Hamster Princess--Giant Trouble

by Ursula Vernon

  There’s nothing inherently wrong with having a castle in the clouds, of course. You don’t have to worry about the neighbors, for one thing, and if you run out of space, you can always find a nice chunk of cumulus somewhere, attach a grappling hook, and add a wing on the castle that way.

  The downside is that if you’re drifting along without a care in the world, you run the chance of becoming hung up on, for example, a giant beanstalk that someone has carelessly left lying around.

  Harriet stepped cautiously off onto the clouds. She kept hold of Mumfrey’s saddle, in case the clouds weren’t quite solid, but her feet sank in and then stopped. It was like walking on marshmallow.

  “Well,” said Harriet gloomily, “I suppose we have to go in and apologize to the owner of the castle for having hooked their cloud.”

  “Qwerk,” said Mumfrey, which is Quail for “This would be the civic-minded thing to do.”

  They approached the castle.

  Indeed, they approached the castle for rather longer than Harriet expected. She had thought it was very close, but eventually she realized that it was enormous and fairly far away. The sounds of the harp came to them in snatches on the wind.

  Once they finally reached the castle, it seemed . . . crude. You still had to call it a castle—anything that size was definitely a castle—but the door was made of rough logs. The stones were thrown together with globs of mortar between them. It looked more like a giant cabin than like the castle that Harriet had grown up in.

  It went up for what seemed like miles. Whoever lived in the castle was very large indeed.

  “An Ogrecat could live here,” said Harriet. “Or a dragon. A big dragon. Or a giant.”

  “Qwerk.”

  Harriet sighed. Very large people were not inherently evil, of course, any more than regular-sized people, but dragons and Ogrecats were carnivorous and sometimes they tried to dine on hamster. Everyone in the kingdom knew better than to mess with Princess Harriet, but it was possible that the word hadn’t gotten up into the clouds yet.

  She didn’t mind having to fight monsters—she rather enjoyed it—but it seemed kind of rude to snag someone’s castle and then beat them up.

  “It’d be entrapment or something,” she said to Mumfrey. “Probably.”

  She knocked on the massive door.

  Even though she banged her knuckles against the wood as hard as she could, the sound seemed tiny. Would they even hear her?

  She lifted her paw to knock again. Nothing happened.

  Mumfrey cleared his throat and pointed with a wing.

  There was a gap in the door where the hinges joined the wall. It was a very small gap compared to the size of the door, but a very large gap if you were a hamster.

  Harriet stepped through. Mumfrey sucked in his gut and followed her.

  The harp music was suddenly much louder. It was definitely coming from inside the castle.

  “Hello?” called Harriet. “Is anybody there?”

  She poked her head around the door, one hand on the hilt of her sword.

  The room was huge, cavernous, the ceiling so high that it was almost lost in shadow. The beams overhead were whole tree trunks, with bark still on them. Harriet saw a bent nail in the door that was longer than she was tall.

  • • •

  The music stopped.

  CHAPTER 6

  She heard a soft shuffling in the far reaches of the room. “Who’s there?”

  “Me,” said Harriet. “Princess Harriet Hamsterbone.”

  “Are you a friend of the giant?”

  It was a female voice, and sounded young. Harriet peered into the gloom and saw movement, high up on the wall. “No,” she said. “I mean, not that I’m his enemy either. We’ve never met.”

  “You’ll probably want to keep it that way,” said the voice. “He’s not a nice sort. Eats people.”

  Harriet sighed. “I was afraid of that. It always ends in cannibalism.”

  Mumfrey looked nervously over his wing. A people-eating cloud giant?

  “If you leave now, you’ll probably get away,” said the voice. “He’s off hunting storms.”

  “Storms?” said Harriet, stepping farther into the room.

  “He’s a storm hunter. A good storm can fetch a high price on the open market. That’s how he bought me.” There was an odd, discordant noise, like somebody had banged a harp string in annoyance.

