Authors: John Dahlgren
Sagaria (18 page)
“So you see, what you royals should be asking of the rest of us is forgiveness, not deference. If you want to leave that burden of princesshood behind and become an ordinary person, what better way of doing so than by saying a quick thank you to Flip and Sir Tombin—”
“And you,” she said.
“—and making friends with three of the most ordinary folk you could hope to find in Sagaria.”
I suppose that last bit is true, he thought, Sagaria being what it is. A talking rodent, a human-sized frog in a green cape and plumed hat, and a boy who’s flitted in here from another plane of reality – not exactly an ordinary trio. Still, we’re ordinary folk in our hearts – Flip and me anyway – and that’s all that counts.
Another thought popped into his mind. He didn’t have time to consider it properly before it was gone again.
Except that no one is “ordinary.” Everybody is utterly extraordinary. Everyone there is just waiting for you to discover their extraordinariness.
“I’ve been pretty beastly to you three, haven’t I?” Perima was saying.
He was just about to fob this off in the usual polite way when he realized that that’d be the wrong thing to do.
“Yes,” he said frankly. “But people are always being unpleasant to each other and apologizing afterwards. It’s one of the things that being human is about. It doesn’t stop them being friends again after they’ve made up.”
“My father never forgets a slight.”
“Well, that’s his hard luck. He’d be a lot happier if he did.”
“And throwing off the shackles of royalty, becoming just like everybody else – it’s as easy as that, is it?”
“No, it’s not quite that easy. Very little in life is easy and the best things, the things you want the most, are often the most difficult. But it’d be a good start.”
The smile this time was both broader and more uncertain.
“Sagandran,” she said very quietly, as if in a way she didn’t want him to hear her, “will you be my friend?”
He grinned back at her. “I would be honored.”
A frown drew her eyebrows together. “Honored?”
“I’d be honored because you’re Perima. I don’t give a fig about you being a princess or a beggar. It’s
you
I want as my friend.”
She stopped walking abruptly, and without thinking he stopped with her.
“Oh, thank you, Sagandran.” Now she did throw her arms around his neck, giving him no time to avoid her embrace, and kissed him loudly on the cheek. “You’re my very first friend!”
“Don’t you have friends at home?”
She kissed his other cheek. “Plenty of people are nice to me and smile at me at all the right moments, but no one who’s a friend. You’re my first, and I just know you’re going to be the best friend I’ll ever have.”
Sagandran could see out of the corner of his eye that Sir Tombin had paused in the middle of the trail and was looking back at them. He supposed he ought to be embarrassed that the frog-knight was watching him being kissed and hugged by a girl but, well, he was rather enjoying being kissed and hugged by a girl so he didn’t care – though he could feel his face going red all over.
Flip, however, was getting crushed between them.
“Ow, not again!”
“It’ll soon be sunset, young people,” called Sir Tombin as Perima and Sagandran were ruefully pulling away from each other. “We best make haste if we are to reach the sanctuary of which I spoke before night is upon us.”
“Coming,” said Perima brightly. “Oh, and Sir Tombin?”
“Yes, fair lady?”
“I’ll never be able to thank you enough for saving my life.”
“Think nothing of it.”
“Will you be my friend?”
“I am already that, Perima.”
Sir Tombin spun on his heel and started half-hopping along even more briskly than before. Sagandran and Perima hurried after him, both of them grinning, hands joined.
Flip stuck his head out of Sagandran’s pocket. “What’s going on?”
“You’re the bravest, er, small creature I have ever encountered, Master Flip, and I would like to be your friend.”
“Okay.”
Perima’s face fell a little. “Is that all?”
“Yup.”
Flip’s head vanished back into the anorak again.
“He’s not one to stand on ceremony,” Sagandran explained. “Don’t worry about it.”
small stream – indeed, hardly more than a lazily winding trickle of water – ran along next to the glade. In the center of the open space crouched an ancient monument, a stone tablet, its inscription so worn away with age that even in broad daylight, they probably wouldn’t have been able to read it. Now, in the rapidly dimming twilight, it was illegible. On the far side of the clearing, the massively thick boles of three gnarled trees that looked even older than the monument had knitted themselves together to form a sort of wooden cave. With the velvet purples of night soaking the forest all around, the depths of that cave held the dark menace of the unknown.
“This is the place,” Sir Tombin said when they arrived, swirling his cape around as if trying to sweep the entire clearing up in it. “We’ll be safe here for the night.”
“No worgs?” said Perima.
“I have never seen a worg this far north,” replied Sir Tombin with a mannerly half-bow. “They almost always remain within the bounds of their territory. It was your ill fortune to stray within those bounds.”
