The Boy and the Lion

 The castle was in the young boy’s eye, like the glint of a small gray linnet that lives in the eye of a falcon whose home is the sky. It stood on a hill in the distance, he had been inside it only once when his mother was mistress to one of the gentlewomen there. He thought the word “mistress” meant something honorable, not a word that means a boy has no father.

Inside the castle was glittering stained glass that cast its glow on canvas and velvet walls, woodwork carved from uniquely large knots filamented with spirals of gold dust. But his clearest memory was of the freestanding stone arch that looked a great deal older than everything else. Above it was the most fantastical painting he had ever seen, a heraldic emblem shaped like a lady’s mirror held in place by a marble hand, not made of paint but enamel and bronze and marble. On it a rampant lion holding a golden trumpet was leaping, and a second hand emerging from the wall held a real sword knighting the lion on the shoulder. The motto read “CONTELION PERPETUA AD INFINITUM”, the Count de Lyon lives forever.

In that moment the boy imagined the castle belonged not to a lord but to that lion. Dreams make people forget themselves, and he wished the only wish he had ever made that the lion would come to life. A lion who is a friend to all boys without fathers.

--

Toby was a skilled craftsman of the court, the artisan behind the numerous lion paintings and frescoes and intricate inventions that wowed visiting royals but otherwise earned him no favors. No one knew he was an animal, he simply transformed under cover of darkness and prowled the castle grounds like any other animal.

The carnival had returned, he could smell it and the evil man that ran it. It was the only time of year the castle was open to peasants and their children. He could not believe the man would show his face in these parts again or that he hadn’t died from his own diabolical deeds.

Toby’s large paws crept silently through the black, sightless forest to a sorcerer’s tent with a tall peak at the edge of the carnival camp. There were lanterns swinging and the sound of children’s laughter in the distance. The tent was no different from the one the sorcerer had the last time. Toby’s large, golden eye peered inside through a tear in the fabric and there stood the evil man who had turned him into a beast.

The sorcerer had retired for the evening and was conversing in low tones with a young peasant woman behind the translucent curtains of his inner sanctum. Toby could not see her features but she had a familiar smell he could not place. The evil man filled her ears with whispers and she nodded as if he was giving her professional counsel. A young boy, her son waited patiently at the entrance until they were finished.

The sorcerer parted the curtains and parted his thin lips in a perverse leer as he bowed and the boy’s mother went her way. Then he beckoned for the boy himself to enter with his long finger. The man was bald with a palsied head like a vulture’s egg but he spoke kindly to the boy and invited him into the back. The hairs in Toby’s mane bristled and he tightened his haunches.

Through the fabric he watched the sorcerer pull out a lady’s mirror and show it to the boy. Whatever image its glass revealed to his young eyes Toby could not discern, but the evil man explained to him that his mother was now expecting the sorcerer’s own child.

The boy reacted in horror and dismay, protesting and backing away from him. The sorcerer who had been kind and gentle with him until now was not expecting this reaction and began to show anger, seizing him violently by the wrist.

A furry paw reached up and brought the curtain down. An adult African lion came walking into the tent and the boy’s face went white with fear and surprise. Then he turned and ran out of the tent and into the forest.

The sorcerer was only briefly startled, not expecting to see the same lion after all these years, but he was more furious than anything else. He commanded a pair of black adders to emerge from his sleeves, which slithered up his body and wrapped around his neck, grimacing defensively at Toby with their mouths open on either side of the wizard’s face which was turning blue. Smoke billowed from his robes and he started to increase in size into something even Toby the lion was unable to contend with, red veins bulging from his eyes and dark blood dripping from his blue teeth.

The lion reached out and brought down the tent’s center pole, canvas collapsing on top of them and swiftly trotted away. He followed the boy’s scent into the night, his long tail sweeping the forest floor behind him to mask the boy’s path.

–

The boy cowered in darkness, huddled and shivering unable to see his hand in front of his face. After a while he perceived something watching and breathing on him, but when he opened his eyes there was no lion but a lantern approaching him. It was an ordinary castle workman.

Toby introduced himself and promised to lead him to safety in the castle. Now that he could see the boy with his own eyes he remembered him and his mother. All of his little friends had no fathers, and the boy had no memory of the night he sheltered him.

