3 Dead Princes

by Danbert Nobacon

  “My undercarriage,” said the Bird, answering an unasked question.

  A moment later, emerging from below his probber’s nose came a sphere, which became an ovaloid, which became an egg as it fell onto the dirt. The Bird shuffled gracefully around, scraping a shallow hole in the dirt with one talon. The Gricklegrack stood the egg upright with a deft movement of his other talon. The egg was about three feet tall and looked like a gray-blue rock. Old and pockmarked as it was, at some time it evidently had an overall sheen, a few traces of which remained.

  “Aaaghhhh!” The Witch hissed.

  “Whaaatizzit?” chorused Glamour and The Fool.

  “The Egg of Geddon,” cried The Witch. “It spells doom.”

  “Mother! Don’t be so melodramatic.”

  “It is in the prophecy!”

  “Which prophecy? If you could keep track of all the prophecies you have made, been party to, or read about, we wouldn’t be able to turn over a stone without fear of unleashing every volcanemon that ever spouted fire into the air! Honestly!”

  “The Egg of Geddon was in your father’s leaves,” said The Witch, turning a staring eye upon Stormy. “Tis said the creature who will be hatched is all knowing, all seeing, and wiser than the Ancient Ones. Tis said the creature within will eat the world!”

  Glamour looked a little more interested now, while Stormy was beginning to see The Witch as a serial harbinger of doom and gloom, in a world that could not possibly get much worse.

  With all attention on the egg, The Gricklegrack resumed its crouch and, from a secret hiding place, brought out a plain wooden box, which clattered on the ground. The Bird drummed his left talon rhythmically on the box while he waited for the bickering to peter out.

  “I have a double harness in here,” he said, still drumming on the box. “It won’t be comfortable, but it will do the job.”

  At this, The Fool groaned. “I knew it,” he muttered. “My fear of heights won’t stand this!”

  The Bird ignored him.

  “I leave the egg here, Witch, in your good hands.””

  “No! No! Nooooo!” wailed The Witch.

  “Walterbald found this egg moons ago and he gave it to me, to see if I could crack its mystery.”

  The Fool groaned again.

  “No pun intended.” The Bird gave a slow smile, and Glamour clapped her hands. Gazing at him, she gave a deep sigh.

  “But, why are we even bothering with this egg, if it even is an egg,” interjected Stormy. “Aren’t we losing precious time? What about my dad?”

  “Indeed,” cawed, The Gricklegrack. “But patience again, Princess. All this concerns your father.”

  “Speaking, like your father, as a scientic,” he went on, looking directly with his nearest eye into Stormy’s own, “this egg is made of a substance we have never encountered. It is hard, yet relatively lightweight. Your father and I tried to er, hatch it. I sat on it for a whole month last winter.”

  “Yeh, but what would you know about hatching eggs?” The Fool objected.

  “We do have birds up north on the Great Ice Wall where the male protects and hatches the egg.”

  “Oh,” said The Fool, nonplussed.

  “Then I dropped it from five feet high, ten feet, twenty feet, and so on. There are little dings you will see. The only sign of a crack is the horizontal line running around the top. That was there when Walterbald found it. You see my claw marks where I tried to pry it open. Nothing!”

  Stormy went over to the egg and put her hands upon it. It wasn’t cold but it wasn’t warm either. She crouched down beside it and put her ear against it.

  “Nothing,” she said

  “No matter,” said the great Bird. And at this, he drew himself up to his fullest and most impressive height, causing Glamour to give a little squeal in spite of herself.

  “I am the guardian of the egg. I carried it here, but there is dangerous work ahead. Under the circumstances it is proper that I assure the egg’s safekeeping by leaving it with another member of the Order.” He gave The Witch a gimlet-eyed look.

  “But I’m not IN the Order,” howled The Witch.

  “Kneel,” commanded the Bird in the kind of tone that assured obedience. Rolling her eyes, The Witch somewhat creakily obeyed.

  “He’s not going to smash that egg on her head, is he? He’ll break her skull!” muttered The Fool.

  “Glamour,” crooned the Bird.

  “Sir!” said Glamour, completely entranced.

  “Call me M.”

  “Mmmmmm,” she hummmmed dreamily.

  “Glamour. Be a flame and bring me an egg.”

  Glamour disappeared back into the cabin.

  “Probably just a foul-smelling rotten egg,” said The Fool to The Witch, nodding at the large egg.

  The Witch looked up at him, thoroughly uncomfortable. “Can I get up yet?” she hacked.

  “Be patient,” said the Bird. “Ah, Glamour. Would you do the honors?”

  “With pleasure,” Glamour replied, reappearing with a brown hen’s egg.

  “Witch,” spoke the Bird, “I hereby appoint you into the Order, the first woman ”

  “Second,” said Stormy.

  “Second? Oh, of course,” said the Bird, gracefully acknowledging his error. “I hereby appoint you, Witch in the Ditch, into the Order of the Accidental Adventurers.”

