Authors: Colin Thompson
Excalibur (15 page)
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As the boat drift ed towards the river's entrance, Rampart threw the branches that had been hiding them overboard. The water began to move faster now as it was channelled into the narrow opening. The boat picked up speed then stopped dead. The water frothed and raced past them, but they stayed still as if stuck fast to something.
âWhat's happening?' said Princess Floridian.
âDon't worry, it's the River Sprites,' said Rampart.
âRiver Sprites?' said Brassica. âWill they harm us?'
âNo, they are my friends. I have been this way with my father many times before,' said Rampart.
The water round the boat fell as flat as glass while a few metres away it still raced like a mad water-dragon. Three pale figures rose from the clear water, one in front of the boat and one at each side.
âWho wishes to pass?' said the first sprite.
âIt's me, Rampart.'
âOh, our young turnip friend,' said the sprite. âAnd who are your companions?'
âJust two of my good friends,' said Rampart. âYou wouldn't know them.'
The largest of the three River Sprites drift ed closer and peered at them.
âThe girl we do not know,' said the creature and, looking at Brassica, added, âbut your majesty, though we have never met, it is an honour to let you pass.'
The three ghostly figures slipped back beneath the water and the boat drift ed into the river.
âWhat did he mean by “your majesty”?' said Rampart.
Brassica was about to say that he reckoned they still thought he was the King and hadn't heard about him being deposed, but the air, which had been calm and quiet, was suddenly filled with a deafening roar.
âWhat on earth is that?' said Princess Floridian.
âI haven't the faintest idea,' said Rampart. âI have been this way many times, but I have never heard it before.'
Far back across the lake in his tall tower, Merlin put his powerful wand back in its lead-lined cupboard and went back downstairs for a cup of tea and a turnip biscuit.
âIf I didn't know better,' Rampart continued as their boat rapidly began to pick up speed, âI would say
it was the sound of the greatest waterfall the world has ever seen, 'cept there aren't any waterfalls anywhere on this river.'
They rounded the bend and raced into a cloud of ferocious, wild, angry, savage, merciless water and there, a hundred metres ahead of them, was the greatest waterfall the world had ever seen.
âThat wasn't there last time I came down here,' Rampart said.
âOh my @@#***!!!ing ##**,' screamed Brassica, but no one could hear him, which was probably good considering how rude it was.
âHEEEEELLLPPPPPPPâ¦' screamed Princess Floridian.
The boat began racing very, very fast.
And then, as suddenly as the racing had begun, it stopped and they were floating in a soft white cloud.
âThank goodness,' said Rampart.
True, they had stopped being thrown around by the angry water.
True, they were now floating in a soft white cloud.
But it was also true that the floating was more of a falling downwards very, very quicklyâ¦
70
âSo did you get one?' said Sir Lancelot.
âGet one what?' said his squire Grimethorpe.
âA Troth,' said the knight. âI would fain pledge one to my beloved Morgan le Fey ere this night is out.'
âI thought I explained about all that, my lord.'
âOh yes, so you did.'
âI did get flowers and choccies, though, my lord,' said Grimethorpe. âAnd if I am not mistaken, my lady waits without.'
âWithout? Without what?' said Sir Lancelot.
âWithout flowers and choccies.'
âAh, right, excellent. Hand them over and I shall go without this instant and get plighting.'
Which roughly translated means that just after the three runaways fell over the waterfall, Sir Lancelot and Morgan le Fey got engaged to be married.
Good result all round, really.
1
See
The Dragons 1: Camelot.
2
Turnip gouging is an ancient occupation that has largely become obsolete due to modern hygienic farming methods. It involved digging all the maggots out of turnips with a special tool. The only good thing about the job was that the gouger was allowed to eat the maggots, which were a rich source of protein.
3
His meagre belongings consisted of the old sack and a collection of toenails in a sow's ear he had made out of a silk purse.
4
Of course, this was many centuries before television, when great events can be seen all round the world while they are actually happening. Semaphore is a very slow but effective way of sending messages a long way. A person holds a flag in each hand and the angle they hold the flags symbolises a different letter of the alphabet.
