The Undesired Princess Page 3

  Hobart turned as a faint tooting, and thumping came to his ears. Across the red gravel advanced a procession: undoubtedly the party that had lately occupied the top of the nearest black dome. In the lead puffed a stout, white-bearded man in a long robe and a crown. The party with him included a standard bearer in a glittering brass cuirass—his standard was a pole on which was a square of stiff black material with the word “RAIT” in white block letters—several men in tight suits like that of Prince Alaxius, and some soldiers in kilts and chain-mail shirts; some of these last carried spears and circular shields, others antique-looking muskets.

  Princess Argimanda had already started to run to her father. Prince Alaxius gathered up his art equipment and sauntered after, and the social lion padded after the prince. Hobart, feeling more ill at ease without his peculiar company than with them, followed.

  The princess turned from the king as Hobart approached and cried: “Father, this is my peerless champion and future husband! His name is—uh—”

  “Rollin something,” said Prince Alaxius.

  “Well, well,” beamed the king. “Where’s that eccentric Hoimon? Somebody must make a proper introduction, you know.”

  “He’s gone,” said the prince.

  “Too bad,” wagged the king. “Charion, you’ll have to do it.” He spoke to a tight-garbed, hatchet-faced man at his right; a bald, sinister-looking person with a large black mustache, the ends of which turned up arrogantly.

  Charion shrugged. “It’s non-regulation, Your Altitude. Anyhow, I present the puissant prince, Rollin Something. Rollin Something, you stand before that high and mighty autocrat, Gordius the Affable, king of Logaia.”

  “R-r-r,” muttered Theiax nearby. “You kneel.”

  “Huh? Me?” Hobart looked around.

  “Yes, you,” persisted the lion. “Court ekkytet.”

  Rollin Hobart’s rugged independence did not take kindly to kneeling before anybody, but he went to one knee, lowering his face to conceal his scowl.

  “Arise, Prince Rollin,” said the king. “Welcome to the bosom of the Xerophi family!” He spread his pudgy arms.

  Hobart glanced sidewise at the social lion. “What do I do now?” he hissed.

  “Embrace His Altitude!” the lion whispered back.

  This, thought Hobart, was the damnedest thing yet. He allowed the king to subject him to the double hug used by Latin Americans.

  When Rollin disentangled himself from the king, he protested: “There must be some mistake, Your Altitude. I’m not a prince; just an ordinary practical engineer . . .”

  The king waved him to silence. “You needn’t be modest with me, my boy. A prince is a king-to-be; you’re a king-to-be; therefore you’re a prince, heh, heh.”

  “You mean half your kingdom?”

  “Of course, of course; you can pick either half, too.”

  “But, Your Altitude, I don’t know anything about running kingdoms . . .”

  “You’ll learn quickly enough. Anyway my daughter can only marry a person of the rank of prince or better; hence you must by definition be of the rank of prince or better.”

  “That’s another thing!” cried Hobart. “I don’t know where the young lady got the idea I was her—”

  “R-r-r-r,” went Theiax. Hobart subsided. Come da revolution you eat strawberries and like ’em, he reflected.

  Charion was plucking at the king’s sleeve. “Sire, is it not about enough amenities . . .”

  “Eh? Yes, yes, I suppose so. Time to return, of course; the queen must be told and must meet her new son-in-law. You, Charion, take charge of Prince Rollin Something. Laus!”

  He spoke to a thin, elderly man in a dark-blue robe and a conical hat. As the word was pronounced to rhyme with “house,” Hobart half-expected to see the oldster display resentment; but he learned eventually that “Laus” was a name, not an epithet.

  The king continued: “Get out the wings of the wind!”

  The old man shucked a bag off his back, loosened the drawstring, and began to take out small umbrellas and hand them around. Hobart took one and looked at it in puzzlement. There was no cloud in the sky. Everybody was taking an umbrella except the lion Theiax. Prince Alaxius was standing close to the king and talking quickly in low tones; Hobart caught: “. . . a simply impossible fellow, I tell you; look at that suit he’s wearing; it’s of a color that doesn’t exist. And he argues all the time . . .”

