She was afraid of the tower, but she feared more the sharp switch that her mother would use on her back if she came home without her sheep, and so she went foolhardy or brave within. She climbed the stairs round and round and up and up, calling, hearing always the sheep answering her from afar, until she came out upon the roof and found them there with the first stars coming out in the night sky.
They followed her down again. But the great halls had gone very dark, and the stairs went round longer than they ought, and though she walked a long time, she did not come to the ground again. The sheep were docile and huddling close around her legs, as though they feared some wolf or beast, and whenever she turned round and counted them, the number had changed: there were always more.
She began to fear her own flock, even as they clustered round her ever more closely. She shivered and wished mightily that she had paid more attention to her sheep, and could recognize them one from another, and pick out the strange ones, but then to her even greater alarm, one of them she did recognize: as a child she had taken a fancy to one lamb, small and gentle and white, and had fed it by hand, and called it Snow, and loved it, until by mistake her father had butchered it for the village Maying. She had wept for a week.
She wept now with horror as Snow came and butted her hand, and yet she still petted the soft nubbly head for comfort, and said, “Snow, Snow, which way shall I go,” and when she came to the next landing, which ought have been the ground and yet was not, the lamb baaed softly and turned from the stairs and out into the darkness of the hall.
Beau-Mains and her flock followed the little lamb, which seemed almost to be shining in the dark, until she came to a door which ought not have been there, in a wall which did not curve but ran straight as long as the light reached to either side. Inside she found a table with four small boxes lying open, and in each a great colored jewel as large as her fist: the first of red like blood, the second of browns and deep yellows like mingled shades of earth, the third a virulent green, and the last as clear as water over stones. She gasped with delight and snatched the jewels up, putting them into her apron, and Snow went onward to a door behind the table.
Beau-Mains followed the lamb, and came into another room, where inside stood another table with four larger boxes lying open, each full of coins as is a cup of water: the first of brass, the second of silver, the third of gold, and the fourth of some strange black metal which she had never seen. Beau-Mains would have filled the rest of her apron only with gold, but the lamb butted her until she grudgingly took a few coins from each box, as much as the thin fabric would hold, and followed Snow to a third door.
In the third room there were four great stone coffins of four great lords, their faces and their swords carved into the stone and their names upon the sides. Beau-Mains was only a peasant girl and could not read the letters, but she looked upon them in silence and knew them for seigneurs of high birth, for they were tall and comely and well armored. And in each stone coffin there was a hollow above the lord’s heart, which was made of like shape to the jewels she had found, and upon the eyes of each lord there were carved two stone coins like in size to the coins she had found. Not without a longing look, Beau-Mains put in each hollow one of the jewels, and on the eyes of each lord two of her precious coins, and with the meager handful which was left to her she followed after the lamb through the final door.
And here at last Beau-Mains found herself once more on the floor of the tower, with the great doors standing open ahead of her, but alas! She was not alone in the hall. A terrible beast stood there with a great collar round its neck chained three times to the walclass="underline" a vast coiling serpent with its maw directly at the door, its eyes red and its teeth yellow and brown with old bloodstains. It moved and writhed restlessly, and it cast its eye rolling over Beau-Mains and her flock, and it saw them and snorted steam and hunger from its fearsome nostrils. The chains restrained the beast so it could not come at them, though it strained at their limits, but neither could she come to the door, but that she would go so close the beast could devour her.
Now once more the little lamb made its soft bleating noise, and from the flock around Beau-Mains, a great many of the sheep came apart to stand with Snow, and among them Beau-Mains recognized a few others which she knew also had gone to butchering, or been taken by wolves. And the lamb led its portion of the flock away from Beau-Mains, towards the writhing beast, and Beau-Mains hid her face and put her arms round the sheep that remained to her, burying her head against their wool, so she might not hear the savage feeding.
When the sound of devouring had ended, Beau-Mains lifted her tear-stained face from her sheep, and saw that the great beast had gorged and fallen to sleep, and now slumbered with its wet maw shut. On soft feet she led her flock past its red teeth and through the doors and out upon the familiar hillside, and as soon as they were out together they ran and ran and ran all the long way home. And there Beau-Mains would have been whipped by her mother for being late, and for her gasping sheep, and also for telling stories, but from her apron Beau-Mains took out her handful of coins: brass, and silver, and gold, and one coin of strange cold black metal which the smith’s forge could not melt, nor his hammer break, and so her tale was known for true, even though the next morning, when the villagers with pitchforks and spears went warily to the tower, they looked within the tower and found neither beast, nor lords, nor chests of gold and silver, but only the sun shining through the round circle in the roof.
This story Isabeau loved better than any other about the donjon, both for Beau-Mains, and for the coin of strange cold black metal, which Jerome showed her: it was in the castle’s treasury, in a small chest of wood, and when she touched it with her own fingertip she could feel it taking the warmth from her flesh with a delicious shiver. She did not mind that there were three other tales of the coin quite unlike the story of Beau-Mains, although she rejected scornfully the one which suggested the coin had not come from the tower at all, but instead had been brought from the East some two centuries before, which was plainly ridiculous: two such miracles could not be in so much proximity and yet unrelated.
“We can go in, if you like,” Jerome told her. “It’s all right for as long as there’s no star in the sky.” He took her through the doors and pointed up: in the very center of the ceiling, there was a large ring of metal open to the floor above, and when she stood directly underneath it and looked up, she saw a round circle of blue sky visible through a succession of such openings, just as in the story of Beau-Mains.
There were no doors or chambers within. Each floor was one vast great echoing chamber, so far across that when Isabeau raced Jerome from one end to the other, she was breathless and gasping by the time she reached the other side. The wide stone stairs were twice the width of her own foot, big enough to hold the mailed foot of a knight, and they climbed two vast spiraling swoops up the inside of the tower walls until they passed through to the next floor above. A narrow walkway of stone circled halfway up the chamber, like a balcony looking down upon the window, and arrow-slit windows stood at every tenth step along it.
The second floor was just the same as the first, but the windows were larger: she could have stood upon the sill and stretched to her toes and reached the length of her fingers and still the top of the window arch or the sides would have been beyond her. The third was a little less high, and there was only one turn of the stairs, and no walkway: the windowsills stood at the height of her chin, and you could stand upon a box and fold your arms and rest your head upon them and look out for seven leagues in any direction over the folds and rolling waves of the countryside, like an ocean of green and grain, halted for one instant of time.