Floods 3 (3 page)

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 eye
¹²
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 one 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.'

‘There's no such word as furiosity,' said Mordonna.

‘There is now. I am the Queen so I'm allowed to invent words. Nerlin, my dear boy, go and fetch a marriage celebrant. There's no time to lose.'

‘My father can perform the ceremony,' said Nerlin.

‘Really?' said the Queen.

‘Yes,' said Nerlin's father. ‘I have passed through the sacred fire of the Curry Sewer. This gives me powers of authority. I have fought and
beaten the Great Greasetrap Alligator. This gives me the status of commander. I have swum through the Slough of Diced Carrots and emerged unscathed. This gives me –'

‘Yes, yes, fine,' snapped the Queen.

‘And I have my own pen,' Nerlin's father concluded.

‘OK, OK, get on with it,' said the Queen. ‘We have to go.'

‘Dearly beloved,' Nerlin's father began, ‘we are gathered –'

‘Faster!' snapped the Queen.

‘Do you, Mordonna, Princess of Transylvania Waters, take –'

‘Of course she does, and so does he! Get on with it!'

‘OK, I now pronounce you man and wife. You may kiss the bridge.'

‘Don't you mean kiss the bride?' said the Queen.

‘Not until he's kissed the brown bridge over the Great Sewer of Quagmire,' said Nerlin's father.
‘It completes the ceremony. We all have to do it when we get married, and I can tell you it tastes dreadful.'

The wedding party walked to the bridge. Nerlin closed his eyes, took a deep breath and kissed the disgusting bridge. When it kissed him back he almost fainted.

‘I must take you back to the castle, my lady,' said Vessel to the Queen, ‘before the King notices you are missing.'

‘Notices I'm missing?' laughed the Queen. ‘You must be joking. If I vanished altogether he probably wouldn't notice for six months until it was time for his next bath and he wanted me to scrub his back.'
¹³

‘Have you located my daughter and the sewer rat who kidnapped her?' roared the King.

‘I have, sire,' the Chancellor lied.

Baines LeClaude had been Chancellor for forty years. He had learnt after two minutes in the job to tell the King whatever he wanted to hear, whether it was true or not. When the information wasn't true the Chancellor would find someone lower down the line to blame. This way the Chancellor had managed to keep his head joined onto his body while many of his servants hadn't.

‘You know exactly where they are then?' said the King.

‘I do, sire.'

‘And you have a plan to bring my beloved daughter safely back to me and kill her abductor in a really horrible, slow, painful and loud way?'

‘It is in hand, sire,' the Chancellor lied, seeing a horrible brick wall appear inside his head with no door in it to escape through.

‘You have two hours,' said the King. ‘Oh, and one more thing before you go.'

‘Yes, oh exalted one?' grovelled the Chancellor as he backed away towards the door.

‘You have just told me your fifteen thousand, seven hundred and fifty-third lie since you became Chancellor. Each time you have managed to squirm out of blame by sacrificing some poor innocent idiot. Now, whilst I always enjoy beheading innocent idiots, I'm really looking forward to seeing how you get out of this one.'

‘But sire …' the Chancellor began.

‘Shut up,' said the King. ‘It's simple. Princess Mordonna standing here before me safe and sound in two hours equals Chancellor's body and head
in the same room together. Princess Mordonna not standing here in two hours equals Chancellor's body and Chancellor's head in buckets on their way to the Export Burger Factory.'

‘I … I … I …'

‘That's all. Now off you go and fetch my darling little Princess,' said the King. ‘And on your way out, send in my secretary. We need to arrange for Prince Nochyn to come so we can marry them off before she tries anything like this again.'

‘I'm a dead man,' the Chancellor cried to his wife.

‘If I had a gold sovereign for every time I've heard you say that,' said his wife, ‘I'd be really rich.'

‘This time it's true,' the Chancellor said. He told his wife about Mordonna.

‘In that case, yes, you're absolutely right,' said his wife. ‘You
are
a dead man. Oh well, I suppose I'd better start looking for a new husband. Where's the evening paper?'

‘
What!
' the Chancellor cried. ‘Is that all you can say?'

‘No, of course not,' said his wife. ‘Before you go, don't forget to give me your bank books and the combination to your safe.'

The Chancellor fell on the ground and curled up into a little ball. His wife, who had been vacuuming the floor when he had come home with his news, was not completely heartless and decided to clean around him rather than make him move. His children were not so considerate and complained that they couldn't see the TV properly with him lying there.

‘I suppose I might just as well kill myself now then,' sobbed the Chancellor.

‘Yeuww, Dad, gross!' said his eldest daughter.

‘Yes, too much information, Dad,' said the middle sister.

‘Yeah, Dad, show some consideration. We've had a hard day at school,' said the youngest daughter. ‘Go out and do it in the garden.'

Two hours later the Chancellor was being converted into a carton of Export Burgers on its way to western Europe, and the King summoned his new chancellor to the throne room.

‘I have a new plan,' he told the Chancellor. ‘I want you to issue a Royal Proclamation.'

