Mandricardo, page 9
Before long, explanations were finished, introductions were made, and things were sorted out rather neatly. Florizel dismounted and saluted Mandricardo courteously.
“Hail, sir dight! Blease egsguse by speege, I’b god a code, you dow.”
“Not at all, dear chap, very happy to make your acquaintance, I’m sure,” said Mandricardo affably. “Gesundheit,” he added, for Florizel had just sneezed violently.
Florizel then turned to Doucelette, who eyed him coyly. He blushed violently, recognizing her instantly, and bowed low.
“Hail, brincess! I cad helb speeging lige dhis, you dow. I’b god a code.”
“I quite understand, Sir Florizel,” she answered sweetly. “I usually suffer terribly from them in the winter … have you tried hot tea with honey and lemon?”
“Not surprised the poor chap’s got the sniffles, what?” remarked Mandricardo to the Amazon girl. “Deuced place is soggy as a swamp. And look at all that mist. Must be the dashed Undina these folks have been havin’, what?”
“It is,” Callipygia nodded. “Florizel and I were just on our way to do something about her when you came swooping overhead on that flying thing. He has this plan to rid the kingdom of the Undina, but he won’t tell me what it is, except to admit that he got the whole idea from a copy of Count Articiocchi’s Dictionary of Famous Quests.”
“Fine book, that. Never read the thing, meself.”
“He says it will also rid Upper Pamphyllia of its Salamandre at the same time, don’t ask me how,” she added.
Mandricardo twirled his moustaches: the dampness in the air was making them droop like day-old strands of spaghetti. “That a fact? Sort of killin’ two quests with one stone, what, what? Haw!—did you hear that one, Cally? I said, ‘Sort of killin’ two—’”
“I heard it,” she assured him.
They resolved to have a council of war on the instant, and all sat down on the Magic Flying Carpet, which was the least soggy place to sit. Florizel now held forth, as best he could, what with his awful head cold.
“Dow, here’s by blan,” he said. “Virst, we god do hab a liddle talg wid de Undina. We dell her whad de Salamandre’s beed saying aboud her. …”
Florizel continued his monologue at some length, but I will not go into it at this point for two excellent reasons. For one, you are about to see the plan carried out in action, which is much more fun than just hearing an outline of it. For another, I am beginning to get about as tired of writing out Florizel’s dialogue in “cold-in-the-head-talk” as you are probably tired of reading it.
So from here on at least to the end of the next chapter, I will spell Florizel’s conversations as ordinarily they would be spelled, if he had not had a bad cold in the head. I hope you will make allowances.
And, if we are agreed on that detail, let me wind this one up so that we can get right into the next chapter and have a bit of action for a change. …
13
Outwitting the Monsters
They all got on the Magic Flying Carpet, leaving their steeds to roam at will in the soggy meadow and crop the lush verdure while they soared aloft, settling on the rim of the hills which overlooked the Undina’s waterlogged bower. They found the overweight elemental finishing up a snack of sardines.
“Oop! Goodness me, you popped up so quick … do you have to give a body a start like that?” she demanded, startled.
“Sorry, ma’m,” said Florizel—ever the picture of knightly courtesy, even when in the company of water elemental—“but we were just wondering, my friends and I, that is. …”
“Well, what is it? Hic. There, now, I hope you’re satisfied! You’ve given me the hiccups … or maybe it was that last sardine, it might have been a bit too oily. Hic. All your fault, I’ll wager,” said the Undina, crossly.
“Sorry again, ma’m, but we were wondering if you’ve heard any of the things the Salamandre, over in the next kingdom, has been saying about you? I’m afraid he’s been using words like ‘fat’ and ‘blowsy’ and ‘no better than she should be’ rather freely, you know!”
“Oh, is that so?” snapped the Undina, flirting her tail dangerously. “Well, and how does he know what I’m like, is what I’d like to know! Hic”
“Quite right, to be sure,” murmured Florizel soothingly. “Personally, I think it’s quite out of order for him to say such things about you, really quite uncalled for. For one thing, I don’t think that your hair is dyed—”
“Oh!” she gasped, outraged. “And did he say that? Hic!”
