The Dragons 3

by Colin Thompson

  ‘You are,’ Mordred muttered.

  He stuck out his sulky bottom lip so far that a passing seagull mistook it for a toilet.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ said the Captain. ‘So now you will give me your Lord’s Ring and that nice sharp dagger hidden inside your shirt.’

  You would imagine that at that very moment, and for quite a lot of following moments too, the one person in the world that Mordred would hate more than anyone would be Captain Shortbread Silver. This, however, was not the case.

  ‘You are the nastiest, most unscrupulous person I have ever met,’ Mordred said.

  ‘Quite so, my lord,’ said the Captain. ‘And I am also the one in charge.’

  ‘Indeed you are,’ said Mordred, ‘and when I said you were the nastiest, most unscrupulous person I had ever met, perhaps you misunderstood me.’

  ‘I think not, my lord. Correct me if I am wrong, but did you not say those words with a tone of admiration in your voice?’

  ‘I did, good captain,’ Mordred replied.

  He then told Captain Silver the story of how he had ended up being banished to the remote island. The fact that a mere twelve-year-old child had been considered so evil impressed the Captain immensely. He particularly liked the part about the baby pony stuffed with slug’s intestines. Mordred went on to reveal his plan to raise an army, kill King Arthur and claim the throne for himself.

  ‘With allies like you, good captain, we cannot fail,’ he said.

  ‘I am flattered and honoured, my lord, and will gladly join your cause,’ said the Captain. ‘On one condition.’

  ‘Name it.’

  ‘When we have killed Arthur and you rule Camelot, will you give me his sister, Morgan le Fey, to be my wife?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Mordred, ‘though I think you may live to regret it. She may have a legendary beauty, but she has a ferocious temper.’

  ‘No problem. Look at me, I have survived many fates worse than death,’ said the Captain. ‘I’ll keep her in leg-irons and handcuffs and put a very big cork, which by chance I managed to salvage from my cargo, in her mouth.’

  ‘That would not be enough,’ said Mordred. ‘Were you to chain her up like that and then blindfold her and keep her in a barrel of dirty water full of piranhas, she would still make you suffer. I guarantee that no matter how you restrain her, she will still find a way to maim you.’

  ‘Even so,’ the Captain continued, ‘it would be worth the loss of a limb to make her mine. Pain holds no terror for me. You may have noticed that I have a wooden leg.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Mordred. ‘It’s kind of hard to miss.’

  ‘When I was cast ashore on this godforsaken rock, I had nothing to eat but the last few corks, an enormous amount of rotten whale meat and some sand lice. I grew so hungry that I was forced to eat my boot and, as I only had one boot left, I thought I might as well eat my leg. I could possibly have planned this better for, as you can see, there are no trees on this island from which to carve a wooden leg. Thus, that is why I wear this twisted, old tree trunk that washed ashore during a storm and I curse it.’

  ‘Why?’ Mordred asked. ‘Do you keep losing your balance?’

  ‘No, it is not that,’ the Captain explained. ‘It is the fact that this tree is still alive and has grown into me, so that my very bones are part of it and I cannot remove it and because it is alive, it does what all trees do: it keeps growing so I become taller and more lopsided by the day. I shall be forced to saw it off or else I will tip over. And if that wasn’t bad enough, whenever I stand still for any length of time it starts to take root, fixing me to the spot.’

  ‘Could you not perhaps apply weedkiller to your leg?’

  ‘I fear that were I to do such a thing, it would kill me too,’ the Captain cried. ‘And yet for all that, it is not the worst curse of this leg.’

  ‘There’s more?’ said Mordred.

  ‘Indeed. I am plagued with woodworms. They have tunnelled through my leg and are now making little holes in my bones.’

  ‘That’s dreadful.’

  ‘Indeed, and yet there is worse.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘The woodpeckers.’

  ‘What?!’

  ‘They cling to my leg and peck ferociously at my knee,’ said the Captain. ‘Still, it could be worse. At least the woodpeckers are eating the woodworms and I can pick the rest out with my hook.’

