by J M Sanford
“Where is she, anyhow?” he muttered to himself.
As he contemplated his increasingly complex problem, something scorching hot and crackling with sparks whizzed past his ear. He ducked, much too late to have avoided the thing, if it had been meant to hit him. In one corner of the room, a blue fireball as big as his head bobbed up and down, looking suspiciously as if it were weighing him up for another attack. Then, without warning, it took off on a sparking, hissing, banging, rattling circuit of the room, crashing around in something Harold could recognise as severe agitation. He could only cringe in the middle of the room, hoping desperately that the thing didn’t hit him, intentionally or not. That’s torn it, he thought. Professor Lamb and his wife couldn’t fail to hear that racket. Still, no one came. Gradually, the wretched thing slowed, and stopped. Harold remembered tales that the tower was haunted. The blue fireball had no eyes, no other features with which to form an expression, but it almost seemed to be watching him, waiting.
“Did they leave you all by yourself?” Harold asked the fireball, and immediately felt ridiculous.
The fireball, sparking madly, hurled itself out of the window, vanishing from sight. Harold ran to the window, but couldn’t see the wretched thing anywhere. Then it reappeared again at his shoulder, seemingly out of nowhere. Harold backed off a pace or two, and watched the thing repeat its mysterious performance. He had the idea that it was attempting to communicate, perhaps by some sort of pantomime, since it obviously couldn’t speak.
“She din’t jump, did she?”
The fireball zoomed wildly back and forth, swaying like a pendulum. Harold hoped that meant ‘no’.
“Then what?”
A shadowy figure formed before him: the bulk of a man’s shape suggested in dark smoke, restless purple sparks animating finer details. Two brightly glowing orbs of magenta fire burned in the shadowy form of its head. It mimed furiously, but Harold still couldn’t tell what it was getting at. “Has somebody took her?”
The figure nodded, recollecting itself into its more compact form until it was just a small blue fireball bouncing up and down excitedly. It whizzed around and around, trailing bright pink sparks and making poor Harold positively green with dizziness. “Do you know where’d they go?”
Once more, the fireball hurled itself out of the window, plummeting down towards the sea. Harold leaned over the window ledge, to see it bobbing in agitation just above the surface of the water. Climbing carefully down, he found the thing circling around the bewildered old fisherman. This really would give the people of Springhaven something to talk about… Impatiently the fireball led Harold back to shore, and away from town.
“Wait, wait!” cried Harold, sweaty and out of breath from all the day’s exertions so far. He would be hopelessly slow on foot, and besides, he didn’t like to think what attention the strange animated fireball would garner, dancing excitedly around his head. In a flash of ingenuity, he procured a metal colander and secured it carefully to the handlebars of his brother’s bicycle.
“You can ride in that,” he told the fireball, still not sure if it understood much of what he said, if anything at all. “Here,” he said, patting the colander invitingly. With an indefinable air of reluctance, the fireball got in, and they were under way. There was really only one road out of town, so Harold needed no further direction for the time being. Unused to this new, racy mode of transportation, he wobbled down the road and out into the narrow twisting lane leading inland, away from Springhaven.
~
Tearing through the countryside on the borrowed bicycle, they missed Amelia in Lannersmeet by only a matter of hours. As they approached the small town, down the gentle slope of the hill, Harold could see the road ahead diverge, splitting off in four directions. “All right,” he said to the fireball, “where to now?” He got no intelligible answer from it, not even any esoteric miming. “Maybe somebody here’s seen her?” Suddenly the fireball leapt up out of the colander. It whizzed around and around like a firework, tracing a dizzying circle in bright sky blue sparks. “What? What? Turn around?” No, the fireball didn’t like that – it spun in the opposite direction, faster and faster until it blurred into a blue halo. With the agitated fireball blocking his view, Harold came to a halt at the crossroads, dismounting awkwardly. “I do wish you could talk some,” he muttered to the fireball, as it settled back into the colander.
