The Dragons 3 (8 page)

‘We need troops,' said Mordred. ‘As many as we can get. And weapons.'

‘Indeed, my lord,' said Sergycal. ‘I have done sending my cousins out and abouts to scouring your estates and do bringing back all the able-bodied men they can find.'

‘Excellent. And the weapons?'

‘I have done some ordering the blacksmith in the local village to make gathering up all the ploughs and shovels and buckets and such like, and do beating them into swords and pikestaffs.'

‘Great.'

‘Excuse me,' said Prince Culvert. ‘If you do that, how will anyone be able to grow any food if they cannot plough the land and dig the earth?'

‘It will not matters, good sir,' said Sergycal. ‘There will be no men to be doing such works as they will all be in our magnificent army, marching southly to Camelot.'

‘Then will not the women and children be left behind to starve to death?'

‘Yes well, it's a small price to pay for victory,'
said Mordred. ‘And anyway, once I'm King, do you think I'd want to come back and live in this godforsaken place? So who cares?'

Prince Culvert and Tracyvere were horrified at Mordred's heartless attitude, but they said nothing. It wasn't that Tracyvere didn't like heartless attitudes and pain and torture and currants and sultanas and raisins – which were all horribly evil – but she was very annoyed that she wouldn't be there to enjoy it. They both knew what happened to people who disagreed with Mordred. Even Captain Shortbread Silver was shocked, and he was a man who thought nothing of pillaging entire seaside villages and making off with all their turnips and socks.

Only Sergycal appeared to think Mordred's attitude was all right.

Merlin was not having a lot of success with his spies at Castle Laclustre. The trouble was that there was nothing that Mordred liked for breakfast more than a boiled crow, apart from, perhaps, a fried crow, though he did try to limit himself to no more than four fried ones each week to keep himself from getting fat.

Mordred's parents had been the same. Castle
Laclustre actually had three servants whose only job was to catch crows and two special cooks whose job was to cook them. The difference between Mordred and his parents was that they did this to save money, whereas Mordred, who had been brought up eating crows, actually enjoyed it.

Merlin had tried disguising his spies as sparrows, pigeons, kittens, butterflies and hedgehogs, but no matter what creature he transformed them into, Mordred ate them, even slugs.
³⁷
Mordred didn't do this because he thought they were spies. He didn't know that. He just liked to eat things.

Now and then a spy would get through and make it back to Camelot, but Merlin's information was not as good as he would have liked. He knew Mordred was planning an uprising and that it was probably going to be on the longest night of the year. But it didn't take a genius, or a spy, to work out Mordred would be up to no good and would do anything to become King.

Sergycal's cousins returned with fourteen
peasants, none of whom looked as if they could bite their way out of a paper bag, never mind attack the highly trained soldiers of Camelot.

‘Maybe we need to form an alliance with someone,' said Mordred, but he didn't agree himself.

‘Do looking at it this way, my lord,' Sergycal said. ‘If you haves allies, they will do wanting half or maybe even one quarters of the treasures of the Kingdom when you takes over Avalon. Who's to make sayings that one of their leaders will not trying to take the throne once we have winned the day? I'm meaning, if they are more powerfuls than we are, they could even taking over completely.'

‘I hadn't thought of that,' said Mordred. ‘So what do you suggest?'

‘Well, do looking at this lot,' Sergycal said, pointing at the scabby peasants. ‘If you saw them trying to do attacking you, you would falling about laughing. You wouldn't even setting the dogs on them, would you? You'd just throwing a bucket and a few kittens at them, wouldn't you?'

‘The water, yes, but I'd probably keep the kittens for lunch.'

‘Indeed, and who wouldn't, but what I'm saying is they do looking totally useless,' Sergycal continued. ‘And my point is that we do keeping them looking like that, but we trains them to be seriously vicious killing machineries. The soldiers guardings the bridges to Camelot will just make laughs when they see their approachings. They won't even bothered to drawing their sword, just do laughing for a few seconds before we are chucking them in the lake for the olms to eat.'

‘My good Sergycal, you are a genius,' said Mordred. ‘Let us gather more peasants and build a force of terrifying naughtiness.'

