N8's Artistic Endeavors: Untitled Literary Work, "How Njal's Sons Were Born"
This is a section from my untitled literary work entitled "How Njal's Sons Were Born." The setup is this: there is a creature named Kunto who is the main character in the largest section of the work created this far. Njal (the narrator of this section) basically catches Kunto running a scam, calls him out, and summons two mostrous creatures, his sons, to his side to punish the offender. Kunto's last request is for Njal to tell him how he became so clever and how he acquired such supernaturally talented sons. I've omitted the first part, which is a brief description of the first half of Njal's birth and a tale that Njal's father recalls before he makes a fatal wish moments before Njal is born. I have mercifully employed Lj-cut for this chapters so as to not dominate your "friends" pages.
Current Page Total: 66
How Njal's Sons Were Born
My father, recalling the story, said to himself, “my, I do not want to end up as the king in that story, whose son was far cleverer than he. I was about to stomp my foot and entreat the gods, saying ‘Great gods, make my son the cleverest man alive!’ but now I think the better course would be to stomp my foot and say ‘Great gods, make my son the second-cleverest man alive!’ Since it is generally agreed that I am the cleverest man, this wish will make my son a distant second, and thus I need not fear him and may love him as a father should.”
So my father stomped his foot and said aloud “Great gods, make my son the second-cleverest man alive!” and although my mother, even through the pain of childbirth, managed a scathing stare in his direction (for what mother wants her son to be second to anyone, even her own husband?), the gods granted my father’s request.
Throughout my entire life I was educated by my father, who shielded me from contact with others my age and even other adults, as their lack of intelligence would doubtlessly only hinder my development. Naturally, in all my studies, I strove to best my father, for the little contact I had with the world led me to believe that he was the cleverest man in the land. Of course, I always made second place, even if that second place was not as distant as he might have hoped.
On his death bed, my father told me of the wish that he made at my birth and expressed his love for me, regretting that he had not been clever enough to append “for as long as I live” to his wish. His parting words were “the gods must have willed that omission, for as clever as a man may be, he can never be more clever than the gods.”
After my father died, I tried to enter society, but I failed since I was far cleverer than everyone else. Whether it was chess, checkers, women, or business, I bested them all! Although I had accumulated much wealth and friends in these enterprises, I remembered my father and his wish upon my birth. After much fidgeting about, I came to the irrefutable conclusion that there must be someone clever than I, for although the gods often grant requests in mysterious ways, they are unfailingly loyal to the wording. Without reservations, I left my comfortable life to find this mysterious man who existed somewhere and was cleverer than I.
Such incredible adventures I had (I would recount them, but you only asked me about my sons)! I slayed beasts, wooed women, and discovered countless treasures, all of which would make your eyes fall out in wonderment. However, most importantly, I matched wit with every beast, bachelor, and bumpkin I encountered-I was thorough because the gods often work in unpredictable ways. Every time disappointment followed, as a few wags of my tongue and some slick hand gestures left all of my interlocutors stumbling and dumb. Until one day-one glorious day-in which I met a man who could think around me! A description of the affair would take more time than you have left to live, friend, so let me just say that it was a most impressive engagement which took a whole week to complete, and that the victor was certainly cleverer than I was. He even looked the part, as his beard was longer than mine!
So I said to him, after informing him of my strange birth and purpose, “Kind sir, my quest is complete, for I have finally found the man cleverer than I, and you must therefore be the cleverest man in all of the world. It seems that now my life is empty of purpose, and that I must once more fill it again. So tell me, how is it that you became so clever? I would much like to know your methods so that I may compete with you, even if the fates have decided that I must always lose in such a contest.”
The other man laughed loudly and his beard shook. “That is certainly a bizarre tale you tell, friend, and if I did not know better, I would think it was some sort of trick, concocted in order to reclaim the victory I have just taken from you (a taking long in waiting, I see).
“I do not mind telling you the story of how I became so clever, for is it not true that the wise, more than anyone, wish that wisdom would spread itself to all people in the world? I fear, however, that I have no great revelation. The answer is in that mountain in the distance. I will now tell you how to master its secrets, as I once did. Climb the mountain until you arrive just before the summit, and you will see a small cave with burnt firewood and bits of clothing. Soon after you arrive, you will be visited by a silent lady who will try to tempt you to her bed. Although she may be beautiful, more beautiful than pearls, gold, or whatever bauble it is that you treasure, you must steel yourself to her, as she is the spirit of the mountain. After you finally succumb, as all men do, you will be made cleverer in proportion to how long you were able to resist her charms.”
