“Thank you, father,” said Armida, and for some reason curtsied.
Prince Christopher the Sullen said, “Let us introduce ourselves. This is Armida, and this is—” He glanced down at Chudu the Goat’s Son, but the dwarf flicked his eyes away. It was against his policy to tell anyone his name. Prince Christopher looked puzzled but retired behind a sad smile and did not press. “This is Armida’s dwarf,” he said, “and I am — Christopher.”
The abbot lit up. “Ah ha! Prince Christopher the Sullen! Exactly! I thought I recognized that incomparable, grieving face! I’ve seen you, light of my life, in visions.” He brought this out with such perfect simplicity that no one even noticed that the claim might have seemed, on some other man’s lips, preposterous. He leaned forward, toward the prince. “How’s your poor father?”
“Much better lately, thank you,” said Prince Christopher. He’d forgotten that his father had been unwell.
“God bless him,” said the abbot, beatifically smiling, and his eyes went unfocused for an instant, as if he was looking at something far, far distant, quite possibly the Throne of God. “Well!” he said then, “this is an honor! Yes yes! Exactly! Now we’re on the track! — But I forget myself, you’re starving!” He nodded down the hallway, past the sufferers in the straw, the watchful relatives and neighbors, toward an archway. “You go right through there, my loves — right through there, exactly! — and the brothers will provide you with fresh clothing and food and anything you need. I’ll be in in a minute. I have to—” He smiled and looked floorward, his shoulders briefly rising in a meek, apologetic shrug.
Chudu the Goat’s Son said, head tipped back, staring straight up at him with ferocious and unabashedly skeptical eyes, eyes close together and empty and black as shotgun barrels: “You mean you’re going to heal these sick people?”
“Well, try anyway, with God’s help,” said the abbot with a laugh.
“Goodness,” said Armida, forgetting to look dim-witted, “is it possible that a person might watch?”
“God bless you, my child, for your interest! Certainly you may watch!” He turned his smile toward the prince. “Would you care to watch too? — And you too, of course, my friend.” He bent to smile at Chudu.
“I’d be fascinated,” said Prince Christopher sadly. The Goat’s Son said nothing. He looked more skeptical than ever, and offended, as if someone had insulted his intelligence.
“Fine!” said the old man. “Fine and dandy!” He nodded in the direction of some chairs along the hallway wall. They were wide and comfortable, once-expensive chairs, overstuffed and leather covered, the leather now sewn and patched in innumerable places. The prince, Armida, and the dwarf sat down, and the abbot, with a nod that suggested that he’d be only a moment, went over to the sufferers and their sad-faced families. To a boy who lay rolling his eyes and drooling, snapping at the empty air with his teeth, and occasionally jerking his hands and feet, the abbot said cheerfully, “Well well, my son! What seems to be our trouble this evening?” The boy went on biting and jerking as before. His mother, who was lean and hollow cheeked, her skin gray as ashes, her eyes much too large, raised her hands imploringly and shook them. “It come over him sudden,” she said.
“Mmm,” said the abbot, and creakily got down on his knees, first one, then the other. Beyond him, holy brothers scuttled back and forth, not even glancing in his direction. He smiled and winked at the boy. “You believe in God, my friend?”
“Larble,” said the boy and rolled one eye.
“Good,” the abbot said, nodding and smiling with satisfaction. With only his fingertips poking out of his sleeves, he began to pray.
Strange to tell, as the abbot prayed, not only the boy but also the two cripples sitting closest to the boy began to glow all over with an indescribable light. The jerking and twitching of the boy’s limbs grew less noticeable, then ceased altogether; he stopped biting at the air, and his eyes no longer rolled. Right next to him, the first cripple’s corkscrewed leg began to straighten itself, the foot turning around and around shoe and all until it was exactly as it should be. The cripple bent over to stare in surprise, then yelped and tossed up his hands, wildly joyful, and leaped to his feet and did a tap-dance. The cripple beside him, who had one leg nine inches shorter than the other, watched the dance with interest, then got a startled look and abruptly stuck both legs straight out. Lo and behold, before his very eyes the short leg was growing, about half an inch a second, and soon he was exactly like anyone else. “It’s a miracle!” he cried, and leaping up, danced a little jig. The boy who had been twitching and jerking was now smiling from ear to ear, tears of joy on his cheeks. He seized the abbot’s knees and began kissing the hem of the abbot’s cassock for gratitude, his poor mother screaming and clapping. “Larble,” cried the boy. “Larble! Larble!”
So it went. The abbot cured one after another until there was no one left to cure. Then, gently smiling, the abbot came over to where the three friends sat watching and invited them to go in with him to supper.
When they had eaten their fill in the huge, dim room with its long plain tables, the abbot all the while sitting over in the gloomiest corner of the room with his back to the others, for that was one of his penances, he said, and also he’d always been ashamed, he confessed, of the dreadful way he ate, for he could never, try as he might, keep from talking with his mouth full — the abbot led them to a pair of rooms where the prince could get out of his knightly armor into more comfortable clothes, and the dwarf and Armida could find garments that made them look like nobility. After that the abbot led them to a large, stone-walled chamber where the holy brothers had prepared a roaring fire and set out for them brandy and brandy snifters. The abbot declined, with a little headshake, to take brandy. It was sufficient for his happiness to sit gently watching them, smiling and smiling like a fond old grandfather, his hands in the folds of his cassock.
“Well now,” the abbot said, “tell us about yourselves!”
Armida and the Goat’s Son immediately told him everything, opening their hearts as they might have done to God himself. “I’ve come up the mountain to kill myself,” said Armida, and tears filled her eyes.
“And why is that, my dear?” asked the abbot with great interest.
She told him her secret, how she was not at all what she seemed but, God help her, mannish — complex and quick of mind and as strong as a gorilla.
“Ah!” said the abbot.
“I too came here to kill myself, originally,” said Chudu the Goat’s Son, bleating it really, for pity of himself. “Try as I may I can never persuade anyone that deep down I’m a civilized, decent sort of dwarf, fit to be an alderman — and indeed, perhaps I’m not. Who knows?”
“ ‘Originally,’ you say?” the abbot softly prodded.
The dwarf glanced over at Armida in confusion. He would bite off his tongue before he’d shame her by speaking of his love. But the abbot, it seemed, was a man who missed nothing.
“Yes, I see,” he said, gazing thoughtfully at Armida. “That’s grave, very grave. And you, Prince Christopher?” He tipped his head to look above his spectacles at the prince.
“That’s why I’ve come too,” said Prince Christopher the Sullen. He was standing by the abbot’s mantel, staring moodily into his glass. “I don’t care to go into it except to say I’m, as they say, a misfit. I’m a prince by birth, but by inclination I’m an artist. I hide it, naturally, and I admit I’m deeply ashamed of it—”