  “Later, later,” muttered the king. “If he couldn’t argue he wouldn’t have overcome the androsphinx.”

  The princess was bending over the lion, who had resumed licking his wounds. She asked: “Dear Theiax, can you return to Oroloia afoot all right?”

  “Sure,” grumbled the lion. “Mere scratches.”

  “Why didn’t you wait till the androsphinx had shrunk down smaller?”

  “That is not sporting,” said the lion.

  “Silly males,” said the princess, giving the beast a pat.

  Since Charion had been detailed to take care of Hobart, Rollin Hobart attached himself to the sinister-looking courtier. He held out his umbrella and asked: “What’s this thing?”

  “The wings of the wind,” replied Charion.

  “I know; but what does it do?”

  “We’re traveling on the wings of the wind, Your Dignity. How do you expect us to do that without any wings of the wind to travel on?”

  “Yes, but how does it work?”

  “Oh. You grip the handle tight, and when the king opens his, you open yours and it takes you. We used to travel as the crow flies, but Laus’ crow-wings were dangerous to use, so last year he invented this.”

  “Who’s Laus?”

  Charion looked annoyed. “The Wizard of Wall Street, of course.”

  “Huh? I don’t get it.”

  Charion concealed his exasperation with visible effort. “Laus is the royal wizard; Wall Street is a street built on the city wall, on which is the royal wizard’s official residence. Now do you understand?”

  “Ready, everybody?” cried King Gordius. Everybody raised his umbrella.

  “Go!” shouted the king, and snapped his wing of the wind open. Hobart did likewise with his. At once a terrific wind smote him from behind and almost wrenched the umbrella out of his hand. His feet left the ground, and he was trailing through the atmosphere behind the device. It swooped this way and that. When he got a glimpse of the rest of the party, now quite a distance off, he observed that they were all sailing along serenely in a sort of formation. The trick apparently was to grip the handle in both fists just in front of one’s solar plexus. Hobart did, and soon found that he could manage the contrivance easily.

  He caught up with the convoy, his hair and clothes blown stiffly forward by the gale. A soldier—the commander to judge by his plumed helmet and gold-plated mail-shirt—shouted: “You could use some practice, couldn’t you, youngst—I mean Your Dignity?”

  The princess threw him a tender smile that made him shudder. He thought of making a break for freedom, but the sight of the disciplined ease with which the soldiers managed their umbrellas with their left hands and their spears and muskets with their right dampened the idea.

  They swept over the string-straight boundary at which the red desert and the blue jungle left off and yellow crop-land began. A city came into view and expanded to a mass of prisms, spires, and domes, every last structure either black, white, red, yellow, or blue. The most remarkable feature was a tall screen or lattice arising from each of the four walls, which formed a square. The streets inside were laid out on a strict gridiron plan. In the center of the square was a cluster of extra-large buildings which Hobart took to be the local Kremlin.

  The wind dropped as they approached the walls, and the windborne fliers dropped, too. They came to a running landing on a broad stretch of lawn that ran around the walls. Hobart almost pitched forward on his nose; the officer caught his arm.

  “Thanks,” said Hobart. “What’s your name?”

  �
�General Valangas,” grinned the soldier. “Chancellor Charion should have introduced us, but he wouldn’t of course. Here he comes looking for his ward.”

  The man with the Wilhelm II mustache came up closing his umbrella. “You made the trip, I see,” he said inanely, staring down his nose. Laus was collecting the umbrellas and putting them back in his bag.

  Hobart asked: “Why didn’t we land inside the walls?”

  “Laus’ work,” answered Charion. “He doesn’t allow the wind inside the walls, for fear they might bring in an army of barbarians. That lattice—” he pointed “—keeps out the west wind; the others keep out the east, south, and north winds.”

  “Are those the only winds you have here?”

  “Obviously! A wind is either a north wind or it isn’t!”

  The bugler blew, and the drummer drummed, and the king and his company walked briskly up to the huge gate. There were more tootings from inside, and the gate creaked open. An explosion made Hobart start; as his eye caught a puff of thick white smoke drifting from a gate tower there was another report, and so on. By the time the salute had ended they were under the archway.

