by John Gardner
But King Gregor saw he was on to something. He stopped pacing and pointed at the princess. “Listen here,” he said. “Is it or is it not true that the Fool keeps all the time saying:
’You think I’m small because I’m lazy;
But big brave knights get killed. That’s crazy!?’ ”
“Why, yes,” said the princess, “I suppose he may have said that.”
“Exactly! So that’s where she got it. From the Fool!” He smiled wickedly and rubbed his hands. “Get the Fool in here.”
“It’s after midnight, your majesty!” the princess said.
“Call him!” roared the king.
The princess backed away with her fingers on her chin. A moment later, she returned with the Fool, who was wearing a nightcap exactly like the king’s, which was infuriating.
“Fool,” said the king, “I’ve decided to chop your head off. That poem of yours is what gave the queen the idea to come ruin my war with King John.”
The Fool blinked like an owl. “Really?” he said. He was not as confident as usual just now. His knees knocked together and the twitching of his gray-bearded face was anything but scornful. He was cunning, though; you had to give him that. He said, “Which poem, your majesty?”
King Gregor told him.
He contrived to look puzzled, though still shaking like a leaf. “But that’s from the Bible,” he said.
King Gregor stroked his beard, looking at the princess to see if it was true. “Is it really?” he said.
“I’m not sure, your majesty,” she said.
“Get me an expert on the Bible,” said King John.
The Fool shook his head and wrung his hands. “Impossible, sire,” he said timidly. “The only expert on the Bible for miles around is—”
“Get him for me!” roared the king.
The Fool finished his sentence, kneeling now, so awful was his terror of King Gregor: “The only expert on the Bible for miles around is Just King John.”
“Get him!” roared the king, then had second thoughts. “Is he really?” he said.
The Fool nodded, cowering and raising his arms as if fearing King Gregor might hit him.
King Gregor thought about it, sucking at his cheeks. It crossed his mind that he rather liked the way the Fool showed so much fear of him. It was natural, of course. Everyone agreed he was the most fearful king in miles and miles. At last he said, though feeling he might possibly be making a mistake: “Go get King John.”
“At this hour of the night?” the princess said.
“I’ll get him!” squealed the Fool, glad of any excuse to escape the terrible glance of King Gregor. And before King Gregor could answer, the dwarf had fled.
“I may have judged that Fool a bit too hastily,” King Gregor said.
The princess nodded.
5
Just King John was red with indignation. Even after his six-mile ride he seemed still half-asleep, spluttering like a man who had been rudely awakened by a splash of cold water. “King Gregor, you’re crazier than she is!” he said.
King Gregor was seated in the throne room, Queen Louisa beside him. He was not speaking to her yet, but he was, as everyone knew, a fair man, and if she was to be exonerated, because the sentiment on which she’d acted was from the Bible and thus not open to mere intellect’s antilibrations, however insane one might privately think it, then she had, he supposed, a right to know. Also, he hadn’t been able to stand the thought of her lying there crying and making her face puffy. He felt much better now, partly because he was doing the right thing, the manly thing, and partly because, whereas he and Queen Louisa had on their crowns, King John had come away in his nightcap, which, like his nightgown, was red with white flowers on it. He looked, in point of fact, like a silly idiot, a king beneath the dignity of Bold King Gregor, so that it was foolish, in a way, for King Gregor to bother making war on him.
“We have summoned you here, sir, for one simple purpose,” said King Gregor. “We understand you are an authority on the Bible.”
King John glanced suspiciously around him. Queen Louisa looked supremely solemn. So did the Fool and princess. At last King John said, “I may have a certain acquaintance with the Book.” He casually picked a speck of lint off his sleeve.
“Then you will not object, I presume, to being put a simple question.”
King John closed one eye, looking at King Gregor very carefully with the other. “I might not seriously object to that,” he said.
“Excellent, sir. Then the question is this. Is it the case, as certain persons have alleged, that the following quotation is Biblical?
’You think I’m small because I’m lazy;
But big brave knights get killed. That’s crazy!’
Answer yes or no.”
