by Daniel Fox
Idwal had his breakfast - eggs, bacon, toast, slices of tomatoes pulled fresh from his fields. After washing the dishes and putting them back in their appointed places he stepped out his back door, lighting his pipe, gazed with love across his neat orderly fields. Except this particular morning there was a lump, a very large lump, being all lumpy right out in amongst the vegetables. Being a very organized type of fellow, Idwal was sure he hadn't sown any lump-seeds, so the sudden appearance of just such a lump in his fields was a highly unexpected occurrence. He went out to see just what variety of lump he now suddenly had on his hands.
An hour later everyone of any importance from the village had gathered around in a circle, careful not to tramp the vegetables, and was peering down at the mystery object. There was a multitude of head-scratching, and a smattering of poking with sticks by the elders. Idwal stood outside the circle of people, wringing the end of his shirt around his knuckles. He'd assured everyone that he had never planted such a thing, not in his fields, no sir, and that he had absolutely no idea how it had got there.
Gretal stood off to the other side of the circle of people, dabbing her moist eyes with a handkerchief. She was quite upset. She had, just yesterday, agreed to the marriage proposal of a properly normal young man. And now today she had found out he was the kind of person who had strange lumps in his field. Unusual lumps. She was still fond of Idwal, but she wasn't at all sure that she wanted to be the wife of a purveyor of unusual lumps.
"Please Gretal, all of you," said Idwal, "you must know that I didn't do this on purpose."
"It serves you right," said Gretal, wringing her handkerchief, "messing about with strange women."
All of the village's eyes turned to Idwal. Strange women?
Idwal waved his hands. "No no no," he said, "it's okay. She was very old."
Which didn't help things a bit. All those eyes narrowed. Idwal realized he had managed to go from lump-grower to sexual deviant in the space of four words. It was most desperately time to change the subject. "So who's going to help me get rid of it?" he said.
Jan, of the General Store, ran a finger along one of his many scars. This was a sure sign he was concentrating. "I don't know if that's the wisest course."
"What?" said Idwal. "You can't possibly think I should keep it!"
"No," said Jan. "But I also don't think one should just go off willy-nilly and destroy something so obviously," Jan coughed, not liking to say the word, "magical."
The villagers gasped and took a collective step back from Idwal.
"What can I do?" said Idwal.
"You must take it to the king."
"Me?"
"You."
Idwal jabbed a finger out, pointing at everywhere but here. Safe here, normal here, the only here he knew. "Out there?"
"The king is an extraordinary man used to dealing in extraordinary things." Jan jerked a thumb back over his shoulder at that miserable field lump. "And if ever I laid eyes on the extraordinary…" Jan took pity on the miserable farmer, threw a comforting arm around the young man's shoulder and guided him a few steps away from the others. "I know you've never been outside the village before, and I have to admit I kind of envied you for it. But the truth be told, this may turn out to be a good thing for you."
"I'm not so sure," said Idwal. He looked back past Jan at Gretal standing there, being consoled by the villagers. Poor girl. Imagine getting engaged to someone and the very next day finding out he's involved in doing strange things with weird old women.
"You're a young man. You've got a young man's blood running through your veins. And one major ingredient of such blood is fire. A burning to see, to smell, to touch and taste the new and the unexplored. Hold your tongue boy, I know it to be true. I was once a young man myself. Besides, it would be unnatural for you not to feel that way. So! You go out yonder. You see, you touch, you taste. You take your specimen there and give it to the king. And then you come home and appreciate what you have here all the more. Otherwise, you'll forever be known as the farmer who forced the village to find some way to deal with his magical field lump."
Idwal's mind whirred and clicked and came up with absolutely no counter-argument. "All right," he said, "I'll go." He walked over to Gretal. "Right after we're married."
Gretal eyes went wide. "Me?" She flapped her handkerchief at the atrocity. "Marry that?"
Idwal slumped. Turned to Jan. "Which way to the king?"
