The Emperor's Ostrich Read online

  She fired a question back. “Can’t you do something to help these poor souls?”

  An air of injured dignity. “I am doing something.”

  “And what might that be?”

  The stork squawked. They both turned to look. She had laid an egg. Despite their quarrel, both the man and the woman smiled.

  The man looked back at the woman. “I am keeping hope alive.”

  “Whose?”

  “My own, if nothing else. I keep hoping the young tadpole can learn.” He sighed. “But maybe I’m a fool.”

  The old woman beamed. “Now we’re getting somewhere!” She stretched her legs into a perfect split atop the highest tower. “Does your emperor feel that hope? Can he have learned anything at all?”

  He resumed his cross-legged pose and closed his eyes. He breathed in serenity, or tried to. “I confess I do feel some disappointment there.”

  “Then isn’t it time we did a bit more? Shouldn’t we go down ourselves?”

  A deep inhale. “It may come to that.” A slow exhale. “There’s no denying, it may.” One more breath in, and one more glance at the egg. “But let’s give it just a little bit longer, to make absolutely sure.”

  28

  WHISPERED CONVERSATIONS, AND AN UNDERGROUND COMMOTION

  Afternoon, in the palace dungeons.

  No one there could know that’s what time it was, except possibly the guard on duty, who waited impatiently for his replacement. He had a rendezvous that evening, as it happened, at a dance with a young lady he’d met, and the next guard had better not make him late for it. He’d brought with him a shaving razor, a mirror, and an extra candle. As he groomed, the prisoners took advantage of the additional light. Having nothing better to do, they were getting acquainted, by means of proposing disastrous escape plans.

  “I know,” said Tree. “We call that guard over here and trip him, then reach through the bars and grab his keys. Then we bust outta here!”

  “You’re highly prone to aggressive measures, young man,” said the old chancellor, revived at last. “Why not try diplomacy? Surely not everyone is under the thumb of that horrid Baxa. I never liked him, by the bye. We could ask the guard to let us speak to his superiors. When they know who we are, they’ll be honor-bound to let us out.”

  “Quiet over there,” bleated the guard.

  They waited silently for a moment. “No, they wouldn’t let us out,” whispered Tree. “I don’t think there’s such a thing as honor down here.”

  “What do you think, Mr. Mustaches?” the Imperial Butler asked last night’s newcomer to their growing brotherhood. But the forlorn, little man sat in the shadows of his cell, watching them but saying nothing. It was as if he were in a trance. A waking nightmare.

  “I have the most curious sensation, young man, whenever I look at you,” the old chancellor told the newcomer. “As though I should know you, but I can’t think how.”

  The butler piped up. “Me, too!” He shook his head. “He must just have one of those faces you see everywhere, that looks like your cousin, but isn’t.”

  “Not to me, he doesn’t,” said Tree. “I only see a face that needs a wash. That’s saying something, coming from me.”

  Under ordinary circumstances, a statesman as lofty as the chancellor would have had no occasion to socialize with a butler, who, in his turn, would never have reason to converse with a woodcutter. But prison has a way of bringing high and low together and erasing the distinctions between them.

  “I know,” said Tree. “We gather all the straw, and our clothes, and we figure out how to light it all on fire.”

  “Gracious heavens,” said the chancellor.

  The young butler moaned. “Oh, I could be safe and smelly back on my uncle’s farm!”

  “No, we could do it,” insisted Tree. “If I can just reach something toward that candle over there—maybe my socks, on the end of a stick—I can light it on fire. Then we kindle a fire in my cell, and when they come to put it out, pow! I knock his teeth in.”

  The chancellor tutted his tongue. “Barbaric.”

  “But possibly effective,” said the butler. “We run the risk of them ignoring the fire, though. We’d have gained nothing and lost our clothes.”

  “Imagine winter in the dungeons with no clothes,” whispered the chancellor in horror. “No, no. It’s too risky. We might die in the smoke. If we couldn’t get the keys, we could be trapped in an inferno. Alas! If only the true emperor were here. None of this would be happening.”

  The butler looked up. “You don’t mean you think he could have stopped Baxa?”

