Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming Part 26

"What?"

"The first is an enchanted dagger. It will cut your bonds."

"And the second?"

"A cloak of invisibility. You can use that to get out of the mess you're in."

"Thanks, Uncle! I'd do the same for you!"

"I doubt that," Azzie said. Aiming with care, he dropped the dagger. It went point first into a log beside which Charming was propped.

"Got it," Charming said.

"Good boy. Now here's the cloak of invisibility. Be sure to read the instructions. And above all, do not remove them under penalty of law! Good luck! I'll see you a little later."

Charming heard something soft falling, landing near him with a hushed whisper. That would be the cloak.

After the enchanted dagger had cut his bonds, he looked for the cloak but couldn't find it. That figured, he realized. It wouldn't be easy to find an invisible cloak, especially on a dark night.

Chapter 6.

The demon knights were returning. They were singing,

Fair is foul and bread is dead Put pease pudding in his head And stuff his gut with fine persimmons Till he looks like Jack Fitzsimmons.

No one had ever explained the meaning of this verse. It was very old, from a time when men found obscurity a com-forting way of life.

The demon knights sprawled about the campground then, grunting, stretching, chuttering, yawning. With an occasional belch and considerable scratching, they settled themselves quickly.

Charming turned to the cloak. It wasn't there again. Then he caught sight of the tag, a small square of cloth with phos-ph.o.r.escent writing on it. It said, DO NOT REMOVE THIS TAG UNDER PENALTY OF DIVINE PUNISHMENT. PLEASE READ IN-STRUCTIONS ON OTHER SIDE. Charming tried to read the in-structions on the other side but they were not illuminated.

He arranged the cloak around himself as well as he could and started walking softly among the sprawled ranks of war-riors.

A slight inconsistency in the height of the ground caused him to stumble and brush against one of the figures.

" 'Ere there!" An unsteady hand reached out and seized him. "Boys, ye ken what I've found?"

"Why you got your fist half-clenched like 'at, Angus?" the others cried.

"Because within it, my friends, I've got holt of an invisible spy."

"I'm not a spy!" Charming cried.

"But youare invisible, won't try to deny that, will you?"

Charming broke free and ran. The knights got up and chased after, awakening others with their loud hoots.

From behind him came their cries. These were answered by shouts from ahead. At first Charming thought it was an echo. But then the fact that the cries from before him were becoming louder tipped him off to the real situation. There were demon knights ahead as well as behind. They must have moved quickly to cut him off. He saw that he was going to have to pa.s.s through their ranks.

Pausing to re-drape the cloak of invisibility, he was fas-cinated to see his hand disappear as soon as the cloth was pa.s.sed over it. Charming could look through the cloak and through his hand that it covered and see the ground beneath it.

Of course, the part of his hand that was not covered remained as visible as always. More visible, in fact, since the existence of an arm in which the hand terminated blood-lessly and at a slant did nothing to make it more imper-ceptible.

Quickly, he draped himself as best he was able and set off running again. He plunged into a broad gra.s.sy field. Hors.e.m.e.n appeared by moonlight on the edge of the meadow. Then one of them pointed and waved, saying, "There, where the gra.s.s is parted, that's where he must have gone!" Immediately a squad-ron went out in pursuit.

Charming dodged back into the woods, and there, finding a shallow cave, concealed himself long enough to tear out the cloak's lining. As he had hoped, this material, thin though it was, had the same qualities as the cloak itself. And so Charming could devise a mask for himself, a full-length wraparound mask, and thus even his head was concealed.

He could do nothing about the movements of his pa.s.sage, however. Every footfall was marked by a bruising of leaves and bending of small boughs and gra.s.ses. At least hiding his head was rendering the finding of him more difficult.

