The Boy Who Outwitted Punchkin

There was once a wicked old magician called Punchkin, and he wanted to marry a beautiful princess who did not want to marry him at all. So Punchkin did a terrible thing. With his dark magic he turned the princess’s husband, and all six of her husband’s brothers, into seven still statues of grey stone. Then he carried the princess away to his tower and told her she would stay there until she agreed to be his wife.

The princess refused. A year went by, and another, and many more after that. She would not say yes, and Punchkin could not make her, and so she waited, and hoped, in that cold stone tower.

Now, the princess had a little son, who had been only a baby when all this happened. He grew up far away, safe, and the day came when he was old enough to be told the truth about his father and his uncles and his trapped mother. The moment he heard it, he knew exactly what he was going to do.

He travelled to Punchkin’s tower and got himself work as a humble gardener’s boy, so that no one would guess who he was. Bit by bit he found his way to his mother, and they made a quiet plan. “You must learn his secret,” the boy whispered. “Ask him kindly. Pretend you are softening at last.”

So the princess smiled sweetly at Punchkin for the first time in years, and the foolish magician was so delighted that when she asked, he told her everything. “I cannot be killed,” he boasted, “because my life is not even inside me. Far, far from here there is a thick jungle, and in the jungle a circle of palm trees, and in the middle a great deal of water, and in the water a crystal pillar, and on the pillar sits a little green parrot in a cage. While that parrot lives, I cannot die. And no one will ever, ever find it.”

But the boy had been listening at the door.

He set off the very next morning. It was a long and weary road, and on the way he was kind to every creature he met. He shared his food with a family of eagles, and he gently lifted some baby snakes out of the burning sun. None of these things seemed important at the time. But when at last he reached the deep jungle and stood helpless before that wide ring of water, it was the great eagles who carried him across, and set him down beside the crystal pillar where the little green parrot sat.

He took the parrot in his two hands and carried it all the way home.

When Punchkin saw the boy standing there with the green parrot, his face went grey. “Give it to me,” he begged. “Anything you want. Only do not harm my parrot.”

“Then bring them back,” said the boy. “All of them. My father. My uncles. Every man you turned to stone.”

And Punchkin, trembling, had no choice. He waved his hands, and one by one the seven grey statues softened and breathed and blinked and were men again. The boy’s father looked around, bewildered, and saw his grown son holding a small green bird.

The magician lunged for the parrot the very instant the spell was done. But the boy was quicker. He opened his hands, and the little green parrot shot up into the sky and was gone, and Punchkin’s strength went with it, and the old magician simply crumbled away to nothing on the ground.

And the boy, who had begun as a gardener’s lad with nothing but a plan and a kind heart, led his whole family home at last.