Still, she takes one more swig.
They are both waiting for something to happen, too.
They – the pair of them – are waiting for a man to meet them here at midnight and deliver them a map. On this map, so the old man, a pedlar, promised, is marked the location of a glorious treasure. The kind of treasure you can only dream of, he’d said.
They have adventure in their blood, this knight and her squire, and are inclined to believe wild lines of that sort.
The alternative, after all, is that there are no more quests to be had.
Just before the witching hour, the tavern door swings open.
A gust of wind and a hooded figure enter together: close as lovers, thick as thieves.
The gossip and the murmurs cease. The tale-telling is muted.
All eyes are on this shade, as he walks – no, walks is not right: he slinks – towards the bar. Even in this silence, nobody can pick up exactly what he says to the innkeeper, but the innkeeper, a bear of a man, turns swiftly and fetches a bottle of his finest liquor from the shelf. Produces a glass from underneath the counter, spits in it, polishes it with his rag.
The hooded figure leaves the glass and takes the bottle.
No gold changes hands.
The liquid sways and eddies in that bottle, as the hooded figure slinks again towards a table in the corner. The darkest recess of the hall. He sits, with steadiness and poise, and, once seated, he turns to face the room.
His eyes, though hidden, meet unblinking with a hundred others.
Ninety-six of those eyes turn away.
As soon as Donna and Samuel have joined him, he extends his hand in courtesy to both. Its grip is strong for that of a man they both know to be aged.
Before they begin, he lowers his hood. Another act of politeness or simply part of the ritual of deals such as this, they cannot be sure. Although, with the shadow as deep as it is, they still cannot clearly discern more than a few of his wrinkles. Like incomplete runes on a weatherworn rock.
It doesn’t matter.
All that’s important is that he’s brought them the map.
He lays it out on the table, pinning it flat on one side with his liquor, and at the other with their mead.
He taps the tanned hide with a long, bony finger.
This is where we are, he says.
He drags his finger over a line that, in this dimness, they can barely make out.
This is where you’ll have to go, he says. His voice is careworn, weatherbeaten as his face. Reminds them of grandparents they’d both once-upon-a-time known.
His finger comes to a halt, jabs the map twice for emphasis.
This is where you want to be.
Not quite true.
In this second book, she knows, the treasure’s buried somewhere different than she wants to go today.
In another country, in other halls.
Sammy sent her a message a few minutes ago, asking how she was doing, saying sorry again that he can’t visit tonight.
If he can’t come round here, she thinks, then she will meet him in the castle. She will take him there and show him everything she knows.
They politely decline the map the pedlar is offering, but gladly stick around to help him finish the booze.
34
They leave the tavern at sun-up and make good time on the road.
Her steed is back to his old self again, powerful and lithe as he ranges cross-country. Hoofbeats like cannon-fire on the cobbles and flagstones. Iron of the horseshoes striking up sparks.
Samuel’s steed is less mighty, less of a stallion and more of a mule.
But that’s fine. She has assured him that he doesn’t need to compensate for anything.
The mountains stand bold and blue in the distance, beyond the peaks of redwood pines. And, atop the highest mountain, the castle sits. Proud and rich and holding the only treasure that Donna Creosote desires.
The branches of the trees soon close out the view, though, soon shut out the sky. Sunlight only reaches the ground-level flora in shards that spear in through the canopy, thinner and thinner the further they go. Filamentary. Silken. Donna’s horse whickers in delight whenever they pass through one of those.
Donna herself must admit that there is something mystical about them. They fork through her visor and bring a smile to her face.
She doesn’t turn to check, but thinks that Samuel will be smiling, too.
They pause in the occasional clearings and look around, the way the poets recommend. They study these spaces, these arboreal cloisters, and a certain peace descends upon them. An ease with being. They feel cushioned from the nearby towns, from the fustiness and unsavoury intentions of that tavern and its clientele.
Such birds as there are in the higher branches don’t call out names, or any words, but simply trade in melodies.
At some point, however, those melodies stop. They can’t say when, for certain, because they can’t see the sun. They stop reaching clearings. The shards of light stop breaking through.
Donna’s steed becomes hesitant, reticent, slowing down and whinnying not with pleasure but with fear. Samuel’s mount starts to tremble and squirm.
The great knight’s eyes become accustomed to the gloom; she starts to notice that the tree trunks here are rotten, even though the uppermost branches still appear to be growing, still appear to be healthy, covered with leaves.
Other eyes flicker and lurk in the darkness: the eyes of small animals too frightened to move.
Then a sudden rustle in the undergrowth, and all of them scatter.
She hauls on the reins, attempting to steer her horse back where they’ve come from, but a horde of bandits has already burst forth from the undergrowth, shouting Your money or your life! as they close round in a ring.
