The Royal Family Read online

  ‘Probably about fifteen,’ said Gorsehinge. ‘Sixteen, if we include Daft Victor.’

  The magpie then told the cats to spread out around the castle and to intercept the members of Mordonna’s search party. Each cat would tell a different group of searchers that they knew exactly where Tristram was and offer to lead them to him.

  ‘There will be a prize for the cat who leads people the furthest away from Dreary,’ said the magpie.

  ‘Prize? What sort of prize?’ said one of the cats.

  ‘Something small, furry and delicious,’ said the magpie.

  ‘Still alive?’

  ‘Mostly.’

  ‘So, while all that’s going on, where will I really be?’ Tristram asked. ‘I want to do something. I mean, it is supposed to be my revenge, after all.’

  ‘I have a cunning and devious plan for you,’ said the magpie.

  ‘Brilliant, great, fantastic, wonderful,’ said Tristram. ‘What?’

  ‘We will go to a witch, one that the Floods do not know of, and get her to change you into a really handsome prince,’ said the magpie. ‘Then you will return here, where we’ll get Satanella to fall in love with you and then you will throw her aside like an old dishcloth.’

  ‘Brilliant, great, fantastic, wonderful,’ said Tristram.

  ‘Do you know a witch the Floods won’t have heard of?’ said Flapwig.

  ‘Not as such,’ said the magpie. ‘That’s the only little flaw in my brilliant plan.’

  ‘Not so little, really,’ said Gorsehinge. ‘I mean, it’s the entire plan, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, yes, but I haven’t started looking yet,’ said the magpie. ‘I’ve only just thought of the brilliant plan.’

  ‘You know,’ said Tristram, ‘you don’t actually have to find a witch the Floods haven’t heard of. You could just find one who hates them.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the magpie, ‘but who?’

  ‘There are a few,’ said Gorsehinge with a knowing nod, ‘though most of them have been disposed of by our beloved rulers.’

  ‘What, you mean, killed?’ said Tristram.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘By the Floods?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Tristram was overwhelmed. ‘But I thought they were lovely, kind people and everybody adored them,’ he said.

  ‘Of course you did,’ said Flapwig. ‘They’ve spent a lot of time creating that image.’

  ‘Don’t forget,’ said Gorsehinge, ‘that they are witches and wizards and the rulers of this incredible country. Do you really think they’ve got to where they are today by being sweet and kind to everyone?’

  ‘But the King –’ Tristram began.

  ‘Oh yes, King Nerlin,’ said Flapwig. ‘He’s as soft as luxury toilet paper, but he’s just a figurehead. It’s his wife, Mordonna, who is the real power in this country, and I can assure you that there are a lot of witches and wizards and assorted creatures who would be only too happy to see the back of her.’

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ said Tristram. ‘I mean, I’ve seen the back of her, and it’s nothing special.’

  ‘What?’ said several cats at once.

  ‘Her back’s quite nice, but the front of her is much more interesting,’ Tristram explained.

  So if anyone had doubted that Tristram was a true prince, their suspicions were now put to rest. Only a genuine royal prince would be thick enough to think that Flapwig had actually been talking about Mordonna’s back when he had said there were people who would be happy to see the back of her.

  The poor little dog was completely confused. Why would looking at Mordonna’s back make anyone happy? He didn’t like to ask, so he just kept quiet, which showed he wasn’t quite as stupid as the average prince.

  ‘We will have to be ultra-super cautious about this,’ said Flapwig. ‘We can’t just go round asking people if they don’t like the Queen. The Floods are very crafty and clever. They have spies everywhere.’

  ‘Wow!’ said Tristram.

  ‘We could go round asking everyone if they’d like to make a donation to buy the Queen a big present because she is so lovely,’ Gorsehinge suggested. ‘And if someone says no, we can ask them why not, and then depending on what they say, it might give us a clue as to who doesn’t like her.’

  ‘Or who hasn’t got any money,’ said the magpie.

  This was a good plan. Everyone said so. Except for the simple fact that it was a useless plan.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Flapwig, ‘we might even get some money too.’