  At which point Glamour cracked the hen’s egg on her mother’s crown.

  The Witch in the Ditch howled as if she were mortally wounded, but she was cut short by the great Bird: “As I stand here, I swear by the Order. I swear by all who stand here upon this egg.” He lay a talon upon the egg. “I swear that we shall return to you, Witch and Glamour, with Walterbald, his daughter, and my friend The Fool. And together we shall crack the mystery of the egg.”

  “But my father? Can we go to my father now? Can we? …”

  “Yes,” said the Bird gravely. “I need help with the harness.”

  “I’ll do it!” Glamour said, tripping over the wooden box that held it in her hurry to get to the Bird.

  “And then we’ll fly,” the Bird said. “You and me and …”

  “No,” groaned The Fool. He was airsick already.

  “And The Fool.”

  “I was afraid you would say that.”

  Stormy gazed at the Bird, as Glamour cooed and fitted the harness in place on his broad, feathered back. The Princess’s breath caught in her throat. Was it true? Would she could she really fly? But to fly, that was something the Wangod had forbidden the people of the world. It was in the Book of Life.To fly was the work of the Devanimals.

  The Bird gave her a slow, almost lazy, look, as if he could read her mind. And then it must have been in answer one of his eyes gave a long, luxurious wink.

  Stormy knew it was true. She didn’t care what the probbers said. She would fly. And she would find her father when she did.

  Chapter 15

  THE DEVANIMALS’ WORK

  Even in a sort-of-fairy tale world, it defied belief that a bird of such size could ever get off the ground.

  More perplexing still, how could the Bird not only talk, but also clearly think as humans did? Maybe, even better than most humans did. You may also be wondering, whether ’tis true that The Gricklegrack can out-grackle a whole swarm of its distant blackbird relatives, corvus, quiscalus, or otherwise? Without yet having heard his war-caw, we cannot say.

  But all these things suddenly seemed less impossible when you were a few thousand feet up in the air. For Stormy and The Fool were strapped in tight, side-by-side, to the Bird’s back. Within the strap arrangements they each had what looked like down-filled sleeping bags, to shield them from the cold.

  You could say the flight was uneventful. That is, compared to the preceding four days and nights, nothing much untoward happened. But uneventful as it might have been, to Stormy the views and in-flight entertainment were brainfryingly exhilarating.

  Everything about that day would be etched forev
er in Stormy’s memory. Seeing the tear in Glamour’s eye through her own tears after kissing her goodbye. Being harnessed in by deer-hide straps. Seeing The Gricklegrack’s eyes turn back to that chilling red. Feeling every bone-shaking footfall as the giant bird moved from standing to a breakneck run. Finally as the huge black wings began to flap with a powerful rhythmic beating the momentum that lifted them smoothly into the air, and the altogether new feeling of no longer being earthbound.

  The world looked different from above. To the east, for Stormy was on the right side of The Gricklegrack’s back as they headed due north, were the towering Mezzala Ice Mountains. In school, in books, Stormy had learned that no humans had ever traversed these mountains. Popular wisdom said the mountains stretched thousands of miles to the east, to where the land dropped to a wasteland and fell into the sea.

  But from a bird’s eye-view, it was very different. Stormy could make out a distant forest landscape, similar to the one they were now flying directly above. She could see for herself that while the mountains were vast, stretching as far as the eye could see north to south, they were relatively narrow from west to east. There was even a great green valley that took out a big chunk of the mountains on the eastern side.

  Stormy looked directly down for the merest of moments before her stomach told her to keep looking forward. She saw the lower mountainsides of fir trees by the millions, where each looked like the smallest individual tuft of pine needles on a single branch.

  “Oh oh oh,” said The Fool, “I can’t look down.” Stormy could hear him faintly over the whooshing air.

  “It’s so beautiful! I could cry with joy!” shouted back Stormy.

  “Don’t.” The Fool advised at the top of his lungs. “Your tears will freeze.”

  Then there was a deep gurgling sound, as the Bird cleared his throat.

  With only their heads peeping out of the flight-sacks, by pressing their respective ears against the soft feathers of The Gricklegrack’s neck, Stormy and The Fool could hear what he was saying over the rush of the wind.

  “See the clouds,” said The Gricklegrack. “We will head that direction.” And as the Bird banked to the west, The Fool let out a shrill, sledblastering shriek.

  These sort-of-fairy-tale clouds, sunlit, fluffy, and white against the vast blue sky, were of course no such thing when the Bird actually hit them. As they dropped into the clouds, moist wisps became a dense, gray-green mist. Then shafts of light from above stabbed into the fog. And suddenly they were through the white billowy mattress, so beguiling to the eye.

  And then, there it was. As white as a dream, as beautiful and as forbidding. There at the edge of the mountains, it ran jagged and free all the way west to the sea. North, it went on forever: the Great Ice Wall.

