//------------------------------// // 2. Eggnog and Inspiration // Story: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pageant // by D G D Davidson //------------------------------// A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pageant by D. G. D. Davidson II. Eggnog and Inspiration The byre had an impressive kitchen where Pierre and his several cows transformed their premium milk into various delectable concoctions. When we walked in, six cows, all wearing aprons and with their heads wrapped in hairnets for some reason I couldn’t fathom, looked up from their work and gave us warm smiles. Lyra grabbed an apron of her own from a rack near the door and then joined my side as I, under the close supervision of Pierre, set about making a mess on one of the industrial-sized wooden countertops. “Lyra,” I said, “you can’t make eggnog without breaking a few eggs. Separate us some yolks, would you?” “But exactly what are we doing?” she asked. “Ah! The recipe is simple.” I hauled down random ingredients from nearby shelves in the hopes of looking like I knew what I was doing and in the hopes of finding something useful. “It consists of egg, milk, sugar, nutmeg, and booze . . . I just wish I knew the proportions.” “What are zees ‘boos’ of which you speak?” Pierre asked. “Liquor, Pierre.” “I do not think mademoiselle would appreciate it if I did that.” “No! I mean alcohol. Uh, ethanol.” “Ethanol?” cried Lyra, throwing her front hooves onto the countertop and pulling herself upright. “Isn’t that a cleaning liquid?” “Ah,” said Pierre with a great nod. “It also forms in zuh barrels of preserved juice. Perhaps you want cider with zis eggnog, monsieur?” I shook my head. “No, no, not cider. There’s a concentrated kind of cider, isn’t there? Somebody mentioned it to me—” “Applejack?” Pierre asked. “But zis is only for cooking sauces or for use as a preservative.” “Yes! Applejack! That would work. I think.” Pierre made a face, but walked away to the far end of the kitchen and came back shortly with a large bottle full of brown liquid. When I pulled the cork, I could smell a faint hint of apples and a strong whiff of alcohol. “Enough of that, monsieur,” Pierre warned me, “and you will go blind.” “Perfect. That’s exactly the way I like it.” “Humans eat some gross stuff,” said Lyra as she began cracking eggs over a bowl, “but maybe it would be good if we left out the applejack and added some sarsaparilla syrup.” “Ah, I was thinking zuh same thing, mademoiselle!” Pierre cried. “I knew it,” I muttered as I put the cork back on the bottle. “I knew you were going to ruin my eggnog with that stuff.” The applejack was harsh on the throat, but when used sparingly, it wasn’t too bad with eggnog. After we went through several versions that were too sweet, too thick, or too thin, we at last designed a beverage that Pierre considered worthy of his byre, and he declared that he would put it on the menu the very next day. The eggnog with applejack he promised to call “Jack’s Special,” and Lyra’s disgusting version with sassafras he promised to call “Lyra’s Delight.” “My two favorite customers are now my two favorite drinks,” he told us with tears in his big eyes. “You will be immortalized forever in zuh cuisine of Byre Pierre, your faces pictured together, eternally linked by a little pink heart—” “If you do that,” I said, “I will kill you.” Lyra only rolled her eyes, but Pierre reacted with shock, and I had to explain that I was joking. Now once again bundled against the weather, Lyra and I marched back down the hill into Canterlot. It was early afternoon, and the crowds had grown even thicker. The noise in the street, though still muted compared to that of an American city, had risen to a low din. “I better get back to the seminary,” I told Lyra. “If I make my afternoon classes, maybe the bishop will go easy.” By “seminary,” I actually meant the School for Gifted Unicorns: when Bishop Van de Velde had asked permission to train priests in Canterlot, Princess Celestia had let him temporarily take over an unused wing of her private academy. It might have been an act of generosity, but it was more likely that she wanted to keep a close eye on us. We cut our way through the broad market square, marking the center of which was a large fountain topped by an image of Princess Celestia rearing with her wings spread wide. The fountain was off for the winter, but gathered around its base was a crowd of ponies and other creatures listening to yet another of Canterlot’s street preachers. I usually paid the preachers little mind, so I didn’t notice the stream of words coming from this one, but as we passed close, I distinctly heard “Jesus” and “Bethlehem,” and my stomach sank. “Oh dammit,” I said. “I forgot I needed to avoid—” “And here’s one of them now!” the preacher called. “One of our young human brethren who’s training to be one of our priests.” I slumped. “I’m caught.” Lyra laughed, but the pained look on her face bespoke sympathy. The crowd turned to me and parted so that I could see the preacher himself: standing in the shadow of Celestia’s looming statue, he was a big-bodied, orange earth stallion with a cutie mark depicting a sun peeking from behind clouds. This was Sire August, one of our first pony converts and now a priest. Normally, he wore a Roman collar around his neck, but today he had it hidden under a scarf. With head held high and mouth set in a firm line, Sire August stepped down from his soapbox and marched through the parted crowd like Moses walking through the Red Sea. “Are you in trouble?” Lyra murmured out of the side of her mouth. “Yes,” I murmured back. “But I knew that anyway.” “Jack,” said Sire August as he approached me, “I was unaware that you had no morning classes this term.” “Sire,” I said, clasping my hands together, “fancy meeting you here.” He gave me a sharp glare before turning to Lyra, nickering, and dipping his head. “Miss Heartstrings, how are you?” “I’m fine, August. And you?” “Fine.” Sire August sniffed Lyra’s nose. Then he turned back to me and said, “Now, Jack—” “Hey, what about me?” I pointed to my own nose. He glared again, but nonetheless lifted his muzzle toward me. Because Sire August had spent several years on Earth where he’d learned human customs, he never tried to nuzzle humans or sniff their noses, but he couldn’t refuse a seminarian eager to adapt to the ponies’ ways. I bent at the waist, put my nose to his, and inhaled. He smelled like any other horse. “Jack, you’ve been drinking,” he said. “Oh, crud. I forgot you could smell that.” “Both of you have. Lyra smells like sarsaparilla, and you smell like alcohol. Where have you been, and what have you been doing?” “We have been up at Byre Pierre, where I have been enriching Equestrian culture by introducing the cows to eggnog.” Sire August closed his eyes and took a deep breath before pointing a hoof at me. “You ditched Princess Twilight’s history class.” “Well, yes, but—” “No buts. How many times does this make, Jack? Are you serious about your vocation or aren’t you?” It was obvious both that Sire August had spent time on Earth and that he had been Catholic for a while. Ponies didn’t normally use words like vocation. I looked away and mumbled, “I’m serious, but—” “You are going to go home, and you are going to write a letter of apology to Princess Twilight. She’s a princess, Jack, and she has many important things to do, but she takes time out of her busy schedule to introduce foreigners like yourself to our kingdom and our culture. And here’s another thing.” He reared, placed his front hooves on my shoulders, and got in my face. “You forget where you are. This is not the United States. This is not the United Kingdom. This is Equestria. There is no constitution, and there are no guaranteed liberties. Anything you can do, you can do only because the princesses say so. Catholic missionaries can operate here because Princess Celestia allowed it on my recommendation. When you disrespect a princess, such as by skipping her class, you make the bishop look bad, you make the Church look bad, and you make me look bad. Am I clear?” I swallowed. “Yes, Sire.” “What?” “Yes, Sire.” He dropped to all fours and turned away, but looked back over his shoulder to add, “Don’t forget the letter. I’ll ask Princess Twilight tomorrow if she received it.” And with that, he returned to his soapbox. The crowd was silent, and everypony stared at Lyra and me. I tipped my fedora and said, “You folks have a nice day.” I walked Lyra back to her low-rent flat in The Crags. Equestria’s cities were safe, so I had never been able to make clear to Lyra why it was important for a male to walk a female all the way back to her door even though it meant I had to go about three miles out of my way, but this was one of the many eccentricities she allowed me. “I am so, so sorry,” Lyra said for the fifth time. “I did not mean to get you in—” “Hush. You didn’t get me in any trouble. I came to your place this morning, remember?” “I should have told you to go home and go to class.” She looked away, frowning. We were walking through a narrow alley flanked by shadowed doorways covered with low awnings, so I idly reached up and broke off a large icicle. “It’s not your fault. I should apologize for dragging you away from your harp.” “I can’t believe August Vision told you off in front of