Aslan, who seemed larger than before, lifted his head, shook his mane, and roared.
The sound, deep and throbbing at first like an organ beginning on a low note, rose and became louder, and then far louder again, till the earth and air were shaking with it.
It rose up from that hill and floated across all Narnia.
Down in Miraz’s camp men woke, stared palely in one another’s faces, and grasped their weapons.
Down below that in the Great River, now at its coldest hour, the heads and shoulders of the nymphs, and the great weedy-bearded head of the river-god, rose from the water.
Beyond it, in every field and wood, the alert ears of rabbits rose from their holes, the sleepy heads of birds came out from under wings, owls hooted, vixens barked, hedgehogs grunted, the trees stirred.
In towns and villages mothers pressed babies close to their breasts, staring with wild eyes, dogs whimpered, and men leaped up groping for lights.
Far away on the northern frontier the mountain giants peered from the dark gateways of their castles.
What Lucy and Susan saw was a dark something coming to them from almost every direction across the hills.
It looked first like a black mist creeping on the ground, then like the stormy waves of a black sea rising higher and higher as it came on, and then, at last, like what it was woods on the move.
All the trees of the world appeared to be rushing towards Aslan.
But as they drew nearer they looked less like trees; and when the whole crowd, bowing and curtsying and waving thin long arms to Aslan, were all around Lucy, she saw that it was a crowd of human shapes.
Pale birch-girls were tossing their heads, willowwomen pushed back their hair from their brooding faces to gaze on Aslan, the queenly beeches stood still and adored him, shaggy oak-men, lean and melancholy elms, shockheaded hollies (dark themselves, but their wives all bright with berries) and gay rowans, all bowed and rose again, shouting,
“Aslan, Aslan!” in their various husky or creaking or wave-like voices.
The crowd and the dance round Aslan (for it had become a dance once more) grew so thick and rapid that Lucy was confused.
She never saw where certain other people came from who were soon capering about among the trees.
One was a youth, dressed only in a fawn-skin, with vine-leaves wreathed in his curly hair.
His face would have been almost too pretty for a boy’s, if it had not looked, so extremely wild.
You felt, as Edmund said when he saw him a few days later,
“There’s a chap who might do anything absolutely anything.”
He seemed to have a great many names—Bromios, Bassareus, and the Ram were three of them.
There were a lot of girls with him, as wild as he.
There was even, unexpectedly, someone on a donkey.
And everybody was laughing: and everybody was shouting out,
“Euan, euan, eu-oi-oi-oi.”
“Is it a Romp, Aslan?” cried the youth.
And apparently it was.
But nearly everyone seemed to have a different idea as to what they were playing.
It may have been Tig, but Lucy never discovered who was It.
It was rather like Blind Man’s Buff, only everyone behaved as if they were blindfolded.
It was not unlike Hunt the Slipper, but the slipper was never found.
What made it more complicated was that the man on the donkey, who was old and enormously fat, began calling out at once,
“Refreshments!
Time for refreshments,” and falling off his donkey and being bundled on to it again by the others, while the donkey was under the impression that the whole thing was a circus and tried to give a display of walking on its hind legs.
And all the time there were more and more vine leaves everywhere. And soon not only leaves but vines.
They were climbing up everything. They were running up the legs of the tree people and circling round their necks.
Lucy put up her hands to push back her hair and found she was pushing back vine branches.
The donkey was a mass of them.
His tail was completely entangled and something dark was nodding between his ears.
Lucy looked again and saw it was a bunch of grapes.
After that it was mostly grapes overhead and underfoot and all around.
“Refreshments!
Refreshments,” roared the old man.
Everyone began eating, and whatever hothouses your people may have, you have never tasted such grapes.
Really good grapes, firm and tight on the outside, but bursting into cool sweetness when you put them into your mouth, were one of the things the girls had never had quite enough of before.
Here, there were more than anyone could possibly want, and rib table-manners at all.
One saw sticky and stained fingers everywhere, and, though mouths were full, the laughter never ceased nor the yodelling cries of Euan, euan, eu-oi-oi-oi-oi, till all of a sudden everyone felt at the same moment that the game (whatever it was), and the feast, ought to be over, and everyone flopped down breathless on the ground and turned their faces to Aslan to hear what he would say next.
At that moment the sun was just rising and Lucy remembered something and whispered to Susan,
“I say, Su, I know who they are.”
“Who?”