In a church in a village in a time long ago dwelt a priest, and he was a kind man, and he was a good man. In fact he was so kind and so good that it often confused his flock, who found him doing such things as reading prayers to their cows in the field, or baptising their newborn lambs, or gently reproaching their cats for indulging in wrath, gluttony, and sloth.
“Father,” asked a man one day, who was well-to-do enough to ask impertinent things everyone else was content enough to quietly wonder, “why do you speak so to the brute and mute beasts? They are of no great concern to god.”
“Not so, my son,” said the priest. “All creatures great and small are of worth, and all that is of worth is god’s concern.”
“But surely there are limits!” argued the man, who really was fairly wealthy in the context of that specific community. “Would you preach to the mocking gulls of the shore?”
“Without hesitation.”
“Would you beard a heathen lion in its den?”
“Should it require salvation, with nary a qualm.”
“Would you baptize the wriggling tad-pole that lies trapped in yonder drying puddle, so that it would not perish in sin?”
“I’ll do you one better,” said the priest, and so speaking he took out his small flask of emergency holy water and placed the tadpole within it so that he might carry them home to the church’s well, thus baptizing them and adopting them at a stroke. “Your name shall be Frog,” said the priest, “for it is best to be what you are, and what you are is what you do at your very best.”
“Then my very best is what I shall do,” replied Frog, who was not yet a frog.
And so they strove as such and grew up strong, swift, and sure into a frog in truth, the straightest and noblest youth in all the village, albeit one that stood no taller than a rabbit’s fore-paw. Though some mocked them in private, the priest was simply too kind and good to be openly doubted, and so the frog’s growth from tadpolehood to near-adulthood was a happy and fruitful one, until the day the ogre came.
The day was as lovely as the ogre wasn’t: blue-skied, bright-sunned, brisk-breezed, with a night rainfall that freshened the plants and left dew in all the right places. He stuck out in it like a coal in a linen-chest even before he trod down to the village square and shouted out in his voice like that of six bulls: “where is the tribute? Bring out the tribute! Bring me your wealth, bring me your coin, bring me your food, bring me your cattle, bring me your priest and the jewels from your altar!”
The villagers brought the ogre their wealth and coin and food and cattle, which didn’t please him much because there wasn’t much of any of it, but the priest pleased him still less, for he bowed his head and told the ogre that the village’s altar had not one jewel.
“What?” shouted the ogre as loud as twelve bulls. “Why?”
“It would be extravagant,” said the priest reproachfully. “Beauty is all well and good, but wealth without purpose?”
“I am going to eat your bones and pop your head,” considered the ogre.
“Do not do so!” piped up a small loud voice.
“Why?” asked the ogre. “Also: where? I can’t see you.”
“I am the priest’s foster-child,” said the small loud voice, which belonged to the frog. “I am privy to many secrets and many places, for I am invisible, and I know where the priest has hidden the altar-jewels. I love my father and wish you to spare him; if you swear on your ugliest toe to leave him be I shall lead you to the jewels and you may have them.”
“I swear it so!” said the ogre, but he was a liar most exquisite: as he followed the small loud voice of the frog all the way down the path to the church he contrived to stop and rub his feet, and as he did so he sliced off his ugliest toe with his pen-knife (a cavalry sabre) and let it fall in a bush, thus voiding his promise. But what is hidden from a man is not so hidden from a frog, and this did not go unnoticed.
“Here they are!” pronounced the frog, who had led the ogre to the church’s well where they lived. “My father has cast the altar-jewels down into the well’s bottom, where they glitter. Can you not see them?”
“I see splashes and little else,” said the ogre.
“Ah, that is because the stones are dark as midnight: rare beyond a king’s dreams. Lean over so that all light is hidden and you will see them as the dark spots in the dark waters.”
The ogre was very intrigued by this, and so leaned forwards in a manner most obliging to anyone who should want to crown his skull with a big hard leaden object such as an ogre’s ugliest toe, which did so happen.
“Argh!” he called as loudly as twenty-four bulls as he plummeted headfirst into the well, where he was stuck with his head above water and his feet tangled in the rope-and-bucket. “Treachery!”
