“The prince is a girl.” Ubri eyed all the piles with equal scorn. “That makes our—prenuptial agreement null and void under Old Hydrie law and Gorgorian custom. Anyway, one of my jailors came ’round to tell me that when they asked Arbol did he—she—want to come down to the dungeons and say goodbye to his—her—ex-fiancee, Arbol just asked, ‘Who?’ and when my name was mentioned the miserable pup made gagging noises and said he—she—wasn’t crazy yet.”
“Well, it looks as if the wizard’s spell changed the prince’s mind, too,” Bungi remarked.
“Or his taste,” Crosbi murmured. “For the better.”
“Did it ever occur to you lot of ragbags what it would’ve meant could I have made myself queen?” Ubri snarled. “What it would’ve meant for all Gorgorian women?”
“No.”
“Tell.”
“For one thing, there’s plenty of influence a woman can bring to bear on her man, even when her man’s a king,” Ubri said, folding her arms across her chest.
“Until he hits you,” Jigli reminded her.
“Arbol’s half Hydrie. Hydrie’s don’t hit.”
“They don’t?” Jigli grew thoughtful, a phenomenon which could only be perceived if you listened to her pile of veiling closely enough to pick up a faint hmmmm sound. “You know, I’ve got a little coin put by. Maybe it’s time I paid a visit to the Wheelwrights’ and Gravediggers’ Union Hall myself. These Hydrie men aren’t half bad to look at, and they do smell better.”
“Oh, what doors I might have opened for us all!” Ubri exclaimed. “Now it’s ashes, ashes!” Her scowl deepened and she shook her fist at the palace towers. “Mark my words, Artemisia: If I ever get the chance to do you a mischief, it’ll be the sort that ends with your subjects tossing great handfuls of your intestines up in the air and shouting whoopeee!”
“Hmph!” Bungi snorted. “Not like you’ll get that chance. Things’ve calmed down now, though for a while it looked like everything was running to chaos. Such a messy thing, chaos. Gets all over everywhere, and next thing you know, people with no taste in clothes are parading through the streets with the heads of royalty impaled on pikestaffs.”
“Pikestaves,” Jigli corrected.
“Sit on one, then tell me,” Bungi suggested.
Ubri said a word that was dirty even in the mouth of a male Gorgorian. Then she burst into tears. The clothstacks gathered around and patted her on the back until she got the hiccups.
“There, there, dear, don’t you fret,” Crosbi said. “I’m sure something will turn up.”
“Like what?” Ubri’s voice was flinty. The hiccups vanished like dew in the desert.
“Oh, I don’t know. Like something awful to upset the queen or at least you finding somewhere to lay your head tonight. I was just saying it as empty words of comfort, you know. I haven’t got a dog’s notion of what will cheer you up, or even if anything ever will.”
“DRAGON!” bawled the horseman who galloped past the knot of Gorgorian women and almost slammed into the great gate of the palace. His steed reared and pawed the air, its iron-shod hooves gouging huge splinters from the closed portal.
“Here! You watch that beast, will you?” a guardsman shouted down from a handy turret window. “We just had that gate sanded and shellacked.”
“DRAGON!” the rider reiterated, still at the top of his lungs. “Over there!” He gestured wildly with his riding whip.
“Where?” The guard shaded his eyes.
“Over where all that black, oily smoke is rising, you idiot! The city outskirts beyond the walls!”
“Not the poorer sections?”
“There are no poorer sections of the city outskirts, dolt! You pay that much extra for a cottage so you get the privilege of being as far from the government as possible and still have public fountains! Now open this damned gate!”
The guard’s face vanished from the window. He was muttering something about dragons being not part of his job description. By the time he reached the gate, he had been joined by several other men-at-arms, a few of them Old Hydrangeans.
“You want to say all that again, slow?” the original guard asked of the rider. “Just so’s the natives get a chance to hear about it?”
“I said—” the rider drew a deep breath “—DRAGON!”
All the guards, Gorgorian and Hydrangean alike, agreed that there was no need to shout. The rider, very red in the face, proceeded to give the details of the story while Ubri and her escort of Gorgorian women drew near to eavesdrop, unnoticed and unmolested.
