The Dragons 3 (4 page)

Lady Tracyvere's bad temper had brought her husband and his two companions out of their happy, relaxed state, so once again they were feeling miserable.

‘You mean, you actually murdered both your
parents?' she asked Mordred, with admiration in her voice, when everyone had told her their stories.

‘I had no choice,' Mordred replied.

‘Oh well, that's cheered me up to no end,' said Tracyvere. ‘I couldn't stand your mother with her stuck-up ways and her silly hats made out of kittens, as well as her forever coming over to borrow some peasants or a bucket of earth.'

‘And your father,' she continued. ‘He was a rednecked sexist pig. I quite liked him. He had the most terrifying warts, though, didn't he?'

‘Indeed he did,' said Mordred. ‘They were his hobby. He was the president of the National Wart Society. He even had a paragraph in the
Grimmest Book of Records
.'

‘Though I think,' said Tracyvere, ‘that I like him more now he's dead.'

‘I certainly do,' said Mordred.

‘Right, tomorrow we shall go to your home, Castle Laclustre, and you will fill our pockets with gold,' said Tracyvere, ‘and you shall give me your mother's diamond-encrusted eye-gouger that I lusted after each time I saw it hanging round her neck.'

Back on the Diabolical Islands, it was three days after Rampart had been taken away before the cell door opened again. Once a day, the tiny grille in the door slid aside and two more turnips were thrown in, but that was it. Eventually Princess Floridian and Brassica got so hungry they were forced to eat them.

One of Merlin's spies sat outside the cell window and flew back with her report. The next day the turnips that had tasted only slightly disgusting began to taste exactly the same, even though they now contained a secret tasteless chemical that made the two prisoners put on massive amounts of weight.

The Princess and Brassica were both extremely vain and the idea of putting on as little as fifty grams in weight filled them with dread. When they both woke up the next morning five kilos heavier, they were horrified, angry and depressed with themselves, with each other, with turnips and with the whole world.

‘I am never eating again,' the Princess cried.

‘Me neither,' sobbed Brassica as his trousers split up the back.

But it made no difference. Thanks to Merlin's
spell, they kept gaining on weight whether they ate anything or not. They tried running round the tiny cell to work up a sweat, but they just kept crashing into each other and into the walls, so that by the end of the day they were covered in bruises and they looked like a pair of large, overripe aubergines.

‘I can't see my feet anymore,' the Princess Floridian wept.

‘I've got so many chins I can't even tip my head down far enough to see
your
feet, never mind my own,' said Brassica as his head sunk deeper and deeper into his shoulders.

And then, to make matters worse, at six o'clock the door opened and in walked Rampart. He looked so smart it took Floridian and Brassica a moment to recognise him.

Unlike them, he had lost weight, or to be more accurate, he weighed exactly the same as he did before, but where he had been almost exactly the same shape and colour as a turnip, he was now a lot taller and shaped like a magnificent statue of a Greek god. His hair, once the very worst shade of orange, was now dark brown and shone like coal. Even his voice, which
had been a really annoying high-pitched squeak, was now deep and mellow. Princess Floridian and Brassica did not recognise him any more than he did them.

‘It's me, Rampart,' he said. ‘I have been having the most wonderful time. This place is paradise. Who would ever have thought there was a land where turnips were worshipped above gold?'

‘WHAT?!' screamed the Princess.

This was not a question – just an explosion of sheer anger.

Here is a list of things the Princess thought were bad enough:

• She, a fabulously beautiful, clever and brilliant princess, was locked up in a prison cell.
  
• She, a fabulously stunningly beautiful, clever and brilliant princess with a figure to die for, was now the size and shape of a hippopotamus.
  
• Brassica, who she had kind of, sort of, found herself beginning to maybe like a bit – even though he was way too young – was also the size and shape of a hippopotamus.
  
• Rampart, her other cellmate, who had been a big fat stupid lump with less brain cells than a mushroom, was now extremely good-looking and clever.
  
• Rampart, who she thought she might, probably, yes, definitely did, fancy could see her looking like a lumpy purple pillow.
  

And here are a few things that were even worse:

• It had got extremely cold during the night. Their turnips had frozen so hard it was impossible to bite them. This of course was a curse and a blessing.
  
• She, The Magnificent Princess Floridian, had just wet herself.
  
• It had run down her legs and into her shoes then had overflowed, covering the floor in VERY SLIPPERY frozen wee.
  

And here are a few things that could have been worse:

• At least Brassica was as fat and purple as she was.
  
• At least she hadn't started growing a moustache.
  
• At least she hadn't slipped over on the VERY SLIPPERY floor.
  

