‘OK, little one,’ said Merlin, looking into his crystal ball, ‘time to wake up.’
The girl, who was groggy from the sleep Merlin had put her under, went down without her lamp.
‘My lamp is in the workshop getting serviced,’ she whispered in a voice that sounded very similar to the voice of the person she was supposed to be, but wasn’t. ‘Join hands and I will lead you to the kitchens for a big feed.’
The air was filled with the alluring and irresistible scent of an enormous, freshly baked turnip pie. It was totally captivating, which was exactly what it was supposed to be. Everyone joined hands and walked carefully through the darkness, except for the two big, strong, thick men at the back, who totally failed to miss the open trapdoor that several of Mordred’s gang had earlier totally failed to miss. Bright Eyes Pew only just managed to wrench his hand free, otherwise he would not have totally missed the trapdoor too. However, in pulling his hand free he lost his balance and fell backwards and did fall down the hole he had just narrowly missed.
So now there was just Rampart, Princess Floridian and Ruthra being led along in the silent darkness. Each of them had wild thoughts racing round their brains, but neither of them could bring themselves to speak.
They stopped.
‘Wait here a moment,’ said their invisible guide, letting go of Rampart’s hand.
Silence.
Quite a lot of silence followed by some more silence and then a bit with no noise in it at all and finally some sort of fabric-rustling noise.
Then their guide either turned to face them, or took off a mask, or there was someone else there, because a pair of green eyes appeared.
‘Ready now,’ said a voice where the eyes were.
A trapdoor opened and Rampart, Princess Floridian and Ruthra fell down into further darkness to land on tepid water that came halfway up their thighs. To be accurate, they all fell slightly differently. Rampart fell straight down and landed on his feet. Princess Floridian fell flat on her back, swore a lot, splashed about a lot, staggered to her feet and swore a lot more.54 Of course, the trapdoor was in the rook of the Number Twelve Turnip Store where Mordred was imprisoned and Ruthra landed right on top of him. The two of them, who were about the same age and size, fell over, then swore a lot more than Princess Floridian, who was delighted to learn at least fifteen new swearwords she had never heard before. After they had splashed about a bit and knocked Rampart and Princess Floridian over several times, Ruthra and Mordred finally managed to stand up and shout at each other.
‘Have you any idea who I am?’ they both shouted.
‘What? Do you mean you’re so stupid you can’t remember?’
‘When we get out of here I will have you thrown back in here,’ they both shouted.
In fact, they both kept doing this until Princess Floridian managed to get them to shut up for a minute.
‘Who are you?’ the two boys said.
‘Who am I? Who am I?’ they both said. ‘I’ll tell you who I am. I am the rightful King of Avalon. That’s who I am.’
Each time they spoke they said exactly the same thing. It was as though there was an echo in the room.
Finally, the Princess managed to get them to shut up long enough so they could tell each other exactly who they were.
‘But I am of royal blood,’ said Mordred. ‘The wretched child King Arthur is my cousin. I have priority.’
‘But I was King when your wretched cousin was nothing more than a dirty little kitchen boy,’ said Ruthra. ‘I have priority.’
‘Doesn’t count,’ said Mordred. ‘I have royal blood.’
‘Only if you accept that Arthur is the true King, which I do not. I am the true King,’ said Ruthra. ‘Your cousin is an impostor and a puppet of that evil Merlin.’
‘Calm down, boys,’ said the Princess. ‘Here is something we all agree on: Merlin is evil and must die. Let’s concentrate on that and worry about who is going to be King when we’ve killed him and Arthur and the others.’
‘Yes,’ said Rampart. ‘Good idea.’
Rampart did not actually think it was a good idea. He tried to remember how he had got tied up with all the rebellion and Brat, as he had been called, and the Princess. If he remembered correctly, he had gone off with them because he wanted to escape his boring life working for his father the blacksmith and have a bit of adventure. They had also threatened to kill him. He certainly didn’t remember any plans to kill the King, who he actually thought was lovely and had a cave painting of, stuck on his hovel wall back home. Rampart had just gone along with everything, expecting that after a while he would go home again.
