Gudgekin the Thistle Girl Read Free Page B

maybe ten feet away, lying in the grass like a cat, wings folded along his back, beaked head lifted, his beady black eyes watching with sober curiosity, and suddenly, for all his experience and training, the mason would find himself studying a question that had never gotten into his head before: “Which side of a brick is up and which side down? ” A lunatic question you may say, and so it is, for the top and bottom of a brick are as identical as the mirror-image of a chicken and the chicken looking in at it. Nevertheless, the mason in his sudden bafflement could do nothing more about that wall until the question was settled in his mind, and the longer and harder he looked at that brick, the more certain he would grow that the brick’s top and bottom were impossible to tell apart, so there was no way on earth he could be certain that the top was the top, and the bottom the bottom, and in his fury and frustration he would burst out crying. Meanwhile his assistant would have wandered off, forgetting he was part of the job, imagining he’d merely stopped to observe for a moment, as people all do when there’s construction underway.
    The griffin might materialize anywhere at all, sometimes by casually walking through a door or flying through a window, sometimes right out of thin air, since the griffin knew magic. He might materialize, wearing a black bow tie and sporting an expensive ivory-headed cane, at a concert of the Royal Symphony, when the king and queen themselves were in the royal box, and the French horns would all at once for no reason lose their count and come in seven measures early, or the oboe would go unaccountably flat, and everyone would suddenly be on a different page, some of them blasting out with all their might, some of them playing pianissimo. “Haw!” the griffin would remark and would walk out in disgust. The griffin had, in fact, the lowest possible opinion of people, though they somewhat amused him. Since everywhere he went he immediately caused confusion—since he’d never seen efficiency in anyone but himself—it seemed to the griffin that stupidity and befuddlement were the essence of human nature, though not of his nature. Undependable and changeable as he was, sometimes having three legs and sometimes four, sometimes believing x and sometimes vehemently denying x, he was nevertheless efficient at everything he did, with one exception, as you shall hear.
    Observing the consistent stupidity of human nature, the griffin grew arrogant. In his travels to and fro, he was puzzled and confounded by nothing whatever in the world except—suddenly one day, when it dawned on him—the fact that somehow, when he wasn’t there to watch, human beings did , occasionally, seem to get things done. Though he scorned human beings—hardly cared, in fact, whether they lived or died—this riddle began to pester him. How was it possible that creatures incapable of doing anything sometimes, nonetheless, did things? He would sit in his castle near the top of the mountain overlooking the kingdom, and would turn the question this way and that, upside and downside, the way the mason turned his brick, and after a while the griffin would grow downright cantankerous with frustration, though it did him no good. At last, eyes flashing with annoyance, he would fly back down to have a look at the people again, trying to catch them off guard. It of course never worked. He grew increasingly persistent, popping up everywhere, at all hours of the day and night. Soon all the trains and planes and buses were hopelessly off schedule (many of them were lost, buses coming into their stations in the wrong cities or meandering down dirt roads or into farmers’ yards, planes roaring north when they were supposed to roar south and ending up landing on some ice floe, the crew and passengers shivering and stamping their feet). There wasn’t a bank in all the kingdom that knew how