THE TWELFTH CHRONICLE
THE BUILDING OF CASTLE RODRIGUEZ AND THE ENDING OF THESE
CHRONICLES
When the King of Shadow Valley met Rodriguez, for the first time
in the forest, and gave him his promise and left him by his camp-
fire, he went back some way towards the bowmen's cottage and blew
his horn; and his hundred bowmen were about him almost at once. To
these he gave their orders and they went back, whence they had
come, into the forest's darkness. But he went to the bowmen's
cottage and paced before it, a dark and lonely figure of the
night; and wherever he paced the ground he marked it with small
sticks. And next morning the hundred bowmen came with axes as soon
as the earliest light had entered the forest, and each of them
chose out one of the giant trees that stood before the cottage,
and attacked it. All day they swung their axes against the
forest's elders, of which nearly a hundred were fallen when
evening came. And the stoutest of these, great trunks that were
four feet through, were dragged by horses to the bowmen's cottage
and laid by the little sticks that the King of Shadow Valley had
put overnight in the ground. The bowmen's cottage and the kitchen
that was in the wood behind it, and a few trees that still stood,
were now all enclosed by four lines of fallen trees which made a
large rectangle on the ground with a small square at each of its
corners. And craftsmen came, and smoothed and hollowed the inner
sides of the four rows of trees, working far into the night.
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