A crowd of half a dozen men had gathered around one of the tables. A large man with a pointy red beard sat with a mug of ale in one hand, speaking to them. At first I thought he was a storyteller, but as I drew closer I heard his voice. “If none can defeat the Black Knight—and I’ll not claim as much until I’ve fought him myself—then it stands to reason that your king will give Margaret’s hand to the man who has rid the land of his other foes. And that,” he said, raising his mug as though offering a toast, “is what I shall do.”
A rumble of approval went through his audience. One of the crowd called out, “How will you kill the ogre?”
The man with the pointy beard took a drink, then shook his head slightly. “ ’Tis bad luck to speak of a thing before it happens. But I will tell you this: on the morrow I’ll go to King Roderick and pay my respects to him and his daughter. Then I’ll go up to the caves and destroy the wretched monster. When I come back to this inn we shall all feast, and I will tell you the story of my victory.”
One from the crowd raised his mug and said, “Here’s to Sir William—may he cleanse the land of the murderous beast!”
Another man said, “To the safety of our cattle and our children!”
The rest of the crowd raised their glasses and cheered, one by one adding in their toasts. I sat by the hearth and shivered.
Where was Tristan? Unless he killed the cyclops tonight, it might be too late. It didn’t look like he’d even come today. The sun was nearly across the sky.
Perhaps Princess Margaret was detaining him.
I watched the fire crackling and felt nothing but cold and miserable. I’d come to help Tristan, hadn’t I? And I was invincible now, so who had a better chance to kill the cyclops? Then I could just hide the thing until Tristan could come and take credit for slaying it.
But helping him meant helping him marry Margaret, and I didn’t like her. She was conceited and mean and she’d tried to shut me up in her room for who knows how long.
My mind wandered away from Princess Margaret and back to Tristan. Tristan, who looked so good rugged and mussed and wearing a tunic. He had a new confidence about him, a sense of purpose, as though here in the past he’d found himself.
Margaret didn’t appreciate how smart he was or the way his blue eyes seemed to look right into you. She would only ever see him as a page, a servant. So why should I do anything that made their wedding possible? I sat there for a while longer, but I didn’t see another way. I’d come to help Tristan. I had to face the cyclops tonight.
• • •
I traded the thief ’s horse for a sword. I wasn’t sure if it was a good trade or not, but since I hadn’t paid for the horse I figured it didn’t matter. Being invincible could prove to be profitable.
I got directions to the caves from the innkeeper’s wife, who didn’t seem to think it was odd that I was asking. Perhaps she thought I was asking in order to avoid the place. Instead, I rode out of the village and directly up into the hills where the cyclops lived. The sun had begun to dip down in the sky, and I pushed my horse to a gallop in an attempt to outrace it.
We rode to where the forest grew dense. The caves were somewhere beyond these trees—cold, dark mouths in the landscape. My horse whinnied nervously and twitched her head from side to side as though trying to shake off the bridle. I wondered if she could smell the cyclops from here.
I left her tethered to a tree by the main path. I may be invincible, but she wasn’t. It was safer to leave her here until I’d finished my business. I didn’t worry about her being stolen. I doubted any thieves hung out in the cyclops-infested part of the forest.
I made my way on a path that had already been overtaken by clumps of grass. It had been a while since people willingly rode through this part of the forest.
The night air pressed against my face and neck, and when I approached the caves my back tingled as though someone was watching me. I wished my senses would sharpen the way they did when the thieves had come so I wouldn’t have to worry about tripping over tree roots and rocks, but all my senses remained normal. Apparently it only worked when I was in danger.
I gripped the sword in one hand, nearly using it as a walking stick. My feet made scuffing sounds against the dirt and fallen leaves. I could make out the opening to one cave in front of me and another farther off. Should I go inside and search them?
I heard a sound slithering through the trees to my side. I turned, searching the forest. It grew louder. What at first seemed like a strange wind was actually a voice. “Mmmaaaiiidddeeennn. I smell mai . . . den . . .”
