The Stories

Stories for Another Day

Two children were playing in a big, dark, old house one day when they found something. They were playing with a ball, which you know you should never do inside, but they were playing very quietly, rolling it and not throwing it, because the old lady who lived in the house was sick upstairs, and they had been told to go downstairs and play very quietly.

The boy’s name was Alfonsus, which he hated, and the girls’ name was Eligia, which was worse, but she always called him Foxer and he called her Jilly, so they were friends. It was Foxer’s great-grandmother who was sick upstairs.

Jilly rolled the ball to Foxer, and he missed. The ball went under an old cupboard and Foxer had to half-push himself under it to get the ball back. He still couldn’t reach it but he felt something hanging down a bit from the back of the cupboard, so he pulled and tugged and wriggled it until he got it out. It was a key, a long, heavy key, cold and grey.

“It’s a key,” he said.

“Let me see,” Jilly said. She rubbed off the dust and a bit of dirt with her jumper and held it up. “Look, it’s a dragon’s head.”

It was true, the key was shaped like a dragon’s head, with a long tongue curling at its tip where you would put it in the lock.

“Let’s see if we can find the lock for it,” Foxer said. Jilly was glad to give it back to him. Somehow she didn’t like holding it, cold and heavy, with the dragon’s hollow eye staring at her. They tried all the doors they could find, and the cupboards, a jewellery box, two chests and a music box, but the key was far too big for any of them.

“It could have been here for decades,” Jilly said. “Probably whatever it unlocked has been thrown away by now.”

Foxer put the key in his pocket, saying stubbornly, “I’m going to keep trying every single lock I can find.” And he did, for weeks and weeks afterwards. He never found any locks that the key was even close to fitting, but it stayed in his pocket anyway.

Not long after that his great-grandmother died, and the old house was demolished and replaced by a row of townhouses, so he never got to try it in any of the other locks in the house.

Now quite a while later, just after Jilly turned fourteen, her mother gave her an old black book. “It’s a kind of journal,” her mother said. “My mother gave it to me when I was fourteen – it’s a bit of a tradition in our family. I never saw the point, so it’s been in the bottom of my wardrobe till now.”

The book had hard black covers that were almost falling off. The pages were thick and yellowed and ragged at the edges. Some of them looked like they had been torn out and folded up, then smoothed out again. Some pages were missing altogether.

Jilly loved it. Every page was like a mystery waiting to be puzzled out. The writing was odd and old-fashioned, and so faded in places it was almost impossible to read. “This bit says, ‘For a cold, take sage tea with a little honey,'” she said excitedly.

“Really?” her mother said, not interested at all.

Jilly took the book to her room and pored over it, page after page, until she came to one page that made her stop, frozen to the spot. In the centre of the page was a drawing of the dragon’s head key.

She jumped up, shoved the book into her pocket and yelled to her mother, “I’m going over to Foxer’s place.”

Foxer was doing his homework, so he was quite happy to have an interruption. Jilly told him excitedly, “Mum gave me this book.”

“Is that all?” Foxer said. He’d really had enough of books. “It looks like it’s ready for the recycling.”

“No, look at this!” Jilly said, showing him the drawing.

Foxer nearly jumped out of his skin. He got the key out of his pocket where it always was, even though he’d practically forgotten he even had it. He laid the key on the page. It matched the drawing exactly.

“What does it say?” he demanded. “Does it say what it’s the key to?”

Jilly frowned over the brown, straggly writing. “I think it says, ‘Tap three times to open a place of safety.'”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Foxer said.

“I don’t know,” Jilly shrugged. “That’s just what it says. I don’t know what it means.” They talked about it over and over, for the next few days.

It was about this time that the man appeared.

The first time Jilly noticed him, in a black coat and a hat pulled down over his face, she felt cold all over. He was more like a cloud of black smoke than a man. She felt as if he was following her, but whenever she turned to look, he wasn’t there. Over the next few days, she seemed to see him everywhere.

“There’s this man,” she said hesitantly to Foxer.

“You’ve seen him too?” Foxer said. “I thought it was just me. I think he’s after…”

“…the key!” they both said together.

“Did you tell someone about the key?” Jilly said.

“It fell out of my pocket when I was playing basketball,” Foxer confessed. “The teacher confiscated it and didn’t give it back till it was time to go home. I suppose she could have shown it to anyone.”

“He was outside my window last night,” Jilly said. “I tried to tell Mum, but she couldn’t see him even though I could. I’m frightened. We have to do something.”

“I’m not giving him the key, I don’t care what you say!” Foxer declared stoutly.

The next day they did something without even meaning to. It was a beautiful day so they went down to the beach. The man won’t show up here, in broad daylight, Jilly thought to herself, but she was wrong. She was lying on the sand in the sunshine with her eyes closed, when a growing sense of fear crept over her. When she opened her eyes, he was standing over her.

Jilly panicked. She wriggled to her feet and started running. She grabbed Foxer and pulled him after her. “The caves!” she said. “We’ve got to hide!”

The caves at the beach were big and airy, so open that anyone could see into them except at the very back. They ran in, up to the furthest, darkest point and cowered there, pressed up against the solid wall. They heard footsteps, and then breathing, coming towards them.

Jilly’s mind froze, but something deep in her memory stirred. “Have you got it?” she hissed to Foxer. He nodded with short, sharp jerks. He didn’t need to ask what she was talking about. “Remember what it said in the book,” she said. “Tap three times for a place of safety. Do it!”

“What?” Foxer said.

“Tap, here, with the key!” she answered. Foxer took the key out of his pocket, familiar and quite ordinary now, since he’d been carrying it around for so long. He didn’t know what Jilly wanted him to do, so he gave the wall behind them a tentative tap. “Three times!” Jilly rasped, so he gave two more taps. A keyhole appeared in the rock face. Foxer stared, amazed.

“Go on,” Jilly insisted, “put the key in the keyhole!” He put the key in and turned. The rock wall opened as if it was a door. They stepped through it and Jilly slammed the door shut behind them.

They were standing in a space about the size of Jilly’s wardrobe. It had a solid floor and solid walls on all sides, as far as they could tell in the thick darkness. “What just happened?” Foxer began, but Jilly put her hand over his mouth and hushed him. She put her ear against the door. “He’s there!” she breathed. She heard an angry hissing, and the sound of hands brushing along the rock, then a final thump against the wall which set both their hearts leaping. Then the sounds went away.

“He’s gone,” Foxer said, but they still didn’t move. They waited a long time, hardly breathing, before they opened the door and stepped out. Jilly pulled the door shut behind them and it disappeared as if it had never been there.

“Did I just dream that?” Foxer said, staring at the key.

“A place of safety,” Jilly said, “like it said in the book.”

“It was probably a crack in the rock, just big enough for the two of us,” Foxer said, but they both knew he was trying to explain away something that couldn’t be explained.

They were very quiet on the way back to Jilly’s place. Jilly’s mum was pleased to see Foxer. “Come in, and I’ll get you something to eat,” she said. Something about Foxer always made her want to feed him.

Jilly and Foxer went towards the kitchen, but there was a knock at the front door and Jilly’s mum opened it. “Yes?” she said, uncertainly.

Jilly didn’t hear any words, but her mum turned to them and said, “Mr Black is here… he says he lost something at the beach, a key, and he thinks you may have picked it up. You do have an old key, don’t you, Foxer?”

Foxer growled fiercely, “It’s mine!”

Suddenly it was as if the house had been hit by a hurricane. The walls shook and the windows rattled. A huge wind swept through the house, knocking things off the shelves. The man they had glimpsed on the beach as a vague figure in black advanced into the room, huge and solid. Jilly’s mother was thrust outside the front door and it slammed after her.

Balls of white energy like fireballs spat from the man’s hands. “Give it to me!” His shout wasn’t a noise but a storm inside their heads.

“Run!” Jilly shouted. They raced for the stairs, while a nameless force pounded the house, shaking plaster off the ceiling and pushing furniture over. Flames of fire started licking at the curtains and bookshelves.

Jilly and Foxer were up the stairs in seconds and inside Jilly’s room. They slammed the door and piled everything they could move up against it, but in seconds it burst open. A whirlwind flew into the room, scattering chair, desk, bed, books and clothes into the air, forcing Jilly and Foxer back against the wall.

“Give it to me!” the voice demanded.

“The key, Foxer!” Jilly yelled. “Use the key!”

Foxer looked aghast. “There’s nothing behind this wall, just air!” he said.

“Do it – trust me!” Jilly screamed.

Foxer wrenched the key out of his pocket and tapped the wall three times, despite the force that did everything it could to drag it out of his hand. A keyhole appeared. In a flash, Foxer turned the key and pulled Jilly in through the door that appeared, and heaved it shut behind them.

The silence was unsettling. They were inside a perfectly ordinary room, with carpet and chairs and furniture. They couldn’t hear any sound from Jilly’s room on the other side of the door.

Jilly looked around. “I feel as if I’ve been here before,” she said softly.

Foxer said, “It’s my great-grandmother’s house. This was where I found the key, remember?”

“This is the place?” Jilly said.

“This is the same room,” he answered. “I found it under that cupboard.” He walked over to a high cupboard and bent down to look underneath it. “The ball is still there.”

“But how can it be?” Jilly gasped. “This house was demolished, years ago. It doesn’t exist.”

“We just opened a door that isn’t there, onto thin air, and you’re worried about a little thing like an old house being demolished?” Foxer said shakily. “Come on, it’s all getting beyond weird. Let’s get out of here.”

He put his hand on the door handle but it wouldn’t open. In fact, it was burning hot to his touch. “Ow! It won’t open!” he said, starting to panic. What if they were permanently stuck here?

“It’s a place of safety, remember?” Jilly said. “I think the door won’t open unless it’s safe for us to go out again.” Foxer still looked doubtful. “I’m sure,” she reassured him.

Foxer sat down, wishing he’d brought something to eat. “The question is,” Jilly said, “what are we going to do?”

It seemed like hours before the door was cool enough for them to touch, and when they finally opened it, they walked out through rooms blackened by smoke and scarred by fire. Water was dripping everywhere. Jilly’s mother was standing among a crowd of people on the road, with a blanket around her shoulders, being comforted by a neighbour. “Jilly!” she screamed. “You’re all right!” She ran to Jilly and threw her arms around her. “When the fire started and I couldn’t get the door open, I thought you were both gone! I tried everything to get in, and the fire-fighters searched everywhere for you! Where were you?”

“It’s okay, mum, we managed to get out – we were safe the whole time,” Jilly said, hugging her mother back. “Everything’s all right now.”

There was a lot of fussing with police and fire-fighters, but eventually everyone was just so pleased that the kids were okay, they accepted Foxer’s mumbled explanation about sheltering in an air pocket under some beams until it was safe to come out.

Jilly kept looking at Foxer, but he wouldn’t meet her eye. It had taken a lot of arguing inside the room which shouldn’t have been there, but she had finally convinced Foxer to put the key back where he had found it. She had watched him reach under the cupboard and push the key up, out of sight.

She looked at the fire-blackened house. The smell of burning made her cough. Then she looked at Foxer and smiled. He smiled back, then he put his hands in his pockets and strolled away whistling.

Stories for Another Day

If one day you happen to find yourself at the mudflats where the three great rivers meet, and you should happen to hear a low chuckling coming from somewhere near but out of sight, don’t be afraid, for it’s only the fisher cat. He won’t do you any harm at all, unless you happen to be a fish, of course.

In a kingdom far away, there was a ruler who had two daughters. The younger one, Nevis, was very pretty, with a sweet little nose and honey-coloured eyes, while the elder one whose name was Talana, was a strong, intelligent woman, brave and decisive.

Now their father died, and Talana, although she was still young, became queen. Immediately she she set herself to learn how to govern well so that she could take care of her people.

One of the members of the royal court was a nobleman named Selid. He had fine, flashing eyes and a way of tossing his cape carelessly over his shoulder that made all the ladies of the court sigh with longing. Selid’s ambition was to rule the kingdom, and the way to do that was to either marry the queen, or marry her sister and then dispose of the queen. The queen, Talana, was only interested in crops and education and health care. She hardly knew he existed, and if she had, she wouldn’t have spared him more than a look. Fine eyes and dark wavy hair held no charms for her, compared with good irrigation and new hospitals.

Selid turned his eyes to the queen’s younger sister, Nevis, who was as empty-headed as she was pretty. In record time he was engaged to her and they were married before a month had passed. Then his serious plotting began.

One night, in the cold, dark hours just before dawn, Talana’s maid shook her awake, whispering urgently, “Your majesty, please wake up! Your life is in danger!”

Talana stirred and opened her eyes. “What is it, Jinda? It’s not morning already, is it?”

Her maid said, quaking with fear, “You must leave now! Selid is planning to kill you!”

Talana sat up, fully awake. “What are you saying? Tell me, quickly.”

Jinda said, “My brother-in-law is Selid’s servant, and he heard him talking to himself this evening, after he had been drinking, saying that he means to kill you!”

“How could he kill me?” Talana said. “The royal guards are everywhere, and every one of them would give their lives to protect me.”

Her maid said, “As your sister’s husband, he can go anywhere in the palace. He has slipped a sleeping potion into the guards’ dinner tonight. He is planning to creep into your room just before dawn and drive a dagger into your heart! Then he’ll start shouting that an assassin has broken into the palace and killed you – but by then it will be too late! He will be king, which is all he has ever wanted!”

Talana couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “He would kill me? My own sister’s husband?”

“Please, your majesty, he could be on his way here even now!” Jinda pleaded.

Talana wasted no more time. She threw her clothes on, and she and Jinda climbed over the balcony as silently as they could, and then over the roofs of the laundries and the kitchens below. When they reached the ground, they ran through the palace gardens, towards the jungle that surrounded the palace.

When they reached the edge of the jungle, Talana glanced back, just once. She saw Selid framed in her window, high up in the palace wall, a knife glinting in his hand. Grabbing Jinda’s hand, she ran into the jungle.

The jungle was so thick that it was impossible to run for long. The two women walked for hours, pushing their way through dense bushes and even crawling in places, under the heavy vines. Tired and covered in scratches, they reached the banks of the broad estuary where the three great rivers come together and meet the waters of the sea.

“My family are fisher-folk in a village near here,” Jinda panted. “They will hide us willingly.”

“No,” said Talana. “Selid knows it was you who helped me, and your village is the first place he’ll look for us. We must find somewhere else to hide.”

“At least let us rest at my parents’ home, and eat something,” Jinda pleaded. They had been fighting their way through the jungle for hours, and she was exhausted. She led the queen to a tiny village on the very edge of the mudflats. The people were poor, living only on what they could grow and the fish that they could catch, but they were overjoyed to see their queen. The people prepared food while Talana and Jinda rested, then they all ate together, sitting around the fire.

“We cannot stay,” Jinda said to her mother. “The queen is not safe here.”

Her mother said, “You can’t hide in the jungle in such finery. Any hunter would see you a mile off.” She gave them clothes of her own to wear, and hid their silk dresses at the bottom of a cooking pot, covered in yams. But she did not notice that a strand of silk from Talana’s dress had caught on the rim of the pot.

Talana led the way along the banks of the river, stumbling and tripping over the mangrove roots that poked up like muddy fingers from the shallows of the river. “Oh, your majesty, you’re covered in mud!” Jinda wailed. It pained her to see all her hard work, keeping her mistress’s hair smooth and tidy and her hands and nails perfect, all ruined.

Talana laughed. “So much the better for hiding us in the mud flats,” she said. “The muddier the better!” And she lay down and rolled in the mud until she was covered from head to toe, and she made Jinda do the same.

Prince Selid had taken his horse and his hunting weapons and set out after them as quickly as he could. He went straight to Jinda’s village, as Talana had expected he would. “The queen must be here,” he ranted. “Jinda has kidnapped her and brought her here! Bring her out to me at once, or I will have your village burned to the ground!”

“The queen is not here!” the people cried. “We don’t know where she is!”

Selid refused to listen to them. He went from hut to hut, pulling over cupboards and slashing at beds in his rage, destroying everything he touched. Jinda’s mother’s hut was the last he came to. He upturned baskets and shelves but he found nothing, until his eye lit on the few strands of silk caught on the edge of the cooking pot. A cruel smile spread over his face.

He looked carefully at the floor of the hut and found faint marks of footprints that Talana and Jinda had left behind. He followed them like a bloodhound, along the banks of the river, through the mudflats, until he came to the mangrove forest. Then he crept along silently, his eyes everywhere, and his spear ready.

The women were deep in the forest, moving slowly, their feet cut and bruised from the roots and the shells that lay everywhere in the mud. Then Jinda heard a high, chittering sound. “Stop!” she hissed, putting her hand on Talana’s arm. “It is the monkey who warns the deer when the crocodile is near! He is telling us that Selid the hunter is close!”

Talana grasped her friend’s hand. “Hide yourself in the mud, deep in the forest,” she whispered. “I will climb one of the trees, and keep out of sight while I try to see where Selid is. Don’t make a sound!”

Jinda disappeared deeper into the forest, almost invisible in her muddy clothes. Talana climbed up the tallest tree she could find, and folded herself into a space between the branches. She huddled there, shivering with fear. Then she heard a sound like a quiet chuckle and she almost fell out of the tree with fright.

She looked up and saw the yellow-grey fur of the fisher cat. He was lying on the branch above her, slowly swinging his tail back and forth, and his eyes were fixed on her. With his dark spots and lines, he was almost invisible. He chuckled softly again.

“You frightened me, little brother!” Talana whispered. “Don’t betray me now. My life, and the kingdom, depends on it.” The fisher cat stared at her, and swung his tail silently.

On the riverbank, Selid had lost the trail among the mangrove roots and mud, but he kept searching as a hungry tiger searches for its prey. Then he found what he was looking for, traces of blood from the queen’s bleeding feet. He followed them, drop by drop, smiling to himself and muttering, “You thought you could get away, didn’t you? But I will never give up, until you are dead and your sister is queen, and I am king!”

The trail of blood led him straight to the bottom of the tree where Talana was crouched. He looked up and crowed, “I see you! Come down and meet your death!”

Talana yelled bravely, “Give up, Selid! My guards are all around you!”

Selid threw back his head and laughed. “Guards? I left them sound asleep in the palace. No-one can save you, foolish woman!”

He lifted his dagger, but then he heard a low chuckle. A small flame of fear leapt in his heart. Could Talana be speaking the truth? He heard another low chuckle on his left, and another behind him, then another and another. Seized with fear, he staggered back and started running away from the menacing voices. He tripped on the mangrove roots and went sprawling, his dagger flying out of his hand. Blinded by the mud in his eyes, he crawled into the river, where the crocodiles lie waiting with eager jaws and empty stomachs.

Selid was never seen again, and he was missed by nobody except his pretty wife, but she was soon comforted by another handsome nobleman. Talana returned to her palace and ruled wisely and well for many years. She made Jinda her Chief Advisor, and the people of Jinda’s village were rewarded with the right to hunt and fish along all of the three rivers, them and their children and their children’s children. But there was one animal that they and no-one else were allowed to hunt, and that was the fisher cat.

Stories for Another Day

Once there was a boy called Jessamy, but that wasn’t his real name. His real name was James, but from the time he was born, his grandmother called him Jessamy and she did it so often and so firmly that in no time everyone thought it was his real name. But it wasn’t. She did it because she knew something that nobody else knew.

Everyone knew the family legend that someone in the family named James would become fabulously wealthy and enormously powerful one day, so they all named their children James, hoping it would be their child. Jessamy had six cousins called James and four uncles and even an auntie. Someone had even hopefully called their cat James. But Jessamy’s grandmother knew the other half of the prophecy. One day someone named James would become fabulously wealthy and powerful, OR they would die a terrible, painful death trying to become wealthy and powerful. So when Jessamy’s parents named him James too, his grandmother wasn’t having any of that. “Jessamy,” she said firmly, “and that’s that.”

There were two things that made Jessamy special. One was that his left eye didn’t open properly. It was nearly shut all the time, and nobody knew why, not even his grandmother. The second thing was that he was not afraid to set out on an adventure without thinking about it first.

He wasn’t stupid – he knew it was a very bad idea to set off on a hot day without a hat or even a bottle of water, and he knew that maps were important if you didn’t want to get lost, so he generally asked his friend Jane to with come him, and you shall see why.

On the second Tuesday in September, Jessamy woke up and opened his right eye and knew without a doubt that today was a day to start out on a new adventure.

He called out the window to his friend Jane who lived two houses down and always slept with her window open, because that was the kind of person she was. By the time Jessamy was dressed and had finished his breakfast, Jane had arrived. She had two backpacks full of useful things like fold-up plates and snake repellent.

“Have you got your hat?” she asked Jessamy.

“Hat?” answered Jessamy, looking down the road dreamily.

Jane took a spare hat out of her backpack and jammed it onto Jessamy’s thick, curly hair. “Ready,” she said. She was already wearing her own hat.

“Let’s go,” Jessamy said. He led the way not down the road, as Jane expected, but into the kitchen, then down into the cellar, then through a door hidden behind the potato bin, down a long, dark passage with squishy things underfoot that Jane was terribly afraid might be slugs or leeches, then through a whole lot of twisty, turning tunnels, uphill and downhill, until he finally turned left, pushed at a big rock and brought them out into bright sunshine on the side of a mountain.

There was a loud clanging coming from nearby, and a heavy thumping shook the earth under their feet. “What’s that?” Jane asked. She was trembling so much that the knives and forks in her backpack jingled together.

“A giants’ jazz band?” suggested Jessamy. “Elephants playing tennis?”

Jane smiled and felt a bit better. “No, really,” she said, “what is it?”

“I don’t know,” Jessamy said. “Let’s go and find out.”

Jane was the kind of person that always wanted to wait and see, and Jessamy definitely wasn’t. When he strode off, she followed reluctantly behind him.

Around the side of the mountain, they found a group of big, strong men bashing at an iron door with the biggest hammers Jane had ever seen.

Jessamy bounced up to them and said, “What are you doing that for?”

The biggest man stopped bashing and wiped the sweat off his face. “We’re putting a door on this volcano,” he said, “to keep all the molten lava inside so it doesn’t get out and destroy our village.”

“I didn’t know there were any volcanoes around here,” Jessamy said.

“See for yourself,” the man said, pointing to a cloud of smoke rising from the top of the mountain.

Jessamy said to Jane, “A volcano, right here! We’ve got to see this.”

Jane took two pairs of fireproof shoes out of her backpack and they put them on and started climbing up the steep mountainside. It got hotter and hotter the closer they got to the top. At the very top they stopped. “It’s not a volcano,” Jane said, secretly relieved.

“No,” said Jessamy, “I didn’t think it would be.” There was a terrible, rotten-cabbage smell in air, that made Jane cough. Jessamy noticed an old man stoking a big fire with a long metal stick. Jessamy went up and asked him what he was doing.

“I’m just burning an old alligator skin,” the old man said. “They’re everywhere around here, messing the place up.”

Jane shivered and thought about getting out her telescopic alligator trident, but there didn’t seem to be much point if the alligator was already dead. She could tell that Jessamy was starting to feel uneasy. He was rubbing his ear and shifting from foot to foot. She pinched his arm and whispered, “Let’s go.”

The man said jovially, “There’s a short-cut to the bottom just over there behind that pile of rocks.”

“Come on, then,” Jane said, grabbing Jessamy’s arm.

The track the old man had pointed out was wide and grassy, with burnt patches here and there. As soon as they were out of sight, Jessamy whispered fiercely, “We have to hide, now!”

Jane had learnt over the years that when Jessamy said, “Now!” like that, you didn’t waste time arguing. She spotted a small cave among the rocks, and dragged Jessamy into it, covering the entrance with their backpacks, which were conveniently coloured camouflage green. They heard a heavy dragging sound, then a blood-curdling voice growled, “Where’s my dinner?”

Jessamy peered through a tiny gap with one eye. “I thought so,” he said. “It’s a big, old dragon.”

“A dragon?” Jane said, shrinking back into the farthest corner of the cave. “Couldn’t it be just a big alligator?”

“Talking and growling and breathing fire?” Jessamy said. “No, it’s a dragon all right. Those men weren’t blocking up a volcano, they were trying to seal a dragon inside the mountain. And that old man wasn’t burning an alligator skin, it was an old skin that the dragon had grown out of. When it’s burned, it’s supposed to make a powder that’s either deadly poison or makes you invincible.”

“Which one?” Jane asked. It seemed important to know.

Jessamy shrugged. “No-one knows, and no-one’s brave enough to try it and find out. The point is, there’s a living, fire-breathing dragon out there.”

“Now, Jessamy,” Jane began, as she usually did at about this point in their adventures.

Jessamy paid no attention, as he usually did. He pushed their backpacks out of the way and went outside. Jane grabbed the alligator trident out of her backpack and went after him.

“Hey!” Jessamy yelled. The dragon turned its head and fixed a yellow eye on him.

“Ah, dessert!” it smiled. There was no sign of the old man, just a heap of fine black powder where the fire had been, and a pair of empty boots.

Jessamy said, “You’re not going to eat us, you know.”

The dragon smiled widely, showing a million greasy teeth with horrible bits caught between them that Jane didn’t want to think about. “Oh, but I am,” it said, greedily. “First I’ll snap up the plump, juicy little girl, and then I’ll grind your bones and gulp you down.”

“No, you won’t,” Jessamy said. Jane’s tummy was going round and round. “All I have to do is open this eye,” Jessamy said, pointing to his left eye, “and it will see right through your leathery hide, right through your past and your present and into your future.”

Jessamy opened the eye that never opened and looked at the dragon, and through the dragon, and into time and space beyond the dragon. “Your mother called you Binkie, and you never cleaned your teeth,” Jessamy said. The dragon gasped. Jessamy went on, “You have just eaten your last meal. Your life will end here, in a puff of smoke.”

The dragon’s gasp turned into an angry snarl. It reached its savage claws towards Jessamy, but Jessamy kicked the pile of black powder directly into the dragon’s face. It snorted and choked, swallowed a mouthful of its own fire and exploded in a great cloud of smoke and flames.

When they were going down the mountain on their way home, Jane asked Jessamy, “How did you know all that about the dragon?”

Jessamy shrugged. “All dragons call their babies Binkie,” he said.

“What are you going to do with that powder?” she asked. She had noticed, because she was the kind of person that noticed things, that Jessamy had picked up a small handful of the black powder and put it in his pocket.

Jessamy smiled and told her, but that is a story for another day.

Stories for Another Day

From the time that Currie was a little girl, what she wanted most of all in the world was to travel and see different places and different people.

The best way to do this, she thought, was to go to sea. So she went down to the harbour, where a ship called the Flying Jenny was lying. She asked the captain of the ship if she could have a job on the ship and go to sea.

“A job?” shouted the captain in the loud, bellowing voice that he had got from bellowing at the crew over the noise of gales. “Doing what?”

Currie was quite small for her age, although she was spry and lively. “Cabin boy?” she asked.

“We’ve got one already,” shouted the captain, “and in case it’s escaped your notice although it hasn’t escaped mine, you’re not a boy.”

“Kitchen hand, then,” Currie said.

“Can you cook?” asked the captain.

“No,” said Currie.

“No, then,” replied the captain. “And before you ask, we’ve got a first mate, a second mate, a third mate and plenty of common sailors.”

“What about someone to scrub the deck?” Currie asked. “I’m good at scrubbing.” (Which she was, having spent nearly all her life so far scrubbing dirty clothes and dirty dishes and dirty floors, and shows you how much she really wanted to go to sea because the last thing she wanted to do was more scrubbing).

The captain scratched his head. None of the sailors liked scrubbing the deck. They were always complaining about it, and trying to find ways of getting out of it.

“All right,” he yelled, “but you’ll have to sleep in the lifeboat because all the hammocks are already taken, and if you’re sea-sick, make sure you do it over the side or you’ll have to scrub the deck all over again.”

And so Currie went to sea. She wasn’t sea-sick at all, ever, but she sometimes wished the deck wasn’t so dirty and there wasn’t so much of it, so she might have more than five minutes a day to look up from her bucket and scrubbing brush to catch a glimpse of the wonderful places they were visiting.

She was as happy as a person doing what they have always wanted to do can be, until the day the ship came to a beautiful island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Delicious fruit hung from the trees, pawpaws and coconuts and mangoes and breadfruit. The people who lived there were very friendly, and they invited all the ship’s crew to stay as long as they liked.

The whole crew, from the captain to the cabin boy, were heartily sick of being at sea all day every day, and most of them were close to retiring anyway, even the cabin boy, who was sixty-five years old but no-one would ever guess. They all decided to stay on the island, and drink pawpaw smoothies and eat fresh fruit salad every day, and they got off the ship.

“Hey!” said Currie, who hadn’t had nearly enough travelling and seeing exotic places. “What about me?” She sat down on the deck and cried.

The captain, who was very fond of mangoes and had been looking for an island like this all his life, scratched his beard. “Tell you what,” he bellowed. “You haven’t been paid a penny for all that scrubbing, have you?”

Currie shook her head.

“Well then, why don’t you have the Jenny?” He took off his captain’s cap and plonked it on Currie’s head.

Currie stopped crying and said, “Me? Captain?” The cap was too big and Currie didn’t have the faintest idea how to drive a ship or how to find her way across the ocean. “But there aren’t any sailors,” she said, and there weren’t because they were all lying under the palm trees drinking fresh coconut milk, or swimming on the golden, sandy beach.

