PRINCESS BEAST (5 page)

Croesus flops to the floor and groans.

"Come on--they're fun, in a lovable, dorky, Abba kind of way.  I do like their rendition of
Take Out Some Insurance. 
Which is what you'll have to do if we get gatecrashers like last year.  Need I remind you who was in charge of security, and who, instead of watching the gateway of the dead jumped the stage while Elvis was singing
Hound Dog.
"  Took me an hour to round them all up.  Thought I'd never catch Nixon."

Croesus rolls to his belly and exposes his neck.

Elora shakes her head. "Oh, just blow on it.  I've lined up the Minotaur as bouncer.  Promise to not bug me about Andersen Land again, and I'll send an SOS on Rune's behalf.  Also, it will be my distinct pleasure to roast you a fat, greasy swan over the Samhain bonfire."

Croesus drools a puddle on the parquet floor as Elora walks to the window.  She points to the sky and a blue light shoots from her finger into the clouds.

 

* * *

 

Panic is replaced by resolution and Beauty is grateful for the strength of her beastly body that can run for hours without tiring.  She has been thinking while running and wondering what she could have done to prevent this catastrophe. 
Perhaps I've been over protective; I could have taken Rune on journeys that exposed her to life outside our corner of Grimm Land. 

Beauty imagines again what she has imagined before:  the two of them, hand in hand, entering a village, a sweet grin of anticipation on Rune's innocent face, then women shrieking, children crying, dogs barking, doors slamming, rifle barrels, clubs, and pitchforks protruding from windows. 

She's not prepared to face the world, and that's my fault.  I never learned how to be a proper mother; I've let instincts guide me and believed that the best way.
 Beauty now thinks about her own father and realizes how difficult it must have been for him to raise his three daughters alone.  She remembers that the main concern he voiced was:  "You must each be taught to fit into society."

There is no place other than Cozy Cave where Rune can fit in.  Beauty slows her pace long enough to lift the mirror and ask: 

 

"Through the forest, through the trees,

Show me Rune, if you please."

Beauty watches in horror as the alder trunk's branches become slick, brown arms with fingers, which in an instant grasp Rune's shoulders.  Rune yips, bares her teeth, and thrashes to free herself from the grip that is pulling her downward into the mud.  Just as Rune's chin is about to sink below the bog, her fingers touch the withered petals of the lotus flower.  A flash of blue light pierces the fog from above, the Bog King's arms shrivel, the lotus flower regains its creamy white color, forms a bud that grows larger and larger until it opens and reveals an almond-eyed maiden with long black hair. She pulls Rune from the mud with supernatural strength.

Beauty gasps with relief and resumes her steady run northward. 

And on the west coast of Zealand, Holger the Dane swan dives into the waters of the Great Belt and swims toward the island of Fyn, his beard flowing like a banner in the wind.

 

* * *

 

 

Chapter Five

The Bog King's Daughter

 

Rune's mud-covered body flies through the air and lands on the bog lake's shore with a soft thud.  Her savior from the depths of the Bog King's realm approaches, skimming over the lake's surface, translucent and radiant with light. Her sienna skin, long black hair, linen wrap, jeweled collar and leather sandals are as diaphanous as she.

Rune scrambles backward as the ghostly girl bends and picks a sprig of wild mint.

"If only I could taste it," she says.

"Thank you for saving me from the muck.  My name is Rune, what's yours?"  Rune stammers.

The apparition sits on the shore next to Rune, and Rune smells a scent that reminds her of the moments preceding a thunderstorm.  The maiden is small and too thin; her pinched face making her almond-shaped eyes seem enormous.  She gazes across the bog lake and a tear runs down her translucent cheek.  "I have only three days to tell you my story, as requested by whoever summoned me to rescue you from my father."

"Your father? "

The maiden sighs a fairy tale beauty sigh, "The Bog King."

"You must be Helga, the Egyptian princess the storks told me about.  But she lived hundreds of years ago . . ."  Rune bites the corner of her lip. "I guess you're a ghost, huh?"

Helga’s dark eyes flash and her aura brightens.  Rune shields her eyes and emits rapid glottal clicks.  The light dims to a glow; Rune cautiously lowers her arm and sees that Helga’s expression is as settled as the bog fog. 

"How much of my tale did these storks tell you?"

"They told me about your mother being an Egyptian princess who came here with her evil sisters, disguised as swans, to get a flower for their sick father.  They said the sisters tore up your mother’s swanskin after she dove into the water and then the Bog King pulled her down. Many months later, you appeared in the blossom of a flower and the storks’ ancestors took you from the bog to a Viking woman.  She discovered that by day you were a lovely child, by night a frog, and this happened because of the two natures mixed up inside you, your father's and your mother's.  Is that true?"

"How could it be anything else, for here all stories are true. Sad but true, and as soon as the sun sets, you will see for yourself,” Helga says, breaks into heaving sobs and clear tears stream down her clear face.

