The Royal Family Read online

  ‘Prove it,’ said the ginger tom, who had a very, very short tail and was called Gorsehinge.

  Tristram lifted his head towards the cat and, with little more than a twitch of his left eyelid, gave a nod. The ginger tom rose up off the ground.

  ‘Yeah, well,’ said Gorsehinge, ‘anyone can do that.’

  But as the ginger tom continued to rise, he began to look worried.

  ‘OK, OK,’ he finally said as he passed three metres, ‘maybe everyone can’t do that, but …’

  At five metres, he began to look pretty scared.

  At ten metres, he agreed that Tristram could be a wizard, but said he knew at least five magicians who could do the same trick who were not wizards.

  At twenty metres, he stopped moving and speaking.

  ‘So, am I a wizard or not?’ said Tristram.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Gorsehinge.

  ‘Oh, for goodness sake,’ Flapwig snapped. ‘Of course he’s a wizard, you idiot.’

  ‘He obviously needs a bit more proof,’ said Tristram, who by now was feeling considerably cheered up.

  The feelings of desolate sadness that had been dragging him down were being replaced by an altogether far more exciting sensation.

  Revenge.

  For a split second, the cute little doggie expressions that filled Tristram’s everyday face were replaced by a flash of evil with eyes of fire. It lasted for such a brief moment that no one saw it.

  No one except Gorsehinge, that is.

  It caught him, as it had meant to, right between the eyes and filled him with terror. The ginger tom, who had been the undisputed leader of the stray cats for as long as anyone could remember, wet himself. And just to make his point, Tristram flipped him upside down so that Gorsehinge wet his own face.

  Then he dropped him.

  In a puddle.

  Full of dead worms.

  For a few seconds there was complete silence. The other cats had always been scared of Gorsehinge, but the sight of the old bully on his back, in the mud, stinking of his own wee, was just too much and they all burst out laughing.

  Gorsehinge crept off into the bushes. In one brief moment he had lost all his power. The first thought that came into his head was also revenge, but then he remembered how his tail had become very, very short the last time he had tried to get even with a wizard. He still had nightmares about it.19 So while Gorsehinge might have been very angry, he was not very stupid. He decided his best course of action was to swallow his pride and to try to make up with Tristram Jolyon De-Vere Creak.

  ‘Sorry,’ Gorsehinge said, using the word for the first time in his life.

  The effect was amazing. All the other cats gathered round him and began to lick his fur clean, even the bits with wee on.

  ‘I’m sorry, too,’ said Tristram. ‘I realise I don’t look like a prince or a wizard.’

  The two animals sniffed various interesting bits of each other and surprised each other by becoming good friends.20

  ‘So what do you want do?’ Flapwig asked.

  ‘When I left Castle Twilight,’ Tristram replied, ‘I wanted the ground to open up and swallow me, then you came along and brought me here. I was as low as I could go. No one cared about me. And now here I am, in this lovely overgrown place with all of you, my new friends.’

  ‘Well, you see, that’s one huge advantage being a dog has over being a person,’ said Gorsehinge. ‘If you were a human, wizard or not, you would still be crying into a cup of cold tea and curling up into a ball wanting to die.’

  ‘A ball?’ said Tristram. ‘What sort of ball? A red rubber one?’

  ‘No, no,’ Gorsehinge continued. ‘It’s just a figure of speech. My point is that because you’re a dog, you are genetically programmed to be happy. It only takes a few minutes to cheer up. See?’

  ‘I do, I do,’ said Tristram. ‘Now tell me more about the ball.’

  He may be a prince and a wizard, thought all the cats, but he’s still a dog – dumb as cardboard.

  ‘I mean,’ Gorsehinge added, ‘are you sure you want to change? Are you sure you wouldn’t be happier staying as a dog?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Flapwig. ‘Look how miserable and complicated life can be if you’re a human. Name one thing they’ve got that we haven’t.’

  ‘Thumbs,’ said Tristram.

  ‘Yeah, well, OK. There is that,’ the cats all agreed. ‘Thumbs would be good.’

  ‘iPads,’ Tristram added.

