Noah Barleywater Runs Away (12 page)

‘Oh no,’ said the old man, shaking his head quickly. ‘No, Poppa never mixed with people like that. In fact, he never left the village from the day he arrived here.’

‘So why did he make a puppet of him?’ asked Noah, pulling the Prince’s string: the eyes rolled up in his head as if he was examining the sky.

‘Because I met him,’ explained the old man. ‘He’s an important part of my story. It was after the county board named me the fastest runner in a fifty-three-mile radius and I became very famous. I had an invitation to leave the village and demonstrate my skills elsewhere – my first – and I took it, promising I’d come straight back.’

‘And did you?’

‘Yes,’ said the old man, nodding his head. ‘Yes, on that occasion I kept my promise.’

News of my success as a runner (said the old man) began to spread to the villages that surrounded my own, and then to the towns that looked down their noses at the villages, and then to the cities that sneered contemptuously at the towns.

One afternoon, when I arrived back at the toy shop from school, I found my father sitting at the counter, painting the carriage windows of a locomotive he had been carving over the previous few days.

‘Ah,’ he said, looking up and breaking into a smile as he saw me running through the door. ‘There you are at last. I was beginning to worry about you.’

‘Sorry, Poppa,’ I said, checking my watch. ‘It took me longer than usual to run home today. Almost three minutes.’

‘Well, the school is four miles away,’ said Poppa. ‘So really you shouldn’t feel too bad about it.’

‘But I usually do it in just over two,’ I told him,
stretching my legs behind me and running on the spot so fast that the floor let out a great cry and begged me to stop. ‘I’ll have to train harder.’

‘You train hard enough as it is,’ said Poppa, reaching across the counter and picking up a large, cream-coloured envelope and handing it across to me. ‘Now, here’s a surprise,’ he added. ‘A letter came for you this morning.’

I stepped forward and took the envelope from him. I’d never received a piece of mail in my entire life so this was a terrific treat.

‘Who would be writing to me?’ I asked, looking up at my father in wonder.

‘Open it and find out.’

I stared at the envelope for a moment, weighing it carefully in my hands, before running my finger carefully beneath the seal and taking out the single page that was contained within. I read it once to myself and then once aloud.

‘The King and Queen writing to me!’ I said, looking up at my father in astonishment. ‘I can’t believe they even know who I am. I’ll have to accept their invitation, of course.’

‘But you have school,’ said Poppa. ‘You can’t miss out on your education just for a bit of running.’

‘Oh, I could go just for a day or two,’ I said. ‘They wouldn’t even know I was gone.’

‘And what about me?’ asked Poppa quietly, his voice filled with sadness. ‘You will come back to me, won’t you?’

‘Why, of course I will,’ I declared. ‘I won’t leave you all alone.’

‘Do you promise?’ asked Poppa.

‘Yes, yes,’ I said, smiling at him, scarcely even thinking about whether I meant it or not.

And so, on the evening of 12
^th
October, I ran the hundred miles or so to the harbour and jumped aboard a boat that was headed in the general direction of the palace, and I was ready in the courtyard in my running clothes first thing the following morning when the King and Queen came out to take their daily constitutionals. Behind them loped a young man a few years older than me, with bright blond hair and a golden crown, his neck stretched right back as he stared up into the sky.

‘Are you the boy they say is the tremendous runner?’ the Queen asked me, holding to her eyes a pair of spectacles that she kept on a chain
around her neck and looking me up and down as if she wasn’t entirely sure she approved of me.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ I replied, nodding quickly. ‘I can run faster than anyone else my age.’

‘I’m the King,’ announced the King. ‘This is our son, the Prince. He will be King one day, of course, but not until I’m dead. He hopes that day will never come, don’t you, my boy?’

‘What’s that, Father?’ asked the Prince, taking his eyes off the sky for a moment and looking at the King.

‘I said you hope that day will never come,’ he repeated, raising his voice.

‘What day, Father?’ asked the Prince, entirely innocent of what was going on.

