Dragon, Dragon and Other Tales, Page 2
John Gardner
“Ar har!” said the giant. “What have we here? I do believe it’s nothing else but a fat little tailor!”
The giant was so big that to look into the tailor shop he had to kneel down in the street and press his cheek against the pavement. All the tailor could see of him was his enormous, watery eye, and the tailor was so terrified he couldn’t so much as squeak.
The giant said, “What luck! I was saying to Moranda just this morning,
Moranda, Moranda, get ready for meat!
Today I will bring you a Tailor to eat!
At that, the tailor shook worse than ever and thought surely he would die of fright.
But just that moment a cheer went up from the people who were watching, for who should be coming down the tailor’s street but the king himself and the royal thirty-day army. When His Majesty saw the giant he hastily ducked down an alley, yelling, “Charge, brave boys!” And they charged, being mostly young and foolish. Before the giant knew what was happening, the gallant little army of tinkers and watchmakers and plowboys and bank clerks had scratched up his face with their keen-edged weapons till he looked like he’d just come running through a prickler patch.
The giant was furious, and howling with rage, he snatched up the whole gallant army in his two hands and went thundering home, bellowing unto the heavens as he went,
Moranda, Moranda, get ready for meat!
Today I will bring you an Army to eat!
The timid little tailor, who had seen it all, was so moved by the courage of the gallant little army that he could scarcely contain himself. “Oh why can’t I be brave like that?” he cried out, wringing his fingers. However, he wasn’t the type, and he knew it, and there was an end of it. And so he sat in the middle of the shop, sunk deep in gloom, and wished he had never been born.
The king, meanwhile, was extremely annoyed at having lost all his army at one fell swoop, and he made a law that from now on every man in the kingdom would have to serve for ninety days in the royal army so that the realm would be adequately protected at all times. He put his new law in all the papers and sent it through the realm by messengers and had copies of it nailed to every lamppost in every town from one border to the other, and before long the law came to the lamppost in front of the tailor shop.
The tailor, squinting cautiously past the curtain on his front window, read the royal proclamation and shook to his boots and thought, “I won’t do it. How can I? How can they ask it?” However, he did not feel righteous about not doing it this time, for he remembered those gallant young tinkers and watchmakers and plowboys and bank clerks who had saved his life before. And soon it occurred to him that probably no one would want to be a member of the army now, having seen what could happen to a brave little army. Immediately the tailor was indignant, as a citizen, and he realized what his duty was. He began making signs which said JOIN NOW! in big red letters, and he nailed them to sticks for carrying, and when he was finished he intended to march in front of the palace and rouse up the nation. But when the signs were finished the thought of young cutthroats and dogs and falling flowerpots came flitting through his mind, and then, worse, the thought that the people might be irritated at his seeming to be holier-than-thou, and the king might be insulted, and the giant might tend to especially notice a person carrying a sign. So he sat in the middle of his shop and trembled and grieved and tried to think.
It was another first Monday of the month, as it happened. Before long, along came the giant, and he got down on his knees and looked into the tailor shop and there sat the timid little tailor, grieving and shaking.
“Ar har!” said the giant. “As you see, I’m back. I was saying to Moranda just this morning,
Moranda, Moranda, get ready for meat!
Today I will bring you a Tailor to eat!
And sure enough, he opened the front door of the tailor shop with the tips of two fingers and began to reach in for the tailor.
But just that moment a great cheer went up from the people standing by, for who should come marching down the street but His Majesty the King and his royal ninety-day army. The ninety-day army was somewhat smaller than the thirty-day army, but it was even more gallant, being even younger and less experienced. The king ducked hastily into an alley and yelled, “Charge, brave boys!” and they charged. Before the giant knew what was happening he was scratched and slivered to an inch of his life and one of his eyes was swollen shut.
The giant was furious, and bellowing with rage he seized the army in his two hands and went hurrying home, yelling as he went,
Moranda, Moranda, get ready for meat!
Today I will bring you an Army to eat!
