Chapter 19

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 The guilt she had felt at her treatment of the brave young King had evaporated and been replaced by a complacent sense of her own far-seeing righteousness.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 and dainty. 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!

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 ruffians 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.