‘And now she’s freed all those children you enslaved to make your marshmallows.’
‘Yes. She freed all the children.’ Burpintime’s face twitched when he said this, as if a fly was buzzing round him.
‘And she burnt your marshmallow factory to the ground.’
‘Yes. Well, not exactly. I …’ Burpintime paused. He didn’t want to admit that his soldiers had done this when they fired their flaming arrows, or he’d look even more stupid than he already did.
The Evil Overlord shook his head and sighed. Then he shook his head again. Then he sighed. Then he looked at General Burpintime and shook his head. Then he sighed. On his desk was a big red button. Under Burpintime’s feet was a trap door. One press of the button, and Burpintime would drop through the floor onto some very sharp metal spikes.
‘It’s not good enough, is it?’ the Evil Overlord said.
‘No, it’s not.’
‘Your father was a famous general, wasn’t he? What do you think he’d make of this?’
‘I think he’d be very disappointed.’
‘I think you’re right. He’d be very disappointed indeed.’ The Evil Overlord’s finger edged closer to the big red button. He stared at General Burpintime.
General Burpintime started talking very quickly, his high voice became even higher:
‘I have a plan,’ he said.
‘What kind of plan?’
‘A really, really good plan. We know she’s going to see her parents in Beluga, so I’m going to get there first. I’ll take over their castle, kidnap her parents, then wait for her to turn up and rescue them,’ he said. ‘Simple. It’ll work. Trust me.’
The Evil Overlord’s finger moved slowly away from the red button. He didn’t trust anyone.
‘It’d better,’ he said.
29
One Last Magic Trick
Oh – one very last thing: a conversation between Beatrix, Oi and Wilfred as they make their way to the Sea of Sinking Ships. A conversation about an Evil Army knife, and a bottle …
‘As far as I can see, the only way you could get the knife in the bottle is if you made the bottle around the knife,’ Beatrix said. ‘Or maybe you broke the bottom off a bottle, put the knife in, then melted the glass and stuck the bottom back on.’
‘And then filled it with beer,’ Oi said. ‘But you definitely didn’t have a glass blower hiding under the table in the squashed-meatball inn. At least not one that I saw. And I didn’t see you pouring beer into anything.’
‘So that means you’d have had to do all that before we left. Which means you must have already had the knife, which is impossible,’ Beatrix added.
Wilfred flicked the horse’s reins as the cart trundled along the track towards the Sea of Sinking Ships. He was silent for a moment, then he said:
‘Aren’t you both forgetting one thing?’
Oi and Beatrix looked at each other, then back at Wilfred.
‘I don’t think so,’ Beatrix replied.
‘The possibility that this was actual magic?’ Wilfred said.
Beatrix and Oi were very still. Beatrix knew this wasn’t possible, but all the same …
‘Was it?’ Oi said.
Wilfred smiled.
‘Of course not! I got the dagger from the Evil Army’s camp when we disguised ourselves as Wobblers and defeated the Evil Army last year; I got a glass blower to take the bottom off a bottle and stick it back on with the knife inside, and then I filled it with beer. And you’re right, I had to carry it with me the whole way, inside my cape, just in case it was needed. Just in case we bumped into Evil Army soldiers. I’ve still got two emergency tricks in here,’ he said, patting his pockets.
Beatrix thought about this. In a way, it was more impressive than actual magic. All you needed for that was a spell and a sort of ‘Ta-dah’, combined with a wand wiggle. It didn’t take as much effort.
‘It takes a lot of work to make someone believe in magic,’ Beatrix said.
‘Yes, but it’s worth it,’ Wilfred replied. ‘Especially if your life depends on it.’
How to Draw a Dragon
General Burpintime’s artist is terrible at drawing people, but very good at drawing marshmallows. He’s never tried drawing a dragon, because drawing dragons is DANGEROUS. But just in case you ever want to draw a dragon, there are two ways of doing it.
Method 1:
• Find a dragon (dragons are quite hard to find because they’re very shy, but if you look carefully at some very old maps, or indeed Google maps, you might just see here be dragons written in small letters in certain far off places).
• Go to one of these places – make sure you tell your mum and dad where you’re going, and pack a spare pair of pants, at least two rounds of sandwiches and a fire extinguisher.