  ‘Eye pads?’ said Flapwig. ‘Why on earth would you want pads on your eyes?’

  ‘Just imagine,’ said Gorsehinge dreamily, ‘what we could do to mice and birds if we had thumbs as well as claws.’

  The cats imagined how wonderful life would be with more blood and gore and not having to swallow all those feathers.21

  And Tristram imagined how fantastic life would be if he could throw his own ball.

  ‘Well, you’re a wizard, aren’t you?’ said Flapwig. ‘Could you do a spell to give us thumbs?’

  ‘OMG!’ said Gorsehinge. ‘That would be brilliant. We’d still be cats and dogs, but we’d have a fantastic secret weapon. There’d be nothing to stop us. We could take over the world.’

  ‘My mother made me promise that I would never do any big magic stuff without asking her first,’ said Tristram.

  ‘And where is your mother now?’ Gorsehinge asked. ‘Can anyone hear her looking for her missing son?’

  No one could.

  ‘Has anyone seen Tristram?’ said Queen Anaglypta.22

  ‘Who?’23

  ‘My son,’ said Queen Anaglypta. ‘The one who looks like a little dog.’

  ‘You’ve got a son who looks like a little dog?’ said all the people who had said ‘who’. ‘That’s amazing. Our beloved Queen Mordonna has got a daughter who is a little dog.’

  ‘Was a little dog,’ said a servant who had been there when Satanella had been transformed into a person. ‘She is now a staggeringly beautiful princess-witch.’

  ‘Maybe your son got changed at the same time,’ someone suggested. ‘That often happens with magic. I think it’s called the Enchanted Echo Effect.’

  ‘You just made that up,’ said someone’s wife. ‘Ignore him. He does it all the time.’

  But he hadn’t. There really is an Enchanted Echo Effect.

  ‘Is he a small terrier dog with blond fur?’ a different someone asked.

  ‘Yes, yes. Have you seen him, then?’ asked Queen Anaglypta.

  ‘No.’

  ‘So how do you know what he looks like?’

  ‘Just kidding,’ said the different someone who had recently won Teaser of the Year at the International Festival of Japes and Wheezes, which is one of the most exciting events in Belgium’s annual calendar of interesting things.

  ‘I saw him creeping out of the castle a few hours ago,’ the teaser continued to report. ‘And so sad and miserable he looked, dragging his tail through the puddles. It filled my heart with sadness.’

  ‘Puddles?’ said Queen Anaglypta. ‘I didn’t know it had been raining.’

  ‘They were his own puddles, Your Majesty,’ said the teaser. ‘He’d stop, do a puddle and then walk back and drag his tail through it. Even the sparrows were laughing at him.’

  The Queen and quite a few other people too were beside themselves with grief. Anaglypta was overwhelmed with guilt, underwhelmed with sadness and whelmed in quite a few other places with a bad conscience. She had been so in awe of meeting her famous relatives the Floods for the first time and coming to Transylvania Waters that she had almost forgotten her own son, Tristram, the sweet caring boy – OK, OK, the sweet caring dog – a devoted child who had never given her a moment’s trouble.24

  She’d seen how Satanella Flood and her son had instantly taken to each other, and the Queen had dreamily wondered if they might even get married and unite the Floods and the Creaks with litters of adorable puppies. It had crossed her mind briefly to wonder if the two dogs, who were not really dogs but a
wizard and a witch, would actually have puppies or some sort of weird homunculus. But Queen Anaglypta’s brain was not a place where problems and worries ever spent much time, so she had – as she always did with anything that was in the slightest bit difficult – simply forgotten about it ASAP.

  Now her little boy was missing, and when someone told her how Satanella had rejected him, Queen Anaglypta realised that he was not just missing but broken-hearted too.

  ‘I blame myself,’ she said. ‘I should have changed him into a person when he was born.’

  But no one would let her have a nice wallow in self-pity.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ they said. ‘It’s because of that selfish, spoiled Floods girl.’

  And when the news of Tristram’s disappearance reached Castle Twilight, even Mordonna had to agree.

  ‘We will send out a search party,’ she said, ‘and when we find him, I will turn him into an unbelievably handsome prince who any girl would swoon over.’

