Dragons at Crumbling Castle: And Other Stories Read online

  ‘What’s that?’ asked the King of Posra, while Gwimper stood before him waving his arms and pointing.

  ‘Trees!,

  gasped the astronomer.

  ‘Mountains!

  Animals!’

  ‘Hmm,’ said the king. ‘About how far away is it?’

  Gwimper went through his pockets until he found a piece of paper, covered with sums. ‘It’s heading towards Great Speck at one-sixty-fourth of a millimetre per second, and it will pass within two centimetres of us in thirty seconds,’ he said.

  A second was about as long as a day for the Speck people.

  At the same moment Winceparslie, another astronomer, was saying exactly the same thing to the Duke of Grabist.

  Now, Great Speck has been at peace for – oh, at least half an hour, but that is not to say that either country would be above pulling a fast one on the other if it got the chance.

  So both countries immediately set about finding ways of getting to the new speck without letting the other know.

  ‘But how?’ asked Gwimper. Since they were so small the people naturally floated, but the problem was to propel themselves across the two centimetres. He finally built a sort of covered-in rowing boat with two pairs of wings and a lot of ornamental carving.

  ‘What a splendid-looking craft!’ said the king, when it was brought to him. ‘I can see you will enjoy the trip.’

  There was a thoughtful silence.

  ‘Me?’ asked Gwimper.

  ‘But yes!’ said the king.

  ‘I thought we ought to kind of send some animals or something to find out if it’s safe,’ began Gwimper nervously.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll find out,’ said the king heartily, slapping him on the back.

  Gwimper walked miserably back to his observatory and peered up at the new speck. It was already bigger. What would happen if he missed, and got lost? He shuddered when he looked into the infinite immensity of the air, and saw the millions of dust motes up there.

  Meanwhile, the king’s servants dragged the flying machine up to a small hill overlooking the palace, and filled it full of provisions.

  Then they put a fence round it and charged people who wanted to come and look.

  The second of the Great Leap grew nearer . . .

  ‘Where’s Gwimper?’ cried the King of Posra as the second arrived. ‘I’ve got to pin a medal on him before he takes off (I don’t expect there’ll be a chance to do it when he comes back).’

  The crowds were all gathered around the astronomer’s flying machine, which was called the Anybody.

  But Gwimper was nowhere to be seen.fn1

  Then at last he appeared, looking very sheepish in an outsize flying helmet and goggles. The band immediately struck up the Posrian national anthem, ‘Three Cheers for Us’, and the king threw a huge tin medal round his neck like a hoopla hoop, where it hung sadly on a red ribbon.

  ‘Well, goodbye, old friend,’ said the king. ‘Remember to plant the Posrian flag on that new speck. We’ve put a gramophone record of the national anthem in the Anybody. I understand that Grabist is sending a flying machine too. I don’t need to tell you that you’ll land first, HINT, HINT, do I?’

  Gwimper climbed into the Anybody and started the engine.

  A runway had been built down the side of one hill and halfway up another one. The idea was that the Anybody would gather speed and whizz up the hill and away from Great Speck.

  Or it might crash.

  Suddenly the crowd rushed up and gave it a jolly good push. They didn’t care – anything for a laugh was their motto.

  Gwimper hung on tightly when the Anybody shot up the hill, felt his stomach turn over, and next moment the flying machine was flapping quietly through the air.

  I don’t quite believe it, he thought, looking out of the rear window. Great Speck was floating quite a way away. And someone was behind him, banging on the hatch. It turned out to be the king.

  ‘THEY DIDN’T WAIT TO PUSH TILL I GOT OFF!’

  he shrieked as Gwimper let him scramble in.

  ‘TAKE ME BACK!’

  ‘I’m not sure if I can,’ said Gwimper, who was secretly pleased. ‘Great Speck is rushing away from us. If you remember, I did tell you that I probably wouldn’t be able to get back.’

  ‘Did you? What did we say?’

  ‘You told me not to worry, your majesty.’

  The king looked out of the window. There was nothing but Nothing all around them. A few distant dust specks glittered, and far, far below was the hill they had taken off from.

