‘Start rowing,’ said Vessel.
‘Aren’t you guys going to row as well?’ Ooze whimpered.
‘There are only three sets of oars,’ said Nerlin, ‘and besides, I’ve got to steer the ship and Vessel’s got to do the washing up.’
‘Vet, vet, vet, Snip-Snip got vet on head,’ said Parsnip. ‘Vith the tovel make Snip-Snip dry as.’
After three minutes pulling the oars with all their might, the three spies collapsed from exhaustion. The ship had moved three-point-six centimetres eastwards.
‘Faster!’ Vessel demanded.
‘We can’t,’ said Cliché.
‘We’re done for,’ cried Stain.
‘We’re all going to die,’ sobbed Ooze.
‘You’re forgetting something,’ said Vessel. ‘Five of us are wizards. Wizards do not drown at sea. Wizards can only be drowned in the Terrible Pool of Vestor and that is thousands of miles from here.’
‘We’re not wizards,’ Cliché cried.
‘True,’ said Vessel. ‘You three could very well be going to die.’
‘That,’ said Nerlin, untangling a penguin from his hair, ‘is why you need to row faster. The faster you row, the faster we get out of here into the Atlantic.’
‘Boat sink, then Snip-Snip do Albert Ross and sore on vind,’ said Parsnip. ‘Snip-Snip safe bee.’
The storm increased in ferocity. It made no difference how hard the three spies pulled on their oars. They were drifting slowly backwards out of control towards the sharpest pointy rock in the whole area. The sea was so wild that rowing was like trying to stir sugar into a fifty-metre-wide cup of tea with a very, very tiny twig. If there had been a hundred people rowing, it would have made no difference, except, of course, that if there had been a hundred people on the Maldemer, it would have sunk because it was a small boat.
The waves began lifting rocks right up from the ocean floor and the first thing the rocks did was smash the ends off the six oars the spies were rowing with.
‘That’s better,’ said Stain, pulling his sticks backwards. ‘I seem to have found a new strength.’
‘Me too,’ said Cliché and Ooze in unison.
The Hearse Whisperer summoned massive heavy clouds that turned the day to night and dropped raindrops as big as footballs. Nerlin ran round the deck picking up stunned penguins and passing them down to Mordonna in the cabin below, where the soggy birds waddled around drinking all the water that was coming into the boat.
It is often said that every cloud has a silver lining, but no one ever says that some of them have a vulture lining too.
Mordonna’s faithful old bird, Leach, who had been slowly making his way towards Patagonia, had been swept up high into the air by an angry trade wind as he had crossed the equator. It had carried him right into a bank of rain clouds that were so far above the world that he could hardly get enough oxygen to breathe. He had tried to fly down or even fall down, but the clouds had kept him imprisoned in their thick folds. Fortunately the clouds were on their way to South America, having been summoned there by the Hearse Whisperer to join in the storm, and as they dumped all their rain over land and sea, they dropped Leach into a clump of stunted bushes on the mountain above the Hearse Whisperer.
Leach had limited powers, nothing like those of a true witch or wizard, but he had enough to screech at the sky until it began to calm down.
The Hearse Whisperer spun round to find whoever was calming her storm but, squashed between scrubby bushes, Leach was too well hidden.
No matter, thought the Hearse Whisperer. We will move on. Time to leave this godforsaken place.
The sea grew calm and the current carried the Maldemer out into the vast emptiness of the Atlantic Ocean. By taking all the sheets off the beds – which took some organising because they kept calling them ropes and then forgetting they’d swapped the names around – and cutting up everyone’s spare undies, Mordonna and the Queen managed to stitch together the tattered remnants of the old sails that hadn’t got blown overboard, and make a small sail. The trouble was that the wind had not only stopped blowing a storm, it had gone off for a lie-down and the sea was as flat as glass.
‘Where are we going?’ Nerlin asked as they drifted helplessly on the ocean current.
‘Well, according to my compass,’ said Vessel, taking out his geometry set and drawing a circle with a pencil and compass on a sheet of paper, ‘we are heading in a sort of northerly direction, give or take three hundred and sixty degrees.’
