I'm tall for a fairy (all that naiad blood) but really very short for a human. I come up to about the knees of the average adult male. With my stunted wings tucked under a tunic I looked like a hunchback. There's only one role at a royal court for a short hunchback—court jester.
I knew it would all end in tears the moment I saw the hat.
"Do I have to wear it?" I asked the High Jester in shock, staring at the ghastly thing.
He jiggled his own at me. A three-pronged confection of red, blue, and green plaid tipped with silver bells. "Required uniform, I'm afraid," he replied. Clearly he'd gone into the profession out of physical necessity as well. He was extremely tall and decidedly skinny, with a great beaked nose and a very, very low voice.
His hat was elegant compared to the one presented to me. Mine had four prongs and was worn so that one prong always fell directly in front of the eyes. Two of the prongs were yellow with pink spots and the other two were purple with white stripes. Mankind may have made uglier hats, but I seriously doubt it. And don't even get me started on the subject of the bells. The darn thing was covered in them.
I put it on, and the accompanying checked green pumpkin pants and doublet (which, next to the hat, seemed quite somber), and slouched after the Head Jester toward the Throne Room.
"Your Majesty," the Head Jester bowed low to the king. Too low, however, for he toppled forward, stumbled, and sprawled flat on the floor. The assembled courtiers laughed appreciatively. "May I introduce our new Least Jester?" He waved a spade-like hand in my direction from his prone position.
I had fairy grace at my disposal even if I didn't have working wings. So I did a flip and two somersaults to end in a bow at the king's feet.
The king nodded at me happily, and the princess clapped. Not every court was lucky enough to have a tumbling jester.
"Why," said the princess, looking at me closely, "you can't be much older than me."
I looked up at this human who held my fate in her hands. She didn't seem all that bad—a little chubby for a princess, and rather graceless. Hadn't she been given any fairy gifts? I know my mother fell down on the job, as it were, but this poor thing was practically ordinary! She seemed to know it, too. She slid off her throne in the most humble manner, and bent down in order to properly introduce herself to me.
"Princess Anastasia Clementina Lanagoob. How do you do?"
I came out of my bow. When I stood upright my head ended just below her waist. I reached up and shook her pudgy hand with my tiny one. "Bella Fugglecups," I replied. I couldn't give her my fairy name, of course, too recognizable. Aunt Twill had invented this one as an alternative. It was silly. But so was my hat.
"I shall call you Cups," announced the princess.
"Only if I can call you Goob," I shot back.
The king seemed appalled by this impertinence, but the princess was clearly delighted. The statement made her laugh. Which is, after all, a jester's job.
"Done," she said, letting go of my hand. "Will you teach me how to tumble?"
I looked dubiously at her full white skirts covered in gold beads and silver embroidery.
"Now? All right, but I hope your under-things are as attractive as your outer ones."
The princess laughed again. The rest of the court gasped in shock. The High Jester made a frantic sawing motion across his neck. I had no idea what he was on about.
"Anastasia Clementina, I forbid such an undertaking!" The King rose from his throne and glowered down at the two of us. He was a large sort of human, full of hair, and prone to some kind of disease that made his face go all red and splotchy when he was upset. It was doing so now.
"Please Daddy," the Princess turned big muddy brown eyes on her father. Cow eyes. "I'll change my clothes."
The king sighed.
What I didn't know then was that the princess rarely took an interest in, or asked for, anything. When she did, her requests carried more power. It's a good approach to life, generally getting one what one wants. (So long as one doesn't "want" too often.) I would come to appreciate this character trait greatly over the course of my association with Princess Goob, for all too often we fairies are on the receiving end of demanding humans. Take Cinderella, for example, with her gown, and her coach, and her glass slippers, and on and on. I mean, really! But I digress.
"Very well." The king ceded defeat. He looked at me. "You don't mind?"
I tilted my head way back. "It is my honor to serve Your Majesty." What else could I have said?
I did a back bend, kicked my heels up, and walked away from the two royals on my hands until I'd rejoined the High Jester. Then I flipped to standing.
