by Chris Tookey
Mrs Scraggs harrumphed and said she’d see what she could do. As the old crone waddled off towards the larder, dragging her wooden leg slightly behind her, the newcomer’s gaze fell upon Wenda.
“Ah,” he said, amiably. “Hello, young lady. You must be…?”
“Wenda,” said Wenda, with her piercing, blue-eyed stare. “Who are you?”
“Ah, forgive me,” said the man, coming across to shake her formally by the hand. “My name is Merlin.”
“A wizard?” asked Wenda. She had never heard of Merlin but was old enough to know that many wizards had the names of birds of prey.
“That’s right,” said Merlin. “Like Old Buzzard in your library here.”
“Ain’t you related to him?” asked Mrs Scraggs, scratching her bottom and giving her finger a surreptitious sniff. “Or have I got that wrong?”
“You are not misinformed, Mrs Scraggs,” replied Merlin. “In fact, you are as ever fully adduced of the facts. Buzzard is my elder brother.”
Mrs Scraggs returned with a wooden chalice, a half-empty bottle of mead and an inhospitable glare.
“There’s too many wizards around here already, if you ask me,” she said, “without you coming along to cause trouble.”
“I? Cause trouble?” said Merlin, as though alarmed at the very idea. “No, no, no!”
Mrs Scraggs sniffed, in the way she always did when she suspected someone of pulling her one good leg.
“Wizards indeed,” she said. “Spawn of Satan, if you ask me.”
“It is true,” said Merlin, “that I was fathered by the, ah, Prince of Darkness. But I never really knew him. When I was seven, he ran off with some floozie or other. My mother never mentions him.”
“Your mother,” snorted Mrs Scraggs. “She’s a strange one too.”
“She certainly,” admitted Merlin, “has her eccentricities.”
“Eccentricities?” said Mrs Scraggs. “That’s not how I’d describe them.”
“I forgot,” said Merlin. “Of course, you two were at school together.”
“Charm school,” said Mrs Scraggs. “A long time ago now. In Transylvania. I was never too good at spelling, but I knew my way round potions and shape-shifting.”
“I’m sure you did,” said Merlin.
“Your mother loved her animals and beasts,” said Mrs Scraggs. “And of course her black magic.”
“Fascinating,” said Merlin, sipping the mead that Mrs Scraggs had so grudgingly brought to him. “But it is not of my mother that I wish to speak. It is of you.”
“Me?” asked Mrs Scraggs suspiciously. “Why me?”
I would not wish to describe Mrs Scraggs in too much detail, for there is a chance that you might be reading this while eating. Suffice it to say that she never had been one of nature’s beauties, and old age, loss of all but one of her teeth and the amputation of most of her left leg without anaesthetic had improved neither her looks nor her disposition. Despite her many sterling qualities as a cook, her social skills were – it is best to be honest about such things – non-existent. Behind her back, she was known as The Wicked Witch.
This was more than a little unfair, for she had not practised as a witch for many years, nor was she especially wicked. As Wenda knew, Mrs Scraggs was capable of small acts of kindness, as long as they did not require much effort. Like Wenda, she looked as if she was the product of more than one species. It wasn’t hard to see that there was dwarf in her, as well as a touch of elvish. Her elven side may well have contributed to her proficiency with herbs and spices, and there was no one more able than she to differentiate between the various kinds of edible mushroom and poisonous toadstool that grew profusely in the neighbouring forests, tempting many an unwary local resident into an ill-advised if not terminal snack.
But there was more than a touch of goblin in her foul temper and air of malign suspicion, which hung over her like a north Atlantean moorland fog. It was said that she did not suffer fools gladly, but the truth was that she was equally unwilling to put up with the intelligent. She did not tolerate laziness, clumsiness or a lack of hygiene in anyone, nor anything that inconvenienced her for more than a few moments.
She did not need a rod of iron to rule over her motley collection of kitchen staff. When she needed to administer corporal punishment, she used simply to remove her wooden leg and beat the offender with it. Mostly, her reputation as a witch meant that few dared to cross her. No one wanted to risk being turned into a frog or a cockroach, or something more edible when she ran out of a vital ingredient.