“I’m afraid so,” said Florizel apologetically, while Mandricardo snickered into his gauntlet and strove manfully to keep a straight face. “In fact, worse than that, he had been heard to observe that not only is your hair dyed, but that the dye job was a cheap one and shows at the roots—”
“Ooooh!” shrilled the Undina in scandalized tones, flushing indigo.
“And what he had to say about your morals … well, I’m just glad to have met you and to have seen for myself what a fine person you seem to be, a real lady, if I’m any judge, not the loose sort that he makes you out to be … cuddling up with any cuttlefish that comes along (his very words), and an easy mark for a shark on a lark when it’s dark. …”
Florizel continued in this vein for some little time, while the Undina (and to do her justice, she was not really very bright, but then few Undinas are, despite all the fish they eat and which are supposed to be very good for the brain) … while the Undina, as I was saying, got madder and madder, flipping her tail and smacking the surface of the water until she had whipped it into a froth.
“Just you wait, Mister Knight,” swore the Undina, stung to a fury by this time. She was making circular wavy motions with her hands in the air, and already a stiffish breeze was blowing up, tossing the waves to whitecaps. “Just you wait till I whip up this whirlwind, and I’ll go visit Mister Bigmouth over there in that other kingdom. Then we’ll see what he has to say!”
‘“Yes, ma’m, I’m sure you’ll give it to him good,” smiled Florizel. “We’ll be there to watch you teach him the penalty for telling tales on your neighbors.”
They ducked down off the skyline, climbed aboard the Magic Flying Carpet, and went soaring over the border into Upper Pamphyllia, where they soon found the Salamandre basking in his own heat at the bottom of that volcano.
“Oh, it’s you fellows again, is it?” he asked equably. “Brought some friends this time, did you? Hope you’re still not trying to talk me into moving to some desert or other, because if you are, I still haven’t changed my—”
“Oh, no, not at all,” said Florizel. “Why, we just came from Lower Pamphyllia, and we just couldn’t stay there a minute longer, what with that loudmouthed and very unladylike Undina, who’s living over there now, you know, and the terrible things she’s been saying about you. …”
“Oh?” said the Salamandre, cocking his head curiously. “And what has the soggy creature been saying about me that’s gotten you all upset?”
“Well, she says—mind you, sir, these are her words, now, and certainly not my own!—that you aren’t much a Salamandre, that your fires went out ever so long ago, and that the only way you can stay hot these days is to hang around a volcano, where it’s just naturally hot.”
“Oh, she says that, does she?” inquired the Salamandre dangerously, slipping his forked snake’s tongue in and out of his mouth very fast and looking temperish.
“She certainly does; and that’s not all,” added Florizel. “She went on and on about your fires being out, and said your tummy is full of cold ashes and clinkers—”
“Clinkers, eh?” breathed the Salamandre. Smoke and steam had begun to rise from the crater bed beneath him and his long, curved, alligatory body seemed to quake and quiver in the shimmering air.
“Yes, sir, clinkers. She says you couldn’t make the water boil in a hot water bottle—that it would take two of you just to light a match—that the worst you could do to anybody would be to give them a mild sunburn if they got too close to you—”
Florizel continued in this inventive vein for a little, while the Salamandre went from a simmer to a boil. Rocks thirty feet away were beginning to blister and bubble in the heat of his fury. He started to whip his hot tail back and forth, raising dust and clouds of live steam.
“Just you wait,” panted the Salamandre, “until I whip up a fire-storm … I’ll pay the blabbermouthed lady a bit of a surprise visit, and then you’ll see who can boil water—!”
“Oh, you won’t have to do that, sir,” murmured Florizel politely. “When we left her, she was busy raising a whirlwind to come and visit you … I believe she was yelling something about even the two Pamphyllias not being big enough for her to share with a burnt-out old fire elemental who couldn’t toast a frankfurter if he tried.”
