Mandricardo, page 14
She was still occupied with these thoughts, a few moments later, when Gorgonzola snapped into existence on the hilltop and regarded her with menace in his cold black eyes.
The Old Man Who Looks After Cockaigne was in the backyard of his hut hoeing his cabbages, when the Tarandus came strolling up the lane to pay him a visit. Where you or I would have stopped and stared to see a Tarandus—or, as I should more properly say, the Tarandus, for there is only one of them, yes, even here in Cockaigne—the Old Man merely glanced up from his hoeing, said, “You again, is it?” and returned to his labors.
The Tarandus took this inhospitable greeting in its stride, curled up on the grass beside the cabbage patch and proceeded to groom its whiskers. As it left the road, the dun-colored creature became entirely green, yes, even to the whites of its eyes. This was because the Tarandus, whom the better-thought-of Bestiaries will persist in calling “opal-colored” even when he is nothing of the sort, had been designed by whatever playful caprice of Nature had done the job, more or less along the lines of the common chameleon. Which is to say that the neutral-hued creature always assumed the coloration of whatever background he stood in front of, if you take my meaning.
“They are bothering the beasts, over there at the Fountain,” said the Tarandus to the Old Man Who Looks After Cockaigne.
“They are, are they?” replied the Old Man Who Looks After Cockaigne to the Tarandus. “And who might they be, pray tell?”
“A Tartar knight, an Amazon girl, and a Wicked Enchanter,” said the Tarandus, lazily beginning to clean its left ear. It is a highly intelligent beast, the Tarandus, quite unlike its five fellows who spent their days chained up to guard the approach to the famous Fountain, and who were, as Callipygia had already discovered for herself, rather obtuse and dull-witted. I call the Tarandus pretty shrewd to have realized at a guess that the Wicked Enchanter was a Wicked Enchanter; Mr. Sherlock Holmes could not have done it better.
At this news the Old Man straightened up and tugged at his beard, which was stiff and bristly. He looked unhappy.
“Well, I suppose I have to go and see about it, then,” he said grumpily. “If They had consulted me, I could have told Them not to put the Fountain so kind of out in the open like that, where just about any riffraff could come along and discover it. Have the beasts eaten them, do you know? The strangers, I mean?”
Curled on the green grass, the green Tarandus yawned, revealing a green tongue, of course, and replied: “No, they have not. The first arrival flew over their heads on some sort of rug; the second fed a fat bird to each of my greedy brethren and skipped past him while he was occupied with dining off the gift. The third one appeared out of thin air, as the saying goes.”
“Hmmph,” commented the Old Man Who Looks After Cockaigne. “And you just happened to be passing by when all this happened, I suppose.”
“Not exactly. I was bored and thought that I would go and visit my fellow beasts. They are as much one-of-a-kind as I am, you know, and that means we are very lonely. While they are chained together and have, therefore, company all around to talk to, I, as you no doubt are aware, live alone and prefer it that way. But it does get lonely. …”
“I will chain you up beside your friends if you like,” offered the Old Man, but the Tarandus shook its head very positively.
“No, I think not. I am of solitary habits and retiring disposition, and the chatter of so many empty-headed creatures would get on my nerves terribly. They are all right to talk to once in a while, but to be in their company all the time would fret me to distraction.”
“Well, I’d better be getting over there before they’ve drunk the Fountain dry,” said the Old Man, and he rested the handle of his hoe against the back wall of his cottage, took up a shapeless hat and a comfortable old coat, put these on, and headed around the house for the lane. “Are you coming?” he asked.
The Tarandus shook its head. “I think I will go over and visit the Syl and the Soham instead,” answered the creature, and without further ado, faded away.
“Suit yourself,” shrugged the Old Man Who Looks After Cockaigne. “Pesky creature!” he added.
BOOK FIVE
Ithuriel
21
Disenchanting Mandricardo
“Who,” inquired Callipygia, “are you?” My reader will remember that neither she nor Mandricardo had at this time encountered the Wicked Enchanter face to face, although the Tartar knight had glimpsed him once across the room in the carpet-monger’s storeroom. And Mandricardo was presently in no condition to point him out to Callipygia.
