by Alex Bell
When he had finished, the three of them stared at it, enthralled, for several moments and the fairy godmothers in their cottages went to fetch their glasses so they might see it better from their windows. Lex had already known that the royal crowns were made from something even more beautiful and valuable than gold, but he hadn’t known what exactly. Now he clearly saw that the crown was made out of star-silver. The Gods made these crowns out of the stars themselves, imbuing them with an ineffable majesty and beauty that gold would never have been able to achieve. Lex couldn’t take his eyes off it. He wanted to be able to look at it always. There was no way he was ever giving this back to the crone; no way. They would have to prise it from his cold dead fingers first. It was simply shaped with no jewels or gilt adornment of any kind — it simply didn’t need any. Now that it had been washed, the silver shone softly in Lex’s hands, dappling his face with starlight. Lex could see his wavering reflection in the crown’s surface as if he was looking into a clear, still unicorn lake. This was what he lived for — this, right here. The moments when he came face to face with beauty like this.
After they’d been gazing at it for a few moments, the crone began to fidget restlessly and started whining about getting ‘her’ crown back, so Lex stood up with a sigh, shushed her and then prepared to lower the crown onto its rightful place on his head. He froze in surprise when a madman burst from the trees, waving his arms and chasing a herd of startled-looking duckigs before him.
‘Don’t put it on!’ the figure shrieked. ‘Lex, don’t put it on, it’s bewitched!’
‘What’s wrong with Lucius?’ Schmidt asked in surprise.
‘Ha! He’s too late, as usual,’ Lex said with a grin as his brother sprinted towards him.
‘You’re too late, Lucius. I already found the-oompf!’ He broke off as Lucius crashed into him and the two of them went rolling over on the grass, the crown flying out of Lex’s hand.
‘You idiot!’ Lex snapped, snatching it up again. ‘You’re too late; I’ve already won. I found it first.’
‘Lex, please listen to me,’ Lucius begged, still very much out of breath. ‘The Gods are cheating!’
‘Well of course they are; they want to win.’
‘The crown is bewitched. It’s a trap!’
‘Eh?’
‘It’s a trap! I overheard Jezra talking with the Judge. He’s bewitched the crown with some kind of poison to take you out of the running. He made the Judge keep the prophet back so that you’d find the crown first. Oh Gods, Lex, you have to believe me; I’m not making this up!’
‘All right, calm down, I believe you,’ Lex said calmly.
‘You do?’ Lucius beamed up from where he was still sprawled on the ground. He had been sure that Lex would think this was some kind of ploy — that his greed would overturn his common sense and he’d crown himself anyway. ‘Thank the Gods.’
‘Hmm,’ Lex examined the crown in his hands thoughtfully. ‘But is it really bewitched?’
‘Lex, I swear I overheard Jezra saying that-’
‘Yes, yes, I already said I believe you,’ Lex said, waving his hand dismissively.
‘Then you understand it’s a trap?’
Lex glanced at his brother disdainfully. He noticed he still had Zachary tucked under his arm. The ferret was hanging there resignedly. ‘Of course it’s a trap, Lucius; that’s not the issue. The issue is working out exactly what the trap is.’
‘But… I just told you… ’ Lucius stammered.
Lex sighed. ‘Jezra would have realised that you overheard him.’
‘No, no,’ Lucius protested at once. ‘I was careful not to be seen. He told the Judge he realised he wasn’t going to win. He said all he wanted now was to hamper you.’
‘How can you be fooled so easily?’ Lex sneered. ‘This is the God of Wit and Daring. He’s not going to accept defeat that easily. Trust me, he’s still playing to win and if you overheard him it’s because Jezra wanted to be overheard. It was a part of his plan.’
‘Well, what difference does that make, anyway?’ Lucius said.
‘Jezra tricked the Judge,’ Lex said patiently. ‘He got the prophet out of the running before the round had even begun by making up this story about the crown being bewitched. He ensured that you overheard what he’d said so that you would run and tell me not to put on the crown. That much is clear. There’d be a stalemate and you and I would get an equal number of points for this round. A bold lie to frighten me out of winning the crown. If he knew you had overheard and were going to warn me, then he’d have no need to actually bewitch the crown, see?’