"I've never seen anyone cry so much.  I can sing a song for you," Rune says.  She hums a warm-up note then sings: 

 

"Helga pulled me out of the water

From the clutches of her father,

To Princess Helga I sing,

Thanks for saving me from the Bog King."

 

Helga does not smile, nor compliment Rune on her lovely voice; she doesn't even look up.  “Why are you here,” she asks, “why would any creature come to this godforsaken bog?”

“Creature?” Rune wanted to say at least she was a living, breathing girl, but figured it would be cruel to point out the obvious. “A swan flew me to the bog on his back because he said I would transform into the beautiful princess I truly am here in Andersen Land, you see I ran away from home . . .”

Rune is about to explain about the mirror when Helga waves her arm in an arc across the bog and cries, “This should be my home, down in the blackest depths of the bog with my black hearted father. Perhaps my mother is still there, I met her only once that I can remember, after I had run away from the Vikings village. She embraced me saying I was the flower of her heart; she loved me enough to set me free of the bog as a baby. And what did I do with that chance? I don’t deserve to be there or in Egypt, but even a bog would be a home, rather than spending forever after as a bolt of light.” She stands suddenly and rushes to the bog lakeshore, raises her arms in swan dive position and leaps at the water. She bounces off the surface as if it were a trampoline and flies backward to the shore. She makes three attempts before falling to her knees and sobbing, “I am an orphan of God.”

Rune scurries to Helga’s side; she may be a ghost, or light, whatever, still she's Rune's only companion in this strange land. And she is thinking about Cozy Cave—her home in the clean green forest where her mother . . . fat tears form around her budging hazel eyes. A bright white spark zaps Helga’s head and she turns to Rune. “I must tell you my story. Perhaps this good deed will be the one to earn my way into Heaven.”

“Can I ask you something first?”

“I will answer any question you pose,” Helga replies, ‘but be quick, the sun will set soon.”

“Did you always know who your true parents were or did the Viking couple pretend to be your parents?”

 

* * *

 

Plowing through a field of heather, Beauty suddenly realizes that in her haste to lessen the distance between herself and Rune, she's running blindly.  She stops and lifts the mirror to her face.

"Through the heather and through the fog,

Show me the way to the Great Bog."

The mirror reflects the field before her and an arrow appears pointing northeast. Again, Beauty addresses the mirror:

"Thank you kindly for your direction,

Now show me if Rune is in need of protection."

Beauty has used the mirror just in time to hear Helga say that she has three days and three nights to tell Rune her story.  She listens, her heart breaking, as Rune sings a song to cheer the weepy Helga, and she watching Helga bounce off the lake surface, trying vainly to reach her own mother. Then Rune asks,
Have you always known who your true parents are
, and Beauty’s heart thumps, her adrenaline pumps and she’s off at a gallop knowing she can catch up with Rune before Helga’s story is done.

 

* * *

 

“I didn’t know who my true parents were until I was fourteen,” Helga says. “I don’t believe Illa and Worick ever knew. They were my Viking parents. Illa believed I was bewitched because she saw my transformation the first night I spent in her lodge. She never told Worick.  After all my years in limbo, I know now that Worick loved me best because he appreciated the warrior girl I was and didn't want to change me. My foster mother, Illa, hid me at night before the transformation and locked the door."

"Did Worick ever see you as the frog?"

"He would have hacked me in half with his ax, and how I wished that had been my fate."

Rune is becoming tired and impatient with this apparition princess who is more of a wet blanket than the bog moss. “At least you had a father who loved you and was proud of you. I have had no father in my life; Mother says he was a princely beast who is no more, and she won’t say anything else, no matter how much I plead, or tease, or throw things in a tantrum. She’s bigger and stronger; she always wins.”

“Perhaps it pains her too much to talk about him,” Helga sighs and her aura becomes pale, pale blue.

“What about me! What about my pain,” Rune shouts and jumps to her feet, which quickly sink in three inches of bog. “Why did she use the word princely? Is my father a prince? What else can explain the face I saw in the magic mirror?”

“Show me,” Helga says.

“I left the blasted thing at Lake Leda before I jumped on the swan’s back,” Rune tries to kick a stump, but the hold of the bog releases her foot slowly with a thwack and her knee strikes her bottom jaw driving a canine tooth into her upper lip. Rune is swearing up a storm, but stops suddenly when she notices Helga changing color once again. Helga points west where the setting sun resembles a gray-yellow egg yolk.  Her aura darkens to deep green and her shape shifts into an eighty-pound frog with bulbous belly, a plethora of warts and great bulging black eyes.

"Holy Mother Nature!"  Rune whistles with admiration.  “It can’t be getting dark already.”

Helga's eyes dart to the left as a bright spot of color appears over the bog lake and wings toward them. 