So Sergycal sent his cousins back out to round up the other men, the ones who were old and not able-bodied, and even a couple who were on their death beds.

So now they had an army of forty-two terrible-looking peasants.
³⁸
Seven of them kept falling over. Two because they had the bubonic plague. Three because they only had one leg each and two because they were dead.

The longest night of the year was just two weeks away and Camelot was nine days' travel south. So it meant Sergycal and his cousins had just five days to turn the peasants into a cutting-edge fighting force.

A lot of training techniques still used today, like shouting at soldiers and telling them they are stupid to make them angry, did not work with Mordred's army. They knew they were stupid, so they just agreed.

Sergycal split the men into two groups and told each group that the other group was trying to steal their wives and girlfriends. This didn't work either because most of the men wouldn't believe it and the rest of them were delighted at the thought of finally getting rid of their dreadful partners, who they hadn't wanted in the first place, but no one had asked their opinion.

What did make the men angry was telling one half that the other half was trying to steal their turnips. It was all Sergycal and his big cousins could do to stop bloodshed.

‘It isn't truths!' Sergycal shouted. ‘I just tolded you that to get you worked up.'

‘What is true,' Mordred added, ‘is that King
Arthur and his army are planning to march north and steal your turnips.'

‘And then they will enslave you and force you to grow girly food like lettuces,' said Captain Shortbread Silver.

‘And will they steal our wives and girlfriends?' the peasant asked.

‘No.'

‘If we gave them the turnips do you think we could persuade them to?' said one particular peasant whose three wives had been compared to rather ugly warthogs on account of actually being rather ugly warthogs, except for the one who was a rather lovely warthog.

‘Just forget your wives and girlfriends,' said Mordred.

‘We've tried that. It doesn't work.'

It was an uphill struggle, but a combination of turnip wine, lots of shouting and the thought of marching south, away from their wives and girlfriends, gradually turned the band of untrained, stupid peasants into a highly skilled fighting force of stupid peasants. By the fourth day, almost all of them knew which end
of their swords and pikestaffs to hold and those that didn't had no hands left to hold them with anyway and were just taken along to act as temporary shields.

They crossed the border into Avalon and slowly made their way towards Camelot, losing a few men along the way because:

• Two fell into deep, bottomless bogs of wet peat and by the time they realised the darkness was not so much night-time as being drowned in mud, they were drowned in mud.
  
• One was called to a higher place – his mum was shouting at him from the top of a mountain. This did not turn out to be his mum, but a hungry wolf doing a brilliant impersonation.
  
• One was called to a lower place – his mum was shouting at him from a deep cave. This did turn out to be his mum, who was far more ferocious than any hungry wolf and who was even hungrier and ate him.
  
• One of the soldiers, who no one realised had been dead all along, actually fell to bits.
  

However, they managed to collect more troops than they lost, until Mordred was leading an army of over sixty-seven men.

‘Are we now the first army of the Knights Intolerant?' Mordred asked.

‘You knowing, I thinking we are,' said Sergycal. ‘I do thinkings that we shall go down in history as such. Once we have killinged all the wizards, especially Merlins.'

‘Yes,' Mordred agreed. ‘I think there is no doubt our plan will work. The old wizard has to die, for while he remains alive I suspect that my wretched cousin Arthur will remain untouchable.'

‘Indeed, and the extinction of wizards is being the founding manifestoes of the Knights Intolerant. It is why we were foundeded and it is what we living for,' Sergycal explained.
³⁹

⁴⁰

‘How many of us are there?' said Spikeweed.

‘Seventeen,' said Primrose. ‘If you include your granny.'

‘Well, I suppose we could stick her in the middle of the first bridge over to Camelot,' said Spikeweed. ‘The smell would be enough to keep most people away.'

‘If we put her on the third or fourth bridge and there were people coming from both directions, that could create all sorts of panic as they try to flee,' said Primrose. ‘Can she still breathe fire?'

‘Not without a bonfire to start her off.'

‘Seventeen's not very many to mount an attack, is it?' said Primrose.

‘No, but we
can
fly and we
can
breathe flames,' said Spikeweed. ‘None of the humans can do that.'