The third mate, whose name was Tom, spoke up. “I’ll stay with you,” he said. He liked Currie very much and he thought sailing with her would be fun.

Currie made him first mate, which he was very pleased about. They found a new cabin boy and some new sailors from among the island people who were sick of having nothing to eat but mangoes and breadfruit and wanted to see the world, and they sailed away.

Currie gave the orders, generally the wrong ones, but Tom helped out and explained how sailing was done. They did a lot of zigzagging when they were meant to be going straight ahead, and they nearly capsized once or twice because the sailors from the island didn’t know much more than Currie did about sailing, but after a while, with a lot of help from Tom, they all got the hang of it and got along quite well.

They sailed north, and east, and south and west. Sometimes they took passengers with them, and sometimes they carried cargo which needed to be taken from one place to another, which was a good thing because sailors expect to be paid, and passengers and cargo both pay very well.

Once there they were caught in a terrible gale. The winds were so strong that everyone was sure they would be blown over and sink to the bottom, but Currie told them all to be brave and she promised them a holiday if they saved the ship from sinking, so they worked like superheroes and the ship was saved.

They found a beautiful island to visit for their holiday, with some excellent night markets with noodles and dumplings and even a funicular railway. All the sailors decided they weren’t going back to the ship, except Tom, of course. Currie sat down on the deck and cried. “How am I going to sail with no sailors?” she wailed. But Tom said they would easily find new sailors from among the people on the island who were tired of noodles and dumplings, and they did, because conditions on board the Jenny were very good and the pay was fair. Tom did all the cooking, with plenty of fresh vegetables, and Currie made sure that everyone took their turn at scrubbing the deck.

So they sailed off again, south and west and east and north, until one day something happened to Currie’s insides. She began to feel sad, as if she was missing something. One day as she was telling the sailors to haul in the sails and check the barometer, she started to cry.

Tom put his arm around her and asked what was wrong. “I don’t know,” she wailed. “I feel… I want… I think I want to go home!”

Tome’s face cleared. “You’re homesick! Let’s turn around then, and you can go home.”

“Can I ?” Currie said. “But this is what I’ve always dreamed of doing, sailing across the seas and seeing new things and new people every day.”

Tom said, “That doesn’t mean you can’t go back, if you want to.”

So they sailed all the way back to the harbour where Currie had first gone aboard the Flying Jenny. When they dropped anchor, Currie looked up the hill towards the house where her mother lived, and she sat down on the deck and cried.

Tome looked at her with his hands on his hips and said, “You do that a lot, you know.”

“I know,” Currie sobbed. “I get it from my mother.”

“What’s the matter?” he asked kindly.

Currie sniffed and hiccuped and said, “I want to go home, but I want to stay here on the Jenny too, with you!”

Tom laughed and took Currie into his arms. He was very pleased, because as you know, he liked Currie a lot and he had been wondering for a long time if she liked him too.

“You don’t have to let your dreams rule your life,” he said softly. “You can spend some of your time at home and some of your time at sea, if you like. You could even ask your mother to come sailing with us, if she wants to.”

Currie cheered up and blew her nose. “Will you wait for me, Tom?” she said.

“Of course,” he said. “The ship can’t sail without her captain.” He kissed her lightly on the tip of her nose and she went ashore, walking up the hill towards her old home.

Stories for Another Day

In a family of girls, Bry was the only boy, and he felt it very deeply. Through a series of events that there is no need to go into here, Bry had a gold coin, all of his own, to do whatever he wanted with. He kept it with him all the time, either in his pocket or under his pillow. If he was working in the garden, he kept it in a little bag on a string around his neck.

Bry and his three sisters and their mother had a cottage of their own but not much else, so they had to work hard to be able to buy food. His mother did other people’s washing, and she and the girls spent all day scrubbing and bleaching and rinsing and ironing and folding, while Bry worked in the garden, where the soil was so poor and full of rocks that it would only grow thin turnips and shrivelled cabbages.

One night Bry had a dream. In it he was sitting at the table with his sisters, Annis and Gelda and Currie, and his mother. They were all much older, and his mother was very old. Annis was no longer pretty, and Gelda had lost the dreaming look she always had in her eyes, and Currie was no longer as lively as a monkey. Bry’s gold coin was lying in the middle of the table, and they were all gazing at it. Bry was thinking how good it was that he hadn’t lost it after all this time.

Then he woke up from his dream and a cold chill seized him. He put his hand under his pillow and drew out the gold coin and stared at it. What was the use of keeping it, and never using it to bring good to anyone?

The next day and the next day he thought and thought about what he should do with his gold coin. Finally he knew exactly what he wanted to do. He went to the market and came home struggling under the weight of a large barrel.

“There!” he said, heaving it into the middle of the room.

“What did you buy?” Annis demanded. Everyone crowded around to see.

“Books!” Bry said. “A whole barrel full of books!”

“Books?” Annis said. “When you might have bought dresses, or shoes?”

“Or fish, or blankets,” his mother said sadly. “What use are books when none of you can read?”

“You can teach us, Mama,” Bry said.

Annis shook her head scornfully. “I’m not going to give myself wrinkles, screwing my eyes up to read.”

Gelda, the middle sister with the faraway look in her eyes, asked, “What’s in them?”

“I don’t know,” Bry confessed. “I went to the market to spend my gold coin, and while I was trying to decide what to buy, I found this old barrel of books that the bookseller was going to throw away, and he gave them to me for the price of the barrel.”

Currie had already pulled the lid off the barrel and was scattering books everywhere. “Eeuuyew, they’re all mouldy and covered with dust,” she said, sneezing and coughing.

Their mother looked at some of the titles of the books. “I’m afraid you’ve wasted your money on a load of rubbish,” she said, shaking her head.

But Bry was determined. He brushed and dusted and cleaned the books and set them on a shelf that he made out of wood from the barrel. Every night, even though he could hardly stay awake after his day’s work, he made his mother show him what the letters meant and how to sound out the words. It took him a whole year of puzzling and stuttering, but eventually he could read any of the books on his shelf. Then he felt more disappointed than he had ever felt.

One day he threw down the book he was reading, in disgust. “Who would want to read about any of this?” he said in disgust. “It’s nothing but petticoats and bonnets and slippers!”

Annis pricked up her ears. She picked up the book. It was full of drawings of elegant ladies in dresses and furs. She fell on it like a starving person on a loaf of bread. “What does this say? And this?” she demanded.

“It says, ‘Gown for evening, French lace and satin’,” he told her. “What a waste of time!” He went to get up, but Annis pulled him back.

“Read me what this says,” she said.

“I’m too tired to read this rubbish,” he yawned. Then he said, craftily, “But I can teach you how to read it for yourself.” And so, night after night for the next few months, he taught Annis how to read. She never wanted to read any of the other books, but this book she read over and over.

Bry began to think. He said to his sister, Gelda, “Those stars you’re always gazing at, would you like to know their names?”

Gelda spun around from the window. “They have names? Tell me!”

Bry said, “I don’t know them myself, but there is a book here about astronomy, and another one about stars and planets.”

“Why haven’t you told me this before?” Gelda gasped. “Read them to me!”

Again Bry said, “I couldn’t be bothered with all that dry stuff, but I can teach you how to read them yourself, if you like.”

Gelda couldn’t wait to learn. Every spare moment she had, she pestered Bry to teach her more and more. In just a few short weeks she was reading by herself. When she wasn’t reading, she was lying on her bed, gazing out of the window, naming the stars she could see, one by one.

Bry tried to think of a way to get Currie to learn to read too, even though she was still very little. He took a small, blue book off his shelf, and began reading aloud. “Once there was a fairy who lived inside the petals of a bluebell.” Before he had even turned the page, Currie was snuggled in his lap, pointing to the pictures and listening to every word that he read. When he reached the end and closed the book, Currie began to cry. “Read some more!” she pleaded.

Bry said, “Wouldn’t you like to be able to read all by yourself, so you can read the book any time you want to, when I’m working or asleep?”

Currie shrugged. She liked being read to, without the work of reading for herself.

“There are lots of other books you might like,” Bry said. “There’s one about castles, and one about flowers, and one about pirates…”

“Pirates!” Currie said. “Let me see!” So Currie learned how to read too.

As time went on, Annis used her favourite book to teach herself how to make her own dresses and petticoats. One day she was sitting outside, sewing in the sunshine, when a very grand carriage drove up. It stopped, and a grand lady stepped out. Annis curtsied very low.

The grand lady said, “I’m looking for a wife for my son. It’s time he got married, and you’re certainly very pretty. But I don’t want an ignorant, useless girl. Can you read and write?”

“Yes, my lady,” Annis said, curtsying again.

“Can you do anything else useful?” the lady asked.

“I can wash and iron and sew,” Annis said.

“Come along, then, you’ll do nicely,” said the lady. Annis kissed her mother goodbye, then she hopped into the carriage and it drove off.

Bry and Gelda and Currie looked at each other in amazement. Their mother wailed, “Who’s going to do all the work now?”

Bry sighed, and said, “I will,” so as well as digging and weeding in the garden, he scrubbed and washed the clothes.

Another year went by, and one day Gelda said, “I’m going away to be an astronomer. I’ve been writing to a famous astronomer, Professor Holst, and he wants me to come and work with him.” She kissed everyone goodbye, took her favourite astronomy book, and left.

Her mother wailed and sobbed. “Now who will do all the folding and the ironing?”

Bry sighed deeply. “I will,” he said, so he had to work three times as hard as before.

In no time at all, Currie said to Bry and her mother, “I’ve had enough of washing and ironing. I’m going to sea, to learn to sail and become a sea captain.” Her mother started wailing and sobbing and moaning, but Bry knew it was for the best, so he kissed Currie goodbye, and warned her to look out for pirates.

Bry’s mother pointed her finger at him. “This is all your doing, with your books and your reading,” she said.

Now another year and a day passed, and one day a very fine carriage drew up at the door and out stepped Annis, dressed in satin and lace. “Mama, I’ve come to take you to live with me,” she said. “I’m the lady of the house now, and I sleep in a soft bed and never see a washing tub from one day’s end to the next.” Her mother was so overjoyed, she couldn’t speak.

Just then another carriage drew up, and Gelda stepped out, wearing a dark cloak and a mysterious jewel on a chain around her neck. “Mama, you’ve worked so long and hard for so many years, I’ve come to take you to live with me. There’s plenty of room with the professor and me in our astronomer’s tower.”

Her mother was filled with amazement. One daughter a fine lady and one a famous astronomer! Then there was a shout and Currie came striding up the hill, wearing tall leather boots and a hat with a red feather. “Mama,” she said, “I’m the captain of my own ship, now. Come and sail the oceans with me!”

Her mother stared and stared, and didn’t know what to say. A wide grin spread over Bry’s face. All this, from one small gold coin!

His mother said, “Well, now, I’d like to see the world but I don’t fancy all the steps in a tower. Why don’t I stay half the year with you, Annis, and the other half on Currie’s ship?”

So it was decided. But Bry’s face fell. “What about me?” he said. “I can’t manage all the scrubbing and washing and folding and ironing as well as the garden all by myself.”

His sisters laughed. “You’ll become a teacher, of course,” Annis said. “You won’t need to take in other people’s washing ever again, and you can pay someone to come and work in the garden for you.”

So Currie threw all the washing out of the window and they set up desks and pencils for all the children that Bry would be teaching. “You’ll have so many students and they’ll all pay you,” Gelda said. “What will you do with all that money?”

Bry looked at his shelf of books and he began to smile and smile.

Stories for Another Day

Into a small town one day walked a young woman named Liana, whom you may already have heard of in another story. She was very beautiful, with long, wavy, fair hair, long enough for her to sit on if she wanted to. As she walked along, she seemed to be looking for something. She passed through the town and came to a forest just outside the town. She went on until she came to a clearing among the trees. Looking around, she nodded to herself as if she had found just what she was looking for.

She took out of her pocket a long sharp splinter of wood. At its very tip there was a drop of red blood, the heart’s blood of a good and kind man. Liana looked at the splinter and smiled to herself. With a sharp thrust, she pushed it deep into the ground.

Immediately a tree sprang up, first a green sapling, that grew into a young tree with a straight trunk and strong branches while she watched. Tiny buds appeared all over the tree, and burst into flowers, each holding a small, green fruit inside. Liana fetched a bucket of water and poured it over the roots of the tree. The green fruits grew round and plump and ripe, each one a golden yellow peach that seemed to glint in the sun.

Liana nodded to herself, satisfied. Then she took a walnut out of her pocket. She blew on it and it unfolded and unfolded into a small cottage. She went inside and shut the door, and settled down to wait.

The cottage stood on the edge of a path that people from the town often passed along. Before long, a wealthy merchant came past, in his grey suit and his shiny black shoes. When he saw the tree covered in heavy, delicious fruit, he stopped and began to eat and eat and eat. He ate until he was full to overflowing, then he grabbed all the fruit he could reach and stuffed his pockets, even inside his shirt and his trousers. But all the time as he was gulping and swallowing, the man was slowly turning into a huge grey toad.

Liana came to the door of the cottage and put her head out. “Who’s there?” she called.

The merchant hopped away as fast as his four legs with their shiny black spots could carry him.

A little while later, a woman came along with three children, and a baby crying in her arms. They were all dressed in rags, thin and pale as children are who have not had enough to eat for a long time. The eldest child, a boy named Bry, saw the tree first and he pulled at his mother’s arm. “Mama, could we eat some of the fruit of this tree? It looks so good, and there is so much of it. They wouldn’t miss it if we took just one or two.” His little sisters began to cry at the sight of the peaches, and the baby wailed louder than ever.

“Knock on the door of the cottage, Bry,” his mother said, “and ask if we may take some.”

Bry ran to the door and knocked. Liana looked out and called, “Who’s there?”

“Please, may we pick some of the fruit from your tree?” the boy asked.

“It’s not my tree,” Liana said. “The fruit is free for anyone who needs it.” She shut the door.

The children tried to reach the delicious fruit, but the merchant had already picked every bit of the fruit that was within reach. The girls began to cry again, but Bry said, “Mama, let me climb on your shoulders!” He climbed up, and standing on the tips of his toes, he picked the last pieces of the fruit and passed them down.

They all ate hungrily, and even the baby stopped crying. With full tummies and rosy faces, they went on their way.

A long time passed. Liana sat at one window and then at another, looking out impatiently.

Eventually she saw a young man coming along, walking slowly even though he seemed to be in a hurry. Behind him there were twelve turtles walking in a perfectly straight line.

The young man, Gregory, noticed the tree beside the cottage and he smiled. Every bit of fruit was gone, but looking very carefully, he noticed one last golden peach almost hidden among the leaves at the very top of the tree. But how could he get it down? He thought of climbing the tree, but its branches weren’t strong enough to bear his weight. There was no ladder or anything to stand on. He stood looking up for a long time while the turtles gathered around him. The littlest turtle, Pipi, nudged his ankle. The young man looked down, and he saw that the turtle held a small, round stone in his mouth.

Gregory smiled. Aiming very carefully, he threw the stone up into the tree. It struck the twig holding the last piece of fruit and snapped it, and the golden fruit dropped into his waiting hands. It was soft and ripe and it smelled wonderful.

He knocked on the door of the cottage. Liana’s voice called, “Who’s there?” She opened the door and saw Gregory smiling at her. “Oh, it’s you,” she said. “You’ve been a long time.”

Gregory pointed to the turtles, who were politely pretending not to listen. “I couldn’t travel as fast as I wanted to. Turtles aren’t speedy, you know,” he said. “I’ve looked everywhere for you.” He held out the piece of fruit to her.

She took it and smiled, and kissed him, just once. She gave Pipi a gentle pat, then she stepped out of the cottage, folded it up and put it back into the walnut shell. She put the walnut into her pocket and off they went together, with the turtles following behind in a straight line, murmuring happily to each other.

In case you wanted to know what happened to the poor family with the crying baby, not far down the road they found a flock of crows, picking at something on the path. The crows flew off when Bry came up to see what it was. “It’s just an old dead toad,” he told his mother. In fact, the toad, hurrying to get away, was so heavy with the fruit he had eaten that his heart had burst.

“Don’t touch it,” his mother warned.

Bry peered closely into the remains the crows had left behind. “There’s something inside it,” he said. He carefully lifted out a bag, that clinked. When he opened it, it was filled with gold coins.

“So much money!” his mother said. “I wonder whose it is?”

“I guess it’s ours now,” Bry said. “It’s no good to the toad any more.”

“We should take it to the king,” his mother said. “It may be stolen, or someone may have lost it.” So they did. The king thanked them very much, and gave them a much smaller bag of coins as a reward.

Bry’s mother used the money to buy a cottage, and new clothes and new shoes for all the children. With good food and a sound roof over their heads, the family quickly grew strong and healthy. But the mother kept one of the coins and gave it to Bry. “Keep it, and use it as you think best,” she said, and Bry promised he would. But what he did with it, and why, is a story for another day.

Stories for Another Day

Once there were two brothers, Zan and Denny, who loved each other very much. Zan was older than Denny and he looked after him as the best older brothers do. They were both very musical. Denny played the trumpet, but Zan, who liked things a little quieter, was a music teacher.

Denny was a very good trumpeter. He loved playing and he practised for hours every day. One day he said to Zan, “I think I’m ready to try out for the King’s Marching Band.”

Zan frowned. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he said. “It’s too dangerous.”

You may not think that playing the trumpet in a marching band could be dangerous, but Zan was right, and this is the reason why.

The king had a beautiful daughter, and the Prime Minister, whose name unfortunately was Dumm, wanted to marry her, not because he was in love with her or even liked her very much but because he had had enough of being prime minister and he thought it would be nice to be king instead, and have a prime minister of his own to order around.

The princess, Runie, wouldn’t even look at him. He was much, much older than she was, and not at all good-looking or dashing or nice, and besides, he had a bristly moustache that made her feel peculiar whenever she looked at it.

Now many years ago when Princess Runie was still a baby, a fortune-teller had predicted that she would one day marry a man who played the trumpet. This presented a difficulty for Dumm. He couldn’t play the trumpet, not a note. In fact he wasn’t sure which was the right way up to hold a trumpet, so as soon as the princess reached marriageable age, he went out and started having lessons straight away, from our friend Zan. However, his lips were all wrong, his fingers kept slipping and his ear for music was so bad that small animals ran away and hid whenever he started to play. In the end, Zan advised him to take up gardening, or embroidery, anything but playing the trumpet.

Dumm was discouraged, but he didn’t give up, which is a good lesson for all of us. He was also wicked and resourceful and calculating, which isn’t so good. He said to himself, “Predictions have been wrong before. Perhaps it is her second or third husband who will be a trumpeter.”

His first plan was to Eliminate the Competition, which meant that he would get rid of all the trumpeters in the kingdom. He went to the king and suggested that there should be no brass players in the Marching Band. “It’s unhygienic, your Majesty. All that spit everywhere,” he said.

“No, no!” answered the king. “What sort of king has no trumpeters to play a fanfare when he goes out to open a new bridge, or when he wants to announce the arrival of a new royal baby?”

“But your Majesty!” said the Prime Minister.

“No,” interrupted the king. “I don’t want to hear another word. I’m very partial to a good brass band, and mine is the best in the kingdom!”

This was true, because it was the only brass band in the kingdom, the Prime Minister having thoughtfully sent all the others on extended overseas tours, or paid them to stop playing music and become market gardeners instead. So Dumm had to come up with another plan, and after some thought, he did.

One by one, trumpeters started disappearing from the king’s Marching Band.

“I don’t understand it,” said the king, one Saturday morning after the regular Marching Band parade had finished and the players had all gone inside to change out of their uniforms and put their instruments away. “Why does the Marching Band seem to be getting smaller?”

“It’s the trumpets,” said the princess, who had noticed the same thing. “The trumpets are always last in line, and every week, there is one less.”

Dumm coughed a little. “I’m afraid there is a very worrying reason for that,” he said. “I’ve investigated the matter thoroughly, and it seems that the last player in the line disappears, every week.”

“Disappears?” said the king.

“And signs of huge claw marks, and sometimes scorched trees have been seen where the player was last seen,” Dumm said darkly.

“Claw marks?” gulped the princess.

Dumm nodded. “It’s my belief that there is a dragon – “

“Dragon?” squeaked the king.

“- a dragon,” Dumm went on, “who is disturbed when the band goes past, and has a particular aversion to trumpets. You know that dragons hate music of any kind, and brass instruments make their scales rattle and their ears hurt. And we all know what happens if something upsets a dragon.”

The king said, trembling a little, “So you think he snaps up the last trumpeter in the line as the band goes past?”

“I’m afraid so,” said the prime minister, smiling to himself. It was exactly what he wanted the king to think.

“Nonsense!” said the king, pulling himself together. “Everyone knows that the last dragons died out years ago. There must be another reason. Either those trumpeters are too lazy to get out of bed, or they have taken jobs with better pay, as cooks or plumbers. Find me new trumpeters, and pay them better!” he shouted.

This was not at all part of Dumm’s plan, but he had to bow respectfully and say, “Yes, your Majesty.”

It was just after this that Denny decided he wanted to join the king’s Marching Band.

“It’s too dangerous,” Zan told him.

“Dangerous? Playing the trumpet?” Denny laughed. “Ridiculous! Besides, the pay is excellent.”

“But what about all the trumpeters who keep disappearing?” Zan asked.

“That makes more room for me,” Denny answered. The very next day he tried out for the band, and was accepted immediately. He was a very good trumpeter, as I said, but it must be said that the band’s conductor was finding it very hard to find new trumpeters and he wasn’t fussy. He put Denny in the front line of trumpeters.

Every Saturday, Denny put on the black and red uniform of the marching band and marched in front of the king, playing loudly and tunefully. And every Saturday, another trumpeter disappeared, always the last in line.

The king gave new orders. “Let the drummers go last, instead of the trumpets.” But the drummers all got out of time unless they were right under the conductor’s eye, and everyone lost the beat and marched all over the place, so that was no good.

“Place my finest guards at the end of the parade, to protect the trumpeters,” the king ordered, but somehow the guards were always too late, or didn’t arrive at all. In fact, Dumm put sleeping powders in their bedtime cocoa, or he snipped the buttons off their uniforms and hid the needles and thread, so they couldn’t go out in public. Still the trumpeters kept disappearing.

Zan got more and more worried about Denny. One day he would be last in line, and whatever was happening to the last trumpeter would happen to him. In between teaching his music students, Zan played slow, mournful songs on the tuba while he tried to think of what to do. Princess Runie, leaning out of her tower, heard him playing and her heart was touched. She borrowed an apron from her maid and wrapped it around her satin dress, and walked through the town until she found the place where the spell-binding music was coming from. She slipped inside and listened.

When Zan stopped playing, Runie wiped a tear away and said to him, “You play so beautifully, and so sadly.”

Zan sighed deeply. “My younger brother has joined the king’s marching band,” he said.

The princess said, “But that’s wonderful! He must be a very good player.”

“He is,” said Zan, “but he plays the trumpet.”

“Oh no!” said Runie.

Zan said, “Every week another trumpeter disappears, and now Denny is the last one left. I’m afraid he is in terrible danger.”

“What are you going to do?” asked Runie, as worried as he was.

“I’m going to borrow a uniform, and walk behind Denny, playing the trumpet,” Zan said grimly.

“But then you will be the last trumpeter!” Runie said. Her heart shook at the thought of his bravery, and the danger he would be in. “But can you even play the trumpet?” she asked.

“Of course,” said Zan. “And the flute and the piano accordion and the mandolin, and the xylophone, and a little on the tenor horn in E flat. A music teacher must be versatile.”

Runie’s eyes shone warmly with admiration. But at the same time she was thinking.

The next Saturday, Dumm was ready. He climbed up to the top of a high hill, carrying a heavy crowbar. He carefully loosened a very large rock. “Now, when the marching band passes underneath,” he said to himself, “one push with my crowbar against this rock, and the last trumpeter is history! The princess will be mine at last!” He smiled to himself, picturing his wedding day, with the princess walking down the aisle all in white, while an orchestra entirely composed of strings played, with not a trumpet in sight.

He could hear the sound of the marching band coming nearer and he got ready with his crowbar. The musicians came in sight, and Dumm stared in amazement. Behind the last trumpeter there was another trumpeter in a poorly-fitting uniform, playing the trumpet really very badly.

Dumm’s face darkened like thunder. He sent the huge rock crashing down on top of both the trumpeters. Quick as lightning, he ran down the hill and loaded their bodies into a cart that he had placed there earlier. He drove the cart away to a dungeon in the castle that had a back door that only he knew about. He unlocked the door and bundled them inside. “That’s the last of you,” he crowed triumphantly.

The dungeon was full of trumpeters. Dumm was naturally too squeamish to kill any of them, so he had kidnapped every one of them. He kept them locked in the dungeon, and had his servants feed them as much bread and cheese and boiled potatoes and sardines as they wanted, but he was careful to lock their trumpets away in another room, in case someone heard them playing and came to their rescue.

The last two trumpeters began to stir and wake up. This first one, who was Denny, shook his head and said, “What happened?”

Dumm rubbed his hands together with glee and said, “Now that I have rid the kingdom of every last trumpeter, I plan to marry the princess, no matter what any fortune-teller may say. Then I will have you released, once it is too late to stop me.”

The last trumpeter, the one in the poorly-fitting uniform, took off a crushed and battered cap. “Not if I have anything to do with it,” she said. It was Princess Runie.

Dumm almost fell over himself. “Your highness,” he stammered. “How did you… what are you doing in that uniform?”

“Denny’s brother, Zan, was planning to be the last trumpeter, but I gave him some of your sleeping powders and I took his place,” the princess said.

“But you don’t even play the trumpet!” Dumm expostulated.

“No, but a princess is nothing if not versatile,” she said. “Seize him!” she said to the other trumpeters, which they gladly did.

Dumm was exiled to an island overrun with elephants whose trumpeting kept him awake day and night. Denny became head trumpeter in the marching band, and Princess Runie married Zan, of course. They had many children, who were all very musical, and every one of them played the tambourine.

Stories for Another Day

One hot, sunny day, a black-tailed godwit was bobbing his head in and out of the water near a muddy bank when he saw a fat, curly worm just coming out of its hole in the side of the bank. The godwit gave a flap of his wings and flew up onto the bank, but he happened to land on some rocks that were so hot that they burned his feet.

He hopped up and down, first on one foot then on the other saying, “Ow, ow! Ow, ow, oww!” The worm quickly wriggled back to safety inside its hole. The godwit flew off angrily.

A flock of flamingos standing nearby had seen what the godwit was doing. “That was a very interesting dance the godwit was doing, don’t you think?” said one of the flamingos, who was called Fay.

Her sister, Pim, said, “Yes, interesting, and unusual. Shall we try it?”

The flamingos, who were well known for their elegance, bent their knees and lifted their legs gracefully and elegantly, and held out their wings so that the wind ruffled the tips of their feathers.

A herd of deer were standing nearby, watching the flamingos out of the corners of their eyes. The deer, who often came down to drink at the side of the river, spent a great deal of their time watching the flamingos and trying to copy everything they did. “Ooh, a new dance!” they said to each other. They kicked up their hooves and shook their heads so that their ears flapped, glancing at the flamingos now and then to check that they were doing it right.

The flamingos, who were very modest by nature and hated being stared at, blushed a beautiful shade of pink and stood with their heads bowed, drawing one leg up under their wings.

Now, hidden in the undergrowth nearby, a streak of tigers was watching the deer, for their own reasons, which included it being around lunchtime and feeling peckish and knowing for a fact that deer are foolish, feckless creatures. The tigers watched the deer kicking up their heels and knocking their knees together and they said to each other, “What are they doing?”

They stared hard at the deer without blinking, which is something tigers are very good at. “Is that dancing, or do they have fleas?” said one, whose name was Dallas.

“They may call it dancing,” said the leader, whose name was Begley, “but personally I would be embarrassed to do anything like that in public.” He stretched and yawned. “My family has always been known as the most beautiful dancers in the whole of the seven kingdoms,” he said, which was complete rubbish, but as you know, tigers are the most vain of all animals.

The other tigers bristled when they heard this. “My grandfather won a prize for his slow waltz,” Dallas claimed. “I still have the trophy somewhere.”

“Ladies have been known to faint when they see me salsa,” said the oldest and fattest of the tigers. A young tiger snickered unwisely and received a sharp tap on the nose.

“I’ve always found,” Begley said, not wanting to be left out, “that the tango suits my body shape perfectly. Not to mention my wonderful feeling for rhythm.”

None of the others were sure what a tango was, so they kept quiet. The youngest one thought it might be a kind of fruit.

“Why don’t you have a competition?” said a squeaky voice. It was the worm, who had wriggled over to see what was happening and whether or not he could get mixed up in it.

“A competition?” sniffed Begley. “We might do, if there were a prize worth competing for.” The last thing he wanted was a competition, since he had no idea what a tango was either.

“Didn’t someone say they had a trophy?” the worm asked. For a small creature, he had an extraordinary sense of hearing.

Dallas looked uncomfortable. The trophy his grandfather had won had not been for dancing at all. It had ‘Prettiest Baby’ engraved on it in big letters. He shuddered to think how the other tigers would laugh if they ever saw it. He would never be able to look any of them in the face again. He would simply have to win the competition himself so that he could keep the trophy and no-one would ever see it. And there was only one way to do that.

He got to his feet with a graceful leap and said, “As to who should judge the competition, it will have to be someone experienced in the whole range of dancing, from modern to old-fashioned, to… everything else. In all modesty, I think that would have to be me.”

