by Tamsyn Muir
Floralinda had hoped that fairy-magic might be used to procure a beefsteak, using beefsteak wishes, but Cobweb just laughed at her. The fairy was unkinder than ever when she laughed, because now Cobweb was really frightened too. Floralinda regretted then that she hadn’t made Cobweb a boy, as perhaps she would have been less scared.
“Just be quiet and do as I say,” commanded the fairy.
Which Floralinda had, unfortunately, agreed to.
So Floralinda crumbled up some of the loaf into breadcrumbs under Cobweb’s instructions, and left breadcrumbs out on the broad windowsill for the birds, who were now getting hungry as it got colder; and Floralinda stood very still among the sparrows as they alighted down and feasted on the bread, and then—whump!—got them with the pillow; and I am sorry to say Cobweb wrung their poor necks. Floralinda plucked what feathers she could and burnt the rest off on the fire; and she roasted them on sticks, and ate them!
The first time Floralinda roasted those sparrows she thought she couldn’t possibly. She knew nothing about cleaning birds, and had never had any interactions with poultry aside from broiled guinea-fowl and chicken-breast. Anyone who has ever dealt with a whole little bird knows that they are very small amounts of meat and mostly bones and insides; and then there was Cobweb, saying cruelly, “You’ve got to eat it; you won’t get strong otherwise,” just like every awful grandmother who ever was.
And I am sorrier to say that Floralinda ate those sparrows, bluetits and songbirds up, even the insides, and on those first nights when they caught and ate them she slept well for the first time in a while.
How those first autumn nights nipped! Floralinda had to make a sort of cloak from a blanket, and cut holes in it and wear it, and even then she thought she was cold. It was a pathetic sight in those days to see Floralinda in her blanket-coat, holding that spear and squeezing bricks, being told savage things by a fairy, and spending her nights sucking sparrow-bones clean, and sighing over it, and having tears prick at her blue eyes every time she thought about how sweet sparrows were.
But that was not the end of the sparrows’ woes (in aggregate, that is; all the individual birds who had their necks wrung by Cobweb found their woes over very suddenly, for they went directly to bird heaven). In those early days, when her brain had been working so quickly, Cobweb had made her own preparations, and had told Floralinda to take her down to flight thirty-eight. There she had set up a sort of laboratory, with a fairy-sized fire made of half an ever-burning coal, and cunning containers that she had cured out of orange-peel and made watertight. She had also made for herself a whole sort of visor out of orange-pith that was very funny to look at, but that protected all of her face, and the most beautiful little gloves of peel to shield her hands. She would put this all on, looking like the funniest orange doll, and make quite a lot of mess, and a fairy’s-building-site amount of noise what with the fire, and the bubbling containers all sloshing, and the chain with all the rings on clinking every time Cobweb moved. What exactly she was doing Floralinda wasn’t aware of, because it all took place very close to the big dead spider and Floralinda didn’t like to look.
But the culmination of those early experiments came to pass in those autumn evenings. Cobweb made Floralinda tie some of the gauze into a sort of sack, with a string through the top made of curtain-cord, so that it could be pulled shut in a hurry. They put a lot of choice breadcrumbs inside this sack, and Floralinda sat very still until a little bird hopped inside, and then—tug! the cord was pulled, with the bird struggling within.
Cobweb put on her orange-skin gloves, and took one of the tapestry-needles, and unplugged the pith top of one of her miniature orange-skins, and dipped the needle inside. She was as careful as a tiny surgeon as she held the needle over the skin until all the excess dripped off, and then she plugged it up again; she held it before her as she advanced to the struggling, cheeping bag, and as Floralinda held the bag still Cobweb pricked the needle through the gauze and into the bird.
How terribly that bird flapped! Floralinda was relieved that Cobweb had not run it through, which she had been afraid of; then Cobweb stared at the bag, and commenced counting out loud. Before she had counted to two, the bird’s struggles slowed; and before she had counted to five, the bird had stopped struggling altogether. When they opened the bag, the bird had curled up its poor bird toes, and was dead.
“Oh!” said Floralinda.
