The Princess Bride

The Princess Bride Page 59

The wife whirled on the husband. “The boy is eleven and already you want him to throw fights?”

“Nothing like that, no, don’t get all excited, but maybe if he’d even look like he was suffering a little, they’d let up on us.”

“I’m suffering,” Fezzik said. (He was, he was.)

“Let it show a little more.”

“I’ll try, Daddy.”

“That’s a good boy.”

“I can’t help being strong; it’s not my fault. I don’t even exercise.”

“I think it’s time to head for Greece,” Fezzik’s father said then. “We’ve beaten everyone in Turkey who’ll fight us and athletics began in Greece. No one appreciates talent like the Greeks.”

“I just hate it when they go ‘BOOOOOOOOOOO!!!’” Fezzik said. (He did. Now his private picture of hell was being left alone with everybody going “BOOOOOOOOOOO” at him forever.)

“They’ll love you in Greece,” Fezzik’s mother said.

They fought in Greece.

“AARRRGGGGH!!!” (AARRRGGGGH!!! was Greek for BOOOOOOOOOOO!!!)

Bulgaria.

Yugoslavia.

Czechoslovakia. Romania.

“BOOOOOOOOOOO!!!”

They tried the Orient. The jujitsu champion of Korea. The karate champion of Siam. The kung fu champion of all India.

“SSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!” (See note on AARRRGGGGH!!!)

In Mongolia his parents died. “We’ve done everything we can for you, Fezzik, good luck,” they said, and they were gone. It was a terrible thing, a plague that swept everything before it. Fezzik would have died too, only naturally he never got sick. Alone, he continued on, across the Gobi Desert, hitching rides sometimes with passing caravans. And it was there that he learned how to make them stop BOOOOOOOOOOO!!!ing.

Fight groups.

It all began in a caravan on the Gobi when the caravan head said, “I’ll bet my camel drivers can take you.” There were only three of them, so Fezzik said, “Fine,” he’d try, and he did, and he won, naturally.

And everybody seemed happy.

Fezzik was thrilled. He never fought just one person again if it was possible. For a while he traveled from place to place battling gangs for local charities, but his business head was never much and, besides, doing things alone was even less appealing to him now that he was into his late teens than it had been before.

He joined a traveling circus. All the other performers grumbled at him because, they said, he was eating more than his share of the food. So he stayed pretty much to himself except when it came to his work.

But then, one night, when Fezzik had just turned twenty, he got the shock of his life: the BOOOOOOOOOOO!!!ing was back again. He could not believe it. He had just squeezed half a dozen men into submission, cracked the heads of half a dozen more. What did they want from him?

The truth was simply this: he had gotten too strong. He would never measure himself, but everybody whispered he must be over seven feet tall, and he would never step on a scale, but people claimed he weighed four hundred. And not only that, he was quick now. All the years of experience had made him almost inhuman. He knew all the tricks, could counter all the holds.

“Animal.”

“Ape!”

“Go-rilla!”

“BOOOOOOOOOOO!!!”

That night, alone in his tent, Fezzik wept. He was a freak. (Speak—he still loved rhymes.) A two-eyed Cyclops. (Eye drops—like the tears that were dropping now, dropping from his half-closed eyes.) By the next morning, he had gotten control of himself: at least he still had his circus friends around him.

That week the circus fired him. The crowds were BOOOOOOOOOOO!!!ing them now too, and the fat lady threatened to walk out and the midgets were fuming and that was it for Fezzik.