves and the sky. By day the seabirds swept between him and the sun, and at night the stars wheeled over his head; and he never knew how often the day turned to night or night to day again. But a dawn came when he caught the warm smell of land in the wind; and when, putting out all the strength he had, he lifted himself high enough to see over the edge of the boat, he saw that the tide was carrying him into the mouth of a great river. The sunrise shone golden through tall reeds, and wild swans beat up from the water with the light of it under their wings. And far off he thought he saw other boats, and farther still the smoke-haze of hearth fires. There was scarcely any strength left in him, and he knew that whether or no this was the place where he would find healing, his journey must end here. He had no strength to call, but he had hisharp, and the old magic still in his fingers. He drew it to him and tuned the strings, and partly for a cry of help to any who might hear, and partly for the sunrise under the swans’ wings, he began to play.
    The skiff drifted nearer and nearer to land, and the men in the other boats saw it; a boat that seemed empty; yet as it drew nearer they heard wonderful harp music coming from it; for a while they hung back, thinking it might be some kind of enchantment. But at last one or two fishermen, bolder than the rest, brought their hide and wicker boats alongside; and when they looked down into the skiff, they saw a man lying there, all bones, with nothing of him as it seemed alive but his great fever-stricken eyes and his hands on the strings of a harp; and the stink of his wound all about him, and the music that he drew from the leaping harpstrings as sweet as the music of the Land of Youth.
    And as they looked, one of the fishermen said to another, ‘Now was ever sweeter music heard in all Ireland since the Dagda himself would be putting men to sleep with the sweetness of his harp?’
    And when Tristan heard them, his heart knotted up cold within him, for he knew well enough the orders of the King of Ireland. It is a strange fate that has brought me to this place of all others, he thought. And if these people find it is from Cornwall that I come, then indeed I shall find my death here. But his fingers never faltered on the harpstrings, and the fisherfolk did not dare to interrupt his playing with their questions, for the awe that was on them. But they put a line aboard the skiff and towed it in to shore, with Tristan still playing on his harp.
    Now the King of Ireland was riding with some companions along the shore, and when they had brought the boat to land, one of the men ran and told him of the stranger they had found, for the King was one who was interested in all strange and wonderful things. And he came down to see this wounded stranger for himself.
    And when Tristan saw him coming, he knew that it must be the King by the gold circlet on his head, and ceased his playing. And the King asked him who he was, and what had brought him to this evil plight.
    ‘As to my name, I am called Pro of Demester,’ said Tristan, gathering all his strength to answer, and speaking the first name that came into his head, ‘and I am a minstrel, wandering the world. I was on my way from Spain back to my home in Brittany, when our ship was attacked by pirates – and in the fighting I