Which of course she then did.
²⁷

The Princess sat in the middle of the cell, her dress frozen to the floor, and burst into tears. They ran down her face and added themselves to the ice-rink of her wee.

Brassica lost his balance and landed on the Princess, who hit him round the head so he fell off and froze to the floor, where he wet himself
and
burst into tears. The ice-rink got thicker and even more slippery.

And all the while Rampart stood there looking down at them with a happy smile on his very handsome face.

‘Anyway,' he said, ‘I have good news. You were right, this is not a hotel. It
is
a prison, but now I have been appointed Minister of Turnips and All Other Vegetables, and as you are friends of mine, you are free. So come on. I've been given a lovely house where there is a roaring log fire and a fine turnip banquet awaiting us.'

‘I can't get up,' said the Princess. ‘My clothes are frozen to the floor.'

‘Me too,' said Brassica.

‘Guard?' said Rampart, turning to the two soldiers who had come in with him. ‘Any suggestions?'

‘No problem, boss,' said the first soldier.

He poured a can of petrol over the floor and told Rampart to stand back while the second soldier lit a match.

This was followed by quite a bit of screaming and the smell of burning clothes, skin and hair, but all the tears and wee melted and the two fat prisoners were set free.

‘I think I would rather have just slipped out of my clothes and escaped in my undies,' said Brassica.

‘Except you were both much too fat to slip out
of anything,' said Rampart cheerfully. ‘I mean, I'm not sure how we're going to get the two of you through the door.'

The two soldiers got behind and pushed. This at least sorted out the problem of the Princess and Brassica being covered in burnt skin. It all got scraped off on the very rough, splintery door frame. The two of them were now red-raw and in quite a lot of extreme pain. They both made the mistake of tearing at their hair, which being burnt came out in great handfuls.

When the Princess and Brassica were led upstairs to the waiting crowd, instead of everyone falling about laughing, the crowd stood in wide-eyed admiration. Princess Floridian and Brassica were the very image of two Avalon Accolade turnips: fat, soft and purply-red.

The crowd cheered.

When Rampart explained why, the Princess cried, ‘But we are in agony.'

‘All the more admirable,' said the crowd, ‘to suffer for your art.'

Brassica asked through his tears if it meant they
had to stay like that forever, but everyone said no, great art was just a fleeting moment, and they took them away to a dark, cool room and covered them head to toe in soothing Turnipolene Ointment that not only healed their red-raw skin, but nourished them too, so they didn't have to eat anything, which meant that they lost weight.

In no time at all – about seventeen weeks – they were healed. They were slimmer than ever and had skin smoother than the inside of a baby spaniel's ear.

‘This was not an accident,' said the Princess. ‘Someone spiked those turnips and I suspect that evil old wizard Merlin had something to do with it.'

She set a trap and the next morning there was a crow in it.

‘Right, tweety,' she said, grasping the black bird by the throat. ‘You and me are going to have a little talk.'

‘I think that should be you and I,' said the crow.

‘Grammar is the least of your worries, scraggy,' said the Princess. ‘You are going to tell me who you are working for.'

‘Anyone,' said the crow. ‘Make me an offer.'

‘No problem. Here's my offer. Tell me who sent
you here to spy on us and I won't bite your head off.'

‘I was thinking more of sparkly jewels, actually,' said the crow. ‘A nice necklace with a great big red ruby.'

‘The only problem with that,' said the Princess, ‘is that when I've bitten your head off you won't have a neck left to wear a necklace round. Now talk.'

Crows may be double-crossing sneaky creatures, but they can also be quite stupid and not have a very good judge of character. This crow saw a very pretty young girl and thought to itself,
Pretty young girls don't bite birds' heads off.

This was the last thing it thought because Princess Floridian bit its head off.

She had more luck with the crow she caught the next day.

‘Look, birdie,' she said. ‘This is what happened to your friend when she wouldn't answer my questions.'

‘Oh dear,' said the second crow. ‘She won't be wearing any more necklaces, will she?'

‘Answer now, please,' the Princess said, baring her teeth. ‘Who sent you here to spy on us?'

‘Merlin.'

‘Thank you,' said the Princess and bit its head off.

‘What did you do that for?' said Brassica. ‘She told you it was Merlin.'

‘Yes, and then she would have flown back to him and told him we knew,' the Princess explained. ‘Besides, I quite enjoyed it.'

Because the two of them were sort of heroes on the Diabolical Islands, it was fairly easy for them to gather recruits for an army to attack Avalon.

It was agreed that they would invade Avalon on the shortest day of the year, when they would have the most darkness to cover their arrival. In the meantime, boats were sent out to attack and hijack other boats to build up their fleet.

‘The more boats we have, the more mercenaries we can take,' said Bloat.

