The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories Read Free

fell off his lean horse in a clang of home-made armor. He was given to making wan comments in both English and his own language, which turned out to be Spanish.
    "Can you teach me Spanish irregular verbs?" Jamie asked.
    " Sí, naturalmente, " said Don Quixote. "But I will have to teach you some other Spanish as well." He looked particularly mournful. "Let's start with corazon. It means 'heart.' Mi corazon ," he said with a sigh, "is breaking for love of Dulcinea."
    After a few sessions with Don Quixote—mixed with a lot of sighing about corazons and Dulcinea—Jamie took a grip on his courage, marched up to El Castillo, and spoke to La Duchesa. " Pierdo, sueño, haría, ponto! " he cried.
    La Duchesa's eyes widened in surprise, and as she bent toward Jamie her severe face became almost kindly. "You are obviously a very intelligent boy," she said. "You may enter my castle."
    And so Don Quixote and La Duchesa, between the two of them, began to teach Jamie to speak Spanish. If he did well, he was allowed into the parts of the castle where the musicians played and the dancers stamped, where brave Castilian knights jousted in the tilting yard, and Señor Esteban told stories in Spanish, always careful to use words that Jamie already knew.
    Jamie couldn't help but notice that sometimes Don Quixote behaved strangely. Once, when Jamie was visiting the Whirlikins, Don Quixote charged up on his horse, waving his sword and crying out that he would save Jamie from the goblins that were attacking him. Before Jamie could explain that the Whirlikins were harmless, Don Quixote galloped to the attack. The Whirlikins, alarmed, screwed themselves into the ground where they were safe, and Don Quixote fell off his horse trying to swing at one with his sword. After poor Quixote fell off his horse a few times, it was Jamie who had to rescue the Don, not the other way around.
    It was sort of sad and sort of funny. Every time Jamie started to laugh about it, he saw Don Quixote's mournful face in his mind, and his laugh grew uneasy.
    After a while, Jamie's sister Becky began to share Jamie's lessons. She joined him and Princess Gigunda on the trip to the little schoolhouse, learned reading and math from Mrs. Winkle, and then, after some coaching from Jamie and Don Quixote, she marched to La Duchesa to shout irregular verbs and gain entrance to El Castillo.
    Around that time Marcus Tullius Cicero turned up to take them both to the Forum Romanum, a new part of the world that had appeared to the south of the Whirlikins' territory. But Cicero and the people in the Forum, all the shopkeepers and politicians, did not teach Latin the way Don Quixote taught Spanish, explaining what the new words meant in English, they just talked Latin at each other and expected Jamie and Becky to understand. Which, eventually, they did. The Spanish helped. Jamie was a bit better at Latin than Becky, but he explained to her that it was because he was older.
    It was Becky who became interested in solving Princess Gigunda's problem. "We should find her somebody to love," she said.
    "She loves us ," Jamie said.
    "Don't be silly," Becky said. "She wants a boyfriend. "
    " I'm her boyfriend," Jamie insisted.
    Becky looked a little impatient. "Besides," she said, "it's a puzzle. Just like La Duchesa and her verbs."
    This had not occurred to Jamie before, but now that Becky mentioned it, the idea seemed obvious. There were a lot of puzzles around, which one or the other of them was always solving, and Princess Gigunda's lovelessness was, now that he saw it, clearly among them.
    So they set out to find Princess Gigunda a mate. This question occupied them for several days, and several candidates were discussed and rejected. They found no answers until they went to the chariot race at the Circus Maximus. It was the first race in the Circus ever, because the place had just appeared on the other side of the Palatine Hill from the Forum, and there was a very large, very