"Let us be human!" the Andersen Land philosopher squawks.  Helga whips her amphibian tongue through the air like a fly caster, knocking one Nile-green feather from the bird's tail. 

"Poor me, poor me, I suffer as a human being can suffer in indescribable melancholy which always has to do with my thinking about my own existence." The bird makes a U-turn and flies back from whence it came.

"Why did you do that?" Rune shouts.

The frog girl opens a mouth large enough for Rune to sleep inside and sounds a deafening croak.  Rune slaps her hands over her ears and leaps behind the nearest tree.

"Because if the bird had kept flying in that direction, it would have met a pack of boys armed with bows and arrows," a sweet, small voice sounds from the tree above Rune. “She scared you didn’t she, you big sissy beastie.”

“Who said that? Who is up that tree?” Rune demands.

A curled orange leaf unfurls to reveal an elf.  He is perfectly beautiful, his arms are crossed and his black eyes twinkle; his nose and ears are both long and pointed.  He wears a green suit and hat and black slippers with silver buckles.  "This be my tree, ye big hairy ugly beastie thing--don’t be thinking you will sleep here for the night, and you better find a tree or the acid of the bog will singe the hair off your hairy bottom and you’ll look more like a baboon than you already do. A beautiful princess indeed!  I heard every word ye and the spirit said.  Phooey--Helga was born to suffer, and ye being an enchanted princess is as likely as meself being a Hottentot potentate."

“I wasn't scared.  I thought she might explode all over me," Rune says, scratching her leg where the dried mud is beginning to itch and burn.

However, underneath Rune's coarse coppery colored fur, a tingling spreads from her scalp to her chest and it's not from the mud.  She's embarrassed about being afraid; she could count on the talons of one hand the number of times she'd been afraid.  In Rune's forest home, there was little to fear and everything was familiar.  She climbs a tree and scans the bog, its dense floating mats of duckweed, acres of cattails and reeds, thin tall alder, swamp maple, birch trees growing out of brown water, and the enormity of leaving home envelopes her as totally as the fog envelopes the bog.

 

* * *

 

Morning breaks in the Andersen Land Bog at nine AM, a cool late October morning. The only sound to be heard is the snores of Rune who had wedged herself between two branches of a swamp maple. She is dreaming of Hans, of returning to Grimm Land as the princess she had seen in the mirror and Hans, running across Vagary Vale, arms open wide to embrace her. Just before he reaches her, she feels the hair rise on her cheek. She opens her eyes and gasps with fright as Helga, the Egyptian princess cum frog, is nose to nose with Rune.

“I need to tell you the rest of my story,” Helga says urgently.

“Fine, geesh, just back off a bit, will you?” Rune says, sitting up and dangling her legs off the tree branch. Helga imitates Rune’s position. “I scared you,” she whispers.

“No, you startled me is all, it’s dangerous to startle someone sleeping. It could jump up and bite you. Didn’t your mother teach you . . .” Rune breaks off, remembering their conversation the day before. “Didn’t your father teach you that?”

Helga shakes her head slowly.  "I wouldn’t listen to anyone. I was mad and mean, except with Worick.  When the Vikings returned from their raids, I'd sit on his knee in the Great Hall. There were vats of mead, meats roasting on the fire; the balladsman singing tales while the men banged out the rhythm with mugs and gnawed bones.  Worick proudly proclaimed that I would become a Valkyrie, fighting as well as any man and unafraid of the sound of a sword as it cleaves the air."

"You
are
very strong for being so skinny," Rune says.  "Were you unafraid of battle?"

"Of everything!  At least by daylight.  I took pleasure in seeing the red blood of sacrifice to Thor on my hands; I rode a horse as if I were one with the animal, I swam the freezing waters of the fjords, and strung my bow with strands of my hair.  At night, alone with my thoughts, unable to talk, I was afraid I would never have a friend in the world.  It wasn't enough that at night I transformed into a frog, but I also looked different from the other children who had yellow hair and blue eyes and fair skin.  They were careful around me because children are suspicious by nature.  I didn't play with them; I hated them all when I was a girl and longed for each of them as a frog.  Because I was the chieftain’s daughter, they had to be nice to me, but as I grew older and could beat them all at every test of strength even the boys, shunned me.  As a frog I was afraid I would never be loved, and as a warrior, I didn’t care. Hearken well my words Rune, in this land, a girl who is unafraid is doomed."

“But the Viking woman loved you,” Rune says.

"Illa was a strong and capable Viking woman, but toward me she was both soft and frightened. By day, I had my fun scaring her with dangerous stunts, like walking on the edge of the well and standing up on a galloping horse.  But as twilight neared and my transformation began, I drew close to Illa.  I couldn't help myself and I couldn't apologize for being bad because I couldn't talk.  Every night Illa would say:
I could almost wish you always would be my silent frog child, for you are far more frightening to look at when your outside is beautiful and your inside ugly
."