  The old chancellor sighed. “No, probably not.”

  The strange, silent prisoner looked up at this statement.

  “But I doubt Baxa would have staged this takeover if the emperor hadn’t vanished,” the chancellor went on. “Baxa’s nothing but a coward.”

  Tree scratched his chin. “How does an emperor vanish, anyhow?”

  “If only we knew,” mourned the butler. His gaze fell upon the quiet prisoner. Was that his chin, quivering?

  “I still don’t know why the emperor left,” the chancellor mused, “nor what mysterious power could have whisked him away. I tell myself it must be that. Otherwise, I’m sure I would have been able to find him. What his poor mother would say to me now! I shudder to think. I promised her I’d look after him.” He wiped his eyes.

  “If the true emperor were here,” the butler moaned, “I’d be clean, well-dressed, well-shod, and properly fed, with nothing more to worry about but bringing him whatever drinks he wished.” He laughed drily. “And making sure I didn’t upset him, lest he banish or execute me.”

  “Sounds rotten,” said Tree. “I’d take good honest woodcutting any day over doting on such a rat.”

  “Oh, he’s not a rat,” said the chancellor softly. “He’s just a boy. Only a handful of years older than our butler, here.”

  “A ‘boy’ who’s twenty-two and about to gain the scepter!” cried Tree indignantly. “When I was twenty-two, I’d been supporting myself for years and built myself a log cabin.”

  “He would’ve grown up eventually,” said the chancellor sadly. “But it doesn’t matter now, because he’s gone.” There was a catch in his voice. “I’m so afraid he’s gone forever.”

  The newcomer had crawled forward in his cell. He reached a trembling hand out toward the chancellor.

  Tree noticed him then. “Hey, you,” he said. “You’re the one who kidnapped the emperor. That’s what the guard said. Why’d you do it? What did you do with him?”

  “Peace, woodcutter,” the chancellor said. “Don’t rush to judgment. I don’t believe a kidnapper had anything to do with the emperor’s disappearance.”

  The butler took pity and decided to extend an olive branch. “New fellow,” said he, “Quiet chap. None of the rest of us here are guilty of what we’re charged with—except, I suppose, you, Tree, for you did get married, after all—but as I say, we are quite prepared to believe you are innocent. But you must talk to us. You must tell us your story.”

  “Quit your quacking!” ordered the guard.

  They waited for him to forget about them. Then the chancellor tried once more.

  “Young man,” he told the odd little prisoner, “whatever you’ve done, or you haven’t done, take heart. Nothing’s ever quite as awful as it seems. Well, most things aren’t, anyway.”

  The little prisoner held onto the bars of his cage and watched the face of the old chancellor with eager, fearful eyes.

  “It’s pointless,” said Tree. “Fellow doesn’t want to speak. Guilty, no doubt.”

  The chancellor ignored him. “I’ve lived a very long time,” he said. “Too long, according to Baxa. But in that time, I’ve seen that things always seem to change eventually. The good things, and the bad. They all change. So keep hope. Everyone can have a new beginning. Especially someone as young as you. We all need new beginnings throughout our lives. There’s no shame in that.” />
  The butler could’ve sworn he saw the glint of a tear streaking down the little man’s cheek and into his mustaches. Poor fellow.

  Finally, the silent prisoner spoke. “But I’ve … done terrible things.”

  “See?” cried the woodcutter. “He admits it. Guilty.”

  “Quiet, Tree,” said the butler. “He speaks!” But wait. Had he heard that voice before? Impossible. Wasn’t it?

  “And everyone hates me.” The prisoner sniffled into his oily sleeve.

  The chancellor chuckled. “The times I’ve heard youngsters say that! It’s normal to feel that way. But it’s never true. Everyone doesn’t hate you.”

  “They might,” Tree pointed out.

  The butler glared at him.

  “I’m just saying it could be true. We don’t know.”

  “But nobody,” the prisoner said, “ever makes it out of these dungeons. The … The…” He struggled to find a word. “The, er, person in charge here. He makes sure of that.”

