Camelot (6 page)

The Cook told her kitchen staff that under no circumstances were they to tell anyone above stairs about Romeo's talent.

‘If this gets out, they'll take him away from us,'
she said. ‘So if I find anyone has breathed a word, they will become casserole. Understood?'

Everyone nodded. They all remembered what had happened to Dym Trotter. No one wanted to follow in his footsteps, though they had to admit his footsteps had been delicious.

Of course, an incredible talent such as Romeo's could not stay secret forever, no matter what the Cook said. It was a talent that would set him on a new career path, leading to fame, fortune, a pair of clean tights for every day of the week and big boots with very pointy toes. But for now, Romeo, with his very own drawer to sleep in, was happier than he had ever been in his life.

 

King Arthur's Kingdom was called Avalon and it stretched as far as its borders in all directions. Camelot was at the very heart of the Kingdom. Originally a damp, windswept land full of miserable ignorant Celts, the great wizard Merlin had transformed it by magic so that in King Arthur's time it was covered in endless beautiful mountains and valleys and flat bits with windy rivers and lush green fields full of strawberries and tomatoes that actually tasted of something.
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It was a truly beautiful and idyllic land where everyone lived in complete peace and harmony except for those people who didn't. It was heaven on earth except, unlike heaven, you didn't fall off if you went too close to the edge.
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Unfortunately when
Merlin finally died some centuries later in 1927, the magic wore off and the land became, once again, a damp windswept place full of miserable ignorant Celts.

‘Oh great Royal Messengers,' began the King. ‘Well, one says “great”, but of course I'm the only person who is really great, but then as you are my own messengers I hereby decree that you shall be called great while you are doing my messenging. Oh great Royal Messengers, I charge you – and when I say charge, I don't mean you have to pay me anything – I mean, one hereby commands or orders you to search my glorious Kingdom for brave and fearless knights who will come to our aid.'

‘Indeed,' said Merlin.

‘Of course, one is braver and fearlesser than any knight and one would love to go and fight the dragons oneself, but unfortunately that is not possible for technical reasons,' the King continued.

He did not explain what the technical reasons were. Nor did anyone dare ask him, but they all knew. The King was a pathetic coward who was scared of paper bags and didn't want to get his tights dirty.

‘May our blessings be with you, together with a packed lunch and thirty-five groats,' said the King. ‘And for the Royal Messenger who finds the Brave Knight who completes this great quest, there will be a wonderful reward.'

He did not explain what the wonderful reward would be, but everyone knew. King Arthur's wonderful rewards were usually a set of dinner plates depicting famous heroes of Avalon who were all King Arthur. They also got a tabard
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with ‘The Totally Incredible King Arthur Gave Me This' embroidered on it. Most people who got the wonderful rewards sold them on YeBay, which was like eBay before computers and electricity and involved a lot of carrier pigeons. It could take months to place a bid, never mind actually buy or sell anything.

So the four Royal Messengers set off on their quest, galloping like the wind on their trusty steeds across the great drawbridge towards the seventh island. Four days later, they had managed to cross the other six islands and reached the mainland. It had been a particularly crowded time on the bridges
and it had really slowed them down. The Royal Messengers had had to push at least fifty people into the moat simply to get by.

But at last they reached dry land and were ready to set off on their quest.

The first Royal Messenger, Sir Barkworth, rode East.

The second Royal Messenger, Lord Pleat of Perivale, who had picked the shortest straw, rode as slowly as he could towards Wales. Maybe, he thought, one of the others will find the Brave Knight before I get there so I can go home.

The third Royal Messenger, Sir Lamorak, rode forth and North at the same time.

And the fourth Royal Messenger, Sir Bedivere, rode West.

 

When a bird hatches from its egg, it can't fly. This is usually because it hasn't got any feathers. Some birds, even when they do grow feathers, are still rubbish at flying. This includes:

• Emus – too big and heavy.
  
• Ostriches – even bigger and heavier.
  
• Chickens – too stupid.
  