‘Oh, for pity’s—’

‘Our son lacks concentration,’ said the Queen then, interrupting her husband as she looked across at me. ‘He is a great disappointment to us at present, which is why the King is being kept alive by extraordinary means. The Prince is simply not ready to be King.’

‘It’s true,’ said the boy, shrugging his shoulders as he looked across at me. ‘I’m not.’

‘Well, I’m not sure what I can do about that,’ I said, confused. ‘I’m a runner. Perhaps you have me mixed up with someone else?’

‘The Queen never makes a mistake,’ snapped the King.

‘I made one once,’ she snapped right back,
staring across at him before returning her gaze to me. ‘I know exactly who you are, boy,’ she said, controlling her temper. ‘You are the fastest runner in all the land. My question to you is this: are you strong?’

‘Strong, ma’am?’ I asked.

‘That’s right. Do you think you could run with the weight of … oh, I don’t know … shall we say, a mouse on your back?’

I laughed, but stopped quickly as her expression turned to fury. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ I said. ‘Yes, I could, most certainly.’

‘What about a cat?’

‘Without any difficulty.’

‘A dog?’

‘Cocker spaniels, no problem. Great Danes, not so sure. They might slow me down.’

The Queen seemed dissatisfied with my answer, breathing heavily through her nose in a manner that reminded me of a dragon. ‘What if you had a boy on your back?’ she asked after a moment.

‘A boy, ma’am?’

‘Must you repeat everything I say?’ she asked, glaring at me. ‘A boy. Yes, you heard me. Could you run with a boy on your back?’

I thought about it. ‘I wouldn’t be as quick as I usually am,’ I told her. ‘But I dare say I could do it.’

‘Good,’ she said. ‘Well, quick sticks then. Put the Prince on your back and run him up to Balmoral. We’ve just invited one of the smartest men in Europe to set up house there and train our
son in the art of kingship, and there isn’t a moment to spare. The King is half dead as it is.’

‘It’s true,’ said the King sadly. ‘By rights, I shouldn’t even be here.’

‘And the boy has to be ready,’ announced the Queen. ‘Off you go now. No hanging around,’ she said, waving her hand at me as the Prince jumped on my back and we prepared to start running. ‘And bring me back my highland journal,’ she added as we set off. ‘I left it there on our last holiday and I wish to add a new entry.’

‘And my rifle,’ snarled the King, his eyebrows bouncing up and down furiously. ‘There’s a new stag in the park. Magnificent creature. Thing of extraordinary beauty. I want to shoot it.’

The Prince was lighter than I had imagined, and once I had grown accustomed to his weight I found that he didn’t slow me down too much. I still managed to arrive in Scotland by late evening, and when we got there, to my surprise, the Prince didn’t want to go inside at all but insisted on lying on the grass, staring up at the sky.

‘Look up there,’ he said. ‘That’s the Great Bear.’

‘Where?’ I asked, narrowing my eyes.

‘There. The Big Dipper points north. Can you see it?’

‘Ah yes,’ I said, delighted, for I had never noticed it before. ‘Of course.’

‘And that’s Perseus,’ continued the Prince,
pointing out another set of stars. ‘And over there is Cassiopeia, the Seated Queen.’

‘You’re interested in the stars then?’ I asked.

‘Very,’ admitted the Prince. ‘I’d like to be an astronomer, if I’m honest, but my parents won’t let me. They say I have to be King.’ He pulled a face, as if they had told him he had to go to bed early because they had a long journey ahead of them in the morning.

‘Couldn’t you just say no?’ I asked.

‘Impossible,’ he sighed. ‘If I don’t become King, then the crown passes to my younger brother.’

‘And what’s wrong with that?’ I asked.

‘He’s an idiot,’ said the Prince. ‘It would never work out. And after him it goes to another branch of the family, who we don’t talk to. We’d be finished, the lot of us. My mother would never allow it.’

‘So they’ve sent you here,’ I said. ‘To school, in a way.’

‘In a way,’ he said.

