Bodice Ripper, Part Two

We last left Helga rushing into Bob's arms as he sat astride his snorting charger.  That is, not his muscle car but his actual horse.  He didn't have a muscle car yet.  They wouldn't be popular for another six or seven centuries.  Bob, (Roberto Centoothian The Third and Nearly Knighted), had spurned Helga after her eager leaping dash across the henyard.  He realized that she had been fooling around with goulash and another man, Urgundheind.  In spite of his lust for her tenderized white flesh (for she had just an hour earlier soaked rather luxuriantly in a natural hot spring behind the henhouse), he made up his mind once and for all.  He was blinded with sorrow and, of course, lust.  He was a pretty lusty guy, having lived all his life on horseback and on bounding mains.

With rage, he yelled, "I trusted you!" Just as if he were a character in a James Cameron epic movie.  

Her eyes welled up with tears that hung quivering on her long eyelashes, ready to drop to her expansive bosom, where they should have crept ever so slowly to her cleavage and then disappear between her twinned torpedoes, but they just hung.  Not the torpedoes; the tears.  Quivering.  Just like her expansive bosom.  He had a certain fascination with her bosom, but he managed to keep his eyes on the little mole on her cheek.

"I never meant to hurt you," she said, chin trembling, "I can't live like this!  I've told you that, but you didn't believe me.  I don't love Urgundheind.  He means nothing to me.  It was just a fling, a romp in the straw.  You were gone for so long, saving wenches, er...damsels in distress.  I was bored with the chickens.  You can only take so much of all that cluck-cluck-clucking all day long.  I'll go insane.  I really will.  Don't leave me!" she wailed, but the wails were useless.

He jutted his chin defiantly and looked as chiseled and as dashing as any man has any right to look in a ripped shirt with his chest waxed and wind tossing his hair to and fro.

Helga saw him up there on his white horse and got lusty, as she usually did when she saw him like that.  Her bosom started heaving all over again and the pink of her cheeks increased.  Her lips were parted and her eyelids lowered.   She tried all her feminine wiles.  She went at him with everything she still had at her mildly advanced age.  She even tried a little shimmy with her left shoulder and winked.

He saw this and became enraged, disgusted, and then distracted by the horse who was gathering its haunches under itself, readying for a dramatic charge across the hilltops.  He was a charger through and through.

Bob the Nearly Knighted turned his eager charger southward toward Waterloo and off they galloped, dramatically, handsomely, with cape sailing off behind, also dramatically.  He resisted the urge to turn around and wave his gauntlet at Helga one last time in a sad farewell.  He was sure she took him for a fool, and he was having no part of it.

Then he realized he couldn't have waved his gauntlet anyway even if he'd wanted to.  He checked everywhere, in every pocket, every secret leather pouch. The gauntlet was nowhere to be found.  He even looked in the glove compartment.  In those days, saddles had glove compartments, and so in an effort to maintain a link with days of yore, we have adopted the custom forward to this day, which is why even Dodge Chargers are outfitted quite neatly with them.

Bob stopped his charger, his actual horse, to think for a moment and try to recollect in the midst of all his sadness and bitterness where he might have left his gauntlet.  A man needed his entire kit as well as his wits about him if he were to stride into battle or even away from an unfaithful woman such as Helga.

Bob's heart was sinking as he sat there with his brow furrowed.  The realization struck him that he had last seen the errant glove in the hand of the unfaithful and devious Helga the Betrayer and yet excellent preparer of crispbread and cheese.

"Oh, God, what next?" he groaned. The horse screamed and struck the ground with his shod hooves, striking up sparks that lit the twilight and reflected off of Bob's well-oiled bronzed and muscular arms.

He realized that as he had reached for her hand to help her to his saddle, before he had realized she was playing him for a fool and making goulash for Urgy (as Bob called him when they were both boys growing up in the tiny mountain village of Steininfrank), she had grabbed his gauntleted hand, but it had slipped off in her grip:  Whoosh!  They don't make gauntlets like they used to, he thought, and his was probably a one-size-fits-all model.

Feeling shock and awe, just like W had hoped the Iraqis would feel when he foolishly invaded their country for no good reason, after the deeply alarming realization that she was a two-timing strumpet, he had galloped off without retrieving the glove.  It was probably still gripped in her soft pink hand even now.

The wind was blowing hard and his cape whipped and snapped about him.  His horse pawed the ground  and sparks flew up as it struck the hard flint underfoot.  Like a lightbulb going off, but it was sparks this time, Bob had a new idea.  He would go back for the glove!  Why hadn't he thought of that before?  He loved his mind, its complexity, its ability to zero in on just the right course of action.

"Let's go horse!"
 
The horse stood stock still, its ears cocked backwards toward Bob and its eyes rolled skyward.

"Go forward, horse!" Bob flapped the reins a bit and nudged the suddenly stubborn beast in the ribs with his heels.  The horse stood as still as a Greek statue, like those carved in bronze and set on a marble pedestal in the Louvre where the public wanders by and admires them while they check their pamphlets for further information.

"Come on, horse, let's get going!  I have a gauntlet to retrieve!"

Not a budge from the stubborn steed.

"Horse!  Go!"  The finer points of horsemanship were not part of Bob's list of skills.  He had never learned how to make that little clicking sound that cowboys make when herding cattle, and besides that, cowboys hadn't been invented yet.  It was just the past the dark ages, almost light out, and most people in that region ran sheep, not cattle.

"Okay, I'll give you a new contract?" He asked the horse hopefully.  No movement.

"New name?"  The horse whinnied loudly and tossed his head up and down.  He snorted.  That is, Bob snorted.

"God!  That's ridiculous."  The horse neighed and began to gallop away, tail flying in the wind.  "God?  That's your moniker?" He had to hang on with all his might for the horse was really going like the wind now.  Off they flew back to Helga who held the gauntlet in her right hand even still, and schemed with a very dark heart, and Bob wondered about the meaning of God.