  ‘Can’t we signal them?’ said the king.

  ‘Actually, I did work out a way to signal back to Great Speck,’ said Gwimper. He opened a cupboard and produced two flags, then opened the window and started semaphoring to the fast-disappearing speck of dust.

  ‘My assistant is tracking us through the telescope,’ he said, waving his arms. ‘I’ve just signalled: “The King (May He Live For Ever, etc., etc., etc.,) is alive and well and up here with me.” Now just pass me that little telescope, sire. That’s right. Let’s see now . . . Ah, yes. The reply is: “Get him down again, you crazy booby.” But I’m afraid I can’t.’

  ‘How far have we gone?’ asked the king.

  Gwimper twiddled some dials. ‘About seven-eighteenths of a centimetre,’ he said. ‘Not bad going.’

  The king took off his crown. ‘I was a bit of an adventurer in my youth,’ he said wistfully. ‘Can I be the first one to set foot on this new speck?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Gwimper generously.

  ‘Right, then. Tell me how the controls work.’

  Soon the king was flying the Anybody and enjoying himself tremendously.

  When the new speck appeared, Gwimper put the Anybody into orbit.

  ‘I think we’ll call it New Speck,’ said the king, as they looked down at it. ‘Look, there are some mountains and things. I wonder if anything lives down there?’

  The Anybody floated slowly down, and landed with a slight bump.

  ‘ME FIRST!’ shouted the king, and jumped out with the Posrian flag in his hand.

  Gwimper followed slowly, carrying a gramophone, and the two of them stood to attention while it played a rather scratchy record of the Posrian national anthem, ‘Three Cheers for Us’.

  ‘Right,’ said the king. ‘You take a photo of me and I’ll take one of you.’

  But Gwimper was busily breaking up bits of dust with a hammer, and looking at them through a microscope, so the king wandered off by himself.

  New Speck was quite rough, with boulders and large stones everywhere. Soon the king sat down on one and watched the astronomer collecting plants in a canvas bag. The rock stood up, shook him off, and ran away on four stumpy little legs.

  ‘Remarkable!’ said Gwimper.

  ‘OUCH!’ cried the king.

  ‘Look, there’s another of them.’ A rock had opened two little beady eyes, and sat looking at them.

  Then they heard, a long way off, a recorder being played rather badly. Gwimper and the king stared at each other, and as the music went on they began to realize what it was:

  ‘. . . perish her enemies,

  By Fire, the Sword, Drowning, etc.,

  Grabist the Brave! (Pom-te-pom!)’

  ‘It’s the clugging Grabistian national anthem,’ raged the king. ‘The wootling mousesherters have been and gone and got here!’

  ‘Ssssh!’ hissed Gwimper, peering over the rocks.

  There he saw, in a little valley, a flying machine very like the Anybody, with the name Everybody written on it. He recognized the Grabistian astronomer, Winceparslie, and standing next to him, winding up the gramophone again, was the Duke of Grabist.

  ‘The great ninnygremblers!’ cursed the king. ‘Landing on our speck of dust! Let’s put them to the sword! Perish their enemies, indeed!’

  He was shouting so loudly that soon the duke and the astronomer came bounding over the hill.

  ‘You!’ said everyone at once.
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  ‘Get off our New Speck!’ bellowed the duke and the king together. ‘This means war!’ they added.

  ‘Beastly trespasser!’

  ‘Claim-jumper!’

  Winceparslie and Gwimper wandered off, leaving the other two shouting and jumping up and down.

  ‘I’m worried about how we’re getting back,’ confided Winceparslie.

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘This doesn’t look like a very pleasant place,’ Winceparslie said, waving his hand at the rocks and the little stone creatures.

  ‘Very bleak, yes.’

  ‘I can’t help thinking their majesties are getting worked up about nothing.’

  ‘What are we going to do about it?’

  At that moment there was a rumbling noise, and a herd of the stone creatures came charging up the valley and trampled over the Grabistian machine.

  ‘Oh no! The Everybody is destroyed!’ Winceparslie whimpered.

  The creatures surged over the hill. There was another crash.