I was at once eager to meet this new challenge, and hoped that perhaps if I mastered this mountain I could return and best this man-best even my destiny! So, abandoning my better judgment, I attacked that mountain like a pudgy child attacks a steaming plate of sweets; I was without restraint, crawling through crevices and bumping my knees carelessly against cross rocks. On that day my legs painted the sides of that mountain in thin strokes of skin and blood!
It took naught but one day of climbing to reach the summit. It was just as that clever man had described: there was a hasty hide curtain on the entrance of a small cave, the scampering remains of a fire pit, and a stray animal bone-the scraps of passing inhabitance. Naturally, I gathered together the last unburned crusts of wood and set up a modest fire before falling asleep on the hide curtain, which I had torn from the cave entrance to make my bedding.
That very evening, just as the clever man had predicted, I was approached by the most fabulous woman ever seen. Oh, woe is me who must describe her with the plainness of language! I will start with the top. Her hair was golden and curled, in the way that most men seem to prefer for their sirens in literature, but it possessed a peculiar shade and make. Her hair, I think, was most like ivy on a castle wall. Why? For it held the same intermediary quality that ivy holds, as it impressed me as if it had once grown under the careful hand of a gardener, one who shapes nature in a style most pleasing to an eye that craves artfulness. However, like most ivy, it curled as if it had long been left too long to its own devices, free to direct itself as nature (or Ceres, if you prefer) saw fit. Yet, still it betrayed the shadow of the shear and hoe-and beyond its natural liberty laid a plan, the artifice of one who had once paid it tribute with assiduous love.
The hue of her hair was also novel. It was the color of gold; but not gold that would hang on the wrist or head of a queen. Her hair was the gold of the mine and the miner, for it looked like gold that was taken from the living earth! It was a gold darkened by subtle hints of brown and red-much like the impurities that are found in anything lodged in the Earth. I had never seen hair quite that shade before; it bore all the suggestions of discovery.
Her remarkable hair, which tumbled forwards on either side of her head to the tops of her breasts, framed two equally remarkable eyes. They were not the soft, rounded eyes of those accustomed to forming bulbous tears at the trifles that litter the lives of our most privileged ladies-no, for they were pointed on each end like the points of two toy spears. Her brow similarly dipped in between such pointed corners, but her look was not hostile, no, anything but that. Her look was that of an inquisitor, one who is always asking questions and thinking. Those spears at the corners of her eyes were not for slaying men, but for poking and exploring them!
How should I describe her smile? It was just like her eyes! Both sides were turned up-as are all smiles, are they not?-but the side on the left slighted the other by going further, turning up as if to puncture her left cheek. What did such a strange smile portend? Was she laughing at me, the world-the novelty of her own appearance?
You may stand at attention friends, marveling at the creature described, but note, just as you note my account, what a disservice I do her! And I have not even broached the subject of what she looked like from the neck down!
Her neck, of course, was smooth and rounded-and have you ever seen a woman whose neck was so appealing-the skin on that neck appeared so appealing that, despite your better knowledge, you felt-yes, that’s what’s important, you felt, you felt!-that if you were to touch that neck, just graze it with a knuckle on one hand, that that neck would feel soft, softer than you knew it ever could be?
Her dress was green, but not a uniform shade, but one that possessed both the color of grass and the color that grass seems to acquire when viewed through the black water of a lake or a deep pond. It was like a jewel, the way the colors of her dress played off one another. It was modest as a girl’s dress should be, with sleeves that covered the length of each arm and a skirt that covered all but the feet at the end of her legs. Yet, the area around below her neck, that place where lustful men search for the beginnings of the breasts and the endings of the shoulders, offered mute hints to what might lay beneath. The whole apparatus was made secure by the pull and tie of two loose drawstrings.
And her feet… her feet are all that are left for me to describe! Most men, who are careless in their language and thoughts-who could blame them, since they never witnessed a creature who demanded such reverence in description-would describe her feet as white, clandestine. But that is not true, her feet were colored like the feet of any of us Western folk, but her feet had sheen, as if they were two moons with their own light! They were bare, free of sandal or shoe. If I had to compare such feet to those of earthen woman, I would say that on the one hand they were the feet of a peasant girl, for it looked as if the girl was fitted to merrily squash grapes into wine for a farmer. However, why would such plebian feet shine as if they had been scoured with pumice, pruned by attendant maidens?
