Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower

by Tamsyn Muir

  “The ladder!” bawled Cobweb, “you clod, get to the ladder,” which Floralinda would not otherwise have done. She rolled over and over as though she were doing somersaults, and when she came to a stop she was quite close to the open trapdoor. She skinned down that ladder to the next floor in a trice, giving herself frightful splinters as she went in her haste; she saw the devil-bear staring down at her with those terrible eyes from the top.

  “Get it off the pegs,” the fairy shrieked, and once she understood what this meant she started shaking the bottom of the ladder, which was really fairly heavy, trying to work it off the two metal pegs that affixed it to the wall just under the hatch. Neither Cobweb nor Floralinda had expected the devil-bear to follow. It wrapped its yellow paws around the ladder just like a man would, delicately, and came snout-first after them. This wobbled the ladder back on to the pegs, and then off again, and then on; the devil-bear saw what they were about and slapped the ladder firmly back on to the pegs, so that it would have a safe descent.

  It was here that one of Floralinda’s wishes came true.

  She had wished to change, and in that moment she did. She did not do what a princess would have done, which would have been to run to the other side of the room, and cry in a self-pitying way as the devil-bear ate her; nor did she even just sort of run about in a circle like a dog let out into the garden. She planted both feet firmly on the ground, and she heaved at that ladder as hard as she possibly could. Floralinda did not even know quite what she was doing. Cobweb had said to get it off the pegs, so get it off the pegs she must. The truth was that it was long past the time when getting it off the pegs would do anything useful, as Cobweb had thought to remove the ladder before the bear could get a hold of it, not anticipating the bear’s quickness on its paws. But Floralinda pulled with all her strength: and the ladder came off its pegs.

  For a moment the devil-bear was in a very awkward position. It was clinging to the top of a tottering ladder like a stilt-walker on a pole, and its weight was pulling the ladder forwards, away from the wall and into empty space. Being an agile creature, it decided to leap clear, aiming for the iron bars that were fitted across the lower part of the nearest window—which it must have judged would make for a convenient hand-hold, or rather paw-hold. But at the precise moment it tensed to leap, Floralinda, still possessed by her overriding desire to get the ladder down, gave it one final furious tug, and made it lurch suddenly over to one side.

  This threw everything out by a crucial distance. The bear leaped, but instead of hitting the scratched-up iron bars across the bottom of the window, its bulk collided with the upper part of the window, where there were no bars, only glass. It went straight through that glass with such a smash, and the chain sailed with it—Floralinda had to get out of the way of the chain in a hurry as it sped up, and then most of the chain was out the bear-shaped hole, and then all the chain was out of the bear-shaped hole; and there was a terrible sound as the chain snapped taut, and the iron ring it had been attached to nearly came all the way out of the pillar. But it had been driven in there very deep, and so all that happened was that the devil-bear came to a sudden stop, and a bad end. There was profound silence.

  “That was a lovely lesson in angles,” said Cobweb, after a moment, more than somewhat shaken.

  Floralinda sank down to her knees, which had gone like jelly.

  “Cobweb,” she whispered, “oh, dear Cobweb, you saved me; you told me what to do.”

  Cobweb got very uncomfortable.

  “It shouldn’t have worked,” she said. “That was a one-in-a-million chance. I suppose you were quite brave pulling at the ladder like that.”

  But Floralinda just kept repeating,

  “You saved me, Cobweb, dear. I should have made you a boy; you were quite as wonderful as a prince.”

  And the look in her blue eyes was not altogether a look that any princess had ever had before. It was more the look of a man who lives all alone on an island, and who has just seen a boat being rowed towards him; or, worse, the look of someone who stands in the street and gives you a religious tract. But Cobweb, for all her smartness, did not really know about Looks.

