The Princess Gardener

by Michael Strelow

  Arbuckle and Jake are my dragons in this story. Dragons are unpredictable and mysterious. They guard treasure and breathe fire, and no other animals do. They have scales like some creatures but don’t live in water like scaly critters do. So we keep dragons around for story purposes. But both Arbuckle and Jake made good dragons.

  Of the two, Jake was the biggest dragon because he was the most dragon-like: he was unpredictable, and he had some idea of what treasure there was to guard. As the youngest member of the farm family (cats and dogs and goats not counted), Jake enjoyed the privilege of being the darling of everyone—Alyssa, his parents, even visitors. Jake was cute and small and growing every day so that each day he appeared newly made, and the sunshine seemed to follow him across the meadow and up any available tree.

  On the other hand, Arbuckle was a smaller dragon because he could barely maintain any dragon-like qualities. His attempts at style, while they kept the court laughing behind his back, were at least some claim to prominence at court. “There he comes,” they used to say. “Let’s see what goofy costume he has today. Oh, the black lips! Now that’s an improvement!” And so forth and so on.

  Arbuckle was sensing that Alyssa was not actually the princess, and this was just a gift to him from the gods of fortune. No one else seemed to have noticed a thing. Arbuckle began walking around each day smiling on the inside over the deliciousness of what he knew, or at least suspected. He would take his time to reveal the truth as soon as he had proof. He would call everyone together, King and Queen included, and make the monumental announcement. He would hire trumpets and banners. The princess would be revealed, and he would be the hero. I have known him all my life, and this is how he thinks. But first he would have to know and discover and be sure. Find out where I had gone. That was the key. Time would be bided, Arbuckle Pemberton was thinking. He would be thorough and ruthless and…right!

  With two dragons in one story, there’s always the chance that they’ll meet and destroy each other. Or another chance is that each dragon will cause its own kind of mayhem and unruliness, and kerfuffle.

  Alyssa wrote me that she worked each day to be more and more princess-like, as if she sensed somehow Arbuckle’s plot.

  She said her day would go like this.

  “May I be of service, Arbuckle?” He lurked, she reported. Always he lurked.

  “Oh, princess, yes. I was just wondering if you remembered that story of your mother’s oldest cousin who fought at the battle of…? What was it again? The battle of…?” He opened his eyes wide inviting her to supply the battle. “Oh, you know it perfectly well. You were always so good with the history. The battle of…?”

  And she had learned to counter his attempts to trap her.

  She said, “OK now, Arbuckle. Put your mind to it. Try to think of facts around the battle you want. It’s a valuable technique for remembering. Think of the place first. Then the stories from that battle. Then…that’s it. Keep trying. You’ll get it. Go ahead. Think hard.”

  And eventually he had to give in and name the battle, and she would claim a victory for having helped him remember. Then, she wrote, she would study up with the history tutor and next time Arbuckle lurked, she’d pounce.

  “Arbuckle, ah, there you are. I was writing to your aunt, our aunt, I suppose, though the blood’s gotten thin at that end. Anyway, I wrote that we were discussing the battle of Shornsteby, and the loss of our own dear Adrolone, ‘the unkind,’ wasn’t he? Androlone the Unkind? How he saved his reputation by one final act of selfless valor.” She said she was laughing on the inside as Arbuckle’s eyes grew bigger and bigger at her command of family history. Hummm, he seemed to be saying to himself. I didn’t think she would know these things. But, Alyssa wrote, he was never fully convinced, only confused. She’d settle for confused.

  Another time, she reported, Arbuckle had taken his lurking further. She could see his shadow outside the room she was in working with her tutor. They had moved on from history to a kind of complicated arithmetic. The shadow came closer, maybe to hear better. The shadow crouched down. All this she could see in the mirror. The shadow smelled of suspicion and how far Arbuckle’s idle mind had gone astray.

  The tutor was cheering her on. “So if we count by fives—five, ten, fifteen—then the number one is actually five, isn’t it?” She was trying to keep track of both the shadow and the lesson.