If my description itself has not foreshadowed the coming events, let me merely say that, at the very apex of my search for great wit, I lost all of the wit I had! I was of course sprawled on that hide, knotty elbows propping up my torso in an awkward angle with the floor, with my head turned towards that fabulous woman. She approached me, and as she moved I swear that she moved as if her legs, arms, neck, head, hair could each move independently of the rest of the body, but instead chose to move in concert.
Then she touched me, if you would call it a touch. First, however, she crouched before me-close enough so that I was drenched with her slender shadow-and her smile became… how should I describe it? More intense! Yes, the points at the end of her lips sharpened, as if she were suddenly more pleased than she was before.
Oh… the touch! What’s to say but that she presented an extended pointer finger towards me-for the sole purpose of raising the question of her intention in my muddled mind-and held it thus for a painful second. She then formed an “O” with her lips, lowered her eyelids, turned her head-sudden metamorphosis!-and placed her finger in the barrel of the bone that joins the lower leg to the upper, and on the inner portion of the leg! Then she resumed her former expression, save leaving the finger where it was, as if she had forgotten entirely where it was.
What a strange touch! While our churches and altars do not understand that place on the body as a place of passion, is it not a private area? The priests of Apollo, the followers of Christ, the worshippers of Allah, none would disparage that contact, but in that place of the body, in that forgotten cavern, laid a sleeping beast that awoke in a drooling rage! Yet, the contact itself was so soft-she applied almost no pressure to the spot-that I wondered if she was perhaps not touching me at all.
“What if I husked her?” I thought, “What if I tore that too loose dress from her subtle body and unbound the mysteries within? If the outer features are so pleasurable, how could the ones beneath not be of the same nature?” And then the imagination worked, my friends, and I wondered what perfection was-for I held no doubts that that was what was before me.
What’s more to say? I was made slave-girl to my passion, and I laid with her as a man is accustomed to lay with a woman.
I awoke the next morning to find myself in my humble bed, accompanied by naught but the recall of the clever man’s instruction and an encroaching fear of the former night’s consequence. How could it be that one so clever as I was so easily led astray?
Then the rocky floor, gray as an elephant skin, cracked and rumbled beneath me, I clutched at my deerskin rug in fear, and the mountain spoke to me. As the mountain spoke, the cracked earth mouthed its noble words.
“You are the man who came unto me as a man is accustomed to come to a woman. You are not the first, as many wayward wanderers-who knows their motivation-have climbed my deadly peaks and I have experienced many nights of passion in their arms. All have been cast from my rocks to cruel death below, although there may be a chance-for who knows what the gods fated for them?-that one of those men were so incredible that he could withstand such a fall.
“However, take note that when I say that many men have approached me as they would approach a woman, I would not say that these encounters happen frequently. For, here I am, a lonely mountain, love-starved. Do you think I choose to appear as forbidding and dangerous as I do? Nay! Just as the homely maid, unable to satisfy her nature by taking a bridegroom, curses her lot, so do I. No one but the gods choose how each of us must appear to the other.
“So each time a man strays up my slopes, I immediately appear to him as the most lovely creature that he could imagine. Each time, by some mystery, they shun me. Incensed, I increase my charms and my aggression, and sooner or later, they all succumb. However, their surrender is always too late to quench my jilted ire, and I grab them in my rocky fist and toss them to whatever landscape exists below.
“But you! You, Njal, my love, you came to me with only the slightest beckoning, with the slightest twist of my finger! A tender touch upon your blessed knee was all that it took to tangle your heart around mine! Oh, I’m so embarrassed; I’m crimson with joy! Of course, I cannot treat you, venerable guest, as I treated those unworthies. I will give you safe passage to your home, and will grant you anything you so desire, as long as it is within my power.”
At once I could see how I had been tricked by the cleverer man, and I also appreciated the fortuity of the circumstances that had saved me from that man’s designs! How many men had he escorted to death by this way, never suspecting that there was a hidden condition in his trap, a condition if tripped that would spell that man’s doom?
However, while he may have been the cleverest man in the world, he must also have certainly been the most luckless for his plan to be foiled by mere happenstance! At once, I came up with a wish-a better wish than cleverness-for the mountain to grant.
“Mountain, if you mean what you say, then I would like it if, as a result of our union, you would bear me two sons. Each son should inherit your strength and be subject to my will.”
The mountain nodded in assent and, with her rocky palm, set me down on some far away grassland. In the distance, I saw the mountain shutter and then spit out two gray spheres, and those spheres became the sons which you see before you. Accompanied by my sons, I reentered town and ordered that clever man’s death. That clever man only lives now in the laments of his widow, who still remembers the sight of my sons gnashing her husband’s entrails between their bloody teeth.