  Floralinda was really very biddable after that, possibly from the shock. She was not even ill after her knees started working again. It took quite a lot of doing getting the ladder back on the pegs, and there were a few near misses which might well have meant that they would have had to make their new home on flight thirty-six. But they got it back on after all, and less than fifteen minutes later they were sitting up in front of the warm fire again, with flight forty’s everlasting smell of oranges and coal; and there Floralinda did nothing more aggravating, even to Cobweb’s mind, than sit in a blanket by the fire and take little sips of milk. Even as the sky turned to dusk and Cobweb said things like—

  “The moon will soon be up, you know”, all Floralinda did was say a bit vacantly, “How nice!” or, “Really!” in the way people do when they are not listening to you at all.

  In fact, Cobweb was altogether relieved when the sunset made the room all orange and gold, and Floralinda grew pensive, as she so often did at sunsets, and said—

  “I do wish you wouldn’t leave me, Cobweb.”

  “I’m sure I’ll think about you often,” said Cobweb, who hoped entirely otherwise.

  “It’s horrible to be thought of,” said Princess Floralinda wearily. “If one does nothing but think of someone, it takes up all the time you could use to do something about them. I wish nobody thought of me, but did a lot for me instead. It’s just like someone else going to the sea-side when you’re not, and sending a card back saying they’re thinking of you; it’s worse than if they weren’t thinking of you at all, and now you have a horrid card that you have to be grateful for. And I have decided that I don’t like being grateful—at—all.”

  There was nothing to say on either side after this extraordinary speech.

  Floralinda drank her milk and it all filled up back into the flask, and she huddled on the bed as the sun set and the moon began to rise. Cobweb had finished wrapping her heaps of material into little packets by then, and had tied them all together with embroidery floss, and was proud of the effect; when she looked back at Floralinda, Floralinda looked very glum, and Cobweb in turn looked beautiful and irritated.

  “I suppose this is goodbye,” said Cobweb.

  “I suppose this is,” said Floralinda.

  “I’ve resolved to whisper your name into a foxglove first thing I do, rather than make it a middle-man,” said Cobweb, as though it were a great concession. “That means that it’s nearly a sure thing that a daisy will get told; they might even remember up to two of your names. That’s a risk on my part, you know.”

  “I’m very grateful, I’m sure,” said Floralinda, falteringly.

  “I’m sure it’s also been charming to be a girl, and to learn how you people live,” continued Cobweb, paying no heed, “so perhaps I shall even keep on being one, on alternate Sundays,—until I forget to, that is.”

  The room had grown quite dark, except for the coals burning forever in the hearth. The full moon floated up from behind the trees like a great white balloon, very clear and crisp against the sky. It was really a very pretty sight, and Floralinda had the best view of it you could ever possibly have. The evening star twinkled in that navy blue like a very nice-quality diamond, and Cobweb waited before the window looking so beautiful and eager that you couldn’t get a prettier thing to look at in a children’s story-book colour plate. She nearly danced as the full moon rose, so excited was she; and she was so pleased that she was very nearly good. Fairies are only ever nearly good when they are happy.

  The first shafts of moonlight fell on Cobweb, and it was even prettier to see the fairy bathe in that light of Diana like you or I would bathe in hot water. It fell on her in streams and rivulets—real streams and real rivulets; she cupped her hands up and Floralinda could see the moon-beam pool in them, thick and glistening as liquid pearl. She s
plashed her face with it daintily, and from her back, her ripped-up wings mended back up and shone with all the colours of the rainbow, until it seemed that Cobweb was gowned in moonlight and made of it all at once.

  It was at this point that Floralinda rose and hit her with the pillow.

  Floralinda smashed it down over Cobweb in the exact way you’d hit a spider; it was a soft pillow, so Cobweb didn’t go splat, but it was heavy, being filled with those feathers that Floralinda so hated. It stunned the fairy senseless, and then the next thing she knew was that she had been grasped right in the princess’s bite-scarred hands: not to the point where she was crushed, but firmly enough that she was frightened. And in the next moment, a loop of heavy gold came down around Cobweb’s neck; and the moment after that—snap!

