Aurelius and I

by Benjamin James Barnard

  “Thankyou,” I said, adding under my breath; “I only wish Aurelius would leave as many clues as to where he’s gotten to.”

  “Did you say Aurelius?”

  “I did.”

  “You don’t mean Aurelius-Octavius Jumbleberry-Jones?”

  “Do you know anybody else named Aurelius?”

  “And he is missing?” the king asked with great concern, ignoring my sarcasm. “What do you mean by missing?”

  I explained the tale of how I had discovered Aurelius’s ransacked cottage to the aging fairy, whose face turned graver with every word.

  “This is indeed a great tragedy! Aurelius is the guardian of this forest, protector of all whom reside within it. Without him we are all in grave danger. He must be found!”

  I agreed, but privately I was beginning to wonder how it would ever be possible to find Aurelius or Baskerville; Hanselwood forest was enormous, and I was most certainly not. How could I ever hope to cover enough ground with no clue about where to start searching?

  ***

  After a time Brutas returned to inform the king and I that his enquiries had regretfully proven unsuccessful – nobody had seen Baskerville (the king had decided that no-one but he and I should be informed of Aurelius’s disappearance, as this would only be likely to cause panic within the village, while risking that such information may find its way to some of the forest’s less scrupulous inhabitants, who may seek to take advantage of the situation).

  “And you’re sure you spoke to everybody?” I questioned Brutas.

  “Yes sir, quite sure. I questioned every fairy in the village.”

  “Every fairy?” I repeated.

  “Yes sir, every last one.”

  “And what about the Dragnor? Did you question him?”

  “Well, no,” he admitted sheepishly. “But, sir, you can’t seriously think there can be any point in questioning that monster. Everybody knows dragnors are evil, lying beasts. He will undoubtedly say anything you want to hear if he feels it will save his skin.”

  “Actually I do think there’s a point,” I snapped, angrily. “The point is that I don’t give a fudge for your silly conflicts and prejudices, or any other problems you magical lot may have, all I care about is getting my dog back!” And with that I stormed off toward the Dragnor’s fragile prison.

  To my surprise, rather than loudly protesting or attempting escape, I found the dragnor sitting on the floor of his flimsy cage, staring dejectedly at the dirt underfoot. For a brief moment my anger faded as I was overcome with empathy for the broken beast, but I resolved to steel myself before I began my questioning - though he may have looked innocent and even pathetic now, it was important to remember that only hours ago this mean little creature had been willing to burn down the homes of an entire village of creatures smaller and weaker than himself.

  “Have you seen my dog?” I asked by way of announcing my presence. The dragnor, who had clearly not heard my arrival, leapt up in shock, causing him to bang his horns on the roof of the cage. It was a highly amusing sight which made it all the more difficult to keep my threatening look in tact.

  “Your what?” asked Grahndel, rubbing his bruised horns.

  “My dog,” I repeated, and then, remembering what strange world I had wandered into, I added “My carpet dragon?”

  “A what dragon?”

  “A carpet dragon, you heard me. Look, don’t start trying to be clever, I know you know what I’m talking about, a dog, carpet dragons you call them, about this high, four legs, covered in fur, makes a sound like ‘woof!’”

  “Oh, you mean a lesser-striped sabre-toothed fletchling.”

  “A what?”

  “A lesser-striped, sabre-toothed fletchling,” he repeated. “About that high, covered in fur, makes a ‘woof!’ sound, leaves little piles of foul-smelling mud wherever it goes.”

  “That’s right,” I sighed. I asked myself why it was that everybody in the forest communicated in English, yet couldn’t bring themselves to use the same words for things. “So have you seen one?” I asked, before quickly adding, “today I mean.”

  “Today? No, I’m afraid I haven’t, not today. Good thing too, they chase me they do, nasty little schnarff-whitzels.”

  “What’s a scnarff-whitzel? No, you know what, I don’t want to know. Thanks for your help,” I sighed and turned to walk away.

  “No, wait,” the dragnor yelled after me. “Please don’t leave. I don’t want to be left on my own again. It’s boring in here, couldn’t you just let me go? I said I was sorry about trying to set you on fire.”

  “Do I look stupid? The second I open that door you’ll be out terrorising those fairies again, setting fire to their homes and eating their children.”

  “I won’t, I promise. I told you before, I don’t eat fairies, I’m a vegetarian.”

  “Yeah right.”

  “It’s true, why else would I have wanted all those acorns? If I really ate fairies, wouldn’t it have been easier for me to just do it, rather than allowing them to save themselves by collecting food I don’t eat?”

  I had to admit, his argument seemed to make good sense. “But why threaten the fairies at all then? Why not just collect your own acorns?”

  “Are you joking?” he asked. “You saw how many acorns were there, do you really think little old me could ever collect that many by myself? No chance, especially with the professor’s evil squirrels stealing them every chance they get.”