  ‘The only problem is,’ said Wonky George, ‘who the hell is going to give us any money? I mean, we’re not nice little children collecting for a charity. We’re cats – not pampered fluffy kitty cats but the type nobody wants and the ones that get stones thrown at them.’

  ‘In that case, we’ll just have to go with Plan B,’ said Flapwig.

  ‘Brilliant!’ said Tristram.

  ‘And what is Plan B?’ said someone, anyone and everyone who wasn’t called Tristram.26

  Once again they were back at square one, but as they sat under a bush, looking out across the rubbish-covered wasteland, a big pile of rags walked out of the trees.

  ‘What’s that?’ said Tristram. ‘Is it dangerous? It smells like a barrel of pig’s pee.’

  ‘It’s just Gertrude,’ said Flapwig.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Gertrude Flood,’ said Gorsehinge.

  ‘Flood?’ said Tristram. ‘Do you mean she’s one of the Floods?’

  ‘Yes, some crazy old seventh cousin.’

  They explained that when the Floods, who had been imprisoned in the drains below Dreary, had finally escaped and overthrown King Quatorze, who had trapped them there, Gertrude had stayed behind. Everyone else couldn’t climb out of the stinking drains quickly enough, but Gertrude had lived there all her life and couldn’t imagine anywhere else she would rather be. Quite a few of the Floods had been born in the drains too and had only seen the light of day through the gratings above them, but Gertrude was not like the others. In fact, she was not like anyone else at all.

  When everyone had been trapped there, Gertrude had refused all offers to make her life nicer, like clean undies – or, really, any undies – food with no mouldy bits and something soft to sleep on that didn’t leave you covered in slime. Then, once everyone had left, she had retreated to the furthest drain to live alone with her very weird dreams, an assortment of mysterious creatures and her grandmother’s skeleton.

  ‘I wonder what she’s doing up here,’ said Flapwig.

  ‘Yes,’ said Gorsehinge. ‘It must be ten years since she was last here, and that was when we had that earthquake.’

  ‘Maybe there’s another earthquake coming,’ Flapwig suggested.

  ‘Hey, old lady,’ the magpie called out from a branch above her. ‘What are you doing up here?’

  ‘Where? What? Who said that?’ said Gertrude.

  Because she was over one hundred and ninety years old, Gertrude was too bent over and frail to look up to see the bird. The magpie flew down and landed in front of her, but her eyes were so worn out that all she could see was a black blurry shape.

  ‘Hello, little rat,’ she said.

  The magpie swore. Being called a rat was a terrible insult. It was dangerous too, as some of the cats began running around looking for the rodent.

  ‘I am not a rat,’ said the magpie. ‘I am a bird.’

  ‘What’s that, then?’ said Gertrude. ‘Is it a kind of rat?’

  ‘Listen, old lady, do I look like a rat? Am I covered in fur? No. I’m covered in feathers. Black lustrous feathers of amazingly shiny beauty, I might add,’ said the magpie.

  ‘What’s them, then?’ Gertrude asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Feathers. What’s them, then?’

  When the magpie told her, he then had to explain what a bird was. The old lady said she didn’t believe him.

  ‘Rats can’t fly,’ she said. ‘Only one thing can fly and they be bats.’<
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  ‘And flies,’ she added. ‘They can fly too.’

  In the end, the magpie said that he was a kind of bat and that seemed to satisfy Gertrude.

  ‘So, what are you doing up here?’ asked the magpie. ‘The cats said that you’ve been here before when there was an earthquake.’

  ‘Earthquake?’ said Gertrude. ‘The earth quakes? Is it frightened of something?’

  The cats joined in the conversation, but that didn’t help. Gertrude Flood seemed so ancient and decrepit, and had lived alone for so long, that no one could get any sense out of her. This, of course, was merely a disguise to cover up the fact that she was actually as sharp as a very smooth pebble disguised as a piece of pointed flint.

  ‘Look, it doesn’t matter why she’s up here,’ they all finally agreed. ‘The important thing is, can she do magic?’

  Gertrude said she could and, to demonstrate, she turned a nearby tree into a bacon sandwich with tomato relish. She assured them that she could easily turn Tristram into a human, but the little dog wasn’t too happy with the idea.