A long snort, or perhaps a snore, came from further along the bank, where Shukshu, the old hawksbill turtle, had been half-snoozing and half keeping an eye on the tigers while they watched the deer. He cleared his throat and asked mildly, “Do you think it’s a good idea for one of the competitors to be the judge?”

The tigers jumped up to see who was speaking. “Oh, Shukshu, magnificent one!” Begley said. “You speak wisely, as always.”

Shukshu snorted again. Tigers always spoke to him that way, very differently from the way they spoke about him when they thought he wasn’t listening. He yawned and said, “So you want me to judge your dancing competition, do you?”

Dallas said uncomfortably, “I meant someone with experience. A dancer, himself, I thought, who knows about dancing, and so on.”

“Experience?” Shukshu said, executing a very nice pirouette, balanced on one foot. “Someone who know what they’re talking about, eh?” He tap-danced on his back feet and finished with an expert soft-shoe shuffle. He sat down again and said, “Who’s first then? You, Dallas?”

Dallas didn’t have any choice but to step forward, but as he did so, he suddenly began to limp violently. “Ow! Ow! My ankle!” he yelped. “I think I’ve twisted it.” He stood on three legs, holding his front paw in the air. “Possibly even sprained it,” he said. “I couldn’t possibly dance today, I’m sorry.” He sat down again.

Shukshu sniffed. “Next!” he said.

Begley coughed and said, “Any other day I’d love to be in your little competition but my gout is playing up today.” He slid away into the forest.

The next tiger excused himself because he was having a dizzy spell, and the next one had a bad case of eye-strain, and the next thought he might be coming down with a cold. One by one the tigers made excuses and melted away into the forest.

Dallas was the only one left. “That seems to be the end of the competition,” he said. He shrugged, grinning to himself. The trophy was still his, and no-one would see it. He went to walk off, limping on the wrong foot, when Shukshu stopped him.

“Speaking as the judge, I think we have a clear winner,” Shukshu said, showing off his highland fling.

“You?” Dallas said. “Wasn’t it you who said that the judge can’t be a competitor?”

“No, not me,” Shukshu said, frostily. “The best dancer for miles around is Pim.”

“Pim?” Dallas said, looking around. The youngest, prettiest flamingo looked down modestly, and gave a graceful bow.

“The trophy, if you please,” Shukshu said, firmly.

Dallas went red from the tip of his tail to the tip of his nose with anger. He snarled, and if Shukshu hadn’t been standing on his tail, he would have sprung. Instead, he brought out the trophy and gave it sulkily to Shukshu, who held it up high for all the world to see.

“The winner of the dancing competition, AND Prettiest Baby, is Pim!” Everyone clapped, except Dallas who had stalked off, and the rest of the tigers, who were rolling around on the ground laughing.

Stories for Another Day

Because of things that had happened in his early life which you may have heard about, Prince Opie loved water. He loved being in the water and on the water and over the water. His best friend was a giant named Timber, who besides being a carpenter and captain of the guard, had lived long enough to know a great many useful things.

He taught Opie how to swim and how to paddle, how to row and how to float, how to steer a boat, and how to judge currents, but one thing that Opie learned for himself was how to sail, and once he had learned that, he knew what he had been born for.

When Opie was still a very young boy, Timber helped him to make a raft. Now you can be sure that anything Timber made out of wood was sound and watertight, so the raft floated magnificently and never tipped at all. They took it down to the stream that ran by the castle, and it was so blithe and slippy that Opie would have floated out of sight downstream in a trice if it hadn’t had a long, stout rope tied to it that Timber kept hold of.

Over and over Timber let out the rope so the raft would float away down the stream, and then hauled it up to the dock again, until his patience was almost worn out, and for a giant that is saying something. After that, nothing would satisfy Opie but a boat of his own.

Timber insisted that Opie build it himself, so that he would know every board and every nail in her, and even with Timber helping and making Opie re-shape and re-hammer board after board until it was perfectly shipshape and safe as an egg, it took a long, long time. By the time it was ready to launch, Opie was older and taller and slightly wiser in the ways of wood and shipcraft, which had been Timber’s plan all along.

In the meantime, of course, Opie spent every spare moment he had on the water, so he had gradually become an expert at rowing and punting and kayaking and capsizing and marine rescue, as well as fishing and trout-tickling and swimming and water-gazing.

Every day Opie studied history and languages and state-craft with his tutors, as every young prince must, but at night he studied navigation and geography by himself, so that he could find his way by the wind or the stars, or by the shape of the coastline, by day or by night.

The day finally came when Opie’s sailing-boat was finished, and Opie raised his first sail.

Timber knew nothing about sailing, and neither did anyone else in the castle except for Timber’s wife, Rose, who had at least seen a sailing boat before. It was Rose who made the sails for Opie’s boat, out of her memory, from clean, white canvas, but she knew nothing about how to raise them or lower them or use them to make the boat move. But as soon as Opie felt the wind fill the sail and tug at the rope in his hand, his deepest instincts moved his hands and his muscles, and he knew what do without thinking. Before Timber could take a breath to say, “Be careful,” Opie and his sailing boat were out of sight.

When Opie and the sailing-boat reappeared, just as night was falling, his eyes shining, muttering about wind direction and more sail area, Timber knew that his job was done. He could relax and spend more time watching over his own growing family of young giants.

From then on, every moment that Opie was not actually studying or eating or sleeping he spent in his sailing-boat. Day after day Rose would watch him run down to the water and jump aboard his boat, with her heart in her mouth, wondering if he would sail too far this time and not be able to find his way home again, or test himself against a wind too powerful and he and his boat both be lost.

One day she was proved right. Opie set off early, as soon as the wind was up, and by the time night had fallen, he wasn’t back. “Something has happened to him!” Rose said to Timber. “I know it – something terrible!”

Timber listened to her. He dragged the old rowing boat out of the boatshed and set off, just as the moon was coming up.

A sailing boat may be swift and cover a lot of distance in a short time, but a fully-grown giant rowing with all his strength is not far behind. Timber rowed as fast as he could until he felt as if the muscles in his arms would break, downstream along the great river and then into the huge expanse of the lake, where the wind was whipping up waves as high as his head. Then he heard a weak cry. It was Opie, clinging to a few boards in the middle of the lake. With his great strength, Timber hauled the prince into the rowboat, soaked and half-frozen, but alive and bursting with a story that he couldn’t wait to tell Timber.

“I dropped anchor in a little sheltered cove, to do some fishing,” he said. “The water was perfectly calm, and then suddenly the boat tipped as if something was pulling on the anchor, and I was thrown overboard. That was no problem, many’s the time I’ve gone overboard and hauled myself back on board again. But as I was sinking in the water, something grabbed my leg.” His voice grew strained and his eyes opened wide. “I’m sure it was a giant hand!”

“A giant hand grabbed your leg and tried to pull you down?” Timber said, wondering if Opie had hit his head and imagined everything.

Opie said, “It kept pulling and pulling me down. I struggled as hard as I could to get free, and just as I felt as if I couldn’t hold my breath for one second longer, it let me go. I swam back to the surface, but the boat was gone, except for a few planks that I clung on to – I knew you would come, Timber.”

As soon as the queen heard this story, she said, “Never again! Opie’s never going out on the water again, ever!”

“Now, Hazel,” the king said, “the moat will be all right, so long as there are plenty of guards about, all fully armed, of course…”

But the queen would not be moved. Timber could see from the spark in Opie’s eyes, that no matter what his mother said, it wasn’t over.

Sure enough, the next day he found Opie loading a rope into the rowboat. “If you’re going to look for your boat, you won’t be able to bring her back by yourself,” Timber said, climbing aboard.

They set off with Timber rowing, and before long they were back in the sheltered cove where Opie had dropped anchor before. “Here,” he said. “This is where it happened.” The sun was warm and the waters of the lake were calm and barely moving. There was no sign of the sailing-boat, not a single board or scrap of sail. Then a low sound echoed around the bay, like the howl of an unearthly animal.

Opie and Timber grabbed each other. “What was that?” Opie gasped. Then he said, “Wait – aren’t there underground caves around here? Maybe there’s an animal trapped in one of them.”

“Either that, or the creature that tried to drown you is hungry for a meal,” Timber said.

They rowed ashore and started hunting. Among the rocks they found the opening of a cave. “Be careful,” Timber said, peering in. “It drops straight down, like a chimney.”

Opie leaned over the hole and shouted. A hollow, piercing howl came back to him. “Poor creature,” he said. “It must have fallen in and been unable to climb out again. Can you lower me on the rope so I can go and take a look?”

“Wait!” said Timber. He shouted into the opening, and if you have ever heard a giant shout, you’ll know how it echoed down the hole, rumbling and roaring. Seconds later, they heard an answering cry. “It’s not an animal,” he said, “there’s someone down there.”

Opie looked down the hole and he looked out over the cove nearby. “What if the bottom of the cave stretches out under the lake itself?”

“Then it would be flooded, and nothing could live down there,” Timber said.

“Not if its floor was higher than the lake, and if there was just a small opening, like a passage that gets narrower and narrower, so that someone could swim to its end but not be able to get through.”

“Except for an arm or one hand!” exclaimed Timber. “You said a giant hand grabbed you?”

“A giant’s hand?” Opie said.

They both imagined someone Timber’s size falling down the hole at their feet into a great, dark cave half full of water far below, blundering about, wailing and moaning, and then finding a passage and swimming along it, hoping to find a way to escape, but instead finding the passage getting narrower and narrower, tighter and tighter around his body. They imagined him reaching out blindly with one hand through the hole at the end of the passageway, grabbing and snatching in the waters of the lake.

“Timber, get the rope,” Opie said quickly. They tied one end around the base of a tree and dropped the other end into the cave. Timber shouted down into the cave again, and then he began pulling the rope up.

Clinging to the other end of the rope, wet and hungry, was Timber’s friend, Wezel, about as angry as a giant can get. When he could speak, it was just as they had thought. “I fell down this hole, and I couldn’t climb out again. The bottom is full of water, so I tried to swim through an opening that leads to the bottom of the lake, but the passage turned out to be too narrow.” Wezel shivered. “I almost got myself stuck. I could have drowned! I went as far as I could, and I managed to get one arm through, and I grabbed hold of something that felt like a rope in the water and tried to pull myself out with it, but I suppose I was too heavy for it.”

Opie and Timber looked at each other. “My anchor rope,” Opie said.

Wezel said, “I kept feeling around, and I caught something that felt like an eel but it wriggled away from me.”

“That would have been your leg,” Timber said.

“I was never so happy in my life to hear your voice, Timber,” Wezel said.

Opie’s boat was lying at the bottom of the lake, too damaged to save, so Wezel helped them build a new sailing-boat, bigger and faster than the old one. Some of the other young giants came along and helped, and before long, they were building boats for other people too. Opie designed all sorts of ships, and the giants built them expertly. Eventually Opie, the sailing prince, led a whole fleet of sailing ships on voyages of discovery around the fourteen islands and far, far beyond. But that is a story for another day.

Stories for Another Day

In the third kingdom there was a village where everyone who lived there was a giant, and the most ordinary of them all was a giant named Timber. He wasn’t particularly big or strong, and he certainly wasn’t the smartest of the giants – that would be Wezel, who was very clever as well as very tall. Timber was just ordinary.

Timber worked as a carpenter. With a name like his, it seemed silly to work as a brick-layer or a shepherd, so he made his living fixing chairs and beds and things. Sometimes other giants would ask him to make them a table or a cupboard.

One day as he was planing the top of a table he was making to make it smooth and level, there was a knock at the door of his workshop. When he opened the door, there was a very small princess. She wasn’t just small compared to a giant. Even for an ordinary person, she was small. She was little, petite, and dainty.

Timber knew she was a princess, because under her shabby old coat she had on a satin dress and instead of a headband holding back her dark, wavy hair, she had a gold tiara. “I’m looking for a giant to help me,” she said. “Can you help me?”

“You should ask Kale,” Timber said. “He’s very big and strong. He can uproot a tree with one hand!”

“It’s you I want to help me,” said the princess, whose name was Hazel.

“Me?” said Timber. “I’m sure you don’t want me. There are lots of giants here much smarter than me. Wezel is the smartest – he can make onion soup and count backwards at the same time.”

The princess said, “I don’t need anyone to count backwards or to make soup. It’s you I want. Will you help me?”

Tears like tiny pearls gathered in the corners of her eyes. When Timber saw them, he couldn’t resist any longer. “Of course I’ll help you,” he said. “What do you want me to do?”

Hazel said, “The Grey Duke has captured my love, Prince Rowan. He is trying to force Rowan to marry his horrible daughter.”

“Oh no! That’s terrible!” said Timber. He knew how awful it was to be separated from the one you love. He had loved a girl called Rose for a long time, but he had never been brave enough to tell her. He lived in daily fear of her marrying someone else. “I’ll go to see the king and ask him to send the royal guard to free Prince Rowan.”

Hazel said, “I’ve already asked the king, but he says the royal guard are away on holidays and they won’t be back until Tuesday. And the wedding is tomorrow!”

“Tomorrow!” said Timber. “Then there’s no time to lose.” Pausing only long enough to make a sandwich for himself and one for Hazel, and to slip his favourite chisel into his pocket in case one of the other giant carpenters came along while he was out and borrowed it and forgot to bring it back, they set out.

The Grey Duke’s castle was made of heavy grey stone, set on the top of a high hill covered in grey thistle-bushes. The great iron gates were barred and the drawbridge was pulled up. Hazel pointed to a row of windows high up in the grey walls. “Those are the windows of the prison cells,” she said. “I know Rowan is inside one of them. All you have to do is reach up and get him out.”

Timber looked up and up. Even though he was a giant, he was only as big as two tall men, and the windows were far, far above his head. “I may be a giant,” he said, “but even I can’t reach that far.” He thought to himself that Wezel would probably be big enough, or if he wasn’t, he would be able to work out a way of climbing up the walls easily.

Hazel ‘s face fell, and her eyes started to fill up with tears. Timber said hastily, “Don’t worry, I’ll think of something.” He racked his brains to think of some way of getting up there. “I know! A ladder!” he said.

“Have you got a ladder?” Hazel asked doubtfully.

“No, I didn’t think of bringing one, but just wait here,” he said. He strode off to the woods. He soon found a fallen tree, and cut footholds in its side with his chisel. He carried it back and propped it against the wall of the castle. It was easy to climb, and he soon reached the first window.

He put his giant eye up to the window and peered in. There was a sudden loud yelling and clashing of swords and shields and helmets and things. It didn’t take Timber long to realise that the first window must belong to the guards’ room. He blinked when he heard all the noise, which was a good thing, because when the guards saw a giant eye looking in at them, they threw their spears at it and tried to poke it with their swords. Timber climbed down again in a hurry.

He gave Hazel a wave to say everything was okay, that was just a practice climb, then he moved his tree-ladder along to the next window. This time he had better luck, because there was a prisoner inside. He was wearing a red head-scarf and he had a gold earring and a parrot on his shoulder. Timber suspected straight away that he wasn’t a prince. “Excuse me, are you a pirate?”

The pirate said, “I used to be a pirate before I was taken prisoner, but I promise I’ll change my ways and never steal or make anyone walk the plank ever again if you let me out.”

“All right,” Timber said. He pulled hard on the iron bars in the window frame. Only a few of them came out, but that was enough for the pirate to slip through, since he was of slim build as many pirates are, because they live mostly on hard biscuits and rum. He scampered down the tree-ladder singing, “Yo-ho-ho, and off I go.”

Timber called out as he ran off, “Which window is Prince Rowan’s?”

“Second one along,” the pirate yelled back as he disappeared into the woods.

Timber moved the ladder again. He gave Hazel an encouraging thumbs-up, and climbed up to the second window along. This time he was more careful. When he reached the window, he called out, “If you are Prince Rowan, I’ve come to rescue you, and save you from being married off to the Grey Duke’s horrible daughter.”

The prisoner said, “I am Prince Rowan,” springing to his feet.

But another voice also called out, “I’m Prince Rowan,” and then another and another, all along the line of windows. Timber thought to himself that maybe it hadn’t been such a good idea after all. He said to the prisoner, “Can you prove that you’re Prince Rowan?”

“Don’t I look like a prince to you?” the prisoner asked. He was wearing a red uniform with shining gold braid on the shoulders and the cuffs.

Timber still wasn’t sure. He may be a prince, but he might not be THE prince. “If you’re Prince Rowan, tell me the name of your love.”

The prisoner said, “Um, is it Brenda?”

“You’re not Prince Rowan,” Timber said. He climbed down again and moved the ladder to the next window, giving Hazel a cheery next-time-lucky smile.

The prisoner was covered in dirt and grime, but Timber knew that didn’t matter. “If you’re Prince Rowan, tell me what your love looks like,” he said to the prisoner.

“She’s very dainty and petite, with dark, wavy hair, and when she cries, tears gather in the corners of her eyes like tiny pearls,” the prisoner said.

A smile spread over Timber’s face. He had found the right man. “We have to hurry,” he said. “I think the prison guards may know that I’m here.” There was a lot of shouting from inside the castle that sounded as if it was coming closer. Timber pulled at the prison bars with all his strength, and bent them out of shape. Rowan got out, and he and Timber climbed down together.

Rowan and Hazel kissed and hugged each other, laughing and crying with joy. Timber smiled to himself. Definitely the right man.

They all hurried off together into the woods. Then Timber went back for a minute and jammed his tree-ladder against the drawbridge so that the guards couldn’t open it.

Prince Rowan and Princess Hazel were married the very next day, before anything else could befall them. Timber was invited to the wedding, and Prince Rowan and Princess Hazel said to him, “Timber, we would like you to stay with us, and be the Captain of the Guard.”

“Me?” said Timber, amazed. “I’m only a carpenter. I couldn’t be captain of the guard!”

Rowan said, “You have more experience and qualifications than anyone we know: courage under enemy attack, safeguarding and rescuing of the Royal Person, assisting and protecting the Royal Person’s true love – you’re perfect for the job!”

Timber thought hard, then he smiled modestly and said, “I’d love to. But there’s something I have to do first.”

He went back to his village and found Rose, and asked her to marry him. Rose smiled happily and said yes at once, because she had loved him for years but she had never been brave enough to tell him and had lived in daily fear of him rescuing a princess and marrying her instead.

So Rose and Timber were married as well, and lived happily ever after. Timber made a very good captain of the guard, and Rose made an excellent deputy captain of the guard, because she was clever and kind, as well as being quite a big giant. When Hazel and Rowan had their first baby, Timber made a beautiful cradle for the baby with his favourite chisel which he had always kept with him, because you never know when a chisel might come in handy. In fact, the cradle actually saved the baby’s life one day, but that’s a story for another day.

Stories for Another Day

One morning Mim got up as she usually did, ate her breakfast and cleaned her teeth, and then she made a cheese sandwich. But when she went to the cupboard, there was no mustard.

“No mustard!” she cried. “Too bad.” And she went back to bed.

Down by the docks, the string quartet was getting ready to play. The two violins were playing their warming-up scales, and the viola was sounding quite good, for a Monday, but there was no cello. “Where’s Mim?” they said to each other. “A string quartet without a cello is only two violins and a viola. Too bad!” And they went home and went back to bed.

There was a sailing ship waiting at the dock, and its captain, Captain McDoogal, said, “Where’s the string quartet? I can’t possibly set sail without the string quartet playing. Oh well, too bad.” He and all his crew went home and went to bed.

At the castle, the cook was waiting for the ship’s captain to bring her the fish. “Where is the fish?” she said. “I can’t possibly cook breakfast without the fish. Oh well, too bad.” She took off her apron and went back to bed.

Upstairs, the captain of the guard said to his men, “It’s time to raise the flag for the day.” But his men shook their heads.

“We haven’t had any breakfast,” they said. “We can’t raise the flag unless we’ve had our breakfast.”

The captain of the guard said, “Of course you can’t. Oh well, too bad.” They all took off their helmets and their jackets and went back to bed.

In her bedroom at the very top of the castle, Queen Kiri had been up for hours. There was always so much to do, reading papers, writing letters, making new laws to make sure that her people were healthy and happy, so she was always up very early. She looked out of her window and saw that the flagpole was empty.

“Oh no! Where is the flag?” she said. She rang the small bell that she kept on her desk and the Head Servant, Bogg, came in.

“Bogg, why isn’t the flag flying?” she asked.

“Because the captain of the guard and all his men are in bed,” Bogg answered.

“This will never do,” Kiri said. “Follow me.” She went down the stairs to the guards’ room. “You must get up and raise the flag immediately,” she told them. “If the flag is not flying, then the spies from the sixth kingdom will think I am dead or else away on a long trip, and they will start plotting and planning and their wicked king will call up his army and invade us and overrun the kingdom!”

The captain of the guard turned pale. “I’m sorry, your majesty, but we can’t raise the flag. My men haven’t had their breakfast.”

“Breakfast?” said the queen. “What’s that got to do with it?”

“The flag is kept locked in the Royal Safe, and the door is so heavy that it takes three of the strongest men in the kingdom to open it,” he said. “And if they haven’t had their eggs and spinach and orange juice, they don’t have the strength to open it.”

“Oh dear,” said Kiri. “Then they must have their breakfast this minute.”

“But the cook is in bed,” said the captain of the guard.

“We’ll see about that,” she said. Down the stairs they went, to the cook’s bedroom, and knocked on the door. Queen Kiri said, “Cook, you must get out of bed and make breakfast immediately.”

“I can’t,” the cook said. “Captain McDoogal hasn’t brought me my fish.”

“Fish?” said Kiri. “What’s fish got to do with it?”

The cook said, “I have to feed all the under-cooks and dairymaids and scullery-maids with fresh fish caught from the middle of the Bay of Moonflowers every morning, or else they turn into bears.”

Kiri gasped. “Do you mean to tell me that right now the kitchen is full of bears?” she asked.

“Dozens of them,” the cook said. “I don’t dare set a foot inside it.”

“We’ll see about that,” Kiri said. She put on her outdoor shoes and she and the cook and all the guards and Bogg, the Head Servant, went down to the docks. They found Captain McDoogal tucked up in bed.

“Get out of bed, Captain McDoogal,” Queen Kiri said sharply. “You must go and and catch some fish from the middle of the Bay of Moonflowers at once!”

“I can’t,” said Captain McDoogal, pulling the covers up to his chin. “I can’t set sail unless the string quartet is playing, and they are all in bed.”

“You can’t set sail without a string quartet playing?” Kiri said. “Won’t a trumpet do, or a kazoo?”

“No,” said the captain, “because the sea monster who lives under the waters of the bay rises up and destroys any boat sailing in the bay and swallows every one of the sailors whole, unless he is soothed by a string quartet playing lullabies.”

“A sea monster?” spluttered the queen. “We have a sea monster in the bay?”

“Only a very tame one,” everyone said.

“Except when it comes to boats and sailors, when he’s grumpy first thing in the morning,” Captain McDoogal said.

Kiri closed her mouth firmly, and a determined look came into her eye. “We’ll see about that,” she said. They all went to the street where the string quartet players lived. Even Captain McDoogal got out of bed and put his hat on and came along.

“Get up, all of you!” Kiri shouted. “The fate of the kingdom is in your hands!”

The two violinists and the viola-player put their heads of their windows sleepily, and asked what was going on.

“You must come and play to soothe the sea monster, so the cook can have her fish and the flag-raisers can have their breakfast, THIS MINUTE!” Queen Kiri said very firmly.

“We can’t,” the musicians said. “Without our cello-player, Mim, none of us can play in tune, and the monster just gets more angry. Sometimes he even snaps at our viola-player.” Which wasn’t very surprising, since the viola-player was the worst by far.

“Where is Mim?” the queen said, in a scarily patient voice.

The musicians said, “She’s…”

“Don’t tell me,” said the queen, “she’s in bed.”

The musicians nodded. “Sometimes if she runs out of mustard for her cheese sandwiches, she goes back to bed.”

“Mustard?” said Kiri. “Am I hearing you right? Did you say mustard? The fate of the kingdom hangs on a cheese sandwich?”

The viola-player said, “There’s a flock of savage swans living in Mim’s front garden. Unless she throws cheese and mustard sandwiches at them, she can’t even get out of her front door.”

“Right,” said Kiri. “This has all gone much too far. Bring me some mustard – NOW!”

Bogg ran off and borrowed a jar of mustard from the house next door. Queen Kiri tossed it up through Mim’s window. Mim put the mustard on her cheese sandwiches and threw them to the swans so she could get safely out of her front door. Then the string quartet went down to the docks and played lullabies, Captain McDoogal set sail and soon brought back some fresh fish which he gave to the cook who quickly turned the bears back into dairymaids and scullery-maids and under-cooks, so they could all make breakfast for the guards and the flag could finally be raised.

Queen Kiri sat down on her throne, exhausted. “Just in time!” she said. “I’m sure I saw a spy from the sixth kingdom snooping around just now.” Then she made a proclamation. “This must never happen again! I proclaim that Mim be given a new jar of mustard from the royal kitchens every week, so she never runs out again.” But just to be on the safe side, she made a spare flag with her own hands and kept it in a drawer in her desk, so that if Mim ever ran out of mustard again, the kingdom would be safe.

Stories for Another Day

When you are used to living in peace and safety, danger and peril are more terrifying than if you have met with difficulties and hardships all your life. This was the case for the people who lived in Rustum’s town, when the Dark Army came.

To begin with, it was only a disturbing rumour. A passing traveller from three towns over claimed he had seen the Dark Army marching up from the south, from the sixth kingdom. No-one believed him, of course – why would the sixth kingdom be sending its army to this quiet, sleepy little town? But when the mayor from the neighbouring town sent a warning that a great dust-cloud as if from hundreds of horses had been seen on the south road, people began collecting up their most precious things and getting ready to leave while there was still time.

Before anyone had a chance to start off, they suddenly saw, coming over the southern mountains, hundreds and hundreds of soldiers swarming like ants over a jar of sugar. Then the townspeople turned to each other in panic, not knowing what to do.

Rustum was only a boy, but he had seen and done more things than many adults will ever see or do in their lives, so when he said, “The castle! We must go to the king’s castle and shelter inside,” everyone listened, whether it was because they trusted him or because they were desperately frightened and couldn’t think of anything else to do. “It is the safest place,” Rustum said. “The king’s soldiers will be there to protect us.”

The king, of course, had many castles in many towns across the kingdom, and it just so happened that he had come to stay at the castle on the edge of Rustum’s town that very week, in time for the annual apricot harvest.

The townspeople gathered all the food and water they could carry, and with their children and their animals, they hurried to the castle. When the very last of them were safely inside the castle walls, Rustum had the men shut the gates and put the bars across. Everyone breathed a great sigh of relief, thinking that now they were safe – but they were wrong.

The king came down from his chambers to see what all the noise was, and as soon as he saw Rustum he said, “Oh, it’s only you again.” He looked anxiously over Rustum’s shoulder.

Rustum said, breathlessly, “The Dark Army is pouring over the mountains. We only just made it here in time.”

The king paled. “As a matter of fact, I was hoping you were someone else,” he said. “My own army, actually.”

“Your army?” Rustum asked, surprised. “What do you mean? Aren’t they here?” When he thought about it, apart from the noises of the townspeople and their cows and their chickens and their goats and their crying babies, the castle was eerily quiet. “Where are the soldiers?”

The king fidgeted a bit, then he said, “We heard rumours that the Dark Army was invading from the south, but I thought it was a trick, so I sent our army to the north.”

“The north?” Rustum gasped. “Your soldiers aren’t here?”

“Not one,” the king said unhappily.

“The castle is undefended?” Rustum said in shock.

“Completely,” the king said miserably.

They both heard the noise of shouting, the neighing of horses, and the clanking of swords and spears at the same time. They hurried up to the battlements running along the top of the wall that surrounded the castle, and both of them stared at the scene below in horror. The plain was covered with hundreds and hundreds of fully-armed men in black armour, on horseback. If the king was pale before, now his face was as white as paper. “What are we going to do?” he whimpered.

“How long before the army returns?” Rustum said.

The king counted on his fingers. “A day and a night at the very least,” he said. “We could not possibly hope to see them until tomorrow morning at the earliest.”

Rustum looked at the huge army mustering its forces below them. “If the Dark Army breaks into the castle, they will be waiting when your own army returns, and they’ll destroy them.”

“That will be the end of all of us,” moaned the king.

Rustum frowned fiercely. “We have to keep them out of the castle until our army gets here,” he said.

The king groaned, “Impossible!”

Rustum pointed to where the soldiers in black were dragging heavy pieces of equipment towards the castle walls. “See? They’re setting up their cannons. That will take them a few hours. They won’t be ready to attack until nightfall.”

“We can’t possibly hold out against them until morning!” the king said. “Cannon! Swords, spears, muskets! And we have nothing to defend ourselves with, except a few chickens and goats!” He threw his hands in the air.

Rustum wasn’t so ready to give up hope. “Let’s see what we do have, before we lose hope.” He searched the whole castle, through the empty armoury and the deserted barracks, even the kitchens and the laundries. Then he called everyone together in the courtyard.

He told them, “The king’s army is on its way, but it won’t be here until some time tomorrow. It’s up to us to defend the castle and our lives until help comes.”

The people began to shout, “With our bare hands? We are farmers and shopkeepers, not soldiers!”

Some of them began to weep, “We’re all going to die, trapped like rats in this castle! Why did you bring us here?”