I held the sword up and looked over its tip into the shadowy darkness. Any moment the world would grow slow. My eyes darted between the trees looking for movement.
Nothing. Nothing. And then a large shape, slinking toward me, hunched over as though he were about to pounce.
“Perfumey,” he said in a nasally voice. “Stinking perfume filling my forest.”
The cyclops came closer. I could make out his misshapen head. His greasy black hair looked human, but the similarities ended there. The top half of his face was a gigantic bulging eyeball that stared, unblinking, at me. The bottom half was a mouth so filled with teeth that it didn’t look like he could close it. His lumpish brown nose wiggled up and down like a rabbit’s.
He swayed his head as he walked toward me, and I realized why his stare was so intense. He had no eyelid over his eye. I clasped the sword harder, waiting for my senses to sharpen.
The cyclops circled around me. “Methinks she isn’t lost. A maiden with a sword. Why does she come, the tasty maiden?”
I held out my sword more as a shield than as a weapon. “I’ve come to kill you. Sorry, but it has to be done.”
The cyclops tilted his head back and laughed. Then he snorted. Then he laughed again. His bulging eyeball jiggled in his head.
I held the sword steady. “I know I don’t look dangerous, but that doesn’t matter. I’m enchanted and no weapon will hurt me, nor any man defeat me in battle.”
Apparently he didn’t believe in enchantments, because this made him laugh even harder.
“I’m sorry to have to kill you,” I said, trying to dampen his humor. “Perhaps you could just surrender and beg for the king’s mercy . . .”
Where his fingers should have been he had claws, which he tapped together menacingly. “The maiden can’t kill me.”
“I will.”
“Foolish, foolish maiden,” he snickered. “Your magic is nothing. I have no weapons and I’m not a man.”
I took a step back from him. My heart knocked against my ribs. Could he be right? Is that why my senses hadn’t sharpened yet? Why hadn’t that occurred to me before?
The cyclops ran toward me. I screamed and held the sword out, hoping that the cyclops would impale himself as he jumped on me. Instead, he batted away my sword with one hand and knocked me aside with the other. I flew through the air and smacked into something hard, probably a tree. The breath went from my lungs, and everything went black.
Chapter 19
My ribs hurt when I awoke, which didn’t make sense until I realized the cyclops was carrying me under one arm. His grip was painfully tight around my torso. I pushed against his arm, trying to get free, but he held me fast.
“Stupid two eyes,” he hissed. “Squinty little two eyes never pay attention to magic. Only see the part they want to see. Bad vision, they have. Very bad vision.”
“Let me go!” I yelled. I tried to scratch his arm, but his skin was like plastic. I didn’t even leave a mark.
“Shall I eat her, the stinky maiden?” He shook his head and grunted. “She’ll likely taste perfumey bad.”
“Very bad,” I said. “You should let me go.”
“Maybe I should just break her pesky bones and save her for later. I might get very hungry later.”
I gave up trying to loosen his grip on me and just tried to twist so that my ribs weren’t quite as compressed. “I’m sure something better wil
l come along. A pig or a deer . . .”
“Unicorn would be tasty,” he said, and he dropped me on the ground.
I tried to crawl away but he stomped a foot onto my dress, pinning me in position.
“Maiden will sing,” he hissed.
“Sing?” Then I remembered the legend that maidens could tame unicorns by singing to them.
“Sing now!” he yelled so loudly that he probably scared away any animal within a mile radius.
I couldn’t think of a single song. The words all fled my mind. I couldn’t even think of a tune to hum while he was leaning over me, clicking his claws together.
He sniffed at my face. “Perhaps if I rub her with leaves she will taste better.”
“Happy birthday to you,” I sang with a trembling voice. “Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, awful cyclops monster thing. Happy birthday to you.”
“Louder,” he said.
