The Dragons 3 (12 page)

I want my mummy,
he cried to himself as he realised that a life pumping the bellows for his father's furnace wasn't so bad after all.

‘There is a door over there,' said Mordred. ‘It's bolted from the outside, but maybe the five of us could smash it down and escape.'

‘Five?' said Princess Floridian. ‘Who else is here?'

‘My squire, Sergycal,' said Mordred. ‘He and his family before him have served my family, the Laclustres, for generations.'

‘Pleasing to meet you,' said Sergycal with a pretend-friendly voice that said to Ruthra,
pleasing to meet you, but I will be doing thinking about killing you if that would mean my master would be king.

‘I think our visitors in the turnip cellar will be safe enough for a while,' said Merlin, showing his pocket crystal ball to everyone again.

‘We'll deal with them later,' he added. ‘In the meantime, we have two dragons to bless with our great wisdom and incredibly forgiving yet firm justice.'

‘Yes, let's have them for dinner,' said King Arthur, who was basically a gentle soul but had developed a great addiction for roast dragon, which was a shame, really, because he was never going to get the chance to eat it again.

‘We prostrate ourselves before you,' said Spotty Oregano as he and Primrose lay at Merlin's feet. ‘And beg for your mercy.'

Everyone was gathered in the central courtyard of Camelot. It was hard to appear submissive when even lying down the two dragons towered over the wizard. They scratched at the earth and made two hollows that they rolled into, but they still looked huge.

‘How can we be sure that you are the only two dragons left in the world?' King Arthur asked.

‘Indeed,' said Morgan le Fey. ‘How can we be certain there aren't hundreds of you hiding away in Patagonia? That's the sort of place dragons go. Everyone knows that.'

‘There are no more of us,' said Primrose. ‘We are terminally endangered.'

‘You could lay eggs,' said Merlin.

‘At my age?' said Primrose.

‘Yes, and you know you could.'

‘Who's to say you haven't already done so?' said Morgan le Fey, who dreamt of the day that she and Sir Lancelot would get married and lay their own eggs.

‘We haven't.'

‘I'm afraid that it's just too great a risk,' said Merlin.

‘You would kill us?' said Primrose. ‘The last two living dragons on earth?'

On the other side of the courtyard Gorella, who was still buried in the remaining dead dragons that had not yet been salted for future feasts, turned over in her sleep. Several bodies slid off her and her snoring grew loud enough for everyone to hear.

‘The last three living dragons on earth?' Primrose continued.

‘No problem,' said Merlin, reaching for his sword.

‘Send for the cook,' Arthur called out. ‘Tell her to prepare the very big roasting pans.'

‘But are we not supposed to be the most intelligent life form on earth?' said Sir Lancelot. ‘Are we not blessed with forgiveness and compassion?'

‘Who told you that rubbish?' said Merlin.

‘Yeah,' said Morgan le Fey. ‘You are such a Fat Wench's Tabard.'

‘No, but, I mean …' Lancelot began.

‘All right, what do you suggest, good knight?'
said Merlin with an uncharacteristic giggle.

‘Why do you laugh, good wizard?' said Arthur.

‘I'm sorry, sire, but it always cracks me up when I say “good knight”,' said Merlin. ‘Sorry.'

‘Couldn't you do a spell and turn them into something else?'

‘I suppose so. What do you have in mind?'

Everyone had lots of suggestions, including:

• An enormous amount of bacon, though smoked dragon was very similar to bacon anyway.
  
• Kittens, as they are slightly less evil than dragons.
  
• Dead dragons.
  
• Accountants. Though, that's too cruel and besides, accountants had not been invented in the Days of Yore.
  
• Biscuits.
  
• A huge number of pairs of lovely, tan dragon-skin boots.
  
• More biscuits, preferably with chocolate involved.
  

‘Some of those are impossible and some sound delicious,' said Merlin. ‘However, if you want kindness,
I think I should turn them into themselves, only smaller.'

‘Lizards?' said King Arthur.

‘Exactly, but they have to be punished so I have invented a new species of lizard that everyone will laugh at. They are called Blue-tongued Lizards because they will have stubby little legs and silly fat tongues that will be bright blue so everyone will laugh at them,' said Merlin.

‘But …' Primrose began.

‘And, like all other reptiles, you will no longer have the power of speech,' Merlin added.

The two dragons were speechless.

As they crawled away into the not-very-long grass, their only consolation was that reptiles can't blush because Merlin was right. Everyone was pointing at their tongues and laughing.