Now he was stuck in a wet dungeon with three seriously dangerous terrorists and three hundred and forty-seven turnips that were beginning to go slimy in the warm water.
I want my mummy, he cried to himself as he realised that a life pumping the bellows for his father’s furnace wasn’t so bad after all.
‘There is a door over there,’ said Mordred. ‘It’s bolted from the outside, but maybe the five of us could smash it down and escape.’
‘Five?’ said Princess Floridian. ‘Who else is here?’
‘My squire, Sergycal,’ said Mordred. ‘He and his family before him have served my family, the Laclustres, for generations.’
‘Pleasing to meet you,’ said Sergycal with a pretend-friendly voice that said to Ruthra, pleasing to meet you, but I will be doing thinking about killing you if that would mean my master would be king.
‘I think our visitors in the turnip cellar will be safe enough for a while,’ said Merlin, showing his pocket crystal ball to everyone again.
‘We’ll deal with them later,’ he added. ‘In the meantime, we have two dragons to bless with our great wisdom and incredibly forgiving yet firm justice.’
‘Yes, let’s have them for dinner,’ said King Arthur, who was basically a gentle soul but had developed a great addiction for roast dragon, which was a shame, really, because he was never going to get the chance to eat it again.
‘We prostrate ourselves before you,’ said Spotty Oregano as he and Primrose lay at Merlin’s feet. ‘And beg for your mercy.’
Everyone was gathered in the central courtyard of Camelot. It was hard to appear submissive when even lying down the two dragons towered over the wizard. They scratched at the earth and made two hollows that they rolled into, but they still looked huge.
‘How can we be sure that you are the only two dragons left in the world?’ King Arthur asked.
‘Indeed,’ said Morgan le Fey. ‘How can we be certain there aren’t hundreds of you hiding away in Patagonia? That’s the sort of place dragons go. Everyone knows that.’
‘There are no more of us,’ said Primrose. ‘We are terminally endangered.’
‘You could lay eggs,’ said Merlin.
‘At my age?’ said Primrose.
‘Yes, and you know you could.’
‘Who’s to say you haven’t already done so?’ said Morgan le Fey, who dreamt of the day that she and Sir Lancelot would get married and lay their own eggs.
‘We haven’t.’
‘I’m afraid that it’s just too great a risk,’ said Merlin.
‘You would kill us?’ said Primrose. ‘The last two living dragons on earth?’
On the other side of the courtyard Gorella, who was still buried in the remaining dead dragons that had not yet been salted for future feasts, turned over in her sleep. Several bodies slid off her and her snoring grew loud enough for everyone to hear.
‘The last three living dragons on earth?’ Primrose continued.
‘No problem,’ said Merlin, reaching for his sword.
‘Send for the cook,’ Arthur called out. ‘Tell her to prepare the very big roasting pans.’
‘But are we not supposed to be the most intelligent life form on earth?’ said Sir Lancelot. ‘Are we not blessed with forgiveness and compassion?’
‘Who told you that rubbish?’ said Merlin.
‘Yeah,’
said Morgan le Fey. ‘You are such a Fat Wench’s Tabard.’
‘No, but, I mean …’ Lancelot began.
‘All right, what do you suggest, good knight?’ said Merlin with an uncharacteristic giggle.
‘Why do you laugh, good wizard?’ said Arthur.
‘I’m sorry, sire, but it always cracks me up when I say “good knight”,’ said Merlin. ‘Sorry.’
‘Couldn’t you do a spell and turn them into something else?’
‘I suppose so. What do you have in mind?’
Everyone had lots of suggestions, including:
An enormous amount of bacon, though smoked dragon was very similar to bacon anyway.
Kittens, as they are slightly less evil than dragons.
