by Tamsyn Muir
“Oh, don’t say ‘fight’;” Floralinda begged, “I positively couldn’t fight anything.”
“Then get rid of them, you absolute goose. You could at least go and see what’s in the floor you haven’t seen. I would have gone and looked at it in a trice, but I am an intellectual.”
That is how Floralinda found out the truth about the spider. She had discovered that if she put one of the burning coals in a dish, she could carry it about with her like a lamp; and Cobweb had cunningly tied a handle over it out of knotted silver gauze, and damped the gauze so that it wouldn’t catch alight, and Floralinda was pleased as Punch with this invention. She went downstairs and lowered the lamp down the trapdoor to flight thirty-eight. When she saw the dead spider, she screamed and screamed, and dropped the dish altogether, which clattered all the way down to the next floor: but the coal thankfully fell onto the cold stone and didn’t do any harm; and the spider had stiffened all its legs up and made itself much smaller, as spiders always do when they die.
Cobweb, when she reported back, was unsympathetic.
“I don’t know why you’re not more cheerful about it. Don’t you see, that’s another creature down,” she said.
“But I can’t see how it died,” said Floralinda. “I hope something worse didn’t kill it; it’s so big and dreadful. It’s at least the size of the bed, Cobweb dear.” (In death it was the size of her bed, so in life it would have probably looked more like the size of three beds, but Floralinda wasn’t to know this.) “I do hope it is dead, and not just asleep.”
“Poke it with a stick and see,” Cobweb suggested; but Floralinda shuddered and said she absolutely couldn’t. “Maybe it died of boredom. I am experimenting currently to see if this is possible. Say, did it have a web around? Spider-web is useful stuff, you know.”
But Floralinda said No, it hadn’t, and Cobweb said it must have been the other kind, who build a cunning little burrow underground and wait for you to walk over their front door, and then pop out at you; and this did not make Floralinda love spiders much more than she had already.
“This merely proves your excellent success rate,” said the fairy that evening, who at the time was busy pinning up long strands of pith close to the fire, to dry them out. Floralinda was cutting a frock for herself and a frock for Cobweb out of one of the curtains. It was more like a smock, owing to the paucity of material; but it was more genteel than watching each other run about in petticoats or ripped-up petals, even if they were both girls now. Cobweb continued, “Why, I’m sure that by the time I’m gone, you’ll be all the way down to flight thirty-two or somesuch, and I won’t even have to tell anyone about your troubles; you’ll be enjoying yourself no end, and won’t want to be interrupted.”
Floralinda laid down her sewing.
“Must you go, Cobweb?” she said sorrowfully.
“Yes,” said Cobweb baldly, “and I can’t wait to leave. I have been looking at the moon closely and I feel that a fortnight will do it, unless I die of boredom first.”
“But I feel as though we have become friends,” said the princess.
Cobweb looked up at her over the rack of drying pith and orange-peel, and said:
“That is because you are not very clever. There’s no precedent for a bottom-of-the-garden fairy and a princess doing anything together. We live in totally different worlds, and as someone with a shaky start in my industry I don’t desire to change the status quo.”
“I suppose you are right,” sighed Floralinda. “But I do wish I was clever; I do wish I knew more; I do wish sometimes—that I was someone else!”
Which were all dreadful wishes, when carried to a logical conclusion.
Flight thirty-eight really had nothing in it except for a dead spider and a dead dried-up goblin with no blood in him, and a spiral staircase that led down to the next flight. Cobweb grew quite interested in the spider when they ascertained that it was really dead, and wanted to be taken down there to fuss over it, and do quite dreadful things, and ‘experiments’. Floralinda summoned up all her courage and descended the spiral stairs, with her coal and her dish in hand, to see what was next on the agenda.
The stairs led down to the top of a room that was split-level, so that the landing from the previous floor was at the top, and you went down another flight to the bottom, where there was another staircase on the far side of the room. And such a mess that room was! It was all dry twig and old greenstuff, and stank; for you see, it belonged to a night-boar.