The princess clapped delightedly.
I bowed to them both.
"Tomorrow at noon, Cups," she ordered.
"Noon, Princess Goob. Noon," I agreed, and followed the High Jester out of the audience chamber.
* * * *
"Do you think it's enough of a service?" I asked Aunt Twill that evening through a small cup of tea.
Her image wiggled slightly in the brown liquid. Normally tea talking is a delicate spell requiring both parties to use bone china, Earl Grey, and silver stirring spoons. But Aunt Twill had a contract with the tea daemons that allowed her conversational access (between the afternoon hours of half-past three and five o'clock, of course) to any cup in the kingdom. (It's a naiad gossip thing.)
Aunt Twill extracted a small gudgeon fish from her hair and ruminated. "I doubt that teaching a princess acrobatics constitutes proper repayment of an honor debt. Though it is a nice thing to do. Why would she want to learn, though? It certainly isn't normal princess-y behavior."
I shrugged. "She isn't a normal princess. More like a normal dairymaid. Poor thing."
Aunt Twill nodded. "Plain ones happen sometimes. I'll do a little research and get back to you on the tumbling. Until then, I'd proceed as though this were not the answer."
I sighed. "Very well, Aunt Twill."
"Oh, and niece," I looked up, "that's a hideous hat."
I stuck my tongue out at her and lifted up the bone china cup. Her face wavered in the brown liquid as I drank down the tea. Fairies invented tea, did you know that? It was one of our best collective spells, until the daemons stole it from us, and humans got in on the idea. Still, it explains my Child Wishes: baked goods go very well with tea.
* * * *
There wasn't much for the jester contingent to do during the daytime at court. Most of our entertaining work was done at night, or at feasts, or at festivals. The rest of the time we were left pretty much to our own devices.
I spent the first few weeks poking about looking for spells or curses I could break: princes disguised as dung beetles or the odd evil loom wight. Nothing. Not a single enchanted sausage. Smickled-on-Twee had to be the most boring principality in the entire province of fairy-kind. The princess was painfully average. The queen had died a perfectly respectable death (by plague). The only thing out of the ordinary the king had done, in his long and uninteresting career as ruler, was rescue my mother. And he didn't seem to remember doing that.
Princess Goob and I became fast friends. She was hopeless at tumbling: far, far too clumsy. But I soon realized the lessons were only an excuse. What she really wanted was the company of someone her own age, and to get out of the castle once in a while. In keeping with these two desires I announced that we really must practice on a mossy lawn every afternoon, so took her through the castle gates and over the drawbridge to a sheep pasture near the moat. There I pretended to show her handstands, cartwheels, and flips. She pretended to try and learn them. Mostly we just lounged about and chatted.
"I always wanted to be a shepherdess," she confided in me one afternoon. "I think I'd be better suited to that kind of life."
I looked at her from my supine pose on the grass. She wore a very plain dress, borrowed from one of her maids, and long brown bloomers underneath, which were supposed to be for riding. She'd tucked the skirt of the dress up on each
side and tied a kerchief about her hair. She looked very like a shepherdess.
"I think the role would suit you," I replied.
"That's what I like about you, Cups. No silly pandering or hedging. Everyone else secretly agrees when I say such things, but they all pretend to be shocked. Or worse, tell me what a perfect princess I am."
She flipped onto her stomach and began picking away at the grass. "I never had a fairy godmother, you heard by now I suppose? Shocking thing. Dad spent a good deal of time trying to find and rescue fairies in his youth, hoping to gather honor debt, but it didn't work. So I got nothing."
"You're probably better off that way. I always felt that princesses with all those boosts in looks and manners probably have no idea how real people feel. How can anyone be a good ruler if they have no understanding of those they rule?"
The princess looked at me and nodded. "You're absolutely right, and I want you to arrange it for me."
I sat up, wondering what I'd suddenly gotten myself into: small fairy, big mouth.
"What?" I asked, nervous.
"This 'understanding.' Since I can't learn acrobatics during our afternoons together, I should learn something useful. What better thing is there to learn than the lives of my people?"