He hurried, even knowing that he was kicking up a con-siderable trail. It occurred to him that he might do better if he could get himself to move slowly and carefully, thus eluding his pursuers while he was among them. That was how a fairy-tale prince might act, he thought, but that was not the way he was at all. He was running, his long legs exulting in stretching and striding, hurrying away from danger. Viewing himself from the viewpoint of his legs, he was a soaring creature proceeding by leaps and bounds. But the fact was the horses of his pursuers were moving faster. They were coming up on either side of him, the riders only slightly impeded by the necessity of having to sight his movement through the bending branches that marked his pa.s.sage.

They closed in, their steel lance points winking at him. He could see a clearing ahead, but doubted that he could make it. It was all the more tantalizing because it contained a long lime-stone shelf. The stone would neither retain his footprints nor reveal his pa.s.sage. It was going to be close.

One of the knights took aim with his lance and came charging.

It was only at this moment of extremity that his salvation came. He did not know whether it was natural, or induced somehow by Azzie. Where before the air had been still, now a wind rose up. Not just a little wind, but a full-blown gale, bearing drops of icy water and a scattering of hail.

On all sides, the foliage blew into wild disarray, making his movements undetectable.

The leading knight missed him by five feet. The second wasn't even close. The knights spread apart, trying to contain him within their circle. But Charming easily slipped between them and hurried down to the limestone shelf. This he was able to traverse without leaving a trace. When he stopped, the wind had died again, and there were no sounds of pursuit. He realized he had eluded the demons.

Chapter 7.

Prince Charming ran until his legs grew numb and his lungs fiery. At some point, he collapsed and slept.

When he awoke, he saw himself to be in a sunlit meadow. At the far end of it a mountain rose into the sky, a gigantic Matterhorn of the Imagination, a dream mountain of multicolored gla.s.s. In front of the mountain, and block-ing further access to it, was a dense forest of what looked like metal trees.

Charming advanced upon the strange forest and regarded it. The trees were made of thorned stovepipe, and the tallest of them was not over seven feet in height. As he approached, the trees began to emit a yellowish gas which quickly caught fire, sparked by igniters located below-ground.

Prince Charming might not have known what these were, save that he recalled seeing Azzie studying a slip of paper which he later left lying upon his desktop. Curious, Charming had looked at it. It proved a receipt from the All Spiritual Regions Gas Company for payment for gas to power flame trees.

If Uncle Azzie "was indeed paying the bill to fuel the trees - and Charming could draw no other inference from the evi-dence- then the signs of manipulation were unmistakable. He felt strange now when he considered the ramifications. It made him feel as if he were painted cardboard, a cutout figure pinned to the background. This was frightening, but it came at a time when there was an urgent need to get on through the place. So he saved it for later consideration and moved ahead.

If the things could be turned on, they could be turned off. He sought for the better part of an hour before he located the valve in a ditch. The trees went out when he turned it. How very strange, to set up a thing like this in the first place.

He pa.s.sed among them.

And so he came to Gla.s.s Mountain Village, final base camp and source of provender, sustenance, and souvenirs for those who would climb to the sun-dazzled summit of the great moun-tain, where, it was said, stood the enchanted castle within which lay the sleeping Princess Scarlet.

The princ.i.p.al industry of the town was to serve those who sought to climb the Gla.s.s Mountain. Here came explorers and gla.s.s-mountain climbers from all over. The lure of the thing was irresistible.

Charming walked down a line of shops on Main Street in Gla.s.s Mountain Village. Many of the shops specialized in gla.s.s-mountain-climbing equipment. Gla.s.s is a tough substance to scale. To hear the townspeople talk you'd think the gla.s.s changed qualities every time a cloud came over the sun. The mountain boasted every kind of gla.s.s to be found: Swift Gla.s.s and Devious Gla.s.s, Tricky Gla.s.s and Swamp Gla.s.s. There was High Mountain Deadly Gla.s.s and Low Plain Bed Gla.s.s. Each kind of gla.s.s (and Gla.s.s Mountain was said to be composed of all of these kinds and more) had its own difficulties, and booklets were available at the shops dealing with the remedies for every variety.

