Hilda - The Challenge

by Paul Kater

  There was incredible tension between the two men. Hilda quickly glanced at Baba Yaga, who could not pull her eyes away from what was going on. She could not believe it, that William was challenging Lamador this way, confronting him with something that was so stupid and simple, and yet so humiliating for the great sorcerer to have fallen for this.

  Lamador then dropped his hand. There was no more pointing finger. "You are going to regret this," he said to William, then brusquely turned and walked off. Tudris followed his leader.

  The two judges assigned by Lamador looked a bit forlorn. "It looks like you won," the woman said. "I hope you enjoy the winning." Slowly she and her fellow judge flew off.

  The three stood in the forest where now some form of peace returned. Hilda dropped her remaining twigs. "I am not sure if this was such a good idea, now."

  Baba Yaga nodded in silence.

  "Well, it happened," said William. "Not much we can do about that. i'm sorry I dragged you into this."

  Hilda slipped her hand into his. "We were in it together, sweet man. At least we can say we beat Lamador once."

  He kissed her dirty cheek. "We did."

  Baba Yaga worried. "You know he is going to kill you on the next meeting, right?"

  "No. He is not. He is going to be careful with us." William said it full of confidence. "Lamador now knows that he does not know what to expect from us together. This show has taught him that much."

  "You two scare me," said Babs. "Come, let's find your brooms and go back. Get you cleaned up. You two look like a mess."

  51. The aftermath

  "Can you wash my back, please?" Hilda looked at William, who was also in the bathroom of the hut. The bathroom was far too large for the entire hut. The bathtub itself already was, and still somehow it fit.

  "Of course, just don't drop your hair on me, okay?"

  Hilda's wet hair was floating over her head, the waterdrops falling down into the tub like a fountain. "Of course not. You still get your turn to clean yourself up."

  William sat down on a low stool behind the tub, hoping the four legs would remain standing where they were now. The bathtub had moved about a few times already, and he did not feel like chasing after it. He took the washcloth that hung from the side and started washing Hilda's back and shoulders.

  "Ah, yes, that is good. A bit lower please... yes... ooohhh..." She groaned with pleasure and asked him to go on, even though her back and shoulders were clean. He didn't mind.

  "Aren't you getting a bit too much fun out of this, sweetwitch?"

  "Too much? No, William, no. There can not be too much of this, believe me. I promise I'll wash your back also, okay? Just go on a bit longer..."

  He sat back and made the washcloth go over her back.

  "Hey, not fair! That is not the same thing, William Connoley. Be a man and do your duty!"

  William grinned and scrubbed her back one more time.

  By the time he was in the tub (it had similar convenient 'empty' and 'full' plaques as had the one at Hilda's house), Hilda got in it again, together with him. She sat in his lap, holding him close, making somewhat of an attempt to wash his back.

  "I was really scared in the forest, William. Lamador could have hurt you very badly." Hilda stopped her washing movements and looked in his eyes. "I was very very afraid then."

  "Nothing happened, Hilda." William pulled her against him, feeling her skin warm against his own. "I was afraid also. But I did not want to show it. And I am glad you didn't either."

  They sat together like that for a while, until Hilda shivered. "I'm getting out of here. Your water is getting cold!"

  "Well, so much for the backrub," William pouted as he winked at Hilda.

  She laughed, wrapped a large towel around herself and disappeared into the living room of the hut.

  William finished quite quickly after that and tried not to wonder about the bathroom.

  Babs had 'thrown something together' that should serve as lunch. It looked thrown together also.

  As they were digging in, the ugly witch asked them what their next move was going to be. "I would be very careful for now," she said. "Lamador is extremely pissed off at the moment."

  "Well," Hilda said, "we do have to get back home again, and deal with things there. You know, the regular things that go about. Teasing the king, knocking up some naughty villagers."

  "I miss something in that short list," said Baba Yaga.

  "Such as?"

  "Trying to get to the other side of the world?"