Rustum shouted at them, “Come! We are courageous, determined people. Do you want to surrender, and hand over our king and our country to be ruled by the Dark Army and their king?”

“Never!” they shouted back. “Just tell us what we should do!”

“We’re going to make the Dark Army think that the castle is full of soldiers,” Rustum said. “There are rusty helmets and broken weapons in heaps in the armoury. We’re going to polish them and set them on broomsticks on the battlements. In the dark, with only lamps to light them, the Dark Army will think they are soldiers. Gather every broom and rake you can find, and let’s get to work!”

One of the maidservants stepped forward and said, “We have our mops and our buckets, too.”

“Of course!” Rustum said. “Polish the buckets too, and put them on the mop handles. But hurry! We have until nightfall before the Dark Army attacks!”

Everyone ran to their work. The tailors and dressmakers dyed and sewed sheets and curtains to make cloaks to cover the broomsticks. The children drew fierce faces and cut them out of paper to pin under the helmets. The cooks tied their kitchen knives onto sticks to look like spears and swords, and the carpenters shaped pieces of wood and painted them to look like muskets.

As soon as night fell, they set up their make-believe soldiers along the battlements in rows, with lamplight glinting off buckets and pots and pans that had been polished until they shone like steel. Then they waited to see what would happen.

In minutes they heard the Dark Army loading up their cannon and urging their horses up to the castle walls to attack. Then there was the sound of grumbling voices. “Where did all these troops come from? The castle was supposed to be empty!”

Their captains shouted, “Load the cannon! We will blast them from the battlements!”

When he heard this, Rustum whispered sharply, “Get down, everyone, behind the battlements!”

The soldiers of the Dark Army loaded cannonballs and gunpowder into their cannons and fired. In a barrage of roars and flashes, Rustum’s broomstick army collapsed.

“Set them up again!” Rustum whispered, passing the word along to the people hiding behind the battlements. Quickly the helmets and buckets were replaced on their mop-handles and broomsticks, and lifted back into place.

Below, the soldiers of the Dark Army fell back, full of fear. “What sorcery is this?” they cried. “Are they ghosts, that rise up again after we kill them?”

“It must be a trick! Fire again!” the captains shouted, and the cannons boomed.

Again, with a huge, metallic clatter, the mops and buckets and helmets collapsed in heaps. Again Rustum gave the order for them to be set up against the battlements, while the people started a rumbling chant that soon became a roaring war-cry.

The soldiers below, terrified, dropped their weapons and fled in all directions as fast as their feet and their horses would carry them. As soon as they were out of sight, Rustum and the others opened the gates and dragged the cannon inside, along with as many weapons as they could carry. Then they raised a triumphant shout.

In the morning when the king’s army returned, they found the castle in the midst of a celebration, and the Dark Army nowhere to be seen. The king had the cannons melted down and cast into iron bollards in the shape of soldiers wearing helmets. He had them set in a row in front of the castle, to remind everyone of the battle that had never been fought, and they have stood there from that day to this.

Stories for Another Day

Once there was a young fisherman named Ross who, like his father and grandfather before him, lived in a cottage by the sea and made his living by fishing.

One day he was walking along the shore when he met a young girl as sweet as she was beautiful. They spent the day together, climbing over the rocks and gazing into rockpools and walking side by side along the sand. By the end of the day they were deeply in love, and by the end of the month they were married.

In a little while they had a little boy whom they called Sellie, who loved the sea as much as his parents did. While other children cried at the slap of cold seawater on their feet when their parents took them down to the shore, Sellie laughed and splashed happily in the waves.

One day Ross came back from his night’s fishing and the neighbours greeted him with dreadful news. “Your wife was gathering shellfish on the edge of the rocks and a huge wave came out of nowhere and swept her away.”

Ross was wild with grief. He spent weeks combing the shore and the rocks for any sign of her, but he found nothing, not even the smallest trace. Eventually the neighbours said to him, “You are neglecting your own child while you waste time on this pointless search. Your wife is gone for good. Now look after your son. He is all you have left.”

Ross could no longer bear the sight of the sea nor the sound of the waves, so he left the house to be blown to pieces by the sea winds, and he moved to the city with Sellie. He learned carpentry and woodwork from a master carpenter, and after a long struggle, he was able to make a good living from his work.

But Sellie pined for the sea. He was pale and listless, and then he gradually became really ill. The doctors told Ross, “The only thing that will save your son is sea air. Take him to live by the coast, where the sea and the sun will bring him back to good health.”

Ross had no choice but to move back to his cottage by the sea. He nailed all the walls back together and fixed the windows that had been blown out by the sea winds and repaired the roof. Sellie grew well again, with pink rosy cheeks, but Ross turned his back on the sea and refused to go near it. He built himself a workshop at the back of the house, out of sight and sound of the sea, and spent all his time there. He made furniture and toys for sale, but the best things he made were out of driftwood that friends and neighbours collected from the sea shore and brought to him.

One night a wild storm came up. The waves crashed against the shore and dragged the sand away, and the wind howled among the rocks. When a gentle knock came at the door, Ross hardly heard it. He opened the door to find a young woman standing there, wet to the skin. Her clothes and her hair were dripping with water. Caught in her hair, Ross could could see a fine silver hairpin in the shape of a shell.

“Will you let me in?” she asked.

“Who are you, and why are you out on a night like this?” Ross asked.

“I am your wife’s sister, Sheera,” she said.

Ross could see that she was very like his dead wife, so he let her come in to dry herself by the fire. “We have not seen my sister for a long time,” the woman said, the hairpin glinting as it caught the fire light.

“The sea took her,” Ross answered roughly.

The woman’s face filled with sadness. “And the child?” she asked.

“My son stays with me,” he answered.

Sheera looked around the room. “I can see you have put the latch high up on the door,” she said, “high enough to be out of a child’s reach?”

“Sellie is not allowed to leave the house or go down to the sea without me at his side,” Ross said.

Sheera nodded slowly. “Are you afraid for him? Can’t he swim?” she asked.

“He could swim before he could walk,” Ross answered shortly. “For your sister’s sake, you may stay as long as you need to.”

He gave her a bed in a room at the back of the house, next to Sellie’s. Before long, she and Sellie were inseparable, laughing and playing all day long. Occasionally Sheera took him for long walks in the hills behind the bay, where she bought skeins of wool from the farmers’ wives, to dye in a huge pot in the kitchen. She used seaweed and crushed shells, and dyed the wool all the golden colours of the sand, and got a good price for it. But she was never allowed to take Sellie down to the sea, unless Ross was with them.

One sunny afternoon the sea was shining and as flat as a pan of milk. Sheera was humming in the kitchen, lifting her skeins of wool out of the dye-pot to test their colours, when Ross came in from his workshop.

“Where’s Sellie?” he asked.

Sheera went pale. “I thought he was with you!” she said.

They both hurried to the door. While they had both been busy, Sellie had dragged a chair up to it, and unlatched it. It swung open on its hinges.

They rushed down to the shore, shouting for Sellie. He was toddling happily along the edge of the sea where the waves hushed back and forth, tumbling the shells. Then as they watched in horror, a huge wave came from nowhere and snatched the little boy, sweeping him out to sea.

With a great cry, Ross threw himself into the sea after his son. He swam desperately towards the golden head which he could see disappearing under the waves. He took a deep breath and dived. His fingers touched the little boy’s hand and he seized it and pulled with all his might, pulling Sellie into his arms. The sea that moments before had been as quiet as a summer meadow, roared and boiled around them, tossing them about like bundles of seaweed and pounding them into the sand.

Ross managed to lift his head out of the raging water for a moment and yelled, “Help me!” but Sheera ignored him. She ran to the rocks and clambered up to the very highest point. As more waves came crashing down on Ross’s head, he saw her take the silver hairpin out of her hair. In her hand it grew longer and thicker, and became a silver-tipped harpoon.

With all her strength, Sheer threw it into the waves. The sea itself leapt as if to drag her into its clutches as well, but then it fell away and lay flat, as calm as it had been before.

Holding Sellie against himself as if he would never let him go again, Ross swam easily to shore. As he stepped out onto the sand, he looked back over his shoulder. The silver harpoon was floating out to sea, trailing a line of blood from its tip. Then it sank below the surface.

Ross and Sheera were married, with Sellie laughing beside them, and for a wedding gift he gave her a hairpin that he had carved from a piece of driftwood, in the shape of a shell. And no two people were ever happier.

Stories for Another Day

Parfitt, his father, his uncles and aunts, even his grandparents, were sheep farmers. His father, Renown, had the best flock in the country. Their wool was known for its exceptional softness and fineness, and it always brought the highest prices. As soon as Parfitt was tall enough to see over a sheep, he had become a shepherd, the same as his brothers and sisters and father and grandparents and great-great-grandparents had done.

Every morning as soon as it was light, he would go to the pen and open the gate. Then he would set out for whichever hill was greenest, with the sheep following, milling about and bleating. At the end of the day he would round them up, shouting and chasing after them, waving his arms, then he would lead them back, and shut them safely in their pen for the night.

But Parfitt wanted something more. Parfitt wanted to be a musician. His mother, before she left the family, had been a fine singer as well as playing the piano accordion, and when Parfitt found it in a dusty cupboard one day when he was eight or nine, he couldn’t keep his hands off it.

As soon as he touched it and heard its complaining wheeze, he was mesmerised. No more did he want to go out every day from sunrise to sunset and sit around on a hillside watching over a flock of silly sheep. He wanted to play this magical instrument, and fill the world with music.

His father didn’t agree. “Put that old thing down! Stop torturing our ears and go and do your work. Those sheep aren’t going to walk to pasture by themselves, you know!”

“But Father, I want to play music! I want to become a great musician, and fill the world with music!” Parfitt pleaded.

“There’s enough music in the world already,” his father grumbled. “Put that thing down and get going. “

Parfitt got going, but when his father wasn’t looking, he dragged the old accordion with him. As soon as he and the sheep reached the high, green pastures, he sat down and started to play. The sound was awful to begin with, but he kept trying until he could more or less make a tune. Day after day he would sit under a tree practising, while the sheep trotted to and fro on the hillside, until the day when the worst happened. When it came time to gather the sheep to take them home, they weren’t there.

Parfitt ran here and there, and found three, then four, but the rest had strayed to who knows where, looking for greener grass. He had to run home and tell his father that he had lost his sheep.

Renown called the older brothers and sisters to leave their work and come and help find the sheep before they fell over a cliff in the dark or were attacked by wild animals. By the time it was dark, every one of the sheep had been found and tucked safely into the sheep pen, but Parfitt’s father was so angry with him that he threw the accordion onto the ground and smashed it to pieces.

“No more!” he yelled. “From now on, you do your job minding the sheep and do it properly!”

Parfitt was angry and miserable and ashamed, angry that his father had destroyed the accordion so he could never play again, and miserable and ashamed because he knew his father was right. It was his job to look after the sheep, and he had failed them.

The next day he was determined to do the right thing and watch the sheep every minute. But it seemed that the small taste of music that the accordion had given him had woken an insatiable hunger in him. He roamed discontentedly among the sheep, patting them and calling their names now and then, but his mind was humming and his fingers were twitching.

There was a bamboo grove in a hollow nearby and Parfitt noticed that as the wind passed among the tall stalks, they moaned and whistled. He broke off a long hollow stick and trimmed it with his knife, making holes for his fingers and shaping a mouthpiece at one end. When he blew into it, it made an eerie, hollow sound, but to Parfitt’s ears it was music.

Now as he sat on the hillside or walked among the sheep, he played his bamboo flute, making up melodies and playing old tunes. When one flute broke because old Dot stepped on it or Tumble chewed it up, he simply cut another stalk of bamboo and started again. Before long, he could make a flute with exactly the sound he wanted, high and sweet, or low and cooing, as quick as anything.

Then one day, the very worst happened. He looked up from an especially tricky melody he was working on and ran his eye over the flock, counting swiftly as he always did, and at once he noticed that something was wrong. Trundle was missing!

He left the rest of the flock and ran east and west, up and down, yelling Trundle’s name. But the high wind blew his voice away, so he took out his flute and blew it as loudly and as sharply as he could, over and over. Finally he heard a distant answering bleat. He rushed towards the sound and found his missing sheep.

Trundle was browsing among the blackberry bushes, closed to the edge of a treacherous path. The last thing Parfitt wanted to do was shout and frighten Trundle into running away and falling over the edge. Instead he forced himself to sit down calmly and play the sweetest calls he could think of, until Trundle came trotting over to him. Then he led him back to the rest of the flock.

Such a close call gave Parfitt an a idea. From then on, he made up special tunes for the sheep, one that told them it was time to go home, and another that called them to follow after him, and a sharp, strident call that meant danger. He played them over and over, until the sheep knew them and would come whenever the right tune was played. For some of the most stubborn sheep, he made up their very own tunes that he played whenever they started to stray off. There was even a special skipping song for the new lambs. He loved playing his flute on the hillsides, twining their calls into long, winding melodies.

Then one day, the worst of the worst happened. He was sitting in the sun on the hillside with the sheep happily grazing back and forth when a gang of sheep-stealers sprang on him. They beat him with their sticks, and left him lying unconscious and bleeding, while they drove the sheep away.

When he didn’t come home, his father came to look for him. “Stolen! The whole flock, gone!” Renown groaned, when Parfitt told him what had happened. His eyes glinted with anger. “This must be the work of our neighbour, I’m certain. I’ve seen him many times looking enviously at our flock, wishing they were his own instead of the scrawny, rough-coated beasts he raises.”

Parfitt held his aching head and said, “What can we do? We have to get them back!”

“There’s nothing we can do,” Renown said. “Even if we accused him to his face, he will say that they’re his sheep. We can’t prove that they’re ours.”

Parfitt said, “But of course we can prove which sheep are ours. Every one of them knows me, and they’ll come when I call.”

Renown said doubtfully, “A hundred sheep, and you think you know each one of them? And each of them knows you?”

“Just let me try, Father,” Parfitt said.

So the next day they went to see the neighbour, a hard, grasping man with shifty eyes. He was hanging over the fence of his sheep pen, greedily counting the sheep crowded into it. Renown said boldly, “My sheep were stolen yesterday. You’re the thief, aren’t you? They’re here, hidden among your own miserable flock.”

“These are all my sheep,” the neighbour said, with a greasy smile. “Some of them may be a bit fatter than others, but they’re all mine. Do your sheep have your name on them?”

“Of course not,” Renown growled.

“So you can’t prove anything,” the neighbour sneered.

Parfitt said, “They have no marks that you can see, but my father’s sheep will listen to me and come when I call.”

The neighbour laughed. “Sheep that come when you call? I’ve never heard such rubbish! I’d like to see you try!”

Parfitt said, “Open the gate, and watch.” He put his flute to his lips and played. Out of the middle of the grey and dusty flock of sheep, Trundle, Dot and Tumble pricked up their ears and began bleating loudly. They pushed their way out of the neighbour’s flock and ran to the gate. Renown opened the gate, and Parfitt played the flock’s favourite call, time to go home. The rest of Renown’s sheep came running, knocking the thieving neighbour over in their rush. Soon they were all milling around him, bleating and calling. Parfitt set off for home, playing his happiest melodies, and they followed him.

The thieving neighbour was punished for stealing, and his flock was taken away from him and given to other sheep farmers who would look after them better. Renown’s flock continued to be the best in the country, and the best cared-for. From then on, every shepherd boy and girl wanted a flute of their own, and Parfitt was kept busy making flutes and teaching them how to play them, in between making up his own melodies and roaming the hills with the sheep, filling the world with music.

Stories for Another Day

In an ordinary town, there was a shop in a back street with an old, worn sign that said, ‘Antiques’. It was a small, dark shop that most people overlooked, and it didn’t actually sell antiques. It sold things of power.

What made them things of power was that they had been held or carried by people in times of great struggle, when hearts were changed and often blood was spilled. There was a cross that had been carried into battle in hot, desert lands and had been passed from dying hand to dying hand. There was a ragged scrap of cloth that was said to have once been part of a cloak that made its wearer invisible. There was a pebble that had brought down a giant, and silken lasso that had once been used to capture a unicorn, and a diamond that is better not spoken about. There was even a piece of burnt wood that had saved a whole city.

Few people ever went into the shop, except the very curious, or the very desperate.

A woman named Annabelle lived in the town. She had three little boys, but the middle one, Leverett, gave her the most trouble. Annabelle had been born in a distant country, the daughter of a wealthy and noble family, but she had a cousin named Branley, who wanted their wealth all for himself. He stole her away from her family in the middle of the night, and hid her in an empty barrel in a cart that was taking goods and furniture a long, long, way away. When the cart arrived at its destination, no-one knew who the baby girl was, or where she had come from. Her parents searched for her without ceasing, but they could find no trace of her. So then all the wealth in the family passed to Branley.

The lost baby girl was put into a hospital with lots of other children who had been separated from their families. After a long while, when it was clear that no-one was coming to claim her, she was taken in by a family who needed a servant. It was them who gave her the name, Annabelle. She was a good worker, strong and hard-working. In time she married a man that she loved deeply, and they were blessed with three sons before he died. Although she continued to work long, hard hours, the money never seemed to go far enough, with three growing boys. Annabelle often caught herself sighing over another pair of pants that had been grown out of, or another pair of shoes that were worn out, and wondering where the money for new ones was going to come from. Which is why, on Leverett’s ninth birthday, she found herself at the shop with a sign that said, ‘Antiques’.

Leverett had a few coins that his mother had given him to buy himself a gift, and he had come along with his mother to spend them because, he said, who knows what she might buy for him if there was no-one to tell her what was rubbish and what was not?

Inside the shop, the shopkeeper sat behind his counter, with two piles of very old and very dull books in front of him. When he finished reading one, he would immediately put it on the second pile and take another book from the first pile and start reading again. He rarely moved out of his chair, because people very rarely bought anything, and this was the reason why.

The things of power in his shop looked like so many bits of useless junk, unless for some reason the right person came into the shop. Someone like you or me might go in and out of the shop ten times and never find anything worth buying. But certain people for whatever reason would find themselves drawn to this corner or that. They would see something that you or I would think was junk and never even bother to pick up, and it would seem to speak to them. Then if they picked it up, they had to have it, no matter what the cost. They couldn’t put the thing down, and the thing wouldn’t let them put it down.

When Annabelle and Leverett walked in, the owner paid them no attention, but just turned another page and kept on reading.

“Now don’t touch anything and don’t break anything,” Annabelle said to her son. She had had experience before of having to pay for something that Leverett had dropped or broken that neither of them had wanted.

The shop seemed nicer inside than it had from the outside. Annabelle drifted from table to shelf to cabinet, touching here, brushing her fingertips there, feeling a gentle contentment steal over her. Something was calling her. Something in an old desk under a pile of legless chairs and cups without handles and battered hat-boxes. She ran her fingers over the wood of the desk and then, for no reason at all, she opened the second drawer on the left. Every other person who had ever tried that drawer had found it jammed shut, but for Annabelle it slid open easily. Inside was something that took her breath away.

It was a rose, made entirely of glass. Each petal was made separately and joined together in an intricate pattern of crimson and dark pink. Even in the gloom of the shop it glowed a deep, rich red. Three leaves made of silver as finely shaped as any real rose leaf, were attached to the delicate green stem. Annabelle reached out and picked it up.

Leverett’s head popped up at her elbow. “What’s that?” he said.

Annabelle nearly dropped the glass rose. “It’s… a rose,” she said wonderingly.

“I don’t want a flower for my birthday,” Leverett exclaimed in disgust. “There’s a slingshot over there, and I found a brilliant crossbow. “

“No crossbows, no weapons of any kind,” Annabelle said automatically. She could hardly take her eyes off the rose. Besides, she had had experience of Leverett being sent home from school for making weapons out of perfectly ordinary things like a pencil or a hair elastic.

He reached past her and picked up a rock hidden in the darkness at the back of the drawer. “Can I have this?” he said, his fingers closing on it tightly.

“No stones, no rocks, nothing you can throw at anyone,” Annabelle repeated, as if it was a lesson she had learnt very well, which it was.

Leverett said, “It’s my birthday, you said I can have whatever I want,” which she certainly had not.

“Oh, all right!” Annabelle said. She couldn’t put the rose down. “I wonder how much… if I could afford…” They went up to the counter together. The man looked at them sharply for a moment, but then he named a price so low that Annabelle could hardly believe it. She gave the man the money, but when they turned to leave the shop, Leverett, rushing as usual, bumped up against her and his rock struck the rose. There was a tinkling crash and an exclamation. A petal had broken off the rose and stabbed into Annabelle’s finger.

It hurt much more than you’d think, for such a small cut. The man behind the counter said, “You should get that seen to.” Annabelle wasn’t sure if he meant the broken rose or the cut. He reached under the counter and found a small card which he tossed to her. It said, ‘Branley’s Jewellers’.

By now the cut was hurting so much that Annabelle could barely think. Leverett shoved his rock into his pocket and pushed her outside. The address on the card was nearby, only a few streets away. Leverett grabbed her arm and pulled her along.

The jeweller’s shop was even dingier than the antique shop. The windows were so thick with grime that you couldn’t see in, and the paint was peeling off the door and the windowsills. Leverett pushed the door open and dragged his mother in. Her face was white as paper and she was clutching the rose to her chest.

At a small table in the middle of the room, a man was sitting, moodily picking over a pile of jewellery, old-fashioned garnets, rubies in a broken necklace, a shabby sapphire bracelet and a lot of other things. He looked up as the door opened. When he saw Annabelle, he jumped up and hissed, “You!”

It was, of course, Annabelle’s cousin, Branley. All those years ago, when he had gotten rid of Annabelle, he had taken over the family business. Her parents had lost heart when they lost their daughter and they had left everything to Branley to run. He turned out to be a very poor businessman, mostly because although he knew all there was to know about precious stones, he loved them so much that once he had them in his hands he couldn’t bear to sell them again. All the family’s wealth had run through his fingers and trickled away. All that was left was this dingy shop that no customers ever came to, and a large safe, full to bursting with precious jewels of every kind.

Annabelle said faintly, “What do you mean?” She had no idea who he was, since she had been a baby when she last saw him. She only knew that if the pain didn’t stop soon, she was going to faint.

Leverett, who was poking around, looking at things and touching things he shouldn’t, suddenly said, “Look at this!” He was pointing to a life-size painting in a dark corner, of a woman who looked exactly like his mother, holding the very same glass rose in her hand. “It’s you!” he said.

“It can’t be,” Annabelle faltered. “My hair is different, and I would never wear a dress like that.” The woman in the painting was dressed in a red velvet ballgown, and her hair was long and fair, unlike Annabelle’s, which was short and dark.

“It is your mother, my dear,” said a deep, quiet voice from the doorway behind Branley. An old lady leaning on a stick came very slowly into the room. “You are her daughter, Roseanne.”

“My name is Annabelle, not Roseanne,” Annabelle said. “I don’t have a mother, or a father.”

The old lady shook her head. “You must be Roseanne. You look so much like your mother, there can be no mistake. And besides, you have the rose.”

“I have the rose,” Annabelle said, wonderingly.

“She broke it,” Leverett said, not entirely truthfully. “She cut her finger.”

For the first time, Annabelle noticed that the pain had gone, and when she looked, her finger was completely healed.

“Let me see the rose,” Branley said, reaching greedy fingers for it. If he could destroy it, smash it to tiny pieces with his jeweller’s hammer, then there would be no proof that this was his long-lost cousin. She would just be someone who looked like a woman in a painting.

“No!” the grandmother’s voice was icy and commanding. “Give it to me.” Annabelle gave her the rose and the broken piece. With deft fingers the old lady fitted the pieces back together again. “I was the one who made this rose,” she said, her voice warm again. “It was my gift to my daughter, when she was born, and it should be returned to her.”

“My mother?” stammered Annabelle. “Is she still alive?”

“Certainly, and your father, too,” the old lady said. “Their hearts were broken when you disappeared, and they lost all interest in everything else. They live very quietly in our old home. I came here from our own country just a short while ago, to try to save the business that Branley has ruined.”

“It’s mine,” Branley said, savagely. “Even if you are Roseanne, you can’t take it away from me. Your parents handed the business over to me years ago.”

Just then, Leverett, bored again, took his rock out of his pocket and began tossing it in the air and catching it, endangering several windows and glass cabinets. Branley’s attention was caught immediately. “What is that?” he said. “Give it to me!”

“It’s mine,” Leverett said. “I bought it with my own money and it’s mine.”

What it was in fact, was a fabulously large diamond, perfectly cut, covered with layers and layers of grime and dirt. Branley, who knew precious stones and loved them more than anything or anyone, knew it at once for what it was.

“Give it to me,” he whispered. “I must have it.”

“It’s mine,” Leverett repeated stubbornly.

“I’ll buy it from you,” Branley insisted. “I’ll give you anything.”

Leverett considered. There was only so much fun you could have with a rock. “All those jewels?” he asked.

“Yes,” Branley snapped.

“… and this shop?” Leverett asked.

“Yes!”

“… and everything in it?” Leverett asked.

This time Branley hesitated. He was thinking about the extra large safe, bursting with gold and precious stones. Then the diamond caught his eye again, and he couldn’t help himself. “Very well,” he said. “This shop and everything in it.”

Leverett held out the diamond and Branley practically snatched it from his hand. With eyes for nothing else, he walked out of the shop without a word of farewell, and never came back.

The shop, after Annabelle had scrubbed it from top to bottom and cleaned the windows and painted everything there was to paint, became very successful. With her grandmother to teach her the business and train her in the jeweller’s art, she became an excellent jeweller, and so did her two of her sons after her. Her parents soon came to join them, and the business did well, and they became as happy and as well off as the family had once been.

Leverett of course had no patience for something as ordinary as a shop. When he was old enough, he used his money to build racing cars and he became the most famous racing car driver in the world.

But what became of the diamond, now that is a story for another day.

Stories for Another Day

There was once a man who had one son, but his wife died, so he married again and had six more children. The youngest was a girl that he named Septima. But then his second wife died too. The man could not manage all of these children by himself, so he gave them to various aunties and cousins to be looked after. The very youngest, Septima, he begged his grandmother to take care of. Then he set out to travel the world, and whether by choice or by accident, he was never heard of again.

Septima was a tiny baby, and the grandmother was very, very old. One day as she was cooking and singing to herself, she heard the baby in her cradle singing the same song she had just been singing. The grandmother smiled to herself, and from then on, she set herself to teach Septima all the songs that she knew.

While she was still in her cradle, the grandmother sang funny rhyming songs, and Septima laughed and clapped her fat little hands. When she was a toddler, the grandmother sang songs that told the stories of her people, ballads and folk songs. When Septima was older still, learning to chop vegetables and scrub the floors, the grandmother sang about the making of all creatures and the wonders of the heavens, the stars and the forces that made them move, the winds and the waters, how they were formed and how they should be cared for.

Many a time when there was a new birth or a homecoming, the grandmother would be asked to sing to bless the baby or express the joy in everyone’s hearts. If someone should chance to die, of old age or sickness, the grandmother would sing songs of sorrow and lament to accompany the people in their grief and to bring them comfort. Septima would often go with her, and when their two voices joined, people said they had never heard anything more beautiful or more powerful.

One day when Septima was old enough to care for the garden herself, and do the cooking and cleaning so that her grandmother could rest, her grandmother said to her, “Septima, it’s time for you to go.”

“Go where, Grandmother?” Septima asked brightly. She was sewing a patch on her working pants and humming to herself as she did it. “Do you want me to go to the market for you?”

“I mean,” the old lady said, “it’s time for you to leave. It’s time for you to go out into the world by yourself, and do what you must do. You are a Singer, and that’s not given to everyone. And it’s not given to anyone lightly.”

“But, Grandmother,” Septima said, horrified, “who will look after you and carry in the wood for the fire, and read to you, and help you dress?” For the grandmother was so old, that she was nearly blind, and she needed help with almost everything.

“Don’t worry about that,” the old lady said. “One of the cousins will come and live with me, or I’ll go and stay with one of your brothers.”

Septima shook her head. “No, I won’t go,” she said. “You have looked after me since I was a baby, and now it’s my turn to take care of you.”

The grandmother kissed her sadly. “I have taken care of you and I have loved you and I will never stop loving you, but now it’s time for you to go.” She began to sing a song Septima had never heard before, that almost brought her to tears. It stirred up a longing in her very soul, a hunger she didn’t know she had, to see what was in the world and what she could do about it. She found her feet moving towards the door in spite of herself.

The singing was like two hands pushing her out of the door. As soon as she turned and put her foot on the path outside, the song was like a merry jig that lightened her heart and her footsteps, but when she tried to turn and go back in, it was like a wall keeping her out of the house.

The grandmother sang and sang, more strongly and more beautifully than Septima had ever heard her sing before. With tears in her eyes, Septima let her feet carry her over the threshold and away down the road.

And so she went. She went to other villages and other towns, and sang for the people out of the joy of her heart and from the sorrow of her soul. She sang the music and the stories of the people wherever she went, and they welcomed her and gave her a place to stay and shared their food with her, until she felt a stirring that meant it was time for her to move on. For no matter where she went and what she did, she felt inside a deep urging to a task she had not found yet, a feeling that there was work to do that she had not completed yet.

Surely, she thought, this great gift has been given to me for an important reason, not just to sing for ordinary people in their day-to-day lives. And a great gift it was. No-one had ever sung with such beauty and power. She could sing the birds from the trees to circle in a great cloud around her, she could sing the rain out of the heavens, and sing the winds to sleep.