  “I can’t look,” The Fool wailed. But Stormy, as the Black Bird swung first this way, then that in the cold currents of air, stared down, entranced. The Great Ice Wall! She was the first girl ever to see it! It was no story! What other fairy tales had she been told, that were actually as true as true could be?

  And Stormy remembered something from a dream. She remembered being upset by the notion that people were alive during the cataclysm. She remembered a large upright, sort-of-monkey-looking man, explaining it all to her and then laughing. She thought of Glamour’s paintings. And then there was something about tools?

  “But there weren’t any people before the dark times,” thought Stormy as if reciting a school lesson. “And how could there have been any talking animals? Animals don’t .”

  Then it hit Stormy. She was flying. Something she would have thought utterly impossible as recently as that morning at breakfast. Likewise, she was in the company of a giant talking Bird, who was not only sentient but, thus far, showed a very human-like emotional warmth.

  All of this Princess Stormy had been taught was clearly impossible. But here she was. What else that was impossible was actually, positively, possible?

  She wanted to ask The Gricklegrack if he was alive before or during the dark times. Maybe his forbears were alive, and they were the ones who fell afoul of the Wangod?

  She yearned to find her father, and to sit with him and ask him question after question. He had always encouraged her curiosity not like some of the probbers who catechized her at lessons, answering any question sternly with the words, “That is the way it is. That is the way it always has been.”

  Here above the tree line, above the expanse of ice as far as the eye could see, the lessons of her childhood seemed very far away. What new lessons she would learn next, when they found her dad at work?

  But when they landed, delicately, on a ridge of ice next to the small opening of a cave, her father wasn’t there.

  They found signs of a struggle. Tools strewn here and there.

  And a patch of bright red blood in the snow.

  Stormy shrieked, jumped from her place in the harness, and ran to it.

  “Not human blood,” said The Fool, tipping himself from his harness. He knew that right away.

  The Gricklegrack stared at the scene impassively. Impossible to read the great Bird’s thoughts.

  “The tracks are all wrong,” The Fool said rapidly, forgetting his airsickness in his heartsickness at the scene before him. “Two sets, and another human. They’re not birdprints, but whatever they are, they could have only come by air.”

  Emmeur looked slowly from side to side. “Aaagghh,” he murmured, “we are so far from anywhere. Only something with wings and an extraordinary sense of smell could have found this place.”

  “What do you think they were?” said The Fool.

  “The only creatures I think it could be,” the Bird said slowly, “are Drocabodaws.”

  The Fool, shivering, took a deep breath.

  “Droca what?” said Stormy, shivering now as well. She was glad of the thick coats that The Witch and Glamour had insisted they wear.

  “Drocabodaw,” repeated The Fool. “The flying lizard. Well part lizard, part bird.”

  “But they’re not real! They’re just a story…I…” Stormy stopped. She remembered how many stories she had found turned out to be real.

  “Braggardio!” muttered The Fool, pulling off his three-peaked hat and tearing at his thinning hair in his distraction. “It begins to fall into place.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Stormy frantically. “Where’s my dad?”

  “But why point a finger at the Prince, Fool?” quizzed the Bird.

  “I spent some moons in Oosaria in summers gone by. It wasn’t commonknowledge though such knowledge has a habit of becoming common to me but in his youth, Prince Braggardio had a certain proclivity for cruelty toward creatures. It would not surprise me if he had found a way of ensluicing the Drocabodaw.”

  “If it is true, the picture looks grim,” said The Gricklegrack.

  “Aye,” agreed The Fool. “And I’ll bet my big toe Braggardio and Prince Toromos will be at the helm of one of the warships making up the Lumbiana River.”

  “Well, the knowledge of their rough position will aid us somewhat in our journey to find your father. It is a fair guess they hold him captive on board one of those vessels.”

  “I’ll kill him. I’ll kill both of them,” said Stormy, meaning Braggardio and Toromos. Seeing her determined face, The Fool was inclined to take her seriously. She showed no hysteria, only calm determination. “But how did they even know my dad was up north?” she said, intent.

  She answered her own question.

  “A spy,” she said flatly. She remembered Sonia, picking up Waltherbald’s message and putting it safely away, in the kitchen at Bald Mountain Castle, that day which seemed so long ago. It was a horrible thought. But Stormy had begun to grow up, and when you grow up, horrible thoughts cannot so easily be pushed away.

  “Get back in the harness,” the Black Bird said quietly.

  “Wait!” Stormy walked a few paces towards something glittering in the snow that the other two had missed. She pulled a
t the silver thing.

  “The wonderlook,” said The Fool.

  “Bring it,” said the Bird. “We must head south. No time to rest. Except …” He smiled, showing his great teeth as Stormy climbed up his feathered side. “Except rest your mind. And remember Stormy, your father is too precious to the Oosarians as a bargaining tool for them to do him any real harm yet. I will tell you more later, for there is much more to tell. I will tell you things about your mother. I know you have been wanting to ask. But now I must rest my tongue and focus my eyes. We will be passing over northern villages forthwith, and I want no one to see us as we go.”