In Which I Set Out on a Quest
In case you’re wondering, becoming a hero is not as easy as you might think.
I tried rescuing a damsel in distress. But all of our local damsels practice martial arts and assured me that the last thing they needed was rescuing.
Saving a baby from a fire would have been perfect, but the housewives in Finnagen are far too careful. We haven’t had a decent kitchen fire in years.
Last spring, when a bull broke out of its pasture, I thought I had found my chance. But when I caught up with the bull, the stupid animal managed to hook his horns through my belt and flip me up onto his head. William the Tormentor already called me Ho-brat instead of Hobart. After that day, he started calling me Ho-brat Bull Hat.
To not be called Ho-brat for the rest of my life, I needed to become a knight. To get into the King’s School for the Education of Future Knights, I had to become a hero before May Day of my twelfth year. It was already early spring.
I was running out of time and ideas when I heard the news: a local maiden had been kidnapped by an ogre. Ogres don’t usually come this far east. And their hides are so thick that martial arts are useless against them. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
I didn’t own any real weapons, so I took the pitchfork I used to clean out the pigpens and set out to face my first ogre.
The ogre wasn’t hard to find. It had left a ten-foot-wide trail of wreckage through the forest, all the way up to the mouth of an enormous cave. I paused for a minute outside. Ogres are big and strong. But if saving damsels was easy, it wouldn’t be the work of heroes.
I tightened my grip on my pitchfork and started into the cave. Halfway down the tunnel, I began to smell the smoke. The farther I went, the thicker it got. I started to cough. My eyes were watering and my nose running as I stumbled forward. Unable to see anything, I eventually tripped and fell face-first onto the ground.
There, sprawled out on my belly, I got my first good look at the cave. There was a fire up ahead of me, its fl licking wet tree branches and sending out thick smoke. The ogre lay on its side wearing nothing but a filthy loincloth. The creature’s skin was covered in mud and dirt. Its head lolled to one side; its dull yellow eyes stared off at nothing in particular. Sitting at the ogre’s head, happily braiding its greasy hair, was a little girl. By little, I do not mean petite. I mean young. This was no maiden on the verge of womanhood. This was a child, no older than five or six, with blonde curls, rosy cheeks, and a mouth like a bow.
The little girl looked over at me and smiled. “Hello,” she said in a sweet voice. “Would you like to play too?”
“N-no,” I said, peeling myself up off the floor. I tried to stand, my head came into the path of the smoke, and I started coughing again. I dropped down onto my knees, coughing so hard I thought I might hack up a lung.
The little girl tilted her head, observing me with interest. “That’s what he did,” she said, pointing to the dazed ogre. “But he bumped his head when he fell.”
I pulled in a few haggard breaths and managed to choke out, “W-we have to g-go.”
“But we were going to have a tea party.”
“W-we’ll do it at h-home,” I said before breaking into another string of hacking coughs.
“All right,” she said brightly and stood up, patting the ogre on the head before skipping over to me.
The little girl didn’t cough or wheeze. Her eyes stayed perfectly clear and her nose dry—because she was so short that she walked under the smoke. There are times when life is remarkably unfair.
The child smiled when she reached me and held out one dimpled hand. I accepted her small hand, and half crouching, I started us back toward the mouth of the cave.
Even that low, I still breathed in too much smoke, and I couldn’t see anything. I told myself it didn’t matter how miserable I was or how young the girl. I had still managed to save a damsel. No one had to know that she hadn’t actually been in distress. I would be a hero, and certainly her family would be willing to speak for me. I was sure I had finally done it.
Until we made it out of the cave.
There, in front of us, stood a line of horsemen. The Lord of Finnagen was mounted in the center, his nephew, William the Tormentor, on the horse to his right. The men all stared at me, half crouched, eyes watering, nose running, being led out of the cave by a small child.
William let out an enormous laugh. “Ho-brat got saved by a little girl!”
“Th-that’s not wh-what happened,” I stammered. “He’s coming to my tea party,” the little girl said with a broad smile.
The laughter just got louder.
“Do you need a hairbow for your tea party, Ho-brat?” William said between snorts of laughter.
Usually, William pegged me with tomatoes. But we were far enough out of the village that there were no tomatoes at hand. So William kicked his horse into motion and started bearing down on me. I scampered to the side, slipped, and fell headlong into the mud.
The laughter was deafening.
The little girl started toward me; her small hand stretched out to help me up. But I pulled away and ran toward home. The laughter trailed after me.
Maybe, my life would have been different if I hadn’t started stuttering when I was five. Or if my mother hadn’t given me the name Hobart. She named my older brothers after heroes. She named me after a jester she saw at a fair. The man got laughed at for a living. But she thought his name would be a good choice for her son.
I didn’t want to see anyone. And when I reached my family’s pig farm, I thought about hiding in the barn. But hunger won out, and I went into the house. My family was finishing up supper. They all looked up and saw me with my coating of mud.
“What did you do, wrestle a pig?” my brother George said.
“If he did, he lost,” Michael said. They all laughed.
Our father just said, “You’re late. Supper is over.”
“Y-yes, sir,” I mumbled and ducked out of the room before Mother could fuss at me about the mud.
When I walked into the kitchen, our cook, Maude, looked up from the bread she was kneading. She sighed.
“What happened?”
I told her everything.
She had to fight back a smile at times, but Maude is a good woman. She didn’t laugh. She set out food for me and started heating water for a bath.
Sopping up stew with my bread, I began to think. The memories of the day tried to bully their way in, but I pushed them away. Remembering my humiliation was not going to help. I needed a plan.
By the time I finished my stew, I was sure. If I still wanted to make it into knight school after this latest debacle, there was only one possibility left. I was going to have to slay a dragon.
It was risky, I know. But I saw no other choice. I was desperate. (When minstrels tell their tales, they always seem to dwell on heroes’ sense of duty. They completely overlook the equally powerful driving force called desperation.) I took my bath and went to bed. When my brothers came into the loft, I pretended to be asleep, but I was actually thinking and planning. At least as much as you can really plan an epic adventure.
The very next morning, I set out. I had no horse, no sword or shield. The only things I carried were my eating knife and a small sack of food that Maude had packed for me.
“Safe journey, child,” she said as she handed me the satchel.
My parents stood in the doorway watching us.
“Have fun playing dragon slayer,” my mother called after me.
She and Father smiled knowingly as I left. I’m sure they thought that I would be home by dark.
They were wrong.