‘What’s a vegetarian?’ said the boy.
When Betty explained, he was even more confused. It seemed that the King was not a vegetarian and it seemed that the range of vegetables and fruit on offer was cabbages and other cabbages and more cabbages.
‘And the baby cabbages,’ said the boy.
And when Betty looked closer at the other kitchen servants she realised that it wasn’t just the air that was green, it was all the people too.
‘So the only thing you ever have to eat is boiled cabbage,’ she said.
‘No, of course not,’ said the boy. ‘We have baby cabbages too and fried cabbage and pickled cabbage and cabbage coleslaw and … and, umm, err, cabbage stew and at Christmas we have red cabbage and cabbage stalk wine.’
‘And is that what everyone eats, even the King?’
‘Well, yes, of course,’ said the boy.
It was obvious that Transylvania Waters had become an even more wretched place to live than it had been when Mordonna and Nerlin had run away. Mordonna had told Betty about the great feasts they used to have in the castle – and not just in the castle, but all over the country. There were quail’s eggs, white caviar, mushrooms as wide as tables and twenty-three-layer chocolate cakes with fresh strawberries and cream between every layer. Queen Scratchrot had talked about the wonderful meals too, and had even brought a few of her old cookery books with her, containing incredible recipes that were more like works of art than cooking instructions. Transylvania Waters may have been a damp, mould-infested country with spies and secret agents at every corner, but the food had always been its saving grace.
Yet now, all there seemed to be to eat was cabbages.
‘It’s different on Fridays,’ said the boy. ‘We don’t eat grown-up or baby cabbages on Fridays.’
‘What do you eat then?’
‘Nothing. Oh no, that’s not true. Sometimes we eat our own toenails.’
Something didn’t add up. Transylvania Waters was a country full of wizards, so why couldn’t they just do some spells to make any sort of food they wanted? Before Betty could ask anyone, there was an almighty crash and the kitchen door flew open so hard that the whole room and everyone inside it shook.
A fat angry woman in a fat angry dress, with fat angry hair and bright red lipstick smudged over her fat angry mouth and down her chin, stormed in.
It was Countess Slab, the King’s awful new wife. The only good thing about her was that she was so dreadful, she made the King seem almost, but not quite, but nearly maybe, well, actually not so bad after all.
‘WHERE’S ME LUNCH?’ she roared. ‘It’s a minute past one. I wants me lunch NOW.’
The cook – and, in fact, everyone else in the kitchen, except Betty – had thrown themselves to the floor when the Countess had come in. The woman plunged her arm into a boiling saucepan, pulled out two whole cabbages and swallowed them.
This woman’s days are numbered, Betty thought to herself. She could tell that the Countess was only in charge because she was louder, larger and nastier than everyone else.
‘Oi yous, little girl thing,’ she screamed at Betty, ‘get over ’ere.’
‘“Please come here, Your Highness” is what you are supposed to say,’ Betty said. ‘I am a proper princess, not some lardy pants who married a tyrant who shouldn’t really be king at all, and therefore I outrank you, fatso, and you will speak to me with respect.’
The Countess froze. It had been many, many years since anyone had answered her back. In her homeland of Bavaria one or two people had tried, but she had simply sat on them and carried on sitting on them until they had got very, very flat and dead. She had even done this to one of her own sisters. After that no one had ever answered her back, not even her parents.
Until now.
Still rooted to the spot, Countess Slab changed from her angry-looking red to a dangerous-looking purple. Because of her shape she looked like a very big aubergine in a dress. Steam began to come out of her nose, and if there had been any matadors in the room they would have all run away. This is what Betty did, pausing only to cast a spell over the doorway she ran through that made it shrink to about half the width of the Countess. Blind with fury, Countess Slab threw herself at the doorway and stuck halfway through.
‘YOUS EVIL LITTLE WORM!’ she screamed at Betty, who had stopped just out of her reach.9
Taking a few steps back, Betty turned and grinned at her.
