‘Show us the way to go home
We’re drunk and we want to have a sleep
We’re staggering around in the forest
And we just can’t keep our feet!’
Emsie had her work cut out for her. She was trying to force a drunken Cardinal to help support a drunken Marshall, who had broken his leg, and neither was helping her at all. She had tried for a while to put the Cardinal on the Marshall’s left, while she supported his right, however this did not seem to work and after much fumbling, stumbling and general staggering around they had settled with Emsie in the middle, the Marshall to her left (allowing him to lean in from his sound right leg and trail the left behind) and Mascarpone on her right. There was no logical reason why this arrangement should have worked, as it involved the much smaller Emsie supporting the two large and inebriated men, however it did. When they adopted this formation they moved, if she tried to change it; they stopped.
The singing also seemed to help. If they sang they moved quicker, stood straighter and (of greatest importance to Emsie) they put less weight on her and so she had encouraged them to sing and walk. She was now trying to stop them (singing, not walking) as they had made their way out of the forest and into the carnival area, and she was trying not to attract attention. This was not working as Gney and Mascarpone, who had never agreed about anything before, found a great common purpose in annoying the girl who was helping them.
‘Ssh!’ said Emsie, ‘People are sleeping.’
‘Yeah! SSH!’ shouted Gney, ‘Steeple are peopling!’
‘Yeah! SSH!’ shouted Mascarpone, who then laughed, ‘You said that sheephole are people.’
They had to stop.
‘I didn’t say that peepholes are sheep!’ argued the Marshall (quite accurately).
‘I didn’t say that you said that. I said that you said that sheepish is….I can’t remember what you said, but you said it!’
‘I probably did.’
‘Please be quiet.’
‘We are being quiet.’
‘You’re not.’
‘We’re not what?’ demanded Gney earnestly, ‘What are we not?’
‘Being quiet!’ hissed Emsie, ‘You are not being quiet, you are going to wake everyone up and my Grandpa is-’
‘-Going to be as mad as hell!’ shouted Grandpa, who had emerged from the chicken tent to find Emsie in the clutches of two elderly drunks.
‘What do you think that you are doing? I promised your Mother that I’d look after you and keep you out of trouble. I train you, give you an honest job, take you on to see the world, trust you with the responsibility for business and you desert me and go out drinking with these old fools, leaving the cats to steal the chicken and me to face ruin! What are you thinking of?’
At this point Emsie noticed Albert the cat lying contentedly by a pile of chicken bones. He seemed to have put on quite a bit of weight in the evening.
She was upset. She wanted to explain that she had only left the tent for a while, and she had only done that because her new friend, Amarilla, who was actually nearly a Princess, had really needed her help. She was, Emsie would have explained, despite being nearly a Princess, very unhappy and she had needed Emsie’s help, and this was the only reason Emsie had left the tent; the only reason! And she had helped her friend. She wasn’t quite sure how, but they had rescued someone and then people had been going to hurt Amarilla’s Uncle and she had saved him, but he had been hurt and so she had tried to get help, but she had ended up with the drunken Cardinal and that was what she had been doing. She had really, really done her best!
However, as often happened when she tried to speak in her own defence, her normal articulacy deserted her,
‘Gluh,’ she said, stifling a sob.
‘Don’t you ‘Gluh’ me, my girl!’ growled Grandpa with the carefree, self righteous ease of the lazy, ‘I’m not going to be ‘Gluh-ed’ by young girls and old drunkards. This is a disgrace, an absolute disgrace! If your Mother could see you now-’
At this point the Marshall, who had been listening in amusement interrupted,
‘Don’t I know you, Corporal?’ he asked.
Emsie’s Grandpa looked him over and then stared in amazement,
‘Marshall Gney? Here with my Emsie’ he asked.
‘No other,’ replied the Marshall, ‘the girl rescued me and brought me here; so stop shouting at her’.
‘Gluh,’ said Grandpa.
‘I think you mean, “Gluh, Sir!”’ added Mascarpone helpfully.
Pedro, Banshee, Roscow and Amarilla had made their way to the spot where the cart had left the road and entered the forest.
‘You go and see. I weel wait weeth heem,’ said Pedro to Amarilla, bringing Banshee to a halt.
‘Hokay’ mumbled Roscow dreamily from the donkey’s back.
‘Hokay, I mean, I will go and look,’ said Amarilla, ‘I hope they are okay.’
‘They weel bee fine,’ said Pedro as positively as he could manage, ‘eet ees just a leetle drop weeth manee trees and rocks and theengs to heet.’
Amarilla climbed off the road and down into the trees.
‘They are probablee all dead,’ Pedro confided in Banshee, ‘but eet ees not for the likes of me to break thee hearts of thee beautiful young girls.’
‘Hokay,’ agreed Roscow, who slid of Banshee’s back and settled on the path.
Naiman had all the advantages; not only was he a trained and deadly assassin, he was bigger and stronger than Beowulf, he had an element of surprise and he had not already been dropped down a hillside in a cart. He ducked under Beowulf’s block and tackled him to the floor, causing Beowulf to drop his knife. As they fell to the floor he sensed a movement and was able to avoid Beowulf’s knee from causing him any damage by twisting away. They had hit the ground hard and this impact allowed Beowulf to pull away from Naiman and to attempt to roll away, however the assassin had a firm grip on the front of Beowulf’s tunic and he pushed down, pinning Beowulf to the floor while he bought his knife hand up.
‘Not this time,’ said Naiman, as Beowulf tried to roll the other way, ‘you need to follow the plan your Father sent you!’
‘He’s not my Father, at least, not definitely’ said Beowulf, who had stopped trying to roll, ‘and if you kill me, his plan will fail.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Naiman, ‘now that you have all the Louis’; I can kill you, finish off Louie-Louie and the Briton. That will leave Louis as King and I can blame you for the murders. The Pope will have been crossed and the Duke will have his way. He won’t appear to have caused the problem and he can play France and the Papacy off against each other in the war that is to come.’
Beowulf considered this.
While Beowulf considered this, Louie-Louie who didn’t like the sound of being ‘finished off’ had picked up a tree branch and crept behind Naiman.
‘Die you evil murderer!’ he shouted, somewhat dramatically, and swung the branch.
As she picked her way through the trees Amarilla was aware that she was being followed. When she looked back she could see that a growing number of guards were following her down the slope. She hesitated briefly and then decided that it did not matter; she was the fiancée of whichever Louis was still alive (if any) and she was determined to find and help Lewis. A thought came to her; the guards were all French, she was the niece of Marshall Gney.
‘Follow me!’ she shouted, ‘we need to rescue the King!’