So you understand now why it is not enough to be merely clever? How can cleverness, even the cleverness of the cleverest man in the world, trump he who is second-best and paired with the strength of the mountain? Witness, young friend, the end of your tale, as I have bested you in both brain and brawn!
Current Page Total: 66
How Njal's Sons Were Born
My father, recalling the story, said to himself, “my, I do not want to end up as the king in that story, whose son was far cleverer than he. I was about to stomp my foot and entreat the gods, saying ‘Great gods, make my son the cleverest man alive!’ but now I think the better course would be to stomp my foot and say ‘Great gods, make my son the second-cleverest man alive!’ Since it is generally agreed that I am the cleverest man, this wish will make my son a distant second, and thus I need not fear him and may love him as a father should.”
So my father stomped his foot and said aloud “Great gods, make my son the second-cleverest man alive!” and although my mother, even through the pain of childbirth, managed a scathing stare in his direction (for what mother wants her son to be second to anyone, even her own husband?), the gods granted my father’s request.
Throughout my entire life I was educated by my father, who shielded me from contact with others my age and even other adults, as their lack of intelligence would doubtlessly only hinder my development. Naturally, in all my studies, I strove to best my father, for the little contact I had with the world led me to believe that he was the cleverest man in the land. Of course, I always made second place, even if that second place was not as distant as he might have hoped.
On his death bed, my father told me of the wish that he made at my birth and expressed his love for me, regretting that he had not been clever enough to append “for as long as I live” to his wish. His parting words were “the gods must have willed that omission, for as clever as a man may be, he can never be more clever than the gods.”
After my father died, I tried to enter society, but I failed since I was far cleverer than everyone else. Whether it was chess, checkers, women, or business, I bested them all! Although I had accumulated much wealth and friends in these enterprises, I remembered my father and his wish upon my birth. After much fidgeting about, I came to the irrefutable conclusion that there must be someone clever than I, for although the gods often grant requests in mysterious ways, they are unfailingly loyal to the wording. Without reservations, I left my comfortable life to find this mysterious man who existed somewhere and was cleverer than I.
Such incredible adventures I had (I would recount them, but you only asked me about my sons)! I slayed beasts, wooed women, and discovered countless treasures, all of which would make your eyes fall out in wonderment. However, most importantly, I matched wit with every beast, bachelor, and bumpkin I encountered-I was thorough because the gods often work in unpredictable ways. Every time disappointment followed, as a few wags of my tongue and some slick hand gestures left all of my interlocutors stumbling and dumb. Until one day-one glorious day-in which I met a man who could think around me! A description of the affair would take more time than you have left to live, friend, so let me just say that it was a most impressive engagement which took a whole week to complete, and that the victor was certainly cleverer than I was. He even looked the part, as his beard was longer than mine!
So I said to him, after informing him of my strange birth and purpose, “Kind sir, my quest is complete, for I have finally found the man cleverer than I, and you must therefore be the cleverest man in all of the world. It seems that now my life is empty of purpose, and that I must once more fill it again. So tell me, how is it that you became so clever? I would much like to know your methods so that I may compete with you, even if the fates have decided that I must always lose in such a contest.”
The other man laughed loudly and his beard shook. “That is certainly a bizarre tale you tell, friend, and if I did not know better, I would think it was some sort of trick, concocted in order to reclaim the victory I have just taken from you (a taking long in waiting, I see).
“I do not mind telling you the story of how I became so clever, for is it not true that the wise, more than anyone, wish that wisdom would spread itself to all people in the world? I fear, however, that I have no great revelation. The answer is in that mountain in the distance. I will now tell you how to master its secrets, as I once did. Climb the mountain until you arrive just before the summit, and you will see a small cave with burnt firewood and bits of clothing. Soon after you arrive, you will be visited by a silent lady who will try to tempt you to her bed. Although she may be beautiful, more beautiful than pearls, gold, or whatever bauble it is that you treasure, you must steel yourself to her, as she is the spirit of the mountain. After you finally succumb, as all men do, you will be made cleverer in proportion to how long you were able to resist her charms.”
I was at once eager to meet this new challenge, and hoped that perhaps if I mastered this mountain I could return and best this man-best even my destiny! So, abandoning my better judgment, I attacked that mountain like a pudgy child attacks a steaming plate of sweets; I was without restraint, crawling through crevices and bumping my knees carelessly against cross rocks. On that day my legs painted the sides of that mountain in thin strokes of skin and blood!
