The Queen of Penesthelia and Firman the Brave 1
In the seven-and-seventieth garden.
In the time between the Famine and the time of the war with the Men of the East, in Penesthelia they built a palace for the Queen.
There were nine hundred rooms and nine hundred servants in the palace, nine hundred windows and nine hundred doors. There were nine hundred gardens, one each for the many delights that the people of Penesthelia wished for their Queen. There was a garden of roses and a garden of gardenias, a garden of cypress and a garden of narcissus. The paths of the nine hundred gardens were of pink porphyry, and she walked them in shoes of silk brocade, and the wall was of porcelain.
One night, when the moons were high and the night was deep, the Queen did not sleep but walked the seventy-seventh garden, where the native things grew. The Queen and her maidens were approaching the Onyx Gate, and the cypress was trained like dragons.
From out of a line of bushes stepped a man, and the maidens were terrified because he had a long sword of blue calypscine steel that looked like water and a red turban bound around his head like the men of Ortrera.
The maidens quailed, but the Queen was unafraid. “Who are you who have come into my garden by stealth and night?” she said.
“I am Firman the Brave,” he said. “I have come to make you captive and take you back to Ortrera for my bride. Without this wall, I have a thousand men with guns and lances, and though the Famine left them very hungry, they are without fear. But I have less fear, for I left them outside and dared come in alone.”
Queen Arsinoe stood in her garden where the hoopoe and nightingales sang, folded her arms, and said, “It is not fearlessness but foolishness. In this my seventy-seventh garden are seventy-seven trees, and in every tree are seventy-seven drones, and in every drone are seventy-seven darts guided each by seventy-seven eyes. Before you should lay one hand on my sacred person, you should be dead seventy-seven times over.”
“I truly possess no fear now,” Firman the Brave responded, “for you are fair and brave, and I will stop at nothing, not even the seven-and-seventieth death, to have you.”
Now, the Queen of Penesthelia found him handsome and brave, but she was the Queen of a great people and had no desire nor need to wed, so, with a sadness in her heart that she hid, she told him, “You must do seven labors for me, and each of these labors will be your death. Yet if you achieve them—and no man must help you!—then you will be my husband, but even then, you will have no power over me.”
“Name the first task,” Firman the Brave said, “and it is done.”
“You must climb to the highest mountain in the Montara Sierpento in the lands ruled by the Government of Provises, and on it, where there is no air, you will find a house that has no roof and a room that has no door and a bed that has no color and a treasure that has no key, and the treasure and the bed and the door and the room and the house you must bring to me. And while every man in the East will turn their hands against you, no man must help you, and you must go alone with no man.”
“The first step is taken,” he said, “and in time, you will be my bride.”
“We shall see,” said the Queen of Penesthelia.