Hercufleas
Page 14
‘You never wanted me to bring the Black Death back,’ he realised. ‘But why did you send us all that way, if you knew it was for nothing?’
‘I knew no such thing,’ Mayor Witz answered crossly. ‘And some power did come back with you.’
Hercufleas groaned. Mayor Witz was getting forgetful in her old age. ‘I already told you,’ he said. ‘I didn’t take—’
‘I did not say the power was in you,’ Mayor Witz interrupted.
Hercufleas frowned. ‘It wasn’t?’
She shook her head. ‘It was in Greta.’
‘Greta?’
‘Greta.’ She nodded. ‘When she left here, her heart was cold and despairing. All our hearts were. She came back carrying a flicker of hope. Like a tinderfly within her heart. And look at the fire it sparked. Even in you.’
Hercufleas shook his head. The wily old babushka was right.
‘We’re all fleas feeding off of a creature called Hope,’ he grinned, remembering Sir Klaus, and suddenly he knew that Greta would be fine, wherever she went and whatever she did.
42
On the day Hercufleas and his fleamily left Tumber, the whole town turned out to say goodbye. So many sad tears were cried that the nettle tea was ruined and the fleas had to wear wellingtons. Mayor Witz stepped up to an enormous object in the centre of the town, hidden under a white sheet.
‘Big Things are easy to remember,’ she told the town. ‘Big Things almost never get lost. It would be very strange, for example, if tomorrow you saw someone walking down the street, scratching their head and saying to themselves, “Now where did I put Avalon?” Avalon is a Big Thing, you see.
‘It’s the Small Things that tend to get forgotten. They are always slipping from our heads, like coins down the back of an armchair. It would not be very strange at all, for example, if tomorrow you saw someone by the side of the road, scratching their heads and saying to themselves, “Where are my scopical glasses?” or “What’s the name of that little dot on top of the letter i?”’
‘Just so you know, it’s called a tittle,’ said Tittle.
‘Questions like these will always be asked,’ Mayor Witz continued, ‘because people have a habit of forgetting about the Small Things. But just because something (or someone) is small doesn’t mean they aren’t important. They can still do stupendous, awe-inspiring, heroic things. And that’s why we must remember Hercufleas.’
With that, she unveiled the statue in the town square.
A bronze flea, with the inscription:
Until the flea bit, the child wouldn’t fight.
Until the child fought, the axe wouldn’t chop.
Until the axe chopped, the tree wouldn’t fall.
Until the tree fell, the giant wouldn’t wake.
Until the giant woke, the nightmare couldn’t end.
And all from the bite of a flea.
The crowd burst into applause, then looked at Hercufleas. Now it was his turn to make a speech. But he just stood there, looking at his statue.
After a while, the Tumberfolk began to get nervous. Was something wrong? Was the statue not grand enough? Should it have been made from marble instead of bronze? Was his nose too stubby? Were his spines too spiky? That was it, wasn’t it? His spines were definitely too spiky, they had thought the same thing.
‘Do you… like it?’ asked Mayor Witz tentatively.
Hercufleas looked up with a sad smile. ‘I’m honoured,’ he said to her. Then he turned to the Tumberfolk. ‘But I don’t want a statue.’
Mayor Witz frowned. ‘But—’
‘I’m not a hero,’ said Hercufleas firmly. ‘I’m just a flea who lost his fleamily and then found them again. A flea who found a best friend and then lost her.’
The mayor spread her hands. ‘What would you have us do?’
Hercufleas thought for a while. He looked up at Yânariko, standing high above them.
‘Plant an everpine seed here,’ he called up, cupping his hands at his mouth and yelling hard as he could. ‘So they will always remember: big things come from small beginnings!’
And that is exactly what the green giant did. He planted the seed, and the Tumberfolk saw it grow tall. When it was big enough, they wrote the names of everyone who had been lost upon the leaves, starting with Natalya and Nicholas and Wuff. All through spring and summer they lay upon the branches, whispering to each other in the breeze. In autumn, each loss withered and blew away.
‘Come on then, all of you,’ said Min. ‘It’s a long way to Avalon, and we’ve been here far too long already.’
But Hercufleas shook his head. ‘We’re not going to Avalon.’
‘We’re not?’ said Pin.
‘No,’ said Hercufleas, taking his fleamily’s hands and forming them into a circle. ‘We need a new home.’
‘If not Avalon, then where?’ said Min.
‘And who will our host be?’ said Pin.
Hercufleas grinned. ‘You’ll never know unless you jump. Ready? On three.’
The fleas looked at each other nervously.
‘One…’
Were they ready? Of course they weren’t! What was Hercufleas going on about?
‘Two…’
But he looked at them with such belief that the question no longer seemed to matter.
‘Three!’
The Tumberfolk never saw them again.
Epilogue
The fleamily landed on a hillside meadow of chamomile and sage, beside an old hollowed-out tree stump. It had tall square windows carved into the sides and a blood-red door with a brass knocker and a tiny sign, painted with an eyelash. It said ‘Stump Cottage’.
The fleamily stood staring at it.
‘Where are we?’ said Dot.
‘On Yânariko’s head,’ said Hercufleas.