Dead dragons.
Accountants. Though, that’s too cruel and besides, accountants had not been invented in the Days of Yore.
Biscuits.
A huge number of pairs of lovely, tan dragon-skin boots.
More biscuits, preferably with chocolate involved.
‘Some of those are impossible and some sound delicious,’ said Merlin. ‘However, if you want kindness, I think I should turn them into themselves, only smaller.’
‘Lizards?’ said King Arthur.
‘Exactly, but they have to be punished so I have invented a new species of lizard that everyone will laugh at. They are called Blue-tongued Lizards because they will have stubby little legs and silly fat tongues that will be bright blue so everyone will laugh at them,’ said Merlin.
‘But …’ Primrose began.
‘And, like all other reptiles, you will no longer have the power of speech,’ Merlin added.
The two dragons were speechless.
As they crawled away into the not-very-long grass, their only consolation was that reptiles can’t blush because Merlin was right. Everyone was pointing at their tongues and laughing.
It took them three weeks to reach the old valley of the dragons and once they got there it no longer felt like home. Spotty Oregano wanted to suggest they make their way to his homeland of Italy, where at least the sun shone a lot. Sure, his beloved mother and other relations had all died in the battle, but at least there would be his old family cave that would still smell of them. Primrose wanted to suggest they try to reach Patagonia, but as they had lost the power of speech, neither of them said anything. Nor could they write each other messages in the sand, for, even though they had been transformed from dragons, they still had no thumbs that would allow them to hold writing sticks.
They could still think, but they were so distressed at their situation all they could think about were endless strings of swearwords. Spotty chased a cricket up into a tree and bit its head off, but it didn’t make him feel any better. Primrose followed him up into the tree, but the branch wasn’t strong enough and snapped. They landed on a small log that was floating down the stream that ran through the middle of Dragon Valley, into Lake Camelot, down into the River Stycks, out into the open sea and across several seas to the other side of the world until it bumped into Australia and got stuck on a beach at the edge of a forest. Here they lived happily ever after as lizards with silly blue tongues that kept getting laughed at.
‘And now for the other troublemakers,’ said Merlin. ‘The obvious thing is to kill them, but, as we all know, this is the Days of Yore, not the Dark Ages. I feel we need to do something more creative than simply making them dead. Any ideas?’
Everyone had a lot of ideas, but when you looked at them closely, they all ended up with the rebels being dead. The only difference between the ideas was the way in which they were made dead.
‘Well, it’s dark and wet and horrible in the Number Twelve Turnip Store and everyone is getting on everyone else’s nerves,’ said Merlin. ‘So there’s no real hurry. We’ll make the water a bit deeper, up to their chests, say, and sleep on it and see what we come up with in the morning. In the meantime, let’s have a final enormous roast dragon banquet. We have to eat it all today or else it will go off.’
Everyone, especially King Arthur, thought that was a wonderful idea.
But wonderful ideas often have a flaw and this one was no exception.
It was about half-past midnight and everyone was so full of roast dragon they could barely get out of their chairs, when the five prisoners managed to smash down the door to the Number Twelve Turnip Store. This was good and bad.
The good bit was they had escaped.
The bad bit was that the enormous amount of water that had been trapped in the room with them also escaped. It swept the five of them down a tunnel away from the castle, across the grass and threw them into the small black boat. The rush of water was enough to shoot the boat across the lake and towards the River Stycks. As they passed the island where Rampart had grown up, he stood up to call out to his parents and was thrown overboard. Luckily, the olms were so full of burnt dragon that had fallen into the lake that they were all fast asleep, allowing Rampart to stagger ashore and into the arms of his parents, who told him what a naughty boy he had been and took him home. They threw him a big welcome-back party, where he met a lovely big girl called Yongle, who he fell in love with and married and lived happily ever after with.