So I sang louder. My voice wavered and cracked and mostly went off-key, but I yelled out the birthday song, then moved on to “La Cucaracha” and the alphabet song. When I’d reached LMNOP, the Cyclops straightened and sniffed the air.
“Something is coming,” he said. “It smells horsey.”
I stopped singing and looked, but as soon as the tune died in my mouth, the cyclops turned and growled at me. “Sing more!”
I sang again. The moment he took his foot off my dress I planned on bolting through the forest. Hopefully he would be more interested in catching the unicorn than pursuing me. And hopefully the unicorn would stab him with its horn and then run away.
“TUV,” I sang, but then I stopped. A bright light pierced through the darkness, a beam from a flashlight. It went directly into the cyclops’s large eye, blinding him. Unable to shut his eye, he turned away in pain, moaning, stumbling with both arms flung in front of his face.
“Run here!” Tristan yelled, but I was already on my feet, heading in his direction. When I reached him, he barely looked at me, just thrust the flashlight into my hand and said, “Try to keep this trained on his eye.”
I had expected the cyclops to flee from the light into the darkness of the forest, but he didn’t. He stayed where he was, roaring in anger. I shone the flashlight beam directly at his head, but he’d turned his face backward and tried to walk toward us while keeping his eye away from the light. One of his arms swung out in our direction as though trying to scratch us.
The cyclops, I realized, was not used to running away from people and didn’t plan on doing it now.
Tristan walked toward him, a spear in one hand and an object I couldn’t discern in the other. Some sort of cylinder.
“Don’t get so close, don’t get so close,” I repeated, even though I knew Tristan couldn’t hear me over the roars of the cyclops. Tristan walked around to the cyclops so that he faced the monster. I was afraid the cyclops would lunge at Tristan since he no longer stood in the protection of the flashlight beam. But before the cyclops could take a swipe at Tristan, Tristan held the object up and squeezed it. A stream of liquid shot out from the object and went directly into the cyclops’s eye.
The monster screamed again, louder and fiercer this time. So loud that the forest seemed to shake. He clutched at his eye with his clawed hands and stumbled backward, out of the beam of my flashlight.
The cyclops’s screams suddenly stopped. I searched for him with the flashlight, and when I found him, I understood why. He lay motionless on the ground. Tristan’s spear stuck out of his chest.
It was only then, after I knew the danger had passed, that I began to shake. My hands trembled so much that the flashlight beam jumped up and down. Tristan walked toward me, appraising me. “Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
He reached me, and once he was satisfied that I wasn’t injured, the concern in his expression turned into anger. He put one hand to his temple, then held it out in my direction. “Okay, is there some reason you keep trying to kill yourself, some sort of death wish I should know about?”
“I wasn’t trying to kill myself,” I said, my words tumbling together. “Sir William told everyone in the inn that he was going to kill the ogre tomorrow, and I didn’t think you’d make it back in time, so I had to try and take care of it myself.”
Tristan looked at me like I’d lost my mind, then walked past me. I swung the flashlight beam after him to see what he was doing. A few feet away from me, his sword stood upright in the ground. He pulled it out with one hand, then strode past me to the cyclops.
“I was trying to help you, you know,” I called after him.
“And I’ve had enough of your help. If you ‘help’ me any more you’ll get us both killed.”
I took two steps toward him. “I know you don’t believe me, but I have an invincibility enchantment. I fought off three thieves on the way to the inn with nothing but a riding crop. How do you explain that if I’m not invincible?”
He’d reached the cyclops, but turned back to face me. “Three thieves?” A look of frustration crossed his face. “Did it even occur to you before you took off from the castle that it wasn’t a good idea to go running around the forest by yourself?”
“The point is,” I said firmly, “I beat them off, which proves that I’ve got an invincibility enchantment.”
He put one foot on the cyclops’s chest and tugged at his spear, trying to remove it. “Men here aren’t used to ladies who fight back. You probably just took them by surprise and spooked them off.” He gestured toward the cyclops as if presenting me evidence. “You weren’t invincible against this thing.”
