Oh, yes, dear readers- I am back. Writer's block be damned. I feel good about Chapter Six. Which is lucky, because there's only one left!
Expect the seventh and final chapter in the general vicinity of Friday? Maybe. Tomorrow I have a busy schedule of watching Veronica Mars, playing Halo, and writing a comprehensive bibliography for my five-page paper on the role of the Knight of the Mirrors in Don Quixote as he relates to the teachings of the eighteenth century philosopher and utter rat-bastard David Hume- in no particular order- and at some point in the week I'm going to have to start pulling my weight in the writing process of the one-act play I'm co-writing with my girlfriend (I'm not at liberty to divulge any details at this point but there's a character named Doctor Stradivarius) and wow, that was kind of a run-on sentence, wasn't it?
Anyways, I'd rather have a comment in front of me than a frontal lobotomy, by which I mean to say that I treasure each and every scrap of feedback and you are all wonderful people. Now read!
The March-Stepper
Chapter Six
Once upon a time there was a Troll who was having a terrible day. Now, when most people say they've had a terrible day, they mean that the cart got stuck and their boots leaked and they forgot their umbrella and it was porridge for breakfast- again- and there was a sniffle in their nose and an ache in their belly and a pain in their tooth and their afternoon tea wasn't hot enough and left a funny taste in their mouth.
Not the Troll. He was used to wet feet and head colds (as comes from living under a bridge, which is a miserable thing indeed) and he didn't even know what porridge was, except that he had a sneaking suspicion that it was some sort of queer river mollusk. When he said he was having a terrible day he meant it.
And it had been a terrible day indeed, even without lukewarm tea. Why, since he had gotten up he had lost his true love, hiked miles out of his way, trembling all the while and half expecting to hear the trip-trapping footsteps of the Wild Hart coming up behind him, been lied to by a goat, and jumped- well, fallen- well, been knocked off his own bridge by a braw and brawny he-goat going by the name of Gruff who had taken exceptional umbrage to the Troll's having gone and eaten two of his brothers.
"And that," said the Troll, glumly "is a terrible day." Only it came out a little indistinctly because he had put his head underwater.
After a while when he was feeling a little bit better he got up and lurched off towards home, snuffling over his aching bones and his sore head and his poor bruised muscles. The one bright side of it was that he had taken his fall close to home.
The sun was rising but it was still dim when he schlupped his tired body- all eleven blue-green knobbly twisted lank wiry feet of it- under the shadow of the bridge. His big feet splish-splashed over the stones of the riverbed as he waded over to the big cast-iron kettle with CHRISTOPHER carved on it and picked it up with one hand. With the other he fumbled about for the necessary flint and steel, found them on the second try, and lit a fire on a broad rock.
As soon as the kettle was on he splashed off on other business. "Now where'd I put it…" he muttered. "Ah!" Plunging his arm into the chill water up to the elbow he pulled a dirty clammy sopping wet blanket out of the river and draped it over his shoulders with a wet slap of damp wool against warty green skin. After a moment he pulled the blanket over his head, clasped it in place under the chin with one mossy hand, and stumbled off.
The biggest and flattest rock under the bridge was where the Troll kept his bedraggled little flock- half a dozen kine, legs folded under them, eyes half-closed in an expression of wooly indifference. From time to time one of them would utter a long baaaah of contentment. Not much got to sheep.
The Troll plucked one of them from the rock and clasped it to his chest with five froggy green fingers. The sheep bore this patiently and if it was discomfited when the Troll plopped down to sit cross-legged in the water it gave no indication of it.
When he felt he could wait no longer, the Troll got up and shuffled over to the kettle. He poured a cup of strong black tea into a dainty cracked china cup, picked it up delicately between two fingers, and shuffled back to the bit of riverbed that he had decided for whatever reason was more comfortable than any other bit of riverbed.
After spending a long moment rearranging blanket, sheep, and china, he had everything the way he liked it. Raising the cup elegantly to his curled lips, he slurped down the tea in one gulp. It was lukewarm.
"Figures," he muttered.
Once upon a time there was a girl with no name, a Blue Salamander, a trio of hard-luck pirates, and a parrot whose given name was Gunpowder Jack, except that he wasn't very important in the grand scheme of things and anyways the pirates had left him behind at the campsite- probably for the best, as they had never been more than indifferent masters and in England's cold climate it would need more than a little help to get by.
Eventually Gunpowder Jack (who secretly thought of himself as Mwenye) found his way into the custody of a blacksmith called Mulligan (although his friends called him Beef) and spent a happy winter in his toasty forge in Pembrokeshire, where he grew luxuriant and colorful in the smoky warmth and picked up the sorts of words that blacksmiths use when they discover they've been standing a bit too close to the fire and their aprons are on fire.