Cobweb looked it all over, and checked its eyes, and listened to its heart, and did a number of awful things besides. Then she sighed in relief; she took her pad of notes (this was one of the fly-leaves of the Reader’s Digests, cut up into squares with the embroidery-scissors, and tied together with thread) and her pencil (a scrap of lead from a whole pencil that Floralinda had found in a drawer) and wrote down in fairy-sized letters:
SAMPLE #1. ACTIV. ASSEUMD NEWROTOXIN. (Cobweb did not possess a dictionary.)
“Cobweb,” said Floralinda, “why, what did you do?”
“I didn’t do much,” said Cobweb, “but that spider venom jolly well did; that bird’s asphyxiated, as any fool can see.”
Once it had been explained to Floralinda what ‘asphyxiated’ meant, she said she was very glad that the spider had not bitten her.
“Oh! it wouldn’t have done that to you,” said Cobweb.
Floralinda was relieved.
“I get the impression that you would have gone rigid, asphyxiated and then melted into a sort of nutritious slop,” said Cobweb, “that the spider could have crunched up into a nice moist ball to suck dry; you see, a spider keeps all its poisons in different pouches and mixes them up as needed, as if it kept them all ready in one it would kill itself. I have correctly mixed one poison, so now, if you get back into position, we are going to need four more birds.”
And Princess Floralinda was not relieved at all!
But in those early days Floralinda still congratulated herself, in her terrible secret heart-o’-hearts, that she had stolen Cobweb. She tried to justify it to herself all the time, because she was really a princess still, and it hurt too much to think that she had committed such a mortal sin as imprisoning a fairy. Floralinda still wanted to go to Heaven, and even though she hadn’t put a penny in the box since being kidnapped, still hoped she might go there if she didn’t do anything too horrid; so she had to tell herself that she had done the right thing, and that if you looked at it a certain way she had even given Cobweb much more stimulating employment than she used to have. And of course she was as nice to Cobweb as she knew how, and made a lovely little bed for her right next to her pillow, and sewed her beautiful little frocks embroidered with miniature rosebuds in the tiniest of stitches. Even Cobweb admitted these were pretty.
But if you have ever been walloped because you were naughty, and then you were taken out for a good time afterwards to cheer you up about it, you might have a good idea of how Cobweb felt, which was all mixed up. She hated Floralinda with all her fairy heart, and more besides, because Cobweb was more intelligent than most fairies and therefore quite unusually good at hating; and it was all mixed up with grudgingly admiring Floralinda for doing the exact thing she would have done, and feeling a furious pleasure at bossing Floralinda about, and then disrespecting Floralinda for being bossed, and being frightened at all times throughout. That is how Cobweb felt in those early days. So she just thought as hard and as quickly as possible, and muddled through somehow, and kept long-term thoughts boiling in the back of her pretty little head.
“Now go and see what’s on the next flight; you’re such a slowpoke that the dragon will die of old age,” said Cobweb.
“You’re teasing me; dragons live for ever,” said Princess Floralinda plaintively. Which was the first time that Floralinda had contradicted her.
The first flight they dealt with after that fateful moonlit night was flight thirty-five, which Floralinda still hoped in her obvious heart could be taken care of with some fire, or some other trick; but when they opened up that staircase door, a soo
ty red glow hit them with dazzling heat, like opening an oven. This was quite pleasant for the first few minutes, as the cold had drawn in, but then it grew stuffy, and Floralinda had to take off her blanket coat.
The air shimmered before them like it does in the desert, and it was quite dark except for slithery orange lights here and there. The hot, airless room didn’t have any windows, and instead was separated into rocky partitions with liquid reflections in them, as though someone had heaped up stones in a pool. Even Cobweb had no idea what they were looking at as those orange lights moved and scattered, and then she said—
“Salamanders, of course.”
For salamanders they were, amphibians the size of dogs, who like to live in volcanoes and take dips in the lava. The witch could afford the lava but couldn’t afford the keeping thereof, so there was no real lava in that flight; but there was plenty of boiling oil, which the salamanders kept boiling themselves. It must have been a little rough on the salamanders, but if we begin to feel sorry for every single thing the witch locked up, we shall be here all day, so let’s not begin. Very few things that the witch had captured were completely innocent, after all.