• Be very, very quiet. When the dragon appears, draw VERY, VERY quickly.
• If it breathes fire, use the fire extinguisher.
Method 2:
• First draw a giraffe. (A giraffe is the animal that most looks like a dragon. I know there’s an animal called a Komodo Dragon, but this looks more like a crocodile, and you don’t want to draw a crocodile.)
• Once you’ve drawn your giraffe, you’ll need to make the legs and neck a little shorter, add some wings and a long tail and lots of triangles so it looks scaly. You’ll also need to make it look very grumpy. Dragons are a lot more grumpy than giraffes because the fire in their belly gives them tummy ache.
• If you can’t draw a dragon (or a giraffe), draw an egg instead and tell everyone there’s a dragon inside it.
Quiz
Test your knowledge of the Riddletown Dragon with the quiz below. If you get all the answers right, General Burpintime will give you a carriage full of gold (at least, that’s what he told me when I asked him to provide a prize for the quiz).
1. On Beatrix’s map there’s something that looks like a big bar of chocolate. What is it really?
2. What colour does Oi think the yoke is in a parrot’s egg?
3. What does the sign at Matilda’s cake stall say?
4. Which months of the year have two ‘O’s in their name?
5. According to legend, what are conkers actually made from?
6. What’s the only vegetable General Burpintime will eat?
7. Scaly dragons breathe fire. What do red-spotted curtain dragons breathe?
8. What cake will you end up looking like if you don’t do what General Burpintime says?
9. What’s drawn on the walls in the tunnel under the mountain?
10. How many marshmallow boats do they need to escape from the marshmallow factory?
Bonus question: What did one snowman say to the other snowman?
Answers: 1. General Burpintime’s castle, 2. Green, 3. No Riddle
– No service, 4. October (and Joon and Jooly), 5. Dragon poo,
6. Peas, 7. Paint, 8. A pancake, 9. Children, 10. Five,
Bonus answer: Can you smell carrots?
How to Make Sprout Soup
Sprout soup is one of the simplest recipes ever. There are only two ingredients. The first, unsurprisingly, is sprouts. The second is also sprouts. The traditional Riddletown recipe for sprout soup is as follows:
1. Boil lots of sprouts in a big pan of hot water
2. Add more sprouts.
3. Mush them all up.
4. Pour the gloopy green mixture into bowls.
5. Eat as quickly as possible while holding your nose.
If you don’t like the sound of that, Mrs Fartinpants has another recipe for sprout soup you could try:
1. Boil a big cauldron of water over a fire.
2. Add chicken, bacon, carrots and potatoes and leave to simmer for at least two hours.
3. Add one small sprout.
4. Count five seconds, then remove the sprout.
5. Carefully pour the soup into bowls, carefully put the sprout in the bin. (Or you can add it to one of bowls of soup and hide it under the chicke
n!)
Acknowledgements
Thanks once again to my agent Chloe and the amazing team at Piccadilly Press for all their support and enthusiasm. To Georgia for keeping the story on the right tacks, to Jenny for attention to detail and to Cherie for creating another fantastic cover and such wonderful illustrations. Thanks also to Louis for listening to first drafts, re-drafts and ridiculous riddles, and Penelope, without whom Beatrix would not exist.
Don’t miss Beatrix’s next adventures in Beatrix the Bold and the Balloon of Doom!
Beatrix the Bold is on the run from the Evil Army and her evil aunt Esmerelda, but she’s getting closer to finding her long-lost parents, whom she hasn’t seen since she was a baby. She just has to cross the Sea of Sinking Ships and the Volcanos of Doom to get to them. But when you’re Beatrix the Bold and you’ve got Oi the boy, Dog the dog and Wilfred the Wise by your side, you can do anything …
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First published in Great Britain in 2019 by
PICCADILLY PRESS
80–81 Wimpole St, London W1G 9RE
www.piccadillypress.co.uk
Text copyright © Simon Mockler, 2019
Illustrations copyright © Cherie Zamazing, 2019
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
The right of Simon Mockler and Cherie Zamazing to be identified as author and illustrator of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 9781848127685
Piccadilly Press is an imprint of Bonnier Books UK
www.bonnierbooks.co.uk
Beatrix the Bold and the Riddletown Dragon Page 10