When Gunpowder Jack's language had become far too salty for the blacksmith's wife (who was called Sara), she nagged at her husband until he got rid of the bird, exchanging him for a small bag of coffee beans from a passing sailor (Johnson). The sailor and his parrot were inseparable until his ship (the Mer-maid) put it at the port of Casablanca and Gunpowder Jack went absent without leave and found his way, after many adventures too boring to recount, over the Sahara and back to the dripping brown-green forests of Africa from whence his mother had came. He lived there happily for many years until dying tragically in an unfortunate incident involving a groshawk.
None of this is particularly important to the story. I just thought you might like to know.
Anyways, once upon a time there was a girl with no name and a Blue Salamander and a few pirates, and they were all of them journeying through the forest looking for the Vicar, who was a frightfully smart man and who could thus be relied on to answer the questions they were going to ask him- the girl for the last known whereabouts and general dimensions of Love, the pirates for career advice in the new landbound economy, and the Salamander for his own, intensely private questions, the like of which he had not divulged to his companions.
To pass the time they were playing at I Spy. The Salamander with his quick little ice-fleck eyes was ahead by seven points.
"I ssspy," he hissed, "with my little eye, sssomething beginning with… C."
"Corsair," said Feather, immediately.
"No," said the Salamander."
"Clover?" offered the girl. The Salamander shook his angular head in resignation.
"Criminy," said Mermaid in disgust.
"That'sss not a sssomething."
"I know. I just don't care for the game."
"Crevasse?"
"Where?"
"I dunno. I just thought t'was the sort of thing ye might see in the woods."
"Maybe if you took off your ridiculous hat you'd have a better time of it."
"There's no need fer ye t' be mean."
"Shut up, Feather."
"He was makin' fun of my hat-"
"Shut up, Feather."
"Cripple?"
"That'sss the one."
"Oh, come now."
"I callsss them like I ssseesss them."
"Wonder how Salamander tastes?"
"Boys, boys! It's my turn. I'll go. I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with… T."
"Tree?"
"That would be too easssy."
"True, that. Um. Trench?"
"No, sorry."
"Doesss anyone hear that?"
"Tributary."
"Oh, well done, Moustache! Your turn."
"No, ssseriousssly. Doesss anyone-"
"I spy with m' little eye something beginning with W."
"Ye ain't wrong, lizard. I hear it too."
"Wagon?"
"Aye."
"Thank you. I thought I wasss going mad."
"Um. I spy with my little eye something beginning with R."
"Kind of a low flapping, innit? Like a big sparrow'awk."
"Road?"
"Too obvious!"
"Right."
"It'sss coming from ahead. Perhapsss we should sssend up a ssscout?"
"It's not right either."
"I was just clearing the air, miss. Rock?"
"You've got it!"
"What in the blazesss" said the Salamander, "isss that?"
For they had come to the end of the path in a little clearing with a handsome stone cottage built in it, next to a simple, workmanlike well with daisies growing all around. But it was not the daisies or the well or the cottage that made the Salamander stop and the girl's jaw fall or the pirates to curse most saltily, but the great big wooden something casting a shadow over it and making a sort of a flapping hissing thumping noise that shook the dew from the leaves of the trees.
"I believe," said the girl, a little spellbound, "that it's an Amazing Going Up In The Air Machine." And it was.
There, hovering in the piney forest air, was what looked like a wooden rowboat hanging from a big round rippling something in a canvas bag that was stretching up towards the sky. The back half of the rowboat was taken up with hissing tin pipes and big tin buckets with steam puffing out of them and complicated things that went pop every few seconds, and there were great wooden wings with silk panels straining against the wind flapping slowly in the air with a terrible noise. In the rowboat sat a kindly old man in black with a long, long scarf and queer glass lenses over his eyes.
"It'sss the Vicar!" hissed the Salamander, scales rippling an angry turquoise as he lashed his powerful tail. "Don't let him get away!" And with a leap and a bound he flashed through the air towards the mooring rope, seizing it in his powerful teeth. The pirates charged forward with a yell and seized it in their hands, except for Moustache who seized it in his hand. But it was too late; the Vicar had already untied the other end and was holding his Going Up In The Air machine down with all his might.
"I'm sorry!" he yelled. "I'm so sorry! But I've got to go!"
"But we need you!" howled the girl. "You have to help us!"
"No time, no time!" came the reply. "I'm late! Frightfully late! I'm sorry!"
"No!"
"Forgive me!"