  Anywhere else this would have been a good plan, but things were different in Transylvania Waters. The main difference was that every living animal, right down to nasty slimy slugs, could understand speech. They could use it too. This had happened many centuries before, when the original Merlin had thought the world would be a much happier and more peaceful place if every living creature could speak to each other.

  It had been a bad move.

  Within a few years several animals had become extinct, and hundreds of species that had been happily eating each other were now either feeling really guilty or really hungry. Here is an example:

  Big ugly dangerous animal with ferocious teeth and claws is about to kill and eat very small cute animal with no defences whatsoever.

  ‘Hello, lunch,’ says the big dangerous animal.

  ‘Hello,’ the small cuddly animal replies. ‘Would you like some lunch?’

  ‘I would indeed,’ says the big dangerous animal.

  ‘Well, I’ve got some daisies, some lovely moss and a very early variety of beetroot,’ says the small cuddly animal.

  ‘You’ve also got a delicious-looking neck,’ says the big dangerous animal, and bites its head off.

  The small cuddly animal does not say anything on account of its talking bits being chewed up and swallowed.

  ‘Owwwwwwwww …’ the big dangerous animal hears its lunch screaming inside its tummy.

  So, instead of enjoying its lunch, the big dangerous animal feels horribly guilty, but not enough to turn vegetarian, though it does get nasty indigestion and that particular species of small cuddly animal soon becomes extinct.

  This and other sorts of problems made Merlin try to undo his magic, but it was too late. All he could do was stop everyone from understanding each other by making them speak different languages or speak in whistles (birds), grunts (pigs) and tweets (birds that don’t whistle and humans who need to get a life), depending on their species.

  Everyone, that is, except for the creatures of Transylvania Waters, which all knew the old wizard only too well and weren’t falling for any of Merlin’s magickery a second time. They alone had retained the power of speech.

  So when Mordonna had announced her plans for a search party so that she could turn Tristram into an unbelievably handsome prince that any girl would swoon over, a magpie that had been sitting outside on the window sill had overheard and understood every word. This same magpie had previously been sitting on top of the castle gatehouse when Tristram had slipped away into the dark alleys of Dreary. It had watched his encounter with Flapwig and followed the two of them out of town. Then it had got bored, which happens all the time to magpies, and had returned to the castle because it had the best bacon rind in the entire country.

  ‘And I like to think,’ the magpie would say to anyone who would listen, ‘that I am a bit of an expert when it comes to bacon.’

  The magpie then had two choices: he could either fly off to tell Mordonna and Anaglypta that he knew where Tristram was and would be willing to lead them straight to him for a huge reward, or he could fly back to Tristram and tell him that both queens were looking for him.

  Hmm, thought the magpie, tough choice.

  Obviously the huge reward thing seemed like the best idea, but then the magpie realised there was nothing he actually wanted.

  I mean, he said to himself, there are only three things I’ve ever wanted in life – bacon, girlfriends and shiny things – and I’ve more than enough of all of them.

  Which was true. Outside the castle kitchens was a huge oak tree. It was the magpie’s kingdom, and jammed into every crack in the bark were bits of bacon rind. For five generations the magpie and his forefathers had been storing their surplus bacon here. Some of the rind was so old, the tree had begun to absorb it. On warm summer evenings, the lane on the other side of the castle garden wall was filled with couples saying to each other, ‘Can you smell bacon?’25

  This enormous treasure house of bacon meant that the magpie had so many girlfriends, he couldn’t remember all their names.

  And as for shiny things, well, it would take a whole book to list each and every one of them, including the places in which they were hidden. All magpies are addicted to shiny things and this one was no different. The Castle Twilight magpie, being the king of bacon and bigger than all the others, had more shiny things than anyone else. In fact, he had collected so many that there was no room for him in his own nest and one dark night he fell out. The whole nest collapsed, showering him in twigs, bottle caps, broken glass, precious emeralds, priceless handmade watches and Christmas beetles. So he didn’t need any more bling.

  ‘I am totally blinged out,’ he declared.

