Chapter 7: The Plan

A rough paw clumsily drew the curtain at the tent entrance aside, and for a moment, the chubby profile of Edward the Sentry Bear was silhouetted sharply against the setting sun.  Edward bowed with the grudging grunt of a bear whose belly is a little to large for comfortable obeisance, and he moved aside to make way for the three princesses.  Carrie, Samantha, and Anna each stepped into the tent in turn, ducking slightly to avoid catching their heads on the curtain.  Ken shuffled slowly behind them.  His left leg was sticking out at an awkward angle.

Anna paused to let Ken catch up, and then she turned toward Johnny and curtsied.  "Thank you for your generous hospitality, Your Highness," she said.

The prince rose, bowed politely, and offered them a seat on a pile of velvet cushions in the corner of the tent.   It was traditional Doll Kingdom hospitality, but as the princesses sank awkwardly into the mound of foam and velvet, they wished they could have had instead the wooden chair on which Phoebe was perched in the corner. There was a moment's tussle against gravity and foam.  Arms flailed about helplessly as the girls fought to maintain a dignified distance from the floor.

"You slept well?" Johnny inquired when they had ceased struggling against the sinking pillow pile.

"Very well indeed," Anna said.  "It was the first good night's rest I have had since the Barbies overthrew Norland."

"And you?" He turned to Carrie and Samantha.  "You are feeling better?"

"Much better, thank you," Carrie replied.

"Is he alright?" Johnny gestured toward Ken who was splayed out on a cushion in the corner with his leg nearly perpendicular to his body.  Ken was the only one who did not seem to care whether he stayed upright.  At the moment, he was pondering the striped pattern on the ceiling.

"I'm afraid his leg is giving him some trouble," Anna said.  She reached over and laid a consoling hand on Ken's forehead.  "He thinks he probably slept on it wrong.  But it should be better after he walks on it for a while."

"Excellent." Johnny motioned toward the map on the table.  "Phoebe and I have been discussing battle strategy, but I fear we are no closer to having a plan.  In our previous conference, you said we were outnumbered."

"I fear it is true, Your Highness."  Carrie shook her head miserably.  "How many soldiers do you have under your command?"

"Ninety-five."

"Does that figure include a near-sighted sheep?"

The prince flushed slightly and averted his eyes.  "Shep has his talents.  Most of them more fit for ... um... a peaceful farming life, perhaps."

"So ninety-four."

"For all practical purposes, yes."

"We are outnumbered ten to one, at least!" Samantha exclaimed.

In the silence that followed, everyone pondered these odds with a sense of growing dread.  Carrie, Samantha, and Anna gazed at each other in despair.  When they had first stumbled into the Doll Kingdom camp, they had felt fortune favoring them at last.  But now, it seemed that even this hope had been squashed like the pillows underneath them.  A small band of knights and archers and an elderly sheep were no match for the vast Barbarian army.  It would be madness to even attempt an attack.

"I ... I suppose we had better retreat then." Carrie choked out the words over the lump in her throat.  "Perhaps at... at... your castle, a defense could be mounted...."

"NEVER RETREAT!"

The whole company started and turned to see Phoebe.  She had leaped to her feet and was standing in the corner of the tent with her fist raised, her black curls frizzed out wildly behind her.  Her eyes glowed with battle glory as the song of the minstrel played triumphantly in her mind.

"My wife is right," Johnny observed calmly.  "It is too early to talk about retreat!"

Phoebe nodded firmly and resumed her chair, drumming her fingers cheerfully on the table to keep time with the ballad.

"What we need is some advantage," the prince continued.  "Some edge over our enemy.  Can you give me anything?  Is there some weakness among the Barbies that we can use to our advantage?  Is there a division in their ranks?  A particular lapse in their battle strategies?  Anything?"

The princesses all thought hard.

"They sleep at night..." Samantha ventured.

"No good at all," said Anna. "They always post their Kens as sentries."

"Well, the Kens then," said Carrie.  "They are not very bright."  She glanced at Ken. "No offense."

Ken did not even seemed to notice the remark.  He was swinging his sore leg slowly back and forth  over his head as if trying to work out the kinks.

"Kens are not particularly intelligent, but they are loyal," Anna observed thoughtfully.  "I do not think they approve of the looting, but even so, they would warn the Barbies of an attack.  Perhaps the greed of the Barbies is a weakness, if only we can think how to exploit it.  They do love clothes more than anything in the world."