  ‘There goes the Anybody too,’ moaned Gwimper. ‘Now we’re both stuck.’

  They rushed over the hill to find the king and the duke building a wall, and shouting at each other over the top of it.

  ‘Our ships have been destroyed!’ shouted Gwimper.

  ‘Come over onto our side of the wall and stop consorting with the enemy,’ said the king.

  ‘WE CAN’T GET BACK HOME!’

  screamed Winceparslie at the top of his voice.

  There was a sudden silence. The king and the duke looked up at the distant specks of dust.

  ‘The Great Speck is three centimetres away and getting further with every micro-second,’ said Gwimper. ‘Even if they built another ship they could never rescue us and get back. We’re stuck. Those stone things have trodden on the ships, and there are no spare parts. Right. Now what are we going to do?’

  ‘Are you sure the ships are wrecked?’ asked the duke.

  ‘They’re ruined,’ said Winceparslie.

  ‘Then we’re stuck – and I don’t like this place,’ said the king.

  Gwimper looked at the remains of the Anybody and the Everybody and had an idea. ‘I wonder if we could take them both apart and make another one with the pieces,’ he said.

  So while the king and the duke sat by a small fire, the two astronomers started taking the flying machines apart. They used the hull, gas stove, steering wheel and seats from the Anybody, and the wings, motor and instruments from the Everybody.

  While they were working the king caught one of the stone creatures, but there didn’t seem to be any way of eating it. All that was left of the provisions in the ships was half a loaf of bread, some rather smelly cheese, and – no one knew why – a box of glacé cherries.fn2

  ‘Stop fighting over them, anyway,’ said Gwimper. ‘We think we’ve got a working ship.’

  They all climbed into the ship, which Winceparslie had named Somebody, and Gwimper pulled a few levers. The wings flapped and the ship rose.

  ‘Well, goodbye, New Speck,’ said the king. ‘I’m glad to leave, even though it belongs to me.’

  ‘To me, you mean!’ said the duke, waving his arms.

  The ship hovered over the speck of dust while the astronomers looked around for Great Speck.

  ‘That’s it!’ said Gwimper. ‘The green one, floating over there by the Table.’

  The Somebody speeded up, and it wasn’t long before it landed in the mountains that separated the country of Posra from Grabist. The king and the duke rushed out and away down the mountains in opposite directions.

  ‘Here we go again,’ said Winceparslie, as he helped unload the ship. ‘They’ll be arguing again tomorrow. Argue, argue, argue. You’d think they might have learned their lesson by now. They might have learned to co-operate.’

  ‘They might still,’ said Gwimper thoughtfully. ‘I’ve just noticed something. They were so eager to get home they each ran down the wrong side of the mountains. The duke has gone into Posra and the king has run down into Grabist!’

  ‘Gosh! What’ll happen to them?’

  ‘Oh, they might get put in prison for a little while, but I dare say the people will swap them. Though one duke’s as good as another, if you ask me.’

  And they went and had a cup of tea in Gwimper’s observatory, and played chess together until midnight.

  fn1 But he could be heard. For the toilets nearby had been occupied for a Very Long Time, and a lot of flushing noises were coming out of there.

  fn2It’s a rule of the known universe that every kitchen in the world anywhere has a box of glacé cherries hiding somewhere in it. No one knows why.

  HUNT THE SNORRY

  The Great Expedition to find the Snorry began to assemble at the harbour one misty morning.

  Colonel Vest, the famous little-gamefn1 hunter, told the men from the newspapers (who all had to get up at three in the morning to see him off): ‘No one is quite sure what the Snorry looks like, so we’ll be able to tell them when we find it. Some people say that it’s covered in blue fur; others say it tends to sneeze a lot. One man who thought he had seen it said it made a loud whistling noise and ran around in circles. Personally, I think it lives in trees and waggles its ears. Anyway, that’s what we’re going to find out.’

  The expedition certainly looked as if it was going to find out something. The dock was piled high with nets, various traps, ropes, self-inflatable canoes, pieces of old string and giant crates of tapioca, said by some to be the Snorry’s favourite food.