The moving orange lights had grown still. In the hot darkness, ten white lights that both Floralinda and Cobweb had taken for reflections turned towards them: they were pairs of eyes. Cobweb drew Floralinda back from the trap-door and they heaped stones upon it, because they had learned from the devil-bear (whose chain was still stretched taut out the window and who had since expired, we hope, or otherwise was having a worse time than anyone else in this story).
“It’s terribly hot down there,” said Floralinda cautiously, “and there’s not a great deal of light to see by; I don’t think the spear will be much use, Cobweb, dear.”
Cobweb, dear said briskly: “Nonsense. This is all part of my grand plan. I am happy with this outcome. Salamanders are flesh and blood like anything else is, even if their blood is boiling hot; that’s what we wanted. You should have guessed what we are going to do.”
But Floralinda could not think. Even if you are currently delighting in a diet rich with two types of bread, milk, water, oranges, and everything inside a little bird, it can be difficult to think if you are under stress. She was getting better at thinking all the time, but her avenues and promenades of thinking still centred fundamentally about the danger of getting hurt, and how she wouldn’t like it if she did.
“But,” she said, after screwing up her forehead with thinking (she had found this helped), “but those little birds didn’t die right away, you know they didn’t; and the salamanders are bigger than birds.”
“Yes,” the fairy admitted grudgingly, as she always did whenever Floralinda had a point. “The venom isn’t as efficacious as it was when the spider was alive. I’m applying quite a lot more venom to the spear, but you’ll have a few seconds when the salamander will still be coming after you.”
“Will it bite me, do you think?”
Cobweb thought No, for salamanders didn’t have teeth; but she said, “It will slap you with its long tongue, which it keeps hotter than boiling, so if you let it touch you, you’ll get a terrible burn and die. And it will take you ever so long to die in that way, and hot water and orange-peels won’t save you.”
This was rather the wrong approach to take with Floralinda, who was so petrified that it took her a long time to pick up the spear and go anywhere near that trapdoor. She had been biddable in those early days after the full moon, when all that squeezing bricks had done was make her hands sore, and all that practise with the spear had made her body sore, and eating birds had merely made her miserable. Now she turned stubborn, and wouldn’t do anything that night, and was so frightened that she cried herself to sleep and didn’t bother to keep it quiet. Kidnapping Cobweb had been a crime of passion and opportunity that she really had not planned on doing until a few seconds before she had done it, and now she regretted everything, and occasionally wished she were dead, or worse.
The fairy argued and taunted, and then—though she really wasn’t good at it, and in a way it frightened Floralinda worse—she spoke sweetly and patiently; but nothing could convince Floralinda to try until Cobweb said—
“Don’t be such a coward. Let’s coax one of the salamanders upstairs; they’re dumb animals, and I’m sure they don’t hunt in packs. Wave your handkerchief at the door, and we’ll see it coming up in plenty of time,” and other such blandishments.
In the end this cured Floralinda’s mulishness, alongside the fact that the next morning her toes were freezing cold, and had to be stuck close to the fire in the hearth before they got any feeling in them. It was getting chillier all the time, and she wasn’t dressed for any season that wasn’t the middle of summer, and she knew that flight thirty-five was currently the warmest place in the tower.
Eventually, Floralinda permitted herself to be guided downstairs, and she opened the trapdoor, while Cobweb rubbed the point of the spear over with one of the venoms; and she stood there, trembling, her mouth dry and her heart feeling like the drum section in a marching-band. Cobweb sat as far away from all this as possible, which did not feel quite fair to Floralinda. The princess fluttered her handkerchief at the mouth of the trapdoor, and darted back, and then peered over when nothing happened; but a salamander wouldn’t come upstairs. Cobweb told her she wasn’t waving it well enough, and in the end, she got impatient and sat on Floralinda’s shoulder, chain and all, and waved the handkerchief herself.