  The chancellor stroked his wispy beard. “There was a prison breakout some sixty years ago,” he said. “A notorious thief found his way out and robbed the palace treasuries. So, you see, one can never say ‘never.’”

  The butler groaned. Tree sank to the floor of his cell in despair. But the little man kept clutching the bars, watching the chancellor the way a dog watches his master at the supper table.

  Moments later, two most unusual sounds were heard in the dungeons: the voice of a woman and the cry of a baby. The prisoners—even the newcomer—all craned their necks to see, though in the dimness, ears were of much more use. By the light of the guard’s shaving candle, if the prisoners peered and squinted, they could just make out the shapes.

  A woman burst into the guard’s station with an angry soldier at her heels. “Get out of here!” he bellowed.

  “Oh, please, oh, please, sir!” wailed the woman. “You have to let me see my husband!”

  “Song?” yelped Tree. “Is it really you?”

  The baby screamed in reply, a truly terrifying caterwaul that made both guards clap their hands over their ears.

  “Oh, my brokenhearted ch-child without a father!” wailed Song in convulsive sobs. “Here, Sir Guard. Hold my b-b-baby.”

  Before the guard knew what had happened to him, he found himself the temporary possessor of a solidly built, red-faced, squealing, bellowing, moist young human being. He held it at arm’s length and tried to be heard over the noise.

  “What do I do with it?”

  Song’s answer pierced any eardrums that had survived her child’s performance.

  “Give it a kiss on the cheek, the poor mite, for he has no f-father to love and protect him!” She knelt at the guard’s feet and flung her arms around his ankles in supplication.

  “If you hurt that baby,” roared Tree, “bars or no bars, you’ll answer to me!”

  The guard’s fellow officer, the one who had tried and failed to keep Song from descending into the dungeons, found it easier to scold his comrade than to scold a sobbing mother and her screaming child.

  “Put that thing down, Lee, and clear this racket out of here!”

  Lee, for that was apparently the unfortunate guard’s name, glared indignantly at the other guard. “I can’t put it down,” he said. “You don’t put babies down. Not on a floor like this.”

  “Well, make it stop crying, then.”

  Lee thrust the baby toward the other guard. “You make it stop crying.”

  The other backed away as though Lee were offering him a platter full of plague. “I don’t know babies.”

  “And I do?”

  “Poor little orphan!” shrieked Song. “Poor fatherless babe and his poor widowed mother!” She keened like a demon roaming empty highways at midnight. “And all because their father’s been sent to the dungeons. Woe, woe, woe is me!”

  And so the pandemonium continued. The baby screamed, the mother screamed, the guards took turns yelling at each other. So engrossed were all the prisoners by the performance unfolding before them that they almost failed to notice something much more extraordinary that was going on at the very same time that Song and her baby were whipping the guards into a state of near insanity.

  Here is what the prisoners almost, but not quite, failed to see:

  A skinny boy, covered head to toe in the darkest dirt so that he almost blended into the blackness of the dungeons, had crept down the stairs behind the second guard. While both guards wrangled with the unruly woman and her child, the boy tiptoed to the lock of the new prisoner’s cage.

  “Key?” whispered the prisoner. “What are you doing here?”

  Holding a finger over his lips, the boy pulled from his pocket a string of shiny tools and old keys. He fiddled and tinkered with the lock for what seemed, to the Imperial Butler, like an eternity. Like a thousand eternities. The boy listened. He tested. He probed around the box containing the locking mechanism with long, patient fingers. Just as the butler was sure the lad was doomed to fail, the boy’s white teeth flashed in the darkness. He smiled. The bolt slid back. The stranger’s door fell open, just an inch.

  The new prisoner stuck his head out of the cell. “Did you come back for me?”

  “Shh!”

  In no time at all, the boy went to Tree’s lock. The woodcutter watched him in open-mouthed astonishment, but the boy gestured to him with wide circles, pointing toward the guards and his wife, that he should keep up his racket. So he did, hurling insults at the guards in a steady torrent, but his heart wasn’t fully in it. His eyes were glued to the boy’s nimble fingers. They moved more quickly this time.