But as time went on, she found herself singing the same songs for this wedding or that birth, singing the same ballads that people asked for over and over. Discontent grew in her, and with it, resentment. Her singing became so bitter that people lost their taste for it and they turned away when she sang. She left the villages and towns and wandered alone in forests and in the wilderness, silent. The bitterness in her grew, and she could hardly remember any of her songs.

Then one day as she wandered through the forest, the earth beneath her feet began to tremble. “An earthquake!” she thought. The trees around her shook and a rumbling roar filled the air.

A song she had not known she knew rose up out of her. She sang with all her strength to the earth itself, of peace and quiet and calm. The shaking quieted, and the earthquake died to a murmur.

When she went to go on, she heard a distant voice crying. She followed the sound to the rocky wilderness at the edge of the forest. The earthquake had opened a crack in the earth, and at the bottom of the gaping split, there was a small boy, covered in dirt. He was barely three or four years old, and he was crying loudly. Septima had never seen such an ordinary-looking child, or one quite so dirty. She called to him, “Don’t cry. I’ll get you out.” The little boy stopped crying and looked up at her with a tear-stained, muddy face.

“It wants to eat me,” he said. “The ground opened its mouth and it’s trying to swallow me.”

“Don’t be silly, it was only an earthquake,” Septima said. “Hold on and I’ll get you out.”

The hole was not deep, only a little more than Septima’s height, but for a small boy it seemed very deep indeed. Septima took her knife from her pack and cut a long, thick vine from the forest. She tied one end securely around a big tree, then she threw the other end down to the boy.

“Can you pull yourself up?” she called.

The little boy shook his head. “It’s got my foot,” he said. “I told you, it wants to eat me.”

“What’s your name?” Septima asked.

“Rustum,” he answered.

“Well, Rustum, move over a bit and I’ll come down and get you out,” she said. Holding on to the vine, she let herself down into the hole.

It was exactly as the little boy had said. His foot was jammed between two rocks, and no matter how hard Septima pulled, she couldn’t get it out. It was as if the ground had closed its jaws around his foot.

She placed her hands on the rocks and began to sing. She let her song find its own way and gather its strength against the force that was holding the child’s foot. She felt the boy sigh and lean trustfully against her, and she sang with renewed strength until the very rocks shifted under her hands and released him.

As the rocks opened, a stream of water gushed suddenly up from the earth between them. Within seconds it was up to their knees.

“Quick! Up and out,” Septima said. “The earthquake must have opened up some kind of natural spring.”

She lifted Rustum up to grasp the rope and shoved him from below as he scrambled up out of the hole. The water had already reached her waist.

Rustum’s face popped over the edge of the hole, looking down at her. “Now you,” he smiled.

Septima smiled back and took hold of the rope, but as she went to climb, with the water already up to her shoulders, she discovered that her long hair had become caught in the rocks. She pulled at it frantically but it would not come free. The more she struggled, the more tangled it became. The water rose past her mouth and her nose. She snatched one last breath and sank down to try to free her hair, but it was no use. There was no air left in her lungs. Everything began to go black. Then she saw something fall past her, glittering and twisting as it dropped to the bottom of the hole. Her knife! Rustum had found her knife and thrown it down to her.

Her fingers scrabbled among the rocks until she found it, then she sawed through the strands of her hair in handfuls, until she was free. She swam to the top of the hole and clambered out. She and Rustum hugged each other and laughed for sheer joy.

“You saved me!” Rustum shouted.

“You saved me!” Septima answered. They grinned at each other. They looked back and saw that the spring had already bubbled up over the rim of the hole, and water was streaming down the hillside, carving a bed for itself as it flowed.

They sat down together and ate some of the food Septima had in her backpack, and then it was time for Rustum to set off for home. He hugged her fiercely and said, “Will I never see you again?”

Septima shrugged her shoulders and said, “Who knows?” She was full of amazement at the things that had happened in a single day. She felt that the bitterness inside her had been washed away. Her heart was light again, and full of joy.

In fact, they did meet again, just once, but that is a story for another day.

Rustum put his head on one side and said, “Your hair looks funny.”

Septima smiled and said, “Go along now – it’s time you were home. I’ll sing you a song to set you on your way.” A new song had bubbled up in her like the fresh water of the spring. As she sang, it pushed Rustum along like a friendly hand and made his feet skip.

The water that rose up from the spring, clean and pure, flowed without stopping from that day on, bringing life and health to all the land around it. Everyone called it Rustum’s Spring, or sometimes the Singing Spring, but if you asked them, no-one could ever tell you why.

Stories for Another Day

Three travellers came riding with all speed, over mountains and plains, across rivers and through valleys. Long known for their wisdom and their great wealth, they had left their homes to follow a great star that they had seen rising in the East, that told them a new King had been born who would be king of all the world.

In the dead of night they came to a small village. In their haste they meant to go past, but the sound of weeping reached them and brought them to a halt. One said to the others, “Let’s rest here for the night, and set off refreshed in the morning.”

As the sun rose, they set off again and travelled as quickly as they could, to make up for the time they had lost. Without resting, they sped hour after hour in the heat of the day, and long into the night, until they came to the place where the star hung in the sky like a great beacon. It stood over a stable, quiet and still in the starlight.

“This must be the place where the infant King has been born,” they said to each other in wonder. They dismounted, and tidied themselves in preparation for their audience with the young King and his court. “We must have gifts to present to him that are fit for a king,” one said.

The first said, “I brought gold, but I gave it to a young girl whose baby was hungry and cold, to buy food and anything else that was needed.”

The second said anxiously, “I brought frankincense, but I gave it to a woman whose child was suffering and close to death, to cleanse the air and to help her in her prayers.”

The third exclaimed, “Ah, no! For the myrrh that I had, I gave to a mother to bury her son!”

With sorrowful hearts, the three looked at each other, and they looked at the stable which sheltered the baby they had come so far to see. “Perhaps we could slip in unnoticed, and still catch a glimpse of the newborn child,” one suggested hesitantly. The others nodded, eager to see the new King, even if just for a moment.

As quietly as they could, they opened the door of the stable and slipped inside. And there, bathed in the golden light of the great star, they saw a baby wrapped warmly and sleeping in a manger. They hung back in the shadows, ashamed to approach empty-handed, but the child’s mother saw them. She smiled at them, and gestured to them to come closer. With reluctant steps they came forward into the light, and there, lying at the foot of the manger, they saw three gifts, of gold, frankincense and myrrh.

This story has been told before, but it bears repeating because it is well to remember that every gift given from the heart goes further and does more than the giver could ever imagine.

Stories for Another Day

In a group of trees on the edges of a broad wetland there lived a flock of ibises, birds with long legs and even longer beaks in the shape of a reaching hook. Their feathers were a kind of dirty white, with straggling grey and black tail feathers. They were busy birds, always scratching and foraging in the dirt and the mud. At night they roosted in the trees like big bundles of wet washing.

Sometimes the ibises scuffled among themselves over a tasty crab or a plump root, and sometimes they helped each other out, sharing their nests if it rained and looking after each other’s chicks when they needed to go and get food. But one day all that changed.

A new ibis named Sissy, who was someone or other’s cousin or niece, came to live in the wetland. She was no less ugly than any of the other ibises, with their wrinkly, sunken eyes and their scrawny feet, but she spent hours every day grooming her feathers so that they lay flat and smooth, and she was always bobbing her head in and out of the mud, so her beak looked black and satiny from the wet mud clinging to it. She even painted her toes red with strawberry juice.

When she stood in the mud, the little crabs with their red claws came out of their holes and clustered around her, thinking that her toes were other little crabs, so she had plenty to eat, and before long, other ibises clustered around her as well. Two particular ibises were always hanging around her, Enid and Edie. Whatever Sissy said, Enid and Edie repeated it after her, and giggled.

“Who does she think she is?” one of the other birds, whose name was Soupy, said to his friend, Doddle.

Doddle, who was busy trying to pull up a particularly fat mangrove root, said, “Who?”

Soupy said, “Sissy, you know, the one with the shiny beak. You know they’ve started bringing her the fattest crabs and the biggest fish.”

“Have they?” said Doddle. He really didn’t care what the other birds were doing, so long as he had enough to eat every day, and a dry nest to sleep in.

“And they’re building her her own nest, lined with down feathers. It’s up high, so she can look down on the rest of us,” Soupy said, in a disgusted voice.

“Okay,” Doddle said. He gave an extra-hard tug and the root plopped out. He carried it off to eat it, and Soupy followed him, hoping for a share, still shaking his head over Sissy.

Before too long, Enid and Edie were saying that the ibises should make Sissy their queen.

“What do we want a queen for?” Soupy said.

“Because she’s so beautiful,” said Edie. “She raises the tone of the whole flock. I’m sure the other birds all look up to us now.”

“What does a queen do?” Soupy asked suspiciously.

“She sits on a throne,” Enid said. “Everyone does what she says.”

“I don’t want anyone telling me what to do,” Soupy said, stubbornly.

Sissy opened her glossy beak and said, “I don’t want to be anyone’s queen if they don’t want me to be.”

“If they don’t want her to be!” Edie and Enid said, giggling.

Soupy argued, “Why do we need a queen, anyway?”

“Well, if you have to ask…” Sissy said, rolling her eyes.

“If you have to ask!” Enid repeated, and giggled.

“…then you wouldn’t understand, even if I told you,” Sissy finished and strolled off, clicking her red toenails on the ground.

“You wouldn’t understand,” Edie said, and giggled.

Soon everyone started calling her Queen Sissy. Some of them even started to bob their heads whenever she went past. If it rained, Enid and Edie spread their wings over her to keep the rain off, and if it was hot, they stood one on each side and fanned her with their wings. She sat in her special nest, high above everyone else’s, and gave orders like, “Tell everyone to be quiet, I’m having a nap.” Then Enid and Edie would fuss about, making sure she was comfortable and shushing anyone who came near.

Then, as they always did, the big rains came. Doddle started ferrying the eggs and the newly-hatched young to safer nests, up high in the big trees on the other side of the wetlands. Back and forth he went, carrying them in his beak, while the rain came down, heavier and heavier.

Enid and Edie squawked to Sissy, “What should we do? The water’s rising!”

“You should spread your wings wider,” Sissy snapped. “I’m getting wet!”

The rains came down more heavily than ever before. The water rose higher and higher. Nests that had been built in the lower branches of the trees were swept away. Soupy and the other ibises shouted, “What should we do? You’re our queen – tell us what to do!”

Sissy started to get worried. “Save me! Save your queen!” she squawked. After eating all the fattest crabs and the biggest fish, she was almost too heavy to fly.

“Save our queen!” Enid and Edie screeched, dancing about in a panic.

“Help us! Help us!” Soupy and the others cried. “The water is washing our nests away, and our eggs!” They squawked and flapped about in confusion. But some of them saw Doddle flying back and forth steadily through the rain, carrying eggs to safety, and they flew off to do the same thing.

“Doddle, help us!” Soupy yelled.

Doddle looked back and said, “You don’t need my help. Just fly to the big trees on the other side of the wetland.”

Soupy lifted his wings, flapping hard against the heavy rain, and set off. Enid and Edie watched him go and shrieked even more loudly, “Don’t leave us! Help us!”

Soupy yelled back to them, “You need to leave now, or the water will be up to your feet!”

They stopped crying and sniffling and pulled themselves together and flew off to the bigger trees. Sissy was left sitting in her downy nest at the top of her tree.

“You there,” she ordered Doddle, “come and lift me up!”

Doddle flew up grimly, and helped her out of the nest. Together they flew slowly across the floodwaters to the high trees on the other side. When they landed, Sissy’s feathers were sodden. Her beak was dull and wet, and her toenails had lost their shiny red paint. The other ibises hardly noticed her. They were too busy sorting out their new nests and checking their eggs.

“Humph! You people don’t deserve me for a queen!” Sissy said sulkily. She turned her back and sat there by herself with rain dripping off her beak.

Enid and Edie turned to Doddle and said, “You saved us all, Doddle! You should be our king!”

“Yes,” said Soupy. “You should be our king!”

Doddle said, “You’ve got to be kidding. Who’s got time to be a king?” And he flapped away.

Stories for Another Day

There was a carpenter whose name was Bastani, who had a donkey called My that he took very great care of, for reasons that you may have heard about in another story. Bastani was known to everyone as an excellent workman and a hard worker, but as he got older, he found it harder and harder to keep up with all the work that people asked him to do, so he took on an apprentice.

This apprentice, who was named Joseph, learned quickly and well, and soon enough he was more skilled even than Bastani. Bastani could leave more and more of the work to him, which suited both of them very well. The donkey, My, also got older. Bastani noticed that she was looking more and more tired at the end of a day’s work, so he decided that she deserved a rest after so many years of carrying heavy loads of wood and tools. He bought the field next to his house and built a good fence around it, and My grazed peacefully there all the day long. At night she rested in her own stable.

Now one day Joseph came to see Bastani, bringing his pretty young wife with him. Bastani was in the stable, brushing My’s coat until it shone, as he did every night. With a worried frown, Joseph said to him, “You know that a decree has gone out that everyone must return to their home town to be registered for the census.”

Bastani put down the brush he was using, and nodded. Joseph went on, “I have to take my wife and go to Bethlehem. It’s a long, difficult journey, and it will be even more difficult for Mary, who as you can see is expecting a baby.” They both looked at Mary, who was patting My’s soft nose and murmuring to her.

Bastani agreed. “It’s a long way, much too far for her to walk, with the baby coming. You will need a horse or a donkey for her to ride.”

Joseph frowned even more deeply. “I have no money for a horse, or even a donkey.”

Just then, Mary looked up and said quietly, “Joseph?” She had her arm around My’s neck and My was whickering softly.

“Oh, no,” Joseph said, shaking his head firmly. “My is far too old for such a journey.”

Bastani said, “It’s true, My is the oldest donkey in the village, by far. She may be the oldest donkey in the country. She’s nearly as old as I am. But she is still very strong.”

Joseph said even more firmly, “If I was just by myself, I might trust her to carry a small bundle or a few tools, but not my wife, nor the baby she is carrying. Just look at her.”

Mary said, “Please, Joseph! I think she is stronger than she looks.”

Joseph looked at My, and he saw an old donkey with creaky knees and a ragged coat, with a sagging back and eyes milky with blindness. He drew a breath to tell Mary that it was unthinkable that this ancient, worn-out creature could even walk all the way to Bethlehem, let alone carry any load, when the donkey spoke.

She said, “Let me do this. I have waited my whole life for this.”

Joseph was astounded, but his wife smiled, and even Bastani was not as surprised as you might think.

So despite all Joseph’s doubts and misgivings, he and Mary took My, and set out on the long journey to Bethlehem. My carried the bundle of things they would need for the journey, with Mary and Joseph walking along beside her. From time to time, when Mary had walked for as long as she could, Joseph helped her up onto My’s back. My didn’t seem to notice the weight at all, and plodded on as if she had nothing but a load of feathers on her back. Up hills, down steep mountainsides, along rough roads, My plodded on, surely and steadily, without a single stumble.

When they finally reached Bethlehem, Mary was very tired, and My was walking more and more slowly. “Why don’t you both wait here while I find somewhere for us to stay?” Joseph said to Mary. Mary was only too glad to rest. When Joseph came back, he looked more worried than ever. “There are no rooms,” he said. “So many people have come to be registered, all the rooms are taken.”

“No rooms at all?” Mary asked. She knew it was very close to the time for her baby to come.

“The innkeeper said that we could sleep in the stable,” Joseph said angrily. “As if I would allow my wife to sleep among the animals, especially with a baby coming!”

My lifted her head and rested her soft nose in Mary’s hand. Mary smiled, and said, “Where could we find a warmer place to stay, with plenty of sweet-smelling straw to make our beds, and a safe, dry roof over our heads?”

She took Joseph’s hand, and they went to the stable, where the animals stood around, their warm bodies warming the whole stable. Joseph make a comfortable bed for Mary in a corner, and then he brushed the donkey down and made sure there was plenty of straw in the manger for her to eat. Then he settled down at Mary’s side, to watch through the night.

Around midnight, the time came for her to have her child, and she gave birth to a beautiful baby boy. She wrapped him up warmly, and made a place for him to sleep in the clean, dry straw in the manger. Joseph thought of the cradle he had made for the baby, of the finest wood he could find, and he sighed. Mary smiled at him and said, “What could be better than a strong wooden manger full of fresh straw, surrounded by gentle, quiet hearts?”

Some time later, there was a noise of rushing feet outside, and then a timid knock at the stable door. Joseph got up to see who was there, and was astonished to see a group of shepherds.

“We were minding our sheep on the hillside,” they panted, “and the angel of the Lord appeared in the heavens and spoke to us!”

One of them said, “The angel told us that our Saviour, the one we have longed for, has been born this very night.”

“A saviour?” Joseph said quickly. “Why have you come looking for him here, in a stable?”

The shepherd answered, “The angel told us that we would find the baby wrapped up warmly and lying in a manger. So we ran all this way as fast as we could, to see him.”

Joseph heard Mary’s voice from inside the stable. “Joseph, let them come in and see the baby.”

The shepherds took off their head-coverings and fell on their knees beside the manger, gazing at the baby. The youngest said, “My cloak is made of wool from our own sheep. Maybe you could use it to keep the baby warm?”

Joseph looked at the rough, coarse cloak and he sighed. He thought of the soft blankets that Mary had made for the baby, in the cradle at home, and his heart was heavy with disappointment. Mary, who knew what he was thinking, took his hand and said, “What better gift could we ask for, for our son, than the kindness of a loving heart?”

Joseph’s heart lifted, and he accepted the young shepherd’s gift gratefully. Joseph and Mary and the shepherds stood gazing at the baby in silence, with My and the other animals around them, in the warmth of the stable.

Towards dawn, when the shepherds had gone and the stable was peaceful once again, there was a rustling and strange noises from the darkness. Mary was beside the manger in an instant, and Joseph not far behind her, but the baby was lying quietly. “He’s fine,” Mary whispered to Joseph.

“Then what was all the noise about?” Joseph asked. He lit a lantern and held it up so that its light reached into the darkest corners of the stable. My was standing up, shaking herself and looking very pleased with herself. Beside her in the straw, a tiny foal was struggling to its feet.

“It’s My!” Joseph said, astonished. “She’s had a baby foal!”

The little one stood up, with a small wobble, and nuzzled its mother’s side. Then for no reason they could see, the little foal bowed its head.

Mary heard a sound from the manger. To her amazement, the baby was laughing. She lifted him into her arms, and murmured to Joseph, “Put out the lantern.” Joseph blew it out, and still the stable was filled with light.

Stories for Another Day

Bastani was a carpenter, skilful and honest. He had a donkey that he called My, that he loaded up with his tools whenever he had to travel to another part of the town to work. He loved his work, fixing roofs, repairing doors and furniture, even building new houses and barns. He was very good at his work, and he always had plenty to do.

One day an important merchant came to his workshop and said, “My daughter is getting married, and I have promised her a new house for a wedding present. I want you to make the staircase and the furniture for the house. If you do it quickly, I will pay you double.”

Bastani took the job happily, although it meant travelling all the way to the other side of the town every day, with the donkey laden with tools and pieces of wood. He finished in good time, and was paid his money. The merchant was so pleased that he told everyone what a good job Bastani had done, and before long, Bastani had more work that he could handle.

He said to himself, “If I take twice as much wood with me, I can do two jobs in one day.” So he loaded up his donkey with twice as much wood as well as all his tools, and set out very early. It was night time before he was finished work, and on the way home it started to rain. He took shelter in a small cave, pulling his tools in after him so they didn’t get wet and start to rust, but the donkey he left out in the rain.

When they finally reached home, he was so tired that he didn’t bother to unload My, or feed her or brush her coat. He fell into bed and went to sleep at once.

The next morning he woke late, and had to hurry to get to his next job in time. “It’s a good thing I didn’t unload the donkey last night,” he said to himself. “It saved me having to load her up again this morning.”

So it went on, day after day, until Bastani was so tired that he could hardly lift his hammer. He never had a moment to do any repairs that were needed on his own house, and when the roof of My’s stable began to leak, he just shrugged his shoulders. “I will get around to repairing it one day,” he said. “After all, she’s just a dumb animal.”

Then one night a terrible storm hit the town. In the hills to the north, the heavy rain made part of a hill collapse in a landslide. Some of the houses were destroyed, and others were damaged.

“I must see what I can do to help,” Bastani said. He loaded all the tools he had onto his donkey and as much wood as she could possibly carry. The rain was still pouring down, and the roads were deep in mud. Bastani could hardly walk, and My could barely stagger along, with mud up to her knees. Further up into the hills the road became even steeper and My stopped, unable to go on.

Bastani said, “We can’t stay here, sinking deeper into the mud, when so many people up in the hills need my help.” He took a heavy stick and beat the donkey and shouted at her until she started to move again.

Finally they made it to the site of the landslide. Bastani set to work, repairing and building without a break. My was put to work carrying wood back and forth, and even carrying homeless families and their belongings down the muddy hillside. At the end of the day, when Bastani was too exhausted to work any more, he nailed a few planks together to make himself a rough shelter, but the donkey stood outside in the rain and the mud all night.

The next day, Bastani worked all day long, fixing and building and repairing. Finally, at the end of the day, he set off down the hill again. The people shouted after him, “Thanks, Bastani! Thank you for all you’ve done!”

Bastani was so tired that he couldn’t stay on his feet. He climbed onto the donkey’s back and dug his heels into her sides. The donkey stopped. Bastani urged her forward. The donkey gave a shake, and Bastani fell off, onto the road. Bastani had never been more surprised in his life, but more was to come. The donkey spoke.

She said, “Bastani, you’ve gone too far. I have put up with being starved, frozen, beaten, and neglected. I have walked further and carried loads far beyond my strength. And you ask more and more. It’s too much, Bastani.”

Bastani got slowly to his feet. Had My just spoken? Had he dreamed it? He thought of the loads he had expected My to carry, the times he had eaten when My had gone hungry, the times he had found himself shelter and given no thought at all to My, standing in the cold and the rain. A sense of shame filled him.

Can you apologise to a donkey? he asked himself. He made up his mind. “I will change,” he said out loud. “I will take better care of you.”

He was as good as his word. When they got home, he rubbed My down and gave her a good dinner of bran and oats. Never again did he leave her without food or shelter, and whenever he had to ask her to do a little extra, such as carrying a heavy load of wood, he gave her an extra treat, a carrot or an apple, and made sure she had plenty of rest the next day. And the donkey worked as hard as any donkey ever has, without ever a word of complaint.

His neighbours, seeing him brushing My’s coat every day and sweeping out the stable, said, “You certainly treat your donkey very well. After all, she’s just a dumb animal.”

But Bastani wasn’t so sure.

Stories for Another Day

There was a turtle-master named Gregory who had twelve turtles. He took good care of them, and even trained them to walk in a straight line behind him, in order from largest to smallest. After a lot of practice, they could also make a neat circle with Gregory in the middle. The youngest, Pipi, had a very nice singing voice, and sometimes the others would sing along with him, in a kind of wobbly chorus.

They spent most of their days grazing in grassy fields, or else walking in a straight line behind Gregory on their way to new fields. One day, when they were walking happily down the road on their way to a new grassy field, Gregory happened to glance over his shoulder, and he noticed that Pipi was missing. He looked around everywhere but little Pipi had disappeared.

He quickly found a safe grassy patch for the other turtles, and instructed the biggest turtle, Jojo, not to let them stray. Then he set out to look for the one that was lost.

He searched high and low, but mostly low since Pipi was a turtle after all, and quite a small one. Who knows if he would ever have found him if he hadn’t heard a far-off voice singing in a frightened, quavery way.

He followed the sound to a clearing, and as soon as he got there, Gregory knew it wasn’t going to be a simple matter of putting Pipi in his pocket and carrying him back to the others. For the clearing was bounded by seven doors, and in the centre of them sat a beautiful woman, holding Pipi in her lap.

She had long, fair hair, long enough for her to sit on, and she was wearing a clinging green dress under a green silken cloak. “Welcome!” she said, with a smile that turned up the corners of her mouth like a cricket’s legs. “I am Liana, lady of this place.”

Gregory bowed nicely, and asked for his turtle back.

Liana smiled so that the corners of her mouth deepened even more sharply. “Turtle or no turtle, ” she said, “you cannot leave here except through one of those doors. All but one lead to certain death, and even that one, if you should be clever enough to choose the right door, is a perilous passageway fraught with danger. Only the most courageous attempt it, for they risk death by a thousand cuts.”

Gregory said, “I beg your pardon, my lady, but I prefer to leave by the way I came in.”

The lady’s mouth shut like a trap. “That is no longer an option, either for you or your shelly friends. Look behind you,” she said.

Gregory looked behind him. He saw with dismay that not only had the way into the clearing disappeared, but that Jojo and the other ten turtles, in a nice straight line, had followed him in.

He took a deep breath. There was nothing he could do but try and find the right door to go through. He looked at the seven high wooden doors that surrounded him. “Is what you said true?” he asked.

Liana stood up, tipping Pipi off her lap, and stalked up to Gregory. “No,” she said. “In actual fact, you are almost sure to die, no matter which door you choose.”

“And the thousand cuts?” Gregory asked.

“That part is true,” she said airily, “but a man may survive even a thousand cuts. Or he may die of one.”

“Which door is the safest?” Gregory asked.

“Do you think I’m going to tell you?” she laughed. “But you have twelve turtles and there are only seven doors. If seven of them try one door each, you will still have six turtles left, if all goes well. And you will know which doors not to choose.”

“That is not an option,” Gregory said firmly. It was unthinkable that he would send even one of the turtles into certain death, not even Dodo who was very old and almost blind and whose shell was so thick she could probably survive even ten thousand cuts. He gathered the turtles around him in a neat circle and said some encouraging things, and told them to keep away from the doors at all cost.

Liana smiled her crooked smile at him. “Did I mention,” she said, “that within an hour my seven brothers will arrive with their seven flashing swords, and make mincemeat of anyone they find here? And they are particularly fond of turtle soup.”

The turtles all gave horrified little squeaks at that.

“Is that true?” Gregory demanded.

“It may be,” Liana purred. She curled her hair around her fingers, smiling, and waited to see what Gregory would do.

At that moment, the sun, which had been hidden among the clouds until now, suddenly shone its beams into the clearing, and Jojo, who was really quite smart for a turtle, nudged Gregory two steps forward. Suddenly Gregory could see the sun shining on the doors, and he realised that six of them were not doors at all, but mirrors.

“Why, there is only one door!” he exclaimed.

Liana’s smile dissolved. “One is enough!” she said. “Remember the thousand cuts.”

“A man may survive even a thousand cuts,” Gregory said bravely. He strode forward to the door, and turned the handle.

The door shattered into a thousand pieces, each as sharp as glass. Most of them fell harmlessly to the ground, but a dozen of them struck Gregory on the face and the body, and one long, sharp piece stabbed him deep in the heart. He fell to the ground, bleeding.

The turtles rushed to his side, as quickly as turtles can rush. Each of them gripped a piece of the door in their mouth and plucked it out of Gregory’s body. Jojo grasped the largest splinter, which had struck Gregory’s heart, and pulled with all his might, until it came out. It was so large and sharp that it cut both corners of his mouth, which is why turtles even today have broad mouths and a pointed top lip.

Liana took a small pot of ointment out of her dress and spread some on Gregory’s wounds, and some on Jojo’s mouth, and bandaged them up with strips of her petticoat.

“Aren’t your brothers coming?” Gregory gasped. Liana was pulling some of the bandages very tight.

“Not today,” she said coolly. “It seems you won’t die after all.”

Gregory felt his chest, where the splinter of wood had stabbed his heart. “Not even of this?” he said.

Liana said, “These wounds of love never heal completely, but once you are saved by love, you don’t need to be afraid of dying.” She wrapped the splinter that had pierced his heart in her silk handkerchief and put it away carefully in her pocket. “Now, go,” she said, “and take your reptilian friends with you.”

“Will you come with us?” Gregory asked, but he really meant would she come with him. “I have it on good authority,” he said, “that a herd of deadly Argentinian fire ants is about to descend on this place, any minute now.”

“Is that true?” Liana asked suspiciously.

“It may be,” Gregory said.

She smiled. “I expect we will meet again, but I have some things to do first.” She kissed Pipi and patted Jojo, and walked through the open doorway, and was soon out of sight.

And what those things were, and whether they ever met again, is a story for another day.

Stories for Another Day

Sometimes from a broken heart can come great love and self-sacrifice, that can bring about great healing.

Garth was married to a sweet, quiet woman named Aila, and they had many happy, healthy children. The two youngest, a boy and a girl, were very close in age. The older child they named Toben, and his sister was called, Layli. Layli loved her older brother with all her heart. She spent every minute of the day with him, and at night they slept in the same cot together. She went with him wherever he went, shared her food with him if he was hungry, and did anything he asked her to.

They became so close that sometimes Layli spoke in Toben’s voice, and when she dressed in his clothes and his cap, even their parents would mistake them for each other. Once when Toben became very sick, Layli curled up next to him, and lay just as pale and unmoving. Their parents were afraid that if Toben died, Layli would lie too, and she may well have, but Toben recovered, and all was well.

