by Mark Jacobs
Chapter XXII
The Prince had drunk his fair share of grog before losing his bottle, but it seemed only to oil his joints if nothing else—he rode out of the tunnel with his legs churning as robustly as when he had first purloined Pence from the path. The Queen had not made a peep the entire ride, for her head was stuffed in a canvas sack and her heartbeat was fading like an echo in a deep cave, but she clung to the barest edge of life like a bicycle riding the lip of a bottomless precipice.
“I expected you to perish before tea-time, sister, without that flower of yours near-to-hand. It would seem some speck of a spirit trails after you even now; that’s as well. You will lay your eyes on the garden one last time. Live bait, wriggling in fresh blood.”
The Prince brought them to a stop atop the next rise–the last of the mountain’s knuckles, first of the foothills. They passed an old crab tree on their right, halfway up. The hill itself was wreathed in leafless trees. The garden was straight down the path. “When last I searched these lost hills they were a maze and a trap. Yet there is only one path before us… and it was not so near as this a day ago,” the Prince proclaimed with tepid awe. “The garden, it would appear, has come to greet us. Bow, and it will wither.”
The top of the white fence was brown, as if scorched by a sunrise strayed too near. Surrounding the fence were hundreds upon hundreds of animals, from worms and glowflies to pigs and wolves and beasts that had antlers like trees; even a tinker family milling about the outskirts–a man, a woman, and a gaggle of children that Pence would most certainly have approved of, for they all sat in a row–biggest to smallest–on the bench of their family wagon.
The few trees that grew around the bottom of the hill were as visions of paradise, their branches drooping low with exotic birds. The birds watched the worms raptly, but when the Prince arrived and his long shadow was thrown down the hill by the sinking sun–his head and tall hat like a blight on the white gate–all the assembly was hushed and all eyes fixed on the pink bicycle and its rider. The youngest tinker child laughed at the sight of a man on a little girl’s toy.
“Fascinating,” said the Prince under his breath to the Queen as he surveyed the crowd, keeping the bicycle between his legs, ready to go in an instant. “Our reunion has turned into something of a festival, it seems.” He stood up; every head in the crowd rose a fraction. Wary of the assembly’s mood, the Prince hoisted the Queen off his shoulder and planted her beside himself. Too weak yet to stand, she leaned against him for support. He put his arm around her but left the bag over her head.
As a cordial substitution for the formal bow he could not deliver with an old woman cloistered at his side, the Prince took off his top hat and made an elegant gesture. “Phew,” he whispered to the Queen from the side of his mouth, “I half-expected the damned boy to jump out and stick me in the eye.” Then, to the crowd of animals and men he called, “Good evening, one and all!”
Every head–man and beast alike–turned to its neighbor and nattered with curious whispers until the Prince spoke again.
“Allow me to introduce myself: I am your–” but he stopped short of designating himself their rightful royal ruler. “I am the Purloiner.” There was a silence. “To be precise, I am the Purloiner of Previously Less Portable Properties of Other Peoples–” he elaborated with inscrutable eloquence. The Prince removed his hat again and made another trendy gesture, unsure whether or not he had won the crowd over. “–Who Also Wears Purple.”
Many of the heads shifted sideways by a whisker: at the Prince’s side, the Queen had begun to come around and was struggling to get her head out of the haversack with great difficulty, for the Prince had cleverly locked her arms behind her back in his duplicitously supportive embrace.
“My companion is of no consequence,” the Prince told the crowd, and then, just as she managed to rid herself of the sack, he plopped his top hat over her head straight down to her collarbone. This caused a bewildered titter among the animals, but the man and woman with the tinker wagon looked worried, aware that this macabre performance on the hillcrest was more than foolish theatrics. Nevertheless, they did no more than wring their hands and shush their children.
Silence resumed. All eyes waited on the Prince.
“They seem not to know why they’re here,” the Prince whispered to the Queen, who was breathing in fits and starts inside the hat. With a devious chortle he suddenly shouted, “There is treasure in the garden! The old man inside would hoard it for himself! He is not a meek gardener, grabbling his own potatoes all the day; he is a Guardian! A Godless Guardian of Greedily Begotten Gobs and Gobs of Glittering Gold! Join me, neighbors, let us stomp down the gate, and you can all be as rich as robbers!”
The animals stared at the Prince blankly, baffled by his talk of men’s affairs. The tinker man and woman were no more beguiled–indeed they looked more anxious than before. The woman turned to her man, imploring him to intervene. He grimly shook his head.
The Prince watched them all with darting eyes, his grip on the Queen as tight as shackles. “Very well,” he equivocated, thinking fast on his ever-jostling feet, “if they will not join me…”
Employing the same practiced fluidity by which he had always switched his hat for his bottle with a single sleight of hand, the Prince switched himself with the Queen so that she was the one straddling the bicycle. He placed her good hand on the left handlebar where her thumb could reach the bell.
“You see? I am a good brother. I give you back your priceless plaything. I never intended to borrow it from you on that fateful day, but after father requested that I leave, it was the first thing I saw on my way to the stables. I never expected to be gone quite so long.”
The bicycle was as undersized for the Queen as it was for the Prince. He bent down to cram her feet into the iron stirrups. She shook her head frantically but the top hat was too snug to escape from.
“Don’t worry,” said the Prince as he gave her a gentle pat on the back, pushing her over the lip of the hill, “it’s like cutting down a tree–you never forget how.”
The Queen careened down the hill ringing the silver bell like a beleaguered woodpecker as animals scurried and scampered out of her way lest their tails be run over. The training wheels whizzed and clacked but kept her upright and centered. She could not pull her feet out of the child-sized stirrups to break her speed before she crashed into the gate.
The Queen catapulted over the handlebars, which were bent like broken sticks. The bicycle capsized and the silver bell broke off and rolled away.
The white gate creaked open.
The Queen rose from her stomach to all fours and crawled into the garden, finally tearing the top hat off her face. She headed straight for the clearing of the stump.
Animals and men, the crowd turned their collective eyes back to the Prince, still a silhouette atop a hill that knew no home on any map. He stared, stunned, at the wreckage of the Queen’s crash. Then he unclasped his billowing cloak. It blew away in the wind like a purple ghost and was gone. Without the sable cowl or his hat to hide him, the Prince’s head appeared remarkably small and shriveled, like a peeled apple that had spent all day in the sun. He had no beard, no moustache, and no eyebrows, as if no hair would consent to grow on such decrepit turf.
He was garbed now in nothing but his boots and a pair of long pajamas, once rich purple, perhaps, but now as faded as the Queen’s green dress. There were grass stains and dried blood on his knees from the night he had hidden in the bushes outside his sister’s window at the inn. He cracked his nose, swung his axe over one shoulder like a bindle, and marched down the hill after the Queen.
A long shadow shaped like a cross enveloped the Prince. He looked up to the sky just as a downpour of white and purple-speckled poop drenched him like his own personal storm cloud. It smelled of fetid grog.
The throng of onlookers were stupefied for a long, held breath before they broke into tidal peals of laughter. The tinker children all fell off the wagon ho
lding their sides and pointing to the great beast in the sky.
The Prince cursed, wiping the excrement from his eyes and mouth, then he ran into the garden and slammed the gate shut behind him.
The white wood began to glow.
