The four travellers cantered up to a spot about a hundred yards from the moat and drawbridge of a massive castle and reined in. Chalmers rode over beside Shea and the two sat quietly for a moment, studying the huge edifice.
"Looks like Saracen design, probably twelfth century," Chalmers told Shea. The older psychologist rubbed his hands together and Shea noted the delight on his face. Chalmers pointed to some holes built into the arch of the gate. "See the machicolations up there? In a fight, the castle defenders can pour boiling oil through them onto the attackers."
Shea eyed the innocent-looking holes warily. "Lovely," he said.
Chalmers missed the irony. "Isn't it? Fine piece of architecture."
Shea found it hard to get excited by machicolations or Saracen architecture. A home that did not need to be defended by boiling oil and men-at-arms, where he and Belphebe and their future children could live in peace and quiet, seemed very alluring—and very far away. He felt a stab of homesickness.
Quixote led them up to the outer gate, where a mail-clad guard with a light helmet leaned against the wall. Music and the sounds of revelry emanated from inside. Gaudy pennants flew from the peak of every tower and banners decorated the gate and draped from the narrow windows high overhead. The guard wore a beaming expression and greeted the knight and his companions with boozy, cheery bonhomie. "Hi-i-i-i, Don Quixote de la Mancha—and all your friends. Welcome to the castle of Don Tibon de Salazar. Wanna go in?"
"We would," Quixote said sternly. "But first I would know— what celebration leaves the watchman drank at his post and the gates thrown wide open?"
"I'm not—drunk!' the guard protested. He became confiding. "Well, maybe just a little—but our princesses came home today. An enchanter stole them from us, and we thought we would never see them again, but all of a—sudden, they appeared in a cloud of bright red smoke. So—" he concluded, smiling triumphantly, "we're having a party. Good one, too. Lots of food, lots of wine, an' even a talking ape and a puppet show later. G'wan in." He leaned back against the wall of the guardhouse and waved across the drawbridge. "I'll letcha announce yourselves."
Shea, Chalmers, Panza, and Quixote rode across the drawbridge, through the barbican, and into the outer bailey. The grounds were filled with milling people who danced and shouted and drank healths to their Don and his returned daughters; with fiddlers and guitar players wailing away; with dark-eyed gypsy girls in blight skirts of red and yellow and blue who clattered their castanets and swirled and stamped. Along the inner wall, fat, middle-aged campesinas served slabs of meat from a roasted ox, and cheeses and bits of chicken and fish and goat. Liveried servants poured a mediocre red wine for the peasants and a better one for the nobility. Shea and Chalmers, introduced by Quixote as knights of a foreign land, got some of the good stuff.
The lord of the castle, Don Tibon de Salazar, got word Quixote had showed up for his party and made a personal appearance. He was short and obviously well-fed, and he had the same glow of alcohol about him Shea had seen on the guard.
"Noble knight," he yelled, hugging the armor-clad Quixote as best he could and kissing both his cheeks. "You heard about my daughters? How good of you to come! Please, come in out of the heat.
Quixote smiled. "We three, Sir Reed de Chalmero, Sir Geraldo de Shea, and I, Don Quixote de la Mancha. freed your daughters from Hell. Sir Shea is a knight, and Sir Chalmero," he indicated the psychologist, "is a good enchanter."
"How, then—?" The little Don looked wide-eyed at Chalmers. He smiled nervously and edged back a pace. "A good enchanter, heh, heh!" Then his eyes went trustingly toward Quixote. "But come, you saved my daughters? They knew not the method of their rescue—only that the devils who held them were suddenly lured away while the girls were spirited back here in the blinking of an eye." He smiled. "Come in, do come in, and tell us all your tale.
The party went on, and on, and on. Shea found himself recounting the rescue of the princesses to all manner of happy drunks, sometimes several times in a row. As the day progressed into night, and he continued to partake of his host's free food and wine, he began to feel a little warm and fuzzy inside himself. He noticed that the guests were getting wittier and the jokes were getting funnier. It was, he decided, a very good party—even better because he got to be one of the heroes.
When the evening entertainment began, he found himself seated front row and center with the lord of the castle, facing a makeshift stage. Chalmers and Quixote and the princesses—who were uniformly short and round and giggly—took up the rest of the first row.
A liveried servant walked out onto the stage, bowed, and announced, "Master Peter and his talking ape, who knows all the past and all the present."
The man who followed the servant onto the stage was ugly in the extreme. Master Peter's long, pointed nose drooped at the tip so that it looked as if it were dying to touch the wart in the center of his sharp chin. He had a hunchback and limp and greasy gray hair that trailed down to his shoulders. His ape shambled at his side, a big, raggedy chimpanzee with a silly grin on his face. The chimp waved to the crowd and everyone stamped and whistled.
Don Tibon de Salazar leaned over and whispered, "We must ask our questions to the ape, who will whisper the answers in his master's ear. It's a grand ape by all accounts. Master Peter is a rich man because of the puppet show and the ape."
Master Peter settled himself onto a low stool and rested one hand on his ape's shoulder. The man's beady-eyed gaze darted from one corner of the audience- to the other, and settled with unnerving intensity on the princesses and their rescuers. "Greetings, good folk" he rasped. "Who would ask my ape a question?"
Sancho Panza called out, "Tell me what will happen tomorrow."
Master Peter answered for his ape. "He cannot tell the future, but only past and present."
Panza snorted. "I swear I wouldn't give a farthing to be told what happened to me in the past—I know that well enough myself. But tell me then, excellent ape, what is my wife Teresa Panza doing now?"
The ape grinned at Panza, then ran to Master Peter's side and stretched up and gibbered in its master's ear for an interminable time.
Suddenly, Master Peter gave the group in the front row a startled look, and flung himself prone on the floor. "Glorious reviver and flower of knight-errantry," he cried. "Don Quixote de la Mancha, and noble squire Sancho Panza, best of all possible squires to the best of all possible knights, I embrace you! Oh that I have lived to see this day!" He glanced up, added, "Your wife Señor Panza, is cooking dinner while she drinks wine out of a cracked blue pitcher."
Panza gasped. "That's what she does every night," he whispered.
Master Peter then stared at Chalmers and Shea, and ground his face into plank floor of the stage again. "Oh, mighty swordsman Geraldo de Shea, and knight-enchanter Reed de Chalmero, heroes of far-off places, I kiss the ground, so happy am I to find myself in your presence."
Quixote was visibly flattered. Shea, still warm and happy from the wine, thought Master Peter's homage was a fair tribute to someone who had done all the great things he had. He swelled with pride. He ignored the rest of the questions and answers, instead allowing himself to bask in the delicious warmth of praise.
By the time the ape had been led offstage and the puppetmaster's sets were in place, however, Harold Shea became aware that Don Quixote was muttering to Sancho Panza. He caught the tail end of the conversation. "—And thus, if he could not tell the future, his prophecies had to come from the Devil, for while God knows all the seasons of tomorrow, the Devil can only guess at that which comes past today."