“That is neither here nor there, my wench,” spat the other, advancing upon the Amazon girl with pantherine tread, one clawed hand outstretched as if to scratch her eyes out. She could not help noticing that his wicked black eyes seemed to be spitting red sparks.
“All right, then,” said Callipygia belligerently. “Try this question on for size, then—what the devil do you want?”
She was in no mood, just then, for being bothered by meddlesome strangers, was our Callipygia. Here was her lover suddenly transformed into a fat baby—and a very hungry one, at that—and, to make matters worse, she had just discovered that he needed changing (not that he was wearing anything to change). Callipygia was no stranger to babies, not with sixteen sisters and more than a few of them married and mothers themselves, but she was going through a difficult and trying time, just now, and this nosy tall man with the glaring black eyes would just have to come sticking his nose in where he wasn’t wanted … and her with her hands full of squalling baby, and, wouldn’t you just know? not a bottle or a clean diaper for half a kingdom round, most likely.
Gorgonzola, seizing his opportunity, advanced upon her with lithe and pard-like tread, his eyes spitting red sparks. This was his moment, and he intended to seize it by the forelock, as you might say. The mysterious Mandricardo, with his unknown magical powers, or, at least, Gorgonzola thought he had magical powers, was for some reason nowhere to be seen: there was only this fat, frumpy female and her yelling brat between him and the Magic Flying Carpet.
“That Carpet, he hissed, advancing on her. He was close enough by now so that she could see that his eyes really were spitting red-hot sparks; even as she watched, one fell on the collar of his robe and singed a hole right through it. “Step aside, wench—I want that Carpet!”
“Oh, this Carpet?” asked Callipygia, pretending innocence. Then she put the baby down on the Carpet behind her and stood on it herself, legs spread, folding her arms and interposing her not-inconsiderable self between the Wicked Enchanter and the thing he craved. As she stood there with folded arms, one hand was playing fretfully with the curious old bronze ring she wore about her upper arm, you remember, the one she had found in the Troll’s cupboard.
“That Carpet is my property, and I mean to have it back,” he said, and he ground his teeth together—an unnerving sound that rather put Callipygia’s own teeth on edge. “Some lout of a Tartar stole it from me, the thieving rascal—”
“Oh, you must be this Gorgonzola who has been causing such a lot of bother down in Upper and Lower Pamphyllia,” she said. “I’d been wondering when you were going to turn up again. Well, you aren’t getting this Carpet, so be off with you!”
“Madame, if I have to drag you off the Carpet by your hair, and kick that ugly brat of yours out of the way, I’ll not scruple,” began the Wicked Enchanter nastily, but Callipygia, just then, had completely run out of patience. “Ugly brat,” forsooth—and just when she had been thinking what a lovely fat baby her lover had once been!
Irritably twisting the bronze ring about and about on her upper arm, she snorted: “Oh, bother you and your wishes! I wish you were on the other side of the Moon!”
Whereupon, in point of fact—and very swiftly—he was. That mysterious bronze ring of Callipygia’s simply didn’t fool around: a wish is a wish seems to sum up the gist of the matter.
Poor Gorgonzola! For, you know, come to think of it, and taking all in all, he was not without a few sterling qualities—for a fiend, that is. He was tenacious; he was resourceful; and not without a certain bravery. Ah, well … one wonders what his next thought was, finding himself where Callipygia had wished him to be. Surprised., simply isn’t the proper word, I would hazard the guess.
And whatever other emotions must have gone seething through his breast, disgruntlement and chagrin must surely have been among them: for so swiftly and suddenly was he transported thither, that the abruptness of his transition somehow jarred loose that copper bottle of his, the one with the wishing-potion in it.
The bottle rolled out of sight in some of the taller weeds that grew beside the stone wall which encircled the famous Fountain, and nobody at all paid any attention to it, then or for very long after.
