A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pageant
by D. G. D. Davidson
IV. Squabbles for Breakfast
I was able to escape the tensions temporarily because I had to excuse myself to go to Mass. I invited the ponies to come along, but most of them declined. Lyra refused with a few swift jerks of her head and the words, “I’m never going back in there.”
I couldn’t blame her. The first time I invited her to Mass happened to be the day when Bishop Van de Velde unveiled the pony crucifix.
Only Time Turner and Minuette, as a matter of intellectual interest, wanted to join me, so I escorted them out through one of the school’s side doors, and we walked together through the chilly air across the broad square to the cathedral.
The cathedral was called Mary Queen of Peace, and it was yet another of the many innocent blunders the bishop had committed since coming to Equestria. He had dedicated the cathedral to Our Lady before learning that the word queen had peculiar connotations to the ponies: it was a title they used to refer to the rulers of their enemies, to the winners of popularity contests in their academies, and to the first ancestress of their race. By calling Mary the Queen of Peace, Bishop Van de Velde had inadvertently implied that she was wicked, that she was not to be taken seriously, or that she was usurping the place of the ponies’ first ruler.
Because the ponies had no concept of religion, even though they had several organizations that appeared quasi-religious to the human observer, they could not think of the Catholic Church as anything other than a political organization. Thus, royal titles were potentially dangerous, as they could be taken to mean that we wanted to dethrone the princesses. However, Princess Celestia, having spoken extensively both with our bishop and with the pope, knew better, so she allowed our activities even though she repeatedly attempted to defang the Church by making it dependent on her government, much as she had already done with the Order of Timekeepers and the Fellowship of Geldings, two of the more obstreperous equine philosophical societies.
The cathedral was a simple structure, a long hall built with heavy wooden beams. It was in the rustic Victorian style that was popular in rural Equestria, but unusual in Canterlot, where marble and white limestone were the preferred building materials, and where roofs were typically copper instead of thatch. Celestia had offered to construct a grand cathedral at the expense of her treasury, but the bishop had declined, so we had a small, simple church with narrow windows and a dark interior. It had a cold tile floor with no pews, but cushions and seats of various shapes and sizes stood in stacks against one wall.
The sanctuary was nothing but a raised platform at the east end. Like the rest of the cathedral, the altar was of roughly cut and unadorned wood, above which hung a large crucifix, now with a proper human figure on it. The crucifix was of polished pine and dark mahogany, meticulously carved in grotesque detail. A single spotlight from the ceiling shone on it, but failed to illuminate the wall behind, so it appeared to hover in midair.
When I entered with Time Turner and Minuette, the other seminarians had already assembled, as had several pony neophytes and the friars from our small Franciscan abbey. With my guests, I sat on the floor near the back.
Being a Mass on a Tuesday morning, the ceremony was brief. Sire August, the main celebrant for the day, began the Mass with the approved Ponese formula, “In the name of the Sire, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” My roommate Aaron read from the Equestrian lectionary, after which Sire August read the Gospel and preached a homily on the virtue of friendship. When he consecrated the Eucharist, he leaned his chest against the altar and elevated the Host in his front hooves.
Throughout the Mass, Time Turner and Minuette mimicked my motions whenever I sat or stood. Only the humans in the room knelt during the consecration, since they were the only ones who could.
After Mass, as we again fought the cold on our way back to the school, Time Turner spoke from under the heavy scarf around his face.
“I didn’t understand a word of it,” he said, “but I suppose that’s to be expected. What was that large piece of statuary in the back?”
“A torture device,” I replied.
He snorted, perhaps in contempt or disgust, but, unlike most ponies, he showed no signs of horror. “I thought as much. Is it a warning to your enemies?”
“No.”
“Who’s depicted hanging on it?”
“Jesus.”
He paused a moment before asking, “The fellow whose birthday we’re celebrating?”
“Yes.”
He asked me nothing else after that.
