The Princess Rules

by Philippa Gregory

  The firemen unpacked their thickest and longest hosepipe and held it up to the giant. Simon put it carefully into his cavernous mouth, and then they pumped a steady stream of sweet lemonade up to him, emptying every one of the twenty-three fire engines until at last the giant burped an earth-shattering burp and said, ‘Pardon me.’

  Meanwhile Florizella, mounted on Jellybean with Samson trotting behind her – very fast away from the giant, rather slowly back towards him – was riding round to every nearby farmhouse asking everyone to come at once and to bring all the food they had in their larder for the biggest picnic in history.

  They weren’t at all keen. There were still a number of people who thought the giant should be murdered while he slept. There were even more who thought the king and queen – or Florizella and Bennett – should move him on without delay. But Florizella, who could be very persuasive, told them all that the only way they would get rid of the giant for good would be to feed him up, equip him with glasses and seeds, then help him to go home.

  ‘He doesn’t want to stay!’ she said. ‘So we have to help him find his way home. Besides, he doesn’t mean any harm. He’s only little.’

  How Florizella could call an enormous giant ‘little’ was beyond most people. But the nicer people felt sorry for Simon. And the crosser ones were not going to attack him on their own. So Florizella got her way and very soon led them all, in wagons and farm carts, coaches and carriages, to the wood on the Plain Green Plains where the giant was obediently sitting as still as he could.

  They built great bonfires. They roasted oxen on spits as big as trees. They piled mound upon mound of bread dough into bathtubs and set them to cook on the hot embers. They baked a thousand potatoes in the hot ashes, they trailed string after string of sausages like bunting through the flames, where they cooked and spat and sizzled. They found a big empty swimming pool from somewhere and threw hundreds of lettuces into it, tomatoes by the thousand and lorry-loads of onions for a fresh salad.

  ‘Not more onions!’ Florizella said.

  They went to a garden centre and bought the biggest ornamental fishpond that anyone had ever seen, with a lovely circular wavy edge, and into it they poured all the milk from the dairy and all the custard powder they could lay their hands on. They stirred it up and then poured a long stream of red jelly on top. When it had set, which took several hours, they called out the Seven Kingdoms’ world-famous weight-lifting team.

  Dressed only in their smart blue trunks, their great muscles bulging with the strain, the twenty strong men stood on one side of the enormous jelly mould. At the count of three they tipped it up, slowly, slowly, slowly, until it was on its side and then crashed down on to a sheet of corrugated iron that was to be the giant’s pudding plate.

  They stepped back, bowed at the crowd and slapped each other on the back.

  That was the first stage completed.

  The second stage was even harder. They all stood round the upside-down jelly mould and gripped the rim. They heaved and heaved and heaved, while their muscles bulged and their eyes popped out and their faces went most dreadfully red. There was an exciting moment when nothing happened, and then with a great

  Flubb

  ubb

  ubb

  ubb

  ubb …

  … the biggest jelly-and-custard trifle in the world slithered out of the jelly mould and sat wobbling temptingly in the sunlight like a red-and-yellow island.

  When it was all ready, two hundred sea scouts from the Seven Kingdoms’ navy struggled up with a great sail from a tall-masted ship. Carefully they spread it out, heaved it up on to the giant’s knees and heaped all the food on it.

  Then the giant, using his huge fat fingers, very carefully picked up all the potatoes, sausages, bread, roasted oxen and salad, and ate and ate and ate. He used a scoop from a bulldozer to eat the trifle. It was like a dainty little teaspoon in his hand. He dug into the jelly-and-custard island, shovel after shovel, until finally it was all gone. Every delicious slurpy bit.

  It was unbelievable how much he ate. Florizella and Bennett watched in amazement as all the food they had gathered from the length and breadth of the kingdom disappeared. Samson kept a keen lookout for any leftovers. He was determined to lick the bowl. He would have to climb into it, of course, and wade through jelly. He was really starting to like the giant.