Whatever the origins of those who worked under Mrs Scraggs in cookery and housekeeping – goblin, dwarf, elf, halfling, orc, lizard-man or bugbear (and most were a combination of at least two of these races) – everyone knew to stay out of Mrs Scraggs’ way when she was in one of her goblin moods.
There were those among the more elderly kitchen staff – in other words, those who had survived the harsh living conditions in the castle to the age of thirty – who claimed to have seen Mrs Scraggs laugh, but that was more than a decade ago, when she had had a few more teeth and both her legs.
Her left leg had been incinerated in a cooking accident. A dragon that Mr Scraggs had brought in for a banquet had turned out to be stunned, rather than deceased. Since then, the old cook’s mouldering features had settled into a more-or-less permanent scowl, which occasionally lightened into a look of extremely bad-tempered mistrust, which was the expression she was adopting now.
“Thank you for this, Mrs Scraggs,” said Merlin, taking another sip of his mead with imperturbable affability. “Your very good health.”
Mrs Scraggs harrumphed again, as though to say that good health was the last thing she could reasonably expect at her time of life.
“And how,” asked Merlin, “is Mr Scraggs?”
“Still dead,” said Mrs Scraggs.
“Ah, yes,” said Merlin, with the ease of someone used to carrying off social gaffes with a measure of serenity, “I’m sorry to hear it. He was a good fellow at his trade. Giant-killing, wasn’t it?”
“There was no one better than Jack when he was in his prime,” said Mrs Scraggs. “But he was never the same after Magog fell on him. Nasty injury to his spine. Kept him awake at night. Ruined his concentration. That was what did for him in the end.”
“You mean a giant killed him?”
“No,” the old woman sniffed. “The bottom fell out of giant-killing. Not enough of them were left alive, and anyway Jack came to prefer helping me out in the kitchen, may he rest in peace.”
“I trust it was a peaceful end,” said Merlin.
“Oh yes. He fell in the soup when he was stirring and he drowned,” said the old cook, indicating the massive cauldron in the middle of the kitchen. “He went missing for a week. We only found him when we emptied the cauldron.”
“Well, well, well,” said Merlin, all too visibly making a mental note to avoid the soup. “Still, he had a good, long life, didn’t he? What was he: fifty-eight? Sixty?”
“Twenty-nine,” said Mrs Scraggs.
“How misleading looks can be,” mused Merlin. “Still, not a bad age for a giant-killer. You must miss him.”
“Not particularly,” said Mrs Scraggs.
“Ah,” said Merlin genially.
He turned to Wenda.
“And how old are you, my dear?” he inquired.
“Nine years, three months and seven days,” said Wenda, precisely.
“Excellent,” said Merlin, as though he couldn’t imagine any age that it would be better to be. “And are the two of you related?”
“Not related,” said Mrs Scraggs. “She’s my ward. Her mother was Martha. You remember her. Pretty. Part-elvish, part human. About your height.”
“Ah yes. I remember her now. Of Hunnish stock, I recall. She is the King’s food-taster, is she not?” asked
Merlin.
“Was,” said Mrs Scraggs impassively. “She was poisoned. Only last year.”
“Dear me,” said Merlin, “nasty business. But, I suppose, one of the perils inherent in the job.”
He smiled sympathetically at Wenda, who stared unnervingly back. Merlin took another sip of mead, in what might have been an attempt to steady his nerves. He attempted to re-engage Mrs Scraggs in conversation.
“And the King is in good health?”
“Yes,” said Mrs Scraggs. “Nobody’s tried to bump him off for, ooh, months.”
“And I expect Queen Elinor is keeping him young,” said Merlin.
“I wouldn’t know about that,” said Mrs Scraggs, in a tone of extreme disapproval. Whether her distaste was for castle gossip or Queen Elinor’s morals, it was impossible to tell.
“And now,” said Mrs Scraggs, easing herself on to a stool and taking her weight off her good leg, “perhaps you’ll tell me what you are doing here.”