  Once again I was uncomfortably reminded of the unsavoury affiliations of the creatures my supposed friend had had me heal, and I couldn’t help but allow a little doubt into my mind with regards to Aurelius’s motives for my recruitment into the magical community. Was he really trying to help me to discover my powers so that I might one day use them in the fight against the professor? Or was he sided with the tundrala, secretly assessing my abilities until he was sure he could kill me without posing any danger to himself? Or perhaps Aurelius was neither good nor evil, but simply a crazy man who wore strange clothes and liked to befriend children as no-one else would believe his wacky tales. I really had no idea any longer (though I was by now fairly certain that the final, and most sensible, of these three options was in fact the one that was least likely to be true).

  I shook my head, trying to put my doubts about Aurelius to one side while I finished questioning the dragnor. “But if you really need so many acorns to survive, what did you do before you bullied the fairies? And what do other dragnors do? You can’t seriously tell me that your whole species is completely dependent on others to collect its food for it?”

  “Of course not. Dragnors are a proud race, very self-sufficient. They don’t need help from anybody, well at least not while they can get hold of their normal food supply.”

  “You mean, you don’t normally eat acorns?” I asked.

  “Don’t be so absurd,” he replied. “Have you ever tasted an acorn? They’re disgusting. I’d rather eat my own feet. Only I need them for walking on, so, seeing as I can’t get hold of any bat droppings at the minute, acorns will have to do.”

  “Bat droppings? You normally eat bat droppings?”

  Grahndel nodded. I tried not to be sick.

  “So why can’t you get hold of any bat droppings? Are they all constipated or something?”

  “Oh you think you’re really funny don’t you? Well I’d like to see how funny you’d find it if your home and your dinner both got taken at once by Captain Blackheart and his men.”

  I stopped, stunned by what I had just heard.

  “You mean Captain Blackheart is here, in the forest?”

  The dragnor nodded once more.

  “Right,” I said, “tell me everything, from the beginning.”

  Chapter 14

  I sat and listened as the miniscule mauve monster, relishing the amount of attention bein
g lavished on him after hours of solitary incarceration, revealed in intricate detail the tale of how he had come to be left homeless and hungry by the evil Captain Blackheart.

  Grahndel had for many years now made his home is one of the many caves which bordered the fast-flowing river Phale, which divided the forest in two as it hurried toward the sea. Caves, it turned out, make the ideal living spaces for dragnors across the world, all of whom, despite their fire-breathing antics, flourish under cold, damp, and dingy conditions. And of course, caves hold two other distinct advantages as dwellings for dragnors;

  Firstly, they are infrequently visited by humans;

  Secondly, and more importantly, they are frequently visited by bats – thereby providing their residents with a to-your-door delivery service of their favourite food.

  Grahndel informed me that, as far as he was concerned, everything had been quite normal with life in the forest until about two weeks before – just before Aurelius had first made contact with me. The dragnor explained how, on the day when he had first noticed that something was wrong, he had been out all evening (for dragnors, like most magical creatures, were nocturnal) collecting dried rabbit droppings so that he might use them as the filling for a beanbag with which to furnish his humble abode. He had been walking along the river bank and was almost home when he had overbalanced under the immense weight of faeces and sent his load of dry poo rolling everywhere. It was as he scrambled around on the ground, desperately trying to re-gather his precious bounty, that he had first heard the noise. The noise that he had immediately realised meant trouble.

  The sound which had disheartened the dragnor so much had been a simple splash. Not so surprising, you may be saying to yourself, given that he was walking next to the river, and of course you’d be right. Except, this wasn’t just any splash, it was a big splash, the kind of splash that could only have been made by something large hitting the water, and it was that fact that had caused the dragnor’s fear. You see, the intense speed of the river Phale as it meets the rocky waters that surround the caves meant that the water in that area was wholly uninhabitable for ducks, or otters or any other larger animals.

  I enquired as to whether the noise could have been made by a fish leaping from the water, the dragnor merely laughed and said that he knew of no fish so large and asked me the last time I could recall a fish just jump completely out of the water for no apparent reason? No, the instant Grahndel had heard the splash he had been certain it had not been made by any fish, he knew that there was only one creature who ever entered the forest who was likely to have made such a splash, the most dangerous, destructive type of creature of all – a human!

  And so, with a great sense of foreboding, he had scanned the river from his crouched position in the long reeds. He knew that the presence of a human in the river could only mean bad news for all of the forest’s inhabitants. In the best case scenario it would be a bespectacled camper trying to ‘get in touch with nature’ by trampling it wherever they went, or a hunter looking for small animals to murder for entertainment. Both options were greatly undesirable, and would necessitate a stressful period of extra vigilance for all of the forest’s magical inhabitants.

  In the worst case scenario, the noise would have been caused by a lost child, taken by the river and destined to drown. For Grahndel, this would be a catastrophe – not, you must understand, because he gave a fresh donkey doo-doo as to whether nasty, destructive little human children lived or died, but rather because any death in the river would cause more humans to come, ones with funny uniforms and flashing lights, and that would mean that he would have to vacate his precious home - and just when it was starting to look nice too.