  “What? Five is one?”

  “Well it is like one if we’re counting…”

  “But it’s not one. It’s five. Unless ten is going to be two.”

  “That’s it! Good work. Then ten is two. And fifteen is…?

  “Three!”

  At this point, Arbuckle sneezed. And sneezed again. The lurking was finished; the shadow disappeared. After the lesson, Alyssa discovered a broken pencil tip outside the door. Arbuckle had been taking notes, gathering evidence, she thought, to try to trip her up.

  On the whole, I much preferred my own dragon, Jake. No lurking, just little fires he started accidentally.

  By courier we agreed that we would each stay exactly where we were, where we were happiest, and not try to switch back and forth just yet. That is, unless there occurred some emergency where we had to act quickly. Or unless either one of us changed her mind. Alyssa, though she had doubts, had become very fond of the rich food of the castle, even the ceremony and empty pomp at court; she wore her duty like a cape, she claimed. But also it was tiring on her, she wrote. That cape could get heavy. She didn’t know if she could do it for life, but also she could feel herself changing and moving toward the princess business more and more each day.

  I had become very fond of the day and night fullness of farm routine. Each of us felt herself slipping deeper and deeper into new identities. How long could we keep going? Would we just each become the other? I was sure I could blink my eyes and spin in a circle to complete the transformation and act as if I had been on a farm all my life. I was afraid Alyssa would need more magic spinning and blinking and maybe some magic dust to make her change complete. And, of course, would we get away with it? There lurk the dragons, of course.

  Chapter Five

  It seemed almost impossible for Jake, farm boy, and Arbuckle Pemberton, court fop, to join forces for any reason whatsoever. But they did—dragon sniffing out dragon. Arbuckle noticed that our courier—and the couriers were always the soul of secrecy—left the court occasionally and journeyed off in the opposite direction of all the other couriers. And Arbuckle had the advantage—he always did have this, even as a small boy—of being nosey. The lurking instinct! No other way to put it: he was constitutionally nosey. Why, he asked himself, would one courier, though not very often, leave the castle to the south, down river, when all the court business was located to the north where all the other couriers carried their messages?

  And so in crafty disguise, he planned to follow the errant courier and see what he could see. I knew well that news at court was always welcome, and gossip or rumor was always trumped by real news of the outer world. Nothing gave status at court like bearing a piece of news that reeked of reality and newness. And no piece of news struck the eardrums and hoisted the eyebrows quite like a revelation that began, “…Oh, and by the way, I just found out that…”

  Arbuckle had only once before tasted the joy of the revealer’s privilege. He had announced a treaty of some importance, days before it was made official—he had, of course, lingered outside a closed door to steal the information—and ever since the shiver of joy that ran through him had made him long for another such shiver, another taste of glory, while all eyes and ears bore down on him, HIM, for details. I believe that all the high-style nonsense he worked at each day was really just a replacement for the attention he craved. The attention his ancestors had received for their faithful service to the state, that was what he really wanted. Blue hair, black lips, until recently, had worked as a substitute. Now discovery was everything.

  I learned later that this is how the two dragons met.
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  Arbuckle followed the courier. He borrowed a small donkey, dressed in country jerkin and shoes, and rode in secret. The first time out, the courier, riding one of the castle’s finest horses, quickly out distanced him and disappeared over a hill. But Arbuckle could almost taste the court’s attention, and so he got aboard the donkey and spurred the poor beast so hard that it collapsed at the top of a high hill. He rolled the exhausted creature into the ditch and trotted himself down the road until he saw the courier in the distance glancing this way and that until he was sure he wasn’t being followed. Then the courier set off across a field toward a farmhouse just visible in a grove of trees.

  Arbuckle hid himself and waited. And waited. And finally the courier came back across the field, rejoined the road and made his way back toward the castle. Arbuckle, followed the trail the courier had left across the meadow and burrowed into a forsythia hedge near the house and waited to see who or what could possibly have been the goal of the courier’s message. While he waited, the yellow flowers slowly rained down on his head and shoulders every time he moved.