‘OK,’ said Mordonna, ‘so where is the nearest land?’
‘Umm, err, there isn’t any,’ said Vessel. ‘Though I think I can say with some confidence we are probably going to a country that begins with “A”.’
‘Snip-Snip wery pleased not country with a wubble you or a wee,’ said Parsnip.
‘Yes,’ Vessel continued. ‘I’m pretty sure we are headed for Africa. Or America.’
‘Not Austria then?’ said Nerlin, who had a terrible sense of direction and hadn’t even heard of the word geography.
‘Well, this is just brilliant,’ snapped Mordonna, slapping the three spies, who were slumped over their broken oars, with a wet fish. ‘You do know I’m going to have another baby quite soon, don’t you?’
No one did, though they could see why it might make her annoyed enough to slap people with a wet fish.
The Atlantic Ocean is seriously big. You could sail for days and days all over it, or even months if you kept getting your ropes and bed clothes tangled up with your sheets. You would see nothing except water, bits of dead seaweed, bits of alive seaweed, discarded burger boxes, lost thongs, fourteen albatrosses and more water that looked exactly the same as the first bit of water.
However, right in the middle of this cosmically huge desert of wet nothing, there is one tiny island. It is the tip of a huge underwater volcano, and it’s called Tristan da Cunha. It is such a tiny and remote place that it wasn’t even on the map that Vessel was using – and he had one of the best maps that had ever been given away as a free insert in The Junior Wizard’s Fun Weekly comic.39 So when it appeared on the horizon directly ahead of them, they thought it was Africa.
‘Isn’t that amazing?’ said the Queen. ‘I always thought Africa was bigger than that.’
‘Maybe it’s a lot further away,’ said Nerlin.
‘Go see,’ said Vessel, and Parsnip flew off, circled the tiny island, all thirty-eight square miles of it, and was back five minutes later.
‘Africa shrunk done,’ he said. ‘And ahoy no pymarids, all stolen.’
‘Maybe it’s Atlantis,’ Nerlin suggested.
‘Ahoy not Atlantis, big bang come say hello,’ Parsnip called down from his crow’s nest. A second later the Maldemer came to a sudden halt due to the fact that it had hit Tristan da Cunha, proving that it is possible to find a needle in a haystack.
Fifteen sheep wandered down from a field and looked at them.
‘Ah,’ said the Queen, ‘it’s the welcoming committee.’
The fifteen sheep were followed by a man and a dog.
‘Have you got permission to land?’ said the man. ‘Permission?’ said Vessel. ‘We are shipwrecked mariners in dire need of assistance.’
‘Fair enough,’ said the man. ‘Have a potato.’
‘Wonderful,’ said the Queen. ‘What we actually need is hot water and towels. My daughter is about to have a baby.’
‘What’s a towel?’ said the man. ‘Could you use a potato instead? We’ve got lots of them. Or a prawn? We’ve billions of them.’
After a few more minutes of this weird conversation, the man led them up the beach to a place called Potato Patches, where there was a small hut. While the man wasn’t looking, the Queen cast a spell over a pile of potatoes, turning them into a comfy bed, several hot towels and a heated bottle of French mineral water with a dash of lime. At least, that was what she had intended to turn them into. What she ended up with was an armchair covered in the tartan of the McSnaughty clan, three tea to
wels showing detailed maps of Tristan da Cunha before the new hut had been built, bordered with a frieze of potatoes, and a bottle of Belgian beetroot-flavoured mineral water. Her wand wasn’t working properly because the strange man had turned it into a seafood kebab by sticking six prawns and a potato ring on it.
‘Damn wand,’ she said, bashing it against the doorframe to shake off the food.
As Mordonna’s second child, Satanella, was born, the Queen hit her wand a second time. There was a flash of lightning. The air was filled with the smell of fried prawns and the tiny, perfectly formed little baby, lying in Mordonna’s adoring arms, was turned into a small black puppy with pointy teeth. Before the Queen could reverse the spell, the wand turned to dust and vanished in the wind.
‘Oops,’ she said.