King John tipped his head down. He covertly glanced at the guards he’d brought with him, then at the assembled crowd, then at Queen Louisa.
Queen Louisa said, “He’s not called Just King John for nothing,” and smiled.
“Yes or no?” said King Gregor, leaning forward.
“Hebrew,” said King John, “is an ambiguous language, naturally.”
“Ha! You don’t actually know, then?”
With a casual wave, King John sent the idiotic question away. “Of course I know,” he said.
The throne room was absolutely silent. Everyone was leaning forward, waiting. King John glanced at his guards again, then at Queen Louisa. King Gregor had the distinct impression that Queen Louisa winked.
“Yes!” said King John triumphantly. “The passage is distinctly Biblical. Loosely.”
Pandemonium broke loose. Everyone whooped and threw their hats in the air, because the war was over, and the Fool jumped up and down on his stool as if he thought he were a monkey. The princess sobbed and threw herself into the arms of a gored and wounded knight, and the queen, leaping up ecstatically, suggested that everyone go skinny-dipping.
“We’ll do nothing of the kind!” King Gregor roared. “Who’s running this kingdom?”
A great silence fell.
He liked so well the impression he’d made that he said it again, beaming and majestic, his eyes like fire. “Who’s running this kingdom?”
Everyone was looking in the Fool’s direction. It crossed the king’s mind that the Fool looked suspiciously innocent.
“You are, my dearest!” Queen Louisa cried with shining eyes, and threw a scornful—indeed, a quite withering—look at the gray-bearded dwarf. Everyone shouted and (King John having quickly passed glasses around) drank a health to King Gregor. “To Bold King Gregor!” they shouted one and all.
Queen Louisa said with a sly look, “My friends, it’s bedtime.”
Another thing that can be said about King Gregor is that he dearly loved his family.
MURIEL
1
The best thing about suddenly having been turned into a princess was that Muriel escaped all those tiresome and ultimately dangerous ideas that her friends imagined it was necessary to maintain. Granted, there were other advantages. One of them, for a while, was her wardrobe. Actually, the reason for the dark circles under Muriel’s eyes was not so much her pregnancy as the fact that every night, when everyone else in the castle was asleep, she would slip out of her golden four-poster bed and light all the candles in her great stone room and creep over to her wardrobe, which took up one whole wall, and try on more dresses. If she lived a hundred years, it seemed to her, she could never try on all of them. (This turned out not to be true.) With some of them came long pointed hats with trailing veils. She would walk back and forth, looking sideways at her mirror, the silver or crimson or yellow or blue shimmering softly in the candlelight, and she would find herself so deeply moved that she could hardly whisper, “Hello there! How are you, Count?” or, “Aren’t you sweet to say so!”
Another of the other advantages was the class of people one encountered as a princess. In her former existence, she had never so much as spoken to a knight, though
sometimes, looking up from scything wheat (she dimly remembered), she had seen them riding past. They weren’t like people at all: They went by, on their glittering, armored horses, like statues made of iron, or ominous machines. Their metal-cased elbows and knees, their steel-plated hands and feet never moved. The ostrich plumes fluttering on their helmets were no more signs of life than flags affixed to coffins. She’d almost come to imagine, without for a moment really thinking about it, that the dark suits of armor balanced on King Gregor’s horses were empty shells. She didn’t even think of them as tricks on the enemy—empty armor ensaddled to make the army seem larger. She dismissed them, peasant that she was, as merely one more inscrutable fact of government. A way of transporting suits of armor, perhaps.
Imagine her surprise, therefore, when she spent her first night in the castle (she’d been brought in as a chambermaid; it wasn’t till next day that she was discovered to be the princess) and heard the trumpets sound and, running to her window, saw the drawbridge lowered, giving access to fifty of those battered suits of armor (and some goats), and saw the armor, assisted by pages, get down from the huffing, bleeding horses, pat the horses gently and wearily on the rumps, then stagger in across the flagstones to the central hall. She ran lightly down to watch. Even now, with a part of her peasant mind, she thought them mere automata. But as they reached the dais where King Gregor and Queen Louisa sat, they began lifting off their helmets. Their long hair fell flowing free to their shoulders and in some cases down to their tight, girlish waists. Some were old, with gray hair like shimmering silver. Some were young—a few were mere boys, in fact—with hair of chestnut brown, or black as ravens’ wings. Some were blond; some had youthful hair like snow. They were not beautiful, those knights, in the normal sense. Some were ruddy with exertion, and some pale as ghosts from the long day’s fight. But they certainly were, no question about it, men of a kind she had never seen before.