The others looked down at their feet in amazement.
‘Look,’ said Hercufleas, pointing at the supplies piled by the tree stump. ‘We’ve got elastic bands, to make a new boingy-boing room. Pints of blood to put in the pantry. Matchsticks and candles and a cloth we can cut into blankets, and even a box of tinderflies we can breed for fires!’
‘You made all of this?’ Min gasped, looking around the stump. ‘It must be ten times the size of the hat house!’
‘Greta built it,’ Hercufleas said. ‘Before she left. Yânariko knows. He’s offered to be our new host. We can stay on him for as long as we like. All he asks in return is for us to make sure that nothing nasty plants itself on him ever again. We’ll be like his gardeners, uprooting any nasty weeds.’ He stared at them all, hopping about with nerves. ‘What do you think?’
The fleamily looked around them, then back to Stump Cottage. And they burst out laughing.
‘Unbefleavable!’ said Itch.
‘Parasiticulous!’ said Titch.
‘Pestitively brilliant!’ said Burp.
Hercufleas smiled. He joined the others in celebrating. They did star jumps, and somersaults, and double-pike-cross-split-topsy-turvy manoeuvres, leaping through the meadow towards home.
Acknowledgements
Sometimes, words are like fleas: pesky little things that won’t stay where I want them to. Hopping all over the page. Itching and irritating. Leaving me feeling faint.
At one point, the words in this book grew into an enormous swarm that I just didn’t know what to do with.
Lucky for me, I’ve got a crack team of Pest Control.
Charlie Sheppard, Eloise Wilson and Chloe Sackur at Andersen – thank you for your wisdom and imagination. You make my books the best they can be! Eve Warlow and Sarah Kimmelman – thank you for your invites and organising. Small books get overlooked sometimes. You make sure mine get noticed.
Talya Baker, my copy-editor – thank you for your keen eye and clarity. Peter Cottrill – thank you for bringing the world of the story to life. Kate Grove – thank you for your direction, design and mad Photoshopping skillz.
Claire Lawrence – thanks for entering and winning my Real
ly Tiny Story Competition. I hope you like your characters!
Becky Bagnell, my agent – thank you for your belief and judgement. You are my champion!
And Mum – as ever, you’re the best.
Super Fleas
In 1938, a comic book was published about a superhero with a red cape and a big S on his chest. This superhero could leap over twenty-storey buildings. He was super strong. Bullets bounced off his skin.
You know the guy I’m talking about, right?
Thing is, I could never figure why there’s still so much fuss about him. You see, he’s not that special. There are super-strong, mega-leaping, tough-as-nails superheroes everywhere. It’s just that nobody notices them. Because they’re also teeny-tiny.
You know the bugs I’m talking about, right?
At first, I couldn’t believe fleas were such powerful parasites. But the more I researched them, the more amazed I was…
Fleas are so difficult to squash because their skin is made of a hard material called chitin. It’s like wearing a natural suit of armour.
We humans have a guy called Zsolt Sinka, from Hungary, who can pull aeroplanes with his teeth. Pretty impressive, right? Wrong – because a flea his size could pull the equivalent of 218 jumbo jets. Sorry, Mr Sinka.
When fleas jump, their legs accelerate them at 150g – that’s 150 times the force of gravity, and over 23 times that of the world’s most extreme roller coaster. And they can do that 30,000 times without taking a break. (I wonder who measured that, by the way? Did they use tally marks?)
If fleas were human-sized, we might find ourselves in a lot of trouble. Especially since they can drink 15 times their bodyweight in blood.
Don’t worry too much, though – because of how gravity works, fleas only have such incredible abilities because they are so small. If they grew much bigger, they’d lose all their powers.
Size, you see, is sort of like a flea’s Kryptonite.
And sadly, fleas tend to be more villainous than heroic. They’ve even been used by criminals like Lydia Banot, who in 1996 was jailed for eight years after trying to blackmail Harrods, the famous department store. Banot threatened to release a plague of fleas in the designer-clothing department unless the shop gave her millions of pounds.
Unbefleavable!
About the Author
Sam Gayton grew up in Kent with a cat called Archibald, a dog called Ruby, a bunch of humans, and a ghost called Kevin. He spent his days playing with Lego, designing new and extremely complicated board games, and making comics with his friend Loo Loo.
When he had a spare moment, he wrote stories.
They usually contained lots of dinosaurs and explosions (as all good stories should). He started thousands over the years, but he never finished any of them. He gave up, and his stories ended up stuffed into boxes and dumped in the attic.
Poor old stories! There they sat, year after year, heaped with the dust and the spiders and Kevin the ghost, waiting for their endings. Probably they ended up haunting Sam, because a long time later, when he had grown up and decided to be a teacher, he somehow found himself writing stories again.
And this time, he didn’t give up on them.
Sam still loves Lego, board games and comics. But now he also loves drinking tea (milk, no sugar), eating pizza (pepperoni, extra cheese), and wondering how long he would survive a zombie apocalypse (probably about 14 minutes).
@sam_gayton
www.samgayton.com
SAM GAYTON
ILLUSTRATED BY CHRIS RIDDELL
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‘A germ of JK and a pinch of Pullman’TES
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