PRINCESS BEAST (14 page)

“Listen, fur face, I didn’t give her back her true form because I like the girl. Hers’ is the most sentimental, misogynistic, moralizing tale in the land. Just like Helga, the Bog King’s daughter, she could have changed her fate with a change of mind. I did it for Rune.”

 

* * *

 

 

Chapter Thirteen

The Red Shoes

 

The Andersen Land Philosopher is flying high over Zealand. From his birds-eye view he spies Rune climbing out of the Great Belt at the harbor of Helsingor, the northeastern most point of Denmark. He can also see Beauty and Holger climbing out of the Great Belt at the harbor of Korsor on the west coast of Zealand. “One can advise comfortably from a safe port,” he squawks to no one in particular. He enjoys the sound of his own voice.

It is dark at the Helsingor harbor, and so is Rune’s mood. The swim dampened her anger, but darkened her thoughts.
The swan promised me I would transform here in Andersen Land
, she thinks as she shakes water from her fur
. I’ve learned of two transformations: Helga’s and the mermaid’s, and both transformed to human girls, part of the time, but neither of them stayed that way, but transformed a third time from girl to light and girl to air. I hate this stinking place.

Rune whacks the side of her head, jumping on one foot to dispel the water from her ear, and notices rows of lights glowing in the distance. The moon scoots out from behind a cloud and Rune’s breath is taken away as the moonlight shines brightly on Kronborg Castle. She could not have imagined such a castle. She counts the rows of lights, four stories high, and in the towers there are six. Oh and there are many towers and spires, cannons black noses pointed outward from the roofs. The castle sits on a peninsula and is surrounded by a deep moat.

Rune walks toward the castle like a sleepwalker. She crosses the moat bridge to enter a huge stone courtyard where trees grow in urns, and where stand statues of former kings and warriors. Rune approaches the entrance, three giant archways cut into golden hued stone, a Grecian column on either side of each arch.

As she passes through the center arch, she walks softly and lightly, as if a string runs from her feet through the top of her head and lifts her slightly off the ground, the walk of a princess within her palace. She approaches the first lighted window and looks inside to see the Main Hall with its shining checkerboard marble floor, soaring archways and glittering chandeliers. She ducks her head as a servant passes the window pushing a cart groaning with food. It is laden with roasted pheasants, loaves of breads, bowls of brussel sprouts and potatoes and squash; bowls of fruit, slabs of butter and carafes of wine. A feast fit for a king.

Rune skips along the windows outside the Main Hall, following the servant and his cart until at last he enters the Dining Hall. The room is--Rune searches her mind, picturing her mother’s dictionary, for the perfect word to describe the room—splendid. It is six times the size of Cozy Cave. The furniture is enormous, beautiful carved, polished mahogany tables and sideboards. Golden chandeliers with Austrian crystal prisms hang from the ceiling and tapestries of landscapes hang on the walls.  In one corner, a musician strums a mandolin and in another a woman plays a harp. Seating at the table is the royal family: a king, a queen, three princesses and one prince, and a manservant stands behind each one.

Rune presses her nose to the windowpane, her eyes devouring every detail of their faces and their finery. In the nature of fourteen-year-old girls, the prince is the first she sizes up. She is disappointed; the prince is not pretty, he is pudgy. A roll of satin covered fat lops over the waistband of his breeches. He is also pimply and his blond hair hangs limply below his chin.

Rune barely glances at the king and queen; they appear as every king and queen she has seen in history books. However, the three princesses gain Rune’s full and devoted attention. They are each close to her age. She begins with their feet, encased in gold embroidered slippers, neatly tucked beneath the table, one thin ankle resting on the other. Their gowns are pale yellow, pale green, and pale pink, cinched at the waist, and the bodices are bedecked with white flowers, a pearl in the center of each blossom. Their hair is the color of flax seed and their eyes the pale watery blue of March skies. Their noses are long and pointed and their lips thin lines of discontent.

Rune turns away from the window and pictures again, as she has dozens of times, her true face within the magic mirror and her true body within the emperor’s mirror.
My feet are smaller than their feet; my body is curved like an hourglass, not straight and thin. My hair is like a golden waterfall of curls and my eyes are as brown and beguiling as a fawn’s. I belong at that table more than any one of them,
she thinks, eyes narrowing, her jaw clenching.