Underneath a signpost bristling with the names of familiar towns, two identical gentlemen in smart coats and fancy cravats stood consulting a map. Wiping away the sweat trickling down his forehead, Harold wheeled the bicycle over to where the gentlemen stood.
“Beg pardon,” he said, “have you seen a pretty girl with long blonde braids?”
The two men stared at him as if he was a simpleton, their black eyes curiously vacant. “No,” said the one very slightly taller than his twin, his voice flat and emotionless. “We have not.” He opened up what looked like an oversized silver pocket watch, and then stared again at Harold still standing there.
“Not just any girl, I mean,” said Harold. “She’s got braids almost right down to her feet. Not the sort of thing you see every day –”
“What do you have there?” asked the shorter gentleman, indicating the colander wedged in between the bicycle’s handlebars. The fireball was making nervous fizzling noises, pressing itself down in the bottom of the colander and turning orange.
“I dunno,” said Harold, honestly. He looked down at the simmering orange fire. He couldn’t articulate why, but he didn’t think it looked very happy. “I reckon it made itself sick, spinning around like that. What says you?” If it belonged to Amelia, he should do his best to look after it.
“Regretfully, we have more important matters to attend to, and we’re in quite a hurry.” said the very slightly taller of the two.
“Have you seen the snails?” asked his twin, completely ignoring Harold’s question.
The other gentleman hissed and pulled him aside by the elbow. “Don’t.”
A faint resentful scowl crossed his twin’s blank face, very briefly. “Have you seen the snails, please?”
The taller one pulled his twin away from Harold again, this time more forcefully. “He can’t have seen the snails, can he? He wasn’t here. What’s more, snails should not be our only line of inquiry.” The two stared at each other in silence for an uncomfortably long time, before turning from Harold and heading towards the tea house. “We’re terribly sorry to have bothered you,” said the taller one to Harold, over his shoulder as the two of them walked away. “Please, continue to go about your business.”
Snails… Could that be what the fireball had been trying to communicate with its dizzying spirals? Harold hadn’t forgotten the strange snail-drawn contraption that had come to Springhaven, and already suspected it might have something to do with Amelia’s disappearance. He leaned down as close to the fireball as he dared, and whispered, “You saw the snails, din’t you? The giant ones, I mean.” The fireball bounced, but mutedly, still deep orange. “The knight with the snails… is he the one who took Amelia?” The fireball bounced higher. That was enough. Harold got back on his bike. Although five roads led out of Lannersmeet, Harold knew the surrounding countryside well enough to know that three of the five led back to the coast, and a handful of other fishing villages. A fourth would take him to the nearest big city, no place for giant snails to avoid attention. The last road out led into the woods, a thick leafy canopy shading the track would surely be welcome shelter from the heat of the summer sun.
The two strange gentlemen had disappeared, so Harold pushed off, heading into the woods.
6: RULEBOOKS AND FAIRY TALES
From the porthole of the snailcastletank, Amelia watched uneasily as the road unravelled behind them. Slow as it might be, the snailcastletank rarely stood still, and certainly not for long. The apparently indefatigable snails could take their meals on the move, munching their way across meadows and moors, and Percival rarely left th
e driver’s seat. Whether he slept up there or not, Amelia couldn’t be sure, although if not he was certainly prone to long periods of silent reflection. The lack of speed in their progress had fooled her at first, but not anymore. Despite Meg’s protests to the contrary, Amelia could tell that they were running away from something: they’d already put some considerable distance between themselves and the tea house at Lannersmeet, and Meg had spent the first couple of miles walking after the snailcastletank with a broom to cover their silvery tracks. When she’d tired of that, she’d begun a game of chess, quite clearly to take Amelia’s mind off of their pursuers, and for the first time Amelia’s tactics had given Meg serious pause for thought.
Amelia got up to stretch her legs while Meg deliberated over her next move. “So, where are we going in such a hurry, anyway?” She suspected Meg had a destination in mind before they’d even left Springhaven. The two strange gentlemen had only hurried her along.
