Floods 3

by Colin Thompson

  ‘Sorry,’ Nerlin continued.

  ‘Yes, quite,’ said Mordonna, then, ‘What for?’

  ‘Being underneath you.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Mordonna.

  Then she thought for a bit and did something she had never ever done one single time in her whole life up until that point. She apologised.

  ‘Sorry for falling on top of you,’ she said. ‘Would you like me to move?’

  ‘Well, my legs have gone numb, but umm …’ Nerlin began, but he was too shy to tell her he didn’t want her to move.

  ‘OK,’ said Mordonna. Neither of them moved.

  After what seemed like another hour passed and Nerlin’s legs had turned a scary shade of blue with green bits, they managed to move and sat facing each other, both glad they had enough muck on their faces to hide their blushes.

  Mordonna had led a very sheltered life. Her only teacher had been forbidden to talk to her because she was a commoner and Mordonna was a very important princess. So although it had been very peaceful in the classroom, apart from Howler eating school books in a box in the corner, Mordonna had only learnt the few things the teacher had written on the blackboard. She knew the principal towns and exports of Belgium, how to tie her shoelaces and fifteen exciting things to cook in French using the limbs or insides of helpless amphibians. The millions of things she had never even heard of included the Dirt People, and when Nerlin told her about them she was horrified.

  ‘That’s terrible,’ she said. ‘Making you live down here in the dark like rats. Nice smell, though, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Nerlin. ‘I’ve never smelled anything else.’

  ‘Here, try this,’ Mordonna said. She held her armpit close to Nerlin’s face. He closed his eyes and took a deep sniff. He couldn’t speak. His doubts were swept away. He knew he was deeply, incredibly, head-over-knees, in love.

  ‘Can I smell yours?’ said Mordonna, cuddling up to him.

  She closed her eyes and buried her nose in Nerlin’s muddy armpit. She was in love too. All the years of loneliness were swept away. She had met her destiny.

  Their happy underarm-sniffing was interrupted by a roar from above. It was King Quatorze. The roar basically said that Nerlin was more worthless than a festering speck of snot embedded in a mouldy blob of slug slime, and that because he had touched the King’s daughter, the King was going to turn him into a septic-truffle, have him eaten by a vampire frog and then kill him before teaching him to water-ski.

  ‘But I love him, Father,’ cried Mordonna.

  The King went very, very red, opened his mouth, closed it again, went redder than the reddest thing in the universe, and exploded. Bits of him landed on Nerlin and Mordonna. The lovers leapt to their feet and ran down the drain into the darkness.

  ‘They’ll come after me,’ said Mordonna. ‘My father will never rest until he catches us.’

  ‘But … I thought he just exploded,’ said Nerlin.

  ‘Oh, he does that all the time,’ Mordonna said.

  ‘Fifty million gold sovereigns, three-point-seven hundredths of my Kingdom and the hand of my other daughter, Howler, in marriage to the person who brings back my precious daughter and kills the vile traitor who has kidnapped her!’ roared the King.

  ‘There’s only me out here, dear,’ said Queen Scratchrot through the door. ‘Besides,’ she added, ‘who would want to marry poor Howler?’

  King Quatorze dropped six sticks of dynamite and a hand grenade into the toilet, in the hope that Nerlin would be in the drain below, and pulled the chain.

  ‘That’ll teach him,’ he said, coming out of the batroom, which is like a bathroom only with bats hanging above your head watching you.8

  I think you need to calm down a bit, dear,’ said the Queen. ‘If this person has actually kidnapped Mordonna, which I doubt, and he is actually in the drains where your dynamite comes out, and it does actually kill him, then it will probably kill her too.’

  The King looked disgruntled. ‘Right … well, I’ll … umm, I’ll get the Chancellor to make a proclamation.’

  ‘Now, Nombre, you don’t actually have fifty million gold sovereigns, do you?’ said the Queen.

  ‘Well, no, not as such,’ said the King. ‘I do have some nice fruit cake and lots of spare garden gnomes.’

  ‘You don’t even have five gold sovereigns, do you?’

  ‘Err, umm, well … no,’ the King admitted. ‘But the rescuer will be so entranced by Howler they might not notice.’