‘Snip-Snip love puppy wery cuddling,’ said Parsnip. ‘Big hugs, wery, wery good luck blessing.’
‘Shut up, Parsnip,’ said Vessel.
The sheep farmer poked his head round the door and, pointing at Satanella, said that his own dog was getting too old to round up the sheep and he’d be happy to give them sixty-five potatoes for the puppy.
‘I’m not a puppy, you stupid man,’ said Satanella, who hadn’t actually seen herself in a mirror yet. ‘I’m a baby girl.’
The man fainted. What Satanella said when she looked down at her paws is too rude to repeat, but after a chew on a lamb bone, a bit of a run between the potato plants chasing a red rubber ball, and a lick of a few bits of her body that humans and even witches shouldn’t be able to reach, she decided that life as a dog might not be that bad.
‘When we get out of here and settle down into a place of our own,’ Mordonna said, ‘Granny will get a new wand and turn you back into a little girl.’
‘Maybe,’ said Satanella. ‘But in the meantime, throw the ball again.’
When the islander came to and the Queen had wiped all memory of a talking puppy from his brain, Vessel brought the three spies ashore from the boat and the islander took them all along the track to Edinburgh, the largest settlement on the island. Being the only settlement on the island it was also the smallest settlement, the nicest settlement, the settlement with the best potatoes and the settlement most likely to get traffic lights if the island ever got any roads or traffic.
‘We’ve applied for a traffic light grant from London, just in case,’ said the man.
The three spies were an instant hit with Tristan da Cunha’s young women. There was a lack of eligible young men on the island and the sight of these three new men made the girls giggle and blush with excitement.
‘Nice sack,’ said the boldest girl, sidling up to Cliché and stroking the coarse hessian.
The three spies couldn’t believe their luck. Back in Transylvania Waters they were always the ones left on their own at dances and their most popular nickname among the Transylvanian Waters girls was ‘loser’. But now they had their choice of seventeen adoring fans.
The Hearse Whisperer, now in the form of a giant sea eagle, sat on the very top of Tristan da Cunha and watched everything. She was very pleased when the islander invited the three useless spies to stay on Tristan da Cunha. She could have simply turned Cliché, Stain and Ooze into lobsters, but she thought that maybe one day in the future she might want them for something, and this tiny isolated island was the perfect place to store them. No matter how miserable their lives became, they would never be able to leave.
After a brief negotiation, which involved six potatoes and a lobster changing hands, it was agreed that Cliché, Stain and Ooze would give up spying and stay on Tristan da Cunha. There would be a lottery and the three winning ticket holders would each get an ex-spy as a husband. The three happy couples would get one week’s honeymoon in a hut on Inaccessible Island and the runners-up would each get a potato carved in the shape of a husband and a place at the top of the queue when the next boat with any spies on arrived.
The island had recently had a population increase of four, when some rams had been sent over four thousand kilometres from the Falkland Islands to increase the mutton gene pool. Now the three ex-spies would do the same for the human gene pool.
After a hearty meal of potatoes and prawns, washed down with lashings of potato and prawn wine, the visitors were given a souvenir potato each, personally autographed by the island council, and shown to their beds, where they slept like logs.40
Just after dawn, while the population of two hundred and seventy-four41 was still fast asleep, Vessel shook everyone awake and led them quietly back to the Maldemer.
‘We’ll leave them a present to thank them for their hospitality,’ he whispered as they left the village. Waving his wand, he conjured up a set of bright new traffic lights right in the middle of the village. Unfortunately, Vessel was not very scientifically minded and forgot to leave any controls for the lights, so they were permanently set on red. This caused a lot of problems in the village until someone made a new footpath so everyone could walk around the lights without breaking the law.
‘Next stop, err, somewhere beginning with “A”,’ said Vessel.
‘America,’ said Satanella. ‘I want America.’
‘I want Africa,’ said Valla.
‘What about Argentina?’ Nerlin suggested. ‘Or Australia.’
‘Or Amsterdam?’ said Mordonna.
‘Or anywhere?’ said the Queen.
‘Auntie Noreen’s,’ said Parsnip.
