Free Song of the Gargoyle by Zilpha Keatley Snyder Page A

he wrote the song himself. As far as I know there’s no such person as Hulf of Mundgross. And so—lords and ladies, ‘The Knight of the Honorable Name.’ ”
    The song had many verses, each of them telling the story of one of the knight’s chivalrous deeds, such as slaying dragons, saving damsels in distress, and helping comrades in arms who had been accused of horrible crimes by killing their accusers in trial by battle. And between each of the verses there was a catchy refrain which Komus had always sung while pacing grandly around the stage in a stately manner, as one might in some great and solemn procession:
    Let us sing of a knight of great valor and fame,
    Sir Bloodspiller Bergburner, Lord of No Shame.
    Let us sing of the glory, of the deeds grand and gory,
    Of the Knight of the Honorable Name.
    Troff liked the refrain and the procession, but during the verses, which were quite long and wordy, he sometimes lost interest. Lowering his big ugly head onto his paws, he dutifully kept his eyelids partly open and rolled his eyes sleepily in Tymmon’s direction.
    At last Tymmon discarded his entertainer’s pose and dropped down in front of his inattentive audience. “You are just not listening carefully,” he said sternly. “The verses are most amusing, if you grasp their meaning. As in the one about the dragon. When the knight and all his squires and pages arrive in the village that is being harassed by the dragon, the villagers have to feed and house their rescuers. And before the dragon is finally killed, the knight and his party have eaten everything and laid waste the countryside, and all the villagers have died of starvation. And then the great knight leaves, so proud of slaying the dragon he doesn’t even notice that the people he came to save have all starved to death. The ending is meant to be a satire, a kind of mockery. Don’t you understand?”
    Troff grinned and lolled his tongue and then rolled over on his back and asked Tymmon to scratch his belly. By the time the scratching was finished, Tymmon noticed that the sky had begun to lighten and the strange nighttime noises had given way to the first sleepy chirping of birds.
    Tymmon crawled under his blanket. He could sleep now. But before he closed his eyes he found his thoughts returning briefly to what he had just told Troff. “A kind of mockery,” he had said. He had not really thought of it in just that way before. But suddenly it seemed to be true. Seen in a certain way, many of Komus’s songs and stories as well had been a kind of mockery. This sudden realization seemed important, but before he could explore it further it clouded into dreams.
    I’ll think on it more tomorrow, he told himself, but when he awakened, the sun was already high in the sky, and there was much to be done. Troff had already gone hunting.

SEVEN
    A S THE DAYS PASSED, Tymmon thought more and more often of leaving the forest and, in spite of the danger from Black Helmet and his men, returning to the farms and villages of the valley.
    “The Sombrous may be all very well for you,” he told Troff. “But human beings need to be with their own kind. It is most necessary for people to be with other people. And then there is the matter of food. I know that lions and other such wild beasts can live on nothing but the flesh of their prey, and I suppose that gargoyles are much the same. But humans need a variety of foods in order to thrive and stay in good health. There is, for instance, bread.”
    Bread had, of late, haunted his dreams. Bread in particular but also porridge, cheese, soups and stews, dumplings, puddings, and pies. And now that spring was here and the days warming, there would soon be fresh fruits and vegetables. His hunger for such things filled his dreams with wonderful feasts of the past.
    Sleeping, he once more tasted the ripe cherries he and Lonfar had picked in the orchard of a Qweasle farmer. In other dreams he once again enjoyed the delicious things to be