They had sent messages to other dragons around the world, but so far no one had agreed to come and join the fight. The thing was that they all thought the Avalon dragons were rather pathetic for having formed an alliance with humans in the first place. No other dragons in the entire history of dragonography had ever done such a thing. They had never even thought
about it and then decided not to. The very idea was unspeakable. It went against all the laws of nature. Dragons hated humans and humans hated dragons and that was how it was meant to be, not sitting down and eating cake together. They thought Spikeweed was a pathetic disgrace to Dragonhood.

‘Spikeweed, King of the Dragons?' they snorted.
⁴¹
‘More like Dandelion, King of Little Babies.'

‘The Avalon dragons are all just Fat Wench's Tabards,' they said.
⁴²

So the idea of actually flying all the way to Avalon to help them was ridiculous. The only dragon who thought of going was Spotty Oregano from Italy, who had never stopped being in love with Primrose after she had given him up to marry Spikeweed. He was torn between going to her aid and staying at home.

‘If I don't go,' he said, ‘then maybe her stupid husband will get killed in battle and then afterwards I could go and win her broken heart.'

‘But then,' he said, ‘if I don't go, maybe she'll get
killed as well as her stupid husband and my dreams of making her mine will die forever.'

‘But then,' he said, ‘if I do go, maybe I'll get killed. I wouldn't like that.'

‘She's probably forgotten all about me, anyway,' he whimpered and went off to burn something to cheer himself up.

It didn't work, certainly not for the fried goldfish.

If only he had known that Primrose had never really stopped loving him and she had only married Spikeweed because her mum had made her. But Spotty Oregano from Italy was from Italy and Italian dragons had better mums than the Avalonian ones, and Spotty's mum told him that if he did love Primrose, then of course he had to go and fight for her. This meant that the other nine Italian dragons had to go too and that meant that all the other dragon families from around the world had to go as well, in case they missed out on something.

‘And anyway,' said a Very Clever Patagonian
⁴³
dragon, ‘Spikeweed might be a weak-brained idiot, but he is still a dragon, so it is our duty to help him.'

‘Of course, he'll have to be punished. So once we've killed all the humans,' he added, ‘we'll kick him very hard and burn his knees for being so stupid. But first we'll go and torch those smug Avalonian humans.'

So from every corner of the world, groups of dragons began to make their way to Camelot. They travelled by night, hiding in thick forests during the day and roasting all the local endangered species for their dinner. They took refuge in caves to avoid humans.

‘Not because we are frightened of them,' they said. ‘Because we're not, but we want to save our strength for the mighty battle of Camelot.'

Naturally, they took a few beautiful princesses hostage along the way, as that's what dragons do, but their hearts weren't really in it and they released their captives the next day in exchange for a few chickens.

‘We must stay focused,' they said. ‘Build up our strength for the big battle.'

‘I think we should also practise seeing in the dark,'
said another Very Clever Patagonian dragon. ‘After all, let's be honest, our night vision is not so great.'

This was a huge understatement for, as soon as dusk arrived, dragon-sight becomes useless. This is not so much because their eyes themselves are not built for night-time work, but because dragons are really scared of the dark, so as soon as the sun goes down, they bury their heads under their wings where, of course, all they can see is total darkness and a few bristly hairs. To make matters worse, dragons have the worst underwing body odour of any living creature, making their eyes water like mad too.

On top of that, it's really difficult to fly when you've got your head tucked under your wing.

‘What we really need,' said a third Very Clever Patagonian Dragon, ‘is darkness aversion therapy. The trouble is that this is the Days of Yore and I haven't the faintest idea what I'm talking about because things like aversion therapy haven't been invented yet.'

So they sat in the middle of a forest clearing and drew straws, which is quite difficult when you haven't got any thumbs, and the one with the shortest straw, who, by an interesting coincidence was the stupidest of
the Very Clever Patagonian dragons, was not allowed to put his head under his wing when it got dark.

‘But my granny told me that if you don't tuck your head under your wing at night, it will blow up to an enormous size and explode,' said the ‘volunteer'.

This was a complete lie that he'd just made up hoping they let him off, but no one believed him.