‘You don’t have an Auntie Noreen,’ said Vessel. ‘Do you?’
‘Not have, but want one,’ said Parsnip, because he felt at that moment the one thing that would make his life totally complete would be to have an Auntie Noreen.
‘Anywhere begins with “A”,’ said Vessel. ‘So the “A” we will use is autopilot. We will all go below deck and stay there until the autopilot takes us to land. Parsnip will sit up in the crow’s nest and keep lookout.
The ‘A’ where they finally ended their journey is shrouded in secrecy.
Under cover of darkness they slipped ashore on a deserted beach. Vessel tied a long bit of string to a cork in a hole in the bottom of the boat, and when they were safely ashore he pulled the bit of string until he heard the cork pop out. The boat sank and slowly settled out of sight into the mud, where it remains to this day. The Hearse Whisperer, who had changed herself from a sea eagle into a barnacle and glued herself to the hull of the Maldemer, now changed into a duck and swam ashore, where she changed again into a sparrow.
‘We need to find an estate agent,’ said the Queen.
‘Haven’t we been through enough horrible stuff already?’ said Mordonna.
‘Our best way to stay hidden from the King’s spies is to find a remote house in a big forest as far as possible from any other houses,’ said the Queen.
‘I don’t agree, my dear,’ said Vessel. ‘Remote houses miles from anywhere will be the first place they’ll look.’
‘Even if it is,’ said the Queen, ‘it would take them years to find us.’
‘I have a better idea,’ said Vessel. ‘The best place to hide is the last place they would look and that is right in the middle of a human city in an ordinary house in an ordinary street.’
So, in extremely heavy disguises that made them look as human as most people in seaside bed and breakfasts in winter do, Nerlin, Mordonna, the two children and the Queen booked into Seagull View, a grey, nondescript hotel three streets back from the sea front. Here they had to suffer far worse things than they had ever had to whilst at sea. They had to eat salty porridge for breakfast, share a bathroom with a Morris-Dancing group who kept practising all night for the upcoming World Silly Dancing Olympics, and they were forced to sleep in rooms with dreadful wallpaper covered in suspicious stains.
Meanwhile, Vessel went in search of their new home. Although he thought they would be safer in a normal house in the middle of the city, he agreed to look for a big old house miles and miles from anywhere because he was totally in love with the Queen. He changed into a crow and
flew with Parsnip out into the countryside.
The Hearse Whisperer flew behind them.
The seaside town gave way to fields and small villages.
‘Too many people there,’ Vessel said and the two of them flew on.
The fields gave way to open country and a large forest that stretched away to the horizon.
‘This looks promising,’ said Vessel, landing on the top branch of a tall tree.
Here and there dirt tracks cut wavy lines through the trees, but they all seemed to lead to dead ends. Vessel and Parsnip split up and flew down different tracks, returning to the tall tree every hour. Below them, hiding under a big leaf, the Hearse Whisperer had collapsed, exhausted. Sparrows have much smaller wings than crows and she had had a terrible time keeping up with Vessel and Parsnip. Given a choice, she would have changed herself into an eagle, but form-changing wasn’t something you could do too often without bursting lots of veins inside your head and turning into a second-hand car salesman for ever and ever.
It was dusk before Vessel finally found a house. From the air, it looked perfect: semi-derelict but watertight, overgrown with deadly nightshade and ivy, home to a family of bats and armies of spiders. What more could a family of wizards ask for? Perhaps the Queen had been right. Perhaps this was the perfect place for the Floods to settle down. It was certainly far more appealing than any house in suburbia could be.
He flew back to the tree to tell Parsnip.
‘We’ll go and spend the night there,’ Vessel said. ‘You can only get the true feel for a place in the dangerous hours after midnight. There may be ghosts and we’ll need to make sure they’re friendly.’
As midnight struck, something made the hairs in his throat tingle and Vessel knew there was danger nearby. He tried to ignore it, but it was like when you know you are going to be sick – no matter how still you keep and how much you try to sleep in the hope it will go away, you know that it will never go away until you have thrown up. Whatever you do is just putting it off until later.
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