  All this secretive business I know because Jake could see most of this action, and he couldn’t wait to tell me later. Jake is the key dragon here.

  And that was how Jake found Arbuckle, sitting cross-legged in the bushes hidden from everyone except a small boy. Arbuckle’s head was by this time a garland of yellow petals and his lap a potpourri of flowers and twigs. A small white butterfly had alit on one of his knees: a coxcomb of nature was Arbuckle. An omen of things to come. I imagine it went something like this.

  “What are you doing under our bushes?” Jake asked in the deepest voice he could muster. “What do you think you’re going to steal?”

  Arbuckle spun around to see who was talking but saw no one. Jake had climbed a tree and was speaking from behind a large patch of leaves, hanging by one arm and one leg from a crotch in the branches like a small gorilla.

  “You’re under arrest,” Jake said in his deepest voice. “Well, I’ll call the Bailiff. I’ll call the sheriff. I’ll call my father.” I think I might have been next on his list of authorities, but he probably didn’t get all the way to me. “I’ll have you in chains, you know. We have chains right there in the barn. We could easily clap you in chains.” Jake sometimes liked to find out what there was to say by saying things.

  Arbuckle continued to look around from under the bushes, and not seeing the source of the voice, the idle threat (for Arbuckle was well connected in the legal world of the kingdom and feared no consequences for his actions, no matter how illegal), he crawled out from under the forsythia raining yellow flowers, and stood up. There was Jake like a ripe fruit hanging in the tree. He climbed higher, out of reach, and then shook his finger at Arbuckle as he had seen his father do many times, and announced, “You, you don’t belong under our bushes.”

  “And you,” Arbuckle pronounced, “you don’t belong hanging in a tree like a small monkey. Come down at once. I have questions for you.” Arbuckle clapped his hands together to get the dirt off and then finally wiped them on his grubby pants and straightened his clothing and primped his coiffure out of habit. “Now! Now! Come down. I wish to speak to you immediately.”

  And so the meeting did not start out well. But slowly Jake descended, circled the tree cautiously, figuring he could always run away faster than this old rag man, and then stood with his hands on his hips and said, “Well, ask then. But be quick. I don’t have all day to be gabbing. I have work to do. I don’t know about you.” Jake eyed the raggedy man with contempt.

  Arbuckle, used to the trickiness of the king’s court, the ins and outs of diplomatic misdirection and folderol, began by asking Jake his social status, his relationship to the farmer, and then the state of the crops, whether those apples were ripe yet, how many cows there were on the farm, and a number of other irrelevant things so that he could eventually get to the heart of his questioning.

  But Jake, after cautiously beginning his answer as a child might to any adult, decided he’d had enough. “Stop,” he said, holding up one hand as if he were directing traffic. “Just stop for a minute. My turn.” And he proceeded to ask Arbuckle who he was, and who did he think he was, and why did he think he could ask all those questions and why he was on their farm in the first place. I had seen Jake operating in full protector-of-the-farm mode before. He was quite formidable for being eight years old.

  Arbuckle finally admitted he was Arbuckle Pemberton the Third from the court of the King, the King’s wife’s cousin (though he was really just some version of a second cousin) and a powerful man in disguise on a special information-gathering mission. So there. Both fell silent slowly circling each other, barely moving their feet in a dance of grass kicking and shuffling without any music but birdsong and wind through the leaves. A crow orchestra joined in. Then a blue jay, never to be outdone, chimed in his hacksaw caw.

  “OK,” Arbuckle said finally. “Alright. Here’s the question. Why has a king’s messenger come to your farm regularly? Who does he talk to? Why? What is the…”

  “Whoa. Hold your horses,” offered Jake. “I never see a messenger, King’s or anybody’s. What messenger? When? Talking to who?”

