Sagaria (19 page)

Now it was his turn. He felt a little lump in his throat. Sagandran realized that he wouldn’t be able to bring the dramatic intensity and vast vocabulary to his story that Sir Tombin had deployed in his history of the war and that last great battle between King Brygantra and Boss Thumbhammer. He would just have to do his best.

He first recounted Grandpa’s tale of finding the portal and coming through it to Sagaria, of journeying to Spectram and the court of Queen Mirabella.

“Ah, Queen Mirabella,” interrupted Sir Tombin with a dreamy note in his voice. “More beautiful than all the starlit summer nights. Her eyes like sparkling emeralds lit by the morning sun. An ageless wisdom surrounds her, and her smile is balm for the sorrowful heart.”

Sagandran and Perima gazed at him in amazement.

“You’ve met her, then?” said Sagandran.

Sir Tombin gave a sigh that seemed to come from the bottom of his chest. “Ah, yes, but only on a few occasions. To my great misfortune, more often I have
but seen her from afar. Yet, even seeing her from a distance has been enough to make my heart pound like great breakers on the shore. I could be watching her from many miles away and still feel her goodness wash through my every fiber.”

How strange,
thought Sagandran.
He’s a frog and she, according to Grandpa, is a human being. Surely, it’s lady frogs that Quackford should be finding beautiful, not lady humans? Maybe he’s like one of the medieval troubadours, happy enough worshiping women from afar and praising their beauty in song to all who would listen, yet likely to run a mile if any of them showed a sign of returning the affection. That’s what Mrs. Marvell said in literature class, anyway.

“But pray continue,” said Sir Tombin with another of those lovesick sighs.

So, Sagandran described to his audience how Grandpa had shown him the Royal Seal of Spectram, which he had with him even now. He dangled it in the firelight then passed it to Sir Tombin, who wanted a closer look. Then there had been the strange noises and Grandpa’s disappearance, and so Sagandran came through the gateway to be brought eventually to this very glade.

“You’re so brave,” said Perima, her palms pressed together beneath her chin, gazing at him with eyes that glittered in admiration. Sagandran wondered if she’d be quite so expressive had she not had a mugful-and-a-half of beer, but happily took the opportunity to bathe in her approval.

Now it was Perima’s turn.

“My name,” she began, “is Perima, though you know that already. I’m the eldest daughter of King Fungfari the First, and thus a Royal Princess of Mattani. My father … well, my father has never cared much at all for me, you see.”

She sucked in a tight little breath and raised her face with a look of defiance that Sagandran quickly realized meant she was trying not to burst into tears. He wanted to put his arm around her shoulders to comfort her, but she was on the far side of the fire and he didn’t want to embarrass her – or Sir Tombin, or himself – by making a great palaver of shuffling round to sit beside her.

“He’d set his heart on a boy, an heir, a son to ride out each day in jingling armor and a brightly caparisoned horse. What he got instead was … me.”

“Well, one can’t have everything,” Flip put in.

Perima ignored the remark – just as well for Flip. “All my father thought a girl was good for was sewing and knitting and being married off at the earliest possible opportunity to the richest of the many princes who came to court seeking her hand. He banished me to the women’s quarters and decreed that I should be brought in front of him only when he wanted to show me off to some fat, balding, wrinkly prospective suitor. He was trying to dispose of me before I’d even learned how to walk.”

She gave a sorry laugh, as if at the ridiculousness of it all.

“But I was a rebellious little tyke. When he displayed me in front of those horrid old men, like a cake in a bakery window, I would … well, let’s not go into details, but I would do the most unsuitable, offputtingest things I could think of. After a while, it got so bad that even the women among whom he’d set me couldn’t stand me any longer, what with my tantrums and my habit of smashing things when I didn’t get my way. They just gave up and let me wander as I willed, which was usually down to the stables to visit the horses. I think the horses are the only ones at court who’ve ever really listened to me.”

“We’re listening,” said Sir Tombin softly.

“Until now, I mean. Anyway, all the while when I was growing up, my two younger sisters were rejected by my father for exactly the same reason – they weren’t boys, but they were perfectly happy about being rejected. All they want to do is to be ogled by all the boys and prance around empty-headedly having decorative swoons at appropriate moments.”

