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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.
The shape of the castle showed itself clearly now, rising on each side of the bowmen's cottage and behind it, with a tower at each of its corners. To the left of the old cottage the main doorway opened to the great hall, in which a pile of a few huge oaks was being transformed into a massive stair.
All the way they met no one. And Rodriguez' gaiety came back as they rode, for he and Don Alderon recognised more and more clearly that the bowmen's great cottage was the place they should have gone at first.
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.
And standing by what had been the bowmen's cottage, now all shut in by sheer walls of Castle Rodriguez, he gathered his bowmen to him. And when they were all about him he gave them their orders.
He made and mended the weapons used in the chase and in war the gavelocs, bills, and battle-axes; he tipped the bowmen's arrows, and furnished spear-heads for the men-at-arms; but, above all, he forged the mail-coats and cuirasses of the chiefs, and welded their swords, on the temper and quality of which, life, honour, and victory in battle depended.
"Alas, alas for Scotland when English arrows fly!" was the sad lament of many a Highland clan, and Frenchmen often learnt to their cost the force of our bowmen's arms. The accounts of the fights of Creçy and Poitiers tell of the prowess of our archers; and the skill which they acquired by practising at the butts at home has gained many a victory.
Once he turned his bright face back over his shoulder to call gayly to the Jotun: "Brother, you were right in despising craft. When the battle-madness fills a man, he becomes a god!" On, till the bowmen's faces were plain before them; then suddenly it began to hail, "the hail of the string." Arrows! One hissed by the girl's ear, and one bit her cloak, to hang there quivering with impotent fury.
They went through the forest by little paths that they knew, going swiftly and warily in the bowmen's way: and just before nightfall they were at the forest's edge, though they went no farther from it than its shadows go in the evening.
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