  ‘I think entranced is probably not the right word, is it, dear?’ said the Queen. ‘I think the word is more like eaten.’

  ‘Probably,’ said the King. ‘They certainly won’t notice then, will they? And anyway, when our beautiful Mordonna is married to Prince Nochyn of Battenberg we will have a hundred million gold sovereigns.’

  ‘But she doesn’t love him,’ said the Queen. ‘She will never marry him.’

  ‘Love? Love? What’s not to love about a hundred million gold coins?’

  When the King had calmed down some more, Queen Scratchrot sent him off to find the Chancellor, then she summoned her faithful equery, Vessel.9

  ‘My lady,’ said Vessel, kneeling before her.

  Beneath the hood of his cloak, Vessel’s face appeared to be no more than two small piercing eyes set in black emptiness. In his right hand he carried his staff: a dead tree with a bird’s nest at the top. In the nest of broken dusty twigs lived Vessel’s crow assistant, Parsnip. Parsnip spoke a strange pigeon English, which everyone apart from pigeons found very confusing.

  Vessel worshipped Queen Scratchrot. Every second of every minute of every hour of every day, he held her image close to his heart on a platinum chain around his neck. To make sure there was never an instant when he wasn’t thinking of her, the chain was woven with sharp spines that constantly pricked his skin and drew tiny drops of blood. In his private quarters up in one of the castle’s many towers he had over thirty-two boxes of the Queen’s toenail clippings, three sacks of her hair, and a jar of small flaky bits of unspecified origin. The Queen herself pretended to be completely unaware of Vessel’s adoration. Or, more accurately, she pretended to pretend to be unaware, because she was actually in love with Vessel and not the King, because Vessel was everything the King was not – taller than her, intelligent and a sensitive seeker of wisdom. Also, his tights fitted really well and had almost no runs in them.

  ‘My good and faithful servant,’ said the Queen, ‘I want you to go down into the drains and make contact with the Dirt People. Find out who this man is that Mordonna has fallen in love with and tell her that, if she really does love him, I will do all I can to help them.’

  ‘My lady, you are, as ever, kind, wonderful and overflowing with bounteous wisdom.’

  ‘I hardly need add,’ the Queen added, ‘that this must be done with the utmost secrecy. As you know, my husband has spies everywhere.’

  ‘You can count on me, your highness,’ said Vessel, licking the Queen’s shoes. Then, feeling dizzy, he added, ‘Oh my great queen, pray tell me what is that wonderful flavour in your shoe polish?’

  ‘Patagonian Bat Guano.’

  ‘Greater-Spotted Patagonian Bat or Hawk-mouth Patagonian Bat, my queen?’

  ‘Greater-Spotted,’ the Queen replied. She felt herself blush and turned her face away before whispering, ‘Your favourite.’

  ‘I will find your daughter,’ said Vessel, getting up slowly so as not to pass out. ‘You can count on me.’

  ‘I know I can. I don’t know how I would manage without you,’ said the Queen. ‘Here, have some of my bellybutton fluff.’

  Vessel nearly fainted with pure delight. He dropped his tree, sending Parsnip flapping up onto the curtains in a flurry of pigeon swear words. Leaving the bird behind, Vessel crawled backwards out of the room and slipped silently down the stone stairs into the cellars. From there, he made his way down three more levels into the deepest dungeons where the King kept all the people who wouldn’t gi
ve him any more money – the members of parliament, prime ministers and bank managers.

  At the end of the darkest, dampest tunnel there was a small door that looked as if it hadn’t been opened for a hundred years. It looked like this because it hadn’t been opened for a hundred years. Vessel had entered the castle through this very door one hundred and one years earlier as a young man. No one, not even the Queen, knew that Vessel had been born one of the Dirt People. He had kept his head down and blended into castle life, starting as an apprentice cabbage leaf polisher and working his way up until he was now one of the most powerful people in the land. The King hated him because the Queen liked Vessel better than she liked him. And even though it would have been easy to have him destroyed, the King knew that if he did, the Queen would destroy him.

  The door was thick with a century’s cobwebs. Yet when Vessel took a rusty key from his pocket and inserted it in the lock, it turned with no effort at all. It was as if someone had been oiling it.