  For Floralinda had latched her golden necklace with the locket on Cobweb, only taken the locket off first; and she had fixed all her rings to the end, so that it was the neatest little ball-and-chain you had ever seen. It would have been impossible to fly carrying such a weight. All the rings together were very heavy, and the latch, as generations of princesses before Floralinda had learned, was a nightmare to work. You had to really squeeze it with your thumb. Cobweb’s little fairy fingers would never have had a chance.

  “I won’t let you go,” panted Floralinda. “I can’t let you go; not until I’m all the way down to the bottom. I’ll let you go once I’m there, but I can’t let you go before. I need you, Cobweb; I’m not clever, and you are; I don’t want to die, and I don’t know what to do, and you’ve got to tell me.”

  The bottom-of-the-garden fairy looked at the fine gold chain leading away from the latch, which was terribly heavy on her chest; and at the rings, and then at Floralinda, with her obstinate un-princesslike mouth, and big lovely blue eyes, and golden hair that had quite stopped curling long ago.

  “This was really the cleverest thing you could have done,” said Cobweb, and burst into tears.

  You may have felt very sorry for Cobweb when she was taken prisoner, and indeed Princess Floralinda had done something really quite evil. It is a sin to capture a fairy, or any wild winged thing, and keep it against its will; but you can at least be sure that Floralinda did not hear the end of it. Cobweb ranted and complained, and cajoled and threatened and cursed, and had Floralinda in tears three times daily; but Floralinda was inflexible, which should have told Cobweb something important. Princesses are very rarely inflexible.

  When Cobweb had exhausted her raging, she said to Floralinda—

  “If you insist on this, you must do everything I say.”

  The princess said resolutely, “I will.”

  “You must keep your promise, and let me go when it is all over.”

  The princess said resolutely, “I shall.”

  “You must figure out a way so that if you die, I can escape,” said Cobweb, but Floralinda said, in a crestfallen manner—

  “I’m afraid I couldn’t think of a way to do that, and in any case I thought that wasn’t very smart, because then you might tell me to do something that would kill me on purpose, and get away thereby.”

  “That is exactly what I planned on doing,” cried Cobweb in anger; “that’s really too bad; I can’t stand you getting clever now,” and was so cross that Floralinda was obliged to wait for half an hour to continue the conversation.

  After which Cobweb said—

  “You’re a weakling; you’re an absolute fright; if you’re going to be clever, you might as well be strong. I want you to do calisthenics and stretches, and to squeeze india-rubber balls with your hands.”

  Floralinda hated this idea, but she said, meekly—

  “Yes, Cobweb.”

  It was just as though they were married, though of course most marriages don’t involve one party being knocked out before the rings are put on. I wish I could say that no marriages involve that, but it wouldn’t be altogether truthful.

  And Cobweb, for her part, was not a nice wife at all, though it cannot be said that Floralinda was a nice wife either, considering the terrible thing she had done. It was not as though Floralinda wasn’t sorry about it, but she was not really as sorry as she ought to have been, and a tiny part of her was even relieved. A princess should have wept to hear about it.

  The next thing Cobweb said was, “You need a weapon.”

  When Floralinda first imprisoned Cobweb, the fairy was really just saying any old thing that came into her head, to try to buy enough time to sit back and think how to get out of her predicament; but once she had said this, she realised how true it really was. Any cave dweller in the Iron Age would have understood the same principle, which is why we have such a rich resource of arrow-heads and flints for museums now.

  Floralinda had said Oh, such as a sword?; but Cobweb had pooh-poohed this, still thinking hard.

  “No, swords are for strong men, who have been trained. You’d only cut yourself, and you’re not strong or good for much. You mustn’t get very close to anything. I would say that you needed a bow and arrow, only we haven’t got a bow and arrow, and I don’t know anything about making one,” (Cobweb was at least very honest about things she didn’t know) “and I know enough to be sure that arrows are a lot of trouble to make fly. You need to be able to fletch. I will return to chemistry as my starting-point, and educate myself in other areas. Go and count up all the books on the bookshelf, and tell me what they’re about.”