‘You’ve lost me,’ Lucius said.
Lex ignored him. Of course Jezra knew that Lucius knew. He had anticipated Lucius’s loyalty; he knew the message would be passed on to Lex. And he knew that Lex knew his brother was a terrible liar and so had to be telling the truth. So Lex should be able to put the crown on safely… but there was that slight danger that Jezra himself might have been even cleverer than that and also anticipated Lex working out his scam, in which case the crown might be dangerous after all. Lex looked at the beautiful thing in his hand. He just had to put it on. The chances were that this was nothing more than a lie that Jezra had cleverly arranged for Lucius to deliver, for he must have let Lucius overhear deliberately. The whole thing had to be a bluff. Lex glanced at Schmidt. ‘Well, you only live once, don’t you, sir?’ And before anyone could stop him, he lowered the crown onto his head, ignoring the others’ yells of warning.
Nothing happened.
Everyone was staring at Lex in silent apprehension. A grin slowly spread across his face. ‘You see?’ he said. ‘What did I tell-’
And then, without any warning at all, Lex turned into a fish. A whiskerfish, to be precise — with a small, blue, spotted body and long, ridiculous whiskers that fanned out from his face. For a moment everyone stared at the thing, thrashing around in the grass on top of a pile of Lex’s clothes, the crown having rolled off a little distance. Schmidt was the first to recover. He picked Lex up and ran to the nearest fairy godmother cottage with him — dropping him several times because he was thrashing so hard and almost treading on him once. He barged straight into the cottage, past the indignant fairy godmother and dumped Lex into the sink, which he quickly filled with water.
‘Just what do you think you’re doing, young man?’ the fairy godmother said irritably from behind him.
Schmidt turned around in surprise. It had been a long time since anyone had addressed him as ‘young man’.
‘Isn’t it self-evident, madam?’ he snapped. ‘My friend poisoned himself with whiskerfish poison and was suffocating out there.’
‘Yes, but you might have knocked before barging in,’ the godmother said huffily. ‘It doesn’t do to forget our manners over these things.’
‘Oh, shut up,’ Schmidt said wearily.
Lucius appeared in the doorway then and pushed past the irate godmother to rush over to the sink. ‘Oh, is he okay?’ he asked, wringing his hands. ‘Is Lex all right, Mr Schmidt?’
‘He’ll live,’ Schmidt said dryly. ‘But for the next couple of weeks his life is going to be rather difficult, I’m afraid.’
The Goddess of Luck was not at all happy with Jezra over the whiskerfish incident. She was furious at the attack on her player and furious that Jezra had managed to bewitch the crown behind her back. Jezra was pleased to have caused her Ladyship inconvenience, but of course the plan had not worked as well as he’d hoped, for the whiskerfish poison he’d used was not lethal and Lex had still won the round. So really there wasn’t anyone who was all that happy about what had happened. Except, perhaps, for Zachary. When Schmidt had asked the fairy godmother if she had anything with which they could transport Lex back to the ship, she had grudgingly given them a small plastic bag and Schmidt had scooped Lex up in this and given the bag to Lucius to carry. Unfortunately, they had only gone a few steps from the cottage before Zachary leapt up and punctured the bag with his sharp carniv
orous teeth so that water started pouring out and Lex had to be rushed back to the fairy godmother’s sink again, much to her tight-lipped irritation.
Then Schmidt and Lucius had an argument over whether Zachary had been truly trying to eat Lex or not.
‘He only has a ferret brain,’ Lucius whined. ‘He can’t understand. He probably thought Lex was lunch, or something. ’
‘Well, just keep an eye on him, would you?’ Schmidt snapped. ‘He’s been a ferret for so long he probably can’t remember being human. If he got hold of Lex he could kill him instantly.’
When they got back to the ship, Schmidt found a large transparent plastic container in the larder that had been used to store spider snacks. He tipped these out, filled the makeshift tank with water and poured the water from the plastic bag into it so that Lex fell into the tank where he could swim about agitatedly.
