by Jack Heckel
“I disagree,” smiled a very happily disagreeable fellow to his left. “There are plenty of examples of irregular fricative pluralizations, like loaves and thieves.”
From atop his stool, the bespectacled dwarf frowned down at him. “I’m not saying it’s a universal rule. There are no universal rules in morphophonemics. There is only quasi-regularity, and you know it.”
The grim-looking dwarf that had earlier called her a broad frowned. “Well, I think the problem is that you are using the term fricative too loosely. Are we talking about spirant or strident fricatives?”
“Don’t be an idiot,” snapped the white-haired dwarf gesturing violently at his fellow debaters with the book. “How could dwarf be a strident fricative; there’s no tongue involved.” He demonstrated by over-enunciating the word dwarf. “It’s spirant fricatives we’re talking about, so stop trying to complicate the matter.”
“Oh,” said the angry dwarf. “So I’m an idiot now, am I? Is that it?” He took a menacing step toward the seated fellow.
The white-haired dwarf held up his hands. “Now, now, you know that’s not what I meant—”
A dwarf with a violently red nose interrupted. “Actually, dwarf is a voiceless labiodental fricative, and a word like staff can be pluralized staffs or staves, depending on whether you are talking about a group of people or a walking stick . . . so . . .”
This was too much for the white-haired fellow, who chucked his book across the room. It hit red-nose square on his red nose, eliciting a loud sneeze from the victim and a roar of laughter from the other dwarves.
The white-haired dwarf straightened his glasses unnecessarily. “Now that that is settled, we can have a civilized discussion about the issue . . .”
Liz was finding it very hard to concentrate and, besides, felt they were getting slightly off topic, so she simply cut to the point she’d been going to make. “The point is, if you are the dwarfs . . . dwarves—whatever— if you are the fellows from the story, you know the one, aren’t there supposed to be seven of you? Wait—wait, let me guess your names . . .” She studied the arc of faces. There was one with a bright red nose, and one that seemed to be continuously flushing and who, at her glance, slipped behind a nearby curtain to hide. Another was snoring soundly and softly at her feet. She laughed. “Well, he’s obvious,” she said, pointing at the sleeping figure. “He fell asleep right in the middle of our introductions, so he must be Slee—”
The bespectacled, white-haired dwarf interrupted her before she could finish. “Now, wait. You see . . .” Clearly uncertain how to continue, he stopped.
The smiling dwarf took up the thread in a high-pitched squeak. “We don’t—”
“—that’s right,” said the bright-nosed fellow in a nasally voice, “we don’t . . .”
The angry-looking fellow glared at the other dwarves in disgust. “Don’t hurt yourselves.” He climbed up onto the foot of the bed, straddling the sleeping dwarf, put his hands on his hips, and growled, “Listen, lady, we don’t appreciate being reduced to one-dimensional caricatures. How would you like it if I decided to call you Clumsy for falling down a perfectly obvious ravine and breaking your arm, or Trampy because you are apparently perfectly comfortable receiving six men into your bedroom dressed in next to nothing?”
Liz looked down. The odious little man was right. There she was, covers around her waist, wearing nothing but a sheer shift that, in the morning light, was, at the least, immodest. She pulled the blanket up to her chin. The angry dwarf kept haranguing her about the evils of stereotyping, but she didn’t hear any of it. Her mind was fully engaged, trying in vain to remember how she had gotten into this bed, why her arm was covered from elbow to wrist in plaster, and what had happened to her dress. Liz blushed when the inevitable answer to the last question came to her.
“ . . . I mean, now for instance, I could just as well call you Blotchy—”
The white-haired dwarf interrupted the lecture with a frown. “Steady on, Grady, steady on.”
Grady returned the frown. “Well, Dorian,” he said with a one-eyed sneer at Liz, “I expect more manners from someone we saved from certain death, carried a good five miles over rocks and through caves, all the while enduring the threats and slanderous insults of her lunatic boyfriend. But, maybe, I’m old-fashioned.” He ended by shrugging dramatically and bristling his prodigious brows at Liz.