When Toben and Layli grew up, they built themselves a comfortable little hut in the forest. They came to know the trees and the creeks and gullies like friends. They knew how to find food growing in the wild, mushrooms and roots and fruit, so they were never hungry.

One day, deep in the forest, they found a young woman, pale and limping. Her name was Orpa. No-one knew where she had come from, but she was all alone in the world, with no mother or father or family of any kind. She had hurt her ankle while she was searching for food in the forest. Together Toben and Layli carried her to their home, and in no time at all Toben was in love with Orpa and wanted to marry her. Orpa loved Toben with a fierce, burning passion, so they were married without delay.

Layli was overjoyed to see her brother so happy. But Orpa was very jealous by nature. As soon as they were married, Orpa said to Layli, “Toben has a wife now. He must stay with me in our own hut. It isn’t right for you to live with us.” Layli was hurt and saddened, but she saw that Orpa was right. As much as she loved her brother, she had to find a home of her own, and learn to live by herself. She took her bow and her knife and set off into the forest.

After a while, Toben and Orpa had a child, a strong, smiling baby boy who was the image of his father. Layli loved to sit and hold him and play with him, but Orpa’s jealous heart made her say to Toben, “Your sister spends too much time with the baby. I saw her stabbing him with a pin the other day. It’s because she is jealous that she has no child of her own.” Toben listened to her and turned against his sister. He sent her away angrily, forbidding her to come near his son again. Layli went away with a heavy heart.

Toben adored his baby son, and spent every moment he could with him. Very quickly Orpa couldn’t bear the sight of the baby, who took so much of Toben’s attention away from her. Although her face smiled when she held the baby, inside she was secretly planning how she could get rid of him.

One day Layli was hunting for mushrooms among the trees when she heard a baby crying. She followed the sound and found Orpa dangling the baby over the rushing river. Before Layli could move or speak, Orpa threw the baby into the river and ran off, laughing to herself.

Layla jumped in and swam after the baby, and managed to save him before he was swept away by the current. She wrapped him in her cloak and carried him away. She knew Toben would be devastated to hear that his son had drowned, but how could she risk the baby’s life by returning him to Orpa’s care? Instead, she took him secretly to her aunt, Shanama, who took the child in and cared for him.

When Orpa returned home to Toben, she pretended to weep bitterly, saying that the baby had wriggled out of her arms and fallen into the river. The whole village mourned, but secretly Orpa was overjoyed to have Toben to herself again.

Some time later, they had another son. Orpa hated him the moment she set eyes on him. She knew that Toben would love him with all his heart, even more so since he had lost his first son. So she immediately began plotting to get rid of the baby just as she had gotten rid of his older brother.

When Garth was at work in the forest, Orpa took the baby to a deep, dark cave and covered him with branches and left him there. Then she went home and told her husband that a giant eagle had swooped down and taken him.

She didn’t know that Layli had been following her and had seen her leave the baby in the cave. As soon as Orpa had left, Layli went in and brought the baby safely out again, and took him to her aunt, Shanama, to care for with his brother.

Toben was so distressed at the loss of his children that he would not eat or sleep. Day after day he sat weeping silently, blaming himself for not taking better care of them. Orpa grew angry with him. She said to herself, “He cares more for those children, even though they are dead, than he does for me!” Her heart turned against Toben and she hated him.

In her jealous rage, she decided to do away with Toben as well. She went to the forest and gathered mushrooms and made a fragrant mushroom stew. But among the good mushrooms she mixed poisonous mushrooms. One mouthful of the stew would bring a speedy and painful death.

Layli saw Orpa picking the mushrooms, and followed her home. Standing outside the window, she saw Orpa mix the poisonous mushrooms into the stew. She knew at once that Orpa planned to kill Toben, and she could think of only one way to save him. She pushed her hair up under her cap, pulled her coat close around her and walked in. “That smells good,” she said in Toben’s voice. “When will it be ready?”

“It’s ready now,” Orpa said brightly. She filled a bowl with the stew and handed it to Layli. “For you, my dear,” she said, “with all my love.”

Layli filled a spoon with the stew and put it to her lips. Before she could eat it, Toben burst into the room. “What are you doing here?” he shouted at Layli.

Layli said, “This woman, your wife, is trying to poison you. The stew is full of deadly mushrooms.”

“If it is poisoned, why would you eat it?” Toben said.

“To save you,” Layli said simply. “Would you have believed me if I had tried to warn you?”

Toben turned to his wife and said, “Is this true?”

Orpa tried to laugh it off. “Of course not, you silly fool. She is trying to turn you against me, just as she did before.” But there was a look on her face that Toben could not trust.

“Then if it is harmless, eat some yourself,” he said to Orpa. He took the spoon and forced it towards Orpa’s lips.

“No!” she screamed, spitting it out. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “You fool! You spend your love and attention on so many things, the forest, your dead children, even your sister, when it is mine by right! I cannot bear to live with you for even a moment longer!”

Taking all she could carry, she walked out of their home and was never seen again.

Toben put his face in his hands and moaned, “I have lost everything! First my children, and now my wife!”

Layli touched his shoulder and said, “Your wife you have certainly lost, and only time will tell if that is a bad thing or not. But if you come with me, you will find that you have not lost your children after all.”

She led him to Shanama’s home. When Toben saw his two beautiful children, perfectly healthy and happy, and he heard how they came to be there, he was so filled with joy that he never regretted the loss of his wife Orpa, again.

Stories for Another Day

Gavin was what his mother would call a fussy eater. He thought spinach tasted like dirt, and there was no way his mother could ever get him to eat fish. “It tastes… fishy,” he would say, and refuse to eat it. When the milk was just beginning to go sour, Gavin was the first to be able to taste it. “That milk is off,” he would say. His mother, who couldn’t taste anything wrong with it, would tip the rest away in any case, just to be on the safe side, and many times the family might have been sick except for Gavin.

She had a terrible time trying to get him to eat his vegetables, especially green vegetables like zucchini and broccoli. Sometimes she would chop them up finely and sneak them into pancakes when she was making them. Gavin’s brother and sister, Mettle and Marrian, would happily tuck into the pancakes, but Gavin would nibble the edges cautiously and then say, “You’ve put grated zucchini in this! Yuck!” and fold his arms and refuse to eat any more.

His mother would sigh noisily and said, “Gavin, just eat it! It isn’t going to kill you!”

“You never know,” Gavin would say darkly.

He was always saying things like, “There’s too much coriander in this. And you’ve used the wrong lentils.”

His mother said, “Gavin, lentils are lentils!”

“They’re completely different,” Gavin said. “Red lentils are sort of sweet, and brown ones have a kind of nutty taste, and yellow ones make the back of my nose hurt. Can’t you taste it?”

“No-one can taste it but you,” his mother said, exasperated. “I think it’s your imagination.”

Gavin started making his own food, so that there were never any unpleasant surprises, even though his mother complained that it made twice as much washing-up. But it turned out that being able to taste things other people couldn’t was not such a bad thing after all, as you will see.

One day a stranger arrived in the town, and opened a new shop. He was large, and round, with long, spindly arms and legs. He had lots of dark hair, not just on his head but on the backs of his hands and coming out of his nose and his ears. He called himself Oda.

The strange thing about Oda’s shop was that it only sold one thing, a rosy, sweet-smelling drink that came in large bottles and small bottles, all labelled, “Oda’s Rose-Tinted Syrup.”

To begin with, people just looked into the shop as they passed, without stopping, until Oda started giving away free samples of the pink syrup, to the people going by. As soon as they tasted it, they loved it and wanted more.

“It tastes like roses, with just a hint of honey,” Mettle said, “but there’s something else…” A dreamy look came over his face, just thinking about it. “You should try it, Gavin,” he said.

“No, thanks,” Gavin said. “You never know what they put in these things.”

“Oda makes it himself, in the kitchen at the back of his shop,” Marrian said. “It’s all natural, he says.”

“Dung beetles are completely natural, and so is cauliflower,” Gavin said. “That’s no reason to eat them.”

Oda’s shop became so popular that he added some tables and chairs so people could come with their friends and sit for hours drinking the syrup. It seemed the more of it they drank, the more they wanted. Sometimes they stayed so long, they fell asleep at the tables. They forgot to go to work and they didn’t want to go home to their families.

After some time, Marrian went to Gavin and said, “I’m worried about Mettle. He’s at Oda’s all the time now.”

Gavin said, “He’s old enough to know what he’s doing. We shouldn’t interfere.” He was busy trying to perfect a recipe for spinach pie without the spinach, and he didn’t want Marrian bothering him.

Marrian wasn’t going to be put off. She planted herself in front of Gavin and said, “Don’t you know a man died in that shop the other day? They thought he’d fallen asleep, but he was actually dead!”

“So an old man died in his sleep,” Gavin said. “It’s not such a bad way to go.”

“That’s what Mettle said,” Marrian said, “but I heard afterwards that the man wasn’t old at all. Please, Gavin!”

“All right,” Gavin said grumpily. “But it won’t do any good, you know.”

Marrian didn’t smile. She was too worried. She took his arm and dragged him down to Oda’s shop. Oda was standing behind the counter in the cosy dimness, polishing glasses and smiling at the room full of people.

Mettle was sitting at a table with a dozen friends, and it looked like he had been there all morning. “Gavin!” he said jovially. “Great to see you! Come and join us!”

Gavin sat down, and Marrian sat down beside him. Mettle filled a glass and and pushed it over to Gavin. “Drink this,” he said, “and then tell me if it isn’t the best thing you’ve ever tasted.”

Gavin grunted, but he took a tiny sip of the rose-flavoured syrup. “Mmmff, honey, and rosewater – way too much,” he said, screwing up his face. “Tincture of cinnabar, just a hint, to give it colour, I suppose.” He rolled his tongue around the inside his mouth as if he was trying to remember something he had forgotten a long time ago. “And something else…Faughhh! Spider venom!” He spat ferociously, to get the liquid out of his mouth.

Leaping to his feet, he pointed at Oda. “You’ve been putting spider venom in their drink! No wonder they keep wanting more and more. It numbs their taste buds and slows their brains down and makes them sleepier and sleepier.” He threw his glass on the floor, shattering it into pieces. “You’ve been poisoning everyone with this horrible drink!”

Before his eyes, Oda grew and swelled up like a giant balloon. His long, thin arms and legs doubled and became eight hairy spider legs, holding up his black, swollen body.

Gavin yelled, “Marrian, turn the lights on!” Marrian ran to the light switch. As soon as the lights came on, Gavin could see what had been invisible before: a web of very fine, black threads spreading out from Oda’s body to all the drinkers in the room. The threads wrapped around their bodies and led back to Oda’s mouth, where he had been slowly and surely sucking the life out of them.

“Gavin! The glass!” Marrian shouted. Gavin grabbed a piece of broken glass and sawed at the thread that was wrapped around Mettle until it snapped. Oda screamed in a thin, high voice, but Gavin and Marrian went on cutting and slashing at thread after thread, until everyone was free. Then they turned on Oda and drove him out of the town to the open fields, where the crows made short work of him.

There were those who lamented the loss of the syrup, even poisonous as it was, which resulted in one good thing. To keep them quiet, Gavin opened an eating place in the empty shop, and the food that he cooked and Marrian and Mettle served, was the best and the tastiest in the whole town. But he never made anything with even a hint of roses in it, for if he did, no-one would eat it.

Stories for Another Day

Rosabel was born blind, but she didn’t know it for many years. She saw with her hands, and with her hearing, and did not know of anything lacking in her, until one day a visitor to the village said, “Oh, look at the poor blind girl!”

Rosabel went to her mother, Zahara, and said, “Mother, am I blind? What does it mean?”

Zahara said, “It means that you do not see with your eyes, as other people do.”

Rosabel’s feet knew every path and every stone in the village, and she knew the voices of every villager. She learnt to play the harp sitting in her mother’s lap as an infant, tugging at the strings with her short fingers. Wherever she went, her harp was always with her, in a bag that she carried on her back. As she walked through the village and the countryside, friends and neighbours would call out to her and ask her for a song to give them a rhythm for reaping or raising water from the well, or a lullaby to put a baby to sleep, or tunes for the children to dance and clap to.

In the evenings, she and the other harpists in the village would play and sing around the fire, but it was Rosabel that everyone would ask for one more song, when the night was ending.

It was on one of these nights that a band of raiders from the sixth kingdom, on their hard-mouthed horses with hooves like iron, burst out of the darkness into the circle of firelight where the villagers were gathered. They raided the houses and took everything they could carry, carpets, weapons, food and tools. The harps which the village was famous for making meant nothing to the raiders, so they tossed them onto the fire. But their captain, a ruffian named Gilpus, recognised something rare in Rosabel’s beauty, and he caught her up and threw her over his saddle as the raiding party rode off, disappearing into the night with the same speed with which they had appeared.

They left confusion and shock behind them, but when Zahara and Lincoln discovered that their daughter Rosabel had been taken, their sorrow and anger knew no bounds. When light came with the dawn, they searched every inch of the mountains and valleys around them, but no trace of her was found.

Gilpus led his men back to King Haar’s fortress. “I have brought you a prize,” he said to the king, pushing Rosabel forward.

“What, this skinny, unkempt girl?” Haar said. Rosabel turned her head from side to side, trying to measure the size and shape of the room and the people in it by the sounds she could hear. King Haar said contemptuously, “The creature is blind!”

“That may be so,” Gilpus said, “but I have heard she is more skilled in music than anyone you have ever heard. Just listen to her, and if she does not please you, I’ll get rid of her.”

With shaking hands Rosabel took the harp that they gave her and tuned its strings. Then she began to play. The room stood still and the king held his breath.

“You have indeed brought me a treasure, Gilpus,” the king said when she had finished.

Rosabel was bathed and perfumed and dressed in finest silk. Her hair was brushed until it lay on her shoulders like a dark waterfall. She was commanded to play at royal banquets, at suppers, and in the quiet of the evenings, whenever the king desired her presence.

The king was a man of greed and violence, feared, not loved, by all he commanded. Over and over he had led his army against other cities in other lands, building his own wealth by stealing theirs and increasing his power by instilling fear. A man like this often has trouble sleeping, which is why Gilpus’s gift pleased him so much. Rosabel’s playing allowed him to go to sleep, and when he was woken by nightmares, her music soothed him back to sleep.

Whenever the king led his army out to kill and conquer, Rosabel was tied into a saddle and forced to accompany them, so that she could play him to sleep at the end of the day. And over and over, when she heard the horrible sounds of killing and destruction all around her, she was grateful that at least she could not see.

In a neighbouring country there was a city known for its beauty, its music and its wealth. King Haar turned his eyes on it, and he formed a plan. He sent Gilpus and his raiding party into the city by night, to capture its greatest hero by stealth. This man was brought back to the fortress bound in chains, and thrown into a prison made of stone. Then Haar and his soldiers prepared to attack the unprotected city.

Rosabel was free to wander King Haar’s fortress whenever he did not need her to play for him. She often found her way to the kitchen, where she would sit and listen so quietly that people mostly forgot she was there. She heard the servants speaking about the prisoner, and that night, once Haar was asleep, she took her harp and made her way to the prison, where the prisoner sat in deep despair, helpless to protect his city.

When she began to play, the rage and despair in the man’s heart left him, and he listened in silence. Then he began to weep. “How is it that you play exactly those songs which touch my heart?” he asked her.

“I have travelled far, and seen more than the human heart would ever desire to see, although I am blind,” Rosabel said.

The man said, “Your music is more than food and drink to me. Play for me, please.”

Rosabel played, and the music filled the man’s heart with so much hope and courage that he stood and gathered all his strength, and pulling with all his might, he burst the chains that bound him. “Come with me,” he said to Rosabel, catching her hand.

Rosabel answered, “If the kings calls for me and I am not here, he will send Gilpus and his men after us. I can’t travel as fast as you and I would slow you down, and he would easily track the two of us. I would be punished, but it would not be prison for you, it would be death. Go now, while it is still dark. By the time they come to find you in the morning, you will be long gone.”

The man kissed her lightly on the lips and then he escaped into the night.

In the morning, when King Haar found that the hero had escaped, he had Rosabel beaten, then he gave orders that a ball of iron be chained to her leg.

His heart was filled with rage. He ordered Gilpus to disguise himself and his men as merchants, and go to the city with wagons loaded with cakes and sweets. There they pretended to set up a stall in the marketplace. When the children came clamouring around them, they seized them and threw them into the wagons and drove off at high speed, before the townspeople even realised what was happening.

The children were thrown into the dungeon, the locks and the guards doubled. Then King Haar sent a message to the people of the city. “We have your children. Hand over your city to me or they die.”

The people of the city called their heroes and armed themselves, and went to attack the fortress and bring the children back. They found that the walls of stone towered high above them, and the gates of the fortress were as thick as tree trunks. King Haar’s men fired on them over the walls of the fortress, with fire and heavy stones, and they fired back with bows and arrows. The battle went on into the night, and through the next day and the next. The fortress was impenetrable, but the people would not give up while their children remained prisoners inside.

While the battle raged, the children, left alone in the dungeon, set up such a terrible wailing that no-one in the fortress could bear it. “Make them be quiet!” the king ordered, “or I will kill them myself!”

Rosabel said, “If I play for them, it may quiet them.” The king had her taken down at once.

As soon as her fingers touched the strings, the children began to listen. She played the songs their mothers sang to them, the songs they sang at their games in the street. The children came and sat at her feet, weeping. Then she spoke to them, and told them that their families would save them, and they must be very brave while they waited for them to come.

After that she spent every spare moment with the children. When they cried with loneliness and fear, she sang to them and told them stories. Sometimes she asked them to teach her the songs they knew. The music she surrounded them with sustained them and strengthened them.

One morning she heard two servants saying to each other, “If only they knew, in the back wall of the dungeon there is a small door hidden under the rubble, that passes through the wall of the fortress.”

Rosabel sped to the dungeon. In the thick darkness her hands dug feverishly through the rubble at the back of the dungeon. When her hands were not strong enough, she broke her harp into pieces and dug with that until she felt a doorway, hardly as high as her knees. “Children,” she said, “through this door is a tunnel that leads under the wall to the other side, where your families are waiting. You must go now, before the guards come back.”

The children were afraid and said, “Come with us!” but Rosabel pointed to the iron ball and the chain on her leg.

“I can’t run, because of this,” she said.

“That old rusty thing?” the children said. They pulled at the chain and broke it easily, for their tears falling on the chain had rusted it through.

Rosabel helped the children into the tunnel, but when she tried to follow them, the door was almost too small for her to pass through. While the children sped on ahead, Rosabel struggled painfully along the passage inch by inch, scraping the skin off her elbows and knees and nearly getting stuck more than once. At last she felt cool fresh air on her skin, and she pulled herself through the last few metres and out into the sunshine.

She was covered in dirt and scratches, but the sun was shining warmly and she lifted her face to it, smiling. Then she heard shouting from the ramparts above her. “There’s a prisoner escaping!” the king’s soldiers shouted. “Fire! Bring her down!”

Terrible fear filled her. She didn’t know which way to run, or where to hide. Then a strong hand took hers, and a voice she knew well said, “Rosabel! Come with me!” It was the voice of the captive she had sung to, so long ago. Together they set off running for the safety of the forest.

Inside the fortress, everything was in confusion. Outside the gates, the people had gathered up their children and set off for home, singing and shouting for joy, leaving the soldiers in the fortress staring and shouting after them.

The king, when he heard that Rosabel had escaped, fell into such darkness of spirit that he never left the fortress again, so the town was left in safety. As for Rosabel and her rescuer, from that time on they were never apart.

Stories for Another Day

Once there lived a man named Jesper who was a calligrapher. With his pens, he did flowing, beautiful writing on documents and papers, in blue and green and red inks. When people needed special certificates, birth certificates or marriage certificates, or if they needed a sign which they could display in their shops to catch the attention of people passing by, they would come to Jesper.

For the most special documents, he might have to spend days working on a single page, getting it absolutely perfect. When the Duke of Aragon’s baby daughter was born, Jesper took nearly two weeks to finish her birth certificate. When it was done and the ink was dry, he rolled the parchment up carefully and took it to the duke.

The duke was pleased. “Your work is beautiful,” the duke said, as he gave Jesper his money. “What a pity your pens are so poor. If you used good pens like the best calligraphers, you could easily ask twice as much money for your work.”

Jesper went home and told his wife, Meera. She said, “I have seen a silver pen for sale in the marketplace that would make your work even more beautiful, but it costs three gold pieces! Where would we ever get so much money?”

Jesper said, “There’s plenty of work in me yet. If I work twice as hard, and we put a little aside from every job that I do, surely we can save enough, in time.”

Meera said, “I can try to get more work too.” Meera worked as a seamstress, making dresses and shirts and pants, and curtains and bedsheets for the people of the town. “I can sew at night, as well as during the day.”

Jesper got up earlier every day to begin his work before breakfast. He worked as fast as he could, still being careful to do his very best work. In the evenings he found work as a scribe, writing letters for people who couldn’t read or write. Mostly they could only afford to pay him a few copper coins, but every little bit helped, Jesper thought.

Meera sewed all day long, and in the evenings when she couldn’t use her old sewing machine because the neighbours complained that it made too much noise, she would sew by hand, sitting close to the lamp to be able to see her stitches.

After a long time they managed to save almost one gold piece, but then there was a bad storm that blew the roof off and damaged the walls of their house, and all their savings went to having it repaired. Meera looked at the empty tin where they kept their savings, and she felt so down-hearted that she couldn’t help turning to Jesper and saying, “Will we ever have enough saved to buy the silver pen?”

Jesper gave her a hug and said, “There’s plenty of work in us yet.” He set himself to work even harder, and even longer hours. He rose before dawn to help a farmer with his cows before he began his own work, although his fingers were nearly frozen from the cold. Their savings began to mount up slowly again. But then Meera fell ill, and Jesper had to stop working to look after her. The money disappeared quickly, paying for food and medicine. By the time Meera was well again, the tin was completely empty.

She shook the tin despairingly, but Jesper said, “Never mind, there’s plenty of work in us yet.” There were no more hours in the day when he could work so he wracked his brains to find ways to make more money, until he came up with an idea. With his old, worn-out pens he couldn’t make his lettering any better, so instead he decorated some of the letters with swirls and curlicues like climbing vines. He even began drawing tiny figures, birds and animals and flowers, here and there among the curlicues. People loved his new work, and gradually the money in the tin built up again.

One day he came home with great news. “The duke wants me to write out the invitations for his eldest son’s wedding. He’s promised me a whole gold piece for the work. And that’s not all – the news in the marketplace is that the duke’s own scribe is about to retire, and he will soon be looking for a new one. If only I had the silver pen, I think I would have a chance at getting the job as his scribe and calligrapher, and then our fortunes would be made!”

“Your work is the best in the whole town,” Meera said warmly. “I’m sure that if you had better pens, it would be the best in the whole country!”

Jesper cleared his table and set to work.

The next day Meera had good news of her own. “Lady Florida has asked me to make her daughter’s wedding dress! It will be very elegant, with yards and yards of lace and silk. She says she will pay me one gold piece!”

They hugged each other for sheer joy. They counted the money in the tin. There were lots of copper coins, and some silver. “There is almost as much as one piece of gold in the tin already,” Jesper said. “If all goes well with our work, we will have almost enough to buy the silver pen!”

Meera worked on the wedding dress on her old sewing machine every hour of the day. Long into the night, she sat by the lamp, sewing the finest stitches by hand. The wedding dress was finished on the same day that Jesper finished the the last of the invitations. Jesper set off to deliver them to the duke, while Meera wrapped the wedding dress carefully to take it to Lady Florida.

The duke was so pleased with Jesper’s work that he gave him two gold pieces instead of the one that they had agreed on. He said, as he gave him the money, “You know that I will soon be looking for a new scribe for my household. If you continue to do your work as well as this, I will certainly consider you for the job.”

Jesper was very pleased and excited. On the way home, he stopped in the marketplace to gaze at the silver pen on display and dream about creating the most beautiful work in the country for the duke and his household. On the next stall, he noticed a shining, new sewing machine for sale. Its treadle moved easily and quietly, and its needle was sharp and true. He thought of his wife working such long hours with her creaking old machine, with its worn-out wheel and gears.

He made up his mind. “There’s plenty of work in me yet,” he said to himself. He went home and took their savings out of the tin. With the money the duke had paid him, there was still not enough to buy the sewing machine, so Jesper got his good coat and took it to the marketplace and sold it. Then he bought the new sewing machine for Meera.

When he got home, he said, “My dear, you work so hard, for such long hours every day. I couldn’t bear to see you ruining your eyes, sewing by lamplight. The duke paid me two gold pieces instead of the one he promised me, so I took our savings and I bought this for you,” and he gave her the sewing machine. Meera was so overcome, she wept with surprise and joy.

Then she said, “Lady Florida was so pleased with my work, she gave me two gold pieces instead of the one she had promised me. But when I got home, I saw that our savings were gone, and your good coat was gone as well. I thought that thieves must have come and taken them. I couldn’t bear to think how disappointed you would be, so I sold my sewing machine, and with the money Lady Florida gave me, I bought this for you.” And she gave him the silver pen.

Stories for Another Day

There was a man who could find anything in the world if he had a forked stick and enough time. People used to pay him to find things for them, like water and buried treasure, but then he lost the stick and that was the end of that.

The stick was not lost, however. It had been stolen by a monkey-trainer, who had a monkey named Harold. He thought that if people would would pay a man to find things for them, they would pay a lot more to see a monkey find things. He was right. He trained Harold to use the stick and he gave him a nut whenever he found something.

Harold wasn’t much good at finding things, although he did find a whole steam train once, for someone who wanted to know where the station was. One day Harold got into a rage the way that monkeys do, and he threw the stick into the forest. There were so many sticks lying around in the forest, the monkey-trainer had no hope of finding it, so he gave it up as lost and that was the end of that.

But the stick was not lost, as you will see. Some time later a man called Toomie was walking through the forest, in a black mood. He was the head servant in a big house, and it was his job to clean his mistress’s jewellery once a month. He had been cleaning it that very morning, and somehow he had managed to lose a very large ruby on a chain. One minute it was on the table with the rest of the jewellery, and the next minute it was gone.

What Toomie didn’t know was that under the table there was a loose floorboard. When anyone stepped on one end, the other end lifted up just a little. While he was polishing the emeralds, the ruby pendant had slipped off the table onto the floor. Toomie’s chair happened to be resting on the other end of the loose board, and the ruby slithered down through the crack and into the space below the floorboards. When Toomie stood up to look for it, of course the board lay flat again and he had no idea there had ever been a gap there at all.

He knew that his mistress, Lady Florida, would be very angry. He might lose his job, or worse, he might be thrown into jail. So he decided to run away before anyone found out that the ruby was missing.

As he walked through the forest, hands in his pockets, looking at the ground, his foot kicked something and he nearly tripped over. Toomie picked the thing up. It was an ordinary forked stick. He was about to throw it away when he felt it tremble slightly in his hands. He grasped it tightly with both hands. The stick gave a definite tug.

Now if you were holding a stick and it started tugging you along, you might drop the stick and run a mile, but Toomie didn’t. He let the stick tug him back to the house, through the passage, to the room where he had been cleaning the jewellery earlier that day.

The stick pointed down to the floorboards. Toomie poked and pried, and discovered the loose floorboard and the space under it, and there was the ruby! He was so relieved, he went straight up to Lady Florida’s room and slipped it into the jewellery box with the rest of the jewels, so no-one would ever know it had even been missing.

He was very pleased with himself.

Then on the way out of the room, he felt the stick tugging again. It led him to a large cupboard full of ball dresses and fur coats. At the bottom of the cupboard there were rows of shoes, and in the toe of one shoe, there was a whole bag of coins.

Toomie’s eyes glistened, and greed stirred in his heart. Surely if he took only one or two, Lady Florida would never notice. And he had the perfect hiding place.

He made sure no-one was looking, and he slipped a coin into his pocket.

Stealing is a bit like chickenpox. It starts with just one, and you don’t think anyone will even notice. But before long there’s another one and another one, and then there are more than you can count.

Over the next few weeks, Toomie found excuse after excuse to be in Lady Florida’s room, and gradually all the coins made their way from her cupboard to the hiding place beneath the floorboards.

If you’ve ever had chickenpox, you’ll know it’s nearly impossible not to scratch. Once all the coins were in Toomie’s hidey-hole, his hands began to itch for other things to steal. Every Tuesday, all the servants had their day off. When they were all safely out of the house, Toomie sneaked back and searched all over the house. With the forked stick, it was easy to find where the other servants kept their small savings, under their pillows, or inside a sock. The parlourmaid kept hers in a money-box with a knitted cat on top of it. Toomie took a few coins here and there, not so much that anyone would think they had been robbed, but just enough so they might scratch their heads and think they must have counted wrong. But in the gap under the floorboards, it all added up. It gave Toomie a warm feeling every time he sat at his table, to know that secretly under his feet there was a real treasure trove.

Now Parry, the under-footman, was best friends with the parlourmaid. She confided to him one day, “I think someone has been stealing from my money-box.”

Parry said, “Maybe you just added up wrong,” but she shook her head.

“No, I’m sure, because they put my knitted cat back the wrong way around,” she said.

Parry said thoughtfully, “The cook said she thought she was missing some money last week. I’ll ask the others and see if anyone else has missed anything.” He quietly asked all the servants. All of them had lost some money, except for Toomie, and Toomie was looking particularly pleased with himself. Parry said to him, “Someone’s been stealing money, and I believe it’s you. Put it back and I won’t say anything. Otherwise I’ll tell Lady Florida.”