“What goes around comes around,” said the frog philosophically, letting the toe (and matter) drop. And though the villagers were a little unsure of the appropriateness of that moral statement they did nonetheless cheer the frog for it.
“Alas, my child, I fear this is not the end of our problems,” mourned the priest. “You have told a lie on holy ground. Also the ogre was a legal rent-collector sent by the wicked wizard who owns the village’s land, and we shall pay most dearly for inconveniencing him.”
“Then by means of repentance I shall see about defeating this wizard,” said the frog. “Lend me your aid, my fellows, and I will vanquish him mostly thoroughly!”
The villagers stopped cheering and shuffled their feet and checked their pockets and provided approximately six inches of string a glass marble and an old shoe.
“More than enough!” said the frog. “Farewell!” And so the villagers cheered them again and all went home to count their blessings cross their fingers and console themselves that really, it was clearly only the frog that would catch the blame if the whole thing went sour.
The frog hopped boldly forth for a day and a night and a secret hour in-between before they came to the wizard’s tower, which was a wider than the village and taller than the church, and those were all the things the frog had to compare it to in all the world. The dragon encircling it from within its moat on the other hand was simply incomparable.
“Aha!” said the frog. “A mighty foe, but a merry trifle.” And so saying they bound about their glass marble with six inches of string and played with it in the shallow waters of the moat where the light shone brightly and split into a kaleidoscope of rainbows. Dragons have the eyes and interests of magpies, and so it did not take long before its dewlapped and wrinkled maw slapped wetly shut around the prize, whereupon it seized, coughed, and choked to death instantly, for if dragons have the eyes and interests and magpies they also have the palate of misers and poverty is simply inedible to them.
“Onward!” the frog proclaimed as they crossed the moat in their old shoe, using their mighty legs as oars. “Onward!” the frog proclaimed as they crossed the wizard’s great halls, guttering witch-fire shining in the puddles tracked ‘pon the tiles. “Onward!” the frog proclaimed as they hopped step by step up the wizard’s clockwork spire, from cog to cog that was step to step and between the teeth of gears that ate dreams and turned them into math and spun math into things more sinister. “Aha!” the frog proclaimed, as they landed atop the apex of the tower. “And hello!”
The wizard turned from the telescope he was examining, propped atop a great heap of unbearably dog-eared profane and priceless tomes.. He was a perfectly ordinary baron except for the second head he held under his arm, where he placed all his most dangerous secrets. “Hello yourself,” he said to the frog. “I was not expecting unannounced visitors. Tell me, have you seen my ogre manservant? Why has he not led you to me?”
“Alas,” spoke the frog most sorrowfully, “I fear him lost – last I saw him, he couldn’t tell up from down.”
“Then tell me, if you walked in unguided, what of my moat-dragon? Why did it not halt you?”
“Alack!” cried the frog in agony, “I beheld it as silent as the grave – it couldn’t stop an old shoe.”
“Then I suppose I shall have to dispose of you in some gruesome manner,” sighed the wizard, cracking every joint in all his knuckles, “so that I am not made the target of busy-bodies, well-wishers, fairweather-friends, glad-handers, and favour-beggers. An example you shall be! Tell me, intrusive upstart, what do you most fear? I can strike you dead with terror! I can shiver you with thunderbolts! I can draw your innards out like a worm and feed them to a fish while you flop and fail to breath the sweet air! Or something else.”
“Anything, anything at all,” begged the frog, “only please – for the love of god, please please PLEASE! – anything but this: don’t turn me into a frog.”
“Then frog you shall be!” sneered the wizard. “SO IT IS SO IS IT.” And with a wave of his hands and a loft of his head, the frog was enveloped in a plume of radiance. But when the lights and dust settled back into their rightful niches, nothing had changed.
“How can this be?!” demanded the wizard in disbelief.
“Your head has failed you!” said the frog in utter certainty. “It has become too big and swollen and seeks the usurper’s prize! Quick! Quick! Give it the truest reward for such ambition!”
“So it is!” replied the wizard, and thus he cast his second head from his parapet down into the moat, where it plunged into the lilypads and was eaten by a turtle.