It took them three weeks to reach the old valley of the dragons and once they got there it no longer felt like home. Spotty Oregano wanted to suggest they make their way to his homeland of Italy, where at least the sun shone a lot. Sure, his beloved mother and other relations had all died in the battle, but at least there
would be his old family cave that would still smell of them. Primrose wanted to suggest they try to reach Patagonia, but as they had lost the power of speech, neither of them said anything. Nor could they write each other messages in the sand, for, even though they had been transformed from dragons, they still had no thumbs that would allow them to hold writing sticks.

They could still think, but they were so distressed at their situation all they could think about were endless strings of swearwords. Spotty chased a cricket up into a tree and bit its head off, but it didn't make him feel any better. Primrose followed him up into the tree, but the branch wasn't strong enough and snapped. They landed on a small log that was floating down the stream that ran through the middle of Dragon Valley, into Lake Camelot, down into the River Stycks, out into the open sea and across several seas to the other side of the world until it bumped into Australia and got stuck on a beach at the edge of a forest. Here they lived happily ever after as lizards with silly blue tongues that kept getting laughed at.

‘And now for the other troublemakers,' said Merlin. ‘The obvious thing is to kill them, but, as we all know, this is the Days of Yore, not the Dark Ages. I feel we need to do something more creative than simply making them dead. Any ideas?'

Everyone had a lot of ideas, but when you looked at them closely, they all ended up with the rebels being dead. The only difference between the ideas was the way in which they were made dead.

‘Well, it's dark and wet and horrible in the Number Twelve Turnip Store and everyone is getting on everyone else's nerves,' said Merlin. ‘So there's no real hurry. We'll make the water a bit deeper, up to their chests, say, and sleep on it and see what we come up with in the morning. In the meantime, let's have a final enormous roast dragon banquet. We have to eat it all today or else it will go off.'

Everyone, especially King Arthur, thought that was a wonderful idea.

But wonderful ideas often have a flaw and this one was no exception.

It was about half-past midnight and everyone
was so full of roast dragon they could barely get out of their chairs, when the five prisoners managed to smash down the door to the Number Twelve Turnip Store. This was good and bad.

The good bit was they had escaped.

The bad bit was that the enormous amount of water that had been trapped in the room with them also escaped. It swept the five of them down a tunnel away from the castle, across the grass and threw them into the small black boat. The rush of water was enough to shoot the boat across the lake and towards the River Stycks. As they passed the island where Rampart had grown up, he stood up to call out to his parents and was thrown overboard. Luckily, the olms were so full of burnt dragon that had fallen into the lake that they were all fast asleep, allowing Rampart to stagger ashore and into the arms of his parents, who told him what a naughty boy he had been and took him home. They threw him a big welcome-back party, where he met a lovely big girl called Yongle, who he fell in love with and married and lived happily ever after with.

Meanwhile, the black boat was carried down the River Stycks and as it was, the water level
started dropping rapidly because a group of young, inexperienced beavers had completely wrecked the great Sargasso raft that had been holding it back. The boat moved faster and faster and was carried far, far out to sea, where it drifted for weeks with no sight of land. And even though Mordred, Ruthra and Princess Floridian had eaten Sergycal, they were still on the verge of starvation when they finally came to a dark, desolate, treeless island far, far away from anywhere.

Even many centuries later, as their descendants struggled to survive on a diet of seaweed, lichen and mud, and the world was covered from pole to pole in super-fast high-tech communications, this one remote corner remained all on its own and unknown even to Google maps.

‘No one messes with Merlin,' said the old wizard from his remote cave high in the Himalayas.

‘This is true,' said his oldest living friend, the Abominable Snowman.

And what of everyone else?

The rest of the Days of Yore passed fairly uneventfully.

Morgan le Fey and Sir Lancelot got married and so did King Arthur and Petaluna and between them they had fourteen-and-a-half children. Of course, as always, everything got more and more expensive and Arthur's children's children's children were forced to convert Camelot into fancy apartments for rich yuppies.

The Days of Yore ended and then came the Middle Ages, because most people were middle-aged. From then on, it was all downhill and downstream, and in no time at all – in galactic time, that is – the world was covered in traffic lights and petty little officials and idiots, who gave younger idiots homework and disgusting food full of fat and chemicals that ended up making mankind extinct.

This was not as bad as it seemed unless you were one of mankind, but hey, no one said being part of evolution was going to be easy.

So then cockroaches ruled the world for a while,
but at least all the trees grew back and all the pollution and radioactivity faded away.

And then crawly things crept from the sea and ate all the cockroaches and then got quite hairy and began to swing through the trees eating turnips, which were one of the few things that didn't die out but had evolved to grow on trees.

And for a while the world became paradise again.

Until the hairy things started talking.

Then, of course, it was only a matter of time until the talking turned into shouting, and evolution – which wasn't very clever – made some new dragons and wizards and humans and they all ended up trying to kill each other.

Again.