#king thrushbeard

Rook and Thrush

With all my heart, I hate my husband. He walks beside me in this muddy ditch, not noticing that I take two steps every time he takes one stride. He is lanky as a crane, dirty as a dung beetle, and he chatters like a magpie.

“By the king’s left eye!” he crows, in his grating voice. “Never thought I’d end the day with a wife. This morning I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll play a tune for that king up the hill. Get a coin or two from him.’ And the moment I step in the door, he shoves his own daughter on me as lawful bride. Now, I ask you, dear heart, is that a thing that any right-minded man could have been asked to predict?”

I am too angry to answer. If I speak, I will explode, and we are too close to my father’s house. I refuse to let Father see how thoroughly he has won.

My husband doesn’t mind my lack of answer. He chatters on gaily, “I comes before him, plays my song, and instead of offering me a bit of gold or a bite or supper, he says, ‘You’ll marry my daughter.’ Just like that. ‘She’s refused all other husbands,’ he says. Now, knowing what sorts o’ kings and dukes and things has been asking for your hand, I says, ‘Then I doubt she’ll take me, sir.’ But he didn’t care a jot about that. That’s downright fair-minded of him. Most folks’d look at my clothes and my eyepatch and think me a first-rate scoundrel, but I suppose kings is better’n us common folk at reading the hearts o’ men , so I reckon he could see the bit of gold I keep tucked under the muck o’ mine. ‘She’ll have no other for her husband,’ he says, and who am I to gainsay the king? They march me into that little chapel--in front of the bishop himself, and me in nought but my common traveling clothes!--and barely give me the chance to look at you afore they calls us man and wife. But here we are! The minstrel and his bride! Rightful wed before God and man, and I daresay you’re a prettier piece of womanflesh than I expected. Downright picture-like now that I can see you proper in the sunlight.”

I can’t say the same for my husband. He wears a tunic and trousers so threadbare and patched that I doubt there’s any of the original fabric left. His beard--somewhere between brown and red--is sparse and patchy. His hair barely goes beyond his ears, and looks as though a blind man cut it with a scythe. His nose is disfigured by a wart, and one earlobe droops a full inch lower than the other. He might be fair-skinned, but he’s coated in so much dirt and dust from the road that I can’t tell. The only clean thing about him is his teeth--which are surprisingly white and straight--but in the wreck that is the rest of his face, his smile looks garish, rather than attractive, like bone showing through a gaping wound.

I doubt I’ll look much better, before long. I’m well on my way to poverty. After the wedding, Father ordered the servants to strip my clothes from me, and ordered me to leave the palace with nothing but a dress and an ill-fitting pair of wooden shoes that once belonged to the oldest scullery maid. “You’re a beggar’s bride,” Father said, “and you’ll dress as befits your station.”

Come to think of it, I hate my father, too.

“Now,” my husband says, as he steps over a puddle that I have to trudge through, “I’ll admit I’m not set up for much in the way of housekeeping. I preferred the wandering minstrel’s life. But with a wife on my hands, I won’t object to a bit of settling down. Could be right cozy, coming home each night to a fire and a home-cooked meal.”

I’ve never lit a fire in my life, and I don’t intend to learn for this piece of human excrement.

“I reckon I could find us a nice little cottage somewhere. Do you like country living, my dear, or should we find us a city?”

My husband jumps out of the ditch with one long stride, while I struggle to scramble after him. Thistles scratch my skin, dirt gets into my shoes, and mud stains the hem of my gray dress. He doesn’t lift a finger to help. He stands at the roadside with his hands in his pockets, looking up at the wispy clouds as if he hasn’t a care in the world.

“Me, I’d prefer traveling south,” he says, as I finally flop onto the ground, panting, beside him. “Bit too cold in these northern countries, and I’m not getting any younger. What do you think, wife?”

As I lay there on the roadside, dressed in rags and covered in mud, while he chatters heedlessly above me, the thin shell over my temper cracks wide open. “I am not your wife!”

He tilts his head, confused. “I think you are. That bishop fellow seemed firm on that point.”

I surge to my feet, driven by the force of my anger and hatred. I grab the scruff of his collar and yank him down so I can glare straight into his muddy green eyes. “I am not your wife, your bride, your love, or your darling. I am a princess forced to marry a man too dirty and disgusting to clean the dirt from my shoes, and you will not pretend that that farce of a ceremony makes me in any way your equal.”

He nods slowly, as if afraid I will bite if he moves too fast. In the mood I’m in, I just might. “If you say so.”

I push him away from me. He stumbles, but rights himself with awkward grace. I stalk ahead of him, not caring if he comes with me.

He catches up with me in five strides. “But we have been wed.”