• Turkeys – too big and heavy AND stupid.
  
• Kentucky Fried Chickens – too cooked.
  
• Rabbits – not a bird.
  

Dragons are the same except they don't have feathers. When a baby dragon hatches out from its egg it can barely stand up, never mind walk about or get off the ground. The trouble with baby dragons is that they are even more stupid than chickens, and as most of them hatch out in nests in the tops of very big trees, they stay stupid for quite a long time due to the concussion from falling out of their nests and landing on their heads.

This is part of the natural order of things. Nature has evolved the dragon so that it grows far
too big to fit in its nest a long time before it learns to fly. This way baby dragons spend at least the first six months of their lives staggering around seeing stars and wondering why their heads hurt. The reason for this, as all human children know, is that it is very dangerous for little children to play with fire, and as dragons can shoot flames out of their noses as soon as they hatch,
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it's important to keep them distracted as long as possible. Concussion does this. Now and then there are accidents with lazy baby dragons who don't want to leave their nest. What happens then is they breathe fire, burn the nest and fall on the ground. The end result is the same except they have burnt skin as well as concussion.

Young Bloat, son of Spikeweed, King of the Dragons, was one of these. He had burnt his feet so badly that he had to spend the first six weeks out of the nest with his legs tucked under his leaky great-granny Gorella while they healed. This, of course, scarred him for life, as it would anyone who spent a month and a half with their legs soaking in old
dragon's wee.
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Fortunately the concussion protected him from his great-granny's endless wittering about nothing as she talked to the wall, though he did have very strange dreams and developed an allergy to walls that he never got over.

Primrose was not happy when her son was hatched. First of all, the little sod had set the nest on fire, which meant she would have to build another one if she ever wanted to have more children, which she did. Second, she dreaded the future, when her very weird son might one day become King of the Dragons after Spikeweed passed away.

‘Though it wouldn't surprise me if Bloat sets himself on fire before he even grows up,' she said. ‘And as for all the stress of building another nest when I haven't got thumbs, well, I just don't want to talk about it.' Dragon nest building is a very long and complicated business. Birds generally have
quite delicate beaks that allow them to pick up twigs and weave them together. Dragons have big lumpy mouths with dreadful teeth and such bad breath that a lot of twigs simply rot away before they can carry them up to the top of the tree. Also, they need to build really big, strong nests because they are big and heavy creatures. The standard nest-building technique is to blast away at the foot of a tree until it catches fire and falls over. This has do be done just before a rain storm otherwise the whole tree will get burnt. If the rain starts just as the tree falls over, it will put out the fire and the dragon is left with a nice big pile of smashed-up branches.

Bloat had been hatched in Primrose's first nest and it had taken her fifteen goes before she got it right. The thought of going through it all over again had been very depressing. She had sat at the mouth of the cave watching a winter storm lash down over the valley. All the burnt grass turned to black mud that even the endless lightning couldn't make look attractive. She remembered the lush green valley of her childhood and the happy days when she was a young carefree dragon dreaming, like all her friends,
of meeting a dragon prince and living happily ever after.

Then she had met Spikeweed and it had all been downhill ever since. Sure, she had been the only one of her crowd who had actually married a prince, but the happily-ever-after bit seemed to have been held up in the mail.

I should have married Spotty Oregano,
she thought.
He might have only been a humble Italian dragon of lowly birth, but he had lovely eyes. I bet he's living happily ever after all the time.
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The second nest had been a lot easier and when her daughter had been born, Primrose had thought she would be happy at last. Now she would have someone to share her hopes and dreams with. The trouble was that her hopes were few and far between and her dreams were really depressing, so her daughter did her best to avoid her. That was why the poor child had been given the name Depressyng.

Morgan le Fey lived in the North-West Wing of Camelot. It was her domain and no one apart from her few faithful servants was allowed there. She had ordered the castle builders to remove all access to the wing except for one very narrow winding corridor, a corridor so narrow that people visiting Morgan le Fey had to walk in single file and weigh less than eighty kilos.