"No!" The Vicar let go of the rope and his strange craft shot away from the earth like a cork as the mooring line fell in neat coils to the ground.
"The door!" he screamed in a dwindling voice.
The girl stamped her foot in exasperation. "What?" she screamed. "What did you say?"
"The door!" the tiny voice came back. "It explains everything! Sorr-"
And then he was gone, and the girl fought back tears as she watched the speck that was the Amazing Going Up In The Air Machine dwindle to a dot and watched that dot dwindle to a mote.
"Blassst!" said the Salamander.
"Oh, sod," said Mermaid.
"Damn!" cried the girl. "And now what are we supposed to do?"
They sat about for a few minutes, disconsolate, depressed, and stumped.
"Perhapsss," said the Salamander after a bit, "you could check the door?"
"Of course," said the girl, wildly, "the door! The door explains everything!" And she fairly skipped over to the trim little door of the Vicar's cottage, where a few sheets of parchment ruffled in the breeze, swaying on the single nail that hung them from the pulpy wood.
The girl tore them down and went through them. "It says," she read, "once upon a time-"
"-there was a foolish old man who wanted nothing more than to travel the vaulted halls of the Firmament, and soar through the very Gates of Heaven yet living. And so he built, with his own two hands and the sweat of his brow, a skyship that would deliver him to the Sky.
"But he was too foolish, and too old, and his skyship never flew, for there was not a Fire in all of England hot enough to fuse it. And the foolish old man wept.
"Years went by, and the old man, who was a Preacher, gave his sermons and Baptised the children and Buried the old men and forgot about his skyship. And for a time he was Happy.
"But then one day one of his parishioners came to him with a curious Egg that he had found in the Chicken-Coops but which yet was not the Egg of a chicken. And the Preacher, who did not know he was a Fool, consented to examine it.
"He kept it in his Rectory for seven nights and six days. And he found that the Egg was warm to the touch, and that there it was curious Heavy, as if there was a Stone inside it. But in it was no stone.
"On the seventh day the egg hatched. There was no Chick in it but rather a queer Lizard with Wings on its back which was like nothing the old man who was a Preacher had yet seen. 'What are you?' asked the Preacher, and the Lizard said, 'my name is Dragon, what are you?'
"'I am a Preacher,' said the Preacher, 'and I have heard of Dragons. I have heard that they can breath Fire.'
"'Well enough,' said the Dragon, and he blew a ball of Fire the size of a man's Head that warmed the rectory considerable.
"'I have heard of Dragons,' said the Preacher, 'I have heard they have fearsome Claws.'
"'Fearsome enough,' said the Dragon, and he struck a deep Gouge in the Preacher's rude table.
"'I have heard of Dragons,' said the Preacher, 'I have heard that they can Fly.'
"'Alas,' said the Dragon, 'this is our Tragedie, for those who say that Dragons may Fly tell errant Stories. We have Wings, but we are not Birds, for Birds are light enough that their Wings might bear them, but Dragons weigh too much. They say we Fly and breath Fire, but only the last is true.' And he breathed Fire again, and the Preacher saw that here was a flame hotter than any yet in England.
"And so I have embarked on a Great Journey, taking my Dragon with me, for all Dragons desire to Fly, though they have not the strength. They say that I am old and a Fool but even so it makes me sad to leave them- the Farmers, the Goodwives, the children of Dyfed.
"Perhaps my skyship will Fly, and we will storm the very Gates of Heaven.
"Perhaps not. But Men desire to Fly as Dragons do, and I feel certain that, whether or not I see with these living eyes the country of the LORD, I have completed the great Mission of my Life.
"His love be with you. I sign, the Vicar."
The girl read this two or three times. Then, with finality, she laid it down on the Vicar's doorstep, right next to the Vicar's broken old boots.
"I suppose I feel better for knowing the story," she said, "but all the same it's rather too much, isn't it? To have come all this way for so little? I can't help but feel a little- well, a little betrayed. That's all right, isn't it? It's almost as if someone doesn't want me to find love. Does that sound peculiar? Well, it's true! It's one hundred percent true! Nothing ever works out the way I want it to! Nothing at all! And where is that infernal trip-trapping coming from?"
She whirled to confront the pirates or the Salamander or whoever it was who was playing tricks on her, but as soon as she did she realized she had made a mistake. The pirates were gone, so hastily that Mermaid had left his pegleg behind, and the Salamander was gone, except for a few glimmering opal scales scintillating in the dust, and she was alone in the Vicar's clearing, with the Vicar having absconded for his kingdom in the sky.
Alone except for the Wild Hart, fifteen hands high in the morning light, looking at her with his sad eyes.