Aurelius and I (12 page)

By the time my bag was empty the pile of acorns had more than doubled in size. In the mean time, Ophelia had left my shirt pocket and managed to convince the guards that I had not come to the village to extort such valuable treasures as broken glass and discarded drinks cans through the use of a hostage situation, a claim they became more and more willing to believe as the pile of acorns mounted.

“All sorted,” said Ophelia. “You are no longer to be slaughtered.”

“Well that is a relief,
Princess
Ophelia,” I replied sarcastically.

“I was going to tell you...”

“I don’t care whether you’re a Princess, an Empress, or The Banana God of Bingo-Jingo,” I interrupted, “I just want to know where my dog is. What do you think would be the best way to find out if anybody’s seen him? I mean, I can’t just go around asking everybody individually, that would take ages – and besides, I think half of them would be too scared to talk to me.”

“That’s true,” she agreed. “Most fairies are scared of everything, not me though, I’m not scared of anything. Just like my dad.”

“The king? Because he would probably be a good person to ask the other fairies if they’ve seen my, er, carpet dragon”

“No, my father is missing – both my parents are. My grandfather is the king.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling suddenly guilty for my rudeness toward her.

“Don’t be. He was a warrior, like me, and he died in battle just as all warriors should, it is the honourable thing to do. Ah, here comes my grandfather now, he’ll know how to find your dragon.”

I heard Ophelia’s grandfather’s arrival before I saw it. The gong was sounded once again, though in a different pattern to last time, and the soldiers and some other strangely dressed, older looking fairies, formed a corridor through which the oldest fairy of all hobbled with the aid of a twig. He had a white beard so long it dragged along the floor as he walked and he wore a long, regal looking cape which had been formed of old feathers. Upon his head rested an upturned beer-bottle cap which served as a crown for a crown.

“You are late, Ophelia,” he said in a voice full of wisdom, managing to sound firm yet calm.

“I know, I know, but I have returned with a great many acorns for the offering.”

“The size of the offering matters not if it is not here when it is needed, you know that, child.”

“I know, grandfather, I’m sorry. It will not happen again.”

“See that it doesn’t. Now, who is your friend?”

“He is a human, my lord,” the one called Brutus interrupted. “She has brought a human to our village, she has endangered us all.”

“Shut up, bicep-brain,” Ophelia yelled back, “Charlie’s here to save us, not hurt us.”

“SILENCE!” demanded the king. “Brutus is right, Ophelia; you can’t just go bringing any old creature you meet back to our home, it’s just too dangerous. Now, Charlie is it?” the little man asked, turning to face me for the first time, I nodded in confirmation, “I thank you kindly for your contribution to our offering, but I’m afraid that now I must ask you to leave, it is for your own safety as much as ours, you understand.”

“No I don’t understand,” I snapped. “I have no idea what’s going on, and more to the point, I don’t care. That girl, or fairy, or princess, or whatever she is, said she thought someone here might have seen my dog, and I’m not leaving until I find out whether they have or not.”

“But you must leave,” demanded the king, his air of calm threatening to dissipate. It is not safe here, the dragnor will be here at any moment.”

I sighed.

“For the last time, I don’t care! All I care about is finding Baskerville. Now, will you ask everyone, or should I?”

“You don’t understand,” the fairy king pleaded, “if the dragnor finds a human in our lands there will be hell to pay, for all of us, including you.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “What
is
a dragnor anyway?”

“Dragnors are terrible, evil beasts, who leave a trail of destruction wherever they go. They walk like men, but have the faces of lizards and the horns of the devil. Their skin is the purple of venom and they can destroy your home with a simple flick of just one of their two long, forked tails if it takes their fancy to do so. They have the strength of demons, and, worst of all, they breathe fire like dragons. They are a truly formidable foe, the best advice I can give you for surviving against them is to run - run now before it is too late!”

“I’m not scared,” I lied.

“Then you are a fool,” the tiny king replied angrily. “Now, come my subjects, into your homes, quickly.”

“But what about my dog? Hey, come back here.”

The fairies ignored me as they beat their wings frantically in a race to reach the sanctuary of their homes. Even Ophelia, who had been so bullishly cocky up until that point, had become suddenly concerned for her life. I considered yelling after them again, or simply picking each one up and making them listen to me. It was just at this moment that my thoughts were interrupted. Something wasn’t right. All the lights had been turned off and the village lay silent, but it wasn’t the sudden darkness that had aroused my senses. I stared at the village before me not knowing what was different about it, and then suddenly it hit me; the entire village was shaking, and it was shaking to a particular rhythm – the rhythm of footsteps.

With my nerves turned to jelly, I awaited my fate. The village continued to shake more and more vigorously around me. The dragnor was getting closer.

I stood their, trying to decide whether to run or hide, not knowing where to go to do either. From the lightness of the ground’s movement, I guessed I had a little while to decide yet, since this great, fearsome creature was clearly still some distance away.

Then, out of nowhere, the shaking stopped.

Panic gripped me. My eyes searched all around, probing the forest for an indication of which direction the mighty dragnor was coming from so that I could run in the other. But I could see no sign of the great beast.

My thoughts were broken by an unseen voice.

“Who dares to stand in the way of Grahndel the Destroyer?” Came the deep, yet quietly spoken threat.

I spun around again, desperately hunting for the terrible creature whose mercy I found myself at.

“Answer me!”

I was really frightened now, I didn’t want to annoy the savage killing machine, but at the same time I didn’t want to alert him to my position, and I couldn’t be sure that his question was addressed to me. Desperately, I took a final glance around the forest, trying to pick a direction in which to run.

It was only then that I saw him.

There before me, standing no more than two feet away, was a dragnor.