The timid little tailor, who had not made a sound in all this time, unable to bring out so much as a squeak, now managed a feeble little “Hooray!”—for he was moved to the depths of his soul by the army’s gallantry. Also, he devoutly wished that he’d never been born.
“Woe is me,” said the tailor, sunk in gloom, sitting wringing his fingers in the middle of the shop, “I don’t deserve to live, and that’s the truth.” After a moment he frowned and said, “That really is true, you know? I really don’t deserve to live!” The vague idea of jumping off a bridge occurred to him, and he was so frightened by this turn of thought that he began to whistle, trying to cheer himself up. But the thought came again, persistent. “A person as cowardly as you, little tailor, really and truly does not deserve to live.” He shuddered.
Darkness had by now fallen, and as often happened when darkness fell, the tall, narrow buildings on the tailor’s street looked higher than usual, obscurely dangerous with their crooked chimneys and eye-like, gaping windows. The alleys, where the dogs ran, hunting through garbage or chasing rats or biting passersby, and the subterranean rooms and ditches where bands of young cutthroats held their meetings and said their secret passwords and burned their secret candles, all were more frightening than usual now. The weight of night lay over the city like giant crows’ wings, and even the king’s daughter the princess, sitting propped in pillows in her wide, warm bed, surrounded by all her ladies-in-waiting, felt queasy.
The poor miserable little tailor stood in his doorway (which was securely locked and chained against the dark) and held his candle over his head and peered out into the terrifying night. The dark seemed to him to be waiting for him, and he thought in abject misery, tears running down his ashen cheeks, “I deserve to be dead. It’s true.” He thought of the giant’s horrible poem, Moranda, Moranda, and so forth and he realized with a new shock that the gallant armies had been lost for—of all people—him. It was his worthless life they had saved. “Horrible!” he cried. “Oh horrible!” and suddenly, hardly knowing what he was doing, he threw down his candle and unlocked his door and charged out into the street to meet the doom he so richly deserved.
But nothing happened. He stood waiting, but there was not a sound, ominous or otherwise. It was chillier than he’d expected, and he thought of returning for his stocking cap and mittens, but that seemed petty, somehow ludicrous, so he went on waiting just as he was, shivering and wondering where all the dogs were. After a while he began moving tentatively down the street, hurrying through the darker places, slowing down when he came to the street lamps, heading toward the darkest part of town, where perhaps he might come across some cutthroats. He was wrong, however. He went all the way to the city limits, and he never saw a soul or heard a sound except, once, a kind of noise like a pot breaking, falling from a second-story window a block away.
“Hmm,” said the tailor. He scratched his chin and looked down his long narrow nose and thought, “What now?”
He realized with a start that he really was chilly, half-freezing in fact, and no wonder, either, because snow was blowing and the wind was howling, and there were icicles hanging from every tree in the woods. “How stupid,” he thought, “not to have brought my stocking cap and mittens!” But since it might be warmer deeper in the woods than out here so close to the open road, he decided to go wait
in the heart of the woods till the storm subsided. He started down the path that led in deeper, and he walked on and on, absent-mindedly going past lonely hermits’ caves and huntsmen’s shacks and quicksand bogs, all the while staring down his nose and thinking he did not deserve to be alive, until all at once he came by accident to a huge castle. He looked up and realized it was the castle of the terrible giant. “Oh dear,” he said.
No sooner had he spoken than a voice roared from a second-story window, high in the night, higher than the moon, “Ar har! What luck!” It was the giant.
The tailor instantly ducked into the woods, realizing in great alarm that perhaps he had reasoned wrong and did not deserve to die after all. “Perhaps the capture of the army was inevitable,” he thought. “Besides, it’s an occupational hazard of that occupation. If only I’d thought all this out in more detail, in the morning, say, when my mind was fresh!” His knees were knocking, and not from the cold.