-

2

Dawn was already breaking as they approached the ramparts. Toby knew the castle was being watched by the sorcerer’s spies hoping to learn his secrets, but he explained to the boy it was always best to see one’s destination in daylight. They snuck in through a servants’ entrance; it seemed humble and unadorned compared to the boy’s distant memory of the royal tour, but he regarded Toby the workman in silent fascination. A mop of unkempt black hair framed his congenial face, but his body was thin and wasting under his leather workclothes.

The boy followed him through the lower halls, a very adult world where even a cricket could not go unnoticed. The path they were taking seemed to lead nowhere, in fact it led them to a small storage room filled with empty potato sacks and no egress. Toby sat down on a bench and asked if the boy needed to rest, but there was something curious in the room he was staring at.

In the back corner rather low on the wall was a small, narrow painting of just a lion’s eyes. Unlike the heraldic emblem guarding the main entrance this one was incredibly real and lifelike; the huge golden eyes glittered like jewels out of blackness, reminding him of last night.

“Anywhere you see a lion is a path to safety.” Toby explained, reaching out and pressing into the eyes with two fingers. “I have hidden them all over the castle, and each one contains a message that will help you if we are ever separated. This one says ‘Seek and ye shall find’.”

A small, square door magically opened beneath the painting. They would have to crawl through on their hands and knees. The boy crouched down and followed him into a secret world.

He was astonished at the size of the hidden space this man inhabited between the battlements, and the sheer number of unfinished masterpieces and projects he was working on, intricate dioramas and puppets that moved with gears. The boy had never seen a room like this, it was narrow but so tall he couldn’t see the ceiling, cluttered with wooden scaffolding and ropes that hung down from the shadows. And there was glittering fabric, costumes left hanging over the side of a wooden platform as if they had been discarded there.

Toby fetched them something to eat, then he went back to work so the boy could sleep after his lidless night. He curled up and was already dreaming of the lion.

Hours later a noise roused him. It sounded like applause. The sound was very close by, just feet away and the boy looked up to see one whole side of the room was an enormous thick velvet curtain. This was a backstage that must have been behind the court theater. The festivities had already begun, which meant it was already the next day. The sound of the carnival performers and children’s squeals permeated the walls as he rubbed the sleep from his eyes.

Toby was sitting cross-legged on the wooden platform above him tinkering with one of his creations. Just then a burly stagehand barged in to get something, noticed the boy napping among the costumes and shouted “Oy! Whattaryedoin back ‘ere!”

The man took a giant step toward him but something like a delicate wooden stick fell down at his feet and he looked up to see a lion standing above him. The beast leaped down to the floor scaring the absolute wits out of him. The man stumbled backward over a pile of ropes and rushed out without his hat.

–

The boy and the lion looked at each other, but of course the lion could not speak and the boy did not know if he even understood him. But Toby lay down next to him as if he understood, and they waited together until the crowds were gone.

At dusk the lion stood up and yawned, and headed back out the way they came in looking back for the boy to follow him. The boy wondered why he didn’t just turn hmself back into a man. This time they crawled through some kind of drain pipe that led to an iron grate outside which the lion pushed open with his paw. Then the boy rode on his back out into the moonlight.

They came to a beautiful royal garden full of statues, where the lion stopped in front of a particular one. It was a carved relief of a lion holding a cross. Toby nudged the base of it with his nose, and a marble slab shifted to reveal a gold cross studded with jewels hidden underneath it.

Without words he was able to make the boy understand he needed to hold up the cross and speak what was carved in the stone, so the boy took it in his hands and did so. As its shadow passed over the lion’s face Toby stood up on his hind legs and was suddenly his human self again.

-

3

The next day Toby and the boy observed the crowds entering the castle and were able to disappear into that crowd. They explored new rooms where Toby’s works were on display, a sitting room whose centerpiece was a perfect reproduction of the castle four feet square on a table that was so exquisite the unfinished works he saw yesterday paled in comparison. It even opened so visitors could see the pleasures of palace life.