“The same place the other side are going to,” said Meg, not looking up from the chessboard. “Only we’ve to get there first.”
“And what about this other side: who are they? You didn’t really tell me before.”
“The Black Side,” said Meg, indicating the pieces in front of her. “The Black Queen and her men.”
“You mean those strange men at the tea house. In that case… you and I and Sir Percival must be the White Side?” she guessed. It explained the relevance of all those tedious chess games, a little.
“Well, there are more players than that, but yes.”
Amelia stood toying with one of the stylised chess pieces on its long pin – a paladin she had managed to take, to her great surprise. “So… this is like a game of chess?”
“In a roundabout sort of way, yes.”
“So, who is this Black Queen? How come I’ve never heard of her?”
The combination of the difficult chess situation and the sudden barrage of questions appeared to be wearing on Meg’s nerves. “I don’t know who she is; I’ve never met her.”
“And those two men dressed in black?” Amelia, jumping immediately to the most dramatic conclusion as her imaginative nature dictated, had already made up her mind they must be assassins, elegant and deadly.
“I’ve never met them before, either. For all I know, they might not even have anything to do with the Black Queen. I just thought we’d better not take the risk.”
That reminded Amelia… “And the White Queen – that would be you, I suppose.”
“No, that would be you, dear,” said Meg, snappishly.
This temporarily stunned Amelia into silence. For as long as she could remember, she had dreamed of being a princess, but she had always recognised her idle flights of fancy for what they were. Now… maybe even now they were heading for a palace, where an empty throne awaited her royal bottom. Princes might travel from all corners of the land to compete for her hand… She looked again at the chessboard, the game in progress, and remembered the small problem of the other Queen. “Do I… Do I need to be really good at chess?” she asked, afraid of the answer. She’d learnt a lot about the game from Meg, but doubted she could win a game against a serious opponent, except by a piece of remarkable good luck. “I’m not going to have to play for my life or anything, am I?”
Meg burst out laughing. “Oh, heavens no, child! Wouldn’t it be so much easier if it all hinged on a game of chess?”
“Far less running around,” Percival put in, from the driver’s seat as usual.
“Just as well it doesn’t, with the way you play,” said Meg. “Perce said it would help you understand the basic concepts of strategy a bit, and of course the names and roles of the pieces have some relevance.”
Queen, paladin, mage, warship, commander. Amelia ran through them in her head, thinking about how they moved and their individual usefulness. “So if I’m the White Queen,” she blushed a little at how that sounded: all the other players existed solely to support and protect their Queen as she advanced across the board, “then what are you?”
“The White Mage, if you’ve no great objection to that. Not that you know anyone any more skilled in magic,” said Meg.
“Is Percival something?”
“I am most certainly something,” came Percival’s voice again. “Although quite what may be a matter for debate.”
Meg rolled her eyes. The mystery of the man behind the gleaming visor had apparently worn off, as far as she was concerned. “Perce will be your Paladin. This old bus,” she thumped the panel beside her, and it clanged, “is your Warship. I’m sorry we’ve nothing grander, but it’ll get us there.”
Eventually, Amelia thought, but didn’t say anything. Palace or not, she didn’t much want to hurry towards their destination, not before she’d even had time to think it over. She looked up through the driver’s hatch, at the setting sun glinting off Sir Percival’s armour. She still hadn’t seen him without it – hadn’t even seen him take off the helmet – but now she had some idea of why he wore it, travelling with a woman who shrugged off the thought of danger so casually. Overwhelmed by recent events, and beginning to tremble, Amelia sat down carefully at the games table opposite Meg.
Meg reached over and touched her hand, gently. “I know this is all a lot to take in, and you having led such a quiet life up ‘til now, but with you leaving home I’m afraid that’ll be taken as accepting the challenge. I’m sorry, dear, but I couldn’t just leave things as they were.”