  And again they fell silent, having each asked the same questions. It appeared as if there was an extra dose of questions and not enough answers. And all the time each one had his suspicions about, first, the princess, and that something was amiss, and, second, his own sister, and that something was amiss. The two, boy and (sort of) man, jousted without words. Then each fiddled with his pockets as males, I have noticed, are taught to do at a very young age: thumbs hooked in pockets, back pockets checked and straightened, hand finally stabilized in one pocket. I have seen this male-dance many times and always marveled at it.

  This strange pocket dance might have gone on all afternoon, but around the corner I came, and both stopped and looked at me. Of course, I recognized Arbuckle immediately and put on my best play-acting set of skills to become thoroughly the Alyssa I needed to be. I tugged out a hank of hair from my cap to appear more disheveled.

  “Jake, your chores await you in the stable.” Darn, I thought. That was too much princess, not enough sister and contradicted my hair ploy, so I added, “And get a move on. Don’t let the barn door spank your behind.” I shooed him with a small shove. That should do it, I thought. Jake seemed relieved to be released from the uncomfortable encounter and scurried off toward the barn. “And you, sir. May I be of any help? Some food, then be on your way. We have no work here for you. I’ll find you some small thing to eat, but then be off.” Again, I thought I might have overdone the princess superiority and underdone the forceful country girl. So I added, “No time to dither or shillyshally. My chores are calling me too. Do you need food?”

  Arbuckle began to circle me, study me. I thought I better strike first.

  “Sir, you must move along. If you have no business here, shoo! I don’t want to call my father. He’s very unpleasant about strangers on his farm. He always leaves them injured.” Of course, my new father was the kindest, most gentle, man in the whole world. He really would find food and probably some better clothes to give a stranger, but I wanted Arbuckle gone before he had any more time to study me. Still, he circled slowly as if he might be moving away, but he kept cocking his head to the side like a giant crane waiting for a fish. He was calculating something, something not good, I thought. His habit of scheming seemed to drip from him: narrowed eyes, rubbed chin, ears slightly wiggling.

  After a moment he said, “Oh I think I can be on my way. But just one thing, if you don’t mind. Would you say the wind is freshly blowing? Or blowing freshly?”

  No, no, no, I thought. We had spent too much time near each other in the castle. He’ll surely see who I am. I reached one dirty hand up and wiped it on my cheek as if I was scratching an itch. A little camouflage, I hoped. I tugged at more hair across my forehead. I was hiding myself right in front of him. But finally he stopped the gawking as if t
here was something he was supposed to know here but couldn’t quite see. Something that his grammar trap had sprung in his beady little mind. I decided best defense might be a little offense. “Shoo,” I said again like chasing off a dog that had been bothering the chickens. “Shoo and be gone, sir. I have no more patience for the scruffy likes of person like you. On your way. Now! Be gone…” And I would have gone on and on, I suppose. I have done it before. But he seemed to give up.

  And Arbuckle again said he didn’t need food. That he’d be on his way. That it was kind of me to offer. And he pulled his hood over his wig and looked sideways from the depths of the hood to re-gawk at me. I could see his squeaky little mind at work. My hair was wrong, my skin sunburnt, my hands calloused and grubby, but something…something… But he only said his leaving words, brushed the last flowers from his rags and pretended to make his way off the farm. Actually though, I could see that he stopped in the first depression, a drainage ditch, and hid. He hid until he thought I was gone, until he could see that Jake was again moving about the farm, and then Arbuckle slithered his way along a bank of trees and pssted, and then pssted again to get Jake’s attention. I had gone up into the hayloft and spied on them through a crack in the barn wall.

  Arbuckle was charged with intent. “OK, boy. Jake. One question. Is everything about your sister the way you think it should be?” And Jake, after rubbing his chin the way he’d seen father do when pondering something important, allowed that maybe there was something different about her lately, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Couldn’t quite figure out if she was different or just being a girl, you know, like girls do; first one thing, then another, like girls, you know. Mysterious, changeable, powerful strange. Sisters. Older sisters.