The battle of the wineskins

On the evening of the sixth of September our party came down out of the mountains to the same castle where Sancho had once been tossed in a blanket. Sancho did not want to go in. I promised him the blanket would not come out, and we went in together, I with my princess, the priest and the barber, and a gentleman called Cardenio who had recovered his wits at the sight of the princess and was much improved by them. I asked for a bed. I was weary, and I went upstairs and lay down in a loft at once, while the others sat at supper below.

01 Many tales at the castle

I am told that while I slept a great deal happened downstairs. The castellan brought out a trunk of books left behind by a traveller, among them some fine books of chivalry, which he loved and which his wife scorned; and the priest read aloud to the company a long tale found in the trunk, about a man of Florence who tested his wife's faithfulness until he destroyed his own happiness. I heard only fragments of this through the floor. It sounded to me a sad and foolish story, and a warning to anyone who tests what he ought simply to trust.

The priest had reached nearly the end of it when Sancho came running up the stairs in a fright, shouting: “Come, sirs, quickly, and help my master, who is in the thickest of the fiercest battle my eyes have ever seen! As God lives, he has given the giant, the enemy of the Princess Micomicona, such a slash that he has cut his head clean off, like a turnip!”

02 The battle

For my part I remember it thus. I was in a deep dream, in which I had reached the kingdom of Micomicón and found the giant Pandafilando of the Gloomy Look in his tower, and had challenged him. He was enormous and round, and very red in the face, and he would not answer me, which I took for insolence. I attacked him. I struck him again and again, and with every blow there was a great gush of his blood, which ran down my arms and over the floor. At last, with one mighty backstroke, I took off his head, and I was pursuing the remnant of his army about the room when I was seized from behind.

The others, entering the loft, beheld a different scene, which I give fairly as they describe it. I was standing in my shirt, which did not reach my knees in front and was shorter behind, with my lean hairy legs bare, a little greasy red cap on my head that belonged to the innkeeper, and a blanket wrapped round my left arm for a shield. In my right hand I had my naked sword, and I was laying about me and calling out as though I really were fighting some giant. My eyes, they swear, were shut. I was asleep. And the giant, they assert, was the row of great wineskins of red wine hanging from the beams of the loft, several of which I had slashed open, so that the whole room was swimming in wine.

The castellan flew into a terrible rage. He fell on me with his fists, and would have finished the war that the giant had begun, if the priest and Cardenio had not dragged him away. The barber, in spite of everything, brought a great pot of cold water from the well and threw it over me, all at once, and I woke, though not, they tell me, entirely enough to understand where I was. The castellan's wife wailed about her wineskins. The daughter said nothing but looked at my legs. Maritornes, the Asturian girl, held up the lamp.

And Sancho went searching the whole floor for the giant's head. He was certain he had seen it, a great head with a beard down to its waist, and since he could not find it, he concluded that everything in that house was enchanted, as he had found the last time, when he was beaten by an invisible hand and tossed by invisible men. Now, he said, the head was gone that he had seen cut off with his own eyes, and the blood had run from the body like water from a fountain.

“What blood and what fountain, you enemy of God and his saints?” cried the castellan. “Can you not see, you thief, that the blood and the fountain are nothing but these wineskins slashed open and the red wine floating in this room? I wish I could see the soul of the man who slashed them swimming in hell!” Sancho said he did not know about that, but that if the head did not turn up his county would melt away like salt in water. I record his words faithfully, for he was in great distress.

03 The princess thanks me

Still not fully awake, I fell on my knees before the priest, believing him to be the princess, and said: “Your greatness, high and famous lady, may live from this day forward secure from any harm this ill-born creature could do you. I too am freed from the word I gave you, since with the help of heaven and the favour of her by whom I live and breathe, I have so well fulfilled it.” The priest, who has always been kind to me, kept a very grave face and told me the princess was grateful, and then they put me back to bed, where I slept until morning like a man who has done a great day's work.

In the morning Dorotea, who is the princess, told me very kindly that she believed my account entirely, and that her kingdom was now surely won. The castellan presented a bill for the wine, the skins, and certain damages from my previous stay, including the balsam and the barley. The priest paid it all, and the castellan was soothed. Sancho, on the other hand, was not soothed at all. He told me that he had searched in daylight too and found no giant and no head, only the room awash and smelling like a tavern, and that he now suspected the princess was no more a princess than he was a bishop. I told him to hold his tongue, and that enchanters never leave a giant's head lying about, for it would prove too much.

I would add one thing. Many people in this castle, these days, were finding one another after long separations: lovers who had lost each other, wronged ladies, a captive returned from Algiers with a gentle lady of that country, Zoraida, who had left everything to become a Christian and follow him, and whom we all treated with the greatest honour. I sat at the head of the table one evening and spoke at length on whether arms or letters are the nobler calling, and I concluded, with much applause, for arms. I mention it only so that no one supposes all I did at the castle was fight wineskins.

To my historian Cide Hamete: let the record show that I took a giant's head that night. If the head cannot be found, consider who had the most reason to hide it.