“She said that, did she,” said the Salamandre, breathing hard. “Well, just let me get this fire-storm started, and we’ll see what she has to say … I’ll show her how I can boil water!”
A cloud of sparks big as fireflies were now whirling around the furious elemental, and Florizel decided that it was time to be gone from this scene of imminent carnage.
“Sir knight, would you be so kind as to take us to the top of that mountain over there?” he asked Mandricardo. “I think it would be a lot healthier for all concerned if we were there and not here when the two elementals have their discussion. Besides, from that height we should enjoy a good view of the battle.”
“Top-hole, my dear fella! Always happy to oblige. Fly, Carpet!” burbled Sir Mandricardo. He was in high good humor.
Once safely ensconced atop the nearby mountain,* the four sat down on conveniently situated boulders. The view from this height was indeed perfect, affording them a broad vista of the crater of the extinct volcano beneath their heels, and, over to the right, the green and soggy hills of Lower Pamphyllia, shrouded in drizzly veils of humid mist.
From beneath came the sound of six thousand teakettles on a boil, and a whirling cloud of sparks ascended like a meteor, for once going up instead of down.
“Here comes the Salamandre!” chirped the Tartar knight. “I say, the old fella does look mad—see the glint in his eye, Cally?”
“Positively murderous!”
And, just at the same time, something like a funnel of fog appeared on the horizon, rapidly traveling closer to the scene.
“And here comes the Undina, I’ll wager,” smiled Florizel.
The two infuriated elementals spotted each other in the same moment and paused in their headlong flight to circle around each other in mid-air. They did this for all the world like two prizefighters in the ring, looking for an opening in the other’s guard.
“Full of clinkers and cold ashes, am I?” yelled the Salamandre.
“So my beautiful tresses are the result of a bad dye job, are they?” shrilled the Undina.
Furious, the two hurtled at each other and met in the middle.
There sounded a sound that could best be spelled FOOMPH, so we shall spell it that way:
FOOMPH.
The sizzling cloud of sparks vanished; so did the funnel of damp fog.
The ground shook slightly underfoot.
There rose, piling up and turning inside out and twisting and turning, a huge mushroom-headed cloud of boiling hot steam. It towered and towered and grew and grew until it was taller than the mountains.
Then it began to bend in the wind, like a top-heavy umbrella.
A stiff breeze was blowing. The upper works of the mushroom cloud began to fray and tatter, blown in the wind.
Hot as it was, the live steam quickly cooled. A pattering sounded. Raindrops were falling from the remnants of the cloud overhead. They hopped and bounced on the sizzling hot stones below.
There was no sign of either the Undina or the Salamandre. The two combatants had both vanished from view. They had destroyed each other, evidently; they had canceled each other.
“I seem to have missed something,” confessed Callipygia. “What happened? Where are those two?”
“They destroyed each other, when they touched,” smiled Prince Florizel. “Fire and water don’t mix, you know. All that’s left of them is that cloud of steam,” he said, pointing to what little was left of it.
“Well, I’ll be dashed!” confessed Sir Mandricardo. “Deuced clever of you, old chap, what!”
“Yes, Sir knight, a brilliant achievement,” said Doucelette, giving him a coy little smile. The admiration in her emerald eyes made him turn pink and start to stammer.
“Oh, it was really n-nothing, you know,” he said hastily.
“No, really,” said the Amazon girl, “it really was a very clever idea. I should never have thought of it. Wherever did you get the idea … what was there in that book about quests that made you think of it? Did someone else pit a Salamandre against an Undina sometime?”
“No, not that I know of,” said Florizel modestly. “But it really wasn’t so much to do, you know. Not really. I mean, if you have read page 137 of the Dictionary of Famous Quests, the same idea would probably have occurred to you.”
“Well, dash it all, sir, what is on page whatever-it-was of Whatzisname’s book?” demanded Mandricardo.