Donna and Samuel pull their steeds to a halt, there being no room to gather the speed to escape.
Their bandit captors point and laugh, and dance around the hapless heroes, a carnival of silhouettes with leering grins and crooked knives. Coming closer and closer.
Closer
and
closer.
So close that Donna can discern at last their dirty bandit faces, even as they dodge about and try to hide them in the gloom.
With each recognition, she feels herself twist.
Samuel is clueless, overwhelmed, looking to her for ideas on how they might yet survive.
He shimmies his mule nearer, side by side with her stallion.
She can reach across and touch his shoulder, pat his back to calm him down.
No fear, she says, as she readies for battle.
Because this time the knight errant has remembered her sword.
35
The pathway up the mountain is blocked and guarded by far too many men.
Donna Creosote may be a bold and celebrated hero, but she isn’t bloody daft.
They will have to climb the cliff instead.
Be back soon, she whispers confidentially, confidently, into the upraised ear of her horse.
Samuel just pats his mule on the rump and says: See ya.
Halfway up the rock-face she begins to feel funny.
Not haha funny, but strange.
Her helmet grows increasingly tight on her head.
When she stops still against the mountain, Samuel, ever-attentive, looks over.
What’s wrong? he asks.
She doesn’t know.
She’s never felt like this before.
They press on, Samuel watching her closely all the while. Donna is touched, if a little unnerved, by the depth of his concern.
The way he looks at her, it makes her feel as if there’s something he can see that he isn’t letting on.
She wants to ask if that’s the case, and why he doesn’t just com
e out and tell her, but feels that a vertical plane two hundred feet above sea-level might not be the best place for them to have their first fight.
Shortly before the top, she pauses again.
She cannot carry on like this.
Her helmet is squeezing her skull like a vice.
Holding on tight to the rock with one hand, she unfastens her headgear, takes it off, lets it drop.
Set free, a stream of bright copper unspools from her head.
Spills back down the side of the mountain like lava.
Her hair has grown. Is still growing, in fact.
Samuel looks on, agog.
He had seen the feathers of it peeking from under the metal, but harboured no hopes of such glory as this.
He is entranced.
Her mane, to him, is mesmerising.
So much so that he misses a handhold,
and falls.
But he catches the end of her ponytail, and she has to carry him the rest of the way.
They will have their first fight, she thinks, as soon as they both reach the top.
When they get there, however, the castle gates are unguarded.
Wide open.
As they pass beneath the portcullis, Donna Creosote’s armour begins to weigh heavy again. But this is a different heaviness from that which struck her in the desert. It comes not out of weakness, but rather from a sudden knowing that she doesn’t need it anymore.
Not here.
Not with all the soldiers gone to watch the mountain path.
She hands her sword to Samuel for safekeeping, and casts off the breastplate, the gauntlets, the greaves.
He takes a step backwards to better appraise her. To see how she looks in her new satin gown.
Gorgeous, he says. She believes him and blushes.
But, she thinks, with an inner grin, he’d have preferred it if more had come off.
She grabs hold of him, laughing, and they kiss beneath the chandelier. They run barefoot towards the marble stairs, their footsteps making echoes that harmonise around them.
After a whistle-stop, whirligig tour of the premises, they sprint down a corridor to the large double-doors. Dark-varnished oak with gold-plated handles.
After you, she says.
He twists one of the handles and then steps aside, bowing.
No, my lady, after you.
The silver candelabras provide the mood lighting, as before.
She fancies she hears harpists strumming jaunty softcore funk.
But no, it’s the phone.
The landline.
Ringing and ringing and ringing some more.
She knows without getting up and looking at the small display screen exactly who’s calling.
Her mother, pestering her about going round tomorrow for Sunday lunch.
The amount of wine she’s drunk, she isn’t going to be awake by lunchtime, and, besides, she really doesn’t want to go. She doesn’t want to meet Bob, or spend time with her mother. All she wants to do is wait it out until Sammy can come back.
The phone rings off.
She tries to return to the castle, but all she finds when she does is that they didn’t get the treasure and now they’re being chased.
36
They are trapped in a dungeon.
For a while, they puzzle out the dank and mossy paths by torchlight. The flame casts whorish red against the stonework, highlighting the white of bones that sit like malformed stars within the dark.
Donna counts them. Names them. Ribs and skulls and spines and ulnas. They tumble loose from the walls as the prisoners pass, they clatter and scrape and congeal in the shadows. They form traffic-light devils and stand in the way.
Stop. they whisper, each in turn.
It is not safe to pass here.
Donna and her squire should, perhaps, consider taking these devils’ advice.
But then the torch goes out.
And something else inside the darkness bellows.
A distant noise, maybe, but not distant enough.
It bellows again.
