Read Online The Dogs of Babel by Carolyn Parkhurst - Free Book Online

bare and ghostly, were stacked in piles on the floor. Everything was coated with a fine white dust. I remembered the mask I had worn at the wedding.
    “I meant to ask you,” I said. “What does that mean, ‘You have taken the finest knight in all my company’? Is it from something?”
    “It’s from ‘Tam Lin,’” she said. “Do you know that story?”
    “No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
    “It’s from an old Scottish poem, but I first heard it as a fairy tale. There was a version of it on this record I used to have when I was a kid—I’ve always had trouble falling asleep, and I’d listen to these records of people reading stories, kind of like books on tape. It was always these washed-up actors doing the reading, people I’d never heard of but later saw on TV in old movies and stuff. Anyway, I loved this one. It’s the story of a woman named Janet who falls in love with a knight named Tam Lin, who’s been abducted by the fairy queen or the elf queen or something, and Janet has to rescue him and steal him back to the mortal world. She goes and waits for him in the woods at midnight on Halloween, and all the fairies ride by on horses, and Janet has to pull Tam Lin down from his horse and hold on to him while the fairy queen turns him into all kinds of horrible things—she turns him into a snake, and a snarling beast, and a red-hot bar of iron, but Janet has to hold on as tight as she can, until finally he turns into a ‘mother-naked man’—isn’t that a nice phrase, ‘a mother-naked man’?—and then he’s hers forever.”
    “So she’s standing in the woods at midnight with a naked man in her arms? And this was a children’s story?”
    Lexy laughed. “That’s nothing,” she said. “When I was in college, I went and found an early version of the poem, and it turns out that Janet was pregnant. That’s something they left out of the kids’ version.”
    “So what about the ‘finest knight in all my company’ stuff?”
    “Oh, that’s the best part. After Janet rescues him, and everything’s okay, the fairy queen throws a fit. The way it went in my version was,
Out then spoke the fairy queen, and an angry queen was she: ‘You have taken the finest knight in all my company.’
And then there’s this scary part that I found absolutely thrilling, where the fairy queen says to Tam Lin,
‘Had I known but yesterday what I know today, I’d have taken out your two grey eyes and put in eyes of clay. And had I known but yesterday you’d be no more my own, I’d have taken out your heart of flesh and put in one of stone.’
It still gives me goose bumps.”
    “Lighthearted little story,” I said. “I can see why that would stick in your mind.”
    She sank down onto a long, beat-up couch that ran along one wall. I sat down next to her. There was a series of soft thuds from the staircase as Lorelei loped down to join us. She came over to the couch and jumped up, insinuating her large, dense body into the small space between us.
    “Can I help you?” I said to the dog as she wedged herself against my knees. Lexy stroked Lorelei, looking thoughtful.
    “The thing is,” she said, “I always identified with the fairy queen.”
    “Why is that?” I asked.
    “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe Janet was too goody-goody for me.
    “Except for the getting knocked up part.”
    She smiled. “Except for that.” She was quiet for a moment. “No, I guess I kind of identified with her anger. You know, she gets so mad, and it’s presented like she’s behaving totally inappropriately, but I can understand her point of view.”
    I considered it. “Absolutely,” I said. “She’s just doing her thing, being the fairy queen, and Janet comes along and steals away her finest knight.”
    “Right.”
    I watched her scratch Lorelei gently behind the ears. I thought of the queen in the story, stamping her feet and yelling into the night wind, and I thought of Lexy in the Magic Kingdom, leaning