“The cause of such treachery must be extirpated!” elaborated the frog. “Your tomes and tools that fed the head, those too must be removed lest your quislings multiply!”
“So is it!” agreed the wizard, who plucked up his tomes, his mirror, and his obsidian candlestick and mashed them together, starting a blaze that smelled of iniquity and tragedy.
“And the house! The house that stored such implements!” urged the frog frantically. “A befouled sandwich bespeaks a mouse bespeaks improperly stored food bespeaks rotten foundations! Rip the problem out from the roots!”
“So it is so is it!” proclaimed the wizard, and then he seized his telescope and jammed it into between the two smallest of the gears of the tower, which thereby caused the structure entire to halt, hiccup, and unwind backwards over the course of six hundred years or three seconds, depending on your perspective.
The frog buried what was left of the wizard in the old shoe and hopped home, which took a day and a night without any sort of special hour (their load was lighter now). When at last the village was in sight they set up a mighty croaking and one and all came to see them perched atop the church’s steps.
“The wizard is no more!” they cried. “I have laid him and his creatures low and seen all his tools and lairs unraveled! Rejoice!”
“Alas,” said the priest somewhat awkwardly. “It is the truth of things that the wizard was a great evil and harm to all in his lands, but he WAS appointed by the king. We shall have another baron soon, and doubtless he will be most keen to remonstrate us for our behaviour. Hard times await.”
“Hard times due to a hard, ill-suited man!” fumed the frog. “This cannot stand! My friends! Lend me your aid once more, and I shall overthrow this tyrant! Arm me! Armour me! Set me loose ‘pon my target and justice will lend my cause strength beyond measure!” And though the villagers were still poor and still reluctant they did agree that since the frog had laid low an ogre, a dragon, and a wizard they seemed to be someone worth putting their hope in despite standing no taller than a soup-bowl’s rim, so they held a great whip-round and the blacksmith worked all night at his forge and come the morning the frog knelt (most beautifully on account of their froggy legs) before their father in the church and was blessed in their quest. Their raiment was wrought of a cracked tin well-bucket, and at their side they sheathed a peerless blade: a butter-knife of eld, which had been cast aside after snapping in half at the hilt – a trifle to one whose hands were so slight as the frog’s.
“I shall return with my shield or on it,” declaimed the frog, which was said with such certainty and passion that the villagers did not think for a second on the matter of if the frog even had a shield (they did not) and cheered them mightily as they departed, mounted on their runty-piglet steed.
The roads to the main highways and throughfares were long and ill-kempt, and as the frog wandered down them in a great spiral towards the heart of the kingdom they meditated upon their cause: to right a wrong caused by a wizard was one thing, it was to remove an improper element from the rightfulness of the land; but to right a wrong caused by a king was quite another – it was to unseat the very land itself, to heave it up and peer under its rucked carpets and draw forth the lumpen crumb that had mad it sit so foully on what should have been a fair and unblighted floor.
“Friend or foe, I would test you ‘fore you pass!” called a knight, stood astride a bridge with sword drawn. “Draw your steel and present your best be ye the warrior ye play at in yon mockery of a knight’s guise!” But the frog did not hear him, so deep in thought they were.
“Be ye deaf?!” demanded the knight. “I gave challenge: if thou art knight at all, stand hence and speak in the tongue of blade or shrink the coward’s path aside!” But the frog was enwrapped in contemplations most severe of society and righteousness and the foundations of both – their entwinement and divergence and whence that might cause such – and spoke not a word, twitched not a muscle.
“Fie upon ye, ‘tis the time for action!” shouted the knight, and with a fierce cry and a swift blade he swooped low upon the frog as might a hawk. Yet the frog was faster, and fiercer, and blessed by the mots kind and good priest in all the land, so it was that they turned the knight’s blade aside and smote him so severely that his helm split and his hair was bloodied and continued onwards over the bridge, all the while without speaking a word, for they were still so distracted by the moral and spiritual implications of their quest that they did not notice the knight at all.