  An arm was slipped through his; it was the red-haired princess, gazing fondly up at him. “Dear Rollin,” she murmured, “let us not start our life together with such cool formality!”

  Hobart fumbled for an answer; life together my foot, he thought. He should have taken a firm stand sooner. He should have made a break for freedom while they were flying on the wings of the wind; he certainly shouldn’t have let them get him into this crowded city. Not that Rollin Hobart was so completely hostile to the institution of marriage as he sometimes professed. He had considered favorably the possibility of waiting till he was forty and then marrying some squab half his age; with that advantage of years and experience, he could bring the girl up in the way he thought she should go. A romantic marriage would be bad, and an insane union with an incredible female from a delirium-world in which he did not fully believe would be out of the question.

  But Hobart said nothing for the present, as he seldom hurt people’s feelings—deliberately, that is—and, more practically, though Gordius might be called the Affable Monarch, he might use an ax on those who presumed on his affability too far.

  Besides, to walk down the avenue arm-in-arm with an intoxicatingly beautiful woman was a self-justified act. The people lined the sidewalks and bowed and waved in most entertaining fashion. And the city itself was worth seeing. It reminded Hobart of a world’s fair wherein the exhibits constituted the crowds. Besides the uncompromisingly brilliant colors of the geometrically severe buildings, the people presented an incredibly heterogeneous aspect. The clothes included robes, togas, shawls, gowns, saris, turbans, burnooses, and the hardly decently tight coveralls such as worn by Prince Alaxius and Chancellor Charion. A man in a spiked helmet and white cloak pulled his mount over to one side; the man’s skin was black; not any mere negroid chocolate-brown, but the black of india ink. The mount was a camel-like beast, yellow with black rings all over, like a leopard.

  “Good God, what are those?” said Hobart, pointing.

  “Those?” said the princess. “Oh, just Ikthepeli savages, in Oroloia to sell their fish.” The savages were a family of tall, flat-faced, butter-yellow people with soup-bowl haircuts. Papa Ikthepeli came first with a spear and a bone through his negligible nose; then came mama Ikthepeli with a baby slung on her back, and then five children, diminuendo. All were quite naked.

  “Who is God?” added Argimanda.

  “Huh?” Hobart frowned. “Let’s see—the creator and ruler of the universe, or so most of us are taught in my world. Personally I’m willing to concede that He probably exists, but I doubt if He pays any attention to anything so insignificant as the human species.”

  “That sounds like our Nois,” said Argimanda. “But Nois is not indifferent to the human inhabitants of this world—quite the reverse. Anybody can see him any time he wants.”

  “Is he a god or a man?” asked Hobart.

  “Both,” said the princess. “Here—we turn.” The procession filed into a narrow street, and almost immediately came to a shuffling halt.

  General Valangas shouted: “What’s the matter up there?” and pushed forward to see.

  Hobart pulled the princess along in the bulky soldier’s wake, and presently saw over and between heads the cause of the delay. It was an immense tortoise, like those of the Galapagos but three or four times as big. An unpleasantly distorted dwarf with tomato-red skin sat in a chair bracketed to the reptile’s back. The tortoise filled the street from side to side and proceeded down it at an unvarying testudian plod. The dwarf was leaning over the back of his chair and waving his hands and apologizing.

  Prince Alaxius was saying to the king: “Told you you should have widened this street before, governor.”

  “Get along, get along!” shouted Charion. “Laus, you do something!”

  “Ahem, all right, all right, rush me not,” muttered the Wizard of Wall Street. “Where’s my wand? My wand?”

  “In your hand, you old pantaloon!” snarled Charion.

  “My hand? Oh yes, so it is!” Laus waved the wand, and recited:

  “Beilavor gofarseir

  “Nonpato wemoilou,

  “Zishirku zanthureir

  “Durhermgar faboilou!”

  The tortoise opened its beak, hissed, shimmered, and began to shrink. The dwarf scrambled down from his seat; just in time, as the shrinkage progressed rapidly and stopped when the tortoise was a mere foot long. The dwarf picked up his pet, crying: “Oh, my little Turquoise! What have they done to you?”

