The Stone Princess – Part 2

For many sunny days and starry nights the squire rode, over steep green hills and rushing silver
rivers, through thick forests and grassy meadows, his head filled up with youthful dreams of heroism and adventure, following the lovebird as it winged its way, happily, back towards its home.

But then, one night, when the moon was particularly large and bright and perfectly round, like a pearl floating in the glimmering ocean of the sky, and he was encamped in the middle of a dark forest, he had a strange and bewildering dream.

He dreamt that he was in that garden far away in the enchanted land he sought, that the sun was shining and the birds singing and that in front of him was the stone princess and looking up at her face noticed how radiant her beauty was and reaching out and stroking her face said to her, “How will I ever rescue you, my princess?”.

Suddenly, however, to Gordo’s astonishment, the stone eyes of the statue seemed to glow with life and, its stone lips curling into a pretty smile, it looked down at him saying, in a joyful voice, “You will, Sir Knight, because you are the one who the winds of fate have chosen to be my deliverer and they will be your guide. Fear not, my love, and trust in your fate”.

But then, in the middle of the dream, he was woken with a start by two young barefooted peasant girls who pleaded with him, “Oh please, Sir Knight, please help us. Our village is in dire peril. You must save us”.

Gordo tried to explain to the girls that he was on a quest to save a cursed princess and her country from an evil vampire queen but they wouldn’t listen, “Our need is as great as any kingdoms”, they said, “For without your help, Sir Knight, the poor people of our village will undoubtedly starve”.

Then he remembered the words that the stone princess had spoken to him in the dream about
trusting in his fate.

“Perhaps this is part of my fate too”, he thought.

And then, looking at the dirty yet bright honest faces of the two girls, the squire, who had known poverty and hunger himself, couldn’t help but take pity on them and, agreeing to help them,
followed them as they led him into their village.

“There is a well at the centre of our village”, explained one of the girls walking in front of his horse, “From which we get our water for drinking and watering our fields in times of drought but, one night, a large brass coloured serpent with a horn of steel came and wrapped itself around the well. Now whenever we go to draw water from it, we must pay the serpent, give it a goat or a sheep or a pig before it will let us draw water. The bravest men of our village have tried to drive the slithering beast away with pitchforks and scythes and blazing torches but it has a long forked tongue of silver that lashes out as fast as the lightning and kills all, even the strongest of men, with only a single touch”.

Listening to the girl describe the creature, the squire started to doubt himself and his abilities.

“Can I really defeat such a terrible monster?”, he wondered, “ Whose long tongue kills with merely a single touch?”.

But then, up ahead, he saw the creature with his own eyes and the well that it was wrapped around; a brass scaled viper as long and as broad as a cobbled, country road with a hiss like steam rising from red hot metal and a long straight horn of solid steel rising from its nose and before he had even got within a foot of it, he saw the snakes long, three-pronged, forked tongue dart from its enormous mouth as fast as a bolt of lightning, towards him, missing him only by inches.

“Proceed no further, foolish Knight”, said the snake in a slow, slithering voice, “For where you are, my tongue cannot reach you, but take two steps closer and, armour or no armour, my tongue will strike you dead in a semi-second”.

“What a terror”, thought the squire, studying the cruel serpent with widening eyes, “Squire or Knight; King or Emperor; surely no man of mortal flesh could slay such a fearsome creature”.

But then, pondering the problem of the Serpents long, lashing tongue, a clever ruse dawned upon him, for he remembered a certain rhyme from his boyhood days and, smiling, he said to the giant snake, “Worry not, Sir Serpent, for I have not come to try and slay you; no, no; but merely to ask you if you can repeat a rather difficult rhyme for me”.

Hearing this, the serpent raised a scaly copper brow and its eyes lit up like yellow lanterns with curiosity,“Ohh? A rhyme? Well then. Speak this rhyme to me”, it said.

And so the Squire, coughing to clear the dust from his throat, began to recite the rhyme, “How much truth, to a ruthless youth, can a toothless soothsayer truthfully say?”.

The Serpent laughed, “Why that is easy”, it said, “Any child with a quarter of brain could repeat such a rhyme”.

And yet, when the serpent tried to speak the rhyme its tongue only got tangled and tied up with knots; so tangled, in fact, that it could no longer lash out with it.

Seeing the serpents distress as it tried to untwist its tongue, the squire then seized the opportunity to strike, charging bravely towards its vast, scaly, brass coloured, slithering coils and hacking at them with his sword and, though the skin of the snake was as tough as tanned leather and its body broader than the trunks of two oaks, the squire kept on slashing with his sword in the same place until he had cut the slithering giant completely in two.