“Varlet! Blackguard! Ow!” shouted the knight, who was having difficulties standing. “You shall regret your churlish caprice!” And though he was dizzy in the saddle he knew these roads well and rode with much greater speed and urgency than the frog, so by the time the frog came to the next river-crossing they found a second, larger knight there.
“Ho, poxy-faced vagrant!” roared the larger knight. “Thou hast belabored mine brother, eh? A trifling man he may be but family he remains, and thine passing shall not come to pass ‘long as I draweth breath, thou canst be certain!”
The frog demurred comment on this, as they were concerned with extracting every mote of possibly interpretable context from the weight of their father’s palm atop their brow as they were blessed, and the physical realm was as but a pale ghost to them at this time.
“Fie then!” concluded the larger knight, affixing his helm and letting loose his lance. “’Tis past time thine place was whence ye be put!” and he spurred his great black stallion (whose reins were black, and the stirrups besides) at the frog with the speed and force of a great comet. Yet the frog was low to the ground, and their runty-piglet too, so the lance simply missed and struck naught but dirt. As this occurred the frog plucked up a lance of their own – a simple stick, with not one leaf to its name – and drove it home, whereupon it struck through the larger knight’s visor and laid him low and groaning on the battlefield, where the frog left him behind without a word, for they remained fully preoccupied by the great troubles of their quest and had not noticed his words nor his actions in any matter other than that of bodily reflex.
“Your deeds shalt be repaid truly in kind, dog!” called the larger knight as he prodded his most injured eyeball. “By mine troth, it be truth!” And so he rode his great black stallion (whose reins were black, and the stirrups besides, as well as the saddle) all night in a towering fury, which was why when the frog at last stood before the gates of the king’s castle there was a knight waiting for him of such stature and posture as to make the draw-bridge creek under his feet, which were bare for no shoes had ever been made that could hold them.
“Hold, knave,” said the largest knight beneath his high and shining helm, in a voice that rumbled like distant thunder and smoked like distant fire and smelled like distant cattle pastures. “The king is in court and may not be disturbed. For this I will stop you, beyond the insults you have dealt to my brothers, and so cause both fraternal and feudal drives mine limbs to o’ermatch yours, vile wanderer.”
The frog did not reply. They were still thinking things over.
“It is done,” said the largest knight, and he stepped forwards so that the draw-bridge creaked and jumped and shuddered and swung his blade, which was named Conclusion, squarely at the frog and their runty-piglet steed.
The frog clicked their heels and leapt one way, and the runty-piglet went the other way, and Conclusion bit deep into wood and kept biting until the wood was gone, and so it was that the runty-piglet ran off frightened and frogless into the woods, the frog stood unharmed at the door of the castle, and the largest knight plunged into the fathomless depths of the king’s moat and was weighed down to his bitter end, high helm, bare feet, Conclusion and all.
“Ah,” said the frog, as they looked up to the gates. “It is time.” And so speaking they drew their short-handled butter-knife and smote the gates asunder such that the timbers splintered to matches, the hinges shattered like dry branches in a windstorm, and the keystone itself rang like a bell and was ground into powder. Through the rock dust and the ruin strode the frog, bucket-plate gleaming without the aid of the sun, and they walked through the cowed and silent cringing of the king’s court and stood before his throne and waited politely.
“I have come,” the frog pronounced at last some time later, “to have an accounting of wrongs.”
The king pretended he wasn’t hiding under the throne.
“A baron of wickedness and wizardry, appointed under your august rule,” the frog continued.
The king pretended he wasn’t shivering so hard his signet ring was rattling against the flagstones.
“I would hear your defense, your justification for such matters,” requested the frog. “For there must be a reply – without conversation, all hope for sense is lost, only blind action. I felt as much on my quest here, albeit on the edge of my knowing. Reason is god’s gift to man, and I would coax it from you. Speak your truth, my king. Speak it, that we might understand one another and what has been done before us and what must yet be done.”
“I barely knew the man,” said the king, muffled by cushions.
“Truly?” asked the frog.
“Truly,” said the king.
“You swear on your crown?”
“I swear on my crown.”
“You swear on your kingdom?”
“I swear on my kingdom.”
“You swear on your god-granted right of rule?”
“I swear on my god-granted right of rule!”