‘You will now apologise to me, lardy pants, and then you will apologise to the whole world for being so gross and horrible and stupid,’ she said.
‘SHAN’T!’
‘In that case you can stay where you are,’ said Betty. ‘And don’t think you can call a stonemason to come and dig the wall away, because I’ve done a spell and the whole wall is as hard as a diamond.’
‘Excuse me,’ said the cook, after Betty had made a new door in the wall and gone back into the kitchen. ‘Did you say you were a princess?’
‘Umm, err, yes,’ said Betty. ‘Probably shouldn’t have said that, but you know, I got carried away.’
‘So Princess Mordonna is your mother?’
‘Maybe.’
‘And is your father called Nerlin, the true King of Transylvania Waters?’ said the cook.
‘Umm…’
‘It’s all right,’ said someone. ‘You’re among friends here. We’ve all talked and dreamt of the day Nerlin and Mordonna would come back and get rid of them.’
The cook wrapped her arms round Betty and hugged her. All the others came over smiling and wanting to touch her.
‘So it is all true,’ said the cook. ‘When your mother and father and the Queen disappeared, the King tried to cover it all up and said they’d gone away on holiday, but no one believed him.’
She pointed at the Countess, who was now stuck so tightly in the doorway that her stumpy legs wouldn’t reach the ground. She was kicking her feet and screaming.
‘You’re sure she can’t get out of there?’ she asked.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Betty, explaining that she had never been that good at magic so her spells could be unpredictable.
‘She looks pretty stuck,’ said the kitchen boy and he went over and pulled off the Countess’s red shoes.
Then, one by one, everyone went over and tickled the soles of her feet, except for the cook, who whacked them as hard as she could with a huge wooden spoon. The Countess screamed even louder and told everyone all the terrible ways she would kill them when she got free.
‘I won’t just kill you once,’ she cried. ‘I’ll kill you over and over again and then boil you up in a huge saucepan with old cabbage stalks.’
Everyone went through another door into the room where the front end of the countess was screaming and frothing at the mouth like a big, screaming, frothing-at-the-mouth hippopotamus. It was the first time any of them had ever dared get that close to her for fear of getting hit with the nearest kitchen implement.10
‘We’ll spread the word,’ said the cook to Betty, ‘and if there’s anything you need us to do, just let me know.’
‘Thank you,’ said Betty and, taking a broomstick from one of the cleaners’ cupboards, she wished them all goodbye and flew back to the roof.
‘COME ’EEEEERRRE…’ the Countess screamed after her.
‘Yes, we can hear her from here,’ said Mordonna when Betty told her what had happened. ‘Well done, darling.’
It wasn’t often that Betty did magic. Usually her spells had a habit of turning out not exactly as she had planned. They generally went OK, but in a completely different way to what Betty had expected, like the time she had turned the evil little boy next door into a fridge. She had just meant to make him wet himself, but instead of saying ‘be afraid’ she had said ‘be a fridge’. No one had really minded as he was a really good fridge and they had actually needed a new one. But it seemed that coming to Transylvania Waters, the land of magic, had somehow made Betty’s magic work properly.
; ‘Brilliant start,’ said the Queen.
‘Brilliant start,’ said everyone else too.
‘And you’re absolutely sure that all the whole country has to eat is cabbages?’ said Mordonna.
‘Yes,’ said Betty. ‘But if there are so many witches and wizards everywhere, why can’t they turn the cabbages into nice food?’
‘Exactly,’ said Mordonna. ‘That’s what used to happen. Because vegetables are basically evil, but are also really easy to grow in Transylvania Waters, we used to perform Food Magic and turn things like carrots into caviar. You could buy cookery books full of spells that could turn vegetables into anything you wanted. My favourite was the Two Brussels Sprouts Into Two Rat Kebabs Spell.’
‘I always liked the Apple Pie Spell, myself,’ said the Queen.
‘My favourite was the Cauliflower Spell,’ said Vessel. ‘But then we servants were only allowed to perform simple Vegetable Spells.’