A group of peasant children came through and Toby sensed danger. He ducked under the table and pulled the boy down with him. A tall, hairless man in blue robes came leering into the room, aggressively peering into every doorway and behind every piece of furniture making no secret of his search for the boy.

In seconds they would be discovered. Toby took out the gold cross and whispered the words of transformation, changing the boy into a little grass snake in his hand. He whispered for him to make his way out of the castle and meet him at the standing stone, then he put the snake down and it disappeared through a crack in the floor.

“Remarkable construction.” the sorcerer admired the model castle, then he lifted the tablecloth and looked under it to see a sleeping workman, but he did not recognize him.

–

Toby had to wait until the crowds were gone, then he rushed outside to the garden and eventually the little snake appeared. He restored the bewildered boy to human form, having endured a strange adventure as a snake but the first thing he said was that he wanted to find his mother. There was a great deal Toby wanted to tell him that he couldn’t as a lion, and he promised they would find her.

They went over the crest of the hill into the woods, taking a trackless course that led to a dark hollow in the brambles that was both a den for an animal to sleep on the ground and also where Toby kept his most treasured creations that were not for the public.

They sat down and had a very grown-up conversation. Toby told him that since his mother was expecting the sorcerer’s own child, this meant he intended to eliminate the boy before it was born. Then he told him the story of the sorcerer.

His mother was a young mistress of the court although she was barely of age, serving one of the noblewomen and was also friendly with a respectable knight who would have made an excellent husband someday. But the traveling magician desired her for himself, and they were discovered together by Toby the court artisan. The sorcerer was tracked down and confronted where he turned all of the witnesses into circus animals to hide his misdeed and make his escape. The knight was transformed into a baboon who ransacked the sorcerer’s tent and threw all of his magic objects into the forest. The baboon was holding the magic mirror which revealed to Toby that he was human. He found the gold cross in the forest and used it to change himself back with the help of a child who had no fear of lions.

At dusk they stole into camp to search for his mother. There were raised voices coming from the sorcerer’s tent, the mother was beside herself with grief and the enraged sorcerer demanded she start a search party by asking the royals to have the castle turned inside out. He did not offer to use his power to help her in any way, but was cajoling her into doing it herself.

“I just want my boy.” she pleaded with him.

Toby knew he couldn’t fight the sorcerer as himself and as a lion he couldn’t carry the gold cross or invoke its power. He had never thought about fighting a wizard, the man had no weaknesses except perhaps that he didn’t expect animals and people to be working together. He whispered a plan into the boy’s ear.

The boy came running into the tent and embraced his mother who responded with joy and amazement. The sorcerer was pleased as well, grinning from ear to ear until he saw the boy had dropped something on the floor. It gleamed in the lamplight and his eyes became flames.

“Where did you find that?” he took a step forward but something had creptly silently into the tent behind him and pinned the back of his raiment to the floor with its claws.

“Quick, turn him into a mouse!” the boy recalled Toby’s words in the lion’s silent face.

The boy reached down and picked up the cross. The wizard pulled so hard against the lion’s grip he tore out of his clothes, revealing a disgusting palsied body that gave him pause for only an instant. The boy recited the words and instead of growing the sorceror began shrinking. The two adders he had released from his hands turned and looked back at him. Smoke rose from his bare skin as he grew more and more diminutive into a hideous little blue-skinned rodent, at the same time trying to swell himself with incantations that grew so high-pitched they could no longer be heard, his flabby little neck stretching and a pair of little horns sprouting from his head. It was the ugliest thing the boy and his mother had ever seen.

“Now destroy it!” he remembered Toby’s instructions again. There was no way he could break the gold cross so he looked around and there was a black cauldron hanging from an iron tripod with tall flames rising from a bed of crystals. The little mouse mouthed the word “Nooooo!!” but fur had already grown over its body. The boy placed the jeweled cross into the fire which curled around it, the settings glistening until they turned black.

The mouse was just a mouse. It looked very foolish in the presence of the twin adders and seemed afraid of them, scurrying away under the canvas into the night. The boy and his mother embraced. He looked over with gratitude at his friend but the lion was just a lion. Being indoors gave it only a moment’s hesitation, and it blinked and walked out exactly as an animal would do.