Tales from the Perilous Realm: Roverandom and Other Classic Faery Stories. Alan Lee
was only wondering,’ said Roverandom.
‘About that little boy,’ said the Man. ‘I thought so.’ He then pulled a telescope out of his pocket. It opened out to an enormous length. ‘A little look will do you no harm, I think,’ he said.
Roverandom looked through it—when he had managed at last to shut one eye and keep the other open. He saw the world plainly. First he saw the far end of the moon’s path falling straight onto the sea; and he thought he saw, faint and rather thin, long lines of small people sailing swiftly down it, but he could not be quite sure. The moonlight quickly faded. Sunlight began to grow; and suddenly there was the cove of the sandsorcerer (but no sign of Psamathos—Psamathos did not allow himself to be peeped at); and after a while the two little boys walked into the round picture, going hand in hand along the shore. ‘Looking for shells or for me?’ wondered the dog.
Very soon the picture shifted and he saw the little boys’ father’s white house on the cliff, with its garden running down to the sea; and at the gate he saw—an unpleasant surprise—the old wizard sitting on a stone smoking his pipe, as if he had nothing to do but watch there for ever, with his old green hat on the back of his head and his waistcoat unbuttoned.
‘What’s old Arta-what-d’you-call-him doing at the gate?’ Roverandom asked. ‘I should have thought he had forgotten about me long ago. And aren’t his holidays over yet?’
‘No, he’s waiting for you, my doglet. He hasn’t forgotten. If you turn up there just now, real or toy, he’ll put some new bewitchment on you pretty quick. It isn’t that he minds so much about his trousers—they were soon mended—but he is very annoyed with Samathos for interfering; and Samathos hasn’t finished making his arrangements yet for dealing with him.’
Just then Roverandom saw Artaxerxes’ hat blown off by the wind, and off the wizard ran after it; and plain to see, he had a wonderful patch on his trousers, an orangecoloured patch with black spots.
‘I should have thought that a wizard could have managed to patch his trousers better than that!’ said Roverandom.
‘But he thinks he has managed it beautifully!’ said the old man. ‘He bewitched a piece off somebody’s window-curtains; they got fire insurance, and he got a splash of colour, and both are satisfied. Still, you are right. He is failing, I do believe. Sad after all these centuries to see a man going off his magic; but lucky for you, perhaps.’ Then the Man-in-the-Moon closed the telescope with a snap, and off they went again.
‘Here are your wings again,’ he said when they had reached the tower. ‘Now fly off and amuse yourself! Don’t worry the moonbeams, don’t kill my white rabbits, and come back when you feel hungry!—or have any other sort of pain.’
Roverandom at once flew off to find the moon-dog and tell him about the other side; but the other dog was a bit jealous of a visitor being allowed to see things which he could not, and he pretended not to be interested.
‘Sounds a nasty part altogether,’ he growled. ‘I’m sure I don’t want to see it. I suppose you’ll be bored with the white side now, and only having me to go about with, instead of all your two-legged friends. It’s a pity the Persian wizard is such a sticker, and you can’t go home.’
Roverandom was rather hurt; and he told the moondog over and over again that he was jolly glad to be back at the tower, and would never be bored with the white side. They soon settled down to be good friends again, and did lots and lots of things together; and yet what the moon-dog had said in bad temper turned out to be true. It was not Roverandom’s fault, and he did his best not to show it, but somehow none of the adventures or explorations seemed so exciting to him as they had done before, and he was always thinking of the fun he had in the garden with little boy Two.
They visited the valley of the white moon-gnomes (moonums, for short) that ride about on rabbits, and make pancakes out of snowflakes, and grow little golden appletrees no bigger than buttercups in their neat orchards. They put broken glass and tintacks outside the lairs of some of the lesser dragons (while they were asleep), and lay awake till the middle of the night to hear them roar with rage—dragons often have tender tummies, as I have told you already, and they go out for a drink at twelve midnight every night of their lives, not to speak of between-whiles. Sometimes the dogs even dared to go spider-baiting—biting webs and setting free the moonbeams, and flying off just in time, while the spiders threw lassoes at them from the hill-tops. But all the while Roverandom was looking out for Postman Mew and News of the World (mostly murders and football-matches, as even a little dog knows; but there is sometimes something better in an odd corner).
He missed Mew’s next visit, as he was away on a ramble, but the old man was still reading the letters and news when he got back (and he seemed in a mighty good humour too, sitting on the roof with his feet dangling over the edge, puffing at an enormous white clay-pipe, sending out clouds of smoke like a railway-engine, and smiling right round his round old face).
Roverandom felt he could bear it no longer. ‘I’ve got a pain in my inside,’ he said. ‘I want to go back to the little boy, so that his dream can come true.’
The old man put down his letter (it was about Artaxerxes, and very amusing), and took the pipe out of his mouth. ‘Must you go? Can’t you stay? This is so sudden! So pleased to have met you! You must drop in again one day. Deelighted to see you any time!’ he said all in a breath.
‘Very well!’ he went on more sensibly. ‘Artaxerxes is arranged for.’
‘How??’ asked Roverandom, really excited again.
‘He has married a mermaid and gone to live at the bottom of the Deep Blue Sea.’
‘I hope she will patch his trousers better! A green seaweed patch would go well with his green hat.’
‘My dear dog! He was married in a complete new suit of seaweed green with pink coral buttons and epaulettes of sea-anemones; and they burnt his old hat on the beach! Samathos arranged it all. O! Samathos is very deep, as deep as the Deep Blue Sea, and I expect he means to settle lots of things to his liking this way, lots more than just you, my dog.
‘I wonder how it will turn out! Artaxerxes is getting into his twentieth or twenty-first childhood at the moment, it seems to me; and he makes a lot of fuss about very little things. Most obstinate he is, to be sure. He used to be a pretty good magician, but he is becoming badtempered and a thorough nuisance. When he came and dug up old Samathos with a wooden spade in the middle of the afternoon, and pulled him out of his hole by the ears, the Samathist thought things had gone too far, and I don’t wonder. “Such a lot of disturbance, just at my best time for sleeping, and all about a wretched little dog”: that is what he writes to me, and you needn’t blush.
‘So he invited Artaxerxes to a mermaid-party, when both their tempers had cooled down a bit, and that is how it all happened. They took Artaxerxes out for a moonlight swim, and he will never go back to Persia, or even Pershore. He fell in love with the rich mer-king’s elderly but lovely daughter, and they were married the next night.
‘It is probably just as well. There has not been a resident Magician in the Ocean for some time. Proteus, Poseidon, Triton, Neptune, and all that lot, they’ve all turned into minnows or mussels long ago, and in any case they never knew or bothered much about things outside the Mediterranean—they were too fond of sardines. Old Niord retired a long while ago, too. He was of course only able to give half his attention to business after his silly marriage with the giantess—you remember she fell in love with him because he had clean feet (so convenient in the home), and fell out of love with him, when it was too late, because they were wet. He’s on his last legs now, I hear; quite doddery, poor old dear. Oil-fuel has given him a dreadful cough, and he has retired to the coast of Iceland for a little sunshine.
‘There was the Old Man of the Sea, of course. He was my cousin, and I’m not proud of it. He was a bit of a burden—wouldn’t walk, and always wanted to be carried, as I dare say you have heard. That was the death of him. He sat on a floating mine (if you know what I mean) a year or two ago, right on one of the buttons! Not