The Last Slice of Rainbow

by Joan Aiken

  “My goodness gracious, Your Highness!” Hattie exclaimed. “Wherever in the world did all these rings come from?”

  “Never mind where they came from. You’d better have them,” said Emma crossly. “They are yours, in a way.”

  “No, indeed they are not, Your Highness.” And Hattie carried them to Miss Targe, who scolded her, and whisked up the rings in her apron, saying they must have been left behind by a burglar. She took them to the palace security officer, who sold them and kept the money.

  Still, apart from a few accidents like these, Emma, by regular practice, became more and more skillful at moving objects. By the time she reached her teens, she was growing ambitious and wanted to move live creatures. Think of moving a tiger out of the royal zoo! Or her father off his throne, out into the middle of the palace lily pond!

  Emma found that moving live things was much harder work. She had to practice on very small creatures first, fruit flies, and the ants that ran over the palace terrace. Even houseflies were too large and fidgety. Bees, wasps, and bumblebees were too big, and their buzzing gave Emma pins and needles in her mind.

  She still hadn’t gone beyond ants when, one night, as she was getting ready for bed, she found a spider in her marble bath.

  Emma detested spiders. And this was a particularly big one, black and furry and bunchy and long-legged. He kept very still indeed, but when he did move, when Emma’s shadow fell across the bath, it was with such a sudden scurrying scuttle that Emma would not have dared touch him for anything in the world. She tried to move him with her mind; but he was much too big for that.

  “Hattie!” Emma called loudly. “Miss Targe! Hattie! Come here quickly!”

  But Hattie was out, for it was her evening off, and Miss Targe was downstairs having her supper.

  Emma had to go to bed without taking a bath.

  Next morning the spider was still there. He seemed to have grown a bit bigger.

  “Hattie, take that spider out of the bath,” said the princess, when the under nursemaid came in to lay out Emma’s clean clothes for the day.

  Hattie trembled a little—she was afraid of spiders too—but she carefully and gently wrapped the spider in a cloth-of-silver face towel and shook him out of the window onto the wisteria vine that grew outside.

  “Now give the bath a good scrub before I get into it,” said Emma.

  At breakfast that day, among the mail, there was a letter from the crown prince of Pliofinland, asking for the Princess Emma’s hand in marriage. The king snorted irritably over it.

  “Who does he think he is? A miserable little twopenny-halfpenny kingdom like Pliofinland! The prince who marries my daughter must bring a hundred gentlemen-at-arms, each one carrying a two-pound bag of diamonds. They certainly can’t manage that in Pliofinland.”

  And he dictated a letter of refusal to his secretary.

  Emma was delighted to think that her father valued her so highly. She spent the day trying to move a wasp out of a jam jar, and finally managed to shift it into a pot of face cream.

  A month or so later, the spider was there in the bath again, and he seemed to have grown—to Emma’s horrified eyes he appeared about as big as a plum. She tried again to shift him with her mind, but she couldn’t.

  Hattie was downstairs doing a bit of ironing, and Miss Targe was having her supper, so again Emma went to bed without her bath.

  In the morning she ordered Hattie to kill the spider.

  “Oh, no, Your Highness, I couldn’t!”

  “Go on, don’t be such a coward!” said Emma crossly.

  “It’s bad luck to kill spiders, Your Highness!”

  In the end, Hattie, trembling like a leaf, wrapped the spider in a golden towel, and carefully put him out of the window among the wisteria leaves.

  “Throw him down on the terrace!” ordered the princess. “Otherwise he’ll only find his way in again.”

  But Hattie was too kindhearted to do that. And Emma was secretly angry because Hattie had been brave enough to do something she couldn’t do herself.

  A few months later, when Emma went to bed, the spider was back in the bath again, and now he was big as a furry tennis ball with legs.

