The Story of the Amulet, E. Nesbit [me reader .TXT] 📗
- Author: E. Nesbit
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“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, waiting pause. Then a big man, with a cleanly-shaven face, beckoned them from the top of a flight of red marble steps.
They went up; the boots of Robert clattering more than usual because he was so nervous. A door swung open, a curtain was drawn back. A double line of bowing forms in gorgeous raiment formed a lane that led to the steps of the throne, and as the children advanced hurriedly there came from the throne a voice very sweet and kind.
“Three children from the land where the sun never sets! Let them draw hither without fear.”
In another minute they were kneeling at the throne’s foot, saying, “O Queen, live for ever!” exactly as the woman had taught them. And a splendid dream-lady, all gold and silver and jewels and snowy drift of veils, was raising Anthea, and saying—
“Don’t be frightened, I really am so glad you came! The land where the sun never sets! I am delighted to see you! I was getting quite too dreadfully bored for anything!”
And behind Anthea the kneeling Cyril whispered in the ears of the respectful Robert—
“Bobs, don’t say anything to Panther. It’s no use upsetting her, but we didn’t ask for Jane’s address, and the Psammead’s with her.”
“Well,” whispered Robert, “the charm can bring them to us at any moment. It said so.”
“Oh, yes,” whispered Cyril, in miserable derision, “we’re all right, of course. So we are! Oh, yes! If we’d only got the charm.”
Then Robert saw, and he murmured, “Crikey!” at the foot of the throne of Babylon; while Cyril hoarsely whispered the plain English fact—
“Jane’s got the charm round her neck, you silly cuckoo.”
“Crikey!” Robert repeated in heart-broken undertones.
“THE DEEPEST DUNGEON BELOW THE CASTLE MOAT”
The Queen threw three of the red and gold embroidered cushions off the throne on to the marble steps that led up to it.
“Just make yourselves comfortable there,” she said. “I’m simply dying to talk to you, and to hear all about your wonderful country and how you got here, and everything, but I have to do justice every morning. Such a bore, isn’t it? Do you do justice in your own country?”
“No,” said Cyril; “at least of course we try to, but not in this public sort of way, only in private.”
“Ah, yes,” said the Queen, “I should much prefer a private audience myself—much easier to manage. But public opinion has to be considered. Doing justice is very hard work, even when you’re brought up to it.”
“We don’t do justice, but we have to do scales, Jane and me,” said Anthea, “twenty minutes a day. It’s simply horrid.”
“What are scales?” asked the Queen, “and what is Jane?”
“Jane is my little sister. One of the guards-at-the-gate’s wife is taking care of her. And scales are music.”
“I never heard of the instrument,” said the Queen. “Do you sing?”
“Oh, yes. We can sing in parts,” said Anthea.
“That is magic,” said the Queen. “How many parts are you each cut into before you do it?”
“We aren’t cut at all,” said Robert hastily. “We couldn’t sing if we were. We’ll show you afterwards.”
“So you shall, and now sit quiet like dear children and hear me do justice. The way I do it has always been admired. I oughtn’t to say that, ought I? Sounds so conceited. But I don’t mind with you, dears. Somehow I feel as though I’d known you quite a long time already.”
The Queen settled herself on her throne and made a signal to her attendants. The children, whispering together among the cushions on the steps of the throne, decided that she was very beautiful and very kind, but perhaps just the least bit flighty.
The first person who came to ask for justice was a woman whose brother had taken the money the father had left for her. The brother said it was the uncle who had the money. There was a good deal of talk and the children were growing rather bored, when the Queen suddenly clapped her hands, and said—
“Put both the men in prison till one of them owns up that the other is innocent.”
“But suppose they both did it?” Cyril could not help interrupting.
“Then prison’s the best place for them,” said the Queen.
“But suppose neither did it.”
“That’s impossible,” said the Queen; “a thing’s not done unless someone does it. And you mustn’t interrupt.”
Then came a woman, in tears, with a torn veil and real ashes on her head—at least Anthea thought so, but it may have been only road-dust. She complained that her husband was in prison.
“What for?” said the Queen.
“They said it was for speaking evil of your Majesty,” said the woman, “but it wasn’t. Someone had a spite against him. That was what it was.”
“How do you know he hadn’t spoken evil of me?” said the Queen.
“No one could,” said the woman simply, “when they’d once seen your beautiful face.”
“Let the man out,” said the Queen, smiling. “Next case.”
The next case was that of a boy who had stolen a fox. “Like the Spartan boy,” whispered Robert. But the Queen ruled that nobody could have any possible reason for owning a fox, and still less for stealing one. And she did not believe that there were any foxes in Babylon; she, at any rate, had never seen one. So the boy was released.
The people came to the Queen about all sorts of family quarrels and neighbourly misunderstandings—from a fight between brothers over the division of an inheritance, to the dishonest and unfriendly conduct of a woman who had borrowed a cooking-pot at the last New Year’s festival, and not returned it yet.
And the Queen decided everything, very, very decidedly indeed. At last she clapped her hands quite suddenly and with extreme loudness, and said—
“The audience is over for today.”
Everyone said, “May the Queen live for ever!” and went out.
And the children were left alone in the justice-hall with the Queen of Babylon and her ladies.
“There!” said the Queen, with a long sigh of relief. “That’s over! I couldn’t have done another stitch of justice if you’d offered me the crown of Egypt! Now come into the garden, and we’ll have a nice, long, cosy talk.”
She led them through long, narrow corridors whose walls they somehow felt, were very, very thick, into a sort of garden courtyard. There were thick shrubs closely planted, and roses were trained over trellises, and made a pleasant shade—needed, indeed, for already the sun was as hot as it is in England in August at the seaside.
Slaves spread cushions on a low, marble terrace, and a big man with a smooth face served cool drink in cups of gold studded with beryls. He drank a little from the Queen’s cup before handing it to her.
“That’s rather a nasty trick,” whispered Robert, who had been carefully taught never to drink out of one of the nice, shiny, metal cups that are chained to the London drinking fountains without first rinsing it out thoroughly.
The Queen overheard him.
“Not at all,” said she. “Ritti-Marduk is a very clean man. And one has to have someone as taster, you know, because of poison.”
The word made the children feel rather creepy; but Ritti-Marduk had
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