“Surely a worg would think itself safe wherever it went,” said Sagandran, taking off his anorak and lowering it carefully to the ground so Flip could trot out of the pocket. “Why should they keep themselves within borders?”
“It’s because—” began Sir Tombin, but then he checked himself. “The answer to your question, young man, entails a story of sufficient length that it’d serve us well to wait for the telling until after we have settled ourselves, and perhaps partaken of a repast.”
“Had supper,” muttered Sagandran to Perima.
“I know,” she replied in the same low tone. “We have plenty of people back in the court of Mattani who speak like this.”
“I shall kindle a conflagration,” announced Sir Tombin, who had waited politely for them to finish an exchange they’d thought he couldn’t hear, “while
perhaps you two might be so kind as to hunt us up some viands.”
“Hunt?” said Sagandran.
“There are foodstuffs stored yonder for the benefit of weary travelers who may pause here,” said Sir Tombin, pointing toward the cavern the trees made. He turned away and began gathering up scattered bits of dead wood from the glade floor to use as kindling. With Perima still holding his hand, Sagandran, once more wearing his anorak, ventured toward the cave.
Perima hung back. “There could be snakes in there,” she said, “and scorpions and spiders.”
“All sorts of things beginning with ‘s’?” he said.
“Well … yes.”
“Supper’s one of them. Come on.”
It was a little scary as the arched wooden roof closed over them and they ventured into the cave’s pitch darkness, but Sagandran tried not to communicate his fears through their joined hands. He hummed something tuneless but, he hoped, reassuring. There was just one problem.
“Sagandran,” said Perima, “I hate to be a snotty little princess, but how are we going to know when we find the ‘viands’ Sir Tombin talked about?”
“By falling over them in the dark, I suppose,” replied Sagandran ruefully. “But even then, we won’t know what they are.”
“I’ve just remembered what it is that frogs eat,” added Perima.
“I wish you hadn’t.” Sagandran had heard that in some parts of the Earthworld, various insects were regarded as delicacies (Australian Aborigines with their witchetty grubs, for example) but the thought of crunching down on a meal of dead spiders, ants, flies and cockroaches didn’t appeal to him at all.
They stumbled out empty-handed to discover that Sir Tombin had finished building the fire. Wordlessly, he handed Sagandran a burning brand. Leaving Perima warming herself by the flames, Sagandran went back into the cavern to discover a hoard of wooden boxes, small wooden barrels and bulging leather sacks, neatly piled like he imagined provisions aboard a ship must be. One or two of the leather sacks had been chewed by shrews or other small animals, so that their contents – nuts and dried fruit – spilled out onto the ground. Leaving them well alone, he untied the cord of another sack and found what he guessed were dried pears. Clumsily, because he was trying to hold the blazing torch aloft at the same time, he filled the chest pockets of his anorak with the hard, wrinkled fruits. It was only as he was turning toward the stack of boxes next to the heaped sacks that he noticed a tidily fashioned sconce at the same height as his head on the cavern wall. He set his firebrand in it. The first two boxes he pried open held glass jars with unrecognizable somethings floating inside them.
He assumed that the somethings were edible, and appropriated a couple of the jars for his side pockets. There was no doubt about the contents of the barrel. Each had, scorched onto its side in sprawly capital letters, the word:
Sagandran had officially drunk beer on one occasion. Last Christmas. Grandpa had offered him some and Mom, who’d been laying into the sherry while the turkey roasted, had gigglingly agreed to let him have it. There had also been several strictly unofficial experiments undertaken less in the spirit of scientific inquiry than because Sagandran hadn’t wanted to look wimpy in front of the other boys. He hadn’t liked the stuff – it tasted very dead to him – so he hadn’t drunk much of it. If it had been just him, he wouldn’t have bothered bringing one of the barrels back out to the fireside, but there were Sir Tombin and Perima to think of. They probably like beer. Well, perhaps not in Perima’s case. In the court of King Fungfari, they probably drank only the finest champagne out of crystal glasses with paper umbrellas stuck in them.
Staggering with the barrel under one arm and the torch in his other hand, he rejoined the others.
“Cups,” said Sir Tombin, terse for once, taking the torch. A few moments later, he returned from the cave with four wooden mugs and plates. Perima was despatched to gather four sharp twigs from the undergrowth.