  “Get out, you horrible thing!” said Emma, and she turned on the cold tap. The spider scurried to and fro in the bath as the water rose. His frantic movements frightened Emma, who thought he might jump right out of the bath. She turned the water off, switched off the light, shut and locked the bathroom door, and, without washing or brushing her teeth, jumped into bed, knocking over a glass of water on the bedside table. She hid her head under the covers, furious with the spider for having frightened her so.

  “In the morning I’m going to move him,” she decided angrily.

  For that same day, at her practice, she had managed to move a canary chick and a small dormouse provided by the palace gardener.

  “If I can move a mouse, I can move a spider,” thought Emma. “I’ll show him who’s master.”

  So, the next morning, when it was light and she felt braver, Emma put on her ermine dressing gown and went into the bathroom, filled with determination.

  There sat the spider, and he had grown in the night. Now he was big and hairy as a coconut.

  Emma heard Hattie come into her bedroom with an armful of clean clothes.

  “Now!” she thought, “I must do it quickly!” and she focused her mind on the spider like a gardener turning on a jet of hose water.

  But just at that moment Hattie cut her finger on a piece of broken glass that Emma had knocked over and left where it lay.

  Hattie let out a sharp cry of pain, and Emma’s mind was jolted off its track. The spider in the bath jerked—quivered—fell apart—and, all of a sudden, instead of just one, there were a hundred huge black furry spiders, filling the bath to the brim, jostling and rustling and staring hard at Emma with their beady black eyes.

  Emma let out a screech that brought Hattie running, with a handkerchief bundled around her bleeding finger. Hattie herself was so horrified by the sight of what was in the bath that she could only gasp, “Oh! Your Highness!”

  “That was your fault,” said Emma savagely. “So now you can get rid of them! Go on—that’s an order.”

  She was furious that she had failed to move the spider.

  Hattie, white as a cotton ball, stepped toward the towel rail, but Emma shouted, “No! You are to take those spiders out of the bath with your hands. I don’t want those spiders touching my towel. Go on! Take them in your hands and drop them out of the window.”

  “Oh, Your Highness! You wouldn’t make me do that!”

  “Wouldn’t I just!” said Emma. “Do it, or you’re fired, and I’ll see that you get sent to jail for disobeying my orders.”

  So Hattie, her teeth chattering with terror, crept to the bath, and plunged her hands to the wrists into the heaving furry mass of spiders. Her finger was still dripping blood.

  “Well, one good thing,” thought Hattie. “They do say a cobweb’s the best plaster to put on a cut.” So that cheered her up a little.

  She picked up a handful of spiders, all tangled together, and then, with her eyes shut, ran across to the window and dropped them out. Down they slid, on thick silvery webs, and left her hands all coated in web too, like gray silk gloves.

  “Hurry up!” said Emma. “Don’t stop. Get rid of them all!”

  To and fro, to and fro Hattie went, with armful after armful of spiders. By the time she had carried half a dozen loads of black furry creatures, she found she didn’t mind them quite so much. And presently she began to feel quite friendly toward them. After all, they were soft as thistledown, and they didn’t bite, or sting, or even struggle, but just quietly let her carry them. Hattie, for her part, took tremendous care not to bruise them or bend their legs or bump them against each other, and she let each one glide gently
down its own web onto the terrace below.

  There were exactly a hundred.

  As she let out the last one—“Oh, my goodness gracious!” cried Hattie. “Oh my word, Your Highness, do come and look!”

  But Emma had flounced into the bathroom and was crossly brushing her teeth and didn’t hear Hattie’s cry of wonder.

  Down below on the terrace, instead of a hundred spiders, there were a hundred handsome young men, all bowing and smiling. One of them had a crown on his head and a knapsack on his back; the rest carried plastic bags of diamonds. They all gazed up admiringly at Hattie’s pink cheeks, blue print dress, and shining golden hair. The one who wore the crown bowed particularly low, and gave Hattie a specially warm smile. Even pinker than usual, she smiled shyly back.

  “Who in the world are you all?” she asked.