That is how Idwal discovered that inviting strange women into your bed can result in your having mysterious lumps.
***
So imagine you're a farmer of very limited worldy experience, and you're setting out to cart this darned heavy horribly magical lumpish thing off not to the dump or maybe into the presence of the local magistrate, but to the king of all people. Bloody hell, right? And as you're getting ready to step out of the village, which has been your whole world up until now, your feet are dangling because the magical thing is too heavy for your two-wheeled hand cart, so some of your town folk start stuffing rocks into your back-pack while they're giving you helpful advice like keep your nose clean, have a safe trip, and try not to change too much, and you're weighed down enough so that your feet can touch the ground, you'd think the woman you're scheduled to marry would have a kind word for you, wouldn't you? But no, she's still all weepy and somehow blaming you for this whole ordeal, like being kind to a hungry old woman is a monumental crime, and the best she can give you is that she "hopes" that she will marry you when you get back and your life returns to sweet blessed normality, well… chances are you'd be a bit grumpy.
Idwal certainly was. He mumbled out of his village. Grumbled along the king's high road for hours, and didn't come out of his funk until he noticed that the people he was sharing the road with were all annoyingly happy. Oh yes, he thought, you enjoy your gallop you dirty so-and-so's. Like to give you a couple of magical lumps. Lots of angry little thoughts like that passed through his head as lone travellers turned into couples, and those into small groups and those into what might fairly be described as small caravans. All of them happy, all heading his way, all travelling into the city that surrounded the Castle Owl.
One moment Idwal was pulling his cart along the well beaten dirt roads of the country, the next he was on stone. The rumbling of his wooden wheels changed their tone. He rounded a final bend in the road and then there it was, the city. Idwal's foul mood was completely squashed by awe. It was gigantic, stretching across his view from side to side. A tall wall of white stone stood immediately before him, a large gate open across the road to admit the many visitors. Beyond the wall the city sloped up the gentle rise of a hill, going up and up and up until it met the walls of the castle itself.
The Castle Owl. It too was made of clean white stone, now turning a reddish-orange as the sun sank into the west. The flags of the royal family, a white owl on a background of red, flew from every tower's point. The castle had popped up in many a story that Idwal had heard in his youth (not that a great many fantastic stories were told in his village - usually parents would tuck their children into bed by telling them how one operated a plow, or perhaps a gentle rendition of how one should rotate one's crops). Idwal had never seen even a drawing of a castle before; but somehow this particular example nonetheless seemed to snap exactly into what Idwal had expected in his mind, like he somehow had an unfinished puzzle at home and managed to find the final missing piece a great distance away. The castle was, in Idwal's mind, exactly as a castle should be.
He was holding up traffic. People behind him gave him good natured grumbles, encouraged him onward and upward. He shut up his gaping jaw, grabbed up his squeaking cart, and walked himself into his first ever city.
There was disorder, and chaos, and cacophony, and the whole of it seemed utterly and ridiculously happy. The stables and shops and pubs and inns that were normally part of the city had sprouted stalls, proper stalls (unlike the hackneyed affairs in his village), selling just about everything imaginable.
Here! Get your hands on a divining rod that could sniff out not only fresh water but also your neighbour's secret stores of wine and ale. There! Buy yourself a dream catcher that actually caught dreams in its web and kept them there so you could read them like pages of a book the next morning. It boggled Idwal's mind that everyone was so casual about nestling clearly magical items right up against the everyday and the ordinary. Such a thing would never have been allowed back home.
Keeping the castle's spires in his sights Idwal slowly wound his way upwards through the city, his head turning this way and that, trying to take in everything at once. He spotted a stall with a bright painted sign proclaiming this a kissing booth. The proprietor was a cheerfully pretty young lass, her hair pulled back in piggytails. Leaning over the counter of her stall in her exceptionally low-cut peasant's blouse she gave Idwal a quite vivid reminder of the damsel in distress from the brochures of the old woman. The kissing girl gave Idwal a great big smile and beckoned him over with a waving finger. Idwal blushed, fumbled to raise his cap, made apologies, mumbled about being engaged, and stumbled himself right back into a man the size of a bear.
