by Martha Faë
“My dear Tamaran, even if you are mythological you should still go to school, and I tell you this with all my heart. You don’t know anything! It’s against the law for there to be two princesses. Three would be possible, but never two. Three yes, two no. It’s probably to avoid arguments or something, I don’t know, but it’s the law of The Forest.”
“Well,” I said, “if that’s the reason for it then there’s no problem. I wouldn’t argue with anyone.”
“The law is the law.” Squirelle began looking around her suspiciously. “I could get into trouble if somebody saw me talking to an unauthorised princess. I’d better get back to my work, there’s lots of news in The Forest just waiting to be told... Now remember: don’t tell anyone that you’re a princess. Mum’s the word!” shouted the squirrel from far away, closing her mouth with an imaginary zip.
Without giving me a chance to say goodbye, Squirelle dashed away and disappeared among the trees in the blink of an eye. All I could see was the tip of her bushy tail becoming ever more distant in the undergrowth. Being left alone, all I could do next was explore.
There were miles and miles of trees and more trees. Soon I came across a river, and further on I saw a flock of sheep speaking a very strange language. Eventually my feet hurt. Then, finally, I saw something that made it all worth the effort: a castle. It was quite small, but it had water and crocodiles in its moat just as every proper castle should. Having said that, it wasn’t really very pretty. It looked like a picture drawn by a small child. It was a round castle with just one thin, crooked tower. The only window in the whole building was in the tower, and it was a very small one. I climbed a nearby tree to try to see something, but the window was much too small. Bit by bit I edged my way along a branch and at last I could see inside the room. It was a pink room, very likely belonging to the princess Squirelle had told me about. I squinted to see better, and then I saw something truly surprising: the princess had a bed identical to mine, with a headboard exactly like the one Dad had made for me. I held on tightly to the branch and edged myself forward a little more. There was something written on the headboard but... I couldn’t see it clearly and needed to get a little closer... a little more...
Princess, I read. At that very instant the castle disappeared and I found myself moving upwards at full speed through a narrow tube almost too small for me to fit inside. This time there were no bumps, no colours, nothing fun at all, just a sound that was something like a jet engine on an aeroplane. I landed on my bed - the one in my own room, back home, in San Andrés Street, in Madrid.
8
**
I Decide To Follow Bo Wang’s Advice And Find Out The Truth
It wasn’t easy going back to San Andrés Street. I had the feeling everyone was looking at me as if they knew something about the other world I’d been to visit. Gran watched me strangely from her rocking chair while we were eating a mid-afternoon snack, and it seemed that the baker looked at me suspiciously when he gave me back my change from the bread I’d been sent to buy before dinner. Everything, even the TV, seemed to be sending signals to tell me that my other world really wasn’t a secret at all and sooner or later I would have to confess about where I’d spent the afternoon.
The next day, during break at school, Valeria gave me some of her animal-shaped cookies and, when I found one that was squirrel shaped, I couldn’t help but raise my eyebrows at it. I had never thought that keeping a secret could be so difficult, and I began to understand why Squirrel Tattletail felt she had to quickly tell everyone all of her news. When you know something and you don’t tell it to your friends or your family, eventually it starts to weigh you down inside; it wriggles around in your head like a worm and won’t let you live in peace. Later in the afternoon, when we were playing in the square, I decided to tell Bo... Well, I almost told him.
“Bo, remember what you told me about the thing that gets in my room at night and won’t let me sleep?”
“Your dragon?” he asked, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
“Yes, that. Why are you so sure it’s a dragon?”
“Well,” he said slowly, “I’ve never actually seen one. I’ve never been lucky enough to be chosen by a dragon. But my grandparents have told me loads of stories. There’s been more than one dragon in my family - that’s how I know that some of them sneak into kids’ bedrooms at night. They don’t go in there for anything bad, they’re just looking for food.”
I started to tremble.
“Dragons eat humans, don’t they?” I asked, terrified.
Bo burst out laughing, flashing his dazzling white teeth.
