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.  So was the first day’s work accomplished and so was built the first layer of the walls of Castle Rodriguez.

On the next day the bowmen again felled a hundred trees; the top of the first layer was cut flat by carpenters; at evening the second layer was hoisted up after their under sides had been flattened to fit the layer below them; quantities more were cast in to make the floor when they had been gradually smoothed and fitted:  at the end of the second day a man could not see over the walls of Castle Rodriguez.  And on the third day more craftsmen arrived, men from distant villages at the forest’s edge, whence the King of Shadow Valley had summoned them; and they carved the walls as they grew.  And a hundred trees fell that day, and the castle was another layer higher.  And all the while a park was growing in the forest, as they felled the great trees; but the greatest trees of all the bowmen spared, oaks that had stood there for ages and ages of men; they left them to grip the earth for a while longer, for a few more human generations.