It took naught but one day of climbing to reach the summit. It was just as that clever man had described: there was a hasty hide curtain on the entrance of a small cave, the scampering remains of a fire pit, and a stray animal bone-the scraps of passing inhabitance. Naturally, I gathered together the last unburned crusts of wood and set up a modest fire before falling asleep on the hide curtain, which I had torn from the cave entrance to make my bedding.
That very evening, just as the clever man had predicted, I was approached by the most fabulous woman ever seen. Oh, woe is me who must describe her with the plainness of language! I will start with the top. Her hair was golden and curled, in the way that most men seem to prefer for their sirens in literature, but it possessed a peculiar shade and make. Her hair, I think, was most like ivy on a castle wall. Why? For it held the same intermediary quality that ivy holds, as it impressed me as if it had once grown under the careful hand of a gardener, one who shapes nature in a style most pleasing to an eye that craves artfulness. However, like most ivy, it curled as if it had long been left too long to its own devices, free to direct itself as nature (or Ceres, if you prefer) saw fit. Yet, still it betrayed the shadow of the shear and hoe-and beyond its natural liberty laid a plan, the artifice of one who had once paid it tribute with assiduous love.
The hue of her hair was also novel. It was the color of gold; but not gold that would hang on the wrist or head of a queen. Her hair was the gold of the mine and the miner, for it looked like gold that was taken from the living earth! It was a gold darkened by subtle hints of brown and red-much like the impurities that are found in anything lodged in the Earth. I had never seen hair quite that shade before; it bore all the suggestions of discovery.
Her remarkable hair, which tumbled forwards on either side of her head to the tops of her breasts, framed two equally remarkable eyes. They were not the soft, rounded eyes of those accustomed to forming bulbous tears at the trifles that litter the lives of our most privileged ladies-no, for they were pointed on each end like the points of two toy spears. Her brow similarly dipped in between such pointed corners, but her look was not hostile, no, anything but that. Her look was that of an inquisitor, one who is always asking questions and thinking. Those spears at the corners of her eyes were not for slaying men, but for poking and exploring them!
How should I describe her smile? It was just like her eyes! Both sides were turned up-as are all smiles, are they not?-but the side on the left slighted the other by going further, turning up as if to puncture her left cheek. What did such a strange smile portend? Was she laughing at me, the world-the novelty of her own appearance?
You may stand at attention friends, marveling at the creature described, but note, just as you note my account, what a disservice I do her! And I have not even broached the subject of what she looked like from the neck down!
Her neck, of course, was smooth and rounded-and have you ever seen a woman whose neck was so appealing-the skin on that neck appeared so appealing that, despite your better knowledge, you felt-yes, that’s what’s important, you felt, you felt!-that if you were to touch that neck, just graze it with a knuckle on one hand, that that neck would feel soft, softer than you knew it ever could be?
Her dress was green, but not a uniform shade, but one that possessed both the color of grass and the color that grass seems to acquire when viewed through the black water of a lake or a deep pond. It was like a jewel, the way the colors of her dress played off one another. It was modest as a girl’s dress should be, with sleeves that covered the length of each arm and a skirt that covered all but the feet at the end of her legs. Yet, the area around below her neck, that place where lustful men search for the beginnings of the breasts and the endings of the shoulders, offered mute hints to what might lay beneath. The whole apparatus was made secure by the pull and tie of two loose drawstrings.
And her feet… her feet are all that are left for me to describe! Most men, who are careless in their language and thoughts-who could blame them, since they never witnessed a creature who demanded such reverence in description-would describe her feet as white, clandestine. But that is not true, her feet were colored like the feet of any of us Western folk, but her feet had sheen, as if they were two moons with their own light! They were bare, free of sandal or shoe. If I had to compare such feet to those of earthen woman, I would say that on the one hand they were the feet of a peasant girl, for it looked as if the girl was fitted to merrily squash grapes into wine for a farmer. However, why would such plebian feet shine as if they had been scoured with pumice, pruned by attendant maidens?
If my description itself has not foreshadowed the coming events, let me merely say that, at the very apex of my search for great wit, I lost all of the wit I had! I was of course sprawled on that hide, knotty elbows propping up my torso in an awkward angle with the floor, with my head turned towards that fabulous woman. She approached me, and as she moved I swear that she moved as if her legs, arms, neck, head, hair could each move independently of the rest of the body, but instead chose to move in concert.
