Fit For a King

Fit For A King

I was eight years old yesterday. After my birthday party, when all my friends left, I was so tired that I barely remember flopping into bed. I know that I fell fast asleep, but when I opened my eyes, it wasn’t morning - it was still the middle of the night. Looking around, I found myself in what I can best describe as another world. It seemed like a fantasy land, but this was real. All too real.

I remember tumbling out of bed, rolling out of my room, down the stairs, out of my house and into some type of bottomless well.I was tumbling head-over tail, spinning towards the bottom, eventually landing on a dirt road. In front of me I could see what appeared to be a castle of some sort. It looked just like some castles I had seen in storybooks.

I turned around to see what lay behind me and found a forest so overgrown I couldn’t see much beyond the very tall trees in front of it. I could also see what appeared to be a small village a bit beyond the forest. And a sign on the side of the road said, “Don’t go into the woods!”

I didn’t know what to do and I wasn’t sure where I should go, so I started walking through the woods towards the castle.

As I got closer, I could see that surrounding the castle was a moat, a pond of water about thirty-feet wide between the road I was on and the castle itself. I didn’t see any way to get from the road, over the water, and to the castle. But as I stood there wondering what I might do next, a wooden walkway, called a drawbridge, began to slowly lower itself over the water, and connected the road upon which I stood and the entrance to the castle.

I waited until the drawbridge had fully descended. Then, as I was about halfway onto the bridge, a middle-aged woman, wearing a gray bonnet tied under her chin, and a faded blue apron hanging from her neck and tied behind her at her waist, ran out from the castle. She ran right on by me and across the bridge to the road where she stopped about twenty feet behind me. I could tell she was some type of servant, and, having noticed her apron, I guessed perhaps a cook or a maid.

She was obviously upset, as even with her back to me, I could see that she had put her hands up to her face and was beginning to cry.

I wasn’t feeling so great myself, with my arms and legs scraped from falling down the well, but I gathered up whatever courage I had left within me and walked towards her to find out what was wrong.

As I approached, she turned to me and it became obvious that she had hurt herself, Again, I felt as if in a strange fantasy world as I saw that where her nose should have been, there was nothing except a little blood – like a nosebleed without a nose. It was so strange. Something very bad had happened to her, and she may have even been in shock, standing there as she was, and staring at me.

“What happened?” I asked, and she replied, “I’m the King’s maid, and I was in the garden - hanging out the clothes – when down came a blackbird that pecked off my nose.” This can’t be real, I thought, but here I was, and here she was, and she with no nose.

“Why would a blackbird do that?” I wondered aloud, and she told me the strangest story.

Yesterday, she said, the King had given her some money, sixpence, and ordered her to purchase a pie for dessert that evening. “As you know,” she offered, “sixpence is not very much money to get a pie ‘fit-for-a-king’. But, with sixpence in my hand, I left for the village to see what I could do.

“The first baker I approached wanted ten pence for a blueberry pie, so I couldn’t purchase that one. The next wanted eight pence for an apple pie, and I didn’t have enough for that one either. Fortunately, an ancient, hunched over, gypsy woman, overheard me negotiating with the bakers, and called me aside. “I baked a pie.”, she said, in a quivering voice. “And a very special pie it is – filled with four and twenty blackbirds.” “And” she went on, “it is yours for only sixpence.”

“She actually frightened me,” the maid continued, “and I wondered if this gypsy had put some kind of a spell on the pie, but it was the only pie I had enough to pay for. So, I bought it, but I did indeed worry all day long that something strange was going to happen with this pie.”

“That evening”, she went on to tell me, after dinner, when the pie was opened, the strangest thing happened – the birds began to sing. “And,” she went on, the Queen said, “Wasn’t that a dainty dish to put before the King?”. Then, she told me, that the next day, in the garden, the birds had attacked her – she believed they were angry about the pie.

At this point the bleeding where her nose should have been, was getting a little worse, so I handed her my handkerchief to stop it. Then I took her by the hand to go find the King and get this wound looked after. At this point, I could see that she was beginning to trust me. She smiled for the first time, patted her nose with the handkerchief and handed it back to me.

As we headed towards the castle, my aches and pains from falling down the well, were feeling a little better and I was able to walk somewhat steadier. When we passed through the castle doors, she told me that the King was in the counting house, counting out his money, so rather than disturb him, I asked her where the Queen was, and she answered, “In the parlor, eating bread and honey.”

What? At that point, I knew that there was something very, very wrong here. It was like déjà vu, something that had happened to me before. Could I have possibly been here in the past? In this very castle?

My head began to spin. My eyes were closed, and I slowly opened them, surprised to find myself back at home, in my own bed, with a pounding headache. Slowly I realized that I was waking up from a dream. But it had all seemed so real.

Of course, it was just a dream – I knew that – or so I thought - until I looked at the handkerchief, still clutched in my hand, and noticed the bloodstain on it.

So, was this real? Or was it a dream? I honestly didn‘t know.