Nothing but a lifetime of royal training keeps me from leaping on him like a rabid dog. “Only in name,” I snarl. “If you lay a finger on me, or act in any way that I deem demeaning to my royal person, I will shave your lice-ridden head and force you to eat every hair from it.”

He keeps silence for a full ten steps--a new record for him. At last, he says, “They did tell me you were a sharp-tongued thing.” He thrusts his hands into his pockets, maddeningly unaffected by my temper. “Lucky for you, I’ve a forgiving nature. Unlike those kings you sent running.”

Even this beggar knows of my shame. My anger flares outward to cover the whole world. How dare they spread my story like common gossip? How dare they cast me as the villain when I am the one who’s been wronged?

My father had promised me I could choose my own husband. I had five older sisters who could provide marriage alliances, so as the youngest, I could marry for love. I had clung to that promise, for my father, who held his honor sacred, was a man of his word.

Victor was captain in my father’s guard, and a highly decorated soldier--handsome, intelligent, strong, with a voice that was like an embrace in itself. While others assumed that my blunt manner required rough handling, he had treated me like a delicate flower, promising to do all he could to protect me from all troubles. Of course I told my father that he was my choice.

Father, the snake, refused me. Victor was the natural son of a duke--his daughter could not marry a bastard. All along, there had been secret restrictions on my freedom, and Father refused to bend, no matter how much I protested. He transferred Victor to a contingent of guards at the border, while insisting that his honor was unsullied, because he would still make good on his promise.

A month later, with no warning to me, Father assembled every man of rank from within a month’s journey and asked me to choose among them, as if I were selecting a gown rather than a lifelong partner. As if I could discard Victor so long as there was a suitable replacement on hand.

I had never felt such rage. This was his idea of honor? The man I loved banished to the border while I selected from among men who had come to compete for me as if I were a prize mare? Every man in that vast crowd had participated in this farce, treating me as if I were nothing more than a faceless alliance. None of them had even asked my name.

So I gave them some names. I picked the most disgusting feature of each man and made it his new appellation as I rejected him. Long-shanks. Roundbelly. A freckled prince was Mudface. A wrinkled one was Crow’s-foot. I continued along the line, merciless in my wrath, while they howled in outrage.

Last of all was a foreign king, nearly as tall as my husband, though twice as broad, so he appeared properly proportional. While his fellows shouted and raged at my indecency, he alone had remained silent and dignified, and a tiny piece of me respected him for that. In my surprise, it took me a moment to find fault, a reason to reject him beside the disgusting fact that he had participated in this farce.

At last, my eye landed on his chin--a touch crooked, a bit prominent. “Like a thrush’s beak!” I declared. “I could never marry King Thrushbeard.”

That name stuck. Probably because it was more poetic than the other crass insults. (The man seems to have brought out my best.) Whenever I’ve heard him mentioned since, King Thrushbeard has been called by that name. Even I think of him by that name.

And I’ve thought of him far too often. There was devastation on his face as I gave him the name; resigned acceptance of my anger. Almost as if he cared for me. I hate the thought every time it comes; no man in that room deserves my sympathy.

None of them requested it. The men fled the palace as though I’d set them on fire, some of them threatening to declare war. I hadn’t thought them so thin-skinned as that. I only wanted to prove my loyalty to Victor by making it impossible for my father to marry me off to anyone else.

When I confronted Father, he declared that if I was so determined to marry below my station, he would arrange it; by royal decree, I would marry the first beggar who came through the palace gates. This lanky, chattering minstrel had been first-comer.

In the moment, I almost didn’t mind. I had just received the long-delayed news--Victor had left the guard for the love of a merchant’s daughter he’d met in a border town. While I had ruined my life for love of him, he had already wooed another. I hated every man in the world. Baron, bastard, or beggar, they were all the same. What did it matter if I wed one selfish pig over another?

But now I see that it matters. If only I had chosen one of those insulted kings, I could be sitting inside a palace right now, dressed in silk and eating strawberries and cream. Instead, I am tramping through the countryside with a garrulous beggar, and things will only get worse from here.

While I reflect on the ruin of my life, my husband--true to form--chatters. “Right good set-down you gave them. I like a girl who ain’t afraid to speak her mind. I’d been promised a wife with a bit of pepper, but when you was walking all quiet, and was afraid I’d got nothing but a milk-tongued damsel. But you’ve got bite to you, all right! We’ll get on well, you and me, though between the two of us I doubt we’ll ever find a moment of peace and quiet.”

The phrase is so strange that it pulls me out of my enraged reverie. “A what?”

“A name. Like what you gave those kings. I’ve never much liked mine--Mam named me Mortimer, and it just never quite fit me right. Well, I figures, I got myself a wife who’s right good at naming, and if she can name complete strangers, her own husband ought to be good enough to get a name of her.” Suddenly he stops and stands before me, arms outstretched. “Now, look at me close. If you had to give me a name, which one would it be?”