‘I hate people in twos and I hate fat people in ones,' she said to Lady Petaluna, her lady-in-waiting.

But most of all, Morgan le Fey hated her little brother, King Arthur, and with good reason. In fact she had so many reasons to hate him that if she had written them all down, it would have taken her so long that she wouldn't have had any time left to do the actual hating.

She didn't just hate him because he was as stupid as a wooden spoon in a bonfire. She hated him because in spite of his stupidity and only being eleven years old, he had still been made King when their father had died, simply because he was a boy
and she wasn't. This, of course, is a fine, old and totally unfair tradition still used in many countries around the world to this day.

It's probably the main reason there is so much trouble in the world,
she thought.
If girls were in charge, there's be a lot less fighting stupid wars.
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She hated Arthur because he was vain, sulky and stupid. He was very stupid, more stupid than the average eleven-year-old boy, extremely stupid and total world stupid champion. The trouble was that, like a lot of stupid people, he thought he was clever, which meant that almost every decision he made was a bad one.

‘If it wasn't for that wizard Merlin protecting him,' she said to Lady Petaluna, ‘our enemies would have conquered us a long time ago. I'm just glad that I am immune to the wizard's magic.'

(Because Avalon was the most beautiful kingdom in the world and Camelot the most beautiful castle and it had the greatest wizard ever, and the sun shone all the time, even when it was raining, most of the
kingdoms surrounding it hated it and its King and Merlin.

‘They think they are so wonderful with their pretty butterflies and beetroots as big as cabbages,' said King Ingeborg of Norway, ‘but we've got things they haven't.'

‘True,' said his wife, Queen Outaborg. ‘Like frostbite and blizzards and cabbages the size of beetroots.'

‘Well, our wizard is better than theirs.'

‘Oh yes, mighty Thumblik can turn water into ice,' said the Queen. ‘Hooray.'

King Ingeborg's father had tried to invade Avalon once, but it had been a disaster. The ‘narrow stream' he had ordered his army to wade across had turned out to be the North Sea and those who hadn't frozen to death had been knocked out by large icebergs and drowned.)

‘But is not our King Arthur a wise and wonderful ruler full of wonderfulness and wise wisdomness?' said Petaluna, who was blinded to the King's stupidity by his beautiful mauve tights.

‘My child, although you are wise beyond your
years,
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you are blinded by my brother's beautiful mauve tights,' said Morgan le Fey. ‘It is true they are beautiful, but you are being misled by the magic of the colour mauve. For, as everyone knows, mauve has an awesome power over people. That's why my brother will let no one else wear it.'

It might seem that Morgan le Fey was not a very nice person, and if you are spoilt and stupid then you definitely wouldn't like her, but in fact she was as kind as she was beautiful, as beautiful as she was clever and as clever as she was kind. It was just that she had no time for fools and Camelot seemed to have more than its fair share of them. The nicest people were mostly at bottom of the food chain and the higher up you went the more useless they became, culminating in Morgan le Fey's brother King Stupid. So Morgan preferred the company of servants and gardeners to that of so-called great knights and teachers. The servants had nothing to prove. They had little to lose and felt no need to impress anyone, whereas the knights lived in constant fear of being exposed as the useless parasites they were. They had
everything to lose and because Morgan le Fey made no secret of the fact that she could see right through their pompous pretences she was not popular in Court. She was accused to being stuck-up, which was exactly the opposite of what she really was, but as it meant most of the people she despised avoided her, she was quite happy for them to see her that way.

‘I dream of a world where the people are as lovely as our beautiful Avalon,' she said. ‘Not on the outside, I mean, but inside their heads. But I suppose while my brother is King that is unlikely to happen.'

Historians have pointed out that Morgan le Fey was probably the world's first hippie, especially when her tomb was discovered in 1976 and her coffin was draped in a coat of many colours with the words ‘Love and Peas' embroidered on it in gold thread.