Sagandran giggled. He was remembering the cliquey girls at school again. Perima shot him an angry glance, then also chuckled.

“It’s what girls at Fungfari’s court are expected to do,” she said. “But what my father doesn’t realize is that ever since my mother died giving birth to my youngest sister, Emmelina, the older women at court have essentially run his kingdom for him. But that hasn’t meant that the rules about me have relaxed at all. The only times I’m supposed to be on public view, dressed all lah-di-dah as a lady …” She paused and held up the torn hem of her grubby white skirt. “You might not believe it now, but this was a beautifully tailored formal dress just a few days ago. Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes, me and the princes. Most of them have been too frightful for words, though there’s occasionally been a younger one I’ve quite liked the look of – until I discovered that he had mahogany for brains. None have been as brave and dashing as, oh, someone I could mention.”

Sagandran noticed that Sir Tombin’s chest had puffed out and that Flip was smugly brushing an imaginary bit of lint off his fur. With horror, Sagandran then realised he was doing the same. He lowered his arm, embarrassed, and hoped that Perima hadn’t noticed He stared into the flaring embers, not knowing if he wanted her to be watching him or not.

“At the beginning of this week, there was a fanfare of trumpets and a banging of drums, and I knew yet that another suitor had come to call. Despite my kicking and struggling and wailing, the maidservants forced me into this dress and combed out my hair,” she said absently, running her fingers through it, “one hundred times and one, as the custom has it. They painted my lips and my cheeks. Then they went to gawp at the newcomer, foolishly leaving me on
my own for a few moments. Before you could say ‘Hartleberry Spratpole’ (that’s a common name in Mattani), I was down the back stairs as fast as my legs could carry me, then sneaking through the narrow, dark corridors the servants use until I reached the stables. As luck would have it, a carriage had just been kitted out to take one of my father’s courtiers somewhere and I was able to crawl beneath it and cling to the underside of the chassis without any of the stable boys noticing. Minutes later, the popinjay of a courtier had boarded along with his wife and daughters, and soon we were rolling through the castle gates. The carriage came to a halt a few miles out into the country, and I slipped into the roadside hedge and hid until they were gone.

“I had hopes of finding a farmhouse where folk would take me in and put me to work feeding the animals or – oh, how I hoped this might be the case – tending the horses in return for my board and lodging. That way, I thought, I might live out my life as a normal person, not a Princess of the Blood Royal. I soon discovered that farmhouses are scarce in those parts and at the few I did encounter, I received a most ungracious welcome – one of the farmers even set his dogs on me! You would have thought I was a demon, the way they behaved toward me.”

She looked back and forward between Sagandran, Flip and Sir Tombin, as if expecting at least one of them to make a sympathetic comment.

“Perhaps it was something you said,” murmured Sagandran soothingly.

“Or perhaps just the way you said it,” added Sir Tombin with a glitter of mirth in his dreamy eyes, “but carry on with your tale.”

“There’s little more to tell. Disheartened, I wandered into the forest. I’d been walking in among the trees for hours, half a day or more, when I was set upon by a worg. The rest you know.”

“You’re a brave lass, Princess,” said Sir Tombin.

Sagandran looked long and hard at her. “And a very strong one. It must have been difficult to hold onto the undercarriage like that. What happened when the coach hit a bump in the road?”

“I just had to hold on tighter,” said Perima sweetly. “I’m quite strong, really, even though I am, after all, only a
girl
.”

“I didn’t mean it that way,” he hurriedly assured her, holding up his palms as if in defense. “What I meant was that I don’t think I could have done it.”

She grinned.

The moon was high in the sky now. Sir Tombin put the back of his webbed hand to his mouth and yawned loudly. “We should plan to be off by dawn tomorrow, and the night is growing late. We should think about going to sleep – to sleep, and perchance to dream.”

Sagandran stared owlishly at him. How could a frog in a world that was not the Earthworld be quoting Shakespeare? He was just opening his mouth to ask when Perima, who’d been swallowing yet another unwisely long draft from her beer mug, spoke instead.

“There is still one more tale to be told tonight, Sir Tombin,” she said pointedly. “Sagandran, Flip and I have given you our stories. Now, don’t you think you should give us yours?”