  “I’m Prince Boris of Voltolydia,” replied the crowned one. “I was on my way here last year to ask for the princess’s hand in marriage when my horse had the ill luck to tread on a snake who was a witch in disguise, and she turned me into a spider. She told me I could only be changed back by somebody who was brave enough to pick me up with their bare hands and kind enough to give me a little of their blood.”

  Hattie looked down at her bare hands, from which the silvery webs were peeling, and noticed with surprise that her cut finger was completely healed, although it had been quite a bad cut.

  “So,” went on Prince Boris, “I am forever grateful to you, dear and beautiful girl, for rescuing me, and I should like to ask for your hand in marriage.”

  “Oh!” said Hattie, blushing even more. “But I’m not the princess, I am only her maid.”

  “That,” said the prince, “makes no difference at all. You are the lady for me. Will you ride back with me and be Queen of Voltolydia?”

  “Yes, thank you!” said Hattie, for she had fallen in love with him at first sight, as he had with her. So she pushed up the sash a bit farther, stepped out of the window, and slid down the silvery rope of spiders’ webs, which was easily thick enough to support her.

  “Who are all these other young gentlemen?” she asked, looking around at the handsome young men with their bags of diamonds.

  “I have no idea,” answered Prince Boris. “For some reason they all came and joined me in the bath.”

  “We wish to be your followers,” chorused the young men.

  “Certainly you may, if that is your wish,” said the prince. “But you might as well leave all these diamonds here. We have enough diamonds in the mines of Voltolydia to keep the whole world supplied. I brought a bag to offer the princess. But what a disagreeable girl she is. I’m certainly glad that I was saved from marrying her!”

  Boris and Hattie and all the followers jumped gaily off the palace terrace and hurried away to buy a hundred and one horses to carry them back to Voltolydia—where they lived happily ever after.

  All that Princess Emma saw, when she had brushed her teeth and shouted angrily, several times, for Hattie to come and clean the bath, was a wide-open window. When she looked out she noticed, down below, a great many bags of diamonds.

  No other prince ever came to ask for Emma’s hand. Perhaps word had got around how disagreeable she was. She spent the rest of her life moving objects with her mind—larger and larger ones, until at last she was able to move whole cathedrals and power stations and icebergs and moderate-sized mountains.

  At first she found it quite an interesting hobby, but in the end she became bored with it, and used to sit for days and days at a time on her throne (for by then the king had died and she had become queen) doing nothing at all whatever.

  Think of a Word

  ONCE THERE WAS A BOY called Dan who was in the habit of using short rude words.

  Almost any short word ending in T was rude in the country where Dan lived: Dit, Fot, Het, Rit, Sut.

  “You silly old Sut,” he called after an old lady in the street one day, and she turned around on him, quick as a whiplash.

  “You’ll be sorry you said that to me,” she said.

  “Why, you old Jot?” said Dan.

  “Because, from now on,” said the old lady, “every time you say one of those words you seem so keen on, a tiny patch of your skin will turn to glass, so that everybody will be able to see all the works inside you. There are eight words that would cure the habit you have,” she said, “but I shan’t teach them to you. You’ll have to find them out for yourself.”

  And she turned on her skinny old heel and walked away.

  Dan was left standing there with his mouth open.

  He didn’t call anything after the old lady—somehow she had left him rather quiet and thoughtful—but later in the day, he forgot all about her, and called the driver of the school bus a stupid Nat.

  “Dan!” said his friend Rod, who was sitting beside him. “Your face has gone all funny! I can see your teeth through your cheek as if it was glass. And the buttermint you’re sucking. You didn’t tell me you had any buttermints.”

  Dan, quite upset, couldn’t wait to get home and look in the mirror.

  Sure enough, a patch of his right cheek had gone clear and see-through—there were his teeth and his tongue, plain to view.

  It was like having a plastic porthole in his face.