‘Are there turnips in Avalon?' was the most common question, followed by the same question about gold, precious jewels, enchanted things, potatoes and bacon.

‘Avalon is a land overflowing with milk and honey,' said Princess Floridian.

‘Don't like milk,' most people said, ‘or honey.'

‘Well, it's overflowing even more with turnips and gold and precious enchanted things and there's more bacon than you can shake a stick at – even for you at the back there with that really enormous stick,' said Brassica.

‘Wow!' said everyone and signed up.

Meanwhile, at another sadly neglected meanwhile, trouble was brewing.

Back in Avalon, in the dragons' valley, everyone had become really, really bored.

‘It's all very well having peace treaties with the humans,' said Spikeweed, King of the Dragons. ‘I know it's a lot less pressure and hassle, but what are we supposed to do all day?'

‘I know what you mean,' said his wife, Primrose, ‘and I really miss that sweet smell of thatched cottages full of screaming peasants burning out of control.'

‘Yes,' said Spikeweed, ‘and baby-shaped soy tofu burgers are no substitute for real babies. Neither are organically woven spinach kittens anywhere as good as the real thing.'

‘You're right,' all the other dragons agreed. ‘Whatever you say, the only real substitute for warm flesh dripping with blood is warm flesh dripping with blood.'

Things could not go on as they were with a whole generation of young dragons growing up and never having tasted flesh. It had been decided as part of the
peace treaty that the dragons wouldn't eat any meat in case the temptation proved too great for them.

‘Vegetarian dragons,' Spikeweed snorted. ‘Whoever heard of such a thing! Globally, dragon-wise, we've become a laughing stock. Can you imagine our Italian cousins putting up with it?'

‘Another thing,' Primrose said. ‘I didn't see the humans becoming vegetarians. They still tuck into lamb and chicken and pterodactyl.'

‘I think you'll find they've eaten all the pterodactyls,' said Spikeweed. ‘But chicken is bad enough.'

The only one of the dragons who wasn't fed up with the endless monotony of their lives was Spikeweed's ancient mother, Gorella, who spent every day the same way as she had done for the past two hundred or more years. She sat in a dim cave talking to a patch of green slime on the wall and leaking dragon wee everywhere. She thought the green slime was her long-dead husband and that the wee was wee. She was as happy as an armpit of fleas.

‘Something's got to be done,' said Spikeweed and everyone agreed.

Spikeweed and Primrose's son, who had been called Bloat, had gone through one of those naughty stages most young dragons and quite a few humans go through called ‘teenager', but then he had settled down. He had changed his name to Ambrose and become a very bad poet but, at the same time, the most famous dragon poet that had ever lived on account of being the
only
dragon poet that had ever lived. Sure, his poems rhymed, but they were extremely boring and hardly ever made any sense.

Here is an example:

There was a young dragon from here

Who decided to move over there.

Once she'd moved over there

It became over here

So she ended up being nowhere.

On Thursday.

Ambrose had absolutely no sense of rhythm or balance.

Lately his poetry had begun to take on a more dragony and violent tone. He had also decided that he didn't want to be called Ambrose anymore and
changed  his name back to Bloat. His father was delighted and even began to dream of his son becoming a rugby player.
²⁸
His mother not so much.

Here are a couple of Was-Ambrose-Now-Bloat-Again poems from his transition period:

There was a young dragon from here

Who saw a young girl in a chair.

So he set her alight

And to his great delight

The chair was one of those old-fashioned
ones stuffed with really flammable
dangerous foam that burns like crazy AND
gives off terribly toxic fumes.

He said, ‘I don't want to boast

But she ended up toast.

With burning foam in her hair'.

and

Jack and Jill went up the hill

To fetch a pail of water.

Jack fell down and got horrendous burns

Because a dragon had changed the water
for sulphuric acid.

And when Jill saw how awful he looked

She did not go tumbling after

But ran off with someone completely
different.

These got him a lot of new fans among all the young dragons. Suddenly Bloat was Mr Cool. All the girl dragons swooned over him and burnt his name in tree trunks and on each other's arms, but even with Bloat around to adore they were becoming more and more restless too.

It was decided at a top-secret dragon meeting in a top-secret dark cave, which the humans didn't know about, that the peace treaty had to end. It was agreed that killing and eating humans was one of the basic instincts, rights, hobbies and relaxations of dragons, and to suppress them was very, very bad and dangerous and could lead to all sorts of deep-seated, emotional
scars from which a creature as sensitive as a dragon might very well never recover.

‘So we've agreed then,' said Spikeweed, ‘and of course we're only going to do this for health reasons, ending this peace treaty with the humans once and for all. Of course,' he added with a big grin, ‘I mean for our health, not the humans.'