Idwal turned and looked up up up. The bear man frowned and looked down down down. A smile broke through the bear man's wild beard. Quite a sweet smile really, unexpected on such a dangerous looking fellow. Idwal breathed a sigh of relief. Until he realized that maybe the wild man was just happy to have someone to pound into jelly.
"Oho!" said the wild man in a voice that rumbled like not-so-distant thunder. "Another one!" The wild man flipped a coin through the air. Idwal followed the coin with his eyes and saw it land in the hand of a man standing under a small banner that had "Archery Contest!" painted in a handsome flowing script. The admirers around the bear man parted and Idwal saw an open lane. At the far end were hay bales with archery targets pinned to them.
"Oh no," said Idwal, "I don't think you want me, I've never-"
"Come on lads," rumbled and grumbled the wild man, "can't have the lad thinking ill of Owltown hospitality."
One of the wild man's group tossed another coin to the contest's purveyor. Lickety-split the wild man picked up a bow as long as Idwal's body, fitted an arrow, pulled back the string, his arm cording with muscle, and let fly. The arrow zinged its way down the lane and cut through the target half a hand-span from the bull's eye. The crowd let out a great cheer.
Accepting his due praise, the big fellow thrust the bow and a fresh arrow into Idwal's hands. Idwal looked at the unfamiliar objects in his hands. He'd never been hunting. Still, how hard could it be? There was a little notch in the end of the arrow, the string must go in there. So, put arrow on string, pull string back, aim at the colourful circles on the targets, and let go. Easy.
Only it turned out, not so easy. Notching the arrow went easy enough, but pulling the string back required a ridiculous amount of strength. The burly man beside him had managed to pull the string so far back that the bow had nearly bent in half. Idwal could barely get the string to move. But with all those eyes on him he wasn't just going to give up. So he strained a little harder, pulled the string a tiny bit back further, concentrated on the target, the tip of his tongue stuck out between his teeth. He let fly! Sort of. The arrow tumbled out over the fist holding the bow and went down pointy-end first into the ground by Idwal's foot. And then it flopped over.
There was a bit of silence from the crowd. Idwal wondered if he was blushing hard enough for people to actually hear it. But then the wild man broke out into a booming laugh and gave Idwal a friendly slap on the back so hard it nearly made his eyeballs pop out.
"Ho!" he boomed. "Ho ho ho! Didn't want to show me up in front of my hometown ladies eh? There's a man for you! There's a sport! I think we'll have to give him a suitable show of thanks." The giant looked around his crowd of friends and admirers. "What shall it be?"
A voice cried out from the crowd, "Becky!"
And then the whole of the crowd agreed, "BECKY!"
A new lane parted through the crowd. Right back to that tempting morsel in the kissing booth.
"Oh," said Idwal. "Oh no no, oh I couldn't-"
Idwal tried to make for his cart but the crowd picked him up and passed him overhead, happy hands trading him along until Becky was able to lunge up, grab him by the ears, and plant a great big kiss right on his lips. Laughing, the crowd put the farmer back on his feet, and with a few final friendly claps on the back they went on their way. Idwal gave Becky the kissing booth girl a woozy smile, tipped his cap, and made his wobbly way back to his cart. Of all the magical things in all of the magical stalls Idwal had seen in this magical city, Idwal was willing to give the buxom Becky top billing.
It took Idwal a moment to remember what he was doing in this strange place. But then he grabbed up the handles of the cart and continued on his journey up the hill to the castle. Becky waved bye-bye.
That's how Idwal learned that it's not always such a bad thing to come in second.
And also that he was a terrible shot. Just terrible.
