Pentamerone – The Face and The Goose

So, this audio went live six months early. The episode that I meant to schedule will come out next week in audio.

The Face

Burton’s faux-Jacobean on this story is “Renza is shut in a tower by her father, it having been foretold that she would die through a big bone. She falleth in love with a prince, and with a bone brought to her by a dog, she boreth a hole through the wall, and escapeth. But beholding her lover, who is wedded to another, kissing his bride, she dieth of a broken heart, and the prince, unable to endure his anguish, slayeth himself.” I’m not going to do much more with this, because that’s basically the story. It is padded out with pages of that thing where people say the same thing in elegant variations, for pages. Let that go.

Essentially we have a tower filled with riches with a hole bored in the side. A girl under a curse has lived there for long enough to create a small Magical aura. Tiny covenant? The lady sneaks into the court of the prince by pretending to be a male bard, which is interesting. After they die they are buried in one grave and their story etched in the archives. As suicides their ghosts are summonable in Ars Magica.

The Goose

The goose that lays golden eggs is obviously a source of vis, and of treasure. Any covenant would want one. Shall we look at the original story of the fabulous bird? I’ll skip the faux-Jacobean this time.

There are two poor sisters, Lilla and Lolla, who make their living spinning flax. They save enough to buy a goose, which becomes a sort of pet, that sleeps in their own bed. As luck would have it, the goose begins to shit gold crowns. The author does not say which design are on these crowns. Are they the golden ducat of Florence? The bezant of Constantinople? Which imperial head is coming from the goose? We don’t know. I’d be tempted to have them be from an alternate history. In Magonomia, for example, I’d have the head of Henry IX or Queen Jane on them, just to make life interesting. In Ars Magica, each coin could have a mystical secret, so the player characters need to trace every single one.

Sensibly the girls fill a large chest with gold before they do anything, but after that they buy better food, clothes and furniture. The gossips of the town notice, and what they say to each other matters only in as much as they show how people thought treasure is expressed in the sumptuous goods people buy (to steal a term from Pendragon).

They have ‘become so well-fed and well-dressed that they live in luxury like great ladies? Hast thou seen their windows always ornamented with fowls and barons of beef, which stare thee in the face ? What can it be ? Either they have laid hands on their honour, or they have found an hoard.’ “Laid hands on their honour” here is sex work.

The gossips bore a hole in the wall of the girls’ house to peek through. By the way, this is where the old English offence of Housebreaking comes from – literally going in through the side of a wattle and daub house with a shovel. Lilla and Lolla put sheets down, and the goose sprays gold coins on them. “The very balls of their eyes stood out” according to Burton.

The gosspis rock up the next morning and say “Hey, I’ve bought some ducklings and they’d feel a lot better in the house if I could borrow your goose.” She goes on, and on, and on, until eventually the girls cave and let her borrow the magical bird. The gossips lay out sheets, which the goose covers in ordure. To be fair, apparently she hadn’t been pooping normally for weeks, so…time for it to find some ease and equilibrium. The gossips think “Well, maybe we need to feed her the excellent stuff the girls have been giving her” and os they pack the goose to the throat with treats and lay out a new set of sheets. Alas, the goose has dysentery due to this rich diet, and the gossips become angry. They wring the bird’s neck and fling it from a window into a trash-strewn alley.

As it happens, there’s a bit of the dysentry going around, and a local prince is caught short while out riding. He dips into the alley and does his business, but find he has no paper in his pocket to clean himself. I need ot check the translation there, for both paper and pockets seem a bit modern. He sees, however, the downy neck of a dead goose and thinks “Ah-ha! Just the thing for the royal buttocks.”

The goose is not dead, but merely stunned. It is entirely unwilling to allow itself to be used as bogroll, and so it bites the prince’s bottom and latches on. The prince screams and calls his servants, but they can’t get the goose off. He gives up, because of the pain, and makes his servants carry him home with the goose still attached. He calls all of the doctors in the realm, and they are utterly unable to remove the goose. Oinments, pincers, vinegar, none of it works. Why they don’t kill the goose is unclear: some sort of Mentem magic?

The prince, desperate, sends out an edict “Get this goose off my arse and I’ll give you half the kingdom if you’re a man, or marry you if you’re a woman.” What he’ll do for married women is unclear. A queue forms, because it’s kind of like the lottery. If you happen to be the one with your hand on the goose when it dies of hunger, you get half a kingdom. Why not go hold the goose? Also, you get to see your ruler humiliated.. The more people who try the tighter the goose locks on.

Eventually the younger daughter, Lolla, arrives and calls the goose by name. The goose leaves the prince to give her a kiss, preferring, as the author says, the lips of a country maid to the back parts of a prince. The prince asks her what has caused his discomfort, and he thinks the business with the birdshit on the sheets of the gossips is hilarious. He then marries Lolla and takes the goose that shits treasure as his dowry, because he’s not a fool. He then marries the older sister off to a rich guy, cementing his alliances. The moral is “An impediment is often an assistance”.