‘What’s going to happen to him?’ Lucius asked anxiously, pressing his nose against the side of the tank to stare in at his brother.
‘For the next week or so he’ll alternate daily between his usual charming self and this… little fish.’
‘But what are we going to do?’ Lucius cried, wringing his hands again.
‘Oh, stop flapping, Lucius! There isn’t anything we can do,’ Schmidt said impatiently. ‘We’ll just have to wait for it to wear off. In the meantime, do you know anything about caring for whiskerfish?’
It was an aggravating thing to have to spend one day as a fish and one as a human, but the real problem of it was that whiskerfish needed to eat at least once every couple of hours and — as they had no teeth whatsoever — they needed soft, mushy food. But although Schmidt turned the larder inside out looking for seaweed, flotsam or sea cucumbers, he was unable to find anything of the sort. It was all starting to look rather serious because whiskerfish absolutely had to eat once every two hours or they’d starve to death. Lucius volunteered to mash up some bananas he’d found and put them in the tank, but whiskerfish-Lex wouldn’t touch them and it looked, for a worrying few moments, as if he was not going to survive…
But then Schmidt found a box of muggets. Now muggets, as any fisherman knows, are made from a mixture of leech brains, jellyfish legs, maggot eggs and octopus tentacles, and are the best fishing bait ever created. They were seafood — of a type — and they were soft. It was also their only chance. So Schmidt dropped one into the tank, praying to the Gods that Lex would eat it. As it turned out, muggets were apparently divinely delicious to whiskerfish and Lex gobbled the thing up in no time. Based on Schmidt’s calculations, they had enough to last two weeks as long as they were careful. The problem, though, was that whilst this mixture was perfectly delicious and sustaining to the whiskerfish, to humans it was a mildly poisonous combination that the human body was incapable of digesting — not that any sensible person would ever try, for the muggets tasted as disgusting as they looked and smelt.
Because Lex needed to be fed every two hours as a fish, Schmidt and Lucius took alternate night shifts. Then, on the days when Lex was human again, they caught up on some sleep whilst Lex spent most of the day throwing up over the side of the ship. He was always worse in the mornings, when the remnants of muggets he’d eaten the day before were still undigested in his body. Within twenty-four torturous hours he would just be starting to feel like he was merely ill as opposed to dying when he would turn back into a fish that gobbled muggets all day.
There had initially been some worry over the Binding Bracelets. When Lex had turned into a fish, his bracelet had obviously fallen off and been taken back to the ship along with Lex’s other clothes. During his days as a whiskerfish he was unable to wear the bracelet and he and Schmidt were able to eat their meals separately without swapping bodies. But as soon as Lex turned back into a human the bracelet always shot straight back onto his wrist and it was these days that had really worried Schmidt for continuous puking had not put Lex in an eating mood and if Schmidt tried to eat anything without Lex, he would simply have found himself in Lex’s body, meaning he’d have been the one to turn into a whiskerfish when the time came. It even occurred to the lawyer that Lex might refuse food on purpose, just for that reason.
It was therefore with a distinct sense of unease that Schmidt suggested to Lex on his first human day that he put a crumb of bread or something in his mouth at meal-times so that Schmidt could eat his own food without body-swapping. To his surprise, Lex had agreed with a disinterested shrug and said, ‘If I’m going to be throwing up all day anyway I might as well throw up bread as well as muggets.’
It therefore appeared that, if swapping bodies on purpose had occurred to Lex, he wasn’t going to act on it and, to Schmidt’s relief, this remained the case even as the days went by and Lex became more ill.
‘How are you feeling?’ Lucius asked one afternoon as Lex staggered onto the bridge and dropped down onto his blankets.
Lex ignored the question. He felt like he would never be able to eat anything ever again. Being constantly sick drained away all his energy so that he couldn’t believe he would ever want to do anything active ever again either. And the really disheartening thing of it was that he knew he would not even begin to start getting better until he stopped turning into a fish all the time. The idea of this going on for weeks was unbearable.