  The king’s procession crowded past; Hobart noticed that the wizard stayed with the dwarf. When they were all past, Hobart heard Laus’ old voice reciting another incantation. It ended with a shriek of joy from the dwarf, by which Hobart judged that the reptile had regained its former size; he could not see from where he was.

  They came out of the alley onto a vast plaza in which rose another walled inclosure. The domes and cones and prisms of the royal palace appeared over the wall. The gate was open, and another procession was coming out: a procession of women in black. Some of them held lyres which they mournfully twanged.

  “That, my love,” said the Princess Argimanda, “is your future mother-in-law, Queen Vasalina!”

  4

  Rollin Hobart endured the second joyful family reunion and presentation with a fixed, slightly ghastly smile. He had just observed that Queen Vasalina under her funeral garb was a comfortable-looking middle-aged woman when Charion pulled at his sleeve.

  “I’ll show Your Dignity your apartments,” said the Chancellor. And in they went between a pair of black cylindrical pylons the size of sequoia trunks and through an entrance big enough to admit a battleship. After the first three turns inside Hobart was quite lost; his attention was less on direction than on the architecture, which carried out the same style as the exterior. His memory clicked, and he remembered where he had seen structures of this kind before: made of a set of stone building blocks, of simple, elementary shapes, which he had received in a big wooden box on his eighth birthday. Those blocks, too, had all been red, yellow, or blue.

  “Apartments” turned out to be something of a euphemism. Chancellor Charion conducted him to a single room of modest size. As the chancellor held the door open for Hobart to enter, there was a sharp click, and something hit the engineer’s shin an agonizing thump.

  “Yeow!” shrieked Hobart, hopping on one leg. The missile rolled a little way along the floor; it was a steel ball the size of a marble. Inside the room, a crimson-haired boy crouched over a toy canon.

  “Your Dignity!” snapped Charion; Hobart saw that the chancellor was addressing not him, but the boy. “I thought you were to have vacated your room by now!”

  “Don’t want to vacate,” squealed the boy, rising. Hobart’s scalp prickled a little at the sight. There was something wrong about the boy: he was big enough for a thirtee
n-year-old, but he had the proportions, including the large head and smooth, characterless features, of a child of six.

  “This is my room,” he continued, stamping his foot.

  “Now, now,” said Charion, his voice full of obviously synthetic honey, “you don’t want your new brother-in-law to sleep outdoors, do you?”

  The boy’s eyes widened, and he put his finger in his mouth: “That my new brother? What you mean? Got brother, Alaxius,” he mumbled past the finger.

  “I know, but Prince Rollin Something will marry your sister soon. Then he’ll be your brother-in-law.”

  “Don’t want such a funny-looking brother-in-law,” said the boy. “Let him sleep outdoors; I don’t care.”

  “Will you go,” gritted the chancellor, “or must I call your father?”

  The boy went, slowly, turning his head to stare at Hobart as he did so. Charion closed the door after him.

  “Who’s that?” asked Hobart.

  “Didn’t I introduce you? Prince Aites.”

  “Is he normal?”

  “Normal? Why—what do you mean?”

  “Well—how old is he?”

  “He’ll be thirteen day after tomorrow.”

  “He—uh—looks like such a child, in a way.”

  “What do you expect? You f—I mean, of course he’s a child! Being normal, he’ll become an adolescent when he’s thirteen, and not a minute sooner.”

  “Where I come from,” said Hobart, “you change from a child to an adolescent gradually.”

  Charion scowled. “I don’t understand you—either he’s a child or he isn’t. But then, I dare say you barbarians have peculiar customs.”

  “What do you mean, barbarian?” asked Hobart sharply.

  “You have yellow hair, haven’t you?” Charion dropped that subject and opened a chest full of clothes. “I suppose I should apologize for not having your room ready. In theory we always have a chamber prepared for the champion in case he defeats the androsphinx, but that has never happened hitherto, and the preparations have become lax in consequence. What color do you want?”