  "He'd find us there too, I'm sure," said William as he took a something from a plate. He looked at it.

  "Don't look. Eat," was Baba Yaga's advice, and she demonstrated how to do it. William noticed that she closed her eyes while putting the ominous black something in her mouth. Alas, he had held and seen the black object too long. He shook his head and put it back.

  Hilda grinned.

  After the exotic lunch, Baba Yaga asked them if they wanted to stay a bit longer, or head for home straight away.

  "I want to go home," said the wicked witch, "but I do want to be certain that Lamador and his army have left already. And no, you are not getting on a broom to have a look," she added for William.

  Babs said they should give the group a few more hours to pack up and leave, and then she would go out and have a look.

  That sounded like a sensible thing. As they waited, Babs told them about her new artistic exploits. "I am trying to go into surrealism now."

  Hilda frowned. "What's that?"

  William groaned. "If it is the same thing as what I know, I don't want to know."

  Baba Yaga laughed her laugh, making the windows rattle. "I doubt it will be the same, Willy." She got up and brought an old teacup back to the table. "See, this is a real teacup."

  William already feared what was going to happen. Visions of the art of Salvador Dali swam already in front of his eyes.

  Baba Yaga put the cup on the table, made her wand appear and muttered somethin in Russian. The cup seemed to deflate itself and reduced that way to a two-dimensional object. From one side it still looked like the teacup, but from the side there was absolutely nothing that remained visible of it.

  William was impressed. Dali had only done this on canvas. This witch did it for real. When looking at the cup from the front or the back, they could even pick it up and put it down. From the side however, there was nothing. "I really had not expected this, Babs," William said.

  Hilda looked at the cup from all sides also. "Yes, nifty, but what's the point? The only advantage I see is that you can stick more of them in your cupboard, but then you would be preparing for shitloads of company, and I am not going to do that."

  Baba Yaga laughed. "It is not yet something that I would do with all my things."

  "And why not? It looks shiny!"

  "Well, as I said, I am getting into it. Making the stuff flat already works, but I have not quite figured out yet how to undo that, so you can actually use the cup again."

  "Oh. Yes. That is something to take into account," nodded Hilda who sat nibbling a cookie.

  Babs threw the flat cup away and talked some more about the surrealism thing she was now pursuing. Time passed by and she then got on her broom to check the surroundings. One of them in particular.

  When she came back, she was able to report that the group of Lamador had left, but that they had left rather a big mess in the area where they had stayed.

  Hilda and William felt responsible for that. "We'll go by there and clean things up. It is because of us that they were there, so we should do that."

  Babs then said they'd go there together and take care of the place. So the group of three flew out to the former campsite.

  The view was heartbreaking. Lamador had definitely not taken his loss well. Trees had been broken in two, most of the grassland was burnt black, and there was a stack of waste that seemed impossible for a group that had been there for only a few days.

  Baba Yaga and
Hilda started to restore the trees, as far as they were still in a shape to be saved. William did what he could to turn the grass back to green and alive, although some patches were so severely burnt that he could not do a thing but only remove the black matter.

  They worked for hours, and when they were done the sun was already setting, but the area looked presentable again. Hilda did her trash compacter trick and William took the handful of dice with him so they could toss the stuff away.

  With a sigh, later, they stretched their legs as they sat down outside the hut on its large chicken legs. Hilda had magicked up glasses and a large pitcher of ice cold wine. The idea was great, but William frowned at the light blue liquid.

  "Are you sure that is wine, sweet woman?"

  "Sure. Don't like the colour? You can have yellow too. Or green..."

  "No, no. Blue is fine." He did not say it with a lot of vigour, but Hilda blamed that on the hard work they all had done that afternoon.

  She handed him the glass. "Here you go, sweet man."

  "He is an insane man, Hilly, a very insane one. But despite that, I have to admit that he has spunk, standing up to Lamador the way he did." Babs accepted a glass also. "Well, you two idiots, here's to you, and may we all live happily ever after."