She had felt, at that moment, like a mortal raised to heaven for a precious glimpse. But the following day, when Mad Queen Louisa had decided that Muriel was her own lost daughter Muriel (Muriel would have said, except for the conviction of the queen and all her court, that her name was Tanya), it became necessary that Muriel, or possibly Tanya, see those magnificent knights as equals, or, indeed, inferiors. Her real mother, she dimly remembered (or anyway the toothless peasant woman who’d said she was her mother), had warned her many times that she must never judge things by outer appearance. “You’re as noble as you think you are,” the old woman used to say, ferociously greasing the carriage wheels of strangers who broke down on the road past the farmhouse. “People will come asking you for certain things,” the old woman said with a significant look. “You remember who you are.” Muriel, or Tanya, had puzzled over this since the age of eleven, when the old woman first began mentioning it.
Whoever she might be—she’d given up seriously worrying about it—it was an amazing thing to find herself suddenly in the company of knights, receiving love poems from them, as near as she could tell (they were full of hard words and obscure comparisons, and she had learned, after the first few awful embarrassments, to accept the paper with a polite, aloof smile, the way the other courtly ladies did, saying “Thank you very kindly,” and folding the paper and slipping it down into her bosom to puzzle out later, when the others were in bed). It was a war of obscurities, each knight struggling to outdo the rest and furious when he saw that another’s phrase was more befuddling. Muriel had, hidden under her huge silk pillow, a dictionary which Queen Louisa’s minstrel had given her, and whenever she found herself too exhausted for trying on clothes, she would get out the minstrel’s dictionary and work, till she fell asleep, on the poems from the knights. It was exciting at first, though she could never make heads nor tails of half what they were saying, not that it mattered much, probably. But the poems came in so much faster than she could unscramble them that the work became depressing, finally, so that now, for the most part, she pasted them into her scrapbook unread. In the beginning, it had made her feel inferior, all that trouble she had with modern poetry, but Queen Louisa had fixed that, as Queen Louisa fixed everything. Muriel had said, in such a casual way that no one could possibly have suspected it was personal, “What does it mean, exactly, when one says, ‘Your eyes are like mystic pantarb suns’?” Queen Louisa had looked up sweetly and fondly, combing her fiery swirls of hair, “Oh, that’ll be Sir Clervel,” she’d laughed. “Don’t let him near you!”
But the chief advantage of being changed into a princess, at exactly the right time, in exactly the right way, was that Muriel escaped the ideas of her low-born former friends. She discovered this by a curious accident, though the deeper meaning was perhaps still a little uncertain. It came about as follows.
2
One day as Muriel was being driven about the countryside in an open carriage, with a lady-in-waiting on either side of her, a rumble of thunder was heard in the distance, and Muriel, looking at the sky in alarm—for neither she nor her ladies-in-waiting were dressed for rainy weather—cried to the driver, “Please, my good man, turn around and drive us home at once, as our dresses and hats will be ruined.”