  ‘Yes, I was wondering how you lost your hand,’ said Mordred. ‘But now I’m not sure I dare ask.’

  ‘Oh, it’s quite simple. Some ferocious battle or something. I must have left it somewhere, but I cannot for the life of me remember where.’

  ‘What, you just sort of lost your hand?’

  ‘Yes. I lost my mind once too,’ said the Captain, ‘but I found most of that again. I think.’

  ‘And the eye-patch?’

  ‘Clumsy accident, really,’ said the Captain. ‘And here is a useful bit of advice, young man. If you find yourself in a dust storm just after you have had your hand replaced with a very pointy steel hook, probably not a good idea to rub your eyes.’

  ‘You do seem to have been a little careless with yourself,’ said Mordred.

  ‘Indeed, though it could have been worse. I did only poke out one of my eyes,’ Captain Shortbread Silver agreed. ‘Hard to imagine that my nickname as a child was Lucky.’

  They shook hands on their new alliance, each trusting the other as much as a chicken trusts a python. To show their newfound loyalty in each other, the Captain gave Mordred his Lord’s Ring back and Mordred gave the Captain his dagger.

  After all, he thought, I’ve still got my spare dagger down my pants.

  ‘After all, my lord, you’ve still got your spare dagger down your pants,’ said the Captain with a grin.

  ‘I think we were destined to work together,’ said Mordred with a smile.

  ‘Should we not bury your parents before we leave, my lord?’ said the Captain.

  ‘I was planning on letting the seagulls eat them, and when the birds are so full they cannot fly, I thought we might kill them and have a good feed ourselves before setting off to sea,’ said Mordred.

  ‘Excellent idea,’ said Captain Silver, ‘and as luck would have it, I have some peppercorns I rescued from the shipwreck, a large potato, some delicious seaweed and a lovely big cooking pot. We shall indeed have a fine feed.’

  FAMOUS DRAGONS OF THE WORLD

  CALIFORNIA

  DRAGON DUDE. LIKE, FIRE, MAN.

  After three days of ferocious food poisoning and spectacular vomiting, they slid the boat down the beach into the water and set sail. No sooner were they away from the shore and being tossed around by the angry sea than Mordred resumed his vomiting. He lay on the deck, tied to the mast by his left leg, as the waves – combined with peppercorns, seaweed, potato, carrots12 and half-digested seagull – washed over him.

  ‘Make it stop,’ he wailed.

  ‘That, I’m afraid, is beyond my control,’ said Captain Silver, ‘but don’t worry, you’ll get your sea legs in a day or two.’

  ‘A day or two,’ Mordred cried. ‘I’ll be dead before then.’

  ‘Don’t be such a baby,’ said the Captain. ‘Seagull sandwich?’

  Mordred screamed, vomited, wailed, cried, then vomited again.13 The delicious smell of fried seagull eggs with crispy seagull feet and beaks that the Captain was cooking for breakfast did nothing to help. Mordred’s stomach had taken on a life of its own. It writhed and contracted and exploded and nothing he did could bring it under control. Even when he fell asleep from sheer exhaustion, his stomach kept throwing up.14

  When I get back to Avalon, Mordred swore to himself as he passed out, I will kill everyone.

  Normally, after a day and night of merciless wild sea, the new day brings a beautiful calm with a sea as smooth as glass. This was not normally. The sea was even angrier than it had been the day before. Sure, it was like glass, but more like glass that was being thrown violently up and down in
a barrel lined with nails.

  Mordred was too exhausted to whimper, never mind cry. His insides were very, very cross with him and made sure he knew it. Things he had eaten five years earlier were now being thrown up, including a rather nice diamond ring he had stolen from his mother. He had swallowed it in a hurry when she had caught him near her jewellery box and had not seen it since. He had jammed a sieve in the toilet to get it back, but never saw it again and assumed that it must have slipped away down the drains, when in fact it had been hiding in his appendix.15

  There were also several brass screws, which he knew were from his grandmother’s coffin, and a small tooth, which he assumed was from the lovely, sweet, cuddly puppy that his little sister had so adored and which he had eaten one afternoon about five years ago.