The sleepy dwarf half opened his eyes at this and yawned. “Besides, narcolepsy is nothing to laugh at.”
“Exactly, Sloane,” Grady spit, “that’s right—”
“Allergies aren’t either.” The red-nosed fellow sniffed. “I’m normally not this bad, by the way,” he said in an aside apparently meant for Liz. “Only . . . Only . . . Only—ACHOO! I’m terribly allergic to lavender.”
“Precisely, Sneedon,” Grady exclaimed “You see—”
“Or maybe it’s the pollen in the air,” Sneedon continued. “You know, people don’t know how deadly springtime can be. Spring, and nuts of course. Oh. And berries, not to mention shellfish. And then, there’s gluten and—”
Grady reached over and tweaked Sneedon’s nose roughly.
“Youch!”
“Dammit,” Grady complained. “We don’t have time to run through a list of your allergies. We’ll be here until next week. The point I’m trying to make is—”
“Actually, I think narcolepsy is pretty funny,” giggled the cheerful fellow.
“Me too,” said a whisper of a voice from behind the curtain that must have come from the now-hidden dwarf.
“Hayden and Baldwin have a point,” Dorian said. “We have used Sloane as a pretty regular punch line in our plays.”
“Yeah,” sniffed Sneedon, who still looked a little hurt that the topic of his allergies had been dropped so quickly. “Like our humorous adaption of Rumpelstilt . . .” He sneezed again. “ . . . skin. Come to think of it, didn’t you script it so I was to sneeze every time I said Rumpelstilt . . .” Achoo! “ . . . skin?”
With rising irritation, Grady said, “That’s entirely different Sneedon . . .”
“Or, the send-up we gave him in The Dwarf and the Pea,” suggested the hidden dwarf.
“All right, Baldwin, you’ve made your—”
“Or Sleeping Ugly,” Sloane murmured with another wide yawn.
“Well, that was just—HEY, WAIT A MINUTE!” shouted Grady. “We’ve never done a play called Sleeping Ugly.”
The hidden dwarf, whose name Liz thought was Baldwin, giggled. “No, but it is a really good idea.”
Grady raised a finger to the sky and opened his mouth to argue, but stopped short and, lowering his hand, said, “Granted, but we’re getting off topic. The point is . . .”
Liz was finally awake, at least partially from having to shift her gaze this way and that to keep up with the six-way debate, and had come to the conclusion that enough was enough. “The point is, I have been a terribly ungracious guest. For this I apologize. I am clearly deeply in your debt. But, could you indulge me a few questions?”
She paused a moment to see if the talkative Grady would continue his sermon. He did not, but looked none too pleased at having his monologue interrupted—again. Liz nodded and raised her forefinger. “Where am I?” She raised her middle finger: “If you are not the Seven Dwarfs, then who are you?” She raised her ring finger: “How did I get here?” She let those questions linger for a heartbeat, and then raised her pinkie emphatically: “And where are my clothes?”
The five visible dwarves blushed from neck to forehead. Even Sloane woke up long enough to turn a bright cherry red before falling asleep again. They all looked at Dorian, who was sweating so profusely, Liz was afraid for his health. He put a finger under his collar and pulled. Then gulping air like a landed fish, stuttered, “W-Well, you see . . . now then .
. . that is . . . what I mean to say . . . well, we . . . ahhhh . . . er, that is, I had to, um, examine you.”
“Examine me?” Liz said, her voice raising several octaves.
“I am a doctor,” he said gravely.
“Of literature . . .” the voice of Baldwin whispered from his hiding place.
Dorian glared in the direction of the curtain. “Yes, well, regardless, I did bandage your head and fix your arm.”
“I still . . . still say her arm didn’t look all that bad,” Sloane said between yawns.
“How would you know?” Dorian asked. “You slept through the whole thing.”
“I did not,” Sloane said with a lazy blink. “I was . . .” He yawned violently, and Liz found that she couldn’t help but follow suit. After a sleepy smack of his lips, Sloane began again, “ . . . watching and—”
But that was as far as he got. A gentle snore erupted from the dwarf and a visibly relieved Dorian continued. “The point is, your arm was broken. A fracture of the humorous, if you must know.” He wiggled his glasses at her in what could only be described as a professorial manner.
