Wet Magic - E. Nesbit (read novels website TXT) 📗

whatever it may be in yours. What do your Princesses do? Do they open the wind cages?”

“I⁠ ⁠… I don’t know,” said the children. “I think they only open bazaars.”

“Mother says they work awfully hard, and they go and see people who are ill in hospitals,” Kathleen was beginning, but at this moment the Queen rose and so did everyone else.

“Come,” said the Princess, “I must go and take my turn at river-filling. Only Princesses can do the finest sort of work.”

“What is the hardest thing you have to do?” Francis asked as they walked out into the garden.

“Keeping the sea out of our kingdom,” was the answer, “and fighting the Under Folk. We kept the sea out by trying very hard with both hands, inside our minds. And, of course, the sky helps.”

“And how do you fight the Under Folk⁠—and who are they?” Bernard wanted to know.

“Why, the thickheaded, heavy people who live in the deep sea.”

“Different from you?” Kathleen asked.

“My dear child!”

“She means,” explained Mavis, “that we didn’t know there were any other kind of people in the sea except your kind.”

“You know much less about us than we do about you,” said the Princess. “Of course there are different nations and tribes, and different customs and dresses and everything. But there are two great divisions down here besides us, the Thick-Heads and the Thin-Skins, and we have to fight both of them. The Thin-Skins live near the surface of the water, frivolous, silly things like nautiluses and flying fish, very pleasant, but deceitful and light-minded. They are very treacherous. The Thick-Heads live in the cold deep dark waters. They are desperate people.”

“Do you ever go down there?”

The Princess shuddered.

“No,” she said, “but we might have to. If the water ever came into our kingdom they would attack us, and we should have to drive them out; and then we should have to drive them right down to their own kingdom again. It happened once, in my grandfather’s time.”

“But how on earth,” asked Bernard, “did you ever get the water out again?”

“It wasn’t on earth, you know,” said the Princess, “and the Whales blew a good deal of it out⁠—the Grampuses did their best, but they don’t blow hard enough. And the Octopuses finished the work by sucking the water out with their suckers.”

“Do you have cats here then?” asked Kathleen, whose attention had wandered, and had only caught a word that sounded like Pussies.

“Only Octopussies,” said the Princess, “but then they’re eight times as pussy as your dry-land cats.”

What Kathleen’s attention had wandered to was a tall lady standing on a marble pedestal in the middle of a pool. She held a big vase over her head, and from it poured a thin stream of water. This stream fell in an arch right across the pool into a narrow channel cut in the marble of the square in which they now stood, ran across the square, and disappeared under a dark arch in the face of the rock.

“There,” said the Princess, stopping.

“What is it?” asked Reuben, who had been singularly silent.

“This,” she said simply, “is the source of the Nile. And of all other rivers. And it’s my turn now. I must not speak again till my term of source-service is at an end. Do what you will. Go where you will. All is yours. Only beware that you do not touch the sky. If once profane hands touch the sky the whole heaven is overwhelmed.”

She ran a few steps, jumped, and landed on the marble pedestal without touching the lady who stood there already. Then, with the utmost care, so that the curved arc of the water should not be slackened or diverted, she took the vase in her hands and the other lady in her turn leaped across the pool and stood beside the children and greeted them kindly.

“I am Maia. My sister has told me all you did for her,” she said; “it was I who pinched your foot,” and as she spoke they knew the voice that had said, among the seaweed-covered rocks at Beachfield: “Save her. We die in captivity.”

“What will you do?” she asked, “while my sister performs her source-service?”

“Wait, I suppose,” said Bernard. “You see we want to know about going home.”

“Didn’t you fix a time to be recalled?” asked Maia. And when they said no, her beautiful smiling face suddenly looked grave.

“With whom have you left the charge of speaking the spell of recall?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Bernard. “What spell?”

“The one which enabled me to speak to you that day in the shallows,” said Maia. “Of course my sister explained to you that the spell which enables us to come at your call is the only one by which you can yourselves return.”

“She didn’t,” said Mavis.

“Ah, she is young and impulsive. But no doubt she arranged with someone to speak the spell and recall you?”

“No, she didn’t. She doesn’t know any land people except us. She told me so,” said Kathleen.

“Well, is the spell written anywhere?” Maia asked.

“Under a picture” they told her, not knowing that it was also written in the works of Mr. John Milton.

“Then I’m afraid you’ll have to wait ’til someone happens to read what is under the picture,” said Maia kindly.

“But the house is locked up; there’s no one there to read anything,” Bernard reminded them.

There was a dismal silence. Then:

“Perhaps burglars will break in and read it,” suggested Reuben kindly. “Anyhow, what’s the use of kicking up a shine about it? I can’t see what you want to go back for. It’s a little bit of all right here, so it is⁠—I don’t think. Plucky sight better than anything I ever come across. I’m a-goin’ to enjoy myself I am, and see all the sights. Miss, there, said we might.”

“Well spoken indeed,” said Maia, smiling at his earnest face. “That is the true spirit of the explorer.”

“But we’re not explorers,” said Mavis, a little crossly, for her; “and we’re not so selfish