‘Funny that,' said his granny, who happened to be there, standing right next to him.
⁴⁴
‘The way I remember it is that I said if you did put your head under your wing when you had been told not to, then your head would grow to an enormous size on account of me boxing your ears.'

The stupidest of the Very Clever Patagonian dragons kept his head out and kept his eyes wide open. Of course, if he hadn't been so stupid, he would have realised that none of the other dragons could see whether he was doing it or not because that dark night was even darker than the darkest night anyone could remember.

All this not being able to see where they were
going in the dark was irrelevant because all dragons have radar, but as it was the Days of Yore and radar wasn't going to be invented for hundreds of years, they didn't know about it.

‘Cheer up, my young friend,' said Captain Shortbread Silver, ‘for we are a mere two hours' walk away from Camelot and tomorrow is the longest night of the year.'

‘Indeed, my lord,' said Sergycal. ‘One can almost do the smelling our prize. One has but to do climbing up that yonderly ridge to do gazing and lookings down upon the lake and all its exquisitely island bits surrounding the great castle.'

‘Indeed,' said the Captain, ‘and as we speak, a team of our men are building two rafts at the edge of the forest so that we may sneak silently across the water and enter unsuspected by the tradesmen's entrance.'

‘I suppose so,' said Mordred, trying to cheer
himself up by pulling the heads off all the incredibly beautiful flowers and the wings off the spectacular butterflies that sparkled in the afternoon sunshine, which filtered through the delicate leaves around the clearing, deep in the enchanted forest where they had made their camp. ‘Why is everywhere in Avalon so disgustingly lovely?'

‘Suppose so? Suppose so, my lord?' said Sergycal. ‘We cannot do failings.'

‘When we have taken over,' Mordred went on, ‘I'll make sure that everywhere becomes a lot less lovely. Flowers will be banned and the only butterflies allowed will be the dull grey ones with no wings.'

Culvert, Prince of Clapshamshire, and Tracyvere, Princess of Clapshamshire, were the only two who were less than enthusiastic about the planned attack. It seemed to both of them that the venture was doomed from the start. Although they had picked up a few extra peasants along the way, others had died or had run away and their entire force was a bit less than twenty-seven strong, including themselves.

With Sergycal egging Mordred on, plus Mordred's increasingly overwhelming evil personality
and desire to kill King Arthur, it seemed to the Clapshamshires that everyone had lost their grip on reality and that, really, they had a snowball's chance in a very big hot fire's chance of success. Culvert and Tracyvere agreed that at the first opportunity they would slip away quietly and make their way back home.

‘After all,' Culvert whispered to Tracyvere, ‘this is treason and it's bound to fail. I for one do not want my head chopped off as a traitor.'

‘Anyway,' Tracyvere whispered back, ‘can you imagine what Avalon would be like with that vile little Mordred as King?'

In fact, when they thought about it, neither of them were sure why they'd come, except it had seemed at the time that they weren't being given a choice.

‘Do you think that by entering the castle through the back door – because that's the last place they'll expect us – might make it the most likely place they would expect us to enter?' said Culvert, confusing himself and everyone else.

‘But no one is expecting us,' said Mordred. ‘We have the element of surprise.'

‘And we shall be all disguiseds up, my lord,' said Sergycal.

‘Disguised? What disguise?'

‘We shall be disguiseded as washerwomens,' said Sergycal.

‘What, all of us?'

‘Indeeds so.'

‘So you don't think it might look a bit suspicious when twenty-six washerwomen turn up at once?' said Tracyvere.

‘Especially when some of them are as big as giants and have beards?' said Culvert.

‘If you did visiting my homelands,' said Sergycal, ‘you would be seeing that all washerwomens look like that.'

‘But twenty-six all turning up at once?'

‘My spies are making to tell me,' Sergycal lied for he had no spies, ‘that there am a massive amounts of dirty laundries at Camelots.'

Amazingly this was true, but it was a huge gamble to say so because every castle in the land had a massive amount of dirty laundry due to a global shortage of big, bearded Eastern European washerwomen and
the fact that it would be quite a few centuries before washing machines would be invented.
⁴⁵

‘Twenty-five,' said Mordred. ‘I'm not dressing up as a washerwoman.'