The Diamond Tree Read Free Page B

beautiful, and for a moment Prince Dall stood staring at it in breathless admiration.
     
    An old man, bent and gray, sat resting beside the tree on the surrounding close-cropped grass. Eagerly, Prince Dall ventured closer and, as he did, the old man looked up and turned toward him. How odd, thought Prince Dall. If I am invisible, how does he know I’m here?
     
    At that precise moment six knights in black armor stepped out of the shadows behind the prince, seized and disarmed him and tumbled him rudely, headfirst into a sack.
     
    So much, bump, bump, bump , thought Prince Dall as he was dragged along a stone passageway, bouncing over the paving stones, for, he thought, bump, bump, bump, invisibility.
     
    Over passageways, up stairs, along corridors, across halls, down steps, under archways and around corners, Prince Dall was trundled along in his sack. Then, with one final bump he came to a halt. There was a quick shuffling of several feet, the sack fell open and he looked around.
     
    Prince Dall found himself in a room twice as long as it was wide and half as high as it was from end to end. Along each wall were dozens of baskets overflowing with perfect diamonds, all glowing with such intensity that every detail of the room was clearly illuminated. A score of knights dressed all in black armor and as motionless as carvings lined each side
wall. At the far end of the room were double doors that reached higher than a man could jump and at the end nearest Prince Dall an empty throne sat alone on a low dais.
     
    Even as Prince Dall was taking all this in, the double doors swung open and the Prince of Rage entered. He was quite unlike Prince Dall had imagined he would be. Instead of being tall and thin, he was short, with a squat, round torso balanced on pencil-thin legs clad in scarlet hose. Instead of being gaunt and shadowy, he was somewhat green, with a face swollen up like a blowfish centered upon an elegant, ruffled collar. Rather than proceeding at a stately gait, he stumped along in a noisy limp, the result of having stamped his right foot in anger once too often. In sum, he resembled nothing so much as a large, angry, well-appointed frog.
     
    Brow furrowed in a fearsome scowl, lip curled in an arrogant sneer, he limped in a glowering circle around Prince Dall, then turned away in disgust and mounted his throne. “Feed him to Slither,” he roared.
     
    “Before you even ask my name?” asked Prince Dall nervously.
     
    “One,” grinned the Prince of Rage evilly, “small piece at a time.”
     
    “Before you’ve heard my riddle?” asked Prince Dall.
     
    “What riddle?” the Prince of Rage hissed. He leaned forward so far on his throne that his chin almost touched his scarlet knees.
     
    “Actually,” said the prince, “I have three. I will tell them to you unless, of course, you decide first to feed me to Slither. But if you can’t solve them all you must grant me one request.”
     
    “Bugs and nonsense!” bellowed Y’ruf. “Next thing you’ll be wanting me to do is set you some sort of ridiculous, heroic, princely task to perform so you can claim my diamonds.”
     
    “I hadn’t thought of that,” mused Prince Dall. “It’s not such a bad idea.”
     
    “If I thought of it, it’s a marvelous idea,” sneered the Prince of Rage. “But that’s beside the point. We were speaking of riddles.”
     
    “Then we have an agreement?” asked Prince Dall.
     
    “I will think about it,” said the Prince of Rage. He leaned back so far that his head nearly disappeared behind his stomach. “Put him,” he rumbled, “in the basement.”
     
    Prince Dall spent a long, cold night shackled to the wall of a cell, listening to things of various size, shape and consistency scurry about him in the darkness of the castle dungeon. Water from the murky moat seeped though the rough stones around him and dripped onto the stone floor, and every now and then something quite large struck against the wall from