“I didn’t take into account that the cyclops wasn’t human.”
“Yeah, well, once again, that’s where paying attention in school could have helped you.”
I put one hand on my hip in disbelief. “Oh, you mean back in health class when they taught us what to do in case of a cyclops attack?”
“World Lit. The Odyssey.” The spear broke instead of coming free, and Tristan tossed it aside in disgust. He wouldn’t be able to reuse it.
I didn’t say any more about being enchanted. What was the point? He refused to take what I said seriously.
“Hold the beam on the cyclops’s head,” he told me.
I did, but couldn’t watch when I realized what Tristan was about to do. I heard the thwack of his sword and shuddered. A minute later Tristan walked back to me carrying the cyclops’s head by the hair.
He handed me his sword to hold, then took the flashlight from me and strode into the forest. I walked beside him, keeping my gaze averted from what he held in his hand. We walked for a few minutes in silence, following the beam from the flashlight. With more stiffness in my voice than I’d intended, I said, “Thanks for saving my life.”
“You’re welcome.”
We took more footsteps in silence. I tried to match Tristan’s quick pace without tripping on any rocks or tree roots. “So how did you find me?”
“When I reached the inn, I asked the innkeeper’s wife where you were. She didn’t know, but said you’d questioned her about the location of the cyclops’s caves. After that, it was just a matter of hurrying as fast as I could to get things ready, cursing a lot, finding your horse and your sword along the way—did I mention cursing a lot? And then I followed the sound of your voice.”
“What did you squirt into his eye? Acid?”
He shook his head. “Acid is hard to come by in the Middle Ages. It was actually watered-down shampoo. I’d forgotten how much it can sting your eyes until you brought it here.”
So that’s what he’d been holding. My Pantene bottle. “You mean you shampooed the cyclops to death?” The shock of the evening had taken its toll on me and I laughed out loud. “Well, that should make for an interesting story to tell at the king’s table: Tristan and the Shampoo Bottle of Death.”
He grinned, but didn’t look at me. “Don’t make me laugh. I’m still mad at you.”
“I know you are, Tristan. You’ve been mad at me for the last e
ight months.”
He didn’t answer me. For the rest of the way to our horses, we didn’t speak at all.
• • •
We rode slowly back to the inn. Tristan rode in front of me, doing his best to light the way with the flashlight while my horse followed his. I spent a lot of time shivering and looking up at the sky, heavy with stars. How in the world could they be the same stars I’d seen back in my world? Everything else had changed.
Once we’d arrived at the inn, the priest rang the church bell to let the villagers know there was important news. Several of the men made a bonfire in the middle of the street. Then everyone crowded around for warmth while Tristan told them of my rescue and his daring triumph over the monster. In the story, Tristan said I’d gone to the forest searching for him because I thought he went to fight the cyclops. I had been worried when he hadn’t returned and feared he might be lying wounded somewhere. Which I suppose sounded better than saying I went because I was foolish.
He left the shampoo out of it altogether, much to my disappointment, but did say he had temporarily blinded the cyclops with his magic lantern. Then he flipped on the flashlight and shined a beam of light into the crowd. They shielded their eyes and gasped, and were just as fascinated by the magic lantern— wanting to see and touch it—as they were by the cyclops’s head. Which they also wanted to see and touch. Even the little kids had to come up and poke the thing in its face like it was some sort of elaborate Halloween mask.
I couldn’t look at it without getting the dry heaves.
After everyone was done gaping at the head, the innkeeper took it, put it in a burlap sack, and locked it in his wine cellar for safekeeping. Then Tristan and a bunch of the menfolk went to the inn and the innkeeper brought out all sorts of food in celebration. Tristan paid for it, which I thought was backward, but everyone kept clapping him on the back and calling him the king’s new son-in-law, so I guess they figured he could afford it. Even Sir William, who’d been downright put out during the bonfire, became more cheerful when the food was passed around.