The night-boar had the shape of a common hog, but much larger, and would have resisted furiously all attempts to make it into bacon. Each tusk was the size of an elephant’s, and its black bristles stood up on its back like a hedgehog’s quills. They were so black that in some lights they were almost purple. It lived chiefly in jungles, and the witch had acquired it through calling in favours from her friends; it was too big to climb stairs, but sat at the bottom and screamed at Princess Floralinda until red spittle fell a-dripping from the tusks. Sometimes it would take runs and butt the bottom of the staircase hard enough to make it shake, but for all its pawing and squealing, it could not get to her. If it had, it surely would have gored her through, or tossed her up on its horns so that when she landed back down she broke every bone in her body.
Floralinda was so frightened that the most she could do was sit at the bottom of the main staircase and listen to the night-boar squeal, and think about all her problems at once. The goblins had been very frightening and a long-term problem—their tooth-holes had healed as a great many shiny, puckered white marks, which quite ruined the effect of her slim young hands—but they had been got rid of; and the spider had died, which had been a welcome move on its part; but this monstrous boar did not look as though it was going to die any time soon, and she did not feel up to pushing it out of a window. And there were no windows in any case on floor thirty-seven.
The princess thought about Cobweb and Cobweb’s upsetting remarks, and yet about how unhappy she was at the thought of losing Cobweb; or at least, if not unhappy, very scared. It must be stated that she tried quite hard to love Cobweb, as princesses are expected to love everything beautiful; but loving Cobweb was rather like loving a wet cat, who if it gets into your lap makes your lap very uncomfortable, and is likely to scratch. Cobweb’s main advantages were in being lovely to look at and in knowing more than Floralinda knew. (Floralinda should not have rated both of these things as high as each other, but we must forgive her, because of society.)
And all the while the night-boar gruntled and oinked murderously, and sometimes in the background the diamond-tipped dragon roared its tower-shaking roars, and Cobweb made awful sawing noises with one of the needles she had given an edge to, in order to cut things. Floralinda could hardly think, and when one wants to think more badly than anything, it gets even harder to think than before.
The lamp dropped from her distracted fingers. The coal fell into the sett, and the dry twigs took like kindling. Soon the twigs were totally afire, and the night-boar squealed fit to bust. Floralinda fled from the staircase and past Cobweb, away from those squeals and the rising crackle of flame, and all the way back up to her bed in terror.
Before very long she started to smell smoke, and then it pricked her eyes and made them stream. It took a very long time for the fairy to make her way back, and by then the smoke hung in the room like it had been pinned up to dry; and wasn’t Cobweb cross when she got there! “I am not used to walking,” she said resentfully on the threshold, and coughed three to six times.
“Oh! I am sorry,” said Floralinda, contrite. “I just had such an awful fright; I thought that I might have just burnt us all up, and I didn’t know what to do; and oh! that terrible pig did squeal.”
“I might have died,” said Cobweb, after a fit of coughing, “and then I would have had to become a baby’s laugh, or a piece of orange-blossom, or something else equally sickening. The full moon can’t come quick enough, I tell you.”
Floralinda thought thi
s was a bit rich, as Cobweb all along had been very cavalier about whether or not she died; but the fairy was so annoyed that she didn’t dare point this out. She was glad that she hadn’t aggravated her further, because Cobweb said:
“It’s also not fair at all that stupidity has gotten you this far. That’s another creature you’ve killed simply by having no brains, which makes anyone with brains feel as though it isn’t worth the headache of having them.”
“Then it has roasted up and died,” said Floralinda, rapturously. “Oh, Cobweb, how wonderful!”
The fairy pointed out that the night-boar probably went from smoke inhalation rather than burning to death, but admitted: “It was fun to see it all go up. All that straw took in a trice. I wonder if there’s anything left of it?”
“Why, Cobweb, couldn’t I just drop coals in the tower all the way down?”
But Cobweb said that she would likely smoke them both to death if she tried that game again.