When Parry left, Toomie decided he had to do something. He didn’t want to lose his job, but he didn’t want to give the money back. He went up to Lady Florida’s room and took the ruby pendant out of her jewellery box. He hid it in Parry’s room, then he went back to his room and waited.

Soon there was an outcry. Lady Florida called all the servants together and said to them, “My ruby pendant is missing. If you know anything about this, say something now.”

No-one spoke a word. She said, “An untrustworthy servant is a terrible thing. If the thief does not come forward, I will have to dismiss you all.”

Toomie cleared his throat and said, “My lady, I may be able to help. In my family, we have a rare gift for find things that are lost, using a simple forked stick. Would you like me to look for the ruby?”

Of course she did, so Toomie fetched the stick, and then made a great show of going through the house, looking for the ruby, with everyone following him, amazed. When he got to Parry’s room, the stick dipped and pulled him forward towards one of the drawers. “In here, I think,” he said, opening the drawer. Everyone gasped. There, of course, was the ruby.

Lady Florida was extremely angry, and she exclaimed, “I’ll have you thrown into prison for this!” Parry shook in his shoes, protesting that he knew nothing about it.

She turned to Toomie, who was smiling broadly, and said, “It so happens that I have lost some money myself. Can your remarkable stick find it for me?”

Toomie went white. “I fear that the stick only works for jewels and treasure of that kind.”

“Really?” said Lady Florida, fixing him with a steely eye. “Let’s see, in any case.”

Toomie had no choice but to do as she said. The forked stick dragged him along the passage, try as he would to hold it back and turn it away. It tugged him relentlessly to the room with the loose floorboard and dipped down, pointing to the hiding place.

“You see, it has found nothing at all,” Toomie blustered, keeping his boot over the loose board.

“Remove those floorboards,” Lady Florida commanded. The other servants willingly pulled at the boards, until Toomie’s hoard was revealed.

Parry was released and it was Toomie who was taken to prison. The forked stick was thrown onto the woodpile, and it if hasn’t been burnt up by now, I expect it is there yet.

Stories for Another Day

In those days, the second kingdom was blessed with an excellent king, King Rupe. He took good care of his people and his lands, and he made sure that he kept on good terms with the neighbouring lands. He paid them visits from time to time, and occasionally sent them gifts. His people respected him and they were very happy with him.

But King Rupe had a secret. He had a deep, abiding, unappeasable hunger for diamonds. Rupe was not a greedy man, in most things. He didn’t overeat, except when it came to chocolate, but that was no different from anyone else. He wasn’t grasping or miserly. He taxed his people fairly. But where diamonds were concerned, he had a hunger that could not be satisfied.

It started when the king of the sixth kingdom sent him a gift, a pretty diamond on a chain. Rupe thought he would give it to his daughter, Shell, but the more he looked at it, and toyed with it, the more he thought he wouldn’t. It was probably quite valuable, he thought, and Princess Shell might feel uncomfortable wearing it, in case she lost it. So he kept it, and thought no more about it.

But as the days went by, he seemed to notice diamonds everywhere, and every time he did, he felt an overwhelming urge to have them for his own. When the queen, Alabaster, wore her diamond necklace to dinner, King Rupe said, “My dear! Those diamonds are very dusty. Give them to me, and I’ll have them cleaned for you.”

But he never did. He put them away in his private treasury. When he was by himself, he would secretly take them out and hold them up to the light and gaze at them for hours on end.

He sent his servants out to buy more diamonds, all the diamonds they could find, in rings, pendants, and tiaras. The more diamonds he had, the more he wanted.

After a while, he had spent nearly all the money in the Royal Bank. The king was dismayed. He looked at his piles of diamonds, letting them run through his fingers, but he could not bear to part with a single one. He decided to raise the taxes instead.

The people complained, but the king took no notice. What’s the point of being king if you can’t raise taxes now and then? he said to himself.

Then one day, the king fell ill. He lay in bed, white and shivering. The queen made him warm milk and his favourite pudding, and fed it to him herself with a spoon, but he turned his head away and wouldn’t eat. His daughter, Shell, came and offered to sing for him, but he couldn’t bear to have her in the room. The queen became very worried and sent for the palace doctors. They examined the king carefully, then they shook their heads. “There is nothing wrong with his body,” they murmured to the queen, out of the king’s hearing. “We suspect,” the Chief Medical Officer said, tapping the side of his head with his finger, “it may be a disturbance of the mind.”

Princess Shell had an idea.”I have heard of a violinist whose playing is so beautiful that it touches both the heart and the spirit. Perhaps if he played for my father, he would get better?”

The queen sent for the violinist and had him taken to the king’s bedroom. The violinist, whom we know as Cal, lifted his violin and played a few notes but the king cried out and pulled his pillow over his head. Cal lowered his violin, puzzled. It was very hot in the king’s bedroom, so he went to open the windows but the king shouted, “No! Don’t open them!”

Cal sat down on the end of the bed and said, “Your majesty, what is the matter?”

The king bent his head and wrapped his arms around himself. “I am afraid,” he said, “I am afraid.”

“What are you afraid of?” Cal asked quietly.

The king swallowed. He said in a low voice, “My daughter, oh, my daughter!”

Cal was intrigued. He said, “Tell me why you are afraid, your majesty.”

“There is a man,” King Rupe said, choking over the words. “He has a diamond, the most beautiful thing you have ever seen, exquisitely cut, perfectly clear, so beautiful, so beautiful,” he moaned. “I offered to buy it from him. I offered him all the gold in the palace, everything I have, but there is only one thing he will take for it: my daughter. And I am so afraid.”

Cal looked at the king, the truth beginning to dawn on him. He said gently, “Why are you afraid of this man?”

“I am afraid that I will do as he asks and give him my daughter for the diamond!” Rupe whispered.

“No!” exclaimed Cal.

“At first I refused, and laughed at him,” said the king, “but he came again and again, with the diamond in his hand, the lovely thing. Again I refused, but he smiled, and held it so that the light caught it in such a way… I sent him out of my sight, but I see him everywhere, with the diamond. And I dream of it.”

He looked up at Cal, and said, “Now do you see why I keep the doors and windows locked? Why I dare not leave this room?”

Cal got up and walked the length of the room, twice, three times. He came back and stood at the king’s side and said, “The music that I play has the power to touch the spirit. It has brought people back from the brink of despair, and turned the hearts of others away from evil. If you wish it, I can play for you.”

The light of hope sprang up in King Rupe’s eyes. “Yes, play for me!” he said.

Cal said, “If I play, and you change your heart, the change is permanent, and complete. There are no half measures, and no going back.”

The king stayed silent, thinking about his hoard. He wept with anguish at the thought of losing his love for his diamonds. Then he thought of his lovely daughter, Shell. For moments, his heart swayed between the two. Then he looked up at Cal and said a single word. “Play.”

The music of the violin was soft and gentle, like a hand caressing a child’s head. Then it grew deeper and stronger. It pleaded and insisted. It filled the room like a great storm, and then it gradually became quieter, until it came to rest.

The king opened his eyes, smiling. “I am cured, I am sure of it,” he said. “I can feel that my heart is my own again.”

He opened a great chest beside his bed, filled to overflowing with diamonds, large and small. Then he called his servants and said, “Take all these and sell them, and return the money to the Royal Bank. If there is any money left over, then give it to the poor.” The servants loaded up baskets and wheelbarrows full of diamonds and took them away, every last diamond. The king smiled, happier than he had been for a long, long time.

He shook Cal’s hand, saying, “How can I ever thank you?”

Frowning, Cal said, “One moment, your majesty.” In lowering his violin, he had brushed one of the strings, and heard a strange echo from somewhere in the room. He plucked the string again, firmly. The echo, like an eerie singing, came from the king’s robe.

“What is it?” Cal asked.

Rupe put his hand into his pocket and drew out a small, twinkling diamond on a chain. “This?” he said. “I… I had forgotten I had it. It was the first of my collection, a gift from my neighbour.”

They both stared at the diamond, glittering in the light, and they looked at each other. Rupe placed it carefully on the stone edge of the window. Cal lifted his violin and played a single note, over and over, with more and more intensity, until the king had to put both hands over his ears. Then the diamond shattered, into a hundred thousand sparks of light.

Stories for Another Day

A farmer had two sons. Together they worked on their farm, growing crops and tending the cattle and the chickens and ducks. The farm was very prosperous and all was well, until one day the farmer, Dreck, said to his younger son, Raymond, “When you are out in the fields today, make sure you shut the floodgates. The river is already high, and if more rain comes, the fields could be flooded.”

But the son forgot to close the gates. Heavy rains came during the night, and the river rose. Because the flood gates were open, water flooded over the farm. The crops were ruined, and many animals were lost, but worst of all, the eldest son was swept away in the floods and drowned.

Raymond was pierced to the heart with sorrow for what he had done. He wept and pleaded with his father to forgive him, but Dreck stormed and raged at him, shouting, “Never! I will never forgive you! Get out, and never come back!”

Raymond, full of guilt and sorrow that he had been the cause of his brother’s death, turned away and left. As he reached the gate of the farm, his mother came running after him. “Raymond!” she said. “I know that you are truly sorry for what you did, and I forgive you. Now promise me this: for your brother’s sake, you must forgive yourself, and you must try to live the best and fullest life you can.”

Raymond gave her his promise, and they embraced for the last time. She gave him her blessing and he went on his way.

As time went by, Raymond found work on other farms. He worked diligently, and studied hard, and learnt how to take care of sick animals. Soon he was being called on by people from all over the country to help their animals. In time he married and had three sons of his own, and taught them everything he knew. And in time, he managed to forgive himself for what he had done.

Meanwhile, his father was so filled with bitterness and anger that he stopped working on the farm and caring for the animals. He sat at home, day after day, raging and mourning for his lost son. The farm gradually fell into ruin. His wife pleaded with him every day to forgive his son Raymond and ask him to come back, but Dreck closed his heart.

When the crops failed, Dreck blamed his son, saying, “It was him who let the floodwaters in and ruined the land.” When the animals died, he blamed his son again, saying, “The animals have died because there isn’t enough food for them now that the crops have failed.” And when his wife finally died of sorrow, he blamed his son for that too. “Raymond broke her heart and left her without hope,” he said.

With his wife gone, Dreck spent all his time in a single room of the house, staring out over his desolate farm. He ate little besides black bread and porridge. The house began to fall into disrepair, with leaks in the roof, mould on the walls, and holes in the floors. One day he found it was all more than he could bear. He had to get out of the house.

He strode down to the gate and leant over it, looking down the road. A young man he had never seen before was walking towards the farm. The young man spoke to him. “You have a beautiful farm,” he said.

“Do you think so?” Dreck snorted. “Maybe it was once, but now it’s worthless.”

The young man, whose name was Luca, said, “The soil in this corner is good. If it was dug over well, I’m sure it would be fit for planting.”

Dreck shrugged. “You’re welcome to try, if you want to,” he said. He opened the gate and Luca came in. He dug over that corner of the farm thoroughly, and then he planted some seeds and they began to grow.

The young man looked over to the next corner of the farm, then he went and began to dig a long, deep trench. “What are you doing?” Dreck growled. “This land is nothing more than a swamp!”

“If I dig a ditch along the length of this field, the water should drain away,” Luca said. “Underneath, the soil is still good.” Sure enough, once the water had been drained away and the soil dried out, Dreck could see that it was good. Together they dug it over and planted some seeds, and they started to grow.

The young man took his spade to the third corner of the farm, and started digging. Dreck said, “The soil here is parched and arid. It’s a wasteland.”

Luca said, “If I can dig a channel to the river, there will be water to irrigate the land and bring it back to life.” He dug long and hard, and water began to fill the channel, and soak into the dry, hard ground. He and Dreck dug it over and planted seeds, and they grew tall and strong.

In the fourth corner of the farm, some weed-infested buildings that had once been barns were falling down. “If we clear all this away and pull out the weeds, the soil may still be good underneath,” Luca said.

They pulled down the old barns and hauled the rubbish away and tore out the weeds. Then they dug over the ground, planted some seeds and watched them grow.

Dreck said to the young man, “The house needs a lot of work to repair it. Will you help me?”

Luca helped him patch the roof and repair the floors. They cleaned and painted it inside and out. When it was finished, the old man went to the window. He stood there looking out, and he cried out in pain.

“What’s the matter?” Luca said quickly. “Are you ill?”

“I feel as if my heart is being crushed,” Dreck groaned. “I’m afraid I’m going to die without ever seeing my son again!” He wept and sobbed. “Long ago I turned him away, but now I would give anything to see him once more.”

Luca wiped the tears from Dreck’s face and said, “Your son, Raymond, is my father. You are my grandfather. My father speaks of you every day, and always with love.”

This made Dreck weep even more.

“If you want me to, I will go to my father and bring him to you,” Luca said. “Nothing would make him happier, I know.”

Dreck asked him to do as he said, so the young man went quickly and brought his father back. As soon as Raymond entered the house, he fell on his knees before his father, but Dreck lifted him up and embraced him.

“Please, I beg you,” Dreck said, “let me forgive you! For years I have fed on bitterness and anger and blame, but if I can forgive you, I will be free of them.” Raymond embraced his father, and they wept together. Dreck forgave his son, and he felt peace at last. With his son and his grandsons, the old man lived in peace and happiness for the rest of his life.

Stories for Another Day

Spor the enchanter, was in the habit of turning any of his servants who displeased him into pickles. And since he himself had been very lazy when he was a young man learning to be an enchanter, and he had never learned the spell for changing them back into servants, the result was that he had a great many jars of pickles in his pantry and he was always having to get new servants.

One day a tax collector knocked on his door. “Mr Spor,” he said, for tax collectors are invariably polite, “you have not paid your taxes for ten years. You must pay up at once or be thrown into prison!”

Spor protested, “But I don’t have any money!”

The tax collector looked around and said, “You have a great many jars of pickles, a great, great many. Why not pay your taxes in pickles?”

They both agreed this was the only thing to do. Spor loaded up the tax collector’s wagon with jars of pickles, and he drove off.

There was one jar left, with one very large pickle in it. Spor looked at the pickle, and the pickle looked back at him.

“Well, pickle, you had better set to work cleaning and tidying the house, and getting my dinner ready, for there are no servants left and I have no money to pay new ones,” Spor said.

The pickle said, “I must tell you that I am the sixth prince of the third kingdom, and I have always been brought up to the extremely lazy.”

Spor said, “Be that as it may, if you don’t work hard, I will chop you up and eat you between two slices of bread and butter.”

“I think I mentioned that I am the sixth prince of the third kingdom,” the pickle said. “If you were to eat me, you would call down a terrible vengeance on your head.”

“Then we are truly in a pickle, if you don’t mind me saying so,” said Spor.

“I might add,” said the pickle-prince, “that my father, the king, and my five brothers are even now searching for me, and if they find me here, in a jar, their vengeance will be terrible indeed.”

Spor said quietly so that the pickle couldn’t hear him, “My dear pickle, you’re forgetting that I am an enchanter, with at least one good spell up my sleeve.”

Just then there was a quiet knock at the door. A young woman stood there, rather thin with short brown hair, in a tidy dress with a clean apron. “Do you need a servant, by any chance?” she asked.

“Why, yes,” Spor said. “The work is very hard and the pay is very little, but by the look of you, you should be grateful to get any work at all.”

The young woman said, “I will work hard for very little money.”

“That is very convenient because that is what I have,” Spor said.

The young woman, who told Spor her name was Mirra, cleaned and scrubbed and dusted and picked up after Spor all day long.

One thing she cleaned and polished extra well every day was the pickle jar. Spor even thought he saw her whispering to it sometimes. But so long as the cleaning, the ironing, the cooking and the washing up were done, he didn’t mind any odd habits she might have.

Mirra was dusting the books in Spor’s workroom one day while he was checking the use-by dates on his bottles of potions. “Excuse me, sir,” she said, because like all good servants she was extremely polite, “all these books! Have you read them all?”

Spor smiled gently. People were always asking him that. “Yes,” he said, “some of them twice,” which was completely untrue. He had only read two books all the way through, and one was a dictionary of spiders and the other was a photograph album of himself from when he was a baby.

“Even this really big one?” Mirra said. “It says something about ‘pots’, I think. Is it a cooking book?”

Spor smiled his quiet smile again. “Potions, not pots. And no, it’s not a cooking book.”

“Potions?” Mirra said, in an awed voice. “Like for doing magic?”

“You might call it magic,” Spor said, pretending to be bored when in fact he was very flattered that she was interested. “I call it transformation, or transmogrification, to use the technical word.” He smoothed his eyebrows with a finger and tried to look intelligent and mysterious. “They’re for changing one thing into another.”

Mirra’s eyes opened wide and she gulped. “Like changing princes into frogs and things? And changing them back into princes again?”

“Yes,” said Spor. A thought occurred to him. Perhaps the answer to his pickle-prince problem lay in this book.

He picked it up. Oddly enough, Mirra happened to be dusting the very page he needed. The heading at the top said, ‘To change a pickle back into a person.’

“This is exactly what I’ve been looking for!” he exclaimed. “I must get to work at once.” He put his apron on and started looking for the ingredients. “Hair of thistle, root of dandelion,” he muttered. “Now where is the tincture of molasses?”

“Here it is, sir,” Mirra said, lifting down a big, black bottle. She passed him jars and bottles and spoons and ran out to the garden to fetch parsley seeds and curry leaves when he asked for them. Spor mixed and measured and stirred until at last the potion was ready.

“There! I couldn’t have done it without you, Mirra,” he said, which was perfectly true since he had almost used the wrong spoon twice and he didn’t know the difference between parsley and lemon balm.”Now to see if it works!”

Just then there came a thunderous knocking at the door. “Open up, in the name of the king!” shouted a loud voice.

Before Spor could get to the door, it fell down with a crash. The king and five young men walked in.

“Where is the prince?” the king roared. “Bring him out at once or I will cut your head off!”

“Um, it’s not very convenient right now,” Spor sputtered.

The king raised his huge, sharp sword but before he could bring it down on Spor’s head, Mirra stepped forward. “Now, Father, put that down,” she said. “If you kill him, he won’t be able to lift the enchantment that he put on Bob.”

“This miserable fellow has put an enchantment on one of the royal princes?” the king roared. He raised his sword again.

Spor got ready to turn the king and all five princes into pickles, then he stopped and said to Mirra, “Did you say, ‘Father’? You are the king’s daughter?”

“Yes, I am the Princess Mirra,” she said. “I came to rescue my brother from your evil clutches.”

“But you are the best servant I have ever had!” Spor said. “And your brother told me he had always been brought up to be extremely lazy.”

Mirra said, “My father brought up all his sons to be completely useless and unable to do a thing for themselves. My mother, the queen, and I have to do everything for them. In fact, my father is so lazy that when his children were born, he couldn’t be bothered to think of different names for them, so he called them all Bob.”

“Except you,” Spor said, smiling at her.

“No, he named me Bob too, but I always call myself Mirra,” she said.

“It’s a very pretty name,” Spor said. “I like it very much.”

“Enough of this tarradiddling!” the king roared. “Fetch my son, Bob!”

“Now, Father,” Mirra said, “sit down and I’ll make you all cup of tea while Spor goes to fetch Prince Bob.”

The potion worked perfectly. Prince Bob, (the sixth of that name), was soon himself again, except for just the faintest lingering smell of vinegar. They all had a cup of tea and some delicious butter cake that Mirra had made earlier.

“I supposed you’ll be leaving with your father,” Spor said, sadly.

“Not necessarily,” Mirra said. In fact, she had fallen in love with Spor’s quiet smile ages ago, when she first started working for him. “Are you willing to work hard and become a good enchanter?”

“I enchanted you, didn’t I?” Spor said, with a smile.

“Perhaps,” Mirra smiled back.

“Don’t you think it would be useful now and then to have an enchanter in the family?” Spor said.

“We’ll see,” Mirra said. And that is how the kings and queens of the third kingdom came to have the blood of enchanters mingled with their royal blood. And there came a time when it was very useful, as Spor had said, but that is a story for another day.

Stories for Another Day

Cody never thought he would be a hero. Even when he was a small boy and he had rescued his mother from a spider by picking it up by one leg and carrying it outside, he was so frightened that the spider shook between his fingers. Still, he was always happy to do anything he could for anyone who needed help. Which was why, when the greatest and most terrible threat came, it was Cody who was the one, against all odds, who saved the city.

It had been a warm, rainy summer, and the crops on the farms outside the city were flourishing. Everyone in the city looked forward to an excellent harvest and a prosperous year. Then a rumour began that made every farmer shiver in his boots. A plague of locusts was crossing the country, drawn by the golden fields of wheat and barley. But these were no ordinary locusts.

The first sign of the invasion was a quiet rattling, then a slight rasping, just as the sun was rising. It woke Cody’s wife, Elinda, and she slipped out of bed and went to the window. What she saw froze her heart with horror. A single locust, as big as a man, was savaging the crops. Its mouth parts moved like threshing blades, and its legs, serrated like saw-blades, slashed through stalks and branches as if they were dry grass.

As Elinda took a breath to shout for Cody, the giant locust was joined by another, then five more, then a dozen. Elinda screamed, but by the time Cody reached her side, every living plant was gone.

Within days, the acres of crops around the city were little more than fields of dust. Then the locusts attacked hedges and gardens, even fully grown trees. The people huddled in their homes, waiting for the devastation to end, and the creatures to leave in search of fresh pastures. But when every leaf and every blade of grass had been devoured, the creatures turned their quivering antennas on the city itself.

The Town Council called an emergency meeting. “We could burn the fields, but there is nothing left to burn!” they said.

“What if we poison the locusts?” suggested one.

“There isn’t enough poison in the whole city to kill a tenth of them!” said another. “Our only hope is the army, with their armour and their swords and spears.”

Everyone agreed. “Who will take a message to the capital for us?” they said.

So they called all the people together and said to them, “We must send for the army, or all of us will perish.”

The people looked at each other. To reach the capital and summon the army, the messenger would have to pass the nests of the locusts. They looked down, hoping someone else would volunteer.

“Cody will go,” Elinda said. Cody started with surprise, but Elinda pressed his arm and smiled at him warmly.

“Yes, I will go,” Cody said, “if no-one else will.” Everyone else couldn’t wait to clap Cody on the shoulder and tell him he was definitely the right man for the job.

“Do you have any skill with weapons?” asked the Town Councillors. Cody shook his head. The Councillors looked at each other out of the corners of their eyes, and shrugged. “No matter. You must do the best you can,” they said.

Cody and Elinda went home to get ready. “Take my father’s sword,” she said, unwrapping an old weapon that had lain rusting in the barn for years. “I know you have never used a sword, but it may mean the difference between life and death for you. And take this too.” She gave him a piece of wood, little more than a stick. “When you make camp, put this in the fire, and if you are ever in need, say, ‘To me!'”

Cody strapped the rusty sword awkwardly around his waist and thrust the piece of wood into his pack. Elinda kissed him goodbye, and he slipped out into the night.

Even at night the locusts stirred in their rest, clicking their mouth parts ominously. Cody inched his way past them, keeping to the ditches at the sides of the fields, struggling through the mud, making as little noise as possible. Eventually he reached the outskirts of the city, a desert of destruction where even the locusts did not come.

He built a small fire for warmth and to deter the wild animals that roam the edges of all cities. Remembering Elinda’s strange gift, he put the piece of wood on the fire. A soft blue haze rose and hung in the air over the flames. It seemed to Cody that the image of a swordsman shimmered in the haze, twisting and turning as the flames leapt. As the image wavered, the swordsman seemed to dance, his armour flashing. It was oddly comforting, and Cody fell asleep quickly.

He was woken barely an hour later by a hurricane of growling and barking. A pack of wild dogs had found him. Starved since the locusts had cleared the land of everything living, they turned on Cody.

Cody struggled to free the rusty sword from its wrappings, at the same time shouting, “To me! To me!” Suddenly the swordsman was at his side, slashing right and left, sending the wild dogs skittering away, yelping. He put up his sword, saluted Cody and disappeared.

Cody sat down by the fire to catch his breath, more surprised by his rescue than he had been by the dogs attacking him. The image in the smoke of the fire wavered gently as before, dancing slowly before his eyes.

He put out the fire, taking care to keep the piece of wood, a little smaller now, and continued his journey. As he went, he turned what had happened over in his mind. The next time he paused to rest, he made a fire again. When the dancing swordsman appeared, he said clearly, “To me!”

The swordsman instantly stood before him. “It seems to me that two swords may be needed at some point and I am worse than useless with this,” Cody said, showing the swordsman his rusty sword.

The swordsman bowed without a sound, then began teaching Cody how to stand, how to move lightly on his feet and wield the heavy sword, thrusting and parrying. Hour after hour they practised, as the fire burned lower and lower, until Cody was too exhausted to even lift his sword.

Over the next two days, Cody journeyed during daylight hours, and at nightfall he called up the swordsman and they trained, dancing back and forth around the fire. As soon as it was light, he resumed his journey. Finally, on the evening of the third day, he reached the mountain pass above the main road into the capital. The pass was so narrow that no more than a single man on horseback or two men on foot could pass through at the same time. Cody went through the pass and crossed into the centre of the capital, where the Chief Minister’s palace stood.

The Chief Minister listened gravely to Cody’s account of the locust attack. “I will send the army at once,” he said, “before this horrific enemy lays waste to the whole country.” He gave orders for the army to prepare to leave immediately.

But an army cannot be ready to travel in an instant. There are supplies to gather, uniforms, weapons, food, carts and horses to carry the ammunition. Cody grew impatient at the thought of the ravenous locusts swarming over the city walls, and decided not to wait. “I will go on ahead,” he said, “and tell the people that the army is on its way.”

He hurried back the way he had come, going back through the mountain pass under cover of darkness. As he started to make his way down the hill, something made him pause. A faint rattling reached him. He stood motionless and peered into the darkness. To his right and left, mere metres away, there were the locusts, dozens of them, crouched on either side of the pass.

A terrible fear seized his heart. The locusts, lying in wait at the pass, could decimate the army as it passed through in single file. There would be no escape for them, nowhere to run or hide. The army would walk straight into the mouths of the enemy. And with the army disposed of, the way into the capital was open, and the last defence of the whole country was gone.

Cody pulled his last match from his pocket and lit the remaining fragment of wood. “To me!” he shouted, and the dancing swordsman was by his side in the next instant.

In a whirlwind of steel they attacked the horde of locusts. A terrible battle followed. The swordsman seemed tireless, but Cody was soon wounded in many places. He fought on as well as he could, although the numbers of locusts seemed endless. Then what he feared most happened. The last fragment of wood burned through and collapsed into ashes. The swordsman was gone.

Bleeding and barely able to stand, Cody faced the insect horde alone, ready to fight to his last breath. At that very moment, the army came pouring through the mountain pass, surrounding Cody and taking up the fight. The locusts fell back, scattering everywhere, and in a few short hours they were all dead.

The whole city and everyone in the capital were overjoyed when they saw they had been saved. The army carried Cody home on their shoulders, and although Cody never lifted his sword against an enemy again, he and Elinda and their children wanted for nothing for the rest of their lives.

Stories for Another Day

Long before Dharab became known as the greatest dragon-slayer in all of the fourteen islands, a terrible blight came upon the country where Dharab lived. One afternoon while Dharab was away on the other side of the mountains, battling a young dragon that was harassing a village, his wife Eva was foraging in the forest for herbs of healing. She was carrying their two little ones, Garth and Shanama, in a woven basket on her back.

Two people came up to her, in great distress.

“Our son is missing,” said the mother. “We’ve looked everywhere for him. Have you seen him?”

Eva shook her head. “I haven’t seen or heard anyone, except my own little ones. How did he come to be missing?”

“He was playing at my feet while I was cooking our dinner,” the mother said. “I went to the door to call my husband and when I turned back, my son was gone.”

The husband said, “How could he get out where there is only one door to the hut and you were standing in it? There must be some terrible wickedness here.”

Eva hurried back to the town and called people to come and help search for the child, but they could find no sign of him, although they searched long into the night.

When Dharab came home just before midnight, Eva told him what had happened. “But that’s not all,” she said. “I have been speaking to the villagers, and three nights ago, another child went missing, a little girl, her parents’ only child. She disappeared from her bed, although the door was bolted and the window shut. And last night, two more disappeared, without a trace. No-one saw or heard anything. The children just seemed to vanish as if by magic.”

Dharab’s face darkened. “Have there been any strangers in the town since I left?” he asked.

“Only the new cloth merchant,” Eva said doubtfully. “He brought a wagon full of silks and cottons, all beautiful bright colours, and set up a stall in the marketplace. But he’s very friendly, and very kind to the children. He even carries sweets in his pocket for them.”

Dharab strode back and forth distractedly. “No-one else?”

“No-one,” Eva said.

“I’ll go and pay this merchant a visit,” he said, strapping on his sword. “Just to see for myself what kind of man he is. Keep the little ones close to you. Don’t let them out of your sight, whatever happens.”

When he found the cloth merchant’s house, it was locked and bolted and there was no sign that anyone was living there. Dharab knocked and called, but there was no answer. Feeling more and more uneasy, he hurried back home. As soon as he came within sight of his house, his heart stopped in his chest. The door was wide open, ripped half off its hinges. He ran inside the house, and found Eva lying in the kitchen, in a pool of blood, with a great gash in her leg.