“It was off in the Exhalations of Persistent Happiness quarter, outside the city gate, where it happened,” he said.
“Ah, yes,” a Hydrangean commented. “Near the tanneries.”
“It’s quite a nice little section of town—or was, before it got charred to ashes. I run a livery stable out there and I was just seeing to the horses when what do I spy ambling down the road big as my wife and twice as ugly but a dragon.”
“What, just the one?” The Hydrangean snickered. “Not accompanied by any other magical critters of myth and legend, was it? No pink elephants? No yellow-striped wolverines? No wombats?”
The rider’s glare would have peeled paint. “All this dragon was accompanied by was a corps of the scruffiest, dustiest, most ragtag bunch of itinerant road-scum as I ever laid eyes on. All footsore, they were, and complaining about blisters to the high heavens.”
“Why didn’t they just ride the dragon, then?” a Gorgorian asked, and clasped his sides as he shook with laughter.
“I’d like to see any man ride a dragon!” the horseman spat. “It’s not likely to happen in this world. At any rate, the dragon’s companions caught sight of the trade sign over my stable and one of ’em came sauntering up, bold as you please, to demand I make him a sandwich in the name of freedom.”
“A what in the name of which?”
“Well, I told him I didn’t run any sort of an eating house. He pointed to the trade sign and said when a man displayed that end of the horse, he was either advertising authentic Gorgorian cooking—which he didn’t like, but he was too hungry to be fussy—or else philosophy lessons. When I set him right, he turned around and demanded I give him a horse in the name of freedom.”
“Cheeky bastard!”
“I don’t need to tell you what I did give him in the name of freedom,” the rider said, looking very satisfied. It only lasted an instant before his face fell and he added, “Then they were all around me, all demanding horses, and meanwhile no one’s minding the bloody dragon! The Exhalations of Persistent Happiness quarter isn’t that heavily populated—not many people feel secure living beyond the capital walls, you know—but it’s no desert either. While this rabble was swarming me, the neighborhood kids came out to have a gander at the beast.”
The rest of his tale was short and bitter. One of the children, famous throughout the quarter for having inexplicably bad luck keeping a pet, tried to set off a string of firecrackers under the dragon’s rump. The dragon merely glanced down at the youngster’s attempt at wit, sneered, raised one huge haunch, peed liberally over the firecrackers and their patron, and then announced, “You like setting fires, do you, you horrid little mound of rabbit turds on the pasture of life? Well, so do I.”
And she did.
By this time the streaks of smoke rising from the Exhalations of Persistent Happiness quarter were growing too thick for even the most mole-eyed guard to shrug off. Smoke from a hearthfire wasn’t that black, burning leaves smelled better, and cityfolk never incinerated their garbage but threw it in the nearest river, like civilized people. There was also a large cloud of dust approaching. Gorgorians and Hydrangeans alike knew that such clouds generally arose when large numbers of people were on the road in an awful hurry to get away from something nasty.
“Dragon, you say?” the first guard asked, his tongue having suddenly gone all papery.
“And headed this way,” the rider affirmed.
A lou
d, inarticulate cry that sounded like someone putting badgers through a mangle made all the men jump out of their skins. The horse uttered a terrified whinny, bucked off his rider, and pounded into the palace courtyard, scattering the badly-shaken guards. The wailing was still going strong, up and down several scales, by the time they all regained their feet.
It was Ubri. She had her head thrown back, her eyes rolled up so that only the whites showed, and she appeared to be either suffering a conniption fit or doing a spot of folk dancing.
“Oh, the vision! The vision!” she howled. “Oh, darkest fate of complete draconian devastation! Oh, fiery fiend that falls upon out frail festivities!”
“What’s the matter with her?” the well-bruised rider asked one of the shrouded women.
“It is a holy vision,” the lady explained. “The women of my tribe, we have the power to see the future. Sometimes. A little. Some more than others. Nothing too fancy, you understand, no guarantees, we’re not show-offs, and if it doesn’t always come true it’s because you have to believe in it, too, or else—”
“The dragon is at the gates!” Ubri decreed, looking very striking in her dungeon-soiled finery, her hair and eyes wild. “The city, the kingdom can not stand against its might. We are all doomed, condemned to have the flesh seared from our bones, our blood gouting from our headless necks as the dragon rends us limb from limb!”
