• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“That custom, Señor Squire,” responded Sancho, “may be accepted and allowed by the ruffians and fighting men you’ve mentioned, but for the squires of knights errant it doesn’t apply at all. At least, I haven’t heard my master mention that custom, and he knows all the rules of knight errantry by heart. No matter how much I’d like it to be true that there’s a specific rule that squires have to fight when their masters fight, still, I wouldn’t obey it, and I’d pay whatever fine they make peaceable squires pay, and I bet it wouldn’t be more than two pounds of wax,5 and I’d be happy to pay those pounds, because I know they’ll cost me less than the bandages I’ll need to heal my head: I already count it as split and broken in two. And there’s something else: it’s impossible for me to fight because I don’t have a sword, and I’ve never worn one in my whole life.”

“I know a good remedy for that,” said the Squire of the Wood. “I have two burlap sacks here, and they’re both the same size; you’ll take one and I’ll take the other, and we’ll hit each other with the sacks, and our weapons will be equal.”

“Well then, let’s do it that way,” responded Sancho, “because that kind of fight will dust us off more than it’ll hurt us.”

“No, it won’t be like that,” replied the other man, “because we have to put half a dozen nice smooth stones, all of them the same weight, inside the sacks so they don’t blow away, and then we can hit each other and not do any harm or damage.”

“I swear by my father,” responded Sancho, “just think of all the sable pelts or tufts of carded cotton you’ll have to put in the sacks so our skulls don’t get crushed and our bones ground to dust! But even if you fill them with silk cocoons, let me tell you, Señor, I won’t fight; let our masters fight, and welcome to it, and let us drink and live, for time is bound to take our lives, and we don’t have to go around looking for reasons to end our lives before their time and season, when they’re ripe and ready to fall.”

“Even so,” replied the Squire of the Wood, “we have to fight for at least half an hour.”

“Oh no,” responded Sancho, “I’m not discourteous and ungrateful enough to have a quarrel, even a little one, with a man after eating and drinking with him; especially if there’s no anger and no insult, who the devil could start a fight just like that?”

“For that,” said the Squire of the Wood, “I have just the remedy: before we begin the fight, I’ll just come up to your grace and give you three or four slaps in the face that will knock you down, and that’ll be enough to wake up your anger even if it’s sleeping like a baby.”

“Well, I know another move just as good to match that,” responded Sancho. “I’ll just pick up a stick, and before your grace comes over to wake up my anger, with a few whacks I’ll put yours into a sleep that’ll last into the next world, where they know I’m not a man to let anybody lay hands on my face. Let each man look out for himself, though the best thing would be to let everybody’s anger stay asleep; nobody knows an-other man’s heart, and many who come for wool go home clipped and shorn, and God blessed peace and cursed fights, because if a cat that’s hunted and locked up and treated badly turns into a lion, then since I’m a man, God knows what I could turn into, and so from now on I’m letting your grace know, Señor Squire, that all the harm and damage that result from our quarrel will be on your head.”

“That’s all right,” replied the Squire of the Wood. “God’s day will dawn and we’ll be fine.”

By this time a thousand different kinds of brightly colored birds began to warble in the trees, and with their varied and joyous songs they seemed to welcome and greet the new dawn, who, through the doors and balconies of the Orient, was revealing the beauty of her face and shaking from her hair an infinite number of liquid pearls whose gentle liquor bathed the plants that seemed, in turn, to send forth buds and rain down tiny white seed pearls; the willows dripped their sweet-tasting manna, the fountains laughed, the streams murmured,