by John Gardner
She was rubbing the knuckles of both fists into her eyes, crying and striding on.
“What I told you is true,” he said. He danced out in front of her and ran backward. “I’m not tricking you, Armida. I’m not lying to you. I really did come here to commit suicide. I’m going to do it, too.” His cheeks twitched and jittered like a rabbit’s, and he hammered his square right fist into his square left palm.
Deep in her own grief, she didn’t even trouble to look down at him with distaste. “I’m not surprised,” she said.
Before he could answer, his left foot tripped over his right, and he fell. She went by him. He scrambled to his feet.
They’d come to a shoulderlike crest on the mountain, a respite. Beyond, the road dipped downward for a stone’s throw, then lifted again, much more steeply than before. Behind them lay the valley dotted with white villages, churchspires sticking toward the sky like little pins; ahead of them the mountaintop, vanishing into haze, ascended like God’s gray jaw. The trees all around them were luminous and wide-beamed and curiously still, as if grown against a plumbline, and the golden beams of light that settled slanting through the leaves, dappling the high-crowned curving road, gavotted like young swallows in Armida’s yellow hair. The beauty made Chudu the Goat’s Son heartsick. Like a baby, like a billygoat, he bawled out after her, forsaken and forlorn, standing there splay-foot, clench-fisted, humpbacked, drowning in woe: “Armida, don’t do it! Don’t kill yourself!” Chudu the Goat’s Son’s heart went light, plummeting like an elevator when the cable has snapped, and he began, in great whoops, to cry.
Armida slowed her pace. After a long moment she stopped completely, then veered around to face him. Her eyes were still wet, but she was in control now. “It’s my life,” she said. “Go away, dwarf. It’s none of your business.”
Chudu the Goat’s Son, however, was not in control by any means. He cried harder and harder, as he hadn’t cried since childhood, two hundred years ago, and his anger at crying like a baby, augering his fists into his eyes as if to blind himself, made him stamp first one foot then the other then both at once. “It is my business,” he bawled. “It’s very much my business!”
His eyes were too filled with tears for him to see that she was studying him, startled at last. But her voice was remote, withdrawn—she was thinking of herself, not of him—when she said, “I don’t care. I just don’t care.”
She was about to draw away from him. He snatched at her loose sleeve and held it.
“Think of the people who love you, Armida! Think of how they’ll feel!”
His eyes were blurry with tears but he caught, even so, her angry smile and knew what she was thinking. All those suitors.
“Please,” she said, and now her princesslike feebleness seemed unfeigned, her limpness of neckbone, wrist, and elbow: for sorrow of heart she could hardly have picked up a pencil. “I need to get it over with.”
“No!” he said, ferocious, and with sudden bold madness jumped his hold from her airy and insubstantial sleeve to her wrist, to which he clung like a lobster.
As if he’d caused it, there came a thunder of hooves.
Chapter Five
Like an angel of vengeance the knight came galloping, he and his horse leaning far, far over as they boomed around the curve, and then righting again as they came plunging down the straightaway, the horse with his head down, ears laid back, the front hooves slamming down from level with his nose. Chudu the Goat’s Son was too terrified to run, too terrified to think, though he was usually calm in emergencies. It was guilt, perhaps: clinging to Armida’s lovely wrist, he was in the wrong, no doubt of it, though his motives were pure; but whatever the cause was, the dwarf stood rooted there, knees knocking, hair straight up, his eyes enormous, and his instinct for self-preservation somehow jammed, or momentarily went crazy, so that without being actually aware of it he was shape-shifting wildly, twelve creatures per second, now an owl, now a lion, now a woodcock, now a yellow Jersey cow, now a sheep, now a mouse. The lance came straight at him, and the horse and the knight; and the desperate shape-shifting had no effect whatever except that the knight jerked his head once, as if trying to fix his eyesight or shake a pod from his ear. When they were practically on top of him, the lance aiming straight at his adamsapple, his whole life hurriedly passing in re-run (and strange to say, he found himself paying close attention in spite of himself, fascinated: “My goodness! There’s Aunt Urtha!” he thought, transported, for he’d been fond of her, and, “There’s Uncle Ah-ba-ak the Camel!” so that Chudu the Goat’s Son might not even have noticed if, that instant, he’d been killed)—Armida cried out, with the powerful voice of a boxing official, “No, wait!” The horse put the brakes on, and horse and knight, with a terrible noise, came skidding at Chudu sideways.
Armida gave his arm a jerk, snatching him clear, and the horse slammed past him into a tree. The knight went rolling, over and over and over, like an armadillo, and though he’d parted from the horse he apparently didn’t know it, for he was still bellowing, in a tragic, hopeless-sounding voice, “Whoa Boy! Whoa!” Finally he came to rest and, after a moment, sat up and shook his head to clear it and tipped up his visor and looked around.