At last, they were all sprawled in front of the brightly chortling fire. The unidentifiable floating objects in the jars proved to be small spicy sausages, which could be eaten either cold or – after a few finger-singeing minutes holding them out to the flames spiked on the end of a twig – hot. Sagandran hadn’t a clue what the peppery meat was, but he was hungry enough not to care. The dried pears were delicious and so, to his surprise, was the beer. It was much maltier and thicker than the pale yellow stuff he’d had before. Perima seemed to be enjoying the beer too, because she was talking a lot. Squinting through the firelight, Sagandran could see her flushed and animated face. Flip had turned his nose up at the sausages but had guzzled his fill of the dried fruit; he’d lapped some of the beer, after which he seemed to have drifted off to sleep. Sir Tombin, for his part, had become very jovial and gallant.
“You promised you were going to tell us the story of why the worgs never come here,” Sagandran said to him after a while.
“Ah, yes, young lad. All four of us have our stories to tell, though your small companion,” he said with a nod toward Flip, “mayhap will have to save his turn until the morrow.”
“I’m not sleeping,” protested Flip suddenly. “I was merely listening with my eyes closed. An Adventurer Extraordinaire never sleeps much. Haven’t you noticed? That way, I never miss much.”
“I apologize, Master Flip,” said Sir Tombin with a slight bow of his head. “It was the snoring that had me fooled – the clever imitation snoring, I mean, a stratagem adopted solely for camouflaging your true state of consciousness.”
“The trickle of drool dribbling down your chin was a cunning disguise too,” added Perima.
Flip looked at her as if he were about to explode.
Sir Tombin diplomatically resumed talking. “To get us into a fine mood for storytelling, I shall narrate the true history of this monument.”
He proceeded to provide a very long and complex narrative full of dates and scores of names that meant nothing to Sagandran, but must refer to illustrious personages from Sagarian history. The gist of it was that this part of the forest (or Everwoods, as Sir Tombin called it) was known as the Weeping Forest because of a mighty war that had taken place centuries ago between humans and worgs, who had sided with the armies of an evil tyrant from the Shadow World called Cleonthes. The loss of life had been horrific; Sir Tombin painted many a vivid picture of corpses piled high upon corpses, worg and human alike. In the end, so many died that the opposing forces agreed that the matter should be settled once and for all by an unaided bout of combat between the human King Brygantra and the worg Boss Thumbhammer.
“All day and all night and all the next day the contest between them raged, and still neither would concede to the other. At last, both so weak from loss of blood they were barely alive, King Brygantra seized the cudgel from Thumbhammer’s battle-numbed fingers and hefted it high above the worg king’s head. Thumbhammer raised an arm to shield himself from that doughty blow, but his weakness made his movement slow and he was too late.
“The first time the great club landed on the worg king’s skull, the sound rang out so loud that trees lost their branches and birds fell stunned from the sky. To his knees did Thumbhammer topple, all fight gone from him. King Brygantra was prepared to accept his submission, but Thumbhammer shook his gore-streaked head and told him nay – the only surrender he would offer was his death, for having failed the worgs, his people.
“So, with reluctance, did King Brygantra smite again and, this time, the crash was so great that the skeletons of the dead were startled from their graves, to fly up into the air and come tumbling down to lie in heaps of bones.
“But still Boss Thumbhammer lived.
“And a third time did King Brygantra smite with the gory cudgel. This time,
the blow smashed Boss Thumbhammer’s skull, shattering it so that wet green brains flew in all directions, splattering every tree in the forest and filling the air. Still, if you watch the dawn, you can sometimes see a green light in the sky, and that is what’s left of Boss Thumbhammer’s brains, still floating high above the clouds.”
Perima looked revolted yet fascinated at the same time. “And this monument tells the tale?”
“Yes, fair lady,” said Sir Tombin ponderously, “though the tale it tells has long been wiped clean by nature’s mops.” Sagandran had a mental image of this, but thought it probably wasn’t the one that Sir Tombin had intended. “Yet the words will never die, for they are forged in the metals of eternity within the hearts of humans and worgs alike. No worg will come near here, for to them it is an accursed place.”
The word “accursed” seemed to hang around the fireside like a hot mist.
Sir Tombin waved a hand to disperse it. “Now, let the real tale-telling begin, though first let me fill my mug with this most excellent ale. My throat is dry and I would dearly quaff.”
Flip volunteered to go first. He related the tale of Mishmash and Tod’s dare and the hawk Old Cobb sent to carry the Adventurer Extraordinaire to the far side of the mountains. Sir Tombin was visibly impressed and so was Perima. Sagandran, who had heard the tale before, noticed that this time, Flip was adding much more detail to his account. He had to concede that this had all been no small feat for someone the size of a little rat. Not that Sagandran was fool enough to use the word “little,” and certainly not the word “rat.”