"I would think they love their shoes most of all," Ken suddenly remarked, flexing his knee first one way and then another distractedly.

"Will that help us?" Johnny inquired.

"No!" Anna declared, her voice edged in frustration.  "It only makes the Barbies more horrible!"

Ken raised his head from the cushion to fix her with a slightly injured expression.  "Well, you can hardly blame the Barbies, dearest Anna.  Their feet are so deformed from walking in those spiky shoes that they cannot unbend their ankles.  They must have their shoes or they can barely hobble around on their toes."

This was a long speech for Ken.  He sank back on his pillow in exhaustion at the end of it.

The rest of the company stared at him.

"Are you saying..." began Phoebe.

"... that the Barbies..." broke in Johnny.

"... CANNOT FIGHT WITHOUT THEIR SHOES?" they both exclaimed in unison.

Ken, who had drifted into staring at the striped pattern of the tent roof again, glanced at Anna in consternation, unsure how to handle the fact that the conversation was still going on and had now turned in his direction.

Anna struggled out of the depths of her cushion and knelt down beside him.  "Ken, dear," she said gently, "are you quite sure of what you are saying?  The Barbies have deformed feet?"


Ken seemed encouraged by her demeanor.  He sat up with new confidence.  "Yes, Anna, my sweet.  Have you never notice how they stagger when they take their shoes off?  They cannot unbend their ankles.  Tiffany's third cousin Chelsea once lost a whole trunk of shoes in a river, and her Ken had to carry her for three days until new shoes were finished.  It would have only taken three hours, but she insisted on having them embroidered with 120 pink pearls.  We could not find a pink oyster, and there was all kinds of trouble."

The four princesses and the prince glanced at each other with new hope in their eyes.  For a moment, no one dared even say it.

But at last, Phoebe blurted out the thought on everyone's mind:  "So all we have to do is steal their shoes!"

Ken picked at a bit of dust on his cushion.  "I've always wondered why no one tried that," he murmured.

"Ken!"  Anna exclaimed.  "You are our hero!"

"Me?" Ken's eyes opened wide.  "Are you sure?"

"Quite sure!"

"Well, then," Ken muttered vaguely, "imagine that!"  And he leaned back on his cushion and smiled contentedly at the stripes on the ceiling.

Next:  The raid.

Chapter 6: Prince Johnny and his Bride

Prince Johnny and his newly-wed bride stared intently at the map spread out on the table between them.  "We are right here," Johnny said, marking their mountain camp with a pin.  "Here is the capital of Aldervia, and according to the princesses, the Barbies have their primary encampments here, here, and here."  He forcefully drove more pins into the map.  "However," he added.  "From what they said, it was a fluid situation.  The Barbies had already moved their main forces into the palace gates."

Princess Phoebe nodded and ran her hands through her black curls thoughtfully.  She was a woman of few words, but no one in his right mind mistook her silence for cowardice.  Johnny had met her last year on a dragon hunt.  He first sighted her through his binoculars as she stood in the doorway of a dragon cave, her hair singed and smoking.  He had rushed to the rescue of what he had assumed was a damsel in distress.  As he had leaped into the cave shouting, "PRINCE JOHNNY TO THE RESCUE!", Phoebe rapped him over the head with a big stick and reprimanded him sharply for waking her baby dragon, who had just gone down for a nap.

Phoebe was a superb hunter when she needed to be.  Her arrows never missed their mark. But she did not like hunting for hunting's sake.  When she found a baby dragon whose mother had been killed by knights proving their valor, she was disgusted with all the useless bravado that had rendered to poor creature motherless.  She coaxed the tiny dragon into a cave and made him comfortable with a fire-resistant blanket.  She brought him fresh water and meals of chickens and an occasional cow.  The dragon grew fat and healthy.  As soon as he was old enough to leave the cave, he followed Phoebe everywhere.  She called him 'Marley,' and took him with her on adventures.

Most men found Phoebe intimidating.  She carried a bow and quiver of arrows over her shoulder wherever she went.  She wore a red cloak that billowed in the wind, revealing the dagger strapped to her waist.  Her hair frizzed out, heat-scorched from the occasional unexpected burp emitted by her pet dragon.  She wore dainty pink shoes tied with silver laces, but the skirt above them was riddled with carelessly patched burns. Phoebe loved her dragon.  She considered a few scorches here and there a badge of pride in the ownership of such a beautiful and endearing creature.  Not everyone saw it that way.   As she skipped daintily along the town streets with the dragon trotting behind her, a whole bevy of men who had once composed odes to her ebony curls and her ruby lips fled at her approach, muttering under their breath things that sounded more like curses than love poems.  Every man, that is, until Prince Johnny.