“Ah, harrumph, well.” The knight looked abashed. “I don’t think my pitiful biography holds much that would be of interest to you fine young people. Besides, it truly is late of the clock and—”

Sagandran laughed. “Oh, Sir Tombin, please don’t play that game with us.”

“Yes,” agreed Flip. “Come on, Sir Tombin. You’re not getting off that easy.”

“What might a humble mendicant like myself have to tell that could compare in excitement and absorption with your evocatively told adventures?”

Perima hiccuped daintily. “You could start by telling us how come you’re a frog.” Despite the smallness of her mouth, she was grinning so broadly it looked as if one end of the grin might fall right off her face.

“Yes,” agreed Sagandran. “Are you a man who was turned into a frog or a frog who grew to enormous size – enormous, that is, for a frog?” A third possibility struck him. Flip, after all, wasn’t really quite like any creature Sagandran had ever heard of in the Earthworld. He was more like a mouse than a rat, yet he was unlike either in that he didn’t have a tail – not even a stub. Also, his face wasn’t nearly as pointed as that of a rat or a mouse. “Or is it,” he continued, “just that frogs grow much bigger here than they do in my world? And learn to talk?”

“The truth is,” replied Sir Tombin, taking a gulp of his beer, “none of those.”

“Ah,” said Sagandran.

“I suppose I’d better tell you.” Sir Tombin elegantly yawned once more. “Once upon a time I was just an ordinary little frog living among hundreds of other ordinary little frogs in an ordinary little pond. My thoughts were the ordinary little thoughts you’d expect an ordinary little frog to have, which is to say, they were exceedingly little and they didn’t come along very often.

“Then, one day, a witch happened by our ordinary little pond. I was squatting on a lilypad minding my ordinary little business, though I was aware of her sitting down by the pond-side. It was clear that she had been weeping. After a time, she began speaking to herself, as people often do when they’re miserable.

“I can see you’re looking puzzled, Sagandran, but that you’re too well-brought up to interrupt me. Well, the answer to your unspoken question is
that frogs, all frogs, can understand human speech, as humans can, and very often rather better. If you think about it, you’ll realize that this explains quite a lot.

“Anyway, the witch was sitting by my pond, alternately weeping and wailing and muttering, and the gist of all this weeping and wailing and muttering was that nowhere, in the length and breadth of the land, could she find a handsome young man to fall in love with her. Indeed, it became evident, even to unsophisticatedly froggy ears, that she couldn’t find a man of any description to love her. Observing her from the safety (or so I thought) of my lilypad, it was blisteringly obvious to me why this was so. It wasn’t because she was not comely. Oh, she was no great beauty for poets and minstrels to yearn for, but neither was she unpleasing of feature. It was because she was completely and entirely selfish. The only person who mattered to her was her. She was talking about how the handsome young man, if she ever found him, would carry her burdens and do all her work for her so that she could have a life of luxury and ease. In other words, all she was interested in was taking. She didn’t realize that what love is all about is giving. So it was no wonder that any young man she’d gone anywhere near had listened to her for about thirty seconds – or perhaps even a full minute, if he was especially slow-witted – and then run for the hills as fast as his legs would carry him.”

Perima giggled. “That’s what half the women at my father’s court are like. I pity the poor mugs who end up marrying them.”

“That,” said Sir Tombin, “may be.” There was a certain kindly severity in his gaze that indicated he had heard more than Perima might have thought of her conversation with Sagandran when she’d been trying to act the high-and-mighty princess.

He cleared his throat.

“Soon enough, I stopped paying any particular notice to her. She was tedious and whining on the whole time in her self-pitying way. I would much rather think about the deliciously juicy-looking fly that had been buzzing around the pond all day, and whether I might be lucky enough to catch it. When my attention did wander back to the witch, I realized to my horror that she’d been regarding me for some while. What she was talking about now were all the old fairy tales about handsome young princes being turned into frogs by ghastly hags, and about how the kiss of a beautiful maiden can turn the frog-princes back into their original form. She’d got it into her head that I must really be a handsome prince in, as it were, disguise. Since she considered herself exceedingly beautiful, she had conceived the notion that all she needed to do was deliver me a smacker and I’d transform into the man of her dreams.