Meanwhile the giant was shouting out the window to his dogs (which were enormous, larger than elephants, larger than houses, and every red tooth was seven and a half feet long) “Sic ’em!” The dogs came thundering into the forest, knocking down trees with their terrible shoulders, and their eyes were like lightning and their shaggy coats rattled and snapped with electric sparks in the cold wintry air.
“Heaven help me!” thought the tailor, but not so much from fear of the dogs as from his dreadful confusion. Did he deserve his fate or didn’t he? That was the question. He sat huddled up under a frozen log turning the question this way and that way—guilty or not guilty?—thinking, “Blast! If I’d just brought my mittens!”
The dogs all ran past him, never noticing, and soon they came to some quicksand, and down they sank.
Then the giant was angrier than ever, and he yelled down from his upstairs window, “Where are my cutthroat boys? Cutthroats! Get out there and find me that tailor!”
No sooner had he spoken than sixteen huge boys came running from the kitchen with knives and cooking forks, howling like wild men, licking their lips and spraying salt in the air, and their teeth glinted like yellow pearls, and sparks flew out like shooting stars when they ground their teeth together.
But the tailor hardly noticed. “I was a coward,” he was thinking. “But is cowardice a crime, officially? I wonder how the Law reads.” He pounded the sides of his head with his fists, but he couldn’t remember what the Law said, exactly, assuming he’d ever known. And so he went on thinking and thinking and thinking, and the cutthroats rushed past him and away in the direction the dogs had taken, and soon they came to the quicksand, and down they went.
“Fools!” yelled the giant, and in his terrible rage he began to hurl flowerpots into the forest, hoping he might brain the tailor or, at very least, get him to show where he was. But the flowerpots fell to left and right of the tailor, who was lost in tortured thought, and didn’t touch a hair of his head.
“Moranda,” the giant howled at last, “get me my coat and stocking cap and mittens. It appears I’ll have to go after that fellow myself.”
Soon, sure enough, out came the giant in his coat and stocking cap and mittens, hunting for the tailor. The tailor absentmindedly watched him march past in the direction the dogs and cutthroats had taken, and absentmindedly watched him step into quicksand and sink out of sight, flailing his arms and yelling “Zounds!”
Then suddenly it all came clear in the tailor’s mind. Before he could tell for sure whether he really deserved to die or not, he must see whether the giant had actually eaten the armies he’d carried off to his castle. So the tailor got up and walked resolutely into the castle and began to hunt around.
“Excuse me,” he said to a huge old monstrously ugly woman he found in the parlor, “which way is it to the dungeon?”
“Third door on your left,” the old woman said.
“Thank you,” he said, and he went where she’d told him. There he found the king’s two armies, bound up in heavy ropes. Quickly taking out his tailor’s scissors, he cut them free, and they all fled the castle like water coming out of a pipe. “Are you people all all right?” inquired the tailor.
They said yes, thank you. The giant had said they weren’t fat enough, which indeed was true. They were lean as rakes from the exercising they’d had to do in the army, and also, being young, they weren’t any of them more than half-grown.
“Then I haven’t done any real harm,” thought the tailor, looking happily down his nose. Immediately he remembered the huge old monstrously ugly woman in the parlor, and he began to shake like a leaf.
“Don’t worry about her,” the armies said, perceiving his distress. “Now that we’re out of the castle she won’t stir an inch in our direction. She’s a coward, really.” They laughed and slapped each other’s backs. “She’s afraid of everything—dogs, young cutthroats, flowerpots dropping from second-story windows! We’re as safe as safe can be.”
“Ha, ha ha!” cried the tailor joyfully. For it was true, he saw. There at the door stood the giantess, making terrible faces, longing to come in pursuit of them but too frightened to stir an inch.
And so in triumph the tailor and the king’s armies marched home, the tailor speaking earnestly of the lesson he’d learned, how fear is all in the mind, really—though cutthroats are a serious business, of course, and there are, of course, some dogs that would as soon bite you as look at you, and flowerpots do sometimes fall into the street, endangering the casual passer-by. “Nevertheless,” the tailor said, but then pursed his lips, for he’d happened to notice that the king’s armies were hurrying from one street lamp to the next, glancing apprehensively in the direction of every unidentified shadow, listening as if with stopped hearts whenever they heard the whirr of something falling.
