165. The Mask of Falguniben

165. The Mask of Falguniben

Falguniben turned out to be a female half-troll. Her mother was a human lady from India who had wandered into a Scandinavian swamp seeking, of all things, a better life, and had ended up being wife to a  troll who was king of the swamp. They had a daughter whom she named Falgun and the troll named Iben. The mother chose Falgun because it was the Indian springtime month  that the child was born in. The father chose Iben because of his mother’s title, Lady Blackwood, which is a way of translating Iben. Soon everyone found it more comfortable to call the child Falguniben than to be deciding which name to use when and where. And that was what Falguniben called herself as soon as she could speak. The Indian lady, who used to be plain human but now had magical connections, found, thanks to them, an even better life back in India, where she returned as soon as she could after breaking up with the bog king. Her new husband was the favorite nephew of a magical armourer. She acquired him while trying to solve a problem her child had developed soon after birth. Falguniben was physically more like a  true blue troll than like a human, but for some reason found it difficult to breath in the bog. The Bog King, whose name was, by the way, Canute, which means Knot, because he was always entangling and embroiling everyone who had dealings with him, got in touch with the Indian armourer and told him all about his partially Indian daughter and her breathing problem. The armourer, a craftsman of great renown in the magical world, created a solid gold mask or helmet that grew or shrank to fit any head it was placed on. I will describe it in detail later, but for the timebeing I must say that Falguniben breathed perfectly well when she wore it and it became a part of her identity, since she never removed it when she was in the bog, which was always. While he was manufacturing this object the armourer had a conversation with Falguniben’s mother in their own language and in which he asked this lady why she had married a filthy foreigner when he had a perfectly good nephew she could unite with back home. The lady liked this idea and when it was time for Canute to pay for the mask, the armourer asked him for his wife in payment. The troll didn’t like being asked for his wife, but he didn’t like his wife that much either. She was even better than he was, he thought, at embroiling and entangling everything. Still, there was little Falguniben to consider, and he was very fond of his daughter, so he consulted her, ready to do her will. Falguniben spoke out clearly and said her mother could go where she pleased but she herself was staying put right by her daddy’s side. And that is what happened.        

When Alpin told me about Falguniben I was distressed to think I and my allergies would have to drag ourselves to a swamp where the air was unbreathable and fight its entangling king and tear the mask off his daughter, which might even kill her. This is not the sort of thing I enjoy doing even on a bad day and I had problems enough already. But when I said as much to Alpin, he answered that we were only two persons away from Falguniben, and that the first of these persons was Don Alonso. It was him we had to turn to to get the mask.

I had not seen Don Alonso in years, but that is no long time for people like us. We found him sitting in the patio of his house with Michael and Nauta and the Gorgonwell cats. Michael no longer needed to teach him English, but now they had a reading group or book club. The three and the cats gathered there in the afternoons to read and discuss whatever they had decided to read. And Doña Estrella always served hot chocolate and bambas, which are a sort of bun full of white cream, or picatostes, which is toast with olive oil and sugar, or some other treat. And I will add that some of those present sometimes spiked the chocolate with brandy.

I was very happy that my friends were pleased to see me. I had missed them just as they had missed me. I got a little worried when Don Alonso got all worked up after I had explained why I was there and would have rushed off to attack Petey and make him bite the dust, but Michael managed to calm him down. First things first, said Michael, and the first thing was for Don Alonso to get in touch with the armourer, who, as it turned out, was an old friend of his, and who, fortunately for me, owed him a couple of favors, one of which precisely had to do with Falguniben’s mask.

We followed Don Alonso to his study, where he kept in a closet his own magic treasures. Among them, I recognized the casket with the deed to the cave in Apple Island that the Nine Queens had gifted him with. But it was another little box that he brought down from a shelf. He opened the box and expressed his delight upon finding that its contents were still there. He extracted from it a very small and thin piece of rope, no larger than his little finger. “¡Vive, cuerda viva, entrega mi misiva!” he said and he flung the tiny bit of rope up in the air.  This means, "Live, live cord live! Deliver my missive!" The liitle piece of rope resisted the force of gravity. Instead of falling to the ground, it went stiff in the air and began to grow astonishingly large. And them a man with a green turban with a ruby and a showy feather appeared out of nowhere and climbed down the rope. This was the magical armourer himself. And now I will describe Falguniben’s mask, and that should explain why Falguniben  and the armourer were in debt with Don Alonso.      

The uppermost part of Falguniben’s mask is similar to Sikh helmets in shape. It is decorated with a serpent whose tail ends not in a rattle but in a little trumpet-like plume holder. When air enters the trumpet, it is immediately blown out by a mysterious voice that blasts “Long live the Lady Falguniben and her father the Bog King.” I don’t know how she can live with this, but she does. Maybe you can´t hear it if you are wearing the mask, I thought. The middle part of the helmet is up front a section of very clear and hard rock crystal through which the wearer can see what is going on around him. The lower part covers the nose and mouth and goes all the way to the shoulders. The mask has a heavy chamail of chain mail. Aside from the rock crystal, the mask is entirely of solid gold, except for a few metal shavings from Don Quijote’s  basinet helmet. As it turned out, Don Alonso had spotted a true magic treasure when he cast his eye on the barber’s basinet. He had mistaken its identity, taking it for the helmet of the giant warrior Mambrino when in truth, it was the basinet of a legendary Indian barber and healer whose tale is worth hearing but which I have no time to tell here just now. The case is the armourer sought Don Alonso and asked him for a bit of the basinet, because that was exactly what he needed to make Falguniben’s mask function without need of a breathing valve. He said he needed only a very little of the metal, a shaving or two. Don Alonso told him to take what he would have. He was always ready to help damsels in distress, and that was what  baby Lady Falguniben of the Blackwood Bog was back then.       

For the present and to be brief I will only add that the armourer got in touch with Falguniben, who granted us audience and agreed to lend us her mask while she went on a visit to India to meet her family there. Only King Canute the Entangler was upset. His daughter had never left his side before.  But we did our best not to let him embroil things. We couldn’t afford to. We knew we would have to do our work quickly, because Falguniben would only be away from home for a very short while. 

Above is a picture of Falguniben without her mask, in case you are wondering what she looks like, just like everyone who knew her was.  It was the first time she had removed her mask since she was five. What looks like curls on her forehead is a diadem of snail shells. Her hair is blue and white. If all goes well, you will see what her mask looks like in the next chapter. I will be wearing it.