‘That's exactly right,' said Primrose. ‘What we're saying is we don't really want to hurt the humans –' loud sniggers from everyone ‘– but we have to for our own psychological wellbeing because, if we don't, we will end up really, really depressed with deep-seated feelings of inadequacy, low self-esteem and sadness.'

‘And we'll probably get scale-rot too,' Bloat added.

‘And claw-fester,' said his sister, Depressyng.

‘Yes,' everyone agreed.

They all decided to sleep on it, which meant it was five days before anyone woke up because dragons are even lazier than whippets.

‘We have one thing in our favour,' said Spikeweed, ‘and only one thing really, and that is the element of surprise. The humans will not be expecting us to attack
them, so when we do we must make as big an impact as we can, because after that it will be war.'

It was agreed to send a deputation to Italy to see if Primrose's old boyfriend, Spotty Oregano, and his relations would be interested in forming an alliance.

‘If we could get the families from other countries,' Primrose suggested, ‘we could surround Avalon with a ring of fire.'

It was a cool autumn evening and everyone agreed to plan their attack for the shortest day of the year.

In the meantime, there were preparations to be made. All the young dragons who had been born since the peace treaty had to be taught how to behave like dragons and burn things.

‘What we need,' said Primrose, ‘is a human spy. Quite apart from the fact that it would be really useful to have someone on our side with thumbs, it would be great to have someone on the inside of Camelot.'

‘We could get a crow,' Bloat suggested.

‘No thumbs,' said Spikeweed.

‘Yes, I know, but how will we find someone inside the castle who would work for us and who we
could be sure wouldn't double-cross us?'

‘Why not get both?' said Bloat. ‘And then not tell the crow about the human and not tell the human about the crow. Actually, no, we do tell the crow about the human and he could keep an eye on them.'

‘I'm impressed and rather proud of you, my boy,' said Primrose, who put him in charge of finding the secret agents. ‘You are so devious you could almost be a human.'
²⁹

Bloat glowed with pride in the bright-green way only a dragon can glow
³⁰
and had to rush off and write a poem about it.

I wandered lonely as a spy

Who trips you as you walk by

So you fall face down in a pie

And get some pastry in your eye

Which makes me laugh and makes you cry.

The crow was easy to find. Crows are even more devious than humans, who usually only sell their souls to the highest bidder. Crows will sell their souls to any bidder and all bidders, sometimes as many as fifty times a day. Crows have no scruples at all, as long as there's something in it for them. They go way, way beyond double-crossing. Some crows have been known to quadruple-zillion-cross people. It gets so complicated that they often double-cross themselves.

‘Spy, you say?' said the first crow Bloat spoke to. ‘Well, of course I would. Us crows live to spy. Especially us Night Crows.'

‘Night Crows?'

‘Yeah. We can see in the dark better than an owl,' the Night Crow explained. ‘And what with being black we can creep up on anything without being seen.'

‘Except another Night Crow,' said Bloat.

‘Well, yes,' said the crow.

Damn, I hadn't thought of that,
he thought and
hoped his mother hadn't been following him the previous Thursday when, um, er …

‘I want you to go to Camelot and see if you can get us a human spy,' said Bloat.

‘What for?' said the crow. ‘Are you planning to end your peace treaty and attack the humans while they are least expecting it, thus giving yourself a huge advantage?'

‘No, of course not,' Bloat lied. ‘Whatever gave you that idea?'

‘Oh, I dunno,' said the crow. ‘It was just a thought.'

‘Well, no, it's nothing like that at all.'

‘Fair enough, so why do you want a human spy?'

‘It's secret,' said Bloat. ‘Something to do with cabbages.'

‘Oh, I see,' said the crow. ‘You should've said so.'

And before Bloat could stop him, the Night Crow flew off to try and recruit one of the kitchen staff who, of course, would be completely useless as a spy unless the dragons wanted to know what everyone was having for dinner.

The kitchen staff were never allowed up into the castle itself, so they'd never get any useful information
at all, except maybe the cook's recipe for Gristle Knob au Gadoue, which is absolutely no use to anyone without thumbs unless you're prepared to cook it without peeling off the gristle knobs first. The cook kept the recipe scratched into a sabre-toothed tiger's jawbone that she wore on a chain round her neck.

Bloat realised a kitchen spy would be useless, but there was no way he was ever going to admit he'd made a mistake, especially to his mother. He would just have to bluff his way through. Bloat would get the kitchen hand to tell him whatever it was that he or she found out and then he would make stuff up.

As long as he managed to ignore the little voice in his head that kept saying,
It will end in tears
, he'd be all right. By the law of averages some of it would have to be true.

Or not.