  And after two or three days, a good few more patches had gone transparent all over Dan—on his arms, his legs, his neck, and even more inconvenient places. You could see bones and muscles in him, and tubes and joints and things that aren’t usually seen.

  The family doctor was quite keen to send Dan up to a big teaching hospital, so that the medical students could look at him and find out useful facts. But Dan’s mother wasn’t having any of that.

  She was very annoyed about it, and so was Dan’s father.

  “It’s disgraceful,” they said.

  So, since Dan couldn’t seem to stop coming out with short rude words ending in T, they took him away from school and sent him off into the mountains to be a shepherd.

  High up in the hills, alone all day with the sheep, he couldn’t come to much harm, they reckoned, as there was no one to talk to, and so he wouldn’t be using any language, and, by and by, might learn to think before he spoke.

  So off went Dan, into the high meadows, where he had no company but the baaing sheep and a surly old dog called Buff, who never barked, and who made it plain to Dan that he could have looked after the whole flock perfectly well on his own, without any help.

  There, sitting on a rock, or on the short, sweet mountain grass, Dan had plenty of time to think, and to wonder which were the eight words the old lady had meant.

  Day after day he thought, week after week, and he never spoke.

  Thoughts piled up inside his head like leaves in a hollow tree. He thought about how you could tow away the wind, if you had a strong enough rope. He thought about how, if you laid your plans carefully, you could win summer or winter to be your very own. He thought about rolled and stuffed thunder, and pan-fried lightning. He thought about weaving a rope of rain. He thought about the air, which is everywhere. He thought about the earth, which is nothing but a shepherd’s pie of everything left over.

  “Words are stronger than blows,” he thought. “And perhaps,” he decided later on, “thoughts are stronger than words.”

  So Dan passed days and weeks and months, wandering among the hills with his sheep. He was happy now. He didn’t even want to go back to his home.

  He listened to what the wind had to say, he watched the dark and the light playing hide-and-seek with each other, he felt the rock under his toes, he tasted the rain and smelled the warm salty wool of the sheep.

  Meanwhile, down in the plains, and in Dan’s home town, they were having a lot of trouble with dragons.

  Dragons had suddenly started breeding quicker than wasps, and the whole country was full of them. Put your
Sunday roast in the oven, and half an hour later a dozen dragons would have smelled it out; they’d be battering at your window like bulldozers.

  Dragons fouled up the airport runways with clawmarks and scattered scales and droppings; they burst into banks and snatched bags of cash; they came snorting into cinemas and burned up reels of film; they broke off TV aerials and scraped tiles from roofs; splashing in rivers, they turned all the water to steam; they swallowed down hundreds of men, women, and children going about their daily affairs. And as for princesses—there wasn’t a single princess left free in the world, for the dragons had collected the lot, and had them all shut up together in a nasty greasy cindery castle, which stood on an island in the middle of a lake, up among the highest peaks of the mountains, which in that part were so tall and sharp that they looked like the spikes of a king’s crown.

  Dan knew nothing of all this.

  He did notice, to be sure, that dragons flew overhead much more than they used to: All of a sudden there would be a big spiny shadow across the sun, and the sheep would bleat in fright and huddle together, and old Buff the sheepdog would growl and snake out his head with flattened ears.

  Dan noticed, too, that knights and princes and soldiers were quite often to be seen, riding horses or tanks or motorbikes up the highways into the mountains. From his perch on a high crag Dan would see them go up, but he never saw them come down again. Up, up, the tiny figures went, and vanished into the high passes. Maybe they were crossing the mountains to the other side, Dan reckoned. He didn’t give them too much thought. Nor did he trouble his head about the distant rumblings and flashes from those high peaks where they went. A bit of bad weather in the mountains was nothing out of the ordinary. The sheep didn’t mind it, nor did Dan.

  But one day a young fellow in shining armor, a handsome lad with a ruby-hilted sword and a gold crown around his helmet, came riding past the crag where Dan sat with his flock.