Liz had broken her arm as a child. The way she could wiggle her fingers without pain made her think the little man was exaggerating. “I think it is pronounced humerus, Dorian,” she said. “And, it doesn’t feel broken.”
“That’s because it wasn’t broken,” Sloane said with eyes so heavily lidded that it was impossible to know if he was awake or talking in his sleep.
“Right,” Dorian said, ignoring Sloane’s comments. “So, with your arm broken and your head bashed in, I—”
“Removed my dress!?”
Dorian blushed again and Grady decided to answer. “Some gratitude. I told you we shouldn’t have helped her, Dorian.” He shook a finger at Liz. “Look, lady, we find you at the bottom of a ravine, your arm bent all wrong, and your head bleeding, and all you can do is complain about your modesty?”
“It’s not so much my modesty,” Liz lied, “and more a question of whether any of you are qualified to examine young women? I mean, you’re— ”
“What? Miners?” Grady reddened around the neck and squinted at her. “There you go making assumptions again. We’re dwarves so we must be miners, eh? I’ll have you know we are artists, and you, Miss, are not that young.”
Liz glared back at him for the remark about her age, and said, “I was going to say writers.”
“We’re actually actors,” Hayden said with a smile and a wink.
“We are not actors,” Grady countered with a snarl.
“But we act.”
“Perhaps I should say that we are not merely actors,” Grady said. “We are artists that on occasion author, produce, and perform dramatic works.”
“But we do act,” Hayden said in happy, but relentless, repetition.
“I won’t have this argument again,” Grady said. “We are a bloody artist collective, and you know it!” He turned back to Liz and said in honest, if aggressive, confusion, “Now, where were we?”
Liz fought her growing desire to laugh. Maybe her arm wasn’t broken, but they had done what they thought was best, and no real harm had come of it. Still, she decided they should squirm a little more. She cleared her throat. “You were telling me how being an actor—I mean, an artist—qualifies you to examine me?”
“I thought that would have been obvious!” he replied matter-of-factly, “We are used to dealing with the exposed form—in all its shapes—no matter the flaws.”
Liz could not help blushing, and to his credit, so did Grady.
“Yes, well, perhaps we could move on,” Dorian pleaded, wiping his forehead with the end of his beard.
Apart from a twittering of birds, there was a general silence that he took for consensus. Dorian poked at his glasses with his thumb, until they were listing badly to the left, and nodded. He raised his forefinger. “Let’s see, your first question was where are you? You are in the Cottage of the Seven Players, deep in the White Wood. You have been with us something a little short of a week.”
“And, you were right,” Baldwin said, briefly poking his head out from behind the curtain and eyeing Grady, “we are the Seven Dwarfs . . . at least we are six of the Seven Dwarfs. You-know-who is in rehab.”
“We are not the Seven Dwarfs, Baldwin,” Grady barked, emphasizing the “Seven Dwarfs” with imaginary quotation marks. “We, each of us, played one of the seven dwarves in that awful play.”*
“Awful play?” Liz protested. “It was fantastic. My mother took us to see it when we were children. I loved it, especially the singing numbers.” She hummed a few bars of one of the songs.
“Thank you,” five of the dwarves said in unison.
“Crass commercial fluff,” rasped Grady.
“Wait,” Liz said firmly, “you called the seventh dwarf ‘You-know-who.’ Who? Do you mean Dop—?”
“Shhh . . .” hissed the dwarves.
“Don’t,” Grady said with real urgency. “The rights to that name, in particular, were sold, and well, in fact, we sold the rights to the whole play to pay off some um, ill-advised, well . . . I guess you could call them investments.”
“He means, we lost big on the horses,” Hayden translated with a smile.
Grady glared at him and continued. “The point is, if you don’t want to wind up in the poorhouse with us, you’ll not mention That Play again. The new owner lives in another magical kingdom, but he has some bloody good lawyers. They could be anywhere.”