We had breakfast with Celestia’s students in the school’s cavernous refectory. By the time we entered, the room already roared with a steady din of animated conversation. Plates and cups rattled, and red light angled sharply in through the high, broken-arched windows, making all the dishes glow like burnished brass. Lyra and the others were already there; now surrounded by young ponies who chortled at their antics, they made a ruckus at one of the long tables. Lyra, possessed of a strong sweet tooth, dug her way through a mound of pastries. Carrot Top, with back ramrod straight, eyes lowered, and an expression of distaste affixed to her muzzle, grazed at a healthier meal of oatmeal and green salad. Berry Punch guzzled coffee, and I saw her, after furtive glances at her neighbors, lace it with the contents of a hip flask.
Just as I stepped in with Time Turner and Minuette, Derpy, who was walking from the buffet table carrying a tray loaded with several kinds of muffin, took a spill. Tripping over her hooves, she tumbled face-first into the marble floor. When her tray crashed down, her carefully arranged pile of muffins burst, and its constituent parts rolled in several directions. All the students, as they would whenever anyone dropped anything in the refectory, cheered, whistled, hooted, and stomped their hooves.
With her pale golden eyes tilted at odd angles, Derpy raised her head and grinned vacantly, apparently thinking she was being congratulated rather than mocked. Time Turner sighed, mumbled something unintelligible, and, with many clicks of his tongue, cantered to her side to help her up.
A faint smile darted swiftly across Minuette’s muzzle as she watched Time Turner lift Derpy to her hooves and bend down to pick up the muffins she’d dropped. “Doctor Time Turner has become decidedly less intolerable since his marriage,” she said.
I glanced at Minuette, but couldn’t read her face. “They don’t really seem suited to each other.”
“They don’t, but they are.” Her smile appeared again, but this time it stayed. “She’d been sweet on him for quite a while. As for him, well, I don’t think he’d loved anypony before. I don’t think he knew how. Having a wife and daughter has been good for him.”
With that, she walked to the buffet table, levitated a tray with her horn, and picked her way through what remained of the food. I followed close behind.
At last, having acquired my bowl of oatmeal and my coffee, I made my way to the long table. I had hoped to sit next to Lyra, but Berry Punch and Bon Bon already flanked her. Berry, who was laughing boisterously, had a foreleg thrown across Lyra’s shoulders, and Bon Bon glared daggers at me, so I took a seat on the other side of the table beside the Time Turner family, where I soon found Dinky trying to climb into my lap.
With another sigh and another cluck, Time Turner grabbed Dinky and pulled her between himself and Derpy. “No, no, Dinky,” he said. “You’re too big to sit on a human. They’re delicate.”
After a few gulps of coffee, I was finally feeling like myself. I looked up to find I had sat directly across from Carrot Top, whose glare was almost as fierce as Bon Bon’s. Even as she grazed at her salad, her narrowed eyes never left my face.
When in Ponyville, I had learned three things about Carrot Top. She was painfully prissy, and she could hold a grudge probably longer than any other pony in Equestria. But she was also capable of startling acts of compassion, and I was still trying to figure out how that third trait fit in with the first two.
I ate a spoonful of oatmeal, neatly patted my mouth with my napkin, set down my spoon, looked Carrot Top in the eyes, and said, “Euphemisms.”
She raised her head. “Excuse me?”
“Euphemisms. Give me some euphemisms. You don’t like my straight talk, so tell me—”
“I would never accuse you of ‘straight talk,’ Jack.”
I had a retort on the tip of my tongue, and I nearly choked as I swallowed it. I was not good at swallowing retorts, but the last thing I wanted to do right now was rouse more ire from Carrot Top. “Fine. But I have to figure out a way to do this Christmas pageant, so tell me how to talk the pony way. How do I say a mare is—?”
She cringed, and her eyes slid toward Dinky.
Tapping my spoon on my bowl, I thought a moment and then asked, “How about ‘with child’?”
She slammed a hoof on the tabletop, making all of us jump. “No! Not decent!”
“‘In a delicate condition’?”
“Absoulutely not!”
“‘Got a bun in the oven’?”
“Jack!”
“C’mon, Carrots, help me out here!”