“Wait a minute,” the first guard said. “How can the dragon rend us limb from limb, blood gouting and all, if it’s already seared the flesh from our bones?”
Another Gorgorian guard gave him a smart thwack in the head and said, “It’s a holy vision, you clod. Things don’t need to make sense when they’re holy visions.”
“Oh, agony, agony,” Ubri chanted. A crowd began to gather, though none of them looked as if they wanted to stay once they got there. With every dire prognostication that fell from Ubri’s lips, they all shifted nervously from foot to foot and cast uneasy glances all around, looking to see whether anyone else was walking away. No one was bold enough to take the first step, so everyone stayed and suffered.
This went on for some time.
It was getting a little old and Ubri was running out of evil tidings to scatter when an Old Hydrangean guardsman actually found the backbone to announce, “Well, this is all very nice and picturesque and an authentic display of the Gorgorian folkloric tradition of silly woman’s stuff, but the fact remains that we’ve got a dragon coming to pay us a visit. Has anyone done anything practical about it?”
“Practical?” The Gorgorian captain-of-the-guard was astonished. “You, a Hydrie, asking us to do something practical? Sure you don’t just want the rest of the day off to write a poem ’bout it or something?”
“I want the rest of the day off to fireproof my house, or run away, but that’s about it,” the Hydrangean retorted.
“I hear as how they’ve locked and barred the city gates,” someone from the back of Ubri’s crowd piped up.
“The gates lie smashed and shattered!” Ubri cried. “The dragon’s fire leaves them smoking in the dust. Oh, fools, fools to think that mere gates made by the hand of man can ever hope to stand against so great a monster! The lowest slug that beslimes the face of earth knows that there is but one hope of diverting a dragon!”
This latest pronouncement scared up a flurry of renewed interest in Lady Ubri’s words. Suggestions flew hither and yon as the crowd battled to come up with the answer to dragon diverting. Most of these were shouted down as soon as they were uttered, and the unlucky soul who recommended sending out a company of street mimes was beaten senseless.
“No, you lackwits!” Ubri shouted, miraculously snapping out of her holy vision trance. “None of those will do. Gods, don’t you ever patronize marketplace storytellers? What every dragon wants is a nice, fresh, royal virgin staked out to await its pleasure.”
“A royal virgin, ma’am?” The captain-of-the-guard rubbed his forehead. “The way I heard it, the dragons never checked the poor girl’s pedigree before…”
“Royal.” Ubri showed every tooth in her head in a grin that would send most wolverines yipping for their dens. “Else the beast will know, and its wrath will be great, and there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, and a dreadful plague of toads with the croup will fall upon the land, and—”
“Yes, but a royal virgin—!” The captain blew his lips like a winded horse. “It’s not like we’re over-rich in such. Finding a royal woman’s scant enough pickings. Queen Artemisia was married to Gudge, after all. No way we could fix her up so’s the dragon would think she’s still—”
“But, my friends, don’t you see?” Ubri spread her arms wide and beamed at the mob. “The gods are kind. They have foreseen this very disaster and in their mercy they sent you the solution even before the disaster fell upon you!”
“That was nice of ’em,” someone commented.
“Aye, for once,” another bystander replied. “Makes a pleasant change from all that smiting they’re usually up to.”
“So where’s this solution the gods sent us, then?”
“The prince!” Ubri exclaimed, pointing at the palace. “The princess, I mean! Arbol’s transformation, which was ascribed to witchcraft by some royal fool—I’m not mentioning any names but it starts with A-r-t-e-m-i-s-i-a—is in reality the work of the gods! Oh, wise and noble people, now you may clearly see the only course open to you, the one way in which you may save your lives, and the lives of your dear ones, and your more expensive possessions.”
“We may?”
“We do?”
“I don’t mind the part about saving my life, but do we have to save my brother-in-law, too?”
“Most expensive possession I’ve got’s a new rutabaga.”
