bowmen's eyes the triumphal car of the forest. So they took their bows
and obeyed, leaving the craftsmen at their work in the castle, which
was now quite roofed over, towers and all. 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.
And there they rested under the oak trees for the early part of the
night except those whose art it was to gather news for their king; and
three of those went into Lowlight and mixed with the villagers there.

When white mists moved over the fields near dawn and wavered ghostly
about Lowlight, the green bowman moved with them. And just out of
hearing of the village, behind wild shrubs that hid them, the bowmen
that were coming from the forest met the three that had spent the night
in taverns of Lowlight. And the three told the hundred of the great
wedding that there was to be in the Church of the Renunciation that
morning in Lowlight: and of the preparations that were made, and how
holy men had come from far on mules, and had slept the night in the
village, and the Bishop of Toledo himself would bless the bridegroom's
sword. The bowmen therefore retired a little way and, moving through
the mists, came forward to points whence they could watch the church,
well concealed on the wild plain, which here and there gave up a field
to man but was mostly the playground of wild creatures whose ways were
the bowmen's ways. And here they waited.

This was the wedding of Rodriguez and Serafina, of which gossips often
spoke at their doors in summer evenings, old women mumbling of fair
weddings that each had seen; and they had been children when they saw
this wedding; they were those that threw small handfuls of anemones on
the path before the porch. They told the tale of it till they could
tell no more. It is the account of the last two or three of them, old,
old women, that came at last to these chronicles, so that their tongues
may wag as it were a little longer through these pages although they
have been for so many centuries dead. And this is all that books are
able to do.

First there was bell-ringing and many voices, and then the voices
hushed, and there came the procession of eight divines of Murcia, whose
vestments were strange to Lowlight. Then there came a priest from the
South, near the border of Andalusia, w