Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming by Roger Zelazny and Robert Sheckley. Part 5

“Me wear crampons?” He had the common superstitious awe of these useful objects.

“They are what all the climbers wear.”

“No thanks. You’re not going to get those things on me.”

“If you don’t wear them, you’ll never get to the top. It’s all glass, you know. Slippery.”

Charming, like so many young men in those days, had prejudices against both goats and crampons. Sighing, he chose at last what seemed the lesser evil.

“So all right already, saddle me up a goat!”

* * *

Not even all the goats make it up Glass Mountain. That must be understood by those who think a goat is all it takes to win a princess. It’s just that you need to use a goat even to get into the running. If at the very end, you want to substitute a horse for your goat, after the feat is accomplished, and have your portrait painted that way-well, a horse looks better than a goat, and it can be arranged.

And so it was that at last Prince Charming found himself racing upward on goatback until he came to the entranceway to a great castle whose battlements rose high into the air. Ahead of him was a staircase. He knew he had arrived when he saw the cardboard sign on an iron stanchion. It read, YOU HAVE ARRIVED AT THE ENCHANTED CASTLE. THE SLEEPING PRINCESS IS IN THE FIRST CHAMBER TO THE RIGHT AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRS. CONGRATULATIONS.

With a tremulous feeling in his thumbs, Prince Charming performed the final climb over the barbican, endured the icy swim across the moat, and then, dripping wet, went down the gallery and through the turret passageways, and finally through the outer rooms where ensorcelled servitors snoozed, to the staircase with upward curves of great cruelly, to the flagstones of the outer chamber.

He opened the door and took two steps inside. In the middle of the room he saw the bed, a high four-poster. Lying on it, eyes closed, was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. She was the one whose miniature he had fallen in love with. But in person she was incomparably more lovely than her painted representation.

Chapter 8

Any eyes would have sufficed to see her beauty. But Prince Charming’s dragon’s eyes saw something more. They saw through Azzie’s scheme and under­stood the snare that the demon had planned. The dragon’s eyes saw that he, Charming, wore the hated face of Scarlet’s seducer. What would she do when she saw that face? The dragon’s eyes could see the shadow of disaster here. But Charming ignored the warning, bending low over the Princess.

This was the moment Azzie had been working toward since he had thought up the plan in the first place.

The kiss! The fatal kiss!

Azzie had already positioned the poisoned dagger on the little bedstand, close to Scarlet’s hand. This was what Scarlet would use when she opened her eyes and recognized who had kissed her-the despised seducer!

Azzie, from behind the curtain where he had stationed himself, addressed the great unseen audience watching the drama unfold.

“Ladies and gentlemen, beings of Light and Darkness, fellow demons, rival angels! I bring you now the conclusion of the most ancient and edifying drama of Prince Charming and Princess Scarlet. Behold, the awakening kiss and its outcome!”

Even while his words died away, Prince Charming, with his dragon’s eyes, continued to regard Azzie’s scheme, and he spoke of it, thus:

“A-ha,” he soliloquized, “it’s obvious to me I am a nothing, a mere congeries of disparate parts, and that my so-called uncle Azzie, a demon indeed despite his ingratiating ways, gave me the face of Scarlet’s seducer when putting me together, for the purpose of being sacrificed by Scarlet when I awaken her. Well then, if that’s so, let it be. Kill me, pretty Princess, if that’s what will content you. But though I am a nothing man, constructed of odds and ends and brought to life by a fiend, yet a true heart beats in my breast, and I can only say, I am yours, Princess, do with me what you will.”

Scarlet felt the touch of a man’s lips. Her eyes opened, but at first she saw nothing due to the nearness of the young man kissing her. Her first thought was, What bliss to be so awak­ened!

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