Tales from the Perilous Realm: Roverandom and Other Classic Faery Stories. Alan Lee
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was almost as bad as being asked to jump into the hole in the Man-in-the-Moon’s cellar, and Rover backed away, so that Mew and Psamathos had to push him in. Push him they did, too, without a coax; and the whale’s jaws shut to with a snap.
Inside it was very dark indeed, and fishy. There Rover sat and trembled; and as he sat (not daring even to scratch his own ears) he heard, or thought he heard, the swish and beating of the whale’s tail in the waters; and he felt, or thought he felt, the whale plunge deeper and downer towards the bottom of the Deep Blue Sea.
But when the whale stopped and opened his mouth wide again (delighted to do so: whales prefer going about trawling with their jaws wide open and a good tide of food coming in, but Uin was a considerate animal) and Rover peeped out, it was deep, altogether immeasurably deep, but not at all blue. There was only a pale green light; and Rover walked out to find himself on a white path of sand winding through a dim and fantastic forest.
‘Straight along! You haven’t far to go,’ said Uin.
Rover went straight along, as straight as the path would allow, and soon before him he saw the gate of a great palace, made it seemed of pink and white stone that shone with a pale light coming through it; and through the many windows lights of green and blue shone clear. All round the walls huge sea-trees grew, taller than the domes of the palace that swelled up vast, gleaming in the dark water. The great indiarubber trunks of the trees bent and swayed like grasses, and the shadow of their endless branches was thronged with goldfish, and silverfish, and redfish, and bluefish, and phosphorescent fish like birds. But the fishes did not sing. The mermaids sang inside the palace. How they sang! And all the sea-fairies sang in chorus, and the music floated out of the windows, hundreds of mer-folk playing on horns and pipes and conches of shell.
Sea-goblins were grinning at him out of the darkness under the trees, and Rover hurried along as fast as he could—he found his steps slow and laden deep down under the water. And why didn’t he drown? I don’t know, but I suppose Psamathos Psamathides had given some thought to it (he knows much more about the sea than most people would think, even though he never sets toe in it, if he can help it), while Rover and Mew had gone for a walk, and he had sat and simmered down and thought of a new plan.
Anyway Rover did not drown; but he was already wishing he was somewhere else, even in the whale’s wet inside, before he got to the door: such queer shapes and faces peered at him out of the purple bushes and the spongey thickets beside the path that he felt very unsafe indeed. At last he got to the enormous door—a golden archway fringed with coral, and a door of mother-of-pearl studded with sharks’ teeth. The knocker was a huge ring encrusted with white barnacles, and all the barnacles’ little red streamers were hanging out; but of course Rover could not reach it, nor could he have moved it anyway. So he barked, and to his surprise his bark came quite loud. The music inside stopped at the third bark, and the door opened.
Who do you think opened it? Artaxerxes himself, dressed in what looked like plum-coloured velvet, and green silk trousers; and he still had a large pipe in his mouth, only it was blowing beautiful rainbow-coloured bubbles instead of tobacco-smoke; but he had no hat.
‘Hullo!’ he said. ‘So you’ve turned up! I thought you would get tired of old P-samathos’ (how he snorted over that exaggerated P) ‘before long. He can’t do quite every-thing. Well, what have you come down here for? We are just having a party, and you’re interrupting the music.’
‘Please, Mr Arterxaxes, I mean Ertaxarxes,’ began Rover, rather flustered and trying to be very polite.
‘O never mind about getting it right! I don’t mind!’ said the wizard rather crossly. ‘Get on to the explanation, and make it short; I’ve no time for long rigmaroles.’ He had become rather full of his own importance (with strangers), since his marriage to the rich mer-king’s daughter, and his appointment to the post of Pacific and Atlantic Magician (the PAM they called him for short, when he was not present). ‘If you want to see me about anything pressing, you had better come in and wait in the hall; I might find a moment after the dance.’
He closed the door behind Rover and went off. The little dog found himself in a huge dark space under a dimly-lighted dome. There were pointed archways curtained with seaweed all round, and most of them were dark; but one of them was full of light, and music came loudly through it, music that seemed to go on and on for ever, never repeating and never stopping for a rest.
Rover soon got very tired of waiting, so he walked along to the shining doorway and peeped through the curtains. He was looking into a vast ballroom with seven domes and ten thousand coral pillars, lit with purest magic and filled with warm and sparkling water. There all the golden-haired mermaids and the darkhaired sirens were dancing interwoven dances as they sang—not dancing on their tails, but wonderful swim-dancing, up and down, as well as to and fro, in the clear water.
Nobody noticed the little dog’s nose peeping through the seaweed at the door, so after gazing for a while he crept inside. The floor was made of silver sand and pink butterfly shells, all open and flapping in the gently swirling water, and he had picked his way carefully among them for some way, keeping close to the wall, before a voice said suddenly above him:
‘What a sweet little dog! He’s a land-dog, not a sea-dog, I’m sure. How could he have got here—such a tiny mite!’
Rover looked up and saw a beautiful mer-lady with a large black comb in her golden hair, sitting on a ledge not far above him; her regrettable tail was dangling down, and she was mending one of Artaxerxes’ green socks. She was, of course, the new Mrs Artaxerxes (usually known as Princess Pam; she was rather popular, which was more than you could say for her husband). Artaxerxes was at the moment sitting beside her, and whether he had the time or not for long rigmaroles, he was listening to one of his wife’s. Or had been, before Rover turned up. Mrs Artaxerxes put an end to her rigmarole, and to her sockmending, as soon as she caught sight of him, and floating down picked him up and carried him back to her couch. This was really a window-seat on the first floor (an indoors window)—there are no stairs in sea-houses, and no umbrellas, and for the same reason; and there is not much difference between doors and windows, either.
The mer-lady soon settled her beautiful (and rather capacious) self comfortably on her couch again, and put Rover on her lap; and immediately there was an awful growl from under the window-seat.
‘Lie down, Rover! Lie down, good dog!’ said Mrs Artaxerxes. She was not talking to our Rover, though; she was talking to a white mer-dog who came out now, in spite of what she said, growling and grumbling and beating the water with his little web-feet, and lashing it with his large flat tail, and blowing bubbles out of his sharp nose.
‘What a horrible little thing!’ the new dog said. ‘Look at his miserable tail! Look at his feet! Look at his silly coat!’
‘Look at yourself,’ said Rover from the mer-lady’s lap, ‘and you won’t want to do it again! Who called you Rover?—a cross between a duck and a tadpole pretending to be a dog!’ From which you can see that they took rather a fancy to one another at first sight.
Indeed, they soon made great friends—not quite such friends, perhaps, as Rover and the moon-dog, if only because Rover’s stay under the sea was shorter, and the deeps are not such a jolly place as the moon for little dogs, being full of dark and awful places where light has never been and never will be, because they will never be uncovered till light has all gone out. Horrible things live there, too old for imagining, too strong for spells, too vast for measurement. Artaxerxes had already found that out. The post of PAM is not the most comfortable job in the world.
‘Now swim away and amuse yourselves!’ said his wife, when the dog-argument had died down and the two animals were merely sniffing at one another. ‘Don’t worry the fire-fish, don’t chew the sea-anemones, don’t get caught in the clams; and come back to supper!’
‘Please, I can’t swim,’ said Rover.
‘Dear me! What a nuisance!’ she said. ‘Now Pam!’—she was the only one so far that called him this to his face—‘here is something you can really do, at last!’
‘Certainly,