Johnny found Phoebe fascinating.  As he recovered from the blow to his head in the entrance of her dragon cave, he watched her.  She reassured the startled dragon, rearranged his blanket, and stroked his scaly neck, gently humming lullabies until the creature yawned a stream of thick smoke and settled down to his nap again.  Johnny decided then and there that he would marry Phoebe.  The next day, he brought Marley a feast of wild goat as an apology.  The dragon forgave him at once, with such a snort of approval that he accidentally scorched Johnny's eyebrows.  Phoebe took a little more time to convince, but Johnny was persistent, and she gradually developed a more favorable opinion of him.

And so here were Johnny and Phoebe, newly married, and huddling over their battle plans in the Doll Kingdom encampment.  Marley had been left home, much to Phoebe's disappointment.  Due to an underdeveloped smoke pharynx, young dragons often swallow too much air while they are consuming their dinner, and so they spend their post-meal hour sporadically belching flames.  The volunteers in the Doll Kingdom Rescue Brigade firmly asserted that they could not be expected to focus on their duties amid the interruption of unexpected blasts of fire.  Phoebe complained that they ought to be more understanding of a dragon's adolescent development.  However, she agreed to leave the dragon in the care of the castle guard.  The castle guard muttered that dragons might prove far more useful in a Rescue Brigade, but they were sworn to protect the prince and his loved ones, whoever those loved ones might be, and so they stitched together flame-resistant undergarments and grimly undertook the task as their duty.

Without Marley, Phoebe was a little restless, but otherwise, she was as comfortable in a battle tent as she would have been in a castle.  "There's nothing for it except to attack the city from the west," she said.  "I do not know why we are still talking about this.  We can't attack from the north because of the river."

"They will be expecting an attack from the west," Johnny pointed out.  "We are outnumbered.  We need to surprise them to gain an advantage."

"Well, if we were going to surprise them, we should have brought Marley," Phoebe remarked irritably. "Everyone is surprised by Marley."

Johnny glanced at her sympathetically, but his mind was too occupied to involve itself in that topic again.  "If only we had an advantage," he murmured.  "Some secret weapon."

"We should talk to the Aldervian princesses," Phoebe suggested.  "They have been around Barbies.  Perhaps the Barbies have some weakness that we haven't considered."

Johnny shook his head.  "If they did, don't you think it would have been used already, my dear?  These Barbarians travel like a swarm of locust from one city to the next, and no one can defeat them.  I fear this is destined to be a futile expedition."

Phoebe shrugged resolutely.  "So be it.  We will fight them anyway.  Perhaps our resistance will discourage them from attacking the Doll Kingdom."

"I admire your courage, darling," he said.  "Courage without a plan makes for a brilliant last stand about which wandering minstrels compose ballads for hundreds of years.  But it rarely ends well for anyone besides the minstrels."

"I wonder what they will sing about me," Phoebe mused thoughtfully.  She was a woman given to heroic imagination, and the word "ballads" had set her off again.

"Perhaps we could slip in under cover of darkness.  Perhaps in a good thick mist," muttered Johnny.  "The city is near a river after all."

"Oh, Phoebe was a girl with smoky eyes, and she tried to take the Barbies by surprise," sang Phoebe with gusto.  "On a silent morn under cover of mist, she stood upon the battlefield with an upraised fist..."

"I'd really prefer you lie flat behind a large boulder, dear," murmured Johnny.  "You'll only attract arrows by standing on a battlefield with an upraised fist."

"In the heat of the battle, with arrows flying round, Phoebe lay behind a boulder with her chin to the ground..." Phoebe corrected herself.  Then she shook her head in discontent.  "My fist must come into it somewhere.  For a heroic ballad, I must be able to rap somebody on the head."

"You do have a talent for that," Johnny said affectionately, rubbing his own head at the memory of the lump she had given him when they met.  "I expect it will find its way into the ballad somewhere."

At that moment, a voice from outside the tent called, "Their majesties Princess Carrie, Princess Anna, and Princess Samantha seek an audience with Prince Johnny and Princess Phoebe."

"Ah, good... perhaps we shall have some helpful information," the prince said to his wife.  And then, "Bid the princesses welcome!" he called to the sentry.

Next:  Chapter 7:  Ken surprises even himself