After the death of the old hermit, Basil Fet Frumos grows up to be a model son; he brings his mother game meat and “juicy berries for her thirst,” since the old hermit did not bequeath him a water pitcher or anything. One day, he happens upon a pearl-encrusted golden castle in the middle of a lake. In the castle, he surprises three dragons in the act of boiling nine men alive and eating them bones and all. The fearless Basil slaughters two of the majestic beasts, locks the third in the dungeon, and moves into the golden castle to live with his dear old basil-sniffing mother.
Alas for Basil and Mom, the dragons were the property of a wicked, parsnip-nosed witch who happens to call when Basil is off getting more berries. The witch locks Basil’s mother in the dungeon and hides in her bed; when Basil returns, she sends him away on a wild goose chase looking for “bird’s milk.” Luckily for Basil, he stumbles into the house of the golden haired Ilana Cosinatsa, Sister to the Sun, who lends him a winged horse and something absolutely vital for his task: a pitcher, with which to carry milk. Ilana is a wise girl; I’ll be she never sniffs basil. Ilana also gives him directions to the nearest roc’s nest.
Basil rides the horse back home with the borrowed pitcher of roc’s milk. I’ll bet you didn’t know elephant-eating giant birds gave milk, but you were living in a fool’s paradise. Upon Basil’s arrival, the dragon shreds the poor lad “like a head of cabbage,” stuffs the dismembered corpse into sacks and sends it back to Ilana’s house on the back of the winged horse. This last proves to be a tactical error on the dragon’s part. Ilana does not mess around. She washes each and every body part in roc’s milk, fits them back together like a jigsaw puzzle, bathes the corpse in roc’s milk and brings young Basil back to life. Basil takes Ilana back to meet his mother, of course, and when he gets there he confronts dragon and witch. “Before they had time to look up, he had killed the foul pair, chopped their bodies into tiny pieces, ground the pieces into dust and scattered the dust to the four winds.” He’d better hope none of that dust ever gets near any bird’s milk.
The victorious Basil marries Ilana in a lavish ceremony attended by the sun himself, and they live in that golden castle with Basil’s mother to this very day “unless, of course, the time has come for them to die.”
There. I typed all of that from memory without consulting the book. Rose has me re-read that line about grinding the pieces into dust and scattering the dust to the four winds several times whenever I read it. I am a horrible mother, so I read the line several times and don’t scold her for glorifying violence. I do, however, stop the story after the basil-sniffing woman is thrown out of her parents’ house, to remind Rose that she can tell me anything she wants to and I’ll believe her. I also showed her the basil plant I have growing in the garden, and smiled when she looked awed, because I’m a horrible mother.
I’m sure that when Rose outgrows this particular phase, if she ever does outgrow it, I’ll miss reading Tyrannosaurus and Basil Fet Frumos several times a week. The day will come when she picks up the fairy tale book and reads it to herself. God forbid the day should come when she has no patience for dinosaurs and fairy stories, but she might go through a phase like that as well. And I’ll miss whatever phase came before, even as a I secretly feel relief that I’m not trying to pronounce Romanian names several times every evening.
I’m a horrible mother, after all.
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