  She did not approve of people being bought. Or sold, for that matter. Once you started treating people like things you could buy and sell, you were firmly on the Bad Guy side of the equation. (Eating people was also bad, of course, but monsters did have to eat, so the trick was to get them into things like tofu and carrots that didn’t object to being eaten.) She wondered if the giant would like to eat beans. There had to be plenty on the vine for even the biggest giant.

  “Bought,” said the voice, and a sad arpeggio drifted from the back of the room, followed by another discordant twang.

  “Are you playing the harp back there?” asked Harriet.

  “In a manner of speaking,” said the voice. “I strongly suggest you run away now, but if you’re staying, come a little closer. I’m up on a shelf and it’s hard to get down.”

  Harriet strode out into the room.

  She strode boldly, because she was Harriet Hamsterbone, princess, warrior, bane of evil witches and unreasonable kings. But she still felt like an insect crossing the floor.

  Everything was just so large. There was a giant chair ahead of her, and looking up the legs was like looking up in a forest.

  The giant had to be thirty feet tall, to use a chair like that. A thirty-foot giant that ate people. This was shaping up to be a lovely day.

  She skirted the chair and an even larger table. There was a fireplace on one wall. Harriet’s entire bedroom would fit in that fireplace. An old-fashioned oil lamp on the table had a glass dome over it the size of a greenhouse and there were a couple of shelves on the walls and a door.

  Other than that, there was almost no furniture. The room seemed very bare. For all that it looked like a castle to Harriet, to a giant it might be a rather small cabin.

  “You don’t seem to be running away,” said the voice.

  “I’m very brave,” said Harriet, because it was true. “My friend Wilbur would add ‘and not always bright’ at this point, but he’s not here, so let’s not worry about that.”

  The shelf was so far up the wall that she could only see the bottom. There was a thump and another twang of music, and a face came into view.

  “You’re a hamster!” said Harriet, delighted.

  “Close, but not quite,” said the stranger. “I’m a harpster. My name’s Strings.”

  “Harpster?”

  Strings rested her chin on her hands. “It’s easier to explain if you come up here.”

  Harriet looked around. There were no ladders, no ropes, nothing up the wall. Except . . .

  “Aha!”

  The giant chair had a back like a ladder. Harriet climbed onto Mumfrey’s back. “Up, Mumfrey!”

  “Qwerk?” muttered Mumfrey, which is Quail for “Why am I doing all the work here?”

  But he hopped up the leg of the chair, digging his claws into the wood, and then up onto the seat. Harriet stood up in the saddle and jumped for the first slat on the back of the chair. She caught it and began to climb.

  Strings nodded. “I figured your bird would fly up,” she said. “But that works too.”

  “Mumfrey has a lot of talents,” said Harriet. “Sustained flight isn’t one of them. He is a top-notch battle quail, though!”

  She reached the top of the chair and eyed the gap.

  It was a big jump for a hamster, which is not, by nature, a species given to leaping.

  But Harriet was used to cliff-diving, which starts with a
jump, and landed easily.

  “Whoa!” said Strings.

  “. . . whoa,” said Harriet.

  They gazed at each other in frank amazement.

  Harpster.

  Strings was, in fact, a hamster . . . from the front.

  From the back, she was a harp.

  CHAPTER 7

  You’re a harp!” said Harriet.

  “No,” said Strings, “I’m a harpster. Half hamster, half harp. It’s complicated.”

  “I can see how it might be,” said Harriet.

  Strings shrugged. Her shoulders went up and the strings rippled behind her, a complicated scale that still sounded like a shrug.

  “So you live here with the giant?”

  Strings gave her a sarcastic look. “Well, I can’t exactly leave,” she said.

  “You can’t?” asked Harriet.

  The harp rolled her eyes and turned slightly, so that Harriet could see a shackle running around the back of the harp, attached to a long chain. “I’m not here for my health.”