“No, they don’t. Who told you that? They eat plants and roots... They have a varied diet, or at least they should have but in general they’re very greedy, especially all the smaller dragons. They love anything sweet. Haven’t you ever seen a picture of a dragon?”
“I’ve seen drawings.”
“And what do they look like?”
“Potbellied,” I replied.
“Exactly - that’s because they’re nuts about sweet things. Although sweet things don’t really agree with them. And chocolate... Their biggest weakness is chocolate!”
“I love chocolate, too,” I said.
“So do I!” said Bo sitting himself down on a swing.
What Bo Wang was telling me made me think a lot. I sat down on the next swing along from his. We both swung back and forth for a while without talking.
“Bo,” I said, as I saw his feet swish past alongside me, “is it also not true then that they breathe fire?”
“Oh, that’s true. They breathe a lot of fire,” Bo dragged his heels along the ground to bring the swing to a stop. “If you really want to find out what's in your room at night, you have to be brave.”
I stopped swinging and looked him in the eye. I was determined to face the danger; already too many years had passed without me being able to sleep well.
“What do I have to do?”
“You have to act tonight and take advantage of it being a full moon. Leave a piece of chocolate in front of the window. If it’s a dragon, it won’t be able to resist and it’ll go there to eat it. Then you’ll be able to see it in the moonlight.”
“Do you think it’ll work?”
“Dragon, chocolate - the combination is infallible.”
“And what if it isn’t a dragon?”
“Then you’ll have to be ready to defend yourself. Are you scared?”
“No,” I replied.
“Are you going to do it?”
I nodded. Bo and I shook hands to seal the pact that committed me to taking action that very night. I was scared, of course I was, but I was also very curious. When I got home I got everything ready for my mission. I took Gran’s rocking chair cushion to my room, and Mum’s sunglasses, and the most important thing – a big piece of chocolate. Later that night, after Dad had tucked me in, I got it all out from underneath the bed and set it all up: the chocolate in front of the window, the cushion next to my pillow, and the sunglasses on my bedside table. For the first time since I was five years old I turned off the light and then closed my eyes hoping for my mysterious visitor to appear.
As always, in the darkest hour of the night, I woke up with a jump as something hit me in the face. This time was no different – as soon as I felt it, it scared me to death and I sprang out of bed, but instead of screaming like a maniac this time I covered my mouth with Gran’s cushion. It worked – my parents didn’t hear the little fraction of a scream that escaped before I covered my mouth. It seemed my visitor had heard it, however. The same horrible smoke as always began to appear. With tears in my eyes I fumbled around for the sunglasses and put them on. Then I could finally see what was behind the smoke. There was a little burst of fire, and behind that – bingo! Bo was right. My mysterious visitor was a small dragon. It seemed furious. It had scrambled up onto the foot of my bed and was waving its little arms around and roaring, aiming its fire at me. Then suddenly it f
ell silent and began to sniff the air. Just as Bo had said, it couldn’t resist the chocolate. It leapt towards the window, and I could see its silhouette clearly under the moonlit frame. In the silence of the night I heard the dragon making little noises as it was eating the chocolate. I could also hear a patter of its little paws on the wooden floor – it was doing a happy dance. It was time to turn on the light.
Click.
What?
A rag dragon?!
The dragon was made of fabric like a kitchen tea towel! I started to laugh hysterically. I couldn’t believe that ever since I was five years old my life had been terrorised by a dragon made of cheap, everyday tea towels. My explosion of giggles startled the dragon. It held what was left of the chocolate close to its chest and darted quick glances around it like the police do in films on TV. It threw itself down on the floor and rolled over to the legs of my headboard – just like they do in the films! I couldn’t believe it! I crouched down, crying with laughter, to see underneath my bed. The little dragon gave the headboard a kick and the little magic door appeared. He threw his piece of chocolate through the doorway and then jumped in after it.
Mum and Dad came running into my room. Just like every other night their feet got wet in the build up of tears on my floor, but this time my tears were because I couldn’t stop laughing. They took me to the kitchen, put on the TV for me, and offered me some cake. Gran sang a song from when she was younger, and Dad pretended to be angry with me. But nothing could make me stop laughing until sunrise.