  At last they came in sight of land, and as the wind blew them into a wide bay, the water became calmer. Mordred’s stomach slowly stopped trying to escape from his body and his face changed from a dirty-green colour back to its usual dirty-grey colour.

  ‘See, I told you you’d feel better,’ said Captain Silver as Mordred crawled up the beach and collapsed on a pile of rotten seaweed.

  Still the ground was shaking. Not like the rough shaking of the sea, but more like the shuddering of an earthquake. Mordred thought it was just his body getting over the terrible storm, but when the ground spoke to him, he realised something wasn’t right.

  ‘Get off me, thou pestilence,’ it said, shaking so hard that Mordred was thrown into the air.

  The pile of rotten seaweed turned out to be the clothes of a human being, though calling the creature human was stretching the definition of the word.

  Captain Silver drew his sword and held it to the creature’s throat. ‘Who are you that you dare call us pestilence, thou foul-stinking apology for flotsam?’ he roared.16

  ‘I am Culvert, Prince of Clapshamshire,’ said the creature, ‘and I am jetsam not flotsam, for I did not fall into the sea by accident. I was thrown overboard deliberately by a mutinous crew. Robbed I was, then thrown into shark-infested waters to certain death.’

  ‘Yet you are not dead,’ said Mordred.

  As an old sea-dog himself, Captain Silver had heard of the Prince. Prince Culvert of Clapshamshire was legendary among sailors for he had sailed to more corners of the world than anyone else. Before his great exploits, everyone thought that the world only had four corners and that it was flat. Then they discovered that the world had seventeen corners and was definitely flat, for, so the legend went, the great Prince was saved from falling off the edge by hanging onto the tentacles of a giant squid. Most of these fabulous stories came from the Prince himself.

  To find a great hero like Prince Culvert of Clapshamshire in such dire straits confused and upset the Captain.

  ‘Who performed this dastardly act upon you, good sir?’ he said, helping the Prince to his feet.

  ‘You may well ask,’ said Culvert.

  ‘Thank you very much. Who performed this dastardly act upon you, good sir?’ the Captain repeated.

  ‘Well, it was like this. I was tied up at Shoeburyness at the mouth of the River Stycks when these three disreputable characters approached me, offering me a priceless ruby if I would set sail and take them to the lovely island of Fantasia some thirteen days away.’

  ‘Know you who these persons were and their names?’ Mordred asked.

  ‘Indeed I do,’ Prince Culvert replied. ‘There was a young lady of rare beauty who went by the name of Princess Floridian. Accompanying her was a young man going by the name of Brassica, who said he was actually Arthur, the true King of Avalon who had been deposed by a false King Arthur. There was a great lout of a lad called Rampart, who claimed to be quite big in the world of turnips, which may well have been true for he most certainly did look like a big turnip.’

  ‘Really?’ said Mordred, seeing all sorts of wonderfully evil possibilities opening up before him. ‘And where did you take these people?’

  ‘Well, that is it,’ Prince Culvert explained. ‘We set sail and once we were out of sight of land, they said we were not going to Fantasia, but to the Diabolical Islands,17 which, as everyone knows, is the land of pirates and brigands. Ships going to the Diabolical Islands are seldom seen again except as ghost ships. When I refused to take them there, they overpowered me and cast me adrift in an old pickled herring barrel.’

  ‘Did your crew do nothing to save ye?’ said Captain Silver.

  ‘They were bribed with turnips,’ said the Prince, ‘and the promise of Naughty Things.’18

  ‘Tell me, good captain,’ said Mordred, struggling to his feet, ‘have you ever been to these Diabolical Islands?’

  ‘Been there? Why, I should say so!’ The Captain laughed. ‘I was born there, and there be precious few folk who can say that.’