Chudu was still trembling, though not in his dwarf’s shape; he was in the shape of a small pink-eyed pig, which Armida held gently, firmly, under her arm. Limp and princesslike as she appeared, and comfortable as it was between her arm and breast, she stood like a hundred-year-old elm.
Now the knight got unsteadily to his feet and, after testing his legs, walked, staggering a little, to where his horse lay. It was unconscious. He got down on his knees and listened to the horse’s heart, then opened a sort of saddlebag-like thing and got out a waterskin, which he opened and emptied onto his horse’s face. The horse shook its head and came to. Then, glancing up at Armida and the pig, the knight remembered himself and said, in an official voice that seemed studied and somehow unnatural for him, “What seems to be the trouble here?”
Armida pointed to the horse’s foot. “That horse of yours has got a shoe loose,” she said.
“Hmm,” the knight said, and bent over to look. Then alarm came over his face, and he went to the saddlebag-like thing again and dived his iron-gloved hand into it and brought out, to the surprise of Armida and the pig, a violin.
“Christ!” he said, and it sounded much more like a prayer than like swearing, “I thought for sure I’d broken it.”
“You,” the pig said, tipping its head, “—you are a violin player?”
But the knight said nothing. He was looking for something and couldn’t find it. “It must’ve fallen out,” he said. “Darn!” He began walking down the road he’d come galloping up before, retracing his horse’s steps.
“What are you looking for?” Armida said. “Can I help you?”
“The bow,” he said. “It’s a wooden thing, with horsetail on it. It’s about this long”—he held his gauntlets apart in front of him, separated by about two and a half feet.
“I know what a violin bow is,” said Armida.
“Sorry,” the knight said.
“What’s-your-name,” she said to the pig, “find the man his bow.”
Chudu the Goat’s Son came to his senses now, blushing at his foolish wish to stay there between her arm and her breast all year. He changed back into a dwarf and then, on second thought, into an eagle and flew off to find the bow. He found it nearly three miles back, picked it up—carefully not touching the strings with his beak—and returned it to its owner.
By now the horse was standing up, and Armida was holding his right back leg up, bracing it professionally, hammering in the shoe-nails with a rock.
“Be careful,” the knight said, “he’s a kicker.”
“He won’t kick me,” Armida said.
The horse laid back his ears and looked at her and decided he better not.
The knight watched her with respect. So did Chudu the Goat’s Son. The horse was as big as a house, and Ch
udu the Goat’s Son, for one, wouldn’t have touched that hoof for a hundred million zloti.
“You’re damn good at that,” the knight said when Armida put the horse’s foot down.
Armida merely smiled and looked shy and silly in the elegant way she’d learned from her step-sister. The knight blushed, suddenly shy himself. “Perhaps we should introduce ourselves,” he mumbled. “My name’s—” He paused, for his eyes had accidentally met Armida’s and it seemed he was about to have a heart attack. He looked at the violin bow in his right-hand gauntlet and said, addressing the ground, “My name’s Christopher the Sullen.”
Instantly—quicker than an ax could fall—both Armida and Chudu the Goat’s Son dropped to their knees, for Christopher the Sullen was the kingdom’s crown prince.
“Don’t do that,” yelled Christopher the Sullen. “Please! I hate that.”
Instantly they got up.
But the day was ruined. His personality had changed completely, and even a chicken could have understood how it was that he’d gotten his name.
Chapter Six
He’d come up into the mountains, the prince said morosely, because the king had ordered him to. (The three of them were traveling up the road again now, the prince and Chudu the Goat’s Son walking—Chudu scrambling to keep up, sometimes falling—Armida riding on the big white horse. He had a black nose with pink spots on it. “What’s your horse’s name?” Armida had asked the prince, fluttering her lashes. “I don’t know,” the prince said. “They told me, but I forgot. I call him Boy.”) Christopher the Sullen had no liking for quests, and no liking for tournaments or fights or politics, all of which, as crown prince, he was forced to make his business. He was the unhappiest man in the world. Also, he said—giving a little tug at the horse’s bridle, because every time the road went under low-hanging branches the horse would reach his head up for a mouthful of leaves—he, Prince Christopher, wasn’t what you could call good at quests or fighting or politics, and he made no bones about it.
“I was sickly, as a child,” he said gloomily, looking off into the woods—they were dark now, toward the middle—“and I never really did get my strength back. But that’s the least of it.” He pursed his lips, looking now at the ground a few feet ahead of him, for the confession, Chudu the Goat’s Son saw, was embarrassing for him to make. It was a mark of his despair that he made it anyway, as if nothing at all mattered one jot. “That’s the least of it,” he said again, and nodded. “The sickness apparently affected my mind. A prince is supposed to be clever. Quick-witted. Ha.” He glanced over at Chudu, then back at the ground again. “I’m doltish, that’s the truth. Sometimes I forget to tie my shoes.”
“But you’re good at heart,” Armida said encouragingly.
