Archive for the ‘Rudi Dornemann’ Category
Uther and the Mirror
Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010
Uther Pendragon, high king of all Britain, looked into the mirror, and a face that wasn’t his looked back. He stuck out his tongue. The face of Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall, did the same.
“But when will I change back?” said Uther.
“Soon,” said Merlin.
They sat together in a roofless, nearly wall-less hut, abandoned years before by whatever hermit had built it.
“How soon?” said Uther.
It had only been a few hours since Merlin had worked the spell and Uther had ridden off to Gorlois’ fortress.
“Remember when I said I couldn’t give you the likeness of the Duke for a night so that you could have your way with the duchess?”
“You did say that,” said Uther, “then you did it anyway.”
“No,” said Merlin, “No spell will change you for a single night.”
“You’re saying I’m trapped like this?” Uther threw the mirror to the mossy ground. “I’ve traded my kingship for the beauteous Ygraine?”
Merlin picked up the mirror, polished it with his sleeve. “It lasts a month.”
“Eh,” said the king. “I might not even tire of her by then.”
“Looking like Gorlois,” said Merlin, “only lasts one night.” He turned the mirror.
“Who’s that?” Uther stared at the teenager in the reflection.
“A stableboy of the duke’s. I believe the other servants call him ‘Onions.’”
“Onions!?!”
“I have no idea why,” said Merlin.
“You cast the spell!” The king who looked like a stableboy looked like he was going to burst a blood vessel in his pimply forehead.
“No, I mean, I don’t know why they call him that.” Merlin tucked the mirror in his cloak. “About the spell–of course you’ll keep changing. It’s a moonspell. You’ll change nightly until the moon is dark again.”
“Why?”
“It was the only spell that would give you what you asked for,” said Merlin. “Magic can be complicated.”
“I suppose it will be an adventure,” said the king. “Life is boring at court…”
“Indeed,” said Merlin. With luck, Uther might learn something, might rule a little less unwisely before Britain dissolved back into squabbling dukedoms. “You need to get to the stables by dawn.”
“Adventure!” said the king/stableboy.
With even more luck, the king might become Ygraine, might gain some sense of consequences, some appreciation for life in its faintest flickerings. Or at least experience the adventure of morning sickness.
The Miser’s Cat
Tuesday, October 19th, 2010
There was a miser who had a cat.
He died.
The miser, that is.
The cat was fine.
The miser, who’d hoarded, cheated, and loaned at exorbitant and inflexible rates, left all his wealth to the cat.
Had this been strictly a matter of what was written in his will, his lawyer (whom he’d swindled) and the judge (whom he’d nearly bankrupted) would gladly have mislaid or invalidated anything bearing the miser’s signature.
But the miser had guaranteed his wishes by locking his fortune in a brass-bound trunk he buried beneath the oldest, tallest tree in the forest, and by hanging the trunk key on the cat’s collar.
Now, you’ve heard that cats have nine lives, but that doesn’t mean a string of lives lived one after another. Cats live all nine at once. And only one is a cat life. For instance, the miser’s cat was also a riverboat captain, a seamstress, an itinerant mole, a mathematician, an angel, and several other things. That’s why I love cats, although right now I only have a dog that I love so much, I always feed him with the best karmapets calming treats amazon because I care for him.
On a cloudy day, the lawyer and the judge finished decoding clues the miser had left in his will, and dug around the roots of some old, tall trees until they struck the brass-bound trunk with a shovel-bending clang! At the very same moment, in a nearby field, the cat wriggled through an inconvenient fence and snagged its collar there, key and all.
While the lawyer and judge rested from their excavations, a seamstress and a mathematician were crossing a fence-divided field from different sides. These two women spotted the key at the same moment they spotted each other.
Don’t mistake this for coincidence–this kind of thing happens all the time. In that country, there’s an expression, “They’re two lives of the same cat.” So it was with the seamstress and the mathematician.
It began to rain, softly, but as if it weren’t planning to stop, so they took refuge in the forest. Following the map on the inside of the collar, they found the trunk, opened it, and lived happily for many years.
The lawyer and the judge, whose schemes to defraud each other the treasure had given way to fisticuffs and blunt objects, regained consciousness and stumbled back to find the trunk empty. The lawyer was convinced that the judge had taken all the treasure, and vice versa, beginning a feud that would last generations.
The cat, meanwhile, was fine.