‘Lex? I said, how are you feeling? Did you hear me, Lex?’ Lucius persisted.
Lex would have shot him if he’d only had a gun in his hand.
‘It’s quite clear that he feels like drowning himself in his own tank,’ Schmidt said from across the other side of the bridge. ‘Why don’t you just leave it at that?’
Lex felt a burst of gratitude towards his employer in that moment and made a silent vow to be nicer to him once he was recovered. At last he drifted off to sleep, but it seemed like mere moments later that Lucius was shaking him awake. ‘Come on, Lex, it’s time to get back down to your tank and have some more of those nice juicy muggets,’ he said, trying to lend a supportive hand. Lex shook him off irritably, suppressing the urge to heave just at the very mention of the word mugget.
‘Don’t fuss me!’ he snapped. ‘Don’t touch me! I can manage!’
‘All right,’ Lucius said, holding up his hands and backing away. ‘Fine. Do it yourself. Here’s your blanket.’
Lex snatched the blanket from his brother’s hand and wrapped it around his shivering shoulders, glaring at Lucius from red-rimmed eyes as he did so. Then he turned and stalked from the bridge towards the kitchen where his tank was, with Lucius trailing along behind him. Lex actually preferred it when Schmidt was the one babysitting him. Schmidt didn’t ask stupid questions or try to help him get dressed when he became human again — he just let him do it on his own.
Lex tried to stop himself from gnashing his teeth in annoyance when he walked into the kitchen and saw his tank sitting on the kitchen table with a slimy-looking mugget all ready for him. There was also a miniature castle in the tank, which Lucius had found on the ship somewhere and had insisted on putting there to make it seem more ‘homely’. Lex picked the thing out with distaste and threw it down on the table. ‘How many times do I have to tell you not to put that in my tank?’ he snapped. ‘It’s demeaning. I’m not really a fish — you do realise that, don’t you?’
‘You like it when you’re a fish,’ Lucius sighed, picking up the tiny castle and replacing it in the tank. ‘I think it makes you feel safe. You like hiding underneath that little drawbridge thing.’
Lex scowled and said nothing. The truth was that he found it hard to remember much of what he did as a whiskerfish. The only thing that mattered to his tiny fish brain was muggets. When he was human he would always promise himself that he was never going to eat another one of those awful things even if that meant he starved to death as a whiskerfish and Lucius had to flush his little fish corpse down the toilet the next morning. But when he was a fish again, it was like he was addicted to the bloody things and all he could think about was how much longer until he’d b
e given his next mugget. It was exhausting and Lex was thoroughly fed up with it. He was also less than comfortable about his tank being in the kitchen in case someone, in some fit of madness, decided to cook him for a midnight snack or something. But they couldn’t move his tank to the bridge because it was too heavy with all the water inside. And they absolutely had to keep him away from Zachary, for the ferret seemed quite determined to eat him if he could.
‘How many more days?’ Lex asked, shivering as he pulled off his shirt. When you’re ill and longing for warm sheets and blankets, having to get into a cold tank of water with no clothes on and eat slimy poisonous brains and tentacles really is the very last thing you want to do.
‘Mr Schmidt said probably just a few more days,’ Lucius said.
Lex would be interested to find out just how Schmidt knew so much about whiskerfish poison later. But for now, all he could do was concentrate on how ill he felt and how bitter he was that that beautiful, flawless, enthralling crown had been left behind in the dirty fingers of a mad old crone.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
JEZRA’S PROPOSAL
At long last, eight days later, Lex was standing shivering in the kitchen, stripped down to his underwear, waiting to get into his tank, glaring ferociously at the slimy mugget already there when… absolutely nothing happened.
‘You should have turned into a fish by now,’ Schmidt said eventually.
Lex sat down on the chair, pulled his blanket tighter around his shoulders and said nothing. He didn’t care any more. Fish, human, what did it matter? Another side effect of whiskerfish poisoning was that, for some reason, it made your hair grow. Lex’s hair was now as long as Lucius’s, and lank and greasy because he hadn’t washed it since becoming ill. His skin had turned this greyish colour and he felt thin and everything ached…