Although some believed that this Gla.s.s Mountain was the only place of its kind in the world, unique and unduplicatable, there were intellectuals who insisted that the perennial human custom of climbing gla.s.s mountains could only be accounted for by deep historical memories, practically universal to the race of man, of doing so countless times and places in the past. These theorists would have it that Gla.s.s Mountain was an archetype of human experience whose physical corroboration was always taking place on innumerable levels, from the first moment of the beginning of the past to the last instant of the furthest unrolling of the future.

The bookstores of Gla.s.s Mountain Village were also filled with technical books on how gla.s.s mountains had been climbed in this year or that. There were histories, guidebooks, books of interviews with climbers and theorists. There were several shops in town that sold nothing but crampons of all types and descriptions, including diamond-studded ones.

The matter of whether or not to use horses to climb Gla.s.s Mountain called up some controversy in the town. In general, it is much more difficult for a horse to climb a gla.s.s mountain than it is for a man.

Horses' legs don't go in the right ways. They are n.o.ble beasts, excellent on plains and prairies, agile in forests and pretty fair even in semidense jungle, but just not good at climbing gla.s.s mountains. So the custom had sprung up of riding up the mountain on goatback.

To traditionalists, this was unacceptable. Everyone expects Prince Charmings to scale the Gla.s.s Mountain on horseback. Generations of ill.u.s.trators, some of them claiming to be au-thorized by high spiritual powers, had shown horses climbing gla.s.s mountains with Prince Charmings on their backs. The fact is, as learned societies have never tired of pointing out, even if a horse could manage the mountain, it would leave him damaged in spirit and weak in the wind. Despite this, no one liked the idea of goats.

Charming was like everyone else. "Are you kidding?" he said, when told about riding a goat. "No way!"

"In that case," they told him, "you'll have to wear crampons and try to get up the mountain yourself."

"Me wear crampons?" He had the common superst.i.tious awe of these useful objects.

"They are what all the climbers wear."

"No thanks. You're not going to get those things on me."

"If you don't wear them, you'll never get to the top. It's all gla.s.s, you know. Slippery."

Charming, like so many young men in those days, had prejudices against both goats and crampons.

Sighing, he chose at last what seemed the lesser evil.

"So all right already, saddle me up a goat!"

Not even all the goats make it up Gla.s.s Mountain. That must be understood by those who think a goat is all it takes to win a princess. It's just that you need to use a goat even to get into the running. If at the very end, you want to subst.i.tute a horse for your goat, after the feat is accomplished, and have your portrait painted that way-well, a horse looks better than a goat, and it can be arranged.

And so it was that at last Prince Charming found himself racing upward on goatback until he came to the entranceway to a great castle whose battlements rose high into the air. Ahead of him was a staircase. He knew he had arrived when he saw the cardboard sign on an iron stanchion. It read, YOU HAVE ARRIVED AT THE ENCHANTED CASTLE. THE SLEEPING PRINCESS IS IN THE FIRST CHAMBER TO THE RIGHT AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRS. CONGRATULATIONS.

With a tremulous feeling in his thumbs, Prince Charming performed the final climb over the barbican, endured the icy swim across the moat, and then, dripping wet, went down the gallery and through the turret pa.s.sageways, and finally through the outer rooms where ensorcelled servitors snoozed, to the staircase with upward curves of great cruelly, to the flagstones of the outer chamber.

He opened the door and took two steps inside. In the middle of the room he saw the bed, a high four-poster. Lying on it, eyes closed, was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. She was the one whose miniature he had fallen in love with. But in person she was incomparably more lovely than her painted representation.

Chapter 8.

Any eyes would have sufficed to see her beauty. But Prince Charming's dragon's eyes saw something more. They saw through Azzie's scheme and under-stood the snare that the demon had planned. The dragon's eyes saw that he, Charming, wore the hated face of Scarlet's seducer. What would she do when she saw that face? The dragon's eyes could see the shadow of disaster here. But Charming ignored the warning, bending low over the Princess.