  Grahndel’s bright yellow eyes desperately scanned the pond as he prayed that he would spot a nerdy camper sitting, drenched and spluttering on the muddy riverbank. After a long moment of searching, the tiny dragon-demon had found nothing. His eyes, flicked desperately from left to right, but he could see no change in the movement of the water. His worst fears were being realised, whomever or whatever had fallen into the river was not resurfacing. He didn’t know what to do. He was far too small rescue a child by himself, but by the time he found someone larger it might be too late. He wished Mr Jones had been there, he might have been an officious, lanky know-it-all who enjoyed telling everybody else what they were doing wrong, but you couldn’t deny that he was good in a crisis.

  Then, just as the dragnor was assessing how quickly he would be able to run to Aurelius’s house from his position on the riverbank, his thoughts were interrupted by a second enormous splash. Then another. And another.

  My goodness! He thought to himself. How many of them are there? They’re jumping in like lemmings!

  It was only then that his eyes were met with the source of the splashing, and its source, as it turned out, was not human after all...it was far worse than that.

  There, in the river, over by the rapids, leaping gleefully betwixt and between the jagged rocks as if they were some sort of inflatable, children’s water-park obstacle course, were two mermaids.

  “I thought mermaids only swam in the sea,” I blurted out, shocked by the twist in the dragnor’s tale.

  The scaly little creature gave me a stern look to show that he was unhappy with the interruption before remembering that he was my prisoner and that I was more than big enough to crush him under my trainer. He quickly moved on with his story, agreeing that he too had believed mermaids to be salt water bound until that evening, but could not deny his own eyes, which were particularly well adapted to night vision, just as is the case with all dragnors.

  I tried to ascertain more details about the mermaids – what did they look like, what they were doing et cetera, but my captive was unable to answer my queries, explaining that – given his dislike of ordinary fish, let alone mermaids, whom everybody knew to be troublesome – the idea of getting a closer look at the terrifying had been far from his mind. Rather, he had lain perfectly still within the reeds, avoiding detection until he was certain that the mysteriously mislocated creatures had disappeared.

  “And what did you do next?” I asked.

  “I went straight to, Mr Jones, of course,” he replied as if to suggest that he was always one for doing the right thing. The sense of pride in his voice, however, hinted that this occasion had, in reality, been something of an exception.

  “And what did Aurelius, I mean Mr Jones, say?”

  “He seemed decidedly unconcerned to be honest with you. He promised to look into the situation, but his response by far failed to mirror my own sense of urgency at the situation. He even went as far as reminding me that I should not judge the character of all mermaids upon the actions of a few, as if he somehow considered me to be in the wrong for being concerned at their presence. If you ask me, that bloke’s a nut-nut. I mean, everybody knows that mermaids are seriously bad news, and seeing them this far inland is unheard of; it was obvious that something was going on. He must have been crazy to be so calm about it all.”

  Either that or he was expecting them, I thought to myself. I decided it would best to keep my suspicions to myself however, and encouraged the dragnor to continue with his story. How had the brief presence of a couple of mermaids led to him being forced to vacate his home and bully helpless fairies in order to feed himself? Had he really been so scared that he had had refused ever to return to his dwelling for fear of being... I didn’t know what, I mean what could a mermaid do anyway?

  He seemed offended at such a suggestion and explained that dragnors were brave and noble creatures who were very proud of their homes and would never give them up without a fight. I decided not to raise the question of how brave or noble it was to enslave smaller creatures rather than go to the effort of feeding oneself, but said nothing.

  Over the following nights Grahndel had been on high alert, vigorously checking the river and its banks for any further sign of mermaid-based activity
, but finding nothing. Indeed, nothing out of ordinary had happened at all. After three days, still anxious and finding sleep difficult, he had been to see Aurelius again to see if he had heard anything more about the forest’s unusual and unwelcome visitors. The fernator had assured him that the matter had been investigated most thoroughly, but that none of the forest’s other inhabitants had seen or heard anything out of the ordinary, and suggested that the dragnor had once again been drinking the dregs from the discarded fizzy drinks that littered the edge of the forest (apparently cola holds a strong hallucinogenic quality among dragnors).

  Grahndel was indignant at the suggestion and stomped back toward his home, angered that he was not being taken seriously. He knew what he had seen. He knew he wasn’t crazy. He knew something strange was going on. And, as his home cave came into view, everything he knew was proven to be correct.

  The network of caves that bordered the river was, on a normal evening, as close to abandoned as you were ever likely to see. Their dark, damp, and decidedly smelly nature meant that the only creatures who would voluntarily spend any amount of time in one were bats, rats, and dragnors. Even the various creepy-crawlies which could be found in every inch of the forest tended to find the caves to be too full of mould and bat droppings to be considered habitable. Grahndel then, had been highly surprised upon reaching the river bank, to see an infestation of trolls, goblins and various other unsavoury-looking characters carrying large crates from a boat moored nearby into the entrance to the caves, an entrance guarded by two rockalusses.

  ***

  I, as I’m sure you will be, dear reader, was mystified as to what a rockaluss might have been, but was far too interested in hearing the rest of Grahndel’s story to risk further interruption. I later discovered that rockalusses were once ordinary magical creatures who had been captured by the professor and had their bodies encased in stone in order that they could be used in the evil armies of the Tundrala without risk of their escape, for, though immensely strong, rock demons were also immensely slow and could easily be beaten in a race by the average pensioner.