‘I wonder why the spells don’t work any more,’ said the Queen.
‘Probably the King,’ said Winchflat. ‘Persecuting everyone.’
‘Yes, but if it was him, surely he wouldn’t make himself eat it too,’ said Betty. ‘The kitchen boy said everyone, even the King, had nothing to eat but cabbage.’
They came up with various reasons, but there was no way they could tell which might be the right one:
The Food Magic Spells had been used too much and had got worn out.11
Someone had placed a Cabbage Curse so that even though the Food Magic Spells were still working, this new curse just turned the food back into cabbages.
If there was a Cabbage Curse, it was organised by a group of grey-haired school teachers who thought that cabbage is actually good for you. This, of course, is stupid because as everyone knows, chocolate is ten times better for you than any vegetables.
It was aliens.
Legend. 12
Who cares?
In fact, all of the above reasons were true except for the bit about aliens.13
‘So if all the food here turns to cabbage, why couldn’t they just import nice food from overseas?’ said Betty. ‘I mean, it’s not like they couldn’t afford it, is it? We all know witches and wizards can turn anything into money.’
To prove her point, she picked up a pebble, waved her hand over it and said the Twenty Dollar Note Spell.
‘See,’ she said, holding out her hand.
‘Brilliant,’ said Winchflat, ‘a cabbage leaf.’
‘My goodness, no decent food and no money,’ said Mordonna. ‘This Cabbage Curse is some really powerful magic.’
‘Yet another reason for everyone to hate the King,’ said the Queen. ‘Even if he’s got nothing at all to do with it, everyone will still blame him.’
‘I like cabbage,’ said Auntie Mould, but since she had spent years eating nothing but her own scabs that was hardly surprising.
‘I like money,’ said Betty, throwing away the cabbage leaf.
Whoever was controlling it all was using some very powerful magic. It had even got through the Protection-From-ALL-Outside-Spells-Curses-And-Witchery Gadget that Winchflat had fitted to the camper van before they had set off for Transylvania Waters – as Mordonna discovered when she went back into the van to make them all bacon sandwiches and found that the bread and bacon had turned into cabbages.
‘Even the bar of chocolate I was hiding in the glove box has vanished,’ she said.
‘Umm, err, that was me,’ said Mildred Flambard-Flood. ‘I had a craving. Sorry.’
Witches are just the same as humans when it comes to being pregnant. They get strange food cravings. Chocolate for humans is not strange at all. Lots of extremely clever and intelligent people frequently crave chocolate even if they are not going to have a baby, but witches and wizards like chocolate as much as humans like crunchy cockroach bars, so for Mildred Flambard-Flood to crave chocolate was weird. Mordonna knew most humans were addicted to chocolate so she always kept a bar or two around in case she needed to lure a human somewhere.
‘That’s fine, my dear,’ said Mordonna, putting her arm around her daughter-in-law’s shoulder. ‘Was it you who ate one of the tyres off the van?’
‘Yes, sorry.’
‘That’s all right. We’re not going anywhere in it.’
It was decided that all the Flood children would go down into the town and check things out. They had never been since Mordonna and Nerlin had left Transylvania Waters so no one would know who they were and they’d be perfectly safe. Or rather, they would be as safe as anyone else.
Far below, Countess Slab was roaring at the top of her voice, a voice so powerful that some of the slates fell off the roof, followed by twelve chimney pots.
Many years ago, when Mordonna and Nerlin had fled Transylvania Waters, Queen Scratchrot had fled with them too. Being fairly old, she could not be expected to do fleeing on foot, so she had ridden on the back of a miserable, complaining donkey called George. When they had reached Shanghai they were so fed up with George’s constant complaining that they had sold him to a coal miner for three fen, which is slightly more, but not much more, than nothing.
From then on, George had carried coal up from the mine. As time passed he realised that all the things he had moaned about before in his old life had not actually been that bad and he decided that if he ever escaped from the coal mine he would never complain about anything ever again.