“I’ve come to ask a tiny weenie miniscule favour of you,” said Merlin. “You see, I’ve come across this boy.”
“What boy?” said Mrs Scraggs, looking around. “I don’t see any boy.”
“Why, the boy outside,” said Merlin. “I knew you were suspicious of strangers, and nothing wrong with that, Mrs Scraggs. So I asked him to wait outside. There is no need to arise from that splendidly practical stool, Mrs S, I can bring him in myself.”
And, with one wave of a wand that appeared magically from somewhere up Merlin’s right sleeve, the wizard made a small boy appear, dripping slightly, in the middle of the kitchen floor.
Mrs Scraggs sniffed disapprovingly, with the air of someone who preferred entrances to be made in a more conventional fashion. Wenda sniffed too. The boy smelt of sea spray and drains.
“He’s shivering,” observed Mrs Scraggs.
“I daresay that is because he’s cold,” replied Merlin.
“He’s wet, too.”
“Not much escapes your notice, does it, Mrs Scraggs?” observed the wizard. “I discovered him on a cliff overlooking Hell Bay, not two hundred yards from here.”
“What was he doing there, on a wild, wet night like this?”
“Who can tell?” said Merlin.
“Come to think of it, what took you there?” asked Mrs Scraggs with obvious suspicion.
“The long walks. The scenery. Sea air,” said Merlin. “Very bracing.”
Mrs Scraggs snorted sceptically. Hell Bay seemed to her a most unlikely tourist destination, especially at night.
“Is he human?” asked Mrs Scraggs, studying the boy’s face. “He looks human. More or less.”
“Yes,” said Merlin, pointing to a graze on the boy’s knee, with a smear of blood below. “Look. He has blood of red.”
Wenda looked curiously at the boy. So, the boy was human, though not of the purple-blooded, royal Atlantean line. Even this early in her life, Wenda knew that blue blood would have been the telltale sign of a halfling. Black was the colour of the elven races. Dwarves, goblins and the other mountain breeds had a touch of yellow in them. Scratch a lizard-man and his blood would run green – as would a bugbear’s, although bugbear blood had a distinctive smell of rotting vegetation. Those of mixed blood generally had blood of a muddy brown colour, though some had the colour of their most dominant race.
This human boy could have come from anywhere. He was no more than two years older than Wenda, painfully skinny, with lips that were a pale mauve from the cold. He was wearing a grubby, salt-stained white cotton smock and breeches that would have offered him little protection from the elements.
“Come here,” said Wenda, with an encouraging smile, “it’s warmer near the fire.”
The boy nodded and walked towards her with his uneven stride.
“He’s a cripple,” said Mrs Scraggs.
“Hardly a cripple,” murmured Merlin. “Unlike yourself, Mrs Scraggs, he does have his full complement of legs.”
“But his left leg’s shorter than his right,” said the witch. “Even you must be able to see that.”
“Indeed I can, Mrs Scraggs,” said Merlin. “But which of us is free of imperfections? I’m sure even that charming little scullery maid over there is not without a flaw.”
“Wenda?” snorted Mrs Scraggs. “She’s a good, hard worker.”
“But I do have a limp,” said Wenda. “In fact, my left leg’s longer than my right.”
“You see?” said Merlin. “They make a perfect pair. Between them, these two children amount to nothing sort of perfection!”
The boy sat cross-legged on the floor next to the cauldron and began rubbing his toes in an attempt to warm them up.
“What’s your name, boy?” said Mrs Scraggs.
The boy shrugged.
“Does he understand what we’re saying?” asked the cook. “Or is he simple?”
“I assure you he has his full complement of wits,” said Merlin. “I was holding a pleasant conversation with him only a few minutes ago. I expect he’s overawed by the magnificence of your kitchen, Mrs Scraggs.”
“Nothing to be afraid of in here,” said Mrs Scraggs sharply to the boy. “You may as well know that I don’t hold with shyness, young man. Nor with airs and graces, neither.”
“What’s his name?” asked Wenda.
The boy opened his mouth for the first time, hesitated and spoke.
“They call me Wyrd,” he said. “But I’m not sure it’s my real name.”