  The reason there were so few people who could say that was because eating babies was a Diabolical Island tradition, and Captain Silver was one of only three known people out of the quite a lot who were born there who had not been eaten. He was spared because he was born particularly hairy, covered from head to toe in thick curly hair and, if that wasn’t bad enough, the hair had been ginger. The other two uneaten children were the Captain’s younger siblings known as the Indigestible Twins.19

  ‘It is no mistake that we are named as we are,’ said their mother, the staggeringly beautiful yet strangely terrifying and left-handed Lambstail Indigestible.

  This meant, of course, that the population of the Diabolical Islands seldom varied. There were, give or take three or four, two hundred and seventy people living there. Old people died and were skilfully converted to tasty casseroles, and runaways, such as Brassica and his cronies, sought refuge there. There was no government, no police and no rules. It was a rough and dangerous place to live, though living was an optimistic word for life there. It was the survival of the fittest or most cunning.

  It was the perfect place for Mordred.

  He had never heard of the islands before then, but felt instantly that it was his destiny to go there. He would gather a band of evil souls around him and with them he would take over the place and declare himself King before setting out for a vengeful and disgustingly violent revolution in Avalon. Obviously Brassica, having been thrown off the throne, would hate Arthur as much as he did. It seemed too good to be true.

  ‘We must go to the Diabolical Islands immediately,’ said Mordred.

  ‘Er, what about the wealth and rewards and all that stuff you said you would give me when we got back to your estate?’ said Captain Silver.

  ‘Wealth?’ said Prince Culvert who, although a prince, was seriously deficient in the being-rich department, having been cut off without a penny by his parents because of a Dark Scandal.

  ‘Never mind all that,’ said Mordred. ‘We can do that later.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said the Captain, reaching for his really sharp dagger.

  ‘Yes, I agree with the good captain,’ said the Prince, reaching for a particularly smelly bit of seaweed with really sharp grit sticking to it. ‘Wealth first, travel later.’

  ‘But if we go to the islands we can raise a rebel force and take over the whole of Avalon and then we will have beyond our wildest dreams.’

  ‘Listen, sonny,’ said Captain Silver, ‘I have dreams that are so wild they would paralyse you with violent conniptions.’

  ‘And my dreams are full of lots and lots of rude things you couldn’t even begin to imagine,’ the Prince added. ‘And weevils.’

  ‘So take us to Castle Laclustre and fill our pockets with gold, or we shall bury you on this very shore,’ said Captain Shortbread Silver.

  ‘Alive,’ said the Prince.

  ‘And upside down,’ the Captain added.

  ‘Besides,’ said the Prince, ‘a few bags of gold will always come in handy when you’re trying to recruit evil villains to your cause. If they think there is more treasure to be had, they will try to keep you alive.’

  The problem was t
hat Mordred wasn’t exactly sure how much gold and silver and jewels his parents had actually owned, if any. They had never lived the high life, but that could either mean they hadn’t any riches or that they had been really mean and had tons of stuff stashed away. Mordred had always told himself the latter was the case, but he had to admit that could have been wishful thinking.

  Whatever the truth was, there was no way he dared tell Captain Shortbread Silver or Prince Culvert about his doubts. He had to think fast. But all he could think was, HELP! 20

  He tried to think of a way to play for more time, not that it would help. In fact, it would just make things worse. Instead of being scared witless for a couple of days, he could end up being scared witless for weeks, but there was always the chance that something might turn up and fix things.

  We might get attacked by highwaymen or bandits, he thought. Then I can pretend I’ve been kidnapped and offer them a reward to rescue me.

  Oh, umm.

  Except that would mean I would have to give them gold and stuff.

  ‘It is many days’ journey to my estate,’ he said. ‘Unless we had fast horses. Which of course we don’t. And of course it will take even longer because I haven’t the faintest idea where we are.’

  ‘Apart from those three fast horses grazing in that field over there,’ said Prince Culvert, pointing to the top of the beach.

  ‘But surely we cannot just take them,’ said Mordred. ‘Horses as fine as those will belong to great knights or noblemen. If we take those horses, they would hunt us down and hang us as common horse thieves. No, my lord, we will have to spend many, many days walking.’