 

* * *

 

Beauty furrows her hairy brow at the sight of Rune’s expression within the mirror—exactly like Runyon’s whenever his father, the King, visited Castle Fleur de Coer. That was before Beauty left on her quest, before Runyon poisoned the King and took his crown. Now she is grateful for the precious time Rune is spending at Kronborg Castle, the sooner to catch up with her, for she and Holger had paused as well. While climbing up the wharf at Korsor, Holger tore his shin. Despite his protest, Beauty insisted they stop when she spied a cluster of sedum plants. She ripped up one plant, bit off the bottoms of the roots, and applied them to Holger’s shin.

“By Odin’s beard, the bleeding has stopped and the pain is gone,” Holger says, and Beauty sets the mirror aside to examine his leg.

“The plant is Sedum Purpureum, common name Live-Forever. It also works well for stomach pain when brewed as tea,” Beauty says. “I have a medicinal garden at my home in the Grimm forest.”

“I should like to see your garden one day,” Holger says as he stands and the two pick up their pace, heading northwest.

 

* * *

 

Rune is wrung out with emotion and longs for a warm, soft spot to sleep.  From the far end of the castle comes the whinny of horses. Rune loves horses as most fourteen-year-old girls do, even though she had never ridden one. She trots off in the direction of the Royal Stable hoping to sleep there tonight. Nearing the stable, she is stopped short by a multi-colored glow. The Royal Chapel Window soars twenty feet high and depicts Saint Margaret of Antioch who was swallowed by a beast, but due to her faith and goodness and the cross she wore that choked the beast, she emerged alive and well.

Rune steps backward to view the entire glass mosaic. Candles are lit inside the chapel and their light makes the glass glow like precious jewels: the emerald green of Margaret’s robe, her amber hair, the gold of her cross, and the ruby red beast’s mouth, lifeless at the base of the glass, while Margaret rises from the beast’s dead shell.

Tingles spark Rune’s scalp and the hair on her arms stands erect. “It has happened before,” she whispers, “a beautiful princess living beneath beastly skin . . . a real transformation. It must have happened in this land, in a church . . .“ her eyes roll upward, fixing on the cross hanging about the saint’s neck . . . “when she was confirmed. I need a gold cross and I’ll find one on the way to Copenhagen, I know in my heart that I will.”

The Andersen Land philosopher alights on Rune’s shoulder. He gazes at the window and says, “If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe.”

Rune drops to the ground and turns three somersaults and the bird flies to the chapel’s roof. Too excited to sleep, she runs to the main crossroads entering Helsingor where stands a wooden signpost. An arrow points east to Hellerod, another points west to Halsingbord, and the third points south to Copenhagen.

An hour has passed and the hour is now midnight. Rune has entered a sparse forest and moonlight coats the forest floor with shadows of tree limbs.  Her adrenalin has ebbed low and she finds a huge fir tree to bed down beneath. She eases into sleep with thoughts of her transformation . . .
perhaps an emerald green gown, but not hanging loose, tailored to fit my curvy form, a full skirt with a train flowing behind . . . green like the forest . . . no, something that shouts my beauty, red, yes, ruby red . . .

The sound of rapid footsteps jolts Rune from sleep. She leaps to her feet and scans the forest as far as her beastly eyes will allow, which is a fair distance. Two flashes of red dance toward her and in a moment it is clear to her that the red flashes are in fact a pair of shoes. Not your average shoes, but shoes so exquisite that Rune does not even notice the skeletal feet inside the dancing shoes. The shoes stop before her dancing a clog.
How can I describe this shade of red?
Rune wonders.
Ah, the glowing, liquid red of ripe currants, translucent with a hint of sunshine, a hue so alive it seems about to give birth
. The shoe toes are pointed and the heels like miniature pedestals. The front is as high as the back, bowing lower in curves at the center, reminding Rune of a ship at sea.

The shoes quit the clog and dance slow, seductive sliding steps in a circle around Rune. Now she sees the stub of shin and anklebone protruding from each shoe, and from the right anklebone, a gold chain dangles. She reaches out to pluck the chain from the shoe, and the shoe rubs against Rune’s hand like a cat in heat. Rune eyes half close and she makes a yummy noise; the leather is soft, softer even than the softest thing she knows, which is the ears of Manfred the Mink, a neighbor to Cozy Cave. These shoes are fit for Princess Rune.