5
I.e. the ones most likely to try to invade Camelot.
6
Dave's parents and doctor had been very shy too and had all kept their eyes shut and not realised that Dave was a girl.
7
Interestingly, Dave's scribbles were very lovely to look at and within five years were selling for up to ten groats a dozen at Avalon's only art gallery â SoThyBuys.
8
Since he had been told he was the true King, Arthur had actually grown two millimetres taller, but then so had every other child of his age.
9
Not only was King Arthur unprepared, but so are you because you don't know about Princess Floridian either. It's all right, though, because she will be along shortly.
10
A system still widely used today.
11
There are still three families of English aristocrats who claim their three potatoes a week to this very day.
12
Malmsley Cohen was my great-grandfather and I've been told he was the family clown.
13
It was the law in those days that Court Jesters were allowed to have as many as seven wives, though none of them were allowed to be sheep. This had bothered Malmsley when he was poor, as the only living thing who ever smiled at him was actually a rather attractive sheep called Felicity. When he became rich a lot of people who were not sheep started smiling at him. Yet more evidence that money can buy you love and happiness.
14
Where the fourth donkey ended up will be revealed later, but be reassured it was not eaten by an olm. All four actually ended up in the same place, but the fourth one took a short cut and got there before the others.
15
Wending was extremely popular in the Days of Yore. Now we have GPS no one âwends' anymore. We simply âgo'.
16
He had trained her well, so like a good homing pigeon Sir Bedivere's mother kept finding her way home again.
17
Which is like chicken pox except the spots are bright purple and much, much smaller and the patient is really embarrassed because they look so silly.
18
See the previous footnote.
19
Like whooping cough, but with a lot more, and I mean a lot more, mess.
20
This was not that unusual in those days. Most fine ladies carried a bucket or two of rosewater and a sack full of hankies wherever they went. This was because the Days of Yore were very smelly. I imagine that you are very surprised to learn that biological Spray n' Wipe had not been invented in those days â it was, in fact, invented by William Shakespeare in 1478 at half past three. So fine ladies walked around with rosewater-soaked hankies stuff ed up their noses to avoid the terrible stinks that assaulted them from every side.
21
Actually, three of them sat on a rock. Scraper walked into the lake because they hadn't been able to remove his bucket.
22
See
The Dragons 1: Camelot.
23
Roads had only been invented ten years before, so there weren't very many of them. In fact there were a lot of people who thought they were a bad idea and would never catch on.
24
Which is a real town in Scotland and one of the few not to have a place in Australia named after it.
25
You may have noticed that a lot of people keep fainting in this book. This is because fainting was a new invention in the Days of Yore and looked upon as quite a novelty, which made it very popular and fashionable. It was a huge improvement over the Dark Ages, when throwing up had been all the rage.
26
Highwayman Positioning System.
27
The victims that is, not the vampires. All they got was red teeth and a bit of indigestion.
28
If they finally did get permission to suck blood, there was a very strict formula on how much blood they could take. It was worked out based on the weight of their victim. It was this that had actually led to the invention of diets.
29
Not many people realise that hippies were actually invented centuries ago. Of course a lot of hippies know this as they are still wearing the same clothes and dream of those simple olden days before shampoo and washing machines were invented.
30
One thing she didn't know was that fainting was going out of fashion.
31
Sarcasm is rare in dragons, but Bloat was particularly good at it.
32
This grease comes from a very remote mountain in Patagonia where it oozes from a crevice on a cliff top. Western chemists managed to synthesise this grease in 1922. They called it Vegemite and then lied to everyone about how it was made from yeast. The truth is so gross even I can't bring myself to tell you what it's really made of.
33
Princess Floridian: staggeringly beautiful, super-intelligent, fluent in five languages, great cook, but completely terrible at maths.
34
In case you think cardboard didn't exist in the Days of Yore, it was actually invented by the ancient Chinese, who treated it as a food item â a tradition still carried on by many fast food shops to this day. For example, next time you buy a takeaway burger try throwing the burger away and eating the cardboard box. You will be pleasantly surprised.