  Floralinda dutifully went to count up all the books on the bookshelf, and reported that there were thirty-two, with twenty being about general economics, and ten being about the need for leather imports, grain imports, iron ore imports, and imports of all kinds of cloth; and the last two were Reader’s Digests.

  Cobweb had written all this down, and thought about it some more.

  “Tell me how many needles there are in the embroidery hoop,” she said at last.

  Floralinda was bewildered by this, but felt much more at home, and could answer after checking that there were forty, of assorted sizes, with the most numerous being the large blunt-eye tapestry kind, and the second most numerous double-endeds.

  Cobweb wrote all of this down too and thought about it all for at least thirty minutes, or so it felt to Floralinda.

  “H’m! Things we could use if only we had more of them, and things we have in abundance that we can’t use,” said the fairy. “I’ve decided. Take down one of the wooden poles that holds up the curtain—you’ll have to climb up there somehow, and for goodness’ sake don’t break your neck, or that’s the end of me.”

  It took quite a lot of balancing—the curtain-pole was hung very high, and Floralinda had to stand on a chair and then tip it off using other things, and it hit her on the cheek, which smarted; but once she had slid the curtain-rings off they had six feet of fairly solid wood, about two inches thick in diameter. It was rigid but not totally inflexible, and not too heavy.

  Then came the curious part. Cobweb looked over the wood, and hemmed and hawed, and at last said—

  “Now let’s put the end on some of those coals. Tie a wet rag around it—just so—so the rest of it doesn’t catch alight, and take it out when I say so.”

  That was a very long day. Floralinda sat in her underthings and got quite sooty and hot, with a red face and hands, holding that curtain-pole into the fire. Cobweb had her take it out whenever the exposed end got charred, and then she had to sit with the pole on the stone floor, and take the knife that had been meant for cutting the bread, and use it to scrape the ashes off until the pole started to have a point. Halfway through Cobweb changed her mind and made Floralinda get the iron dustpan from the hearth instead, and use the flat flanged end to scrape with; that was much easier, although being ornamental it cracked in two quite early, and she had to use one half and be careful not to cut herself on the edge.

  This process took all of one hot, dirty evening, but by the end of it Floralinda had a long wooden shaft sharpened to a wicked point. It had split a bit in parts, but it was quite nicely d
one for a first-timer, as Floralinda did everything Cobweb told her to do.

  “That’s your weapon,” said Cobweb. “The only thing you need to know about it is that you can thrust it. It’s not fancy; you can’t do anything interesting with it. You just stand and push it into something else, which you have proved that even you can do, on a good day.”

  And that was Princess Floralinda’s introduction to the spear.

  In the dying days of summer, long past the full moon, Floralinda had to get up very early and practise holding it, and thrusting it forward, all of which was very dull: and they had no india-rubber balls, and so Cobweb made her squeeze smoother chunks of broken brick. She was forced to tie her lovely long hair back, and sort of pin it up over her head, so that it did not get in her way; and she did not like how she looked in the mirror, but at least she was not everlastingly pushing curls out of her face. She did not know that Cobweb was really doing this to get her own back rather than to teach Floralinda anything, but Floralinda became familiar with holding the pole, and far too familiar with squeezing lumps of rock. Her fingernails often came off, and she became pale and sad, and her mouth got lumps in it.

  “You need better food,” said Cobweb. “Just because you won’t die without it doesn’t mean that you don’t need nourishment. You are too weak-minded to get strong on thought alone.”

  This was a little more to Princess Floralinda’s tastes than being told she needed a weapon, especially when Cobweb added, “Like a beefsteak, or kidneys; something with protein.”

  “Red meat is bad for the complexion,” said Floralinda.

  “So is anaemia,” said Cobweb. “You can’t think how delicate human beings are; they can’t just eat nasturtium petals, or drink spring dew, as anybody normal might. They need all kinds of variety or their hair drops off. You’ve really saddled me with an awful burden here.”