“You see?” said Merlin, with a warning look at Wyrd. “A man of mystery.”
“But you must know who he is,” said Wenda, staring at Merlin accusingly. “You’re a wizard. You know everything!”
“Tush, my dear! I wish it were true,” said Merlin, with a self-deprecating laugh. “We wizards have our magical powers, of course, and our areas of sorcerous expertise. But omniscience? I fear not. Let’s just say that he is Wyrd, and be done with it.”
“So, what was he doing out on a night like this?” demanded Mrs Scraggs.
“I wish I could tell you,” said Merlin, “but I cannot. However, I am intrigued by the plight of this young man.”
“Can’t say I am,” said Mrs Scraggs.
“But you will be,” promised Merlin. “You see, Mrs Scraggs, with Castle Otto being so close, I naturally thought of your bewitching self and the many delicious banquets I have enjoyed here. And I wondered, while I am away investigating who the boy is, how he came to be in this unfortunate predicament, etcetera, if you might take him under your wing, as it were, as you evidently have done so successfully with this young lady. You could fatten him up, educate his palate, make him useful about the place.”
Mrs Scraggs sniffed discouragingly.
“Why don’t you get old Buzzard to look after this boy?” inquired the old woman. “Isn’t he your brother?”
“I only wish I could,” sighed Merlin, “but unfortunately he and I have not always seen eye to eye over certain matters. Political matters, you might say. He’s a fine fellow after his own fashion, but hardly fathering material. And, between the two of us, I fear there might be a, how shall I put it, conflict of interest.”
“What about that other brother of yours?” asked Mrs Scraggs. “The younger one.”
“What do you know of him?” asked Merlin.
“He’s here,” said Mrs Scraggs.
“Osprey? I thought he was on the other side of the Channel, in Armorica.”
“He came over with Queen Elinor.”
“Are you sure it’s Osprey?”
“That’s what he calls himself. Wanders round in a toga. Tall. Dark. Thinks he’s Roman.”
“That certainly sounds like my little brother,” sighed Merlin. “But I fear Osprey doesn’t approve of me either. He hankers for the days when Albion was a part of the Roman Empire
and looks to Aurelius, Queen Elinor’s brother, to restore Roman rule. Whereas I have… Well, let’s just say, I have a more realistic vision of the future.”
“Well, I don’t have time for politics,” said Mrs Scraggs, “or looking after stray cripples.”
“Can I not appeal to your better nature?”
“Course not,” she snapped. “I don’t have one.”
“No, indeed. And why should you?” Merlin acknowledged agreeably. “But I am sure that for a small consideration…”
Here Merlin magicked into existence a small bag of coarse sackcloth, from which he poured several gold coins.
“Might you not see your way to taking him on as a kitchen hand?”
A greedy glint came into Mrs Scraggs’ eyes as she gazed upon the coins in the wizard’s hand.
“How long for?” she asked, without looking up.
“As long as is necessary. I could ensure that you are rewarded like this on an annual basis.”
“Six-monthly.”
“Quite, quite,” said Merlin hurriedly. “I meant six-monthly.”
The old cook dragged her eyes away from the coins and glared up at Merlin suspiciously.
“What is this interest that you have in him?”
“Well, believe it or not, Mrs Scraggs,” said Merlin, leaning towards her conspiratorially, “I think the child may have the makings of a mythic hero.”
“A what?”
“Mythic hero. You have, perhaps, heard of Hercules, Achilles, Ulysses?”
“Never heard of them,” said Mrs Scraggs, irritably. “What are you on about?”
“Never mind,” said Merlin affably. “The point is, I feel that the boy, crippled or not, has considerable potential. And you of all people, Mrs Scraggs, are just the person to bring it out.”
“I don’t suppose for one moment,” said the old crone sarcastically, “that you picking me had anything to do with Castle Otto being the only place for miles around that had a sound roof and a warm fire.”
“I cannot deny,” said Merlin, “that warmth and the propinquity of flaming firewood were of the essence since, as you have already observed, the boy is flimsily dressed and might easily die of exposure were he not to find a bed for the night.”