The driver obeyed and put the horses into a gallop in the direction of the castle, but, for all their haste, Princess Muriel saw that the rainclouds were amassing far more swiftly than the horses could run. They gathered above her like black, churning mountains, shocking silver at the edges where the sun’s beams shot past. They rose higher and higher, growing darker and darker, as if gathered together by sorcery, till soon they reminded her of monstrous wild horses that were rearing up crazily to strike with their hooves. “Faster! Faster!” cried Muriel, and the ladies-in-waiting cried the same, but with voices that sounded, in that weird, greenish weather, like witches’ voices, hideous and mocking. They were, of course, anything but witches. The lady-in-waiting on Muriel’s right was Madame Logre, lady-in-waiting to Mad Queen Louisa herself, for Queen Louisa had had a premonition that something terrible would happen to Muriel today and had wanted her own faithful servant to be with her. It was a general rule, Queen Louisa had noticed, that when terrible things happened Madame Logre was always there. Where general rules were concerned, Queen Louisa was conservative. It was to Madame Logre that the driver now turned with a pitiful look, tears running down his red, coarse face, stretching out his hand as if asking for mercy, but Madame Logre said only, “Faster, my good man!” and pressed a small bag of coins into his hand. With a moan of fear and agony, the driver turned back to his horses and whipped them to still greater effort. They were at this moment entering a deep, dark wood. No sooner were they inside it than the rain came hissing down, pushing past the oak leaves—it was now late spring—and pasting Muriel’s clothes to her skin.
“Look out for the bump!” cried the ladies-in-waiting in the wood’s profound darkness.
The next instant, so suddenly that she couldn’t make out what had happened, exactly, Muriel found herself sitting in the middle of the road, alone, the sound of the carriage wheels and galloping horses fading in the distance.
“I’ve been jolted out!” thought Muriel, “—and so abruptly that no one has missed me!” The next thought that came was even more alarming. This was no place for a princess, or even for the peasant girl Tanya. No one ever came to the great, dark forest but rapists and anarchists and outlaws. She shuddered.
Then, taking courage, because, as the peasants she’d lived with used to say, “It’s always darkest before the dawn”—which, oddly enough, was only sometimes true, but never mind—she got up off the road and walked over to the bole of the nearest oak, where she thought she might be more sheltered from the rain. Imagine her terror when, reaching out to touch the oak, her fingers came, instead, upon a human hand, which quickly closed on hers in a viselike grip. Muriel screamed.
“So we meet again!” cried a cruel voice.
“Vrokror!” Muriel gasped, and fainted.
3
She did not wake u
p, as she’d expect she would (for having been once a peasant girl she never fainted without planning ahead), in the smugglers’ cave in the great black cliff, but in the basement of the village church, among all her old friends. She sat up blinking and looking around her. Fat, freckled faces smiled back at her, apparently delighted to see her. There was Djubkin, who’d kissed her in the barn one time, and there was Pretty Polly, about whom everyone was always writing sad or naughty songs (“So stable your horses and feed them some hay” Haw haw haw!), and there was Dobremish, the tinker’s daughter, who’d once been Muriel’s dearest companion. The whole of the candlelit room was filled with smiling friends. She greeted them all with hugs and kisses and could hardly believe her happiness, until she remembered, and cried out: “But where’s Vrokror?”
They all looked embarrassed and guilty. “Don’t think about him, Tanya!” they all said, patting her and kissing her cheeks. “It’s so wonderful to see you!”
But Muriel drew back from them, fearful and suspicious. “Where is he?” she said.
“Oh, Tanya, Tanya,” dear Dobremish said, trying to smile, despite a frightened look.
She narrowed her eyes, considering. “My name’s Muriel,” she said.
Their faces fell.
Suddenly Djubkin slid his floppy cap off and crushed it in both fat hands at his chest. “We thought you’d be glad to see us, Tanya.” In half a minute they’d all be crying.
“I am glad to see you, certainly,” she said, “though my name’s not Tanya—that is, not anymore. My name’s Muriel the Long Lost Princess, and my parents are not mere farming people, as you all supposed, but His Majesty King Gregor and Her Majesty Mad Queen Louisa.”
“Sure, we all know that,” Djubkin said, with an ingratiating little wave.
“Good,” said Muriel, feeling better all at once and momentarily forgetting her grounds for suspicion.
“Tell us about life in the palace,” Pretty Polly said. She was a very pale and elegant girl, quite pregnant at the moment by heaven knew whom. Her hands were as lovely and frail as white flowers. She would have made, Muriel couldn’t help but confess, a simply beautiful princess. But fate was fate, she consoled herself, and smiled.