Then,with a terrible, hissing cry of fear and pain that sounded almost like a howling gale to his ears, the serpent closed its scaly eyelids, becoming as limp and lifeless as an old dead tree trunk and, as it did so, Gordo saw that deep inside the belly of the serpent was a sword; a remarkable sword with a blade shaped just like a wriggling serpent and made of a strange green metal with patterns upon its blade and hilt like snakeskin and, picking up the snakeskin sword and holding it aloft, Gordo, for once truly felt like a knight.

Then, throwing away the sword he had stolen from his old master said, “Here is a sword that I have earned the right to hold; a sword that is truly mine”.

And watching Gordo’s victory over the serpent all the villagers who lived round about now came running out of their little thatched dwellings to cheer and praise the squire for his bravery and cunning.

“Oh, thank you, Sir Knight”, said the two peasant girls who had led him to the village, kissing him upon each of his cheeks, “Now our villagers will no longer have to beg for water”.

But then, just at that moment, there was a loud booming crack of thunder from high overhead and, looking up, all saw big dark clouds coming together to form a dragon like shape in the skies and then, down out of the mouth of that dragon cloud came a thunderbolt and, riding upon that thunderbolt as if it were a witches broom, came the evil lightning queen.

“Who dares to destroy my beautiful serpent?”, bellowed the evil queen, her pointed boot heels crackling with electricity as she landed upon the ground, “Whoever they be, let them pay with their peril”.

Terrified by the lightning queen, the villagers who had earlier cheered now only cowered and quaked, but the Squire, emboldened by his defeat of the monstrous serpent, had more spirit within him.

“I, Sir Gordo, killed your Serpent”, he said, bravely, stepping towards her and raising his fabulous snakeskin sword.

Looking the squire up and down, however, and probing his mind with her icy, piercing eyes like two sharp, iron nails, the wicked lightning queen only started to shake with laughter, “You!”, she said, a broad, heartless grin curving across her cold, pallid features, “You are no knight. You are but a playacting peasant and a fool. Well, if you have forgotten your station, Sir Serf, then I will remind you of it”.

And, raising both her hands that then crackled all over with tiny jagged bolts of blue lightning, she prepared to work some terrible spell upon the squire and, for a moment, Gordo felt helpless against the evil queen.

But then, darting down from the skies, screeching and clawing bravely, came the little love bird and with its beak it pecked her twice upon the crown of her head which startled her so much that the spell that had been aimed at the squire now hit a willow tree instead, turning it into a tiny scurrying spider.

Angrily, the evil queen now turned her attentions towards the bird, pointing a bony finger at it, that then crackled with more bright blue sparks of electricity but the bird would not stay still long enough for the Queen to take proper aim and, while she was being distracted, the Squire Gordo raised up the serpentine sword he had taken from the belly of the monster and quickly lopped off Ulcimea’s evil head.

Falling to the ground with a thud the head of the undead queen let out a horrible screech and, haplessly, her headless body struggled, bent over, to locate the head and place it back between her shoulders and, when it finally managed to do so, to her great embarrassment, she found she had put her head on upside down by mistake.

Blushing from her upturned cheeks, the wicked lightning queen then decided it best to beat a hasty retreat, “But I will teach you a lesson you will not soon forget, Squire Gordo”, said the Vampiress as another long bolt of blue lightning streaked down and snatched her away as fast as a finger click up into the clouds, “Mark my words!”.

Now, the evil queen gone, the little love bird fluttered down, coming to rest upon Gordo’s left shoulder, “That must have been the wicked queen which you sung about, my friend”, he said to the bird, stroking its brightly plumed head and thankful for its timely assistance, “Let us hope our next encounter with her will be as fortunate”.

But one embarrassing defeat was quite enough for Ulcimea and, as soon as she had got back to her
pitch black fortress and put her head on the right way up, she summoned down an ancient map from one of the many dark and dusty shelves in her secret room that then unrolled itself obediently across her table.

And, studying the map, she saw the path that lay ahead of Gordo; then, dipping a quill made of
dragon bone into a bubbling inkwell filled with bright green fairy blood, she drew all kinds of terrible traps, monsters and calamities upon the parchment that by the power of her evil magic became real obstacles barring Gordo’s way.

“Let he who dares to meddle in the affairs of darkness learn the might of evil’s sword”, she cried, cackling hysterically; her wicked laughter echoing throughout her dark fortress.