This is one of my favourite stories in this collection, because it’s obvious a magus with a Hermetic twist is loose in the background, mucking people about. let’s hear Burton’s take on the plot, in his weird mock-Jacobean English:

Penta scorneth to wed her brother, and cutting off her hands, sendeth them to him as a present. He commandeth that she should be put within a chest and thrown into the sea. The tide casteth her upon a seashore. A sailor findeth her, and leadeth her to his home, but his wife thrusts her again into the same chest and into the sea. She is found by a king, and he taketh her to wife ; but by the wickedness of the same woman, Penta is expelled from that kingdom. After sore troubles and travail she is recovered by her husband and her brother.

The storyteller at the beginning of this one says that “Virtue is tried in the crucible of troubles” and I’d suggest that’s because Penta has the Flaw where beauty calls trouble.

The King of Pretasecca is a widower, and he begins to have the evil thought that he should marry his sister. His reasons are, for the period, kind of sound, and could explain why the Hapsburgs all married cousins an developed a family chin. Penta, though points out that incest is a sin, and will have none of it. She says that just because he’s lost his wits doesn’t mean she’s lost her sense of shame. She tells him that if this was a joke he’s an ass, and if he was serious she thinks its a pity he has a tongue at all. Penta then leaves, locks herself in a her bedroom, and bars the door. He mopes about for a month, so she gets sick of him carrying on at her door and confronts him.

“Look,” she says “I’ve checked my face out in the mirror pretty thoroughly and I can’t see why you don’t just go after someone else.” He answers “You’re beautiful from head to foot, but frankly it’s your hands that that “make me faint with excessive desire”. He then carries on about her hand for a page with various metaphors, about how its the fork on which she holds his spirit, and the spoon that holds his life’s sweetness, and much more besides. Penta is, you will be unsuprised to hear, entirely unmoved by this sort of carry on, and eventually interrupts him mid-flow by dismissing him and going to her chamber.

There she pays a witless slave to chop off her hands, telling him she has secret arts to make them more beautiful and white. He complies. Penta puts her hands in a fancy basin (made in the great ceramic manufactories of Faneza) covers them with a silk napkin, and sends them to her brother with a note that says “Enjoy these. Have good health and twins.”

The king throws a tantrum. He orders her cast into the sea, locked in a tarred chest. She drifts until some shore fishermen capture her box, and open it. She’s even more beautiful, “like the Lenten moon over Taranto.” The chief of the fishermen takes her home, but his wife, Nuccia, feels jealous. She waits for him to leave the house, then loads Penta in the chest again and throws her back in the sea.

Eventually the chest bumps into the boats of the king of Terra Verde. Is this the actual Green Land? Probably not, but I want vikings in this story, so…now it is. Deal with it, now, long dead author. The King opens the chest, claims that what comes in chests is treasure, and weeps that the “casket of so many gems has no handles”.

Then he takes her home and gives her as a maid of honour to his wife, the Queen. Penta does all the services of a maid with her feet, like sewing, combing the queen’s hair, and laundry. The Queen begins to think of her a daughter, and a month later, when she’s dying, she makes a dying wish that her husband marry Penta as soon as her eyes close in death. He agrees, and his wife obliges the story by passing away in the next sentence. They marry immediately, and Penta becomes pregnant on their first night, but the king is required to sail to Anto-scuoglio, and so Penta gives birth before he returns.

The counsellors send a felucca to tell him he has a beautiful son, which wrecks my Greenland theory, because that’s a Mediterranean type of ship. The ship has a stormy passage, and stops, by chance, at the same point where Penta washed ashore. Again, by chance, the captains find refuge with the woman who put Penta back in her box. The lady gets him drunk, takes the letter he has from Penta to the king, and swaps it with another. The new letter claims it is from the royal counsellors, says the queen has given birth to a dog, and asks for instructions. The captain is illiterate, and so does not notice the substitution.

The king sends back a letter saying that the counsellors should work hard to keep Penta in good spirits. Bad things happen due to ill stars or Heaven’s commands, and men should make the best of them. On the way home the ship stops at the same place, and Nuccia swaps out the letter for one saying they should be put to death. The counsellors open the letter, have a bit of a chat with each other and conclude that the king’s either going mad or under a spell, because murdering a woman and baby is so far beyond what they are willing to do that they are amazed he’d even ask. They give her some money and send her from the city, so no news of her can reach the king.