So much for Gorgonzola; it is just as well, I suppose, that he is now out of our story entirely, and we need no longer worry for fear that he will somehow wreak a horrible revenge on Doucelette and Florizel. …
Whether or not Gorgonzola was astonished, Callipygia certainly was. Her jaw dropped and she paled beneath her healthy tan, looking quickly around. But he was gone, no doubt about it.
As for Limburger, well, he gasped, turned up his eyes, and fainted dead away. This made the second time in this story that Limburger fainted, and I’m sorry to say that I think he was a little too nervous to be going around with Wicked Enchanters and evil genies and that sort. That is what you might call “life in the fast lane,” and it requires a stronger and more durable constitution than Limburger’s to keep up the pace.
However, as Limburger passes out of our story very shortly, it’s a moot point. One hopes, thereafter, having learned his lesson, he avoids the company of enchanters and finds a secure niche in some lucrative, honest trade. Well, we can always hope.
It was not very long after this that Callipygia found the means to break Mandricardo’s enchantment, or to nullify his transformation, or whatever the correct term is for one who has been accidentally youthened (if there is such a word, and if there isn’t, there should be, for just such occasions as this); youthened, as I was saying, by having accidentally drunk of the waters of Fons Juventutem. He recovered his former appearance and age and everything, and at the moment the transformation occurred, had obviously been in the middle of swearing by devils again, for he regained his normal self in the midst of saying, “I say, by Apsu’s ankles and by the stomach of Set and by the vocal cords of Vukub-Kakix, what—!”
Then, rather suddenly, realizing that he was himself again, and also that he was lying there stark naked, he crimsoned, snatched up his lion-skins and draped them about his middle parts, saying plaintively, and rather incoherently, “Oh, now, I say, dash it all, Cally, I mean, what? Give a felly a word of warning, can’t you, what, old girl, eh?”
She politely turned her back while he climbed into his garments again as hurriedly as possible, and if you have never happened to see a knight half-in and half-out of his armor, hopping about on one leg while trying to get the other into a sheet-metal nether garment, well, it is quite a sight to behold.
When he was all together again and decent, they embraced and kissed rather enthusiastically and began babbling questions to each other and so on, at such a rate that neither of them could understand what it was that the other one was trying to say.
It was while this was going on that Limburger, having recovered from his swoon, decided to slip away. He left the scene by the remarkably simple method of running away—and the beasts of fable watched him run past them, and they blinked puzzledly, and did nothing at all to stop him, or even try to seize him, for, after all, they had been chained up in this place for the single purpose of keeping people from going up the hill to where the famous Fountain was. But nobody had ever told them to interfere with people who happened to be going down the hill, and that is why they did not bother Limburger.
He nearly fainted again from relief, took to his heels, and very rapidly passed out of this scene and, in fact, out of our story entirely.
Not a bad fellow, Limburger, taking it all in all. Deplorable taste in employers, of course, but then, one cannot always pick and choose, can one?
While Limburger was engaged in dwindling into the distance, Mandricardo and Callipygia were busy hugging and kissing and all that sort of thing that parted lovers tend to do, rather enthusiastically, when their sundered paths are joined once again. They were also talking rapidly to each other between these hugs and kisses. The Amazon girl was telling him all about how she had returned from scaring up some lunch only to find him gone, and how she had followed him here and found him gone, and then how that really irritating Wicked Enchanter had come along, and so on, while Mandricardo was saying that he had only come over here to fetch some bally water, what, and how in the world (now that he came to think of it) did she get by the beasts, what, since she didn’t have the Magic Flying Carpet, what, and she told him how she had employed what was originally intended to be their lunch (that is, the five fat game-birds) to the purpose of distracting the monsters; and he remarked that that was dashed clever of her, and so on.
When she got around to mentioning the Wicked Enchanter and how he had menaced her before vanishing so welcomely, but also so inexplicably, Mandricardo was interested.