As Morgan le Fey had said, Lady Petaluna was just a child. She was eleven years old and had been Morgan le Fey's lady-in-waiting for the past five years. Queen Igraine had acquired the child in a cart boot sale in a box of pig's bladders. Lady Petaluna had been in the box playing with the bladders and no one had noticed her until they got back to Camelot
and then no one could be bothered to take her back. A messenger had been sent to her parents. A few gold coins had changed hands and Lady Petaluna had been given to Morgan le Fey as a maid.

Fortunately Morgan le Fey, apart from hating people in twos, fat people in ones, stupid people in any amounts and her brother and quite a few other people too including Merlin, was a kind and lovely young woman and took Lady Petaluna under her wing, treating her almost as if she was her younger sister, apart from making Petaluna sleep at the foot of Morgan le Fey's bed on a pallet of straw and not giving her a crown to wear.

Over the ensuing five years they had become devoted to each other. Lady Petaluna trimmed her mistress's toenails and in her turn Morgan le Fey allowed Petaluna to sell the clippings on YeBay. Lady Petaluna removed unsightly hair from parts of her mistress's body where they were not welcome and in return was allowed to use the hairs to make herself a lovely comfortable pillow which, after four years of resting her head on a rock as she slept, was wonderful.

Because she was a Top Royal Princess, there
were many places in Camelot that Morgan le Fey could not go, either because they were not very clean or they were listed in her
Princesses' Guide to Camelot
as banned. Of course, if Morgan le Fey had decided to go somewhere that wasn't considered proper for a princess, no one would have dared to stop her. Apart from her sharp tongue, she also had a sharp sword, which she was rumoured to be incredibly good at using.

Lady Petaluna, however, had free rein to go wherever she liked, from the dungeons deep below the kitchens to the Attic of a Thousand Nanas and even up to the remote tower where Etheldred the Wise Woman lived. So it was that Lady Petaluna became the eyes and ears of Morgan le Fey. The child was a lot more reliable than the cockroaches, who tended to tell people what they thought would bring them the greatest reward.

‘Of course, as the King's sister, I should be allowed to go everywhere,' Morgan le Fey complained.

‘Oh no, my lady,' said Petaluna, ‘there are places no one would want to go.'

‘Like where?'

‘Down in the dungeons.'

‘Have we really got dungeons?' asked Morgan le Fey.

‘Indeed, my lady, and they are terrible to behold,' said Petaluna.

‘And are there prisoners there?'

‘There are and they are terrible to behold.'

‘And you have beholded them?' Morgan le Fey, whose governess had been rubbish at teaching English, asked.

‘I have and they are terrible to hear. They wail faint and low,' said Petaluna. ‘And they are terrible to smell. They smell strong and high.'

‘But they must have been there forever,' said Morgan. ‘I mean, my brother hasn't caught any prisoners. He's too scared to say boo to a goose, never mind fight any wars or battles.'

‘They have been there many, many years,' said Petaluna. ‘Word has it that some were there before your father became King.'

‘That's terrible,' said Morgan le Fey. ‘We must do something.'

‘I have done something, my lady.'

‘What, you mean you've helped them escape? How brave of you.'

‘Well, no, not that, my lady. They are all still there,' Petaluna explained. ‘But I have brought them good cheer and sustenance.'

‘How?'

‘I took each one of them a marmalade sandwich and some cabbage water,' said Petaluna.

‘Oh.'

‘Yes, my lady,' said Petaluna. ‘I have made a friend in the kitchens and he helped me.'

‘A friend? Surely not a common kitchen boy?' said Morgan le Fey.

‘Indeed, my lady,' said Petaluna, ‘But he is a special boy, not like the other half-starved wretches down there. I hardly dare say it, but he has a majestic air about him, a natural dignity I have never seen before. And he has a great talent that I believe no other living person possesses.'

‘This boy, what is his name?'

‘He is called Romeo Crick, my lady.'

‘And this talent that has so impressed you, what is that?' said Morgan le Fey.

‘He is fireproof.'