  They all toasted and enjoyed the nice chilled wine. William made a tray of sandwiches and that way they spent a reasonably nice and relaxed afternoon together. There still was, however the gloomy shadow of the challenge gone so terribly sour hanging around them.

  The talks died out after a while, and they sat quietly together, until the time to go to sleep came. That evening that moment arrived quite a lot earlier than otherwise.

  The next morning Hilda and William said goodbye to Baba Yaga and set off for their journey home. Over a large lake William dropped the dice that were the trash Lamador had left behind.

  They came back to their house. At least there everything was in order. On the flight over they had already agreed that they'd change into their normal clothes and do the rounds. At least that routine made things a bit better for them.

  As the days passed, they managed to forget the nasty experience somewhat.

  One day they came back from the rounds and discovered a man sitting near the house. There was an animal with him that tried to get away all the time.

  After they had landed their brooms, they met the man who was fighting to hold on to a goose.

  "Good day, honourable witch," said the man, "honourable wizard. My name is Alfred Esop. I hope you can help me."

  "Maybe, if you tell us the problem," Hilda said, eyeing the goose.

  "You see," said the man, "this is the goose with no golden eggs."

  Hilda looked at William, then back at the man. "I doubt this is the only one."

  The man stared at the witch as if she had turned purple. "Honourable witch, this is the only one!"

  Hilda scratched her head. "Either you are losing it, or I am. And I am not losing it. Am I losing it, William?"

  "Can't say that I have noticed that around you..."

  The goose-holder was starting to panic a bit. "But please, if you can, help me. This is the goose that had golden eggs, but they are not golden anymore. Actually there is nothing egg-like coming from it anymore."

  "Oh. You mean that." Hilda considered the goose again and still did not find it very appealing. "William, do you know anything about geese?"

  "Yes, I do, but that is kitchen-related, and I don't think this one is ready for that yet." William saw how the goose-owner flinched.

  The goose did not like it to be the centre of all this attention, it tried once more to escape from Alfred's hold, making feathers fly around.

  Hilda flipped up her wand and touched the goose with it. "Dormio." It went limp, fallen asleep at the witch's request. "Right, now that has calmed down a bit, let's take it inside and see what we can do with it." As they went in, she muttered that someone should open up a place to heal animals.

  The good goose-owner picked up his coat and followed the magical couple inside. His lower jaw became heavy for a moment as he saw the two brooms find their place on their own. Then, on Hilda's word to put the sleeping goose on the table, he snapped out of it.

  Hilda walked around the goose, not detecting anything special about it. "So it worked fine for a while and suddenly it fails to lay eggs?", she asked, to buy herself some time.

  "Yes. The last egg came out just fine, about twelve days ago. Since then, nothing. I have travelled four days to get here."

  "Four days? I am sure there are wizards or witches closer than that!", Hilda said, who had just opened a book, trying to find something about geese. "Why did you come all the way here?"

  Alfred sat down on a chair, uninvited. "I have tried to get to them, but they all thought I was crazy. Geese, they say, don't lay golden eggs. Well, this one did, until a while ago. And I did not have a spare egg to show them, so they just laughed at me and sent me away." The man looked at the wicked witch. "So if you want to laugh at me, go ahead. Then I'll pick up the goose and leave again."

  52. Goose

  "Do you have more geese, or is this the only one?", William asked Alfred.

  "This is the only one, sir."

  "And I guess you checked with other goose-owners if there was something similar happening with their geese?"

  "Uhm. No. I am not much into social gatherings with people that have ordinary geese." Alfred's cheeks coloured red.

  Hilda nodded. "I know what you mean. I have issues with ordinaries also. Let me check my books. I may have something I don't know about."

  She walked off towards the large amount of shelves that carried even larger amounts of books and went over the titles on the backs. "Mushrooms. Nope. Dragons. Hardly. Handpupp- uhm, no." She peeked at the two men at the table, hoping they had not caught the last bit. If they had, they did not respond to it.