  There was something behind the door. When Vessel pushed it open, the something fell over with a feeble cry.

  ‘Is that you, Vessel?’ said an ancient spindly voice from under a broken chair.

  ‘Mother?’ said Vessel.

  ‘Yes. Come here, my child, that I may feel your face. My eyes left me many years ago as I sat here waiting for your return,’ said the old lady, wiping her oily hands on her dress.

  ‘You mean … every day, for a hundred years?’

  ‘Yes, I knew you’d come.’

  Vessel waited for the old lady to move, but she didn’t.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said at last. ‘I’ve been sitting here for so long I seem to have forgotten how to move.’

  Vessel picked up his mother and carried her down the narrow drain into the sewers. She was so frail that Vessel imagined he was holding a bundle of sticks.

  ‘See, everybody,’ the old lady kept calling out, ‘I told you he’d come back.’ But there was no one there.

  The sewer joined others and finally led into the Great Sewer of Quagmire. Here and there people appeared wearing the traditional lavatory cleaner’s Wide Hat and carrying their long brushes. The heady smell of rotting food and other drainy substances filled Vessel’s head with long-forgotten memories. A little voice inside his head kept telling him that he had come home, but his heart told him that his home now was up above with his beloved queen.

  They passed under the town that surrounded the castle and out past its suburbs towards the end of the Great Sewer, where it poured its untreated effluent from a hole in a cliff high above Lake Tarnish. The mouth of the drain was blocked off with a heavy cast-iron grating put there by the King’s ancestors to keep the Dirt People from escaping. The secret door to the castle that Vessel had gone through was the only way in or out of the entire drainage system.10 Apart from occasional gas explosions in the drains and the faint glow that sometimes shone down from the lavatories, the grating was the only source of light in the whole sewer system. It was in the side tunnels near this grating that the Dirt People had made their homes.

  Vessel carried his mother through the honeycomb of narrow tunnels with an inherited skill that all Dirt People had from birth, only hitting her head on the low roof seventeen times. Even though it was a full century since he had gone to the world above, Vessel needed no guidance to his old family home. The route would be forever etched into his memory.

  ‘Where the hell have you been, Mother?’ said Vessel’s father as they entered. ‘It’s a new century.’

  You would think that Vessel’s father would be over the moon with excitement to be reunited with his only son after a hundred years, but he had lived in the drains all his life and he had never seen or even heard of the moon. Besides, being a hundred and fifty or so, he had reached the age where all he wanted to do was sit and stare at the wall and watch the slime and algae grow.11

  ‘Who are you?’ said Vessel’s dad.

  ‘Your son,’ Vessel replied. ‘Are those new shoes you’re wearing?’

  After his dinner had gone down, come back up and gone down again, Vessel asked around the tunnels to find the princess. At first people were suspicious of him, but they knew that once a Dirt Person, always a Dirt Person, and so they took him to where Nerlin and Mordonna were hiding.

  ‘Your royal highness, Princess Mordonna, I have been sent to speak with you by your mother, the great and glorious and wonderful and adorable Queen Scratchrot,’ he said.

  ‘Old man, I know you are a good and faithful servant, but you must tell my mother that we are in love and I shall never return,’ said Mordonna.

  ‘You are in love?’ Vessel asked. ‘Both of you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘With each other?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mordonna. ‘We are engaged to be married. Look.’

  She held out her left hand and on her finger was an enchanted ring, woven from threads of the finest gold. In its centre was a massive emerald surrounded by thirteen perfect diamonds.

  What neither the King nor anyone else in the world above knew was that the drains led off into tunnels with walls covered in veins of the purest gold, not just little nuggets and specks, but veins as thick as your finger than ran for hundreds of metres. The golden veins wrapped themselves around precious stones, including rubies, emeralds and diamonds as big as chickens. The Dirt People hadn’t the faintest idea how valuable all this stuff was. To them it just got in the way when they were trying to excavate a new room to live in.

  Having moved to the world above, Vessel knew that beneath the town lay more wealth than the King could ever dream of, even in his totally greediest dream. But he wasn’t about to tell anyone about it, not even his beloved queen. Mordonna was overwhelmed when she saw the treasure, but she too decided she would never tell her father. Nevertheless, she did fill her pockets with enough diamonds to keep them for the rest of their lives.

