Let Sleeping Sea-Monsters Lie (2 page)

“Where is my little girl?” wailed the Queen, and:

“Where is Her Royal Highness?” yelled the servants.

Actually, the servants weren’t at all sorry that the Princess had gone because she’d been a very naughty child. She’d begun as one of those babies that turn purple from
screaming and kick people in the stomach, and gone on to be the sort of little girl who yells with temper if she’s asked to put on a pair of plain knickers instead of lace ones. Later she was
faddy about her food and snobby with the children who came to play with her and rude to the servants. “Princess Toffee-Nose” they called her because that’s just what she was.

But when it was discovered that the Princess had not only vanished, but been eaten by a worm, something had to be done. So the King sent out a proclamation to say that anyone could have half the
treasure in his kingdom if he would go out and slay the loathsome monster who had devoured his daughter. He would also have offered his daughter’s hand in marriage but of course he
couldn’t because she had been eaten by a worm.

Then he waited for lots of princes to come flocking to the palace, but nobody came at all. This was because the Princess had been rude to so many people that no one cared what happened to her
and nobody wanted to risk being killed.

But at last they found a tired old Knight who said, “All right, I’ll see what I can do.”

So the Knight rode off on his rather battered old horse in his rather rusty armour to the field where the worm was still lying peacefully with his head by the gate and his body
coiled round and round the field. And because the Knight was a very fearless knight he began at once to chop pieces off the worm, starting at the tail. He chopped off one piece and then another and
another. And every time he chopped off a piece he threw it as far away as he could, over a hedge or into a duck pond, because he thought that if he did this the worm would not be able to join
itself up again. He didn’t know, you see, that he was dealing with a very clever worm.

At first the worm did not notice what was happening. This was because worms like that are so long that it takes ages for messages to get from one end to the other.

But in the end it did notice and then a long and bloody fight began. The worm reared round and snapped at the Knight with its teeth and blew at him with its poisonous breath and roared horribly.
But the Knight, though old, was nimble and the Knight’s armour, though rusty, was poison-proof and he just went on leaping out of the worm’s way and chopping more and more bits off the
worm and throwing them away so that the poor worm got weaker and weaker and weaker.

The Knight had got almost to the head end of the worm when something odd happened. He had just chopped off a rather fat and bulgy bit and was picking it up to throw it over the gate when there
was a slithering, slurching kind of noise and out on to the grass fell the Princess!

She was in an awful mess! You know what the insides of squashed animals are like. Little bits of mince stuck to her all over. She was wet; she was crumpled; and she was bald, too, because the
Knight had chopped so close to her head that he had cut off her hair. What’s more, she was covered in bright red spots because inside the worm she had got the measles.