Meanwhile, the black boat was carried down the River Stycks and as it was, the water level started dropping rapidly because a group of young, inexperienced beavers had completely wrecked the great Sargasso raft that had been holding it back. The boat moved faster and faster and was carried far, far out to sea, where it drifted for weeks with no sight of land. And even though Mordred, Ruthra and Princess Floridian had eaten Sergycal, they were still on the verge of starvation when they finally came to a dark, desolate, treeless island far, far away from anywhere.
Even many centuries later, as their descendants struggled to survive on a diet of seaweed, lichen and mud, and the world was covered from pole to pole in super-fast high-tech communications, this one remote corner remained all on its own and unknown even to Google maps.
‘No one messes with Merlin,’ said the old wizard from his remote cave high in the Himalayas.
‘This is true,’ said his oldest living friend, the Abominable Snowman.
And what of everyone else?
The rest of the Days of Yore passed fairly uneventfully.
Morgan le Fey and Sir Lancelot got married and so did King Arthur and Petaluna and between them they had fourteen-and-a-half children. Of course, as always, everything got more and more expensive and Arthur’s children’s children’s children were forced to convert Camelot into fancy apartments for rich yuppies.
The Days of Yore ended and then came the Middle Ages, because most people were middle-aged. From then on, it was all downhill and downstream, and in no time at all – in galactic time, that is – the world was covered in traffic lights and petty little officials and idiots, who gave younger idiots homework and disgusting food full of fat and chemicals that ended up making mankind extinct.
This was not as bad as it seemed unless you were one of mankind, but hey, no one said being part of evolution was going to be easy.
So then cockroaches ruled the world for a while, but at least all the trees grew back and all the pollution and radioactivity faded away.
And then crawly things crept from the sea and ate all the cockroaches and then got quite hairy and began to swing through the trees eating turnips, which were one of the few things that didn’t die out but had evolved to grow on trees.
And for a while the world became paradise again.
Until the hairy things started talking.
Then, of course, it was only a matter of time until the talking turned into shouting, and evolution – which wasn’t very clever – made some new dragons and wizards and humans and they all ended up trying to kill each other.
Again.
‘Oh well,’ said Merlin as he packed his bag and said goodbye to the Abominable Snowman. ‘I suppose I’d better get back to work.’
And what of Gorella?
Just to show how loving and kind and forgiving humans were, she was not changed into a lizard. She was sent to a little island all of her own, out in the lake with just enough food and a nice warm cave with a gentle slope that allowed her wee to soak away into the earth outside.
‘After all,’ said Merlin, ‘she is way too old to be any threat to us.’
And finally, just to show how loving and kind and forgiving humans were and what a great sense of humour they had, Merlin gave her thumbs, lots and lots of them.
FAMOUS DRAGONS OF THE WORLD
TRANSYLVANIA WATERS
GORELLA
HEY, did YOU know you can make your life complete in two easy steps?
All YOU have to do is go out and buy these two amazing books.
Of course, if you’ve already got these books then your life is fairly complete and you are almost brilliant.
BUT there is always room for improvement. Just turn to the next page to find out how you can become totally brilliant and make your life even more completerer.
If you buy all these books, then your life will be the completerest it could ever be. Your brain will expand to an enormous size because of all the wisdomness you have filled it with, and you will probably live to be very, very old with no aches and pains or being ill or holidays in Belgium, but with huge amounts of chocolate and money and cake.
If you read all these books but do not buy them, your life will be not quite the completest it could be. Your brain will still expand to an enormous size and you will still live to be quite old, but you will probably get aches and pains and go to Belgium at least twice with never quite enough chocolate or money or cake.
* * *
Postest Postscript Ever
Yes, yes, yes, I know we were all expecting Fremsley the Royal Whippet to star in this book. I certainly was. However, when the Assistant Royal Whippet Handmaiden was sent up to fetch him from Betty’s bedroom, where he sleeps under the blankets, he wasn’t there. The mystery remains …**1
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