“Alas,” sighed the frog, and so sighing, jammed the butter-knife through the throne until it split the flagstones beneath it. “It is a sin to lie on holy ground.” And speaking such they released their grip and left the blade behind, where it has lain entrapped in the flagstones – and the king’s ribcage – to this very hour and shall remain longer still, until the days yet to come when the world shall grow old and the firmament itself will fall away.
The frog’s trip home was longer and there was less to think about, until at last they arrived home and found the village all in black and their father reading out prayers for their soul over an empty grave.
“The runty-pig came back riderless,” explained the priest apologetically as he gave them a hug, “so we feared your doom.”
“Doom, nothing,” said the frog, doffing their armour and bowing low. “The quest is complete! The king was foul, not fair, and has been served god’s justice.”
“Well, that is a troublesome thing,” said the priest. “Since it was god that put him there, after all.”
“Say no more!” said the frog with earnest zeal. “As the baron was the responsibility of the king, so too is the king the responsibility of god – and one I shall hold god to as well! Good friends and neighbours, I ask your aid one last time!”
At this the village was filled with much coughing and excuse-making and special-pleading as everyone was very busy and tired and had already spent much time at the funeral and so really nobody was in a position to hold god to account.
“Then I shall go myself with naught but my father’s blessing!” declared the frog, standing proudly though they were but the height of a sickly newborn kitten.
“I believe that would defeat the point, my child,” explained the priest awkwardly. “But I believe in you, and have faith that you will do the right thing.” So saying he patted them twice on the snout in a non-denominational sort of way, and although they parted without blessing it was in good spirits.
“Farewell!” called the frog as they entered the church, though none replied. “Farewell!” called the frog as they ascended the steeple, though all windows were shuttered against their words. “Farewell!” called the frog as they stood on the precipice, and then without reply or fear they leapt up and up and up and beheld the heavens, and above and below and all about them the heavenly hosts teemed, winged, and armed, and terrible to behold.
The frog was naked and alone and bereft of all but themselves, and they did not hesitate. With a chuggarumph and a croak and a flick their long, long adhesive tongue shot out and encapsulated the hosts of heaven, enwrapping them and coating them in runny saliva that prevented escape as the tongue returned to the frog’s mouth, where vigorous blinking of its eyeballs helped ram the captured prey down its throat.
At this, god waxed wroth, and did unlock the storehouses of the deeps and let loose the waters of the sea that were piled up there upon the frog. Though the frog was naked and alone and bereft of all but themselves this did not halt them; their soft, glandular skin suckled eagerly at the mighty waters that surrounded them, and despite being swept far from light and air and life they did breath easily and freely through its oxygen-permeable membrane.
At this god waxed with greater wroth still, and produced a hook with which to draw out the frog and a cord with which to draw out their tongue, but the frog leapt with great speed and force at the distant motion (guided by the distinct sensitivity of their eyes to such things) and god fumbled in the heat of the moment before the stout forelimbs and mighty legs of the frog made contact, and under their furious and eager thrashing the fight was contested and concluded in short matter. So passed god, and the frog did descend from heaven with head held high and great spirits.
“I have returned!” shouted the frog as they hopped eagerly into the village square. “And I have triumphed! Tell one, tell all – and tell ME where my father is, that I might speak of my victory?”
“Alas, my good frog,” said a sorrowful neighbour, “your father has passed away.”
“Whyforeartthus?!” cried the frog, indistinctly.
“His head exploded during service this morning. Very sad.”
So even amidst the frog’s greatest victory they knew sorrow, and they bowed their head and spoke no more for the remainder of the day but retired to the church, where they lived out the rest of their long life. They spent the majority of this in the holy font and basin, considering its subtle ripples and the occasional lost fly, and though they did not converse often with the other villagers there was no resentment between them, nor squabbling or jealousy over the matter of the waters or their flow. Indeed, their neighbours made much use of the font’s liquid contents, moreso than they ever had before – for blessings, for births, for funerals, for long dangerous trips, for tonics and nostrums.
“It’s good stuff,” they explained to doubting passers-by. “It’s been blessed by Frog.”