9
**
Dragons Get Punished Too
Auntie Marita says that whenever you have a problem, no matter how scared you are, you have to be brave and look for a way to resolve it. I was thinking about this a lot, especially now I knew that the dragon wasn’t really so fierce... I still couldn’t believe it - a tea towel dragon! I thought the best thing to do would be to return to The Forest so I could look for the dragon and talk to him. I wanted to ask him why he kept sneaking into my room. If it was to look for food, as Bo said, we could make a deal: I could throw chocolate down the slide to him every night so he wouldn’t have to come all the way up.
I looked under my bed for the little door, but saw nothing there other than the smooth, clean floor, and nothing even resembling a door. I went back to jumping on one leg on my rug, but still nothing happened. Finally I remembered that on the day I found the door I’d bumped my head on the left leg of my headboard. Yes. Surely that was the way to make the door appear – I thought back to the dragon’s movie-style kick just before he escaped. I lay myself flat under the bed and gave a little karate kick against the headboard: yiaaaaah! The doorway to the slide magically appeared. I pushed my nose up close to it and felt something strong pull me in again. Down I went with spirals and bumps, and more spirals and bumps, until I landed in the exact same spot as before. This time, however, there was no sign of Squirelle, which was a shame because she was the only person- well, the only being I knew in The Forest, and the dragon was going to be hard to find without help.
“Squirelle! Squirelle!” I called out, but without any luck.
I set off walking and kept going until I came to a stone wall. I was intrigued to know what could be on the other side. I remembered that curiosity killed the cat – that’s what adults say – but I was not a cat and I was not in the world of adults. So, stretching upwards as high as I could, I hooked my hands onto the top of the wall and tried to climb up.
Trampoline, I thought, and just as I did a round trampoline appeared, nice and new. I jumped about happily for a while, enjoying every little flight and letting my curls bounce in the air. After a while it seemed the moment was right to bounce over to the other side of the wall. As you might imagine, the landing wasn’t very pleasant... I should have dreamed up a mattress or something to comfortably break my fall - obviously I was still a novice at this freedom of decoration thing. But still, the important thing was that I’d managed to get over. I stood up, dusted myself off, and set about exploring, but only to find that all there was on the other side of the wall was more forest – metres and metres of it - identical to the bit of forest I’d just left behind me. What a sneaky trick! If I’d known it was like that I wouldn’t have bothered coming down the slide. All that travelling for what?
“Well,” I repeated out loud to myself, “if I’d known this I wouldn’t have crossed the wall or even imagined another world existed or that I was a princess or anything. Brilliant. So this world turns out to be even more boring than my old one in Madrid. If I’d known this, I wouldn’t have wished to have two lives and two names. I could have just called Valeria and I would be having an afternoon snack at her house now and that’s that. Oh well. I suppose this is it, then. Or is it? What’s that noise?”
It sounded like a train coming towards me. An enormous one, judging by the loudness of the rumbling noise. And why was it getting so hot all of a sudden? The situation was becoming unbearable. As it got hotter and hotter I began to weigh my options: stay or run? As I was thinking about what to do, the heat came closer and closer until it was so close that it became a shockwave. It dried out the grass and left it all yellow; it fiercely blew my hair about from one side to the other - and that, as you all know, is not easy at all, given that my hair was so strong, wild, curly, and generally impossible. In fact, my hair at that point in the story was really difficult to... But hold on a second! I didn’t have time to start talking about my hair! I had to make a decision fast.
Stay or go? Be brave or be cautious? I couldn’t decide, so I decided it would be better to be brave and cautious at the same time. I hid behind a tree and peeped around it just a little bit so I could see what was happening.