“Not really,” said the prince. “Take horses, for instance. I’m not so stupid I haven’t noticed how ‘real men,’ as they say, feel about horses—the way they pat them lovingly, you know, when they dismount, and always think of their horses’ needs first on long journeys. Read stories of knightly adventure, it’s all there.” He glanced at his horse as if to see if he was listening and decided, fool that he was, that horses don’t understand. “I hate horses,” he said fiercely. “My favorite way to travel is on a train.”
Chudu the Goat’s Son thought of his nights by the railroad trestle and shuddered.
“Oh, there are some things I like about horses,” Prince Christopher corrected himself—for one of his faults, as his father was always telling him (since it was a serious disadvantage in government work), was that Christopher the Sullen was abnormally fussy about truth. “I like the smell, for instance. Somebody should bottle it. But as for the rest…” He glanced at the horse’s nose. The horse’s black lips parted, trying to give Christopher the Sullen a nip. The prince jerked his hand away. Armida, unbeknownst to the prince—her face still empty of intelligence as a plate—patted the horse to calm him and distract his mind.
They walked on for a time in silence. Prince Christopher, who had his steel helmet off now, had long, raven-black, shiny hair, as soft and beautiful and well-cared-for as a woman’s. It flowed halfway down his back and had a wonderful smell; it took all Armida’s concentration to resist reaching forward and touching it, sniffing it, pressing it to her lips. His dark, handsome eyes were also womanish, and so were his gestures. When he waved his free left hand, gesticulating, he reminded her of an Indian princess. And she noticed this too: When lost in thought he had a funny way of pursing his lips as if preparing for a kiss. She blushed.
“I should never have been a prince,” he said. “It’s all some absurd mistake. All I really care about is playing the violin. I’m really good at that. And also, occasionally, I like to read books. I like books quite a lot, actually, though people say it’s sissy.” He added in haste, “Not science books or history books.” He glanced at them. A blush rose up his neck but he wouldn’t stop confessing. “I like poems and stories. I do. I wish the whole world was run by poems and stories. ‘Why not?’ I say. People laugh. Poems are for girls, they say. I say ‘Pish!’”
“Personally, I hate poetry,” Armida said, and then looked nonplussed, for she’d been trying not to let any thoughts slip out.
“I don’t believe it,” the prince said simply and impolitely. He looked up at her, eyes brightening. “You want to hear a poem?”
Armida pursed her lips, glanced at Chudu the Goat’s Son, and said nothing. The Coat’s Son chuckled grimly. He did like poetry, but only poetry about caves.
Prince Christopher’s face became more animated, and his walk, in some curious way, took on conviction, though he wasn’t walking faster. “It’s about a juggler,” he said. “A juggler who’s a magician. It’s a poem I wrote myself.”
Prince Christopher the Sullen was striding now, striking his legs out like an Irish dancer, his right hand still holding the bridle of the horse, his left hand pressed against his chest so that he could feel the fremitus as he spoke. The sun was slanting into the woods almost sideways—it would soon be dark—but the prince, declaiming his poem, was like cock-robin early in the morning. “The Juggler and the Baron’s Daughter,” he began, “by Prince Christopher the Sullen.”
It went:
Draw in near!
Draw in near!
Draw in near to
The jolly old juggler!
There once did live
A rich baron’s daughter,
And she’d have no man
That for her love had sought her,
So nice she was.
And she’d have no man
That’s made of bone and meat
But if he had a mouth of gold
To kiss her on the seat,
So grand she was.
And so the jolly juggler learnt,
Lying on the heath,
And at this pretty lady’s words,
Forsooth he grit his teeth,
So cross he was.
He juggled him a mighty steed
Out of a horse’s bone,
A saddle and a bridle too,
And sat himself thereon,
So sly he was.
He pricked and pranced that mighty steed
Before the lady’s gate:
She swore he was an angel
Come there for her sake.
(A dunce she was.)
He pricked and pranced that mighty steed
Before the lady’s bower:
She swore he was an angel
Come from Heaven’s Tower.
A prancer he was.
Then four and twenty knights
Led him through the hall;
Mean-while, as many squires
Led his horse to stall
And bade him eat.
The squires did give him oats,
The squires did give him hay,
But he was a mean one
And turned his head away.
He wouldn’t eat.
Then day began to pass
And night beg
un to come;
Up to her bed was brought
This gentle wo-mun.
The juggler too.
Then night began to pass
And day begun to spring,
And all the birds around the bower
Begun at once to sing.
(The cuckoo too!)
“Where are you, my perty maids,
That you come not me to?
The jolly windows of my bower
I pray that you undo,
That I may see.
“For I have here inside my arms
A duke or elst an earl.”
But when she looked upon the man,
He was a blear-eyed churl!
“Alas!” cried she.
She bore the juggler up a hill
And meant to hang him high:
He juggled him into a meal poke,
And dust fell in her eye.
Beguiled she was!