Penta cries it out. In her reasoning we see something odd from medieval Venice “The unhappy Penta, perceiving that they had expelled her, although she was not a dishonest woman, nor related to bandits, nor a fastidious student, taking the child in arms, whom she watered with her tears, and fed with her milk, departed, and fared toward Lago-truvolo where dwelt a magician, and he beholding this beautiful maimed damsel who moved the hearts to compassion, this beauty who made more war with her maimed arms than Briareus with his hundred hands, asked her to relate to him the whole history of her misadventures.” The magician, because he’s awesome, tells her not worry, that she’s found in him a mother and a father. Penta recovers from her depression, and the magician’s servants treat her as if she was his daughter. The magician decides its time to take some names and kick some arse.

The magician hires a crier to go about telling people that whoever came to his court and told him the greatest tale of misfortune would be given a sceptre and crown, both of gold. People “more than broccoli” turn up from all over Europe, generally with stories about how noblemen have done them wrong, but also with tales of ill-luck, or dedicated work not rewarded. Frankly, there’s a coven full of folk here. You’ve got scribes, courtiers, merchant adventurers, and military veterans just in the few examples given.

The King of Terra-Verde returns home to find he’s in a fine sirup, which is a turn of phrase I like. He rages and tries to blame his counsellors, who show him the letter. The king calls the captain who bore the message, works out what when on, then sails to the hamlet where Nuccia lives. After charming her into a confession, the king coats her with tallow and burns her alive. Staying only to make sure there’s a body, because he’s aware of the narrative convention, he then sails hoe. On the sea, he meets the vessel of Penta’s brother, and they carry on with the ceremonies of kings meeting.

After making friends the King of Pretasecca tells the King of Terra Verde that he’s going to Lagotruvolo, where the king has offered a treasure to the most sorrow-stricken person in the world. The King of Terra Verde says he’ll come along too, because that’s him. He soliloquizes on his pain for some time, in metaphor. The King of Pretasecca doesn’t agree, but they are such good friends by now they agree to travel together and split the prize. I then start singing the “Agony / Misery” duet of the princes from “Into the Woods”, and the woman at the desk next to me starts playing Yaketty-Sax on her phone. Why? Who knows. It’s a fool who questions the ill-omened stars, apparently.

They arrive, and send to the king’s palace. The magician is all, “King? Rightio.” and greets them from a throne on a dais which we have not heard about previously. He knows who they are, because they have made very sure to tell people they are kings. Time to twist the knife a bit.

Penta’s brother begins first and he tells of the wrong he has done, and how wonderful his sister was, and how he murdered her by throwing her into the sea. This has made him very sad, for several pages, so clearly he should win the prize. Her husband says “Your troubles are but lumps of sugar compared to mine, because I was married to your sister, and due to a complicated plot I’ve lost both her and our son. Although I did incinerate a woman, so, that was a high point.”, but again he takes several pages.

The magician says to a page boy “Go kiss that guy’s feet.” and he does. He’s such a cool kid they say to the magician “Is this your son?” and he says “No.”

“Who’s son is he?”

“Ask his mother!”

“Where’s his mother?”

Penta comes out from behind an arras, where she has been listening as is required by genre convention. There are tears and forgiveness. She seems to have forgiven her brother. The magician gives Penta and her husband his kingdom.

The magician restores Penta’s hands. She just puts the stumps under her apron and pulls them out, even more beautiful than before. This can’t be done with Hermetic magic – I presume her hands are more beautiful as an effect of the wizard’s sigil. He may have regrown them with ritual magic while she slept, then hid them with illusions until the unveiling.

Penta’s brother takes a note to the brother of the the king of Terra Verde, telling him he’s now ruler, as his sibling has decided to stay with these cool people in Italy. The moral that’s given is that you can’t taste the sweet without having first tasted the bitter, but that seems like the sort of thing you say to Italian nobles who wouldn’t know the bitter if it had a herald.

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