35
The only trouble was that they tasted like footballs too, but that was nowhere near as bad as the taste of the fish from the river. We will not go there, but if you ever eat one of these fish, you will be going everywhere, very, very, frequently.
36
See
The Dragons 1: Camelot.
37
Unlike nowadays when people are very superstitious and gullible.
38
Actually, one other person had been there: Brat, the fake King Arthur. He had gone there to use the toilet, but he had only gone into the very first bit of it and had kept his eyes shut.
39
Oh My Wizard.
40
See
The Dragons 1: Camelot.
41
It was actually an old vampire tradition to murder relatives and drink their blood. It was a tradition that had begun in the Very Dark Ages which had come before the Dark Ages, when all sorts of unspeakable things were frequently spoken about. On the positive side, it was a very effective way of keeping vampire numbers quite low, and you wouldn't want thousands of them everywhere sticking their fangs into all your soft bits, would you?
42
See footnote 34.
43
There are also Batty Vampires, which are vampires that have gone mad, and Batty Vampire Bats, which are vampire bats that have gone mad. There are also Umpire Bats, which are bats that like cricket.
44
Not to be confused with the Vampire Fish, which sucks the insides out of tadpoles.
45
Not to be confused with Babies which, although very dangerous, don't bite you so much and usually do the mouth frothing thing themselves.
46
Now there's a brilliant title for a rubbish TV series.
47
In hot weather this was reduced to about eight days.
48
Most of the older bats had a different beam to hang from for every day of the week. The reason is far too complicated to go into here, but has something to do with woodworm and dry-rot.
49
Of course this isn't even counting the seven Islands of Little Trees That Look Exactly Like Swords.
50
These were not the donkeys that lived on the other islands, but the four donkeys that had belonged to Armoire the Donkey Lift er. Three had swum there when they had been thrown into the lake and the fourth had flown, or rather been thrown, straight there when the bamboo tower had collapsed.
51
WD42 â Wizards' De-Ruster. The 42 is the number of times it had been used to free various enchanted swords, daggers and lances from various enchanted rocks, stones and dead persons.
52
See the back of this book for a lovely selection of fates worse than death.
53
As in having been on fire, not smoking a cigarette. This was long before the idea of rolling up some dried weeds, setting fire to them and putting them in your mouth had been thought of.
54
This was a very strange yet popular belief, because no country was due to invent a postal system for hundreds of years.
55
See footnote 34 â same timescale.
56
One Avalon entrepreneur made a nice living for a brief period by selling reinforced Anti-Whale Hats.
57
Oops, not sure how that got in there.
58
Top soldier dude.
59
Even Brat knew that Arthur was the real king, though he would never admit it. Princess Floridian had always known it, but figured it was worth trying to get hold of Excalibur anyway. She didn't so much want to do lots of killing with it, as sell it for an unimaginable amount of money.
60
Brat was slithering because it had started raining, not your normal type of rain, but very localised rain from one of Merlin's spells that made it rain only on Brat and Princess Floridian.
61
Apart from a group of dragons living in the remote pine forests of northern Russia who press flowers by dropping huge brown bears on them.
62
You know, like the Queen of England and, even worse, like people who want you to think they are someone awfully posh and important and not some inbred chinless wonder which, of course, they are.
63
Not in a good âfor he's a jolly good fellow' way, but in an âanyone fancy a toasted snack?' sort of way.
64
Yeah! How about that! Bet you never saw that coming!
65
I realise this should probably be in a footnote, but it is
MUCH TOO IMPORTANT
for that. And I'm writing this book, so I can make up the rules.
66
Someone somewhere does know, but whether we will ever find out will remain a mystery until it might be really good in a future book. Or not.
67
The things he carved were probably quite rude, but because this is a children's book, I'm not allowed to say that.
68
The man who had hidden inside the marrow gradually recovered, though whenever he went near onions his eyes would water uncontrollably, a curse that his descendants still endure to this very day.
69
The medieval equivalent of a thermos flask.
70
I only hope I can write
The Dragons 3
quickly enough to save them.