Except my aching back, he thought, and my split hooves.
And all the bald patches on my back,
and the rubbish grass I always have to eat,
and the dirty water,
and the colour of the sky.
After a few more years he decided that if he did ever escape, he wouldn’t complain about the colour of the sky. He prayed to himself every day that something or someone would come along and set him free.
Then one day something did.
The coal miner never actually seemed to sell any of his coal on account of it being an environmentally friendly coal that wouldn’t catch fire and burn. This meant that each day George had to walk just that little bit further across the field to tip out his load. One day as he leaned forward to tip out his load at the far side of the field, he tripped over something.
‘Isn’t that typical?’ he moaned as blood trickled out of his cut leg. ‘Probably start raining now with big hailstones and lightning too and I’ll get gangrene and my leg will fall off.’
When he looked down to see what it was that had injured him, he saw a piece of bent metal sticking out of the mud.
‘Oh, wonderful,’ he said. ‘For anyone else it would be a magic lamp with a genie, but as it’s me I expect it’s an old corned beef tin that will give me a terrible infection much worse than gangrene and all my legs will fall off.’
But he was wrong.
It was a magic lamp and a genie did appear.
‘Hello, sunshine,’ it said.
‘Sunshine? Sunshine?’ said George. ‘I don’t see any sunshine. Look, black clouds, big storm coming. What are you talking about?’
The genie clicked its fingers and the clouds crept off with their tails between their legs, leaving the sky a brilliant blue and warm sunshine kissing George’s back.
‘Right, donkey, and may I say that you are one of the most magnificent donkeys that I have ever seen,’ said the genie. ‘You can have three wishes. And consider the blue sky thing like a free sample so that’s not one of your wishes.’
‘Wow,’ said George, feeling strangely happy for the first time since he could remember.14 ‘My first wish is for a hundred wishes,’ he said quickly.
‘Clever boy,’ said the genie. ‘You’d be amazed at how many people never think of that.’
The coal miner was marching across the field towards George cracking his whip. This was his normal method of communication, not just with George but with everyone.
‘You don’t need to tell me,’ said the genie.
The miner flew up into the air. His whip s
lapped him around the face and flew backwards, flipping the miner upside-down with such force that his head and shoulders vanished into the mud. Then he shot up in the air again, flew upside-down back across the field and fell down the shaft of the coal mine into a dirty puddle.
‘That was a special ten-pack revenge wish,’ said the genie.
‘Brilliant,’ said George. ‘Can you show me how to smile?’
‘No problem,’ said the genie. ‘Though a donkey with a smile on its face looks very weird. Take my advice and only smile when you’re on your own. You could scare people.’
After a meal of the finest grass ever, George was transported back to a small valley high up in the mountains above Transylvania Waters, where he rested for a week eating lots more wonderful delicate grass and drinking crystal clear water that magically healed all his aches and pains.
‘You know what you need, sunshine?’ said the genie. ‘A wife.’
‘You think?’
‘Go and look at yourself in the stream,’ said the genie. ‘You are a seriously handsome animal. You are the Brad Pitt of donkeys, with a touch of Clint Eastwood, and any young lady donkey would give her right hoof to be your wife.’
George walked across to the stream and stared at his reflection in the water. He was so good looking that he not only didn’t recognise himself, but he also totally fell in love with himself.
‘You are so right, genie,’ he said. ‘I am one totally cool donkey dude.’
‘You are indeed,’ said the genie. ‘I have read on the Genie Blog that your mistress Queen Scratchrot has returned to Transylvania Waters. It’s time for you to go back home and check out the chicks.’
‘Yeah, let’s go,’ said George.
‘Well, I can’t actually come with you,’ said the genie.
‘Why not?’
‘As you know, Transylvania Waters is the land of witches and wizards,’ the genie explained. ‘And witches and wizards are really bad news for genies. They make us grant them outrageous and often dangerous wishes, which, because we are genies, we are not allowed to refuse. No, you must return home alone.’
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