And it was true that for the rest of the evening and all the next morning great grey clouds of it blew through the tower, and Floralinda’s eyes and nose streamed, and she coughed so much that she got a bad sore throat and had to take to her bed for a whole day. And it wasn’t even very restful there, on account of all the smoke hanging around the bed; she had to put her sheets over her mouth and nose. But the night-boar was well and truly dead. She went down to flight thirty-seven to check, and to make sure the coal was not doing any more damage; and there were no squeals from the big charred lump that had once been the night-boar, only a dreadful smell of roast pork that nonetheless made her very hungry.
Princess Floralinda had grown quite confident over these easy victories, which was unfortunate. It is like thinking you are very good at swimming when everyone you have tried to swim a race against has been eaten by the local shark. She was even quite enthusiastic to see what lay on flight thirty-six, and despite Cobweb’s prophesying had not quite discounted the idea of simply dropping half a dozen coals down the trapdoor. The stairway down to the next flight took a whole week to be cool to the touch, and it still made her cough horribly every time she went down there; but she had gone down there, and she had seen the trapdoor, and had started wondering what was below.
If she had asked Cobweb the correct question, Cobweb might have given her an answer that made her more worried; but Cobweb now spent a lot of time in the glow of the fire looking very hard at the moon, which was waxing quite fat and white in the night sky. The correct question would have been, Cobweb dear, have you noticed anything about the order of the monsters so far? And Cobweb would have said, The witch is sandwiching expensive ones next to cheap ones, if she did not say, Oh, do stop bothering me!
Goblins are cheap; very venomous spiders are expensive, especially if, when alive, they are the size of three beds; night-boars give a lot of show for the money, but don’t honestly cost a lot if you know where to get them; so it stood to reason that what was coming next was going to be worth the cash.
The trapdoor down to flight thirty-six opened to a very long ladder, balanced up against the wall on pegs. Flight thirty-six itself, once Floralinda looked down there with her lamp, was quite empty and light: unlike in the earlier floors, this flight had windows. They were very large, but up so high that there was no hope of opening or shutting them, and they had iron bars at their bottoms to stop you from touching the glass; these iron bars were very bowed and scratched, which would have been an awful sign had Floralinda thought about it. But they did let plenty of light through, so that Floralinda could see clearly that there were no leaves, nor wood, nor straw, putting paid to her fire idea. There was only a central column of stone, and up against that central column was sat—a big, yellow, furry bear!
“Then I can’t leave too soon,” said Cobweb, once she described what was down there to the fairy. “Tomorrow night ought to do it. You can see that the moonlight is already helping my wings, and I’ve come up with a fool-proof story. I’m simply going to say that I met a child in the woods who didn’t believe in fairies, and that we had a dialogue; at the end I saved it from a wolf or a lack of imagination or something; that’s unexceptionable, especially if you count the woods as a very large back-yard,” she finished.
Floralinda did not think this story was very good, and she was frightened all over again at the idea that Cobweb might soon go. She said, “I think it’s dear that you’re scared by a bear, Cobweb; but I’m not; bears and princesses have historically been fine in close quarters, and we even marry them under the right circumstances.”
This drove Cobweb into a frenzy. “Hark at her! Think it’s dear! You carry me down there right now, and I’ll tell you something you won’t like.”
Which was an offer that you or I might have been able to say No thank you to, but Floralinda was puzzled, and she carried Cobweb on her shoulder all the way down to the end of flight thirty-seven.
“See!” said Cobweb, when they were peeking down the trapdoor. “Now, why has a bear been chained up, as though it were in the circus?”
Floralinda answered that perhaps it had used to be in the circus and wanted to feel comfortable, to which Cobweb was so disgusted that she could not speak for a moment.
“That is a devil-bear,” said the fairy.
Floralinda had heard a little of devil-bears. Even she knew that devil-bears were larger and cleverer and crueller than their other ursine brethren, and indeed often cleverer than men, though their cruelty and men’s was probably of a muchness. As Cobweb spoke, the bear began to pace around its pillar and strain the length of its chain. Floralinda could see clearly now that its fur was matted and pallid and ought to have been white, not yellow at all, only it had grown discoloured, like lace that hadn’t been stored properly. When it peered up at them, she got an awful feeling in the pit of her stomach. The devil-bear had eyes like human eyes, with long white lashes, only the iris was red as blood.