“For pity sake, for the love of God, don’t touch the shoes,” the bones cry.

Rune pulls back her hand but does not take her eyes from the shoes, for the dangling chain threads through the foot bones and ends with a gold cross at the great toe bone.
Not only the most beautiful shoes in the world, but a cross for my confirmation,
Rune thinks,
I knew, I knew in my bones I would find a gold cross on the way to Copenhagen.

“These shoes are cursed! Stay away, stay away!” The bones scream and lean far left causing the soles to lift and dance a Cha-cha-cha fifty feet east.

“Hold on, wait up,” Rune shouts, following the shoes.  “I need those shoes and that gold cross.”

The shoes rise off the ground, turn and point their toes toward Rune, waltzing up to her, the bones horizontal. She leans forward to snatch the cross, moving in awkward three-quarter time to catch the dancing shoes. Because she is grossly top heavy she soon falls to the forest floor.

“Rats,” Rune says, jumps to her feet and chases the shoes as they Quickstep through the trees.

“The curse of these shoes is that they never stop dancing,” the bones call out. “Once you put them on your feet, you’ll dance yourself to Hell and back.”

Rune pictures herself dancing with Hans at his palace, all the court sighing and murmuring about the beautiful bride in red. “Okay,” she shouts falling behind the speedy shoes, “I don’t need the shoes, besides, look at my feet, did you notice the size of my feet . . .but the cross . . . I’m cursed as well, and I need the gold cross to be confirmed, to break the curse.”

The shoes circle about and dance the Paso Doble up to Rune’s feet. “If you tell me your story good and true,” the jostling bones speak, “and if I decide it is a worthy story, I will tell you my story good and true, and then I will gladly give up the gold cross for your confirmation. But you will need to dance along, and I warn you, these shoes are contrary and evil.”

Dawn has broken by the time Rune says, “I lay down under that fir tree to sleep when I saw two flashes of red light.” She is tired, mentally and physically, her voice a coarse whisper from the night’s dancing and talking, now and then when the shoes would permit, sitting and shouting her story, and the bones calling out,
And then what happened?

The shoes are currently dancing the Merengue, soles dragging through pine needles. “A worthy story and because you may be too proud yet, even after hearing the stories of the Ugly Duckling, the Bog King’s Daughter, the Ball and the Top, the naked proud Emperor, the proud Buckwheat Field, and the Little Mermaid . . ."

“The duckling was a swan," Rune says, rolling her eyes upward.

“Aha, aha, just what I said. Too proud!” The bones rattle and veer the shoes away in Flamenco steps. “I saw that expression many times on Karen, the owner of these very shoes, these very bones.”

“I’m sorry, I’m so tired. Please, tell me Karen’s story good and true. I promise to listen as I have never listened before,” Rune pleads. “Is Karen here? Are you her spirit?”

The shoes about face and skip step back and forth in front of Rune. “Her spirit is in heaven where she earned her place for eternity. She never thinks of the bones she left behind, but we remember her every moment we dance. Foot bones forever hold memories, no matter how long they lie buried. Feet carry you through life, they balance your very being from cradle to grave.”

Rune turns to the muffled sound of a beating drum and sees a funeral procession through the clearing. The mourners follow, heads bent, checking out each other’s shoes, umbrellas opened against the lightly falling snow; the Andersen Land Philosopher rides atop the coffin.

“Karen received her first red shoes the day of her mother’s burial. She was a beautiful child, but very poor, going barefoot in summer and wooden shoes in winter that made her little ankles red and sore.”

Rune remembers wearing wooden shoes she had taken from the Emperor’s castle, how her feet bleed when she removed them, but so tired is she, so eager to get the cross and the shoes, she does not move, not even a hair.

“The widow of the shoemaker sewed together scraps of red cloth into shoes for Karen to wear to the burial. Not the proper color for mourning, but she had no others to walk behind her mother’s pauper coffin. A carriage drove by the procession and within was an elderly lady who felt so sorry for Karen that she said to the minister,
Let me have that little girl, and I shall be good to her and bring her up properly.
She was good to her word, dressing Karen well and teaching her to read, write and sew. And with each passing year, Karen grew more and more beautiful. When she reached the age of fourteen . . .” the shoes rush off in cakewalk strides down a deer path and out of sight.