The Last Battle. Клайв Стейплз Льюис

woe, woe!” called the voice. “Woe for my brothers and sisters! Woe for the holy trees! The woods are laid waste. The axe is loosed against us. We are being felled. Great trees are falling, falling, falling.”

      With the last “falling” the speaker came in sight. She was like a woman but so tall that her head was on a level with the Centaur’s, yet she was like a tree too. It is hard to explain if you have never seen a Dryad but quite unmistakable once you have – something different in the colour, the voice, and the hair. King Tirian and the two Beasts knew at once that she was the nymph of a beech tree.

      “Justice, Lord King!” she cried. “Come to our aid. Protect your people. They are felling us in Lantern Waste. Forty great trunks of my brothers and sisters are already on the ground.”

      “What, Lady! Felling Lantern Waste? Murdering the talking trees?” cried the King, leaping to his feet and drawing his sword. “How dare they? And who dares it? Now by the Mane of Aslan—”

      “A-a-a-h,” gasped the Dryad, shuddering as if in pain – shuddering time after time as if under repeated blows. Then all at once she fell sideways as suddenly as if both her feet had been cut from under her. For a second they saw her lying dead on the grass and then she vanished. They knew what had happened. Her tree, miles away, had been cut down.

      For a moment the King’s grief and anger were so great that he could not speak. Then he said: “Come, friends. We must go up river and find the villains who have done this, with all the speed we may. I will leave not one of them alive.”

      “Sire, with a good will,” said Jewel.

      But Roonwit said, “Sire, be wary even in your just wrath. There are strange doings on foot. If there should be rebels in arms farther up the valley, we three are too few to meet them. If it would please you to wait while—”

      “I will not wait the tenth part of a second,” said the King. “But while Jewel and I go forward, do you gallop as hard as you may to Cair Paravel. Here is my ring for your token. Get me a score of men-at-arms, all well mounted, and a score of Talking Dogs, and ten Dwarfs (let them all be fell archers), and a Leopard or so, and Stonefoot the Giant. Bring all these after us as quickly as may be.”

      “With a good will, Sire,” said Roonwit. And at once he turned and galloped Eastward down the valley.

      The King strode on at a great pace, sometimes muttering to himself and sometimes clenching his fists. Jewel walked beside him, saying nothing; so there was no sound between them but the faint jingle of a rich gold chain that hung round the Unicorn’s neck and the noise of two feet and four hoofs.

      They soon reached the River and turned up it where there was a grassy road: they had the water on their left and the forest on their right. Soon after that they came to the place where the ground grew rougher and thick wood came down to the water’s edge. The road, what there was of it, now ran on the southern bank and they had to ford the River to reach it. It was up to Tirian’s armpits, but Jewel (who had four legs and was therefore steadier) kept on his right so as to break the force of the current, and Tirian put his strong arm round the Unicorn’s strong neck and they both got safely over. The King was still so angry that he hardly noticed the cold of the water. But of course he dried his sword very carefully on the shoulder of his cloak, which was the only dry part of him, as soon as they came to shore.

      They were now going westward with the River on their right and Lantern Waste straight ahead of them. They had not gone more than a mile when they both stopped and both spoke at the same moment. The King said “What have we here?” and Jewel said “Look!”

      “It is a raft,” said King Tirian.

      And so it was. Half a dozen splendid tree-trunks, all newly cut and newly lopped of their branches, had been lashed together to make a raft, and were gliding swiftly down the river. On the front of the raft there was a water rat with a pole to steer it.

      “Hey! Water Rat! What are you about?” cried the King.

      “Taking logs down to sell to the Calormenes, Sire,” said the Rat, touching his ear as he might have touched his cap if he had had one.

      “Calormenes!” thundered Tirian. “What do you mean? Who gave order for these trees to be felled?”

      The River flows so swiftly at that time of the year that the raft had already glided past the King and Jewel. But the Water Rat looked back over its shoulder and shouted out:

      “The Lion’s orders, Sire. Aslan himself.” He added something more but they couldn’t hear it.

      The King and the Unicorn stared at one another and both looked more frightened than they had ever been in any battle.

      “Aslan,” said the King at last, in a very low voice. “Aslan. Could it be true? Could he be felling the holy trees and murdering the Dryads?”

      “Unless the Dryads have all done something dreadfully wrong—” murmured Jewel.

      “But selling them to Calormenes!” said the King. “Is it possible?”

      “I don’t know,” said Jewel miserably. “He’s not a tame Lion.”

      “Well,” said the King at last, “we must go on and take the adventure that comes to us.”

      “It is the only thing left for us to do, Sire,” said the Unicorn. He did not see at the moment how foolish it was for two of them to go on alone; nor did the King. They were too angry to think clearly. But much evil came of their rashness in the end.

      Suddenly the King leaned hard on his friend’s neck and bowed his head.

      “Jewel,” he said, “what lies before us? Horrible thoughts arise in my heart. If we had died before today we should have been happy.”

      “Yes,” said Jewel. “We have lived too long. The worst thing in the world has come upon us.” They stood like that for a minute or two and then went on.

      Before long they could hear the hack-hack-hack of axes falling on timber, though they could see nothing yet because there was a rise of the ground in front of them. When they had reached the top of it they could see right into Lantern Waste itself. And the King’s face turned white when he saw it.

      Right through the middle of that ancient forest – that forest where the trees of gold and of silver had once grown and where a child from our world had once planted the Tree of Protection – a broad lane had already been opened. It was a hideous lane like a raw gash in the land, full of muddy ruts where felled trees had been dragged down to the river. There was a great crowd of people at work, and a cracking of whips, and horses tugging and straining as they dragged at the logs. The first thing that struck the King and the Unicorn was that about half the people in the crowd were not Talking Beasts but Men. The next thing was that these men were not the fair-haired men of Narnia. They were dark, bearded men from Calormen, that great and cruel country that lies beyond Archenland across the desert to the south.

      There was no reason, of course, why one should not meet a Calormene or two in Narnia – a merchant or an ambassador – for there was peace between Narnia and Calormen in those days. But Tirian could not understand why there were so many of them: nor why they were cutting down a Narnian forest. He grasped his sword tighter and rolled his cloak round his left arm. They came quickly down among the men.

      Two Calormenes were driving a horse which was harnessed to a log. Just as the King reached them the log had got stuck in a bad muddy place.

      “Get on, son of sloth! Pull, you lazy pig!” cried the Calormenes, cracking their whips. The horse was already straining himself as hard as he could; his eyes were red and he was covered with foam.

      “Work, lazy brute,” shouted one of the Calormenes: and as he spoke he struck the horse savagely with