John Gardner - The Art of Living - And Other Stories

He was nobody’s fool, but he had, it is true, his limitations, and the chief of them was this: ponder as he might — and ponder he did, hour on hour and year on year, his black head lowered into the carpet’s scents, his eyes rolled up — he could never penetrate the reason (for presumably there was some reason) for the curious behavior of Queen Louisa and her court. It was said, and Trumpeter in his way understood, that at times Queen Louisa, to rest her mind, would transform herself suddenly into a large greenish toad. This habit was notorious, reported far and wide; everyone who knew her had seen the thing happen quite frequently. Everyone, that is, except Trumpeter. It was not, in his opinion, a case of the Emperor’s Clothes. Trumpeter was no innocent: man’s ways are not dog’s, he knew. He had seen the whole court sit erect for hours, dead silent except for an occasional whisper, an occasional cough, listening to people on a bright raised platform howl. He, when he tentatively joined them, had been kicked and sent outside. On that same raised platform he’d seen a man in black creep up cunningly on another, a dagger in his hand, and when he, Trumpeter, had hurtled to the rescue, he’d been beaten and seized by five knights and had been chained behind the buttery.

The oddities of man were inexhaustible, and this change that came over the Queen — a change Trumpeter could not see except by the reaction of the others — was merely one of them. He had learned to accept, simply to watch and consider, stretched out half hidden behind the curtains or under the table, offering no comment. One moment the court would be walking toward the chapel all in solemn array, bearing high white candles, Queen Louisa at their head in her long sky-blue gown, her red hair gleaming, her expression sweet and sad — they all had sad expressions as they moved toward the chapel, and their bodies were rigid, as if ritually so, slightly trembling with each step — and the next they’d all be leaping, or darting their tongues out — even King Gregor, with a pained expression, his black beard bristling — and the princesses and princes would suddenly begin croaking, ludicrously grinning, and their eyes would bug out. Trumpeter would let out a sigh and shift his position slightly, and when Queen Louisa came down like an avalanche inches from his nose, he would thump his tail once, courteous, showing her he’d noticed. “Goo-boo!” she’d say. This was not, strictly speaking, his name, or the right time of day, but he accepted it.

Whatever the reason for this strange behavior on the part of the Queen and, after her, the court, it was a peaceful kingdom, no one could deny it. King Gregor and King John, who for years had been at war, were now, because of the general confusion, the best of friends, squatting on some garden path arm in arm, or, in another mood, debating at the tops of their voices, jabbing their fingers at the writing in a book. “Saintly, my ass!” King John once yelled. (Trumpeter had no trouble understanding words. It was merely sentences that befuddled him.) “Saintly, my ass! Do you wash your peasants’ feet on Maundy Thursday?” King Gregor’s eyes widened. “God forbid!” he said.

If all this was strange, there were other things still stranger. No one seemed to remember anymore, except for Trumpeter, that the Princess had gone away. Not the Princess called Muriel, whom the Queen had discovered and declared to be her own dear long-lost child, and not the numerous princesses and princes she’d found later and joyfully recognized and brought to the castle, Djubkin and Dobremish, Pretty Polly, and the rest. For all these, Trumpeter had no hostile feelings; and he understood — dimly, yet clearly enough — that in making them her children, as perhaps they were indeed, since the life of a dog is but a heartbeat, so to speak, in the long span of man, the Queen had brought happiness to a kingdom that had suffered, before that, grave troubles — peasants against royalty, “madness against madness,” as the minstrel said: an obscure saying; but Trumpeter, in his heart, understood it.

He remembered, nonetheless, that another princess had lived here once in the days before Queen Louisa was mad — she had vanished one morning like dew into the blind blue air. Her hair was yellow. He would lie beside the fireplace, an old slipper in his mouth — he was not always, in those days, wide awake — and he would feel a certain pressure bearing down on his shoulder, and when he opened his eyes and turned his head, there the Princess would be, her hair falling over him, her cheek on the flatness between his shoulder and back, using him as a pillow, and he would moan and she would mimic him, harmlessly mocking.

This was no flickering memory but steady as the floor.

Whether or not he understood the details, he understood the importance of a kingdom at peace. Vrokror, that terrible grudge-bearing fiend, had no supporters now. The words with which Queen Louisa had undone him—“All error,” she’d said, “begins with soreheads”—were now common slogan in King Gregor’s realm. It was part of a verse for skipping rope to. Trumpeter, travelling far and wide, had seen the extent to which Vrokror had been undone. Vrokror was a monk again, as he’d been in the first place, but a monk in absolute and terrible isolation: he saw nothing sentient — certainly not God — but lived all alone on the top of a mountain, eating tundra plants.

All was well, all was well. Travelling through alleys, Trumpeter saw that the servants were afraid of their masters and would do them no harm, hunger as they might for those coins stacked like pillars in the palace. Watching the cutpurses, studying every smile, he saw that they were miserable, whatever their pretenses. There are never, of course, enough purses to go around. And Trumpeter saw that the merchants all cheated fellow merchants, and the pirates all stole from them, and no one was distressed; they were used to it. Trumpeter began to feel a strange discomfiture.

“Bad dog,” she’d say, this real Princess whom only Trumpeter remembered, and she’d shake her finger ferociously, and he would duck his head. But it was a pleasure, he would admit, that attention she gave him; and he partly understood — sometimes fully understood — that she did it for the absolute absurdity of the thing. Here was he, four, five, six times her weight, with jaws that could cut through the thighbones of a steer; and here was she, who with a word could lay him flatlings.

Sometimes lately, in the middle of the night, Queen Louisa would sit bolt upright in her bed. She would be atremble all over. He lay perfectly still, ready to spring to the defense, but there was nothing to defend her from. “We must have,” she said one drizzly, miserable dawn, “a royal ball. I must marry off my princes and princesses.”

There followed a period of intense preparations; dressmakers came, and cooks and carpenters and pirates disguised as wine merchants, eyeing the silverware. The palace was transformed. King Gregor paced furiously back and forth, stroking his black beard, snatching at the arm of his friend King John. “We’ve forgotten something,” he cried out, “but what? ” Trumpeter rushed with renewed intensity from the cemetery to the alleys of the village to the foul black wharf. All was well, all was well. On every lamppost and wall he left his warning.

She’d grown pale as marble and quick to be exhausted. Nevertheless, all was well, it was obvious. King John and King Gregor met daily for war, and their armies came home bleeding — or King Gregor’s came home bleeding and King John’s army went — and there was dancing till midnight and poetry speaking and courtly love — and the Princess would shake her head and smile: “They’re all mad, you know, Trumpeter. Stark raving mad.” He would hold out his paw, and she would take it and solemnly make acquaintance.