The Lad Of The Gad

“I will not believe,” said the Champion, “but that you are taking anger and rage, King Donald.”

“Well, then, I am,” said Donald, “if I did but know at what I should be angry.”

“Good king,” said the Champion. “Coming in was no harder than going out would be.”

“You are not going out,” said Donald, “till you tell me where you came from, with two shoulders through your coat, two ears through your hat, two squat kickering tattery shoes full of cold roadwayish water, three feet of sword sideways on the side of your haunch, after the scabbard has ended.”

And the Champion said:

“I come from hurry and skurry,

From the end of endless Spring,

From the loved, swanny glen:

A night in Chester and a night in Man,

A night on cold watching cairns.

On the face of mountains

In the English land

Was I born.

A slim, swarthy Champion am I,

Though I happened upon this town.”

“What,” said Donald, “can you do, o Champion? Surely, with all the distance you have travelled, you can do something.”

“I was once,” said he, “that I could play a harp.”

“Well, then,” said Donald, “it is I myself that have got the best harpers in the five fifths of the world.”

“Let’s hear them playing,” said the Champion.

The harpers played.

They played tunes with wings,

Trampling things, tightened strings,

Warriors, heroes, and ghosts on their feet,

Goblins and spectres, sickness and fever,

They set in sound lasting sleep

The whole great world

With the sweetness of the calming tunes

That those harpers could play.

The music did not please the Champion. He caught the harps, and he crushed them under his feet, and he set them on the fire, and made himself a warming, and a sound warming, at them.

Donald took lofty rage that a man had come into his court who should do the like of this to the harps.

“My good man, Donald,” said the slim, swarthy Champion, “I will not believe but that you are taking anger.”

“Well, then, I am,” said Donald, “if I did but know at what I should be angry.”

“It was no harder for me to break your harps than to make them again,” said the Champion. And he seized the fill of his two palms of the ashes, and squeezed them, and made all the harpers their harps and a great harp for himself.

“Let us hear your music,” said Donald. The Champion began to play.

He could play tunes with wings,

Trampling things, tightened strings,

Warriors, heroes, and ghosts on their feet,

Goblins and spectres, sickness and fever,

That set in sound lasting sleep

The whole great world

With the sweetness of the calming tunes

That Champion could play.

“You are melodious, o Champion,” said the king. And he and his harpers took anger and rage that such an unseemly stripling, with two shoulders through his coat, two ears through his hat, two squat kickering tattery shoes full of cold roadwayish water, three feet of his sword sideways on the side of his haunch, after the scabbard was ended, should come to the town and play music as well as they.

“I am going,” said the Champion.

“If you should stir,” said the king, “I should make a sharp sour shrinking for you with this plough in my hand.”

The Champion leapt on the point of his pins, and he went over top and turret of court and city of Donald.

And Donald threw the plough that was in his hand, and he slew four and then twenty of his own people.

Well, what should the Champion meet but the tracking-lad of Donald, and he said to him, “Here’s a little grey weed for you. And go in and rub it on the mouths of the four and then the twenty that were killed by the plough, and bring them back alive again, and earn for yourself from King Donald twenty calving cows. And look behind you when you part from me.”

And when the tracking-lad did this, and looked, he saw the slim, swarthy Champion thirteen miles off on a hillside already.

He moved as a wave from a wave