  Harriet scowled. “I see.” She’d suspected as much, given the whole bought thing, but it was infuriating to see it. She decided right then that she wasn’t leaving without taking Strings with her.

  Strings turned and walked along the line of the shelf. Her legs were fused to the body of the harp, and she could only move in small, shuffling steps. The links of the chain clinked as she moved.

  “He doesn’t mistreat me or anything. I mean, other than not letting me leave. But he’s so boring. He wants the same music over and over.” She picked out an arpeggio on the strings. It sounded beautiful to Harriet, if you liked that sort of thing. “Plunk, plunk, wordless lullaby, plinka plunk. I’m really suffering creatively here.”

  She slapped the strings with one hand, fist raised. The noise that came out sounded raw and angry, like thunder.

  “Wow,” said Harriet. “I didn’t know a harp could make a sound like that!”

  “Most of them can’t,” said Strings. “I have to clench a lot of muscles. I have amazing abs.”

  “Cool!” said Harriet. She’d always wanted to be in a band. “Do you need a drummer?”

  “Maybe,” said the harp. “What are your qualifications?”

  “I can hit things really hard and my arms don’t get tired.”

  “Okay, you’re in.”

  Harriet opened her mouth to ask another question, when a horrific cackling came from the dark corner by the fireplace.

  “Yikes!” said Harriet. “What was that?”

  “That’s the goose,” said Strings. “My fellow captive. Doesn’t sing very well, I’m afraid. She’s a softy. Lays eggs.”

  “Golden eggs?” asked Harriet, who knew how these things usually go.

  Strings stared at her blankly. “Brown,” she said. “He eats them for breakfast. And lunch and sometimes dinner. And he puts so much chili powder on them, it’ll make you sneeze.”

  “The goose is okay,” said Strings. “She comes up occasionally and I scratch her beak.”

  Harriet nodded. Mumfrey also liked to have his beak scratched, right around the base, where things got itchy.

  Mumfrey hopped down from the chair and went to go investigate the goose. Harriet heard a “Qwerk!” and a “Honk!” and then the chatty “squonk-chrrk-blat” noises of two birds getting acquainted.

  “She does lay eggs when she gets nervous. Sort of spontaneously. It’s a bit awkward.”

  Harriet had recently had to lug a hydra egg around on her back. The hydra was half the size of a goose. She tried to imagine the size of the eggs that the goose might lay, and made a note to stay well clear of the bird’s back end.

  “So the giant bought you,” said Harriet. “How? From where?”

  Strings scowled. “I was stupid. I went to talk to what I thought was a music agent. Someone to set up tours and book castles to play at and whatnot. And instead he stuffed me in a sack and sold me off to a giant!”

  “That jerk!”

  “I know, right?!” Strings waved her arms in the air. Her strings jangled furiously. Harriet wondered if they ever snapped, and if so, if it was painful.

  “Does your family know where you are?”

  The harpster shook her head. “Don’t really have one. A wizard made a couple of us one day, as an experiment. I mean, he was very nice about it. Made sure we had a proper education and let us go off and follow our dreams. My . . . sister, I guess . . . is a harpsterichord and plays in a monastery. She seems happy. But I wanted to go out and do things! See the world! Shake the dust of that wizard’s laboratory off my tuning pins!”

  Harriet could sympathize. She herself had wanted to get out of her parents’ castle and explore the world as soon as she was old enough to toddle down to the stable and climb on a quail’s back.

  “Anyway,” said Strings, “it was great to meet you, and if I ever escape, I will look you up for Ironstring. But you really ought to leave before the giant gets back.”

  “I’m going to help you escape,” said Harriet.

  Strings gave her a skeptical look. “Are you sure? Did I mention that he’s about thirty feet tall? And eats people?”

  “Trust me,” said Harriet. “I’m a professional.”