The rumbling train noise was actually the rumble of a hundred pairs of marching feet belonging to a hundred real dragons. That’s right, an army of authentic dragons. These were not made of fabric like the intruder in my room. These had big feet, long snouts, and infinite moustaches. They had narrow, lizard-like yellow eyes, strong wings, and scaly skin. They all marched in perfect lines, in perfect synchronised rhythm, and with a precision that made my jaw drop. There were dragons of all sizes. I think they must have been in order of age or something like that, because the tallest were in the first line, and then they got smaller and smaller towards the back. They were all so serious that it looked like they’d just been shouted at. Marching at the front of them all was a dragon with a patch over one eye. It was very short, awkward, and clumsy-looking, with such tiny wings that surely it couldn’t possibly fly. Every now and then the dragons in the first line spat out bursts of flame which the poor little dragon had to dodge as best it could. The army stopped just in front of the very tree I was hiding behind.
“Fall out!” yelled one of the bigger dragons in a deep voice. “Let the trial begin!”
The dragons sat down in a semicircle. The dragon with the deep voice began to pace from one side to the other, over and over in a straight line on the same spot, as if he wanted to wear a groove in the ground. He cleared his throat and said:
“Let the accused come forward.”
The awkward little potbellied dragon went to the front. His scales were all odd. Instantly a lady dragon with a scroll came forward also and began to read.
“Private Gondra, you are accused of disregarding legal authority, disorderly conduct, and incessant repetition of disgraceful behaviour. You are also accused of shameless personal untidiness and - most serious of all accusations - of thinking for yourself and without the authorisation of the Marvellous Supreme Council of Dragons.”
“Well...” began the accused dragon.
“—Silence!” interrupted the dragon with the deep voice. “The accused is not permitted to speak until time to speak is granted to him.”
“Following the aforementioned accusations,” continued the lady dragon, “the Most Honourable Independent State of Dragonia has convened this trial.” She took a couple of steps back, made a low bow to the bigger dr
agon and then said: “His Lordship Mr Drac, of Drac and Drac, now has the floor.”
What a name! I thought.
“Is it true, Private Gondra, that you have been found on several occasions in the vicinity of Castle Street?”
“Where?”
“You know the rules, Private. Please limit yourself to responding in affirmative or negative. Have you been seen near the castle or not?
“I’ve been to the castle, yes. But whether I’ve been seen there or not, I wouldn’t know.”
The dragon lord glared with flaming eyes at the awkward little dragon.
“Sorry... Affirmative,” said the dragon private, trembling.
“Did you know that the area around the castle is strictly forbidden to any soldier?”
“Negative, sir.”
“Ah, you didn’t know. May we then take it that you have not read the Good Dragon’s Manual?”
“Yes, I have read it,” replied the soldier very quietly, “but I don’t remember everything in it. It was very long.”
“Ahem!” The lord cleared his throat so loudly that it seemed he might tear a hole in it.
“Affirmative, but a little bit negative,” replied the accused dragon, looking down at the floor.
“Interesting... Very interesting. Private Gondra doesn’t remember things he was taught in training. Perhaps he should be stripped of his diploma and sent back to the beginning.”
“Negative, sir! Negative, please!”
“Do not make jokes, Private, it was not a question. Is it true that when your superiors have questioned you repeatedly about your reasons for being in the restricted area, you have replied with a wide range of varied excuses?”
“Those weren’t excuses, it was the truth... I mean... Negative, sir.”
“Don’t make me lose my patience, soldier. Did you or did you not tell your superiors the story of the beautiful little princess and the poor, misunderstood soldier?”
“Do you mean the story of The Beautiful Little Princess Who Lives Happily But Completely Bored In Her Impressively Fortified Castle And The Poor Misunderstood Soldier Who Suffers Because It Seems He Is Invisible To The Princess So He Strolls Back And Forth Sadly In Front Of The Castle Of The Beautiful Little Princess Who Lives Happily But Completely Bored In An Impressively Fortified Castle?” The dragon soldier had gone purple before finishing his sentence and was out of breath from the long title. “Ah! Ooofffff! Ooh! Excuse me, sir. Sorry. That title leaves very little room for breathing. And I left out the second part, which is: The Soldier Does Not Lose Hope, However, That The Little Princess Might Look Out Of Her Little Tower Window One Day And See The Soldier...”