I squinted at her. She may have looked nothing like a princess, but she certainly spoke like one. If she kept her mouth shut, we should do all right. It was a bit like the enchanted leading the enchanted though. The only person less likely to know about the common lives of humans than a princess was a fairy. But an order was an order.
So our afternoon tumbling sessions turned into afternoon field trips. First we visited the shepherdesses (because she really was interested), and then the dairymaids. Then we visited the stable hands and the goose-girls, the portrait painters and the gatekeepers. I learned a lot on these journeys. I found the lower-class humans far more interesting than the nobility.
Eventually we ended up in the castle kitchens.
My Child Wishes made us quite the popular visitors there. The princess liked it too. Even without my help she seemed to have a natural talent for cooking. She invented a roasted peacock dish stuffed with dates and sage, slathered in a thick gravy with wild mushrooms and cubed ham, that caused the king to give the entire kitchen staff a raise.
Of course, the staff all knew she was the princess, but they pretended not to, and that seemed to work well for everyone.
Me, on the other hand, they called their Lucky Least, as whenever I was around pastries and breads seemed to turn out moister, chewier, fluffier, and more delicious than when I was away.
"Why is that, Cups?" the princess asked me, dusting flour-covered hands on pure silk petticoats.
"I like baking, so I'm good at it."
"But you don't actually touch anything. You're too short to reach."
I shrugged, a movement made very odd by my hump of hidden wings. "I keep an eye on things. Make sure they don't mess up."
Princess Goob looked at me skeptically, but she let it at that. She'd learned that if she questioned me closely I got all philosophical, so it was better to stop before things got epistemologically out of hand.
* * * *
I'd been there nearly a year, and was no closer to repaying my debt, when the peace of Smickled-on-Twee was finally disturbed by something terrible.
It was a festival day and everyone was sitting down for high tea. We jesters were gallivanting about jestering, when an earth dragon waddled into the main banquet hall.
He was a smallish, fat sort of dragon, only about two horses long and probably that many wide, with muddy bronze scales, six sad little horns, lots of sharp teeth, and a sour expression.
Still he was an earth dragon, and as such, terrifying to humans. Earth dragons take food seriously, you see. They collect interesting recipes and bags of fizzy lemon candies to stash deep in the recesses of their muddy caves. They also consider humans crunchy little treats of meaty goodness. Other dragons don't care a jot for such things. Air dragons eat birds and collect kites as a general rule, while water dragons eat algae and collect fishing tackle. Fire dragons are the ones who hoard gold. No one is quite sure what they eat, though they have a nasty reputation. Difficult to get close enough to find out.
As a fairy, I don't find earth dragons all that bad, but then I'm a fairy. Magic in the blood makes us far too spicy for consumption.
This particular dragon headed straight for the high table. Where he squatted across from the royals and gave Princess Goob a very toothy grin. Princesses tend to be succulent: well fed and soft skinned. It was earth dragons that started the whole "kidnapping of princesses" policy. They like to steal them away and keep them around for late night attacks of the munchies.
The king knew this and panicked. His face went redder than I'd ever seen it, and he began to sputter like an over-filled teakettle.
I snuck under the table to sit at the princess's feet. I could touch the dragon's baby toe from there. It was about the size of my head.
I touched the princess's toe instead. She twitched slightly. I touched it again. She lifted the edge of the tablecloth up and looked down at me.
"Tell your father," I said, "that the only way to get out of being eaten by an earth dragon is to serve it a high tea far better than the one you would be."
The princess nodded and her head vanished.
A moment later I heard the king bang hard on the table and call for service.
This dragon was unlikely to be particularly impressed with the king's tea. Smickled-on-Twee was a very small principality and not precisely prosperous. The honey-glazed whole pig with thyme and raisins was not as big as it would have been in the Principality of Bugdoon-near-Schmoo. Nor were the great mounds of tiny new potatoes drizzled in melted butter and sprinkled with mint quite as small or as minty as they would have been in Schmoo itself. But the bread was certainly up to par; I'd been lounging about wasting Child Wishes on it all morning. There were huge crispy brown loaves shaped like tortoises and filled with sweetmeats; small round honey-soaked buns rolled in cinnamon; and long skinny cheese-encrusted baguettes. The dragon ate sixteen loaves in all, and I had to sneak away to the kitchen to make sure the second batch came out as good as the first.