“Oh, it’s very simple,” said Florizel. “You see, when the present King of Pantouflia was a young man, they were having trouble up in that country with two monsters. One of them was a remora, an ice-worm—a creature that radiates intense cold; the other was a firedrake, which radiates extreme heat. He—Prince Prigio, I mean, the present king as a youngster—taunted the two into fighting, guessing that heat would cancel out cold and, er, vice versa. Which is exactly what happened.”
“And so, Sir Florizel, you presumed correctly that if heat and cold would cancel and destroy each other, the same thing would happen when water and fire met, is that it?” asked Doucelette.
“I’m afraid that’s all there was to it,” smiled Florizel.
“Good show! I say, old chap, jolly good show!” barked Mandricardo, slapping the slimmer knight on the shoulder, a buffet that might well stagger an ox. “So your quick thinking, what, has destroyed both Scourges at once, and won the Quest for you. …”
“And also the hand of the Princess Doucelette in marriage,” grinned Callipygia.
“Hem, haw. That’s right.”
Doucelette turned furiously pink to the tips of her ears, and appeared to be intently studying the pebble she was shoving around with the toe of her small slipper.
Florizel, no less pink, was studying with equal intensity the shape of a cloud overhead.
And it was time for everybody to get back aboard the Magic Flying Carpet and get back to Bongozinga, or do I mean Zingobonga?
14
Gorgonzola Reconnoiters
It was sometime after these events that the Wicked Enchanter arrived in Bongozinga, flying hither on a wish, and was very much surprised and considerably displeased to find everybody acting as if they were quite happy.
He had expected to find a miserable populace clamoring for relief against the depredations of the horrible parching heat of the Salamandre and the entire kingdom slowly withering away into a veritable desert … but here were the cheerful Bongozingians tying up garlands of blossoms and graceful green boughs to every lamp-post and setting out long tables upon which picnic hampers were being unloaded by the wives of the happy burghers.
It was glaringly evident that some sort of public celebration was underway, although the baffled and annoyed Gorgonzola could not for the life of them imagine what the Upper Pamphyllians could possibly have cause to celebrate. When the innkeepers began rolling out into the town square huge barrels of ale and the town crier bawled out the news that free ale was offered to one and all, courtesy of the Palace, there no longer remained any doubt in Gorgonzola’s mind.
He and his faithful henchman, Limburger, had arrived, materializing in the rooftops of the town. There they huddled among the chimneypots, peering down into the quaint and crooked little cobblestone streets with envy and curiosity. At length, the Wicked Enchanter bestirred himself and kicked his servant into attention.
“I cannot bear this not knowing what is going on, by the Deggial!" he swore. “So I shall descend into the streets and seek out some responsible burgher to query on recent goings-on in the kingdom.”
Limburger looked askance at this news. He eyed the lean enchanter dubiously, his beady gaze lingering on the purple robe adorned with stars and moons and comets and ringed planets, all picked out in silver embroidery, and at the live cobra which was wound about the narrow waist of his master and which served him as a belt or sash or something.
“I fear me, Master, that even the lowly peasants will know you for an Enchanter, if not in fact the celebrated Gorgonzola the Great,” he began, but the other cut off his words with an abrupt gesture.
“I have already anticipated that possibility, dolt,” he grated. “And I shall cast a Glamour over myself, to make it appear that I am some wealthy and powerful emir or nabob from some friendly Eastern realm, here a-visiting. That should suffice to permit me to pass among the locals without arousing their suspicions unduly.”
At this happy news, the good Limburger relaxed visibly.
“In that case, dear Master, we will have nothing to fear from chance discovery,” he simpered.
“My thoughts, exactly. Still and all,” mused Gorgonzola, fingering his long and bony chin, “we had best steer clear of the palace. It would never do to risk running into that unknown knight who carried off my Magic Flying Carpet and who rescued the Princess Doucelette from my lustful clutches.”
Limburger looked puzzled. “But, Master, why should he recognize you, when you are under a Glamour?”
“Because, fool, I begin to suspect that the Unknown possesses some powerful magic of his own! How else would he know just where and when to be in order to carry off Carpet and Princess in one fell swoop?”
“Mayhap you are right, Master, dear,” said Limburger.
