Part Nineteen
 

Princess Sara woke as the sun was beginning his morning ascent, dispersing yet again, the blackness of night.  Cockerels were crowing  and had been for the last few hours, leading the avian orchestra in its daily chant of welcome to the dawn.  She stretched herself lazily and luxuriously on the ground, feeling the small stones and tufts of wiry grass beneath her ever sensitive and silky soft skin.  What a wonderful day she was about to have!  The fairy's stern warning was all but forgotten.

Despite ten days without the protection afforded by the now dormant fairy ring, she was proceeding well along her return path to love and fortune.  Each night, after those first few cold  hours of her punishment,  had been spent under the stars in balmy  languorous ease and she had  slept deeply and well.  The guilt she had felt at her treatment of the brave young King had evaporated and been replaced by a complacent sense of her own far-seeing righteousness.  After all,  real, hard men should learn to take many fearsome, damaging and painful blows, the more the better, she told herself.  She wanted the man she married to have a body covered with countless deep and terrible scars, the result of many a hard and brutal battle, in all of which he had triumphed, fighting for her honour and approbation..

Then came the recurring stab of pain.  "Why can I not prove myself in combat like my valiant and doughty ancestors?  Why am I doomed to be a feeble woman all my life.?"  She recalled that day when her darling friend Martha had felled her with a single fearsome blow to the jaw, instantaneously reducing her to a state of semi-comatose  humiliation.  She had always accepted that the punch in question had been well merited and richly deserved, but the fact that she been able to do no other than succumb still rankled.

"Martha can fight.  Why can't I?" she bitterly complained.  Then she looked down at herself and saw at once why  not.  Despite all the gruelling and hard work she had been forced to do and the immense strengthening of her body that had resulted from this incessant toil, she was still only five feet three inches tall and of slim build - wirily strong perhaps, but still very, very slim.  The delicate loveliness that melted men's hearts would serve her ill in brutal  physical combat.  She cursed the Fate that had given her a woman's body and a man's heart.

Fate was listening and was not at all amused at this!  As she prepared to lead her beloved horse on the continuing journey, now well over half way completed, she had no idea what lay around the next bend in the track.  In a few minutes, the starry-eyed and romantically battle hungry girl would have had her fill of conflict!

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Ahead of her, as she rounded a bend in the road were three men.  She was used, by this time, to encountering strangers along the way and had long ago lost all traces of her former shyness, carrying her body proudly, aware of the admiration it excited from men and women alike.  It was increasingly sad for her to contemplate that day, now only weeks off, when she would once more be arrayed in fine clothes, her tanned, lithe beauty hidden from view.

There was something in the attitude of these three ruffiens that spelt trouble as soon as she saw them and they her.  They were coming towards her and she looked around for a suitable place to stop and defend herself, as she knew she must, with a burst of fear combined with a wonderful, intoxicating excitement, something she had never experienced in her life before and which she instinctively realised to be  a heady and addictive drug.  She determined to defend her honour or die in the attempt.

"Look at that pretty,  shameless little maid, lads  We'll each have her before we throw her body to the vultures and take that fine steed which she is afraid to mount." shouted the leading villain to his two confederates, who jeeringly and enthusiastically signified their agreement.

Sara saw that there were many large, loose stones by the roadside at the point she had reached.  She stopped and waited for the rogues to come near,

"I command you to let me pass.  I am a Princess and low peasants such as you are duty bound to obey me!"she cried out in her clear confident voice.  They answered her with a scornful, coarse laugh and the leading man drew a long sharp knife.

Without waiting to let him get any nearer, she picked up a large stone, aimed it and threw it with all her force at the man, who fell to the ground, his skull split open with the force with which the heavy rock had been hurled.  She was a lot stronger than she looked.  She was a lot stronger than she had herself realised!

The remaining brigands ran at her and she felled one in the same way as she had their leader before the third man jumped at her and grappled her to the ground, hitting the Princess across the face,  leaving a large bruise and drawing blood from her nose and mouth.  Both arms were firmly grasped by this man, a tall and powerful fellow, in whose strong and merciless hands she was helpless.  She allowed her body to go limp, and he released one arm, using his free hand to pull down his breeches.

CENSORED

She was looking closely through her almost shut eyelids, at her attacker, while pretending to have been knocked out by his savage blow.  Gently, imperceptibly  she moved her free arm and waited for her chance, the last chance to preserve her virginity.  The man drew his head back briefly and as he leant again towards her, she drove her hand upwards, her middle and index fingers apart in the shape of the letter "V".  The two fingers penetrated the man's eyes, blinding him instantly.

He screamed horribly, clutching at his wounded face.  Princess Sara slipped from under him and leapt to her feet, picking up a suitably heavy rock and dashing out his brains with a vicious blow into which she put all her strength.  All three of her assailants were dead, killed by a slightly built, tiny girl, who a year earlier had known only luxury and idleness.

"So perish all rapists and abusers of women!" she muttered, before continuing her journey, more erect in her bearing and full of pride than she had ever been before, and the more attentive reader will have gathered by this time that humility had never, in any case,  been one of her more noteworthy qualities.  She rubbed her face  and noted,  with a satisfied thrill of pleasure, the blood on the back of her tiny little hand.  How distressing, she thought with deep regret,  not to have a looking glass to inspect her first ever real proper wounds!  The ones she had suffered at the whipping post didn't count, she decided, but these had been sustained in a face to face fight to the death, and she would be proud of them for the remainder of her days.

 So this was what it was like to be a fighter, she thought excitedly! Oh,  how lucky men were to be born for nothing else!  Now that she tasted the exhilaration of combat, she longed to prove herself in a proper war, riding her white horse into battle at the head of her country's armies, felling enemy after enemy until victory had been won.

The horse, too, seemed to walk more jauntily than before, as he led his mistress and double rescuer along the last few leagues back to her home.