She closed her eyes and wrinkled her nose as if she could smell something foul. She lifted her head high and said stiffly, as if the words pained her, “If you must refer to such things, you would say, ‘There is going to be a happy event soon,’ and you would toss the words into the air, casually, without referring to anypony in particular.”
Slowly, I set my spoon down and clasped my hands in my lap. “You have got to be kidding me.”
“I most certainly am not.”
“How does anyone know who you mean if—?”
“Everypony knows, Jack! That’s why we don’t need to talk about it!”
I frowned. Pregnant ponies didn’t show much until late in their terms. I glanced at Lyra, who was giggling with Bon Bon while simultaneously trying to keep a chortling Berry Punch from stealing her food. She looked at me and swiftly tapped her nose.
Ah. Of course. The ponies would know if a mare was pregnant because they could smell it, for every pony’s body radiated information to any other pony nearby. They were more delicate in speech than we, but that didn’t mean they had more privacy: just as people living in a traditional Japanese house, where the rooms were separated by sheets of paper, maintained propriety without privacy by pretending to be unaware of anything happening in another room, the ponies maintained propriety by refraining from mentioning anything private that they could detect by means of their highly attuned senses of smell or hearing.
Minuette, who sat on the other side of Derpy, leaned over the table so she could speak to me, and said, “Jack, is this absolutely necessary to the theatrical production in question?”
“It is,” I answered. “It’s the whole point.”
“In the timeframe of the story, is the happy event soon or in the distant future?”
“It happens during the story.” Carrot Top, with lips spread and teeth clenched, gave me a sharp glare, so I quickly added, “Offstage.”
“This is really not so difficult,” said Minuette. “We could represent it with makeup.”
I opened my mouth to answer, but once again found I had no words, mostly because I didn’t understand what she was saying.
“That’s true,” said Lyra, who had been whispering to Bon Bon but now joined the conversation. “What would you use?”
“Wax, I suppose,” answered Minuette.
Carrot Top appeared gratified. With a silent sigh and a relaxing of her shoulders, she finally took her eyes off me and finished the food on her plate.
Apparently noticing my confusion, Lyra said, “Don’t worry, Jack. I’ll explain later. In private.”
She did explain later, right after breakfast, in a quiet corner of the hallway. A mare close to foaling would develop a waxy substance over her teats and would soon after begin leaking colostrum, which would run down the insides of her back legs. Although ponies usually took their baths very seriously, a mare getting ready to give birth would avoid washing her udders in order to preserve the waxy seal on her teats and lose as little colostrum as possible, since it contained the immune cells vital to a young foal’s health.
Although I hadn’t made the connection during the conversation at breakfast, I was already halfway aware of this stuff: the cows up at Byre Pierre, when they calved, sometimes created one of their most expensive delicacies, a sweet cheese made of colostrum. Supposedly, though the claim was dubious, eating this cheese could prevent humans from contracting some nasty zoonotic diseases against which we had no natural immunities, such as pony pox, or any of the various infections that caused dysentery, here known as the trots. Every human visitor got pony pox and the trots eventually.
I hadn’t had either. Yet.
While Lyra, with her cheeks burning red, explained all this to me with many awkward pauses and nervous giggles, I rubbed my chin and ruminated. It was yet another example of how ponies thought differently: what could not be said could still, at least in some cases, be shown. Minuette had been suggesting that the pony playing the Virgin Mary could be represented as pregnant by painting her hind legs with simulated colostrum. Just as nopony would openly mention that he could smell the stages of a mare’s reproductive cycle, nopony would mention that a mare’s udders were leaking, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t see and know what it meant.
Instead of defiantly skipping class for the afternoon, I begged it off by pointing out to the bishop that I had guests who had come all the way from Ponyville.
He merely waved a hand at me and said, “Your instructors hardly expect you in class anyway, Mister Andrews. If you showed up regularly, they’d think something was wrong.”
That was why I went to the bishop first. It was his job to be kindly and understanding, because he had others to be authoritarian on his behalf. At any rate, it didn’t matter if I went to class or not; one way or the other, I would do what I always did: I would cram the night before my tests and get straight A’s the next day.