  ‘So, Vessel, you can tell my mother to tell my father I shall never return to the castle until he gives our love his blessing.’

  ‘Well, your wonderful mother, my divine Queen, sends you her blessing and says she will do all she can to help you,’ said Vessel. ‘But I fear, young mistress, that nowhere in Transylvania Waters will be safe for you to hide. Your father will never accept this liaison. He planned to sell you in marriage to Prince Nochyn of Battenberg for one hundred million gold sovereigns, and he has already spent the ten per cent deposit.’

  ‘I know,’ said Mordonna. ‘He’d sell my mother and my sister and me for nineteen pieces of silver. I’ve heard he even sold his aunt for a second-hand lawnmower. We will have to leave Transylvania Waters.’

  ‘But there is no way out of the tunnels,’ said Nerlin despondently. ‘We are doomed to a life of darkness and slime.’

  ‘Actually, there is a way out,’ said Vessel. ‘How do you think I got down here?’

  ‘I imagined that as you are such a devoted servant to my mother you had allowed her to flush you down a lavatory,’ said Mordonna.

  ‘No, no, young mistress,’ said Vessel, and told them about the secret door. ‘My grandfather showed it to me and that was how I left the drains in the first place.’

  ‘Can you take us to my mother?’ said Mordonna. ‘If anyone will know what to do, it will be her.’

  ‘Yes, my lady. As soon as the world is asleep, we will go to the Queen.’

  Queen Scratchrot may have been short-sighted, but she knew a hunk when she saw one, and as soon as she laid eye12 on Nerlin she was captivated.

  ‘I can see why you fell for him,’ she said to her daughter. ‘He’s absolutely gorgeous.’

  ‘Oh, mother,’ Mordonna cried, ‘what can we do? What is to become of us?’

  ‘You must leave Transylvania Waters,’ said the Queen. ‘And I shall leave with you.’

  ‘You would give up everything you have here, your majesty?’ said Nerlin.

  ‘I think you can call me Mummy now,’ the Queen giggled. She tried to flutter her eyelids at Nerlin, but o
ne of them fluttered out of the window and got attacked by a butterfly. ‘Anyway, what’s to give up? I’ve spent most of my life married to a red-faced, brainless, chinless tyrant. I know, I know, that’s the role of every queen … but it’s time for a change.’

  ‘You would leave Transylvania Waters and those who love you?’ Vessel sobbed, unable to hide his true feelings.

  The Queen patted her equery on the arm and whispered in his ear, ‘Only if you will go with me, my dear.’

  You would think that being married to a King would have its good points, such as wealth and status, but being the wife of King Quatorze had so many bad points – too many to list here – that Queen Scratchrot was very lonely. For years and years she had tried not to fall in love with her faithful equery, but his elegant dead-body-like good looks and sweet rotting-flesh smell made him irresistible. Now that her own daughter had found true love, the Queen decided she would deny her heart no more.

  Vessel fainted and dropped his tree again, which made Parsnip really cross as he had only just settled back into his nest.

  ‘Snip-Snip got head saw,’ he squawked. ‘Need go wet.’

  ‘What’s that bird talking about?’ said the Queen. ‘Need go wet? Does he want to go to the toilet?’

  ‘No. Need go wet,’ Parsnip repeated. ‘Snip-Snip got head saw, need go wetinary surgeon.’

  The Queen threw a bucket of ice-cold water over Vessel, and when he had regained consciousness they all went down into the drains, where they would be safe from the King and his spies.

  ‘There is no time to lose,’ said the Queen when they were safely back in Nerlin’s home in the sewers. ‘You must marry this very night. The King is more wild with rage than I have ever seen him. He has spent three hours pointing at a whippet and laughing. He has even painted its claws with red nail varnish and is calling it Margaret.’

  ‘But I don’t have a wedding dress,’ said Mordonna.

  ‘There’s no time for that,’ said the Queen. ‘I don’t think you realise just how incensed with heavy-duty, big-time furiosity your father is. He is melting jelly-babies with a blowtorch and setting fire to the one-thousandth piece of all his one-thousand piece jigsaw puzzles.’