“Why not?” Amelia asked, brusquer than she had really intended. But why pluck her out of her safe, comfortable home in Springhaven? No one had wanted to kill her there!
Meg withdrew her hand, her expression strangely guilty. “Well… I…”
“No. No. I think I’ve had quite enough of all this,” Amelia interrupted, getting up from her seat in such a hurry that she likely would have upset the table had it not been bolted to the floor, “I’d like to go home now, thank you.” With the threat of tears stinging behind her eyelids, she pulled her handkerchief from her sleeve, twisting it anxiously. She paced the short distance from the table, to the door, to the hatch that led to the driver’s seat, but the snailcastletank rattled onwards. Each turn of its wheels took her incrementally further from her home – from everything safe and reasonable, everything she had taken for granted.
Meg sighed in exasperation. “Amelia, dear, do sit down. There’s no need to get so upset…”
“I didn’t ask to be the White Queen, you know!” To her dismay, Amelia’s voice was escalating beyond her control, in both pitch and volume, “I didn’t want to come out here with you and your silly castle and your horrible snails and now I want to go home!” And then the tears spilled over and she could say no more, which was probably just as well.
“Don’t be such a twit! If the Black Side are following us then we can’t just lead them back to Jonathan and Sincerity. We’d be putting them in danger for no reason at all! Better to keep going, now.”
“But I don’t want to! I don’t want to be the White Queen! I don’t want to fight anyone!” Unable to run and hide in her room as she would have done at home, Amelia did the next best thing: she yanked on the cord and the staircase came down in a commotion of clattering. She scrambled up and pulled the staircase back up behind her. Then, panting and almost choking on her tears, she lay flat on the floor of the bedchamber, holding on tight to the handle of the trapdoor.
She heard someone pull on the cord to no avail, and then Meg’s muffled voice. “Oh for the love of… Nobody’s going to hurt you, dear – I shan’t let them!”
“But you don’t think they won’t try!” Amelia shouted back down through the floorboards.
“Try they might, but they’ll have a damn fine witch to contend with!” Meg shouted back. “And Percival will do his best to look after you, too, so don’t you be afraid.”
“I’ll be afraid all I want! Go away!”
The snailcastletank rumbled on, but Meg had fallen silent. Amelia, despairing at all the asso
rted new miseries of her life, lay on the floor and sobbed.
~
Hours later, a knocking from beneath the floorboards startled her from sleep. “Amelia?” Meg called up. “Would you like something to eat?”
Feeling calmer with her tears long since run dry, Amelia couldn’t ignore the growling of her stomach. Father wouldn’t have sent her away with Meg if it wasn’t safe, would he? And Sir Percival was a knight, so he’d have to do the right thing and protect her from any real peril. She had to confess to at least a spark of excitement at the idea of being a genuine damsel in distress, with a literal knight in shining armour never very far away… Reluctantly, she put away her pride and came down.
Meg had put together a supper of cold gammon, cheese and half a loaf, with some watercress and tomatoes to go with it, and a large jar of pickled onions. Judging by the contents of the tiny kitchen area, Meg didn’t often cook, which seemed sensible with the snailcastletank on the move so much.
“Come on, Amelia,” said Meg, “we’ll sit up with Percival, shall we?” and she quickly clambered up out of the hatch to the driver’s seat, plate in one hand, and the jar of pickled onions wedged under the other arm as she held her skirts out of the way. Amelia passed up her plate and followed, squeezing onto the bench between Meg and Percival. Somehow, she found it not entirely uncomfortable. Soon, with the rocking of the snailcastletank and Percival’s gentle cultured voice rolling out the rhythm of some ancient epic poem, only the cool evening breeze on her face kept her from dozing. She closed her eyes, the words of the saga leaping forth behind the dark of her eyelids, vivid images of fiery battles with dragons. When the saga ended, Amelia stifled a yawn, and stretched as best she could in the confined space.