  ‘I don’t mean the being-turned-into-a-handsome-prince bit,’ he explained. ‘I mean having it done by her.’

  ‘I see your point,’ said the magpie. ‘But I don’t think we’ve got any other option.’

  ‘What’s the worst that could happen?’ said Gorsehinge.

  ‘I could end up as anything,’ said Tristram.

  ‘But we could get her to change you again until you were a handsome prince,’ said Flapwig.

  ‘Not if she turned me into an ugly prince,’ said Tristram. ‘You can only be a particular species once, and I wouldn’t think a handsome prince is a different species to an ugly prince.’

  ‘Probably depends on just how ugly you were,’ said Gorsehinge.

  They thought about it, talked about it, and then thought and talked about it some more until they ended up in exactly the same place they had been half an hour before, except everyone was now thirty minutes older.

  ‘Suppose she changes me into a girl?’ said Tristram.

  Everyone said that was impossible, though no one was prepared to take a bet on it. In fact, the best they could agree on was that no one had ever heard of it happening before.

  ‘And hey,’ said the magpie, ‘if it did happen, you could end up more beautiful than Satanella. AND you could probably get into the Guinness Book of Records too.’

  In the end, no one could say anything to make Tristram feel safer about letting the crazy old witch perform magic on him, so the poor little dog shrugged his shoulders, closed his eyes and said, ‘OK, get on with it, then.’

  ‘Right,’ said Gertrude. ‘Go and stand over there under that tree.’

  Tristram, who was now too scared to open his eyes, walked straight into the tree.

  ‘Oww!’ he cried, still refusing to open his eyes. ‘You never said it would hurt like that. Am I a handsome prince now?’

  ‘You walked into the tree,’ said Gertrude. ‘I haven’t done the magic yet.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Right. Now stand perfectly still,’ Gertrude said, ready to cast her spell.

  She shut her eyes and walked straight into the tree.

  ‘Oww!’ Gertrude cried. ‘Who did that?’

  The dog and the old witch opened their eyes, got themselves into the right positions and closed them again. Gertrude started wailing a weird, scary wail that made the cats’ fur stand on end and all the leaves fall from the trees. There was a bright flash, a thick cloud of smoke and the smell of burnt fur.

  The magpie had flown back up into the tree and was the only one who could see anything for all the smoke, though all he could see was all the smoke. A breeze turned up from somewhere and gradually blew the smoke away.

  The smell of burnt fur had actually been the smell of burnt hair. Gertrude was now completely bald and it was not a pretty sight. The burnt-hair smell had hidden another smell – burnt clothes. Gertrude was also completely naked, but instead of being something that would scare the living daylights out of a blind man, she was actually quite cute in an I-Wouldn’t-Mind-That-For-Dinner-With-Some-New-Potatoes-And-Apple-Sauce kind of way.

  Gertrude was a piglet.

  ‘Oink oink, oops,’ she said, and began nuzzling through the fallen leaves for slugs.

  All the cats’ fur seemed to be stuck standing on end, and no amount of preening and shaking could return them to normal.27

  High up in the tree, the magpie had been out of range of Gertrude’s magic and was completely unchanged.

  But where was Tristram?

  It took a while to find him. There were several reasons for this:

  He was very, very tiny.

  He was hiding under a leaf because …

  He was a mouse, which, as everyone knows, is about the favourite thing cats like to eat, apart from tiny defenceless birds.

  ‘Double oops,’ said Gertrude. ‘Mind you, every cloud has a silver lining. I had no idea that slugs were so incredibly delicious.’

  Tristram made a break for it and ran up the tree without any of the cats seeing him.

  ‘Well, I suppose it could have been worse,’ said Flapwig. ‘Though I’m not quite sure how.’

  ‘So where’s the little dog?’ said Gorsehinge. ‘And, more to the point, what is the little dog?’

  Only the magpie knew the answer because he had tucked Tristram safely under his wing. Magpies also like eating mice, but usually not until they are dead and have rotted a bit, so at least for now Tristram was sort of safe.

  ‘I say, piglet lady,’ the magpie called down to Gertrude, ‘I’m assuming that you are still a witch and can still do magic.’