So, while the other seminarians were hearing a lecture on Thomistic metaphysics, I again sat on the corner of a table in the rec room and faced Lyra and her group of unruly friends.
“Well,” I said, “you’re probably wondering why I called—”
“You said that already,” said Carrot Top. “Get on with it.”
“I’m waiting for the quiet,” I replied, and I directed the comment at Lyra and Bon Bon, who whispered and giggled like a couple of schoolgirls.
“Sorry,” said Lyra, and she tried to wipe the grin from her face, but then burst into giggles again.
I merely shook my head and returned to the topic, though a part of me burned to know what they were laughing about. “Okay, ponies, here’s what I’m thinking. Time Turner is our only stallion here, so he’s a natural pick for Saint Joseph. Dinky’s our only foal—”
“I’m not a foal!” Dinky yelled. “I’m seven!”
“Right. But you’re the youngest, so you get to be the Christ child. Er, that’s a fancy term for baby Jesus.”
“Wait a minute,” said Carrot Top, “I thought this was a birthday party for this Jesus. Isn’t he coming himself?”
“That’s an interesting theological question, which I will happily address at another time. But right now, I’d rather cast roles—”
“This fellow I’m playing,” said Time Turner, “who is he exactly?”
“Ah. Well, as I was trying to explain before, he’s engaged to marry when he discovers, to his shock, that . . . er, there’s going to be a happy event soon—”
Carrot Top turned red again, but she bit into her lip and stayed quiet.
Time Turner pulled his head back as his eyebrows rose. He said, very slowly and quietly, “Are you mocking me, Mister Andrews?”
I blinked a few times as I tried to figure out what he meant.
And then I realized.
Dammit.
Lyra had filled me in on some of Time Turner’s story, though I only knew hazy details. Eight years ago, a disreputable stallion had, on his way through Ponyville, seduced Derpy, gotten her pregnant, and skipped town, instantly turning the naïve mare into Ponyville’s pariah. Carrot Top had taken Derpy in to make sure she and her new daughter had a roof over their heads. Time Turner had later married Derpy, apparently after having a decidedly harrowing adventure with her, and thus shared in her shame.
It reminded me again of how different Equestria was from my homeland: here, having a child out of wedlock was a major scandal. Back home, it was Tuesday.
And, yet again, I had inadvertently blundered into touchy territory. I had just cast Time Turner in the role of a man set to marry a woman having a child who wasn’t his, a role with which he was already familiar.
So I ran with it.
“Not at all, Time Turner,” I said. “You’re Saint Joseph. That’s a great honor. Little Dinky is playing Jesus. Derpy, you get to be Mary.” Then, just to make sure the scandal was complete, I looked straight at Carrot Top and added, “That’s the Virgin Mary, by the by.”
Carrot Top’s face turned so red, I was afraid her head might burst.
With a frown, Time Turner said, “But I thought—”
“Another interesting theological question,” I replied, “and also one I will address later.”
I clapped my hands and jumped off the table. “All right. Now for the three wise mares. Bon Bon, you seem like a Balthasar to me. Minuette should be Melchior, and Berry Punch is definitely Kaspar. Yes.”
Clasping my hands behind my back, I paced. “Lyra, would you be willing to play harp? I mean the small, portable one—”
She said, “It’s a lyre, Jack.”
“Exactly. Will you play it?”
“Sure.”
“Great. You can be an angel.”
Berry Punch chuckled, but I ignored her. “Now, we should have a narrator—”
“That should be Bon Bon,” said Lyra. “She’s the best storyteller.”
“Hm? Oh, okay. Well, then, Carrot Top can be—”
Carrot Top finally released her lower lip from her teeth. “I do not think I am still interested in participating in this . . . this . . .”
She shuddered as her eyes roved around the room, apparently in search of the right word.
“This indecency,” she finally said. Dipping her head, she glanced at Derpy and whispered, “I am going back to Ponyville.”
Then, with head still hanging low, she turned her back on us, stepped through the door, and closed it quietly behind her.
And, for the next few minutes, none of us said anything.