When she saw Dharab, she started screaming, “The children! He’s taken the children!”

Dharab rushed to her side, and grabbed a cloth to wrap around her leg to stop the bleeding. “What’s happened?” he said, fear clutching at his heart.

“The merchant!” Eva said, “He knocked at the door, asking for you, and when I opened it, he pushed me to the ground and snatched up the babies. I grabbed the kitchen knife and fought with him, but he suddenly reared up, and changed into the shape of a huge dragon!”

“I should have known,” Dharab said, through his teeth. “A dragon-enchanter! This wound will be poisoned.”

“I’ll take care of it!” Eva said, in an agony of impatience. “Go after him! Nothing matters but the children.”

Dharab grabbed his spear and ran out into the night.

It was easy to follow the dragon’s trail, through the village and up into the mountains. Eva had managed to cut one of the dragon’s arms badly, and drops of the dragon’s blood marked the track. Dharab followed them deep into the mountains, then up a steep, rocky path. The path grew narrower, and the rocks more slippery. Then Dharab heard a laugh behind him.

“So you are here where I want you, dragon-slayer!” the voice said.

“Tarn!” Dharab said. “I should have known it was you. Where are my children?”

The dragon sneered, “When I heard that the great dragon-slayer was fond of children, that he had children of his own, I could scarcely believe it!” Then he hissed, “But it was true. And they have made the perfect bait to lure you here.”

“I have come for my children,” Dharab said in a terrible voice.

“Your children? Squalling like young piglets – faugh! Still, they will make a tasty snack, once I have finished you,” the dragon said. “You have killed too many of my kind. Now it is your turn.” Tarn swung his tail, swift and low, to sweep Dharab off his feet but Dharab leapt out of the way and drew his sword.

They battled over the rocks, back and forth, up and down the treacherous pathway. The dragon pulled back inch by inch, until Dharab had him backed against a heavy rock, a sword’s-length away. He drew his arm back for the final blow, but the dragon’s breathless words stopped him.

“Kill me and your puny offspring die too!” he hissed.

Dharab froze. “Where are they?” he demanded. The dragon flicked his tail, once, twice, pointing down below the rock that he was pressed against. Dharab peered down and saw the babies lying on a ledge jutting out from the mountainside. One movement, even a shiver, would push the rock over the edge, crushing the crying babies, and sending them plunging into the ravine below.

The dragon laughed. “I planned to finish you tonight,” he said, panting hard, “but the woman’s knife cut my arm and that has slowed me, just a little, but enough. If you want to save your children, you must let me go. And know this: I will return, some day in your future and mine, to destroy you and them.”

Dharab hesitated for a heartbeat, then he lowered his sword.

“Fool!” shouted the dragon. Unfurling his huge, black wings, he lifted himself into the air. At the very last minute, he gave a backward thrust with his legs, to push the rock over the edge.

But Dharab was not such a fool as the dragon thought. He threw his sword like a spear, striking Tarn no more than a glancing blow to the chest, but it was enough to throw the dragon off balance, and give Dharab a few precious seconds. He scrambled under the teetering rock and leapt down to the ledge, grabbing up the children and pressing them and himself into a crack in the side of the mountain, just as the rock fell. It crashed and rumbled past him, taking half the ledge with it, the very place where the babies had been seconds before.

With a hollow laugh, Tarn swept away into the night. Dharab, his two little ones held tightly to his chest, made his way back down the mountains, to where Eva was waiting.

When she saw them, she took the children from Dharab and held them and cried over them until all three of them were crying together. But Dharab’s face was like stone. “I failed,” he said. “I let him go, to kill and destroy, wherever and whenever he pleases.”

Eva looked up into his face, her own covered in tears. “You couldn’t have done anything else. You had to save the children.”

So Tarn the dragon-enchanter lived to bring death and destruction wherever he went throughout the fourteen islands, until the day he returned to fulfil his promise to Dharab. But that is a story for another day.

Stories for Another Day

Once there was a boy who was very, very rude. When he was a baby he was the sweetest little thing, and everyone who saw him smiled and said, “What a darling!” and wanted to kiss him all over. When he was a toddler, just learning to walk, he was so cute that his mother couldn’t help picking him up all the time and cuddling him and covering him with kisses. His father used to take him for rides on his shoulders just so the neighbours could see what a fine young son he had.

But when he was four or so, something got into him and he started behaving very badly. One day when his mother asked him to pick up his toys, he said, “No! I won’t!” She was shocked, but he rather enjoyed it, so he kept on being rude. In fact, he got ruder and ruder.

When his mother said, “It’s time for bed, Jeremy dear,” he said rudely, “You can’t tell me what to do!” and when his father told him not to speak to his mother like that, he said, “I can do whatever I want!”

He was even rude to his grandmother. When she said, “Eat up your yummy vegetables, Jeremy, they’re very good for you,” he said, “What would you know?”

At school he was even worse. He had no friends because he was always calling them names like “Dumb-head,” and “Horse-face” so no-one wanted to play with him. Whenever his teacher asked him to do something like get out his books or put his pencil down, he said, “You’re not the boss of me!” or “I don’t have to if I don’t want to!” His teacher didn’t want the other children to think that this was acceptable behaviour so she sent him to the principal’s office.

The principal knew that Jeremy was a very rude little boy, so she left him to sit outside the office on a chair while she attended to more important business. Jeremy didn’t mind at all, because it meant he got out of doing hard things in class like maths, which he hated. To this day he hasn’t got the faintest clue about decimals or long multiplication.

When the principal finally did see him, she tried to look kindly at him and she said, “Now, Jeremy, you know I don’t like having to speak to you like this. Being rude is not a very nice way to behave, is it? Don’t you think you could try to be a little bit more thoughtful and kind?”

Jeremy actually poked his tongue out at the principal, and said, “This school is stupid, and you’re stupid!”

The principal sighed and said, “It might be best if you spend some time by yourself with a book or a puzzle, to try to calm down. When you’re feeling more like yourself, you can go back to class.”

Jeremy was already feeling exactly like himself, so he went back to his class and was just as rude all over again. He hadn’t done his homework, because whenever his father said, “Jeremy, you’d better do your homework,” Jeremy always answered back, “No way! You do it yourself!”

He tried to copy it from a girl who always did her homework, and did it very neatly. The girl said, very nicely, “Please don’t copy my homework, Jeremy.”

Jeremy answered very rudely, “Who’d want to copy from a dumb-head like you?” The girl was used to Jeremy talking like this so she just closed her book and looked the other way, but the teacher sighed and said for the tenth time already that day, “Now, Jeremy, please speak more kindly to the other children.”

Jeremy said to the teacher, “Why do you have to pick on me all the time, you big meanie?”

Some bears who were passing by outside, heard this. They reached in through the window and picked Jeremy up and took him away. Bears are notoriously rude themselves, and they thought Jeremy would fit in very well with their family.

They took him to their cave. Jeremy was shaking like a leaf. The father bear said, “Raarrh!” which means, “You’re way too skinny. Don’t you eat your vegetables?” but Jeremy didn’t understand, of course. He was sure they were going to eat him.

The mother bear gave him a light cuff around the ear as she did to all her cubs as a sign of affection, but to Jeremy it felt like an enormous whack. He fell over backwards into the dirt and he was sure the End was Near. He began to be sorry for the awful things he had said to people and how he had hurt their feelings.

Then, horror of horrors! the bears put a big pot of water on the fire to heat up. They got out a big chopping board and a great big knife. Jeremy was sure for certain that they were going to chop him up and throw him into the pot and cook him and eat him.

“Please, please don’t kill me!’ he said, crying piteously.

The bears said, “Arrh, awp, awp, arrrh, arrrh!” which means, “Don’t be silly, we’re vegetarians!” but Jeremy didn’t understand, of course.

“I promise I’ll never say anything rude to anyone ever again in my whole life,” he pleaded, sobbing and sniffling, “if you’ll only give me another chance and not eat me.”

The bears said to each other, “He seems rather polite after all, and besides he’s very damp and sniffly and his nose keeps running. I don’t think we should keep him.”

So they put him outside the cave and said “Mmwarrrh!” which means “Run along now,” and gave him a gentle pat on the bottom which felt to Jeremy like a great big smack.

He ran and ran all the way back home, and if he wasn’t perfectly polite every day for the rest of his life, at least he tried to be, which is all any of us can do.

Stories for Another Day

Once a boy was playing around in the bushes when he disturbed a snake. The snake leapt up and wrapped itself around his arm. At the very last minute, the boy grabbed hold of the snake’s tail.

“I’ve got you!” the boy shouted. “Let go of my arm!”

“No, I’ve got you!” the snake retorted. “Let go of my tail!”

“No! I’ve caught you!” the boy said, and so they went on arguing. Neither would let go and neither would give in.

The funny thing was that neither of them really meant to catch the other. The boy was far too big for the snake to eat, and the boy had no reason to kill the snake. But both of them were afraid to be the first one to let go, because of what the other one might do.

After half an hour of stubbornly arguing and not letting go of each other, and lunchtime getting nearer and nearer, they did the only thing they could both agree on: they went to ask Shukshu, the Old One, who should let go first.

Shukshu, the hawksbill turtle, was the oldest of all the creatures on the land and in the water, and so everyone felt he must be the wisest.

“Tell this annoying child to let go of my tail,” the snake said to Shukshu. Now it wasn’t wise to speak to Shukshu like this, without asking how he was or passing the time of day first, and perhaps offering a small gift, like an orange or a sweet, juicy melon.

“Make this stupid snake let go of my arm,” the boy said, even more rudely.

Shukshu was even more offended, but he said nothing.

The snake naturally thought that Shukshu would be on her side because, after all, they were both cold-blooded. The boy on the other hand expected Shukshu to be on his side, because after all, the snake was a silly female.

“She is hurting my arm,” the boy complained. “I can see it starting to turn purple!” He tightened his grip on the snake’s tail in return.

The snake said, “My tail! My tail! Let go!”

Shukshu said, “You should both let go at the same time. I will count to three, then both of you release the other. One, two, three!” But of course, the boy did not trust the snake so he waited until he could feel the snake’s grip loosen, and the snake did not trust the boy, so she also waited. So neither of them let go.

“Three! I said three!” Shukshu said, getting annoyed.

“I’ll let go if she will,” said the boy.

“I will if he will,” said the snake. They waited, watching each other, but of course neither let go.

Shukshu was getting hungry and and he had no patience for these two foolish creatures. He said, “If neither of you will listen to sense, then let there be a contest between the two of you, and the loser must release the other first.”

“Agreed,” said the two.

“Let it be a running race,” said the boy.

“No! Let’s see who can open their jaw the widest,” said the snake.

“No!” said the boy. The thought of seeing the snake’s fangs made him feel a little green. “High jumping!”

“No!” said the snake. “Spelling!” She was very good at forming letters with her long, lithe body.

“No!” said the boy. In fact, he was a terrible speller. “Arithmetic!”

“No!” said the snake, for sadly, having no fingers, she had never learned to count. “Singing!”

Now singing was something the boy felt he could do, and do well. “Yes, singing!” he said.

“Very well,” said Shukshu. “There will be a singing contest, and the winner will order the other to let go. Agreed?”

“Agreed!” they said.

“Me first!” said the boy, and opened his mouth to sing.

“Wait!” commanded Shukshu, who was, in fact, very wise. “A contest like this deserves a proper stage.”

He took them up to a high, flat rock overlooking the river. “Now, sing,” he said.

The boy sang very nicely, although the snake cheated a little by giving his arm an extra tight squeeze when he was singing his high note, making him squeak. The snake had her turn, and sang very nicely too, for a snake.

Shukshu pondered, then he announced, “The snake is the winner.”

“No!” said the boy. “All she did was hiss!”

“It was better than the noise you made,” the snake said. “It was all yowling!” And they began to argue all over again over who had won the competition.

Finally Shukshu shouted, “Enough!” The noise was giving him a headache, and besides, by now he was very hungry.

“There will be one final competition,” he said. “Flying!” As he said this, he pushed them both off the rock.

The boy scrabbled frantically and grabbed at the trunk of a young tree with both hands. The snake leapt into the tree and wrapped itself around one of the branches. And Shukshu smiled to himself and went off to get his dinner.

Stories for Another Day

Just after Bede turned seventeen, her mother said to her, “Bede, now that you’re old enough, I have something extraordinary to show you. It’s this.” She took a piece of dirty, ragged cloth out of her pocket, and laid it in front of Bede.

“What is it?” Bede asked, unimpressed.

Her mother said, “It may not look like much,” Bede had to agree with her – it didn’t look like anything at all but a dirty rag, “but it has been handed down in our family for generations, and now it is your turn to become its custodian. It’s a cloak of invisibility.”

“A cloak of invisibility?” Bede said, astonished. “How could something like this belong to our family?” Bede had always been the most ordinary person she knew, living in an ordinary house in a perfectly ordinary village.

Her mother said, “It was my great-great-grandfather who actually made it – or perhaps my great-great-great, I can’t remember. His name was Bishop, and there is a legend that he saved an entire town. His son, Vickery, used it to rescue a princess, and save the whole of the seventh kingdom.”

Bede was very impressed. She ventured to touch the cloth with her finger. “It doesn’t look like much,” she said doubtfully.

Her mother said, “It’s old now, and it’s been through many hands. Once it was sliced in half by a sword, and it has been dragged through dirt and snow and sand, through forests and jungles, up mountains of ice and through pits of vipers. There’s not much of it left, but what there is, is yours.”

She gave it to Bede solemnly. It was about the size of a handkerchief, frayed and worn thin.

“What should I do with it?” Bede asked.

“You must use it as you see fit,” her mother said. “But you must only use it for good.”

Bede folded it carefully and put it in her pocket. She couldn’t imagine what a cloak of invisibility the size of a pocket handkerchief could be useful for, but if ever there was a need, she would be prepared. That was how she came to have it in her pocket the day she saw a mouse being attacked by a malicious cat in the marketplace. Mice in the marketplace were very common, I’m sorry to say, but the way the cat arched its back and hissed triumphantly, ready to kill the mouse and eat it, stirred something in Bede.

“Stop! Don’t!” she shouted. The cat turned its head long enough for Bede to notice that the cat was wearing a jewelled collar, and long enough for her to toss the cloak of invisibility over the mouse. At once the mouse and the cloak disappeared.

The cat was astounded. Where there had been a tasty mouse a second before, now there was nothing but empty air. It walked around in a circle sniffing, then it stalked away embarrassed, pretending that it had not the slightest interest in mice.

Bede carefully slipped the mouse and the cloak into her pocket. At home in the safety of her room she lifted out the mouse and took off the cloak. He sat quietly on her hand, gazing at her with eyes like shiny black beads. “Aren’t you a handsome little fellow?” Bede said admiringly. The mouse was black, with satiny fur from the tip of his nose to the very end of his tail, which he held between his paws. “I know! You’re a fancy mouse!” she exclaimed.

Then the most extraordinary thing happened. The mouse bowed low and said, “I must thank you for saving my life.”

Bede almost dropped him in fright. “You’re a talking mouse?” she said.

“I am not a mouse at all,” he said.

“Wait! Don’t tell me – you’re an enchanted prince!” Bede said.

“How did you guess?” the mouse said. “I am Prince Locran, rightful heir to the throne. My half-brother, Raymis, put me under this enchantment when our father died, six months ago. He expected I would be caught in a trap or killed and eaten, and then the throne would be his. But for you, he would have succeeded.”

Bede remembered the sadness that had been felt throughout the kingdom when the old king died. It had been made even worse when the heir to the throne, Prince Locran, had disappeared. “But your brother, Prince Raymis, has search parties out looking for you everywhere across the seven kingdoms!” she said.

“He pretends to wish for my return, but in reality he plots to have me killed,” the mouse said, in his high, squeaky voice. “If I do not return within a year, he will be crowned king. That is all he has ever wished for. That, and the hand of the Princess Amabel, our beautiful cousin.”

“I’ll take you back to the palace at once,” Bede said. “But can a mouse, even a fancy mouse, be crowned king?”

“If I return to the palace like this, Raymis will have me in his power, and he will not hesitate to put an end to my life, even under the heel of his own boot!” the mouse squeaked.

“Then we must break the enchantment,” Bede said firmly. “But how?”

“It is almost impossible,” Locran said. “Raymis wears a precious jewel, a rare black carbuncle, on a chain around his neck, day and night. It is the source of his power over me. The only way I can be freed is for the carbuncle to be destroyed.”

They both sat in silence. Locran nibbled on a sunflower seed he had found, and Bede absently stroked his silky back with her finger. “At least we have six months to come up with a plan,” she said.

“Six months of this!” Locran threw up his paws. “Eating whatever crumbs I can find, running for my life, danger around every corner!”

“You will be safe with me,” Bede said. “Wherever I go, you can be in my pocket, and at night I will make you a bed of straw in a safe place.”

Locran was thinking hard. “Do you have any extraordinary skill, or talent?”

Bede said sadly, “No, unfortunately I am the most ordinary, talent-less person I know. All I have is this ragged cloak of invisibility.”

“You can’t spin straw into gold?” he asked. Bede shook her head. “Knit shirts out of thistles?”

“No,” Bede said. “All I can do is tap-dance a little.”

“Tap-dance?” said Locran. His tiny black eyes shone and he clapped his paws together. “It is true, then, as they say, that fate brings all things together at the right time and the right place for those who wish to do good!” And he told her his plan.

Bede was more than reluctant, she was positively unwilling. But as Locran said, there seemed to be no other way, and the coming together of herself and Locran and the cloak of invisibility just at the right moment had to be more than mere chance. “It will take extraordinary timing and all the courage you can muster,” Locran said, and Bede agreed with him. In spite of all her misgivings, she began to practise her tap-dancing, for hours a day.

Exactly twelve months to the day that the old king had died, the court and the people of the seventh kingdom gathered to see Prince Raymis crowned as the new king. Bede was there, in a startling red skirt with golden bells and a matching red jacket. The little black mouse was hidden in her pocket with a supply of sunflower seeds, just as he had been for the past six months, going everywhere with her. To her family and friends Locran was her pet mouse, so tame that he would sit on her palm or her shoulder, even nibbling at her ear as if he were whispering to her. But Bede never forgot that he was the crown prince, and his life and the future of the kingdom were in her hands.

Bede had used the remains of the cloak of invisibility to make a small pouch, just big enough to hold a mouse. Now she slipped the mouse out of her pocket and into the pouch, with a couple of sunflower seeds, and hung it around her neck. When they entered the room there was a sharp hissing and a “Mreowr!” A cat wearing a jewelled collar leapt towards Bede, yowling. Bede managed to push it away, and with the help of a servant, put it, hissing and spitting, into a cage.

Prince Raymis, tall and handsome with curly golden hair and noble bearing, sat on the coronation chair while the archbishop in charge of coronations intoned the blessings and prayers. He raised the crown over Raymis’s head, ready to crown him king. Raymis smiled confidently.

“Wait!” yelled Bede, stepping forward, with her bells jangling. The archbishop stopped with the crown in mid-air.

Deeply embarrassed, Bede said, “I beg your pardon, your Highness, but on such occasions, I believe it’s customary to have an anthem, or an ode, or least a sonnet, to show the people’s joy.” Red from her ears to her toes, she went on, “I have written a song to mark this auspicious occasion. May I sing it for your Highness?”

Raymis flapped his hands and said, “Yes, thank you, but keep it short and to the point.” The archbishop put the crown down, and the people gave a small cheer.

Bede stepped forward in front of the prince. Clearing her throat she began to sing and tap-dance at the same time.

“O Prince Raymis who can blame us

if we sing because you’re famous?

For there’s no-one who’s the same as

you, incredible Prince Raymis!”

She was not a good singer, and everyone realised that very quickly, but it was a holiday and there was going to be cake and ale afterwards, so they listened good-humouredly. Prince Raymis liked it very much, except for the tap-dancing which went on longer than he thought was necessary.

“Thankyou, that will do!” he said. The crowd clapped kindly. Bede made the curtsy that she had practised over and over and managed to step even closer to the coronation chair where Raymis was sitting. As she straightened up, she suddenly pointed at the chair and screamed, “Look! A mouse!”

“Where?” Raymis screeched, springing to his feet. Bede pulled the invisible pouch over her head and threw it as hard as she could. It flew through the air and landed on the coronation chair. The mouse scrambled out, suddenly visible.

“Got you!” shouted the archbishop, bringing the crown down smartly on top of the mouse, for in his day, before he became archbishop, he had been known as the best rat-catcher in his village.

Bede launched herself at Raymis and snatched the carbuncle from around his neck. She dropped it on the floor and tap-danced all over it, shattering it into a million pieces.

Immediately a shortish young man with smooth dark hair, rose from the coronation chair, with the crown on his head. “Your Majesty,” cried the archbishop, sinking on one knee. “King Locran!” The crowd, seeing the rightful king rightfully crowned, although they didn’t understand in the least how it had happened and supposed it was some kind of magic show arranged for their benefit, gave three enormous cheers. Then they sank on their knees too.

“So, you have won,” Prince Raymis said bitterly. “Defeated by a mouse!”

“A mouse and a courageous young woman,” King Locran said.

“So now the throne is yours, and the hand of Princess Amabel, just as you always wanted,” Raymis said heavily.

In the corner of the room. a high-pitched screaming was coming from the cat’s cage. The princess Amabel, who was squashed into the cage with her fingers and toes poking out through the gaps, was screaming, “Let me out of here!” The servants quickly opened the cage and she climbed out, smoothing down her hair.

Bede recognised the pretty jewelled necklace she was wearing, and said, “You! You were the cat who tried to kill Prince Locran in the marketplace!”

“A smelly little mouse!” hissed Amabel. “I begged Raymis to tun me into a cat so I could take care of the little rodent, but you got in my way! However, that is all in the past.” She took Locran’s hand with a smirk.

The king put her hand into his brother’s hand. “She’s all yours, Raymis,” he said, “so long as you both find somewhere to live far away from me and my true queen.” He took Bede’s hand, smiling. “If she will have a mere mouse.”

So Bede and Locran were married and ruled wisely and well. It is said that it was under their rule that the growing of sunflowers and the making of cheese in the seventh kingdom became what they are today, the best and most successful in all the secluded kingdoms. What remained of the cloak of invisibility stayed in the royal treasury for a long time, until a time came when the kingdom was in great need again, but that is a story for another day.

Stories for Another Day

Once there was a rich nobleman who lived in a great house and had everything his heart could desire. All around him lived poor people in cold, cramped houses with little enough to eat in spite of working hard from dawn till dusk every day, but Valerian never gave any thought to them.

Then one day a terrible plague struck the town and the countryside around it. People fell sick and lay in their homes with no medicine and no-one to look after them, and many of them died. In his great house, with plenty of food to eat and warm fires in every room, Valerian hardly knew what was happening, until one day his favourite servant, a young man named Coby, fell sick and fainted before his eyes.

Valerian lifted him in his own arms and carried him to the servants’ rooms. “The boy is ill,” he said. “Help him.”

But no-one rushed to help him. The cook was sitting in her chair weeping into her apron, for her own child had just died of the sickness. The head footman, who was trying to comfort her, said, “There is no-one to help, and nothing we can do. Many of the servants are in bed with the sickness themselves, or else they have gone to say goodbye to the dying in their own families.”

Valerian was struck with horror and shame. “But surely, with good care and medicine, they will recover?” he said.

The footman shook his head. “None of those who become sick with the plague live longer than a few weeks,” he said.

Valerian laid Coby down and instructed the head footman to do what he could for him, then he rushed from the house. Throughout the whole town and the neighbouring city he searched for medicines, or for a doctor who could help him, but he could find no-one. Everywhere he went, there were houses full of the sick and the dying.

Returning to the marketplace, he searched wildly for healing herbs or medicines of any kind but there was nothing. Everything had been tried, and everything was useless.

He was standing in the centre of the marketplace tearing his hair, when he heard a low voice, singing, “In sorrow or in sickness, healing comes soon for those who are touched by the tears of the moon.”

Valerian turned and saw a girl plaiting vines and weaving them into a basket. “You, there,” he said. “What is this about the tears of the moon? What are they, and how can I get them?”

The girl, whose name was Silva, said, “It’s only an old song, sir. My mother used to sing it to me, and her mother to her.”

“Is it true?” Valerian demanded. “Can the tears of the moon save someone from this sickness?”

“I don’t know,” said the girl, her deft fingers continuing to form the sides of the basket.

“Look at me when I speak to you,” Valerian said roughly. “Don’t you see who I am?”

“No, sir, for I am blind,” said the girl, her fingers still working.

“Blind?” said Valerian. “How can you do that work, if you cannot see?”

Silva smiled. “This is work of the hands, not of the eyes,” she said. “My fingers know the vines and the baskets form themselves under my hands. See?” She plaited the top edge of the basket and wove in a handle.

“The song you sang – where can I get these ‘tears of the moon’? Is it a herb, or a plant?” Valerian asked.

Silva shook her head. “It is only an old legend. Whoever can weave three reed baskets in one night between moonrise and moonset will find the tears of the moon.”

“Your fingers are swift and skilful,” said Valerian. “You can surely finish three baskets in one night.”

Silva shook her head again. “Baskets of willow, or cane, are quickly made. But reeds from the Black Lake are as sharp as knives and as thick as leather. They must be woven on the same day that they are harvested, for by the next morning they are dried out and brittle, and impossible to weave with. Only the most skilled hands can make baskets from reeds without being cut to pieces. But once woven, they make the most beautiful baskets, light and waterproof.”

Valerian said, “If you will do this for me, I will pay you whatever you ask.”

Silva said, “I would gladly weave one hundred baskets if it would help cure the sickness, but even as skilled as I am, I can barely finish one in a day.”

Valerian thought for a moment, then said, “Then you must teach me.”

“You?” said Silva. “Have you ever made a basket before?”

“No,” Valerian said, “so you had better begin at once.”

Day after day he sat at Silva’s side, letting her take his hands and guide them in bending and twining the vines together. His first efforts went straight into the fire, and his second were not much better, more like sieves than baskets. After endless hours of learning, and weaving long into the night, he could make a passable basket.

“I don’t think you would find a buyer for it in the market,” Silva laughed, “but it is a basket of sorts.”

“Now teach me how to cut and weave the reeds from the lake,” Valerian said.

The reeds grew straight as swords all around the edges of the lake, and they were tough as leather, as Silva had said. Even the heaviest knife could only cut a handful before it became blunt and needed sharpening again. After a whole morning of harvesting the reeds, there were barely enough to make even one basket.

Valerian began to weave them and the first reed sliced though his fingers. He cried out in pain, “How can anyone ever make a basket with these?”

“Perhaps that is why it is only a legend,” Silva said. But Valerian refused to give up hope. He went on cutting down the reeds and trying to weave them in a basket. The reeds cut his fingers and his palms, and his fingers bled so much that the baskets were red with blood.

Then he remembered what Silva had said, that the baskets must be made in a single night, between moonrise and moonset and he almost despaired. If he could barely make a single basket in full daylight, how could he ever finish three, working in darkness? His heart sank, then he remembered her gentle voice saying, “It is a work of the hands, not of the eyes.”

He covered his eyes with a bandage and set to work. His fingers were clumsy and took much longer to find the strands he wanted. But he persisted until his hands flew at the task more swiftly than they ever had with the guidance of his eyes. Finally he decided that ready or not, Coby and the others who lay close to death could wait no longer. “If I don’t succeed in finding the tears of the moon, whatever they may be, they will die. I simply must succeed.”

It was the night of the full moon, close to the middle of winter when the nights are longest. All day he and Silva cut and hacked at the reeds around the lake until there was a huge pile ready. As soon as the moon rose, Valerian set to work.

He plied and twisted, weaving the reeds tightly up against each other, round and around. He could barely see what he was doing but his hands knew their job. His first basket was finished just as the moon reached the highest point in the sky. “Half the night gone, and only one basket made!” he exclaimed. He redoubled his efforts, weaving faster than he knew he could, and finished the second basket in almost half the time of the first.

His fingers were split and covered in blood, but he set to work on the third basket with all the determination he had. The moon was sinking quickly and he had to force himself not to slacken his pace, no matter how tired he was.

The moon was within touching distance of the horizon when he reached the top of his third basket only to discover that he had used the last of the reeds. He jumped to his feet and ran to the edge of the lake and began sawing at the reeds. In his haste he dropped his knife. It sank into the water and hid itself in the mud. He searched frantically but he could not find it.

With tears in his eyes, he tore at the razor-sharp reeds with his bare hands. With blood running down his arms, he glanced past the reeds towards the moon which was slipping silently below the horizon. Suddenly he noticed that on the reeds around him there were droplets of a clear liquid like dew, which reflected the silver light of the moon, as if the reeds themselves were weeping. “Tears!” Valerian cried. “The tears of the moon!”

He sped back to his nearly finished basket and wove the last of the reeds into its border. Then with the finished baskets, he raced back to the lake edge. One by one he shook the standing reeds gently so that the droplets fell into the baskets, while the moon dipped lower and lower. As the last echo of moonlight left the sky, he shook the last of the dew into his full baskets.

Carefully he carried them back to the town, to his own house, where he gave some to Coby and the rest of the servants. They stirred and woke, refreshed and well again. With Silva at his side, he went through the town, giving the medicine to anyone who was sick, and they too were cured.

From that day on Valerian had his house made into a hospital for the sick, and he and Silva and their children and grandchildren after them were famous throughout the seven kingdoms as basket-makers and healers.