The dragon consumed three of the princess's famous peacock dishes, eight racks of lamb smeared with roasted garlic and rosemary, two platters of pork sausage with hot mustard, and several spit-roasted pheasants. Between each course the dragon picked up his teacup and gazed deeply into the murky depths. The fifth time that he did this the princess stopped me when I came in for a bread check and asked me about it.
"He's doing what?" I said.
"Talking dragonish into his teacup."
I looked at the dragon. At that moment he was stuffing his face with a trencher of bacon-and-tomato-stuffed quail. I was suspicious. So far as I knew, only naiads and daemons used the teacup network. What was this dragon doing?
I looked at the huge beast carefully. There was something oddly familiar about his markings. Had we met before? I crinkled my forehead in thought. Then I remembered. Once, long ago, an earth dragon had turned up at a fairy potluck. Could this possibly be the same one? I squinted at him: six horns, sour expression...yes, it must be. And if this dragon was talking into his teacup, I bet I knew whom he was talking to.
I snuck a cup of tea off of the high table and retreated into a corner of the room.
"Aunt Twill," I hissed into the cup.
The surface of the tea shivered slightly and Aunt Twill's wrinkled face appeared in the dark brown liquid, looking harried.
"Aunt Twill, what are you up too?"
"Add a little milk will you, dearie? You know the spell is easier in milky tea."
I ignored her and said firmly, "Aunt Twill!"
Aunt Twill had the good grace to look slightly guilty. "He's been asking about your banana puff cupcakes for ages. So I thought, why not just send him along?"
I was shocked. "Aunt Twill!"
&nbs
p; Aunt Twill straightened her spine. "Now don't go taking that tone with me, nestling. This is quite the opportunity. The princess is at risk, the castle in danger, and you and your Child Wishes can save the day."
Just then, behind me, the dragon sent up a great roar and tipped over the high table. There was a cacophony of sound as plates, platters, knives, and teacups slid to the floor.
"Gotta go," I said, drinking the tea unceremoniously.
I turned and rushed towards the chaos.
The dragon was yelling in dragonish—a sort of rolling fuzzy kind of language. I don't speak it well myself, but I gathered he wasn't entirely pleased with the meal.
I ran up to Princess Goob. "Stay out of his reach as much as possible and keep feeding him bread. It's very filling." She looked at me with wide eyes and I could tell she really wanted to ask how I knew so much about earth dragons. But instead she just nodded.
I turned to run back to the kitchens.
"Where are you going?" asked the Princess in a panic.
"I have to make banana puff cupcakes! Your life may depend on it," I replied.
Strange as that statement was, Princess Goob merely nodded again. That's what I liked about that girl, no silly interfering when there's work to be done.
Once in the kitchen I marched straight up to the High Cook.
"I need to make banana puff cupcakes," I said.
The cook looked at me in a harried kind of way. He had about a hundred desserts all going at once. "At the moment," he said, "the needs of the Least Jester don't particularly concern me."
I stared up at him earnestly. "The princess's life depends upon it."
The thing I've learned about humans is, if you make a bizarre enough statement, they simply don't know what to do. In this case, it was easier for the High Cook not to argue with me. He pointed at a small oven and a bit of counter space in one corner and I went off to find myself a stepping stool so I could use both.
With the help of Ernest, one of the Least Cooks, who was very tall and liked helping me, I managed to gather all the ingredients and get to work. There were only six small bananas, almost completely black and very sad, so I used every last Child Wish I had on that one batch of cupcakes. I decided to let the earth dragon eat up as much of the other desserts as possible first so that he had very little room left for my cupcakes. That way they would come as a kind of crowning glory to the whole high tea experience.
Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword and Sorceress XXII Page 25