This was the moment Azzie had been working toward since he had thought up the plan in the first place.

The kiss! The fatal kiss!

Azzie had already positioned the poisoned dagger on the little bedstand, close to Scarlet's hand. This was what Scarlet would use when she opened her eyes and recognized who had kissed her-the despised seducer!

Azzie, from behind the curtain where he had stationed himself, addressed the great unseen audience watching the drama unfold.

"Ladies and gentlemen, beings of Light and Darkness, fellow demons, rival angels! I bring you now the conclusion of the most ancient and edifying drama of Prince Charming and Princess Scarlet. Behold, the awakening kiss and its outcome!"

Even while his words died away, Prince Charming, with his dragon's eyes, continued to regard Azzie's scheme, and he spoke of it, thus: "A-ha," he soliloquized, "it's obvious to me I am a nothing, a mere congeries of disparate parts, and that my so-called uncle Azzie, a demon indeed despite his ingratiating ways, gave me the face of Scarlet's seducer when putting me together, for the purpose of being sacrificed by Scarlet when I awaken her.

Well then, if that's so, let it be. Kill me, pretty Princess, if that's what will content you. But though I am a nothing man, constructed of odds and ends and brought to life by a fiend, yet a true heart beats in my breast, and I can only say, I am yours, Princess, do with me what you will."

Scarlet felt the touch of a man's lips. Her eyes opened, but at first she saw nothing due to the nearness of the young man kissing her. Her first thought was, What bliss to be so awak-ened!

Then she saw his face. That face! O G.o.ds! She recognized it instantly. This was the face of the man who had seduced her and abandoned her.

Her eyes widened. One white hand fluttered to her breast like one of the lost doves of Hera. He! It is he! Her hand groped behind her and encountered the haft of the dagger lying on the little nightstand. She lifted it. ...

Azzie had calculated this part with precision. He knew how the dagger would slide into her hand as if of its own volition. The audience, invisible but present, would lean for-ward. The members of the Awards Committee would see Scar-let's hand pull back, then plunge the dagger into his back, through to the heart! And then, with Charming expiring on the floor of her chamber, Azzie himself would step forward.

"Alas, little princess," he would say (the speech long rehea.r.s.ed), "you've killed the only man you could ever love, the man in whom was bound your salvation!" And after that, Azzie thought it would make a pretty ending if Scarlet turned the dagger on herself, thus ensuring herself an eternity of pain in the Pits of deepest h.e.l.l. He had even considered bringing Charming back to life long enough to watch Scarlet die, in order to tempt him into uttering blasphemies so great as to ensure his own eternal d.a.m.nation. A good ending for one who likes to tie up loose ends.

So sure of all this was Azzie that he appeared before Scarlet now, saying, with heavy irony, "Heaven finds means to kill your joys with love; but the world is not thy friend nor thy world's law."

People argued for a long while afterward as to why this plan was not successful. In Azzie's opinion, simple reciprocity should have guided Scarlet's fingers to the dagger, and the dagger to the unprotected back of the young Prince. But life, with its healthy habit of indeterminacy, would not have it so.

Azzie had miscalculated the effect of Scarlet's eyes. Though they had not the ability to see the truth, as had those of Charm-ing, yet the eyes could see triviality and artifice, and these they perceived as she considered the tableau she made, she and Prince Charming, and the poisoned dagger. Her artist's eyes saw the artificiality of it: this was not a good subject for one who paints from life. She rebelled for artistic reasons from plunging home the knife, and then, later, her sensibilities fol-lowed her aesthetic judgment.

Scarlet said, "What are you talking about?"

"You shouldn't have killed him," Azzie said. "You've doomed yourself to an eternity of infernal torments, young lady."

Scarlet burst out laughing.