  And no sooner had she said that than the door was flung open and a vast roaring voice shouted, “I’m home!”

  CHAPTER 8

  Strings grabbed Harriet’s hand and pulled her toward the back of the shelf. There was a pile of straw padded with what looked like giant towels.

  “Hide!” hissed Strings. “The goose will take care of Mumfrey!”

  Harriet hoped that the harpster was right. She dove under one of the towels and tried to look like straw.

  The giant closed the door. Under the edge of the towel, Harriet could see the enormous shape stomp across the floor, drop his bag (his bag was bigger than a wagon) on the floor . . . and pause.

  The giant turned toward the back of the room. He had incredibly long ears, dangling past his belt, and was wearing boots so enormous that a regular-sized person could have put a roof over one and set up house.

  Rabbit, thought Harriet. Giant Lop, I think, which would make sense. Problem is that once they get to this size, they stop wanting to eat just vegetables . . .

  “I smell something!” roared the giant rabbit. “Harp, has someone been here?”

  “My name isn’t Harp,” said Strings.

  The giant ignored her. “Fee fie foe . . . uh . . . famster,” he said. “I smell the blood of a mortal hamster!”

  “Famster?” said Harriet under her breath. “Famster? Seriously? Oh, now it’s on.” As a princess, she expected to have a certain amount of bad poetry written about her, but there were limits.

  “Yes, yes,” said Strings. “There was a hamster.”

  Harriet held her breath. Had she misjudged the harpster? Was Strings about to reveal her to the giant?

  An expression of alarm crossed the giant’s face. “Did she steal my treasure?”

  “Well, I’m still here,” said Strings.

  “Not you,” said the giant rudely, and stomped over to the doorway on the far side of the room. Harriet caught a glimpse of an enormous bed through the door and an equally enormous chest. The giant opened the chest and began digging through it.

  “Oh, thanks,” muttered Strings. “Nice to know that I’m valued. Bad enough to get bought and sold, but to someone who doesn’t care that you exist . . .”

  She plucked a bitter arpeggio.

  “Should we make a break for it?” whispered Harriet.

  “No,” whispered Strings, over the notes. “He’ll go to sleep after dinner. That’s the best time.”

  “Got it.”

  Harriet settled down to wait. She hoped that Mumfrey was doing the same, and that the goose could keep him safe.
r />   Mumfrey, for his part, was tucked up underneath the goose like a chick under its mother. While most people would object to being sat on by a giant goose, for a bird like Mumfrey, this was actually quite comfortable. It reminded him of being a very young quail, when he and his sisters had snuggled up under his mother’s wings at night. There were several eggs under there with him, and they were warm and smooth and comfortable.

  He was, in fact, starting to fall asleep.

  He was about to have a very rude awakening.

  The giant left his bedroom, apparently satisfied. “Next time, try to keep the hamster here,” he ordered Strings.

  “How do you know I didn’t?” asked the harpster. “You got in late.”

  “Yes, well . . .”

  “So cut us loose,” said Strings.

  The giant groaned. “It’ll be two days with an ax,” he said. “The cloud’s all tangled up and I’ll have to chop all the tangled bits free. Clouds are delicate, you know.”

  He built up the fire. The logs beside the fireplace were whole trees. The fire roared, and he took down a frying pan as big as Harriet’s bed and slid it over the fire.

  Then he casually reached over and shoved his hand underneath the goose.

  The goose honked in alarm. Strings put her hands over her mouth.

  Harriet cringed.

  The giant pulled out one egg, two eggs, and then—

  “What’s this?” cried the giant.

  He yanked his hand free of the traumatized goose.

  CHAPTER 9

  Fee fie foe fear!” cried the giant. “How did a quail get in here?”

  Mumfrey squawked and flailed in the giant rabbit’s fist, to no avail. The goose honked wildly, then made a strangled sound. An egg plopped out and rolled along the floor, going wogga wogga wogga as it teetered in a circle.