The king was so pleased with the tailor’s work that he gave him his daughter’s hand in marriage. They lived happily ever after in the royal palace, never leaving it for anything, not even to go get the mail.
THE MILLER’S MULE
A miller had a mule that had grown too old to turn the mill wheel, and the miller decided to shoot him. But the mule said, “Oh, master, do not shoot me! Spare my life and I’ll make you a wealthy man.”
“Hah,” said the miller, “a likely story!” However, the miller was basically a kindly person, and so he decided to give the mule a chance. “Very well, I’ll spare you a while,” said the miller, “but you’d better be as good as your word.”
“God bless you!” cried the mule, and he showed such gratitude that, in spite of himself, the miller felt touched. Nevertheless, the mule was actually a wicked and spiteful creature, and had a plan.
That afternoon the mule carried the miller to the royal palace, and on the way he said to the miller, “When we come to the royal palace, let me do the talking. You simply agree with every word I say.”
The miller thought about it, full of doubts, but at last he decided to give it a try.
They came to the gates of the castle, and the mule exclaimed to the guards there, “Quick! quick! Take me to His Majesty, for I’ve brought him a horrible traitor to the kingdom!” The miller was surprised at the mule’s words, but when the guards looked at him inquiringly, the miller, remembering his agreement, nodded to the guards and told them, “It’s just as the mule says.” And so the mule and the miller were taken to the king.
When they reached the throne room, the mule fell down on his knees and said, “Your Majesty, I’ve brought you a horrible traitor to the kingdom. If I were you I’d chop off his miserable head.”
“A traitor?” said the king. “You say this miller’s a traitor?”
“He admits it himself,” the mule said, and when the king glanced at the miller, the poor man, feeling uneasy, admitted it was so.
“It’s a serious crime to be a traitor,” the king said. “What has the miller done?”
The mule answered, “He claims he’s mightier than you are, Your Majesty. He claims he can turn huge boulders into rubies.”
“Now see what you’ve done,” the miller said in the mule’s ear. “They’ll chop off my head for sure.”
But the wicked mule smiled slyly and said, “All may yet be well, master. All this is just as I planned it.” And so the miller quieted his fears. He walked with the king’s knights to the field where the huge boulders were, thinking the mule had some trick up his sleeve if not, indeed, some magic by which to turn stones into rubies. When they reached the field, the knights left the miller to do his work and went back to the castle. Then the miller turned to the mule for help, but to his surprise, the mule was nowhere in sight. “Ah ha,” thought the miller, “so that’s his game!” And he swore he would get his revenge. First, however, he would have to solve the problem of turning boulders into rubies.
For about a half an hour the miller walked up and down the field, dancing around the stones on one foot and shaking his hands at them and saying all the spells he’d ever heard of, but he soon realized he was no magician and had better try something else. He borrowed a shovel from an old woman who was sitting on a fence post, watching with one brown eye and one green one, and for the second half-hour he dug deep holes, hoping he would find rubies down inside them, the idea being that if he found rubies there he could dig up the rubies and put the boulders where the rubies had been and the rubies where the boulders were. But all he found was some bits of limestone and part of a ketchup bottle. Next he borrowed a hammer from the old woman sitting on the fence post, and he nailed up a sign which read, “Do Not Steal These Boulders,” the idea being that when people saw the sign they would steal the boulders and he could tell the king, with an innocent expression, “I changed the boulders to rubies, but people came and stole them.” It was a good idea, but the field of boulders was far from the road and nobody saw the sign. When all his schemes had failed, the miller sat down on one of the boulders and sighed. It was now almost sunset, and he knew that soon the king and all his knights would come and that would be the end of that. “What in heaven’s name shall I do?” the miller said to himself.