This time when Ubri howled at the sky, she meant it. However, not everyone there present missed the true meaning of the Gorgorian noblewoman’s words. The captain and his men were right behind her, especially after the Hydrangeans among them passed on a few of the local myths about what happened to people who overlooked the gifts of the gods.
“I never heard of celestial wolverines,” said one Gorgorian as they marched into the palace to do what needed to be done.
Of course there was some resistance, but Queen Artemisia was easily restrained and Prince—Princess Arbol could not stand against so many guards, especially since she had been forced to wear a long dress and Artemisia confiscated all her favorite weapons because swords weren’t ladylike.
Thus it was that when Bernice and her contingent of Bold Bush-dwellers approached the city, they were confronted by a large banner reading WELCOME, DRAGON, draped above the city gate. They entered the capital only to find the streets deserted. There were other banners hanging from balconies and windows, most saying things like WE GREET YOU WITH WILLING SACRIFICE and THIS WAY TO FEAST and SORRY YOU’VE GOT TO EAT AND RUN and MY BROTHER-IN-LAW IS A ROYAL VIRGIN TOO IF YOU’RE STILL HUNGRY AFTER.
“What a bunch of jerks,” Bernice remarked after one of the literate Bold Bush-dwellers read her the signs.
“It’s all that city living,” the Blue Badger replied.
“But I am getting hungry,” Bernice told him. “And the signs do say there’s a feast. I think it’s meant for me. How nice.”
“You can’t eat yet!”
Bernice’s huge head turned slowly towards the Blue Badger. “Sez who?”
“If you eat too much, you may get all sluggish.”
“So?”
“So a sluggish dragon’s no use to us in the fight for freedom.”
“Ask me if I care.”
“You promised you wouldn’t do anything until we rejoined the Black Weasel.”
“Promises are such slippery things.”
“And then you’ll have come all this way for nothing.”
“Not if the feast is any good.”
The Blue Badger got a canny look in his eye. “Sluggish dragons are pretty easy to slay, you know.”
&nb
sp; “Oh.” Bernice was abruptly silent.
“Look, don’t take it so hard,” he coaxed. “As soon as we find the Black Weasel, we’ll all have a nice snack and then we’ll free the kingdom and—and then we’ll probably throw a party after and you can eat all you want.”
“All right, I’ll wait for the Black stupid Weasel.”
“Well, you did promise.”
“I said I’d wait! Isn’t that enough for you? Because if it’s not…” Bernice’s narrow eyes got even narrower.
“It’s enough, it’s enough. Let’s go.”
On they went, but not too much further before they came to a great public square. A crowd had gathered on the far side of the square, being held back by a troop of very skittish-looking guards.
In the center of the square was a platform and on that platform was a pole and on that pole were a set of iron shackles and locked in those iron shackles was Princess Arbol in a white satin gown. She was cursing alternately in fluent Gorgorian and Hydrangean. When she saw the dragon, she just cursed louder and started screaming for someone to bring her a sword so that she might slay it.
The big banner spanning the square above the princess’s head said EAT HEARTY! THEN GO AWAY.
“No!” the Blue Badger cried, seizing Bernice by a scale. “The Weasel’s not here yet. You promised you’d wait for the Weasel.”
The princess called the dragon a bad name. It was so bad that it made Bernice blush, no easy thing in a dragon.
“I’ll wait,” she said, scowling. She sat down with a sound like thunder, pitching several Bold Bush-dwellers off their feet. “But I’m not going to wait forever.”
The princess called the dragon another name.
“You kiss your mother with that mouth?” Bernice roared.
The royal virgin gave her intended devourer the royal raspberry.
Chapter Thirty
Wulfrith really wished that Queen Artemisia would answer his question. It was such a simple question, after all.
Had Arbol been a girl all along?
Everyone else was assuming that she’d been a boy, but Wulfrith didn’t see how that was possible. He might be only an apprentice, and to a mere bush-wizard who lived out in a cave in the mountains, rather than to one of the great magicians of the royal court, but he still thought he knew something about magic, and he just didn’t see how Arbol could have been changed into a girl without a great deal of fuss and bother that would have been very hard to hide.
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