  ‘Probably,’ the old young piglet witch replied. ‘There is a possibility, however, that I might have lost some of my powers, a bit, kind of.’

  ‘So they won’t be as wonderful as they were before?’ said the magpie sarcastically.

  ‘Maybe not,’ said Gertrude. ‘It’s hard to tell. I mean, the spell I just did was the first one I’ve done for a while.’

  ‘WHAT?’ the magpie shouted.

  ‘Well, I was never allowed to do magic stuff when all the family were in the drains with me, and since I’ve been on my own down there, there’s never been much point,’ Gertrude explained.

  Oh God, the magpie said to himself.

  The magpie knew there was no choice but for Gertrude to have another go.

  ‘And who knows,’ she said, ‘now I’ve had a bit of practice, I might be better at it.’

  Hold on to that thought, hold on to that thought, the magpie said to himself, trying really hard to believe it and failing completely.

  Under the magpie’s wing, Tristram was shivering and whimpering.

  ‘Don’t let the cats get me,’ he whispered.

  ‘It’s all right,’ the magpie reassured him. ‘They don’t know you’re a mouse.’

  Right at that moment Flapwig called up to the magpie, ‘Where’s the little dog? What happened to him?’

  ‘I think he turned into an eagle,’ the magpie called back, flying off. ‘Now, the piglet witch lady is going to do some more magic to try to change herself into something else, so I suggest all you cats move a long way away in case you end up even worse than you are now.’

  ‘That’s got rid of them,’ he whispered to Tristram, as he flew down to Gertrude with the mouse buried in his feathers. ‘OK, lady witch pig, do your magic.’

  ‘Right, but first of all, magpie, you two fly out of range,’ said Gertrude. ‘This time I’ll use the holistic wholemeal method.’

  She closed her piggy eyes and concentrated.

  The sky grew very dark above where they were standing. The cats, who were hiding behind a big bush, panicked and ran out into the forest beyond the wasteland.

  A strange, weird, wailing, farty sort of noise filled the air, which was probably just a regular pig noise, and there was a very bright flash that blinded everyone.

  Queen Anaglypta did not look like a qu
een. Unlike Mordonna – her second cousin, three-and-a-half times removed, who was devastatingly beautiful with the power to make any man swoon at her feet – Queen Anaglypta looked like a rather timid mouse in a cardigan that had been knitted for someone who was a completely different shape. She had a kindly but plain face that looked as if angry words had never come out of it. She was like a spoonful of indigestion medicine – safe, uncomplicated and soothing. Normally she smiled a lot, so everyone liked her, but today she did not.

  Today Anaglypta was lost. Not just a little bit lost where she could ask a passing stranger for help, but totally and completely lost – in a very dark forest at the back of Castle Twilight. There was no one else, just her and a huge amount of darkness jammed in between thousands of trees covered in dead leaves. She hadn’t been able to sit still and wait for news when Mordonna’s search parties had gone off looking for her beloved son Tristram, so Anaglypta had gone out herself to look for him.

  The trouble was that she had left without any sort of plan, map, guide person or dog, mobile phone or GPS, and the extra trouble was that this was the first time she had ever been to Transylvania Waters and its capital Dreary, so she didn’t even know where the nearest lolly shop was, never mind which road went where.

  ‘I am lost,’ Anaglypta said.

  ‘Yes, you are, aren’t you?’ said a chocolatey smooth voice from the shadows.

  The forest was so dark it was impossible to see who the voice belonged to, or to know exactly where it was coming from.

  Being a witch herself and coming from Shangrila Lakes – which was a kingdom of wizards and magic like Transylvania Waters, only a lot smaller and with lower property prices on the unfashionable side of the world – the Queen knew only too well that it was impossible to tell from the tone or volume of a voice what its owner might be like. Tiny ants could sound like giants and ferocious skin-ripping carnivores could sound as small and sweet as a little baby.

  So Queen Anaglypta was scared, very hugely scared.

  She decided to turn back and do some very fast running away, except she hadn’t the faintest idea where back or away was. Anaglypta sat down in the middle of what she assumed was the path and began to cry.