A tortured groaning, rising from a throat that they call tell is scarcely human.
Donna knows exactly what it is, of course.
She knew which book she’d get this time, before she even turned it over.
She’d stacked the deck.
It’s the illustrated compendium of myths that Sammy returned to her last night.
The howling, lowing ululation the beast gives out is drawing closer, as they huddle tight in Daedalus’ labyrinth and pledge a tragic lover’s vow.
If the Minotaur finds us, don’t let it take me alive.
Don’t let it take me alone.
If this were a cellar instead of a maze, then maybe they’d make that promise with wine.
They try running back the way they came, but soon reach a dead end. Donna’s hands trace the walls, but can find no break or secret panel. No space through which the two of them might safely squeeze to freedom. They turn and turn, disoriented by the darkness, the way that everything, in every direction, all appears the same, in that it doesn’t appear at all. By the fact that they can know each other here by touch and smell and sound alone.
In a different locale, that thought might be tantalising, but in this labyrinth, the loss of sight – the vanishing of each other’s face – brings out a terror that, for Donna, presages what it must be like to die.
Condemned to lumber, lovelorn, through the chill kingdom of Hades, confronting the same old sweet nothing again and again.
The bellowing grows closer.
Echoes spread across the dungeon walls like ripples on the Styx.
And, for once, Donna Creosote, the great knight, adventurer, raconteur, lover, can’t conceive of a way out.
Saved by the bell.
Well, by the phone.
She guesses it’s her mother again, asking the same question.
Checking, just to make sure.
She guesses as well that her mother will keep checking, unless she gets up and does something about it. She disentangles herself from the beanbag, nearly knocking over the two-thirds empty wine bottle, her second, in the process.
She sways towards her desk, where the phone is currently located, and steadies herself by placing her hands on the back of the chair as she waits for the call to ring off. When it does, she grabs the receiver, navigates into the menu, and sets the ringer volume to mute.
It’s ok, she thinks. Sammy only has my mobile number.
By the time she slumps down again, she’s come up with an answer.
As they spin, as they twist, as they dance a rattled tango, something winds about their bodies, constricting and taut.
Samuel’s heartbeat hammers against her.
Her nipples get hard and her own pulse rate spikes.
But she stops short of panic when she feels a tug on her scalp, because she realises they’re only caught up in her hair.
She must have snagged her ponytail on a gatepost by the entrance.
She tells Samuel, and they unravel themselves, before gathering the ponytail in their hands and working back along its length. Better than yarn, Donna thinks, because a ball of yarn could be dropped and lost within this murk forever.
The lowing, the bass howling, is dying away.
There is a sliver of light up ahead. Compared to the grave-black of the labyrinth, its clarity and brightness appear absolute.
As they draw nearer it expands, and, in the hush, they feel like witnesses to some strange and sacred re-enactment of the universe’s start.
Sure enough, when they pass into it, through it, they discover for themselves a brand new world.
37
Drunk as she is, Donna isn’t unaware of how long, roughly, she’s been dre
aming today.
The fourth book she turns over is another illustrated edition, but this time one that had been loved more in her own childhood than in Sammy’s.
Sometimes she had read beneath a tent that she made with her duvet, by pulling it across from her bed to her drawers. She fixed it at one end by jamming it in the top drawer and at the other by pinning it beneath the mattress, she shuffled underneath with her bedside lamp and began to flip the pages.
Flipping the first page today reveals a picture of a dragon.
The brave and noble knight-princess, Donna Creosote, stands out in the centre of a town square, beside a fountain. Still wearing her gown, her hair still copper-coloured and winding out behind her like a molten stream across the flagstones.
Her squire stands beside her, fearless and tall.
The labyrinth has changed him for the better, Donna decides.
Surviving the Minotaur has made him tougher in the head.
A much needed quality, she thinks, given the ferocious mass of the dragon that currently claws at the courtyard before them.
Given how, when it stretches its wings to their full span, they are double the size of the town hall that squats, shambolic, behind.
Given how its eyes are the size of horses’ heads, and its nostrils gape like oubliettes.
Given how each talon is the size of a two-handed sword.
Which, once again, neither Donna Creosote nor Samuel currently possess.
More’s the pity.
The dragon fills its cavernous lungs and lets loose with a hideous roar.
Drunk as she is, Donna remains conscious of how consistently peril has featured in her fantasies today. Conscious too that this is far from unusual. She has considered at length, several times, the fact that so many fairy tales need such peril in order to function.
The fact that, in so many of those fairy tales and fantasies and myths, such peril serves a dual purpose. It is there to give entertainment and excitement to the audience, and to help move the story along. But it is also there to give excitement to the characters themselves: in particular, the romantic leads.
THE LESS THAN PERFECT LEGEND OF DONNA CREOSOTE Page 12