  ‘Have you had enough?’ Florizella yelled up at the giant. She was perching on one of his knees, clinging to his sail-napkin.

  The giant beamed down at her. ‘That was grand! But tell me – what’s for tea?’

  ‘We’ll think about tea later,’ Florizella said firmly. ‘I want you to wait here now while we see if we can help you with your eyesight.’

  ‘I’ve got to sit still again?’ Simon asked. He was disappointed.

  ‘Yes!’ Florizella shouted at him.

  ‘I thought friends played games together. I thought the three of us might play a game.’

  ‘I have to find my mother and father,’ Florizella said quickly. ‘They will want to meet you.’

  ‘Can’t we have a quick game before you go? What about Hide and Seek?’

  Florizella gazed up at the enormous giant. Even sitting down, his head poked high above the tops of the smaller trees. Standing up, he was taller than the wood. The only place he would ever be able to hide would be among the highest of mountains. And then his boots would fill a small valley.

  ‘We’ll play something later,’ Florizella promised. ‘Will you sit still now?’

  Simon was reluctant. ‘Isn’t there anyone who will play with me? Or even talk to me? I’d like someone to tell me a story.’

  Florizella looked around. Everyone who had been standing about doing nothing except listening to Florizella talking to the giant, suddenly became tremendously busy and had no time at all.

  Everyone except one little girl.

  She came up to Florizella and smiled a wide, gap-toothed smile. She nodded her curly head. ‘I’ll talk to him,’ she said to Florizella. ‘I think he’th thweet.’

  Florizella looked doubtfully at her. She was such a small girl, dressed in a blue pinafore dress with very clean white socks and blue shoes with little straps.

  ‘How old are you?’ Florizella asked.

  ‘Thix,’ the little girl said. ‘I could tell him thtorieth.’

  Bennett gave a giggle and turned it into a cough. The little girl was not fooled. She looked at him severely.

  ‘There ith no need to thnigger,’ she said warningly. ‘I know thome very nithe thtorieth.’

  Florizella grinned. ‘What’s your name?’ she asked.

  ‘Thethilia,’ the little girl said. ‘That’th unfortunate at the moment, becauthe I have a lithp while my front tooth ith growing.’

  ‘Oh! So you have!’ Florizella said kindly, pretending that she had not noticed, and scowling at Bennett, who stuffed his fist into his mouth to muffle his laughter and ducked behind some trees.

  Florizella called up to the giant. ‘There’s a little girl down here called Cecilia. She says she’ll tell you stories.’

  The giant lowered his great hand and Cecilia clambered into his warm, damp palm. Florizella watched as the giant raised her up to his eye level.

  ‘Now,’ she heard her say. ‘I’ll tell you all about Thleeping Beauty.’

  The king and queen had taken a long time to get everyone in the royal court moving, but they were only an hour’s journey away from the giant when Florizella and Bennett met them on the road. With the royal procession was the royal zoo keeper, the royal surveyor, the royal enchanter, two hundred of the royal guard and about a hundred other people who had nothing better to do on a fine summer’s day than to come along and see what was happening.

  ‘Hello, Florizella!’ the king said as Florizella came cantering up on Jellybean. ‘Found the giant?’

  ‘Yes!’ Florizella said in a rush. ‘He’s only young and he’s short-sighted and lonely. But he will go back to his own cou
ntry if we can help him to plant his vegetable garden.’

  The king blinked a bit. ‘Oh, good,’ he said. He smiled at the queen. ‘Looks like Florizella has it under control. Perhaps we should go home and leave it all to her.’

  The queen smiled. ‘I’ll just see this giant before we go,’ she said. ‘Sometimes Florizella’s ideas get a little out of hand—’

  ‘How do you make glasses?’ Florizella interrupted. ‘For short sight. I need spectacles.’

  ‘I expect I could magic a little something,’ the royal enchanter offered grandly.

  ‘Go on, then,’ Florizella said.