The dwarves looked about uncomfortably as though these lawyers might actually be hiding somewhere in the room.
Grady’s muffled growl broke the tension. “Anyway, if you must know, his name is really Dominic. He went solo. Made a mockery of his art by going around entertaining the masses in a one-man comedy show called Big Ears and All.”
“Quite successful too,” Dorian said softly. “It was after he made it big that we got the offer for the rights to . . . That Play.”
“Yeah, and we sold it,” said Grady.
“Poor Dominic,” Hayden said in a happily mournful voice.
“What happened to him?” Liz asked.
Baldwin piped up from his hiding place. “After the lawyers from that other kingdom gave him the cease and desist, he got hooked on snuff. Put all his money up his nose. Sad, really.”
“I’m allergic to snuff.” Sneedon sniffed seriously. “Did you know I’m also allergic to—”
Grady slapped Sneedon’s nose, eliciting a violent sneeze and a round of chuckles from the other dwarves. “I warned you, I won’t tolerate any more talk about your allergies.” Sneedon rubbed his nose sadly while Grady concluded. “Point is, Dominic was a sellout and deserved everything he got.”
“Oh, ignore Grady,” Dorian said, “he’s just grump—uh, angry because he has writer’s block.”
“Speaking of which,” Grady harrumphed loudly. “I don’t have time for idle chatter and neither do you, Sneedon.” He jumped from the foot of the bed and stomped toward the door. “Coming, Sneedon?”
Sneedon shook his head, which made the tasseled cap perched atop it wiggle. “Uh-uh. I want to hear the answer to her last question.”
The dwarves all turned back to Liz. Baldwin’s face appeared from behind the curtain. Sloane’s eyes opened and, for once, stayed that way.
“That’s right,” Dorian said. “You asked us how you got here. We want to know the same thing. How does a lady appear at the bottom of a ravine, in the middle of the woods, with a broken arm and shattered head?”
“I’m warning you, it has all the hallmarks of something a crazed stalker-groupie would do,” Grady muttered under his breath.
Suddenly, Liz’s mind cleared—and the events since her escape from the tower came flooding back. Her eyes widened in alarm. “My God, the Princess has some
evil power! Elle! Will! I—I must warn them.”
She was moving before the words were out of her mouth, but with the movement came a flood of pain that radiated simultaneously from her bandaged head and plastered arm. Gasping, she fell back into bed.
Dorian sprang to her side, “Lady . . .”
“Liz,” she grunted. “My name is Liz.”
“Liz,” he said. “You shouldn’t move. The boys were right before. You were in terrible shape when we found you.” He scratched his head. “Doctor or not, the fact is you shouldn’t be up and moving about.”
Liz sighed and lay back against the pillow. She felt so weak. “I have to. My brother, he may return to the castle at any time. I must get a message to Elle. Do you have a horse? Is there anyone nearby? An inn perhaps?” She wanted to say more, but her head was swimming and she felt nauseous.
Dorian scratched his tangled beard. “We’re pretty far out in the woods, Liz, and we don’t own any horses ourselves on account of, well—”
“On account of horses being great untrustworthy beasts,” Grady spit before concluding with a muttered, “Samson to win. I mean, really, what kind of tip is that? Didn’t I say that Samson had only shown any real speed on turf courses . . .”
While Grady spluttered on, in a soft, almost whisper of a voice, Hayden said, “There is our patron . . .”
At this suggestion, Baldwin disappeared, once more, behind his curtain, and the remaining dwarves exchanged uneasy glances.
“Patron?” Liz murmured weakly.
“Well,” Dorian replied, rubbing a hand along the back of his neck, “I suppose technically he is not our patron.”
“Yet . . .” Sloane added vaguely.
“He’s more of a patron . . . in waiting.” Sneedon sneezed.
“All we need to do is get an audience with him and we’re sure we’ll be able to win him over,” chirped Hayden merrily.
“What? You’ve never seen the fellow?” Liz asked.
“No, not yet,” Dorian admitted.