‘I got sent to school too,’ I told him. ‘I didn’t like it very much. But then it got better. When I realized I was good at something. Anyway, I’d better go inside,’ I said, ‘and fetch your mother’s highland journal and your father’s rifle.’

An elderly gentleman was waiting for me in the palace and looked at me with a mixture of irritation and fear, as if I had been sent to burgle the place. ‘And who might you be?’ he asked me, his voice echoing along the corridors.

I told him my name and what I was there for and he seemed to accept this as reasonable enough. ‘I am Romanus Plectorum, late of Rotterdam,’ he said. ‘Is the Prince with you then?’ he added, not sounding particularly enthusiastic.

‘He’s outside,’ I told him. ‘On the grass. You don’t seem too happy to be here, if you don’t mind me saying so.’

‘I’m not,’ he said. ‘I’ve been summoned against my will to this awful place to tutor the boy. I’d just finished building a castle in Rotterdam with a glass roof so that I wouldn’t have to spend any money on electricity. I would have saved a fortune. In my country I’ve become known as one of the foremost misers of our time. It’s a great honour.’

‘What about when it gets dark?’ I asked. ‘How would you be able to see anything then?’

‘Candles, my boy, candles! It took me six years to finish the castle, and the day I moved in was the day I got the letter from the King and Queen. Now the castle with the glass roof is left empty, and who knows what will happen to it. And I’m stuck here. Here!’ he roared, staring around in self-pity. ‘Anyway, follow me. I’ll show you where the Queen’s study is.’ He led me along a series of dark, wood-panelled corridors.

I stepped into an enormous office and took the book off the desk. Only when I looked up did I notice the number of stags’ heads that lined the walls. Each one was more magnificent than the last, and
they were nailed to wooden plaques with a date carved under each one – the date the King had shot them. I walked over and looked the animals in the eyes and was sure I could see the pain and suffering they had felt as they had collapsed, innocent, to the ground. I frowned and shook my head, noticing the enormous rifle that stood in the corner, the very thing that had caused so much unnecessary death.

‘Here’s your journal, ma’am,’ I said to the Queen the following evening as I handed it across to her.

‘They were right in what they said about you,’ she replied. ‘That was very quick indeed. And our son, the Prince – how is he? Was his tutor pleased to receive him?’

‘Ah, that,’ I said, wishing I’d had a little longer to prepare my story; one of the disadvantages of being a fast runner was that it didn’t leave me a lot of time to think. ‘Yes, they seemed to get along very well. Only they decided that Scotland wasn’t the right place for him to be educated after all.’

‘Not the right place?’ roared the King. ‘But the Scots are the second most intelligent people in the world, after the Irish.’

‘Yes, well, that’s as may be,’ I said. ‘But it’s terribly cold and Mr Plectorum said he wouldn’t last the winter, which would leave the Prince in an even worse position than he is now. They’ve gone back to Rotterdam to continue the Prince’s education there. He said he’d write once they got there.’

The Queen grumbled a little at this news but said nothing.

‘And my rifle?’ snapped the King, dribbling a little into his beard as the taste of gunpowder and venison reached his lips. ‘You didn’t forget my rifle, did you?’

‘Couldn’t find it, sir,’ I said with a shrug. ‘Sorry!’

A low growl sounded from the King’s throat and he looked as if he was about to attack me.

‘I could go back if you really wanted me to,’ I said nervously, knowing that even if I did, I still wouldn’t bring the rifle back with me.

‘Gracious no, boy,’ said the Queen, shaking her head and loosening her wimple in the process. ‘You’ve done enough. Anyway, we can’t stand around here all day. The King has medication to take and the tourists will be at the gates soon. We have to start tearing up bits of bread to feed them with or they start to grow restless. How about you run around the palace once and I’ll time you? Just for fun.’ She removed a pocket watch from under her coat and held a finger above a large round button at the top. ‘There’s a rather lovely lavender bush at the back of the palace – you can’t miss it. Bring me back a flower from it so I know you’ve gone all the way round.’