  There was a small clap of thunder, a puff of green smoke and then there, in the road before them, stood the most amazing scene. There were dancing girls with ostrich feathers in their hair, there were elephants, there were fireworks exploding brightly in the sky, there were trapeze artists, there was a railway train painted in gold with a song-and-dance ragtime band on silver wagons behind it. There were dancing bears and acrobats. There were jugglers, and fountains pouring into silver basins. There were rose petals tumbling down in scented showers from out of thin air.

  ‘No, no, no!’ Florizella said crossly. ‘I meant a pair of spectacles.’

  The royal enchanter waved his wand again. There was another small explosion, and at once there was a huge Ferris wheel with dancing girls waving and singing from the swinging chairs, a showboat paddling its way up the chalky road with people tap-dancing on the top deck, and a flying circus high in the sky with beautiful girls and handsome men standing on the wings of little biplanes that trailed coloured smoke and flags. There was a brass band, a troupe of clowns, a magician pulling doves out of every pocket, which flew around in circling flocks, and about a hundred milk-white horses cantering round a circus ring.

  ‘No! No!’ Florizella said. ‘A pair of spectacles to help someone who is short-sighted. Glasses!’

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ the royal enchanter said. With a puff of blue smoke the whole thing disappeared as suddenly as it had come.

  ‘I say, Florizella, that looked rather fun,’ the king said wistfully.

  ‘But I need glasses for the giant,’ Florizella said. ‘He is most dreadfully short-sighted, and until he can see properly he can’t go back to his own land and plant his own garden. Is it possible to make glasses big enough to fit him?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ the royal surveyor offered. ‘It’s just a question of making ordinary glasses, only ten times bigger.’

  ‘Can we do it?’ Bennett asked.

  The royal surveyor took a gold pencil from behind his ear and a piece of paper from his pocket and started doing sums for a long time, whistling softly to himself while he worked.

  ‘If everyone in the Seven Kingdoms donated a window from every household, we would have enough glass,’ he said after a long while.

  He held up his hand for silence and did his sums again. ‘If everyone donated a bit of their garden gates, we would have enough metal for the frames,’ he said.

  He did some more sums.

  ‘If we emptied one of the small pools at the edge of Great Valley Lake, then filled it with all the windowpanes, then made an enormous bonfire with all the wood from Bear Forest on top, keeping it stoked up all the time … we could melt the glass into the right sort of shape for lenses for spectacles.’

  The king and queen gaped. ‘Burn the wood from Bear Forest?’ they asked. ‘Empty the pools at the edge of Great Valley Lake?’

  ‘Great Valley Lake is empty already,’ Bennett said apologetically. ‘We made it into lemonade and he drank it. Sorry.’

  ‘This is an emergency,’ Florizella said. ‘If he can’t see to plant his seeds, he can’t look after himself, which means he can’t go home. And everyone called him stupid at school, which isn’t fair. And he is awfully nice.’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ the king said. ‘Send out a royal proclamation … but people aren’t going to like it.’

  In fact, the people did not mind so very much.

  It is a rule in the Seven Kingdoms that anything you do not need is collected and shared. Empty bottles are washed and reused. Cardboard and paper is collected, mashed up and made into new paper. Even potato peelings, bits of vegetables and food are collected and fed to the herds of pigs, cows and horses. If someone has a bicycle they don’t use, they just paint it yellow and leave it outside their door. When someone else wants a ride, they take it and then leave it outside their door. When someone has a baby and it grows out of the pram, they give it to someone who has a new baby.

  Once people got the idea that there were plenty of bicycles, and prams, and toys around, they forgot all about keeping them for their own. And everybody shared their food and sometimes cooked in a neighbourhood kitchen.

  So the idea that since the whole kingdom had a problem with the giant, the whole kingdom had to do something about it, was not a great shock. Everyone saw at once that one window each was a small price to pay to help the giant. And, anyway, the summer was very fine with no rain, so they did not miss their windows as much as they would have done had it been winter.