  Of course, he could just tell the two queens where Tristram was and not bother with a reward, but he had his position in magpie society and he couldn’t risk being laughed at for being kind. To a magpie, kindness was like pecking a baby bird’s eyes out so that it couldn’t see the inside of your throat while you were eating it.

  So what could he make out of telling Tristram that there were people looking for him?

  Chaos and confusion, that’s what, the magpie thought.

  And if there is one thing a magpie likes more than bacon, girlfriends and bling, it’s chaos and confusion.

  Apart from more bacon.

  So the magpie flew back to the wasteland at the edge of town, where Tristram was telling the stray cats about his life in Shangrila Lakes.

  ‘Oi, dog,’ the magpie called down from the safety of a thin branch high up in a tree.

  ‘Magpie, lunch, kill!’ the cats shouted together.

  ‘Shut up, you stupid scraggy ratbags!’ the magpie shouted. ‘Or I’ll tell all the posh cats in town you’ve made friends with a dog.’

  A gigantic silence fell across the clearing, followed by a medium-sized silence that had been hiding behind a bush.

  ‘That’s better,’ said the magpie. ‘I’ve got some information for the dog.’

  ‘Yeah, go on then,’ said Flapwig.

  ‘Tell me this,’ said the magpie. ‘Of all the creatures in our beloved Transylvania Waters, who do you hate the most?’

  ‘Well, humans, of course,’ said Flapwig.

  ‘And witches and wizards,’ Gorsehinge added. ‘They’re like humans, only worse.’

  Everyone agreed. Tristram wasn’t so sure. After all he was a wizard himself

  ‘But I like humans,’ he said. ‘They give me dinner and throw sticks and things.’

  ‘Yes, but just think how much better it could all be without them,’ said Flapwig. ‘You could have loads more dinner and any stick you’ve ever wanted.’

  ‘Only if I had thumbs,’ said Tristram.

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Well, I couldn’t open the tins without thumbs,’ said Tristram.

  ‘But you could catch things and kill them and eat them instead,’ said Flapwig. ‘It would be much better for you. Besides, those tins are full of chemicals.’

  ‘Why does the dog want
sticks?’ asked one of the cats.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Flapwig. ‘It’s a dog thing. It’s always confused me. If the humans like the sticks so much, why do they keep throwing them away?’

  ‘And why on earth do dogs keep bringing the sticks back to them?’ asked Gorsehinge.

  ‘It’s a game,’ said Tristram.

  ‘Throwing a bit of dead tree around is a game?’ said pretty well every cat there.

  ‘Yes, it’s great,’ said Tristram.

  ‘You’re an idiot,’ said Gorsehinge.

  ‘HELLO,’ shouted the magpie. ‘Can we get back to the point?’

  ‘Which is?’ Gorsehinge asked.

  ‘Basically, it’s this,’ the magpie replied. ‘Dog, what is the one thing you want at this very moment more than anything?’

  ‘Revenge,’ said Tristram.

  ‘Brilliant,’ said Gorsehinge, deciding he actually quite liked Tristram. ‘Spoken like a true cat.’

  ‘Well, I can help you,’ said the magpie.

  He told them how Mordonna was organising a search party to find Tristram and that she was planning to turn him into a handsome prince. Being a magpie, the bird was full of cleverness and craftiness, so he left out the bits about Tristram’s mother, Queen Anaglypta, being distressed at her son’s disappearance because he knew it would make the little dog run straight back to the castle.

  ‘So, how many of you are there?’ said the magpie.

  ‘Twenty,’ said Flapwig.

  ‘No, twenty-seven,’ said a voice from the back. ‘Wonky George has just had seven kittens.’

  ‘Wonky George?’ said Tristram, who didn’t know all that stuff about mummies and daddies and babies. ‘Why’s he called that?’

  ‘Because George is a girl,’ Flapwig explained.

  ‘So why isn’t he called Georgina?’ said the magpie.

  ‘Because that’s his dad’s name,’ Flapwig said. ‘Don’t ask.’

  ‘OK,’ said the magpie. ‘Let’s start again. How many grown-up cats are there who can go out and distract people?’