‘Yes, sire,' said the new Chancellor.

‘Everyone in the land is to fry six big onions and boil ten brussels sprouts
¹⁴
and eat them with a can of baked beans. Then at midnight, everyone must go to the lavatory. At fifteen minutes past midnight, I will drop a lighted firework down the drains.'

‘Brilliant plan, oh great and wise and seriously, totally clever King of the world,' said the new Chancellor.

‘Yes, it is, isn't it?' said the King, ‘That should flush them out!'

‘Oh, good one, sire,' laughed the Chancellor. ‘Only someone as wise as yourself could have come
up with such a clever plan and then been witty enough to make a joke about it.'

‘Joke? What joke?' said the King.

‘I will organise the decree,' said the Chancellor, hurrying away before the King realised that the explosion would probably kill everyone in the drains, including Mordonna.

‘And I will go and tell the Queen about my brilliant plan,' said the King. ‘She'll be so happy to get our daughter back.'

‘I have a brilliant plan,' said the King, bursting into Queen Scratchrot's bedroom. ‘I know I have fifty brilliant plans every day, but this is my best one ever. Our poor kidnapped daughter will be back here within the hour and Prince Nochyn will be here tomorrow for the happiest day of their lives.'

The Queen tried to push the bag she had been
packing under her bed, but the King was so excited he didn't even notice. He was so full of himself, he wasn't even aware that the Queen was wearing her riding boots or that Vessel was carrying a rucksack full of sandwiches and stay-fresh biscuits.

‘She hasn't been kidnapped. I have spoken … er, I have
heard
they are in love,' said the Queen. ‘She's going to marry this man.'

‘I absolutely forbid it,' said the King. ‘And if he so much as kisses her little finger, I will have him turned into a wood louse.'

‘If you do the slightest bad thing to that lovely boy … I mean, I hear he's a lovely boy … or I, er, imagine he is or our daughter wouldn't have chosen him,' said the Queen, ‘I will turn you into a one-legged rat with extra scabies and pus-filled ears.'

‘Really?' said the King, intrigued.

‘You wouldn't like it,' the Queen warned. ‘Your ears will be filled with boiling hot bubbling pus and the only sounds you will hear will be the ten worst Eurovision Song Contest songs of all time.'

The King looked grumpy but said nothing. He knew the Queen had far more magic than he did. Slamming the door behind him, he went up to his Sulking Tower and made himself feel better by trapping hermit crabs inside their shells with waterproof sticky tape.

The Queen knew that no matter how much she threatened him and no matter what magic she did, the King would never agree to the marriage. She couldn't tell him that the lovers were already married. Even if the King didn't kill Nerlin himself, he had plenty of villains languishing in his gaols who would do it for a pair of well-fitting tights and a royal pardon. There were even desperate characters who would do it for a pair of badly fitting tights and a jar of muddy water.

There were others, of course, who thought Mordonna and Nerlin should be together – people who thought love was more important than snobbery, social standing, gold sovereigns and designer tights – but most of them kept quiet.
They had no desire to learn to water-ski or become export burgers.

‘Go and warn the Dirt People,' the Queen instructed Vessel. ‘Tell them to come up into the castle cellars until the explosions have finished, and tell my daughter and her lovely husband that we must flee immediately. I will meet you all by
the Friday the Thirteenth Kitchen dustbins in one hour.'
¹⁵

‘I am your Vessel, oh great wonderfulness,' said Vessel with stars and several small planets in his eyes, which made him forget there is no such word as wonderfulness. He made his way back to the drains, his heart overflowing with happiness.

The Queen packed the last few royal things into her bag and slipped down the back stairs to the stables to fetch her trusted donkey, George-The-Donkey-Formerly-Known-As-Prince-Kevin-Of-Assisi. George had seen better days. He'd seen worse days, too, and when the Queen told him they were going to flee the country, he knew that this was probably going to be one of the worse days.

‘I don't like it,' he said.
¹⁶

‘You don't like anything,' said the Queen.

‘That's not true,' said George.

‘OK then,' said the Queen. ‘Name ten things you like.'

‘Grass,' said George. ‘I like grass.'

‘Yes? And …'

‘I'm thinking,' said George. ‘Did I say grass?'

‘Yes. Now stop complaining and come with me.'

The Queen put a saddle on the donkey and led him over to the kitchen dustbins. Midnight came and the air was filled with the sound of hundreds of toilets being flushed. As the clock ticked towards a quarter past, the kitchen door opened and Nerlin, Mordonna and Vessel appeared.

‘Everyone is hiding in the cellars,' said Vessel. ‘They'll go back after the explos–'

The ground shook with an incredible boom, cutting off the rest of his words. The drains were deserted as the explosion ricocheted off the walls, flinging some very unpleasant substances all over the place. Above the ground, twenty-seven people who hadn't managed to ‘go' despite the baked beans,
and had still been sitting on their toilets when the explosion had detonated, all managed to ‘go' very suddenly.