  Everyone who had fancy iron gates cut the knobs and twiddly bits off the top and brought them to a great heap of scrap iron beside the royal camp on the Plain Green Plains. They were sorry for the short-sighted giant. But more than anything else they all hoped that the plan to make him spectacles would work so that he could go home and grow his own crops, instead of eating so much of the food belonging to the Land of the Seven Kingdoms.

  The royal surveyor had surveyed both the giant, and the dry bottom of the pool at the edge of Great Valley Lake.

  ‘It’s perfect,’ he said. ‘The glass in spectacles helps people to see because it is made slightly curved. The picture of the outside world is bent by the glass before the eye even sees it. The bottom of the lake is exactly the right curve. When the glass is melted by the fire and then cools and sets hard, it will be exactly the right curve for the giant’s eyesight.’

  All of the members of the court and the royal guard and the people of the Plain Green Plains piled half the windowpanes into the lake, and half the wood on top. Then they lit the wood and let it burn and burn for two whole days and nights. All the children from Great Valley Lake School took another couple of days off without asking and had a barbecue round the lakeside that went on for two and a half days.

  They had never had a summer like it.

  After two days and two nights, the fire burned down and the glass, which had melted under the heat, started to set again in the shape of the pool – flat on top and perfectly curved on the bottom. When the royal surveyor brushed the grey wood ash away, the glass had melted into a smooth surface like ice on a pond.

  Very carefully, without breaking it, they levered the glass from the bed of the pool and laid it on the soft grass of the Plain Green Plains. Then they put in the rest of the windowpanes and melted those too – and all the children from Great Valley Lake School took another couple of days off without permission.

  When they had finished, they had two giant lenses for spectacles so big and so thick that it took ten men to carry each one.

  All that was left to do then was for the nearby blacksmiths to come with their fire and their forges, and heat and hammer the twiddly bits from the fancy garden gates into a smart but simple pair of frames for the spectacles.

  Six blacksmiths rolled up in their blackened and dirty wagons and put all their forges together to make one really big hot fire. And all the blacksmiths’ sons and daughters – who also should have been in school – puffed on the bellows and made the charcoal glow a bright and brilliant red. Then the blacksmiths took all the old scrap metal and hammered and bashed it, cooled it down and heated it up, twisted it and forged it, knotted it together and smoothed it out until …

  ‘That is really great,’ said Princess Florizella with enormous relief.

  It had been nearly a week since they’d first met the giant, and in all that time Florizel
la had been riding Jellybean up to the lake, and back to the royal camp, then off around the countryside to find more blacksmiths and more metal, as well as finding more food for the giant.

  That was the bit that Samson liked the best. He always sat beside the giant at meal-times. He had never eaten so well in his life. Crumbs of bread and cake the size of boulders fell around him. Scraps of meat pies or cheese as big as cartwheels came tumbling down. Samson was the only one in the whole kingdom who was enjoying the giant’s stay. He thought Giant Simon was just wonderful. In fact, he wished he would stay forever.

  Three times a day Bennett sounded a horn and the whole area around the giant was cleared of every person and every animal for at least a kilometre, and Simon stood up and stretched and paced about for a little while. Only Cecilia stayed with him while he moved. He had a little pocket in his shirt where he tucked her inside, to keep her safe.

  ‘Aren’t you frightened of him?’ Bennett asked her. She was, after all, such a very little girl.

  ‘Thilly,’ she said scornfully. ‘You thilly printh! Thimon ith an abtholute thweety-pie.’

  Bennett had to cough and go behind a tree again. But Florizella’s mind was on the glasses, which were rumbling towards them on a specially built wagon drawn by ten big plough horses. Trailing a plume of chalky white dust behind it, the wagon came down the road towards the giant.

  ‘I think I can see it!’ the giant called. ‘I think I can see the wagon coming! I see a white blob coming along the road!’

  ‘Hold still! Hold still!’ Florizella shrieked as the giant boots stamped the ground in excitement. ‘Stand still, Giant Simon!’

  The giant obediently froze – but if you looked upwards you could see his thick green-socked knees trembling with excitement.