“Oh, I say, not that rotter caused all the fuss down in Upper Pamphyllia, not to mention Lower Pamphyllia … bally old Gorgonwhatzizname?”
She informed him that such was the case. “The very one,” nodded the Amazon girl. “Wanted your nice Carpet, he did, and was going to turn me into a toad, I suppose, unless I gave it to him—”
Sir Mandricardo was quite put out to learn this.
“The cad,” he said, ruffled that even a Wicked Enchanter—and everyone knows what they are like—would go sneaking up on girls, what, trvin’ to snatch one’s Magic Carpet away from one. Such things simply weren’t done, not done at all, at least in the best circles, anyway.
Mandricardo paid no attention to the fact that it was, after all, from this same Wicked Enchanter that he had purloined the article in question in the first place, back in Chapter Five. Had you happened to have brought this interesting, but ultimately irrelevant, fact to his attention, I have little doubt but what he would have brushed it aside like an annoying fly, remarking something to the effect of, hem, a mere detail, that, I mean, the principle of the thing—!
“Wish I’d been there, old girl, what,” he declared stoutly. “I’d have taught the rotter not to go slinkin’ around threatenin’ delicately-nurtured women and tryin’ to pinch a felly’s Carpet, deuced if I wouldn’t.”
“Well, you were there, of course, it’s only that you weren’t—you … in a manner of speaking,” Callipygia, rather confusedly (and, also, rather confusingly, for it was obvious that Mandricardo didn’t have the faintest idea of what she was talking about). For it suddenly occurred to the Amazon girl that, quite possibly, even quite likely, her betrothed did not at all remember having been transformed into a fat baby by the famous Fountain. So she explained to him all about the thing, and its properties, and the inscription in Latin, and all.
Well, he was quite dumbfounded. At least, he certainly looked dumbfounded.
“Do you mean to say that I—I mean, dash it!—that it was the dratted Fountain of—? Well, I’ll be dashed! I’d no idea, you know, what—thought the bally thing was just an old well—well, of course, Latin—I mean, dash it all, bally Latin and all, hic, haec, hoc, and all that sort of rot—!”
I have little doubt that Sir Mandricardo would have been fully capable of burbling on in this manner for at least a half a page more, had not Callipygia flung her arms about him at this point. Whereupon, rather naturally, there ensued yet another round of the hugging-and-kissing, until time was called for both to recover their breath.
And it was very shortly after this that the Old Man Who Looks After Cockaigne arrived on the scene and they would have had to stop all the hugging-and-kissing anyway, in order to pay attention to this new visitor, had they not already completed the latest bout … and I will take the opportunity afforded by his arrival to close the chapter at this point, if you have no objections, and save the scene of his introduction to our hero and heroine until the next episode.
22
A Luncheon in Cockaigne
Now he came huffing and puffing up the road, muttering to himself as very old people sometimes do and complaining about the steepness of the way, although the fact of the matter was that he suffered from a certain shortness of breath. And had it not been for the faded and patched and rather dilapidated old clothes that he wore, you would have thought him a personage of considerable importance, from the way that the Bleps and the Strycophanes fawned upon him and licked his heels, yes, and the gray Calcar, too, as well as the Eale with the movable horns, and that is not to mention the Leucrocotta with her golden mane and nicely-matching whiskers.
Mandricardo was impressed. “I say, Cally, look! Bally beasts don’t seem to be tryin’ to gobble him up, what?”
“Well, of course they aren’t,” grumbled the Old Man as he came up to where they were standing on the top of the little hill right next to the famous Fountain, for old or no, the Old Man rejoiced in excellent hearing and had caught Mandricardo’s remark to Callipygia. “Of course they aren’t,” he was saying, “for who do you think feeds the poor beasts, anyway? Somebody would have to, wouldn’t they now, or else the miserable creatures would starve to death, chained to those posts the way they are. And they would be stupid indeed if they didn’t recognize their keeper, now wouldn’t they? Of course, today I’ll probably skimp on their meal since the lady here has already fed them on fat birds, as the Tarandus mentioned.”