  “Was a girl brought down into the dungeons today?” the boy breathed. “Or a woman?” The young butler, who’d been watching the boy like a hawk since he first appeared, shook his head. The lad’s face fell, but he kept on working.

  One more lock to go, and by now the lad was practically an expert. With a shove, a twist, and a flick, he released the bolt that imprisoned the Imperial Butler and the chancellor.

  All the doors were open. All the prisoners halted on the verge of action. The guards were still there, shouting at each other and at the woman and her wailing child. What to do?

  The boy whispered in Tree’s ear. The woodcutter grinned from ear to ear. He nodded.

  Then the boy planted himself in plain sight in the lit patch of floor near the one candle. “Now!” he cried.

  Many things happened at once.

  Song leaped to her feet and snatched her baby away from Lee. The child stopped crying instantly.

  The two guards noticed the boy, then bolted for him like two bulls at attack speed.

  Before they could reach the boy, a prison cell door swung out and smacked them both in the foreheads. Neither guard enjoyed this experience. Before their eyes stopped rolling and their heads had cleared, they found themselves locked in a cell together, with the impudent boy reaching through the bars to steal their belts and pocket their keys.

  “Commendably done, young man,” cried the chancellor. “And you, Mr. Tree, showed remarkable agility.”

  “Yes, well done, Cousin Key,” the butler told the skinny youth.

  The boy gasped. He stared at the butler with his mouth hanging open. “Cousin Shoe? Why aren’t you home with the pigs?”

  “Why aren’t you?” replied the Imperial Butler. “I never thought I’d see you picking locks like a jewel thief.”

  “I never thought I’d see you rotting in the palace dungeons!” cried Key.

  “Later,” said Tree. He pointed toward his wife, who beckoned frantically for them to follow her up and out. “Family reunions, later. Right now, let’s get out of here.”

  29

  DISBELIEF ONCE MORE, AND A SURPRISE ENCOUNTER

  While darkness, mayhem, and sabotage roiled in the dungeons deep below, tranquility reigned above in the gilded halls and plushly decorated chambers of the palace royale. Flowers bloomed, fountains trickled, and treasures beyond price or number
shone in polished splendor.

  Order, perfection, and peace prevailed in every chamber.

  Except for one, at least.

  The room that held Begonia had been, for over an hour, the site of a mighty struggle.

  She had pounded on the door until her knuckles ached.

  She had screamed until her throat was raw.

  She had toppled chairs in her attempt to pry open barred and bolted windows.

  She had never been in such an elegant room in her life. And she’d never felt so trapped.

  Stormcloud, by some feline miracle, had stayed at Begonia’s feet as the merciless men dragged her in. She now lay draped over Begonia’s tired legs on a velvet divan. The kitty’s company brought a morsel of comfort, but only just.

  That wicked, so-called emperor! That malicious usurper. “Baxa the Conqueror” was nothing more than a grasping tyrant. A bully in fancy clothing, with an army at his command to enforce his cruelties upon a mighty realm. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. And it was terrifying.

  Poor, silly Lumi, stuck forever in the dungeons below. Not even a nincompoop deserved that. And she—would she fare any better? Would she ever see Mumsy’s face again?

  At the thought of Mumsy, Begonia broke down. These three days away from home felt like three years. All she’d wanted, last week, was to manure her garden, plant her seedlings, and count the new chicks in her henhouse. All she’d wanted three days ago was to find her runaway cow and be home before lunch. All she’d wanted this morning was to right the injustices of the world. And she’d been naïve enough to think she could do it just by talking to an emperor.

  Key had asked her to wait by the shed until he returned from investigating the dungeons. He’d be terribly worried to find her gone. Would the animals still be there? Might Poka have recaptured his “postrich?”

  Begonia glared at the painted door holding her hostage. Its brass doorknob, though beautifully carved, was her enemy. Well, not the knob. The lock.

  I am a Disbeliever in Locks.

  Key’s ridiculous statement rang in her ears. She might as well be a Disbeliever in Thunderstorms and stop lightning from sparking in the sky and scaring the farm animals.