“That thing is certainly cleverer than you are, and therefore deserves to swap places with you,” said the fairy. “I certainly think it would be funnier if a prince fought all the way up the tower and found the devil-bear instead of a princess; and he’d probably get a more useful wife in the bargain.” (Cobweb was being very horrid here, but perhaps for her own reasons. Cobweb was always at her most horrid when she had pangs of conscience, and tried to get rid of them by being horrider than ever, which I’m sorry to say sometimes helps.) “You’re in a great deal of danger. I would almost be interested to see if you can somehow be so silly that it turns to genius, as before, and get past it somehow; but I’m much more particularly interested in not sharing close quarters with a devil-bear.”
The devil-bear moved slothfully, but with purpose. It kept pausing to stare up the ladder at Floralinda and Cobweb, with its eyes rolling fearfully around in its head, but making no sound. Because it had not screamed and fretted to get at her as the night-boar had done, Floralinda had convinced herself to be bold; but now she was more disconcerted than ever at how it sat there on its haunches and tried to look agreeable, with its ghastly eyes. Every so often it tugged at the iron collar around its neck, but tugged on it quite idly, and without violence; it was more as though it was worrying a fly bite.
Cobweb had told her that she might come up with something if she tried to be as stupid as she possibly could, but the problem was that Floralinda was not actually natively stupid. She did not process things very quickly, and certainly she knew nothing of the world, and hadn’t much of an imagination, and not very much courage or grit either; but she was not really stupid. The really stupid have a wonderful time of it, and often go on to marry royalty and kill giants. Princess Floralinda was just a princess, and thought like a princess, and had princess habits, which made her not stupid but simply a trifle dull.
“Come away from that trapdoor,” said Cobweb, who had grown uncomfortable watching the devil-bear, “make sure it’s shut tight”—which was very silly of Cobweb too, as you will see.
It was a miserable aft
ernoon, for they both knew the full moon would rise that night, and the moonbeams would not only provide Cobweb with a nicer outfit than the little smock that Floralinda had sewed, but they would heal her wings and she would fly away to tell the other fairies about false dialogues she had undergone in the woods; and Floralinda would be left alone with nothing better than the devil-bear for company. There was nothing to do except unpick the latest calla lily she had embroidered so that she could embroider it again, as all the while Cobweb sorted her piles of pith and stuff into order so that she knew what she wanted to take. And all the while Floralinda grew sadder and Cobweb grew happier, which made for a really dreadful time (chiefly for Floralinda).
Late in the afternoon they were interrupted by a terrific clatter and crash. As there had been no noise in the tower up until then that wasn’t Floralinda, Cobweb, or the dragon, both grew very pale in the face. They rushed down to flight thirty-seven, and stood at the top of the stairs in the room which still stank of smoke and burned-up sett—only to find that the devil-bear had seen that the trapdoor opened and shut, and to find that the witch had put the devil-bear on a very long chain after all. It might have clambered up to get at Floralinda and Cobweb any time it liked. It had climbed up all the way up its ladder to flight thirty-seven in order to feast on the dead night-boar, and the chain was still slack even so, and then it saw that Floralinda and Cobweb had come back.
It did not hold off this time. The devil-bear went for them both. It fell to all fours and sprang up those stairs quicker than a cat would, right in front of them, which neatly cut them off from escaping back to flight thirty-eight. Floralinda screamed and darted down-stairs; Cobweb hollered just as loudly, and clung to Floralinda’s shoulder like anything, not having wings to fly away with. For a moment they all played chase-around-the-mulberry-tree with the big dead burnt-up corpse of the boar, until the devil-bear got sick of the fun. As Floralinda ran every which way, the devil-bear picked up its chain in its mouth in an altogether unnatural manner, and tugged on it just as Floralinda ran over its length; this tripped Floralinda up neatly, and she went flying.