everypony like that.” “Ah, that was for show. Don’t worry about it. The bishop is a kindly, doddering old man, but he’s not without his cunning. He and Celestia are playing a long-term, slow-motion chess game. He wants the Church to have free rein, but she wants us under her thumb—er, hoof. She’s been very generous, but every favor she bestows means more power she has and less freedom we have. So when Princess Celestia calls up Princess Twilight to teach a history class to seminarians, the bishop has no excuse to refuse, but it causes him a problem because it puts him in debt to two princesses, see?” “What does that have to do with August yelling at you?” “Among the seminarians, I am, in spite of playing hooky, one of the best students, but I’m also a loose cannon. The bishop wants to keep me here because my psych profile says I rate high in ‘psychopathic deviancy,’ but not high enough to be a madman. That means I can think outside the box and adapt to new situations.” “So you can learn our culture and get along with us, hm?” “Exactly.” “Then why do I find you so difficult?” “Hush. It’s because, in addition to adapting, I can also make trouble. Sire August is the bishop’s right-hand stallion. When he disciplines me in public, word gets back to the palace, and when word gets back to the palace, Celestia knows that the bishop and the priests aren’t going to let someone like me run wild. Then she can’t use me as an excuse to clamp down on us. So it looks like he lost control, but he actually smoothed things over.” Lyra tipped her head back and laughed. “You made most of that up.” “Maybe I did, but Sire August is next in line to be bishop of Canterlot, so he probably wants to rein me in now to prevent me from causing him headaches later. Bishop Van de Velde wants the next bishop to be a pony, and so does Archbishop Maes back in Brussels, and so does, probably, the pope. Sire August is the natural pick.” She nudged my hip with her shoulder. “Why does it matter?” “Ah, there’s the rub.” I patted her withers and tossed the icicle down the alleyway to watch it shatter. “You don’t think it matters because you’re a pony. You’re sensible. You only care if someone can do his job. But we’re human, so we care about silly things like race. If the bishop of Canterlot is a pony, we get to congratulate ourselves for being accepting and open-minded and, most importantly, not racist.” “What’s a ‘racist’?” “Something else it’s best you don’t know about. Remember the uproar over the pony crucifix?” She shook her head. “I’d rather not—” “The bishop thought he was being ‘inclusive,’ but you and the other ponies didn’t know what the image meant, so all you saw was a bunch of black-robed men carrying a pony who’d been tortured to death—” She winced. “Let’s not talk about that. I don’t see why you need to represent something like that anyway, pony or human.” I froze in place. Lyra walked a few steps past me, but then turned and looked over her shoulder. “Jack?” “What did you just say?” I asked. “What? I said, pony or human, you don’t—” “Pony or human!” I snapped my fingers. “I’ve got an idea!” Her eyebrows slowly rose, and a grin spread over her muzzle. “Really? Good idea or bad?” “Maybe both. The bishop’ll love it. It’s right up his alley.” I laughed, rubbed my hands together, and skipped in a circle. “Ah ha ha! Why didn’t I think of this before?” “Jack?” “Jesus was born in a barn!” I shouted. “A barn! Or maybe a cave. Or a room for animals attached to a house. One way or the other, he was born surrounded by animals! Well, presumably . . .” “Jack?” I cracked my knuckles, walked to Lyra, dropped to my knees, and grabbed her cheeks. “Lyra, it’s a stupid, wonderful idea that will please the bishop, and I owe it all to you. I could kiss you.” “Don’t.” “I won’t. But I could. Oh, Lyra, we are going to have a Christmas pageant with the roles reversed!” She giggled and backed out of my grip. “What has gotten into you? All at once, you’re giddy as a schoolcolt!” “I need ponies, cows, donkeys, and mules to play Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, and the three wise men. In fact, let’s get some sheep to play the shepherds. That would be great.” “Play who?” “Never mind. I’ll explain later. I need you to help me recruit. Will you?” “I guess, but—” “As for the other part, leave that to me.” I jumped to my feet, thrust my chest out, and put my hands to my hips. “The humans are going to play the farm animals. This is my decision, and I’m in charge, so there. Also, we’ll serve eggnog.” Lyra started laughing again, and she didn’t stop. She fell over backwards laughing. I nodded and said to myself, “Yes. Yes, this has been a productive day.”