And the leader told Rodriguez that his name was Miguel Threegeese,
given him on account of an exploit in his youth when he lay one
night with his bow by one of the great pools in the forest, where
the geese come in winter. He said the forest was a hundred miles
long, lying mostly along a great valley, which they were crossing.
And once they had owned allegiance to kings of Spain, but now to
none but the King of the Shadow Valley, for the King of Spain's
men had once tried to cut some of the forest down, and the forest
was sacred.
Behind him the men sang on of woodland things, and of cottage
gardens in the villages: with singing and laughter they came to
their journey's end. A cottage as though built by peasants with
boundless material stood in the forest. It was a thatched cottage
built in the peasant's way but of enormous size. The leader
entered first and whispered to those within, who rose and bowed to
Rodriguez as he entered, twenty more bowmen who had been sitting
at a table. One does not speak of the banqueting-hall of a
cottage, but such it appeared, for it occupied more than half of
the cottage and was as large as the banqueting-hall of any castle.
It was made of great beams of oak, and high at either end just
under the thatch were windows with their little square panes of
bulging bluish glass, which at that time was rare in Spain. A
table of oak ran down the length of it, cut from a single tree,
polished and dark from the hands of many men that had sat at it.
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