  Besides Colonel Vest there was a camera-man, a doctor, a botanist, a plumber, a scissor manufacturer, a knife-grinder, a man called Harris, who was very good at French verbs, and eighty-three other people. Whatever the Snorry turned out to be, there was bound to be someone in the party who could watch it, catch it, talk to it, or throw things at it. They set sail . . .

  The Snorry’s haunt was said to be in the giant tapioca forests of the Upper Amazon, and Colonel Vest led his party there.

  For days and days they trudged on, through rather murky swamps full of mosquitoes, and trackless jungles where they spent most of their time following one another round in circles. People they met said yes, this was just the sort of place you caught a Snorry in, and then they went away and laughed quietly to themselves.

  After a few weeks they had come right up to the place where the Amazon was no more than a little trickle, and the giant tapioca trees loomed all around them. Still there was no sign of a Snorry, and at least three people had disappeared. Probably the Snorry had got them.

  Harris had suffered a particularly nasty shock too when he trod on an alligator. Even worse, the alligator could not understand a single French verb when he tried to talk to it.

  ‘I give up,’ said Colonel Vest, sitting down on a log and sneezing. ‘Does anybody have any idea yet what the Snorry looks like?’

  No one had, and they all sat down and waited for something to happen. After weeks of traipsing through wet tapioca forests they all felt pretty miserable, and most of them were sneezing a lot.

  A small man who came wandering through the forest collecting fallen tapioca in a sack stopped to look at them.

  ‘I see you’ve all caught a Snorry,’ he said.

  ‘Have we?’ They all looked rather puzzled. ‘What is it then?’

  ‘Well,’ he replied with a smile. ‘We call it a Snorry – but I suppose you would call it a bad cold.’

  fn1Basically, anything smaller than himself, and preferably no taller than his knee.

  TALES OF THE CARPET PEOPLE

  To the Carpet people the Carpet was bigger than a forest, and was full of cities, towns, small villages, castles and all sorts of tiny animals – even cunning and hairy bandits in the really thick parts that weren’t swept often. Snibril, however, lived on the edge of the Carpet, and the Carpet was fraying. That was something everyone knew. In the village of the Fallen Matchstick, the Carpet-dwellers were already preparing to leave. The only question was – where
could they go?

  Snibril galloped back along the line of wagons that stood waiting in the main street of the village, loaded with chairs, stoves, beds, and anything else that people could tie onto them, which included almost everything.

  Snibril tied his bounder – a rather nervous animal that looked like a grasshopper – up at the post outside the council hall and went inside. The whole village was there waiting for him, but mostly waiting to meet the white-haired old Carpet-dweller who Snibril had brought with him, clinging desperately to the back of the bounder.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ said Snibril, ‘this is Pismire the hermit, who used to live in a cave at Underlay. He thinks he knows a way to help us.’

  ‘Don’t rush me, please,’ said Pismire. ‘My grandfather’s grandfather was Robinson the Wanderer, of whom you have all heard . . .?’ There was a question at the end of that statement, the kind of question that meant you jolly well ought to have heard of his grandfather’s grandfather.

  ‘Wasn’t he the one who was supposed to have walked across the Carpet?’ said Snibril.

  ‘Yes, right across and back again. Well, before he died, he told my grandfather about his journey. He said there was a land where no one lived, but which would be a perfect place for Carpet-dwellers.’

  ‘And where is that?’ asked Glurk the hunter.

  Pismire pointed. ‘Over there, gentlemen. Right on the other side of the Carpet.’

  ‘The other side of the Carpet! That would mean going right round the edge, wouldn’t it?’ said Glurk.

  ‘No, our supplies wouldn’t last that long,’ Snibril said. ‘We must go across the middle, like Pismire’s great-great-grandfather did. What he did, we can do. I know the Carpet is unexplored and full of dangers, and strange lands, and all the rest, but I don’t think we have any choice. The Carpet can and must be crossed.’

  An hour later Snibril rode his bounder up to the first cart in the line. Looking back, he could see the people climbing onto their wagons, and looking sadly around at the village they were leaving. Many of them were wondering what would lie ahead in the unknown parts of the Carpet.