Then she touched me, if you would call it a touch. First, however, she crouched before me-close enough so that I was drenched with her slender shadow-and her smile became… how should I describe it? More intense! Yes, the points at the end of her lips sharpened, as if she were suddenly more pleased than she was before.
Oh… the touch! What’s to say but that she presented an extended pointer finger towards me-for the sole purpose of raising the question of her intention in my muddled mind-and held it thus for a painful second. She then formed an “O” with her lips, lowered her eyelids, turned her head-sudden metamorphosis!-and placed her finger in the barrel of the bone that joins the lower leg to the upper, and on the inner portion of the leg! Then she resumed her former expression, save leaving the finger where it was, as if she had forgotten entirely where it was.
What a strange touch! While our churches and altars do not understand that place on the body as a place of passion, is it not a private area? The priests of Apollo, the followers of Christ, the worshippers of Allah, none would disparage that contact, but in that place of the body, in that forgotten cavern, laid a sleeping beast that awoke in a drooling rage! Yet, the contact itself was so soft-she applied almost no pressure to the spot-that I wondered if she was perhaps not touching me at all.
“What if I husked her?” I thought, “What if I tore that too loose dress from her subtle body and unbound the mysteries within? If the outer features are so pleasurable, how could the ones beneath not be of the same nature?” And then the imagination worked, my friends, and I wondered what perfection was-for I held no doubts that that was what was before me.
What’s more to say? I was made slave-girl to my passion, and I laid with her as a man is accustomed to lay with a woman.
I awoke the next morning to find myself in my humble bed, accompanied by naught but the recall of the clever man’s instruction and an encroaching fear of the former night’s consequence. How could it be that one so clever as I was so easily led astray?
Then the rocky floor, gray as an elephant skin, cracked and rumbled beneath me, I clutched at my deerskin rug in fear, and the mountain spoke to me. As the mountain spoke, the cracked earth mouthed its noble words.
“You are the man who came unto me as a man is accustomed to come to a woman. You are not the first, as many wayward wanderers-who knows their motivation-have climbed my deadly peaks and I have experienced many nights of passion in their arms. All have been cast from my rocks to cruel death below, although there may be a chance-for who knows what the gods fated for them?-that one of those men were so incredible that he could withstand such a fall.
“However, take note that when I say that many men have approached me as they would approach a woman, I would not say that these encounters happen frequently. For, here I am, a lonely mountain, love-starved. Do you think I choose to appear as forbidding and dangerous as I do? Nay! Just as the homely maid, unable to satisfy her nature by taking a bridegroom, curses her lot, so do I. No one but the gods choose how each of us must appear to the other.
“So each time a man strays up my slopes, I immediately appear to him as the most lovely creature that he could imagine. Each time, by some mystery, they shun me. Incensed, I increase my charms and my aggression, and sooner or later, they all succumb. However, their surrender is always too late to quench my jilted ire, and I grab them in my rocky fist and toss them to whatever landscape exists below.
“But you! You, Njal, my love, you came to me with only the slightest beckoning, with the slightest twist of my finger! A tender touch upon your blessed knee was all that it took to tangle your heart around mine! Oh, I’m so embarrassed; I’m crimson with joy! Of course, I cannot treat you, venerable guest, as I treated those unworthies. I will give you safe passage to your home, and will grant you anything you so desire, as long as it is within my power.”
At once I could see how I had been tricked by the cleverer man, and I also appreciated the fortuity of the circumstances that had saved me from that man’s designs! How many men had he escorted to death by this way, never suspecting that there was a hidden condition in his trap, a condition if tripped that would spell that man’s doom?
However, while he may have been the cleverest man in the world, he must also have certainly been the most luckless for his plan to be foiled by mere happenstance! At once, I came up with a wish-a better wish than cleverness-for the mountain to grant.
“Mountain, if you mean what you say, then I would like it if, as a result of our union, you would bear me two sons. Each son should inherit your strength and be subject to my will.”
The mountain nodded in assent and, with her rocky palm, set me down on some far away grassland. In the distance, I saw the mountain shutter and then spit out two gray spheres, and those spheres became the sons which you see before you. Accompanied by my sons, I reentered town and ordered that clever man’s death. That clever man only lives now in the laments of his widow, who still remembers the sight of my sons gnashing her husband’s entrails between their bloody teeth.
So you understand now why it is not enough to be merely clever? How can cleverness, even the cleverness of the cleverest man in the world, trump he who is second-best and paired with the strength of the mountain? Witness, young friend, the end of your tale, as I have bested you in both brain and brawn!