He looked exactly the way that the king had described; human body, lizard’s head, purple skin, yellow eyes, two tails, three horns, a truly deadly menace to the average fairy.

But I was no fairy.

What it had escaped the fairy king’s mind to mention, was the fact that, though this almighty beast certainly did tower ominously over the village, the village was very small; as was the dragnor. To my great relief, this supposed great threat to my existence was no taller than my knee.

“I said answer me!” it wailed again, in a voice that made much more sense coming from something little bigger than your average garden gnome. I tried to answer, but shock and relief had combined to rush over me like a tidal wave of emotion and I all I could do in reply to the question was to burst into laughter.

This was clearly not the most diplomatic course of action I could have taken, and the tiny beast was, needless to say, greatly angered by my impertinence. A fact he made me aware of by expelling a surprisingly menacing roar which briefly provided him with more credibility than a leprechaun in the frightening magical creature stakes. Certainly I could see why the fairies had feared him so.

“FEEL MY WRATH!” the dragnor bellowed, before taking the deepest of deep breaths and puffing out its little chest to twice it natural size. It was clearly ready to attack, and yet it look so ridiculous standing before me, dwarfed by my shadow, and wearing only a pair of tight underpants, that I could not bring myself to be anything but amused.

The feeling of amusement quickly dispersed as the first fireball hit my shin.

“Ouch!” I cried. The fireball had been no bigger than a peanut, but it had hurt nonetheless, in the way that dripping even a small amount of hot tea onto one’s bare skin can be very painful.

“Ow! Quit it would you?!” I yelled as a second fireball was launched from the creature’s mouth and grazed the soft skin on the back of my knee.

“Ha ha ha!” the dragnor laughed monstrously at the sight of my pain. “Now you know the fate of those who dare to mock the power of
The Destroyer
!”

I hopped nimbly out of the way of a third fireball which promptly set alight some dry leaves at the base of the fairy village. I quickly stamped the blaze out, but I knew I was going to have to do something about this irritating little pest, and fast, or the whole village would go up in flames (either that or I would eventually die from having steadily received seven-hundred-and-forty-two-thousand 0.01 degree burns over a three week period). I considered simply kicking the annoying little turd in the face, but I thought that might kill him, which, although tempting, seemed to be taking things a little far – and, in any case, such a manoeuvre would inevitably involve leaving myself open to fireball attacks in the more sensitive areas of my person hidden in my shorts, not a thought I particularly treasured.

I span around in desperation, hopping from one foot to the other to avoid fireballs, looking for some way to defeat this ridiculous bully without actually harming him. It was then, as I looked over the dragnor’s shoulder at the fairy village, that I had an idea.

Ripping the super-sized fast-food drinks container that contained the tiny town’s water supply from its carefully constructed drinking-straw tower, I quickly hurled its entire contents over the fire-breathing dragnor. The effect was instantaneous, completely drenching him, the force of the water knocking him to the floor.

As Grahndel sat, shocked, in the centre of large puddle of my making, I waited for his response. Would he come back even angrier, and persist with his attempts to barbecue everything in the vicinity? Or would he finally realise he was beaten and turn and flee. When his eventual reaction came it was more surprising than either of those things; the little monster began to cry.

“Why did you have to be so mean?” he wept, in a voice that made me feel guilty for having dared to defend myself.

“I could ask the same of you,” I replied, my voice defensively becoming louder as I spoke. “Why do you want to hurt me and all these little fairies, what have they ever done to you?”

“I’m sorry!” wailed the dragnor. “I never wanted to hurt anybody.”

Lights were coming on and windows were being opened all around us now as the village’s inhabitants, sensing the danger had passed, sought to eavesdrop on what was being said.

“Well, if you never wanted to hurt anybody, why did you threaten to eat us is if we didn’t feed you enough acorns?” The voice came from behind me, and I turned to see Ophelia striding angrily towards the dragnor, her inherent bravery having returned to her now that the beast had been felled.

“It was all a lie,” the dragnor continued, struggling to control his tears well enough to remain coherent. “I just wanted the acorns, I would never have eaten a fairy really... I’m a vegetarian.”

Sitting their, little more than a quarter of my size, soaking wet and crying, I couldn’t help but feel a little guilty that it was I who had reduced the little fellow to his current state, even if he had deserved it. Princess Ophelia, however, clearly harboured no such remorse, and as the crowd of angry-faced fairies began to surround the soaking wet dragnor, it quickly became clear that Grahndel was going to find sympathy hard to come by.

“Don’t get too close,” came a warning from the crowd.

“He’s vegetarian, he’s no threat to us, look at him, he’s crying like a baby,” another voice answered.

“What should we do with him?”

“Kill him!”

“Yeah, let’s kill him!”

“Burn him alive!”

The fairies’ fear was rapidly turning to indignation, accompanied by an unhealthy thirst for vengeance. Within no time at all, the tiny inhabitants of the village, who had seemed so meek on my arrival, had transformed themselves into an angry mob. Needless to say this had not gone unnoticed by the dragnor, who had stopped looking sorry for himself and now and instead looked very, very frightened.

“Please sir, please, you’ve got to help me,” he begged me. “I’m sorry if I singed you a little earlier, I didn’t mean anything by it. I was just fooling around. Please sir, please don’t let them kill me.”

“Nobody is getting killed,” came a firm voice from out of the crowd. The king made his way slowly through the sea of fairies, which parted mystically at the sound of his voice. “Well, not yet anyway.”

The king’s small army of bodyguards promptly arrested the dragnor at their leader’s request, and throwing him into a fairy prison cell (they really had thought of everything), and though it had been fashioned from scraps of discarded chicken wire and twigs and was barely large enough to hold it’s prisoner, the broken dragnor made no move to escape.