‘Now what have I told you about telling lies?' said Morgan le Fey.

‘No, no, my lady, it's true,' said Petaluna. ‘I have seen it with my own eyes.'

She told Morgan how she had seen Romeo climb into a glowing-red oven and clean it. He had been in the oven for fifteen minutes and when he had come out he had been completely unscathed. She also told her mistress how the Cook had made her swear on the
Royal Cookery Book
not to tell a soul about it.

‘And now that you have told me,' Morgan le Fey ordered her, ‘you will make that promise again, only this time you will keep it. You will not tell a single soul. If you do, my love for you will vanish and be replaced by a very sharp pointy stick. Understand?'

‘Yes, my lady.'

‘Good girl.'

Even though she couldn't stand to be in the same room as her little brother, Morgan le Fey knew that he had sent Royal Messengers out to scour Avalon for a Brave Knight to confront the dragons
and go through their cave into the secret tunnel that led to the blocked drains under Camelot. She knew, too, that any knight – even the legendary Lancelot, whom she had never met, but who sounded as if he might actually be a true and wise knight and not at all a twit – would get burnt alive by the dragons long before they could reach the tunnel.

She also knew that her brother had promised her hand in marriage to any knight who was successful.

‘We'll see about that,' she said. ‘He may be the King, but if he thinks he can make me marry anyone he likes, he's got another thought coming.'

‘Oh my lady, how could you defy the wishes of the King?' said Lady Petaluna.

‘With a very sharp pointy knife,' said Morgan le Fey. ‘A secret knife that even that evil old fool Merlin cannot protect him against.'

Lady Petaluna was terrified. She adored her mistress, but the idea of her murdering the King was dreadful.

‘Of course, if – and there are a lot of ifs – there was a Brave Knight who did manage the task, and if that Brave Knight was called Lancelot, and if Lancelot
was as stunningly handsome as this tiny engraving of him which I got free with a year's subscription to
Handsome Knights Monthly
, and if Lancelot was as incredibly intelligent, brave and witty as the article in the magazine suggests, well, then, and only then, I might actually, possibly, maybe consider becoming his wife.'

But Morgan le Fey knew all these ifs were unlikely to happen. There were just too many of them. She also realised that the information about the humble kitchen boy was priceless. It was unlikely that a knight would be found who could take on the dragons. Even with the latest advances in armour technology, anyone foolish enough to try to get past the dragons would end up as Boil-in-the-Can Human. Of course, without thumbs, the dragons wouldn't be able to get the knight out of his armour to eat him, but he would still be roasted alive.

But a boy who was fireproof?

It was too good to be true.

So Morgan le Fey decided she had to get Romeo Crick out of the kitchens and into the North-West Wing before her brother found out about him.

‘Roughly how many prisoners would you say there are locked in the dungeons?' she asked Petaluna.

‘I would say, my lady, that there are thirteen,' Petaluna replied, ‘and I would say they are all roughly.'

‘And who knows they are down there?'

‘You, me, the kitchen boy and the jailer,' said Lady Petaluna.

‘So we can assume the kitchen boy won't talk about them or else he'd get into trouble for stealing the marmalade sandwiches and the cabbage water,' said Morgan le Fey. ‘So that just leaves the jailer. What's he like?'

‘His name is Clynk and he is not happy, my lady.'

‘And why is that?'

‘He has been like a prisoner too, my lady,' Lady Petaluna explained. ‘His father and grandfather were the Royal Jailers before him. He was born down there and has known no other life. He has never once seen the light of day. It is as if he himself is a prisoner. The only difference is that he is on the other side of the cell doors.'

‘So he yearns for freedom as do the prisoners?'

‘Indeed so, my lady.'

‘Can you take me down to the dungeons?'

‘Oh, my lady!' Lady Petaluna cried. ‘How could someone as fine and beautiful as you even think of going to so vile a place?'

‘I shall disguise myself as a common serving wench and you shall take me down to the dungeons and then to the kitchens that I may see this Romeo Crick for myself.'