***
It took another hour for Idwal to make it all the way up to the gates of the castle. There had been diversions every step of the way. The castle itself was a blizzard of people, cleaning, carrying, calling out names of lords and ladies. A happy blizzard, smiles everywhere. Despite the crowds that should have overwhelmed him, Idwal was surprised to find that he smiled right back. He passed more contests, wishing he had just a little bit of talent with the throwing axe, or log-rolling, or the rapid eating of pies. He passed musicians and crowds of dancers, wishing that he had some experience with the drum or lute. He even passed an additional kissing booth or two, wishing that he could stop blushing so hard.
It was a surprisingly good time, when all was said and done, except for one peculiar moment. Just as he was making his way up the final few feet to the castle's walls a large dark carriage, pulled by four large dark horses, rumbled by and through the gates. There were no symbols or signs or livery or crests painted on the cart, not that Idwal would have recognized them if there had been. It was strange, but the black cart dampened Idwal's happiness for just that moment, like that one cloud that chills the breeze on an otherwise warm spring day. Then the cart was gone, passed through the gates, and the chill was gone.
Finally arriving at the gates Idwal informed a guard of his business there that day. The guard could scarcely bring himself to believe the farmer until he had a peek at the thing in Idwal's cart, hidden under the tarp.
"Well that's a sight," said the guard. "If not for my own eyes… It's not dangerous, is it?"
"I don't think so," said Idwal. "Unless of course it rolls on top of you."
"And it's a present for the king, eh? Well, that's alright then, the king likes presents. Follow me."
So Idwal followed. Across the drawbridge which spanned a wide water-filled moat. Under the raised portcullis with its nasty downward points. Through a gate in an inner wall, across what was probably referred to as a courtyard, and into the castle proper. Idwal followed the guard, hauling his squeaky cart, through the kitchens where a thousand and one things roasted and bubbled and baked and broiled. They passed through a storage room where ale kegs, big as houses, were lined up one after another in a row as long as the main street of Idwal's village.
After this hallway and that turn they arrived in an area decidedly less workman-like and more suited to royalty. There were no workers at all here, only two guards, much more splendidly dressed than the guard who had brought Idwal this far, standing before two gigantic wood doors crossed with gold bands.
"Right," said Idwal's guard. "I sent a boy ahead so they'd know you were coming."
"Well that was very nice of you," said Idwal.
"Wasn't it? So you wait here, listen for your name, my friends here with the lovely shining armour will whisk open the doors, and in you go to present your present to the king. Easy as falling off of the old log. I'll leave you to it."
"Right," said Idwal.
"Well thank you very much for all your help."
"Think nothing of it," said the guard, waving good-bye over his shoulder.
It wasn't until the guard rounded the corner out of sight that Idwal began to panic. "I'm sorry," he called out, "did you say I'm supposed to present it to the king? Me? But-"
Idwal heard from the other side of the doors, "Idwal the Farmer with a present for His Majesty, King Torquil!" boomed out in the voice of someone who very obviously made their living booming things out. The two guards swung open the doors.
Idwal the farmer, from the most boring man-made place on the planet, found himself looking in the faces of every king and queen of all the human kingdoms.
"Uh," said Idwal.
An awful silence followed. Idwal thought he could actually hear the beads of sweat trickling down his back.
"Go on," whispered the guard to his right.
"You can do it lad," said the one to his left.
Idwal forced his right foot forward, them commanded the left foot to catch up. One step, two step, and so on. He made his way down the clear central aisle, his cart wheels squeaking in an embarrassingly loud fashion with every revolution - why hadn't he gotten that fixed? On either side of him were stout wood tables. At every table sat a royal family, their house banners hanging over them from the rafters overhead. Idwal supposed he must be walking by kings and queens, lords and ladies and knights famous enough to have songs sung about them in their own lifetimes. He couldn't quite bring himself to look, his eyes kept dropping down to the floor right in front of him.
After an agonizingly long walk he finally made it to the raised bit at the end of the hall. The dais, he supposed they called it. Funny word that, dais. The day is what, exactly? And why would you want to sit on it?