  As Hilda went through her library, William looked at the goose a few more times. He had never really had the opportunity to look at one, so here was his chance. "Animals can be fascinating, can't they?"

  "Yes," said Alfred, "very much so. I could write a book about them."

  "It would be good. That way we would have a book on geese also," William grinned. It got him a strange look from Alfred who wondered if he had ended up in entirely the wrong place.

  Hilda came back with a book in her hands. "This is the only thing I can find on birds. No many things goose-specific though, and nothing at all about geese with golden eggs."

  "What did you find out from it?", asked William.

  "Well," the wicked witch said as she looked in the book again, "the most obvious reason for a bird to stop laying eggs is that it's dead. But this one isn't."

  Alfred looked at the goose on the table. It was still breathing, and waking up from Hilda's sedative. "Indeed. It isn't. And I really would like it to stay that way."

  Slowly the goose sat up and looked around at the people in the room.

  "How do we fix you?", Hilda asked the big bird who stared at her without a hint to a reply.

  It honked at her.

  "If that was meant to be insulting, you succeeded, buster." A wand appeared, ready to counter a next insult.

  Alfred however had jumped up and gazed at the goose as that wiggled its tail feathers. Another honk, and it got up. Beneath it lay a golden egg.

  "Suck an elf," said Hilda.

  "Holy Bejeebus," William agreed.

  "An egg!", said Alfred.

  Hilda looked at the book. "Somehow I don't think that bringing this book over made that happen. Anyone an idea or a clue? It wasn't me, even if I would love to have done this."

  William took the book and looked at the page Hilda held open. "Hmmm... it says here that geese don't lay eggs when there's snow."

  "Snow? We have snow lately," said Alfred. "A while ago some weather-mage has moved into our land and he was doing all kinds of things with the weather. Now there is a lot of snow and he has a problem getting that
cleared away."

  Hilda grinned. "I think we have the answer. Your goose just needed to defrost its rear end so now the eggs can come out again."

  Alfred Esop was so amazingly relieved that his goose lay its golden eggs again that he completely forgot himself and hugged Hilda tightly for a moment. "Thank you, thank you ever so much!"

  "Uhm, yeah, I guess that's okay. So you're fine now?" Hilda stepped closer to William to avoid another hugging. Hugging was good, but she would be the one to take the initiative. Not some stray goose-holder. Even if the goose lay golden eggs.

  "Say, Alfred, do golden eggs make good omelets?", Hilda asked.

  Alfred, his goose in his arms already, looked puzzled. "I really wouldn't know. I've never tried that. I just sell the eggs." He looked at the golden egg that lay on the table still. "You can have that one. For curing the goose."

  "Well, I didn't actually - uhm - but okay. Thank you for that."

  They showed Alfred out, and as the man was walking away to the forest path that led to the village, they heard the goose honk a few more times. Apparently there was a line of eggs waiting to be unleashed.

  The magical couple grinned, as they tried to imagine how Alfred was going to handle the goose and the eggs it would lay on the way to the village.

  "Do you want a golden omelet?", Hilda then asked. "I am curious what that will turn into."

  "Sure, why not? Let's crack it and see."

  They repaired to the kitchen together. William wanted to witness this as much as Hilda, but he left the honour of breaking the egg to her.

  The skillet hovered over the fire. Hilda had tossed a lick of butter in it and a wooden spoon slowly stirred it around. She held the egg in both hands and cracked the shell on the side of the frying pan. It broke as one might expect of an egg. Its contents slid into the hot melted butter and spread out over the metal. That was not all that spread. As the innards of the golden egg moved around, a horrendous sulphur based smell spread throughout the kitchen, making both Hilda and William pull funny faces and say "eeew". Despite this disappointment they kept watching the skillet. The egg was slowly colouring. Brownish black.