Although neither princess nor fairy knew it at the time, this was what excited the salamanders. It was not because Cobweb was very good at waving a handkerchief, as the salamanders could tell the difference between a handkerchief and something nice to eat; it was because as Cobweb got more impatient her wings fluttered. A salamander is a kind of lava-dwelling amphibian, after all, and amphibians love nothing better than a mouth full of moth or butterfly, or even better, small birds; and Cobweb moved in quite the same way as a small bird did.
One salamander started lumbering up the staircase, showing itself for the first time. It was easily the size of a Labrador retriever, and covered in thick pebbly scales on its underside with soft, dreadfully hot parts on top (this is how a salamander gets rid of excess heat), steaming in the air as it went. Here Floralinda had her first success. She was frightened, but when Cobweb shrieked, “Go!” she thrust out with her spear. It might have been harder had salamanders had hard stuff on top and soft parts on the belly, but the soft parts were well within reach, and Floralinda got it first try. Even better, the salamander, grazed by the venom-scrubbed tip of the sharpened shaft, took fright and jumped back down the staircase, not knowing it had been poisoned. It was dead very quickly.
Another salamander came up to investigate. Again, Cobweb shrieked, and Floralinda stabbed out wildly with the spear. This salamander escaped upwards into flight thirty-six, and Floralinda ran around the central pillar until the salamander flopped over, and died. By this time three more salamanders had emerged from the trapdoor, and whop!—Floralinda jabbed one with her spear, and whop! Whop!—two more, and it was just as easy as playing Blind Man’s Buff when you don’t have the blindfold on. The salamanders would have been difficult to kill with swords, since they were very quick and hard to catch with a fatal blow; but they had no defense against spider venom, so all Floralinda had to do was scratch their flesh and then stay out of their way for a little while. Their corpses sizzled and smoked against the cold stone floor.
There was a frightening moment when both Cobweb and Floralinda noticed that the tip of the spear had charred, from the heat of the salamanders’ skin, and all the venom had burnt off, and the point was in danger of catching alight; and yet there was another salamander coming up the stairs. They made what is called a ‘tactical retreat’, and Cobweb, who had thought ahead, doused the spear-tip in cold water, and re-applied the venom. Floralinda gripped the spear and went back to the head of the stairs, and immediately shrieked, for the salamander was right below her; it
did indeed flick out its horrible tongue like a flame—it glowed red beneath the thick black leathery skin—but Floralinda stabbed downwards, which put paid to that.
It is very lucky that flight thirty-five was salamanders. The story would have been different had it been something difficult. That first victory was so easy, and so unexpected, that Floralinda laughed and cried alternately for half an hour afterwards; it was as simple as the first flights had been horrible, with the added sweetness that unlike the spider, who died by accident, she had set out specifically to make these things go away, and had managed it. It was like beginning an exam where the first questions were impossible, and then encountering a question along the lines of What sound do cats make (10 points)?. She was so excited, and so close to hysteria, that she ran rings around the central pillar ten times.
Once Floralinda had been calmed down, and once she had eaten some orange between two slices of bread, and unwillingly eaten a wren and a mistle-thrush, she took Cobweb in her hands and danced all around the top of the tower.
“Perhaps with this success you have grown independent and confident, and you’ll take off this chain, and enjoy getting down the rest of the way yourself,” said Cobweb.
“No, not at all,” said Floralinda earnestly, “for, Cobweb, I couldn’t have done that without you at all. I so appreciated you saying what to do, as it solves all my problems. My difficulty is that when I’m frightened, I have no idea, so I just empty my mind and do whatever you say,” she finished.
“The next few flights may not be so easy,” said the fairy.
But the next few flights were easy. In no time at all, Princess Floralinda travelled down three whole flights with no real difficulties. The harpy made things a great deal easier by flying straight at Floralinda first thing, screaming and trying to claw at her with her wicked talons and razor-sharp feathers; there was no time for Cobweb to scream anything like “Thrust!” or “Go!”, but the harpy flew into the point and scratched her arms, and lay paralyzed on the ground until Floralinda got up the courage to scratch her a few more times on her flanks. So too it went with the giant rats, who should have known better, as rats are intelligent; but I am afraid that Floralinda presented such a sight, nervously holding that spear as it shook, with its burnt-out tip, not looking at all like a danger, that they let themselves be scratched and died in record time.
