Floods 10 by Colin Thompson Page B

mean, I want you to leave my country by nightfall.’
    â€˜When you say nightfall,’ said Nerlin, ‘do you mean nightfall or Knight-fall? The reason I ask is, if you mean Knight-fall, you’ll have to be more specific. Do you mean the brave Sir Lostalot or the nearly as brave Sir Listalot? And I have to tell you that both of them – we’ve actually only got two Knights, though I believe my son Prince Winchflat is growing some more in a special greenhouse – that they are both very steady on their feet. In fact, there are no recorded incidents of either Knight ever falling down.’
    Ethel may have been a talking chicken, but she was still just a chicken with a very tiny brain and was now very confused.
    â€˜Then, of course, there’s midsummer’s night,’ Nerlin continued, ‘which is the shortest night of the year, at least fifteen centimetres shorter than Sir Lostalot, who used to be called Sir Hasalot until he lost both arms below the fingertips in a card game.’
    â€˜Umm,’ Ethel said, sinking into the sea of feathers. ‘The corn. Tell me about that.’
    â€˜Interesting you should ask,’ said Nerlin. ‘Because it is magic corn with a very long and fascinating history. It is the oldest known type of corn in the world and comes from a small town in Belgium called Miasto-Kukurudza which means “the City of Corn” in Polish, not Flemish, which is also very interesting. I mean, what is a town in Belgium doing with a Polish name?’
    Fifteen minutes later, as Nerlin was telling her how the children of Miasto-Kukurudza used to germinate the corn in their ears, Ethel vanished below the feathers. This meant she was surroundedby sticky bleeding dead chickens, but she decided that was preferable to listening to Nerlin going on and on and on.
    â€˜Wizards one, chickens zero, I think,’ said Nerlin.
    â€˜Brilliant,’ said Mordonna. ‘Chicken burger, anyone?’

Meanwhile, Maldegard and Edna, completely unaware of talking chickens or Belgian towns with Polish names, were now many miles away from Dreary.
    This time they were travelling on two Royal Donkeys, descendants of the legendary George-The-Donkey-Formerly-Known-As-Prince-Kevin-Of-Assisi, simply known as George, who had been the extremely bad-tempered, smelly, moth-eaten, uncomfortable old donkey that Queen Scratchrot had ridden when she had fled Transylvania Waters with Mordonna and Nerlin 53 what seemed like a what seemed like alifetime ago. 54 George had had the sort of personality that made everyone want to be in a George-free environment as soon as possible.
    The two donkeys Maldegard and Edna were riding were not like that. Blossom and Bubbles were happy donkeys and between them they knew seventeen funny jokes, none of which were rude, not even the one with the knicker elastic in it. Over the generations the bad-temperedness had been bred out of them by a combination of magic, lovely fresh grass and treacle toffees.
    Spudly was riding in a small saddlebag fixed to Blossom’s saddle. The steady rhythm of the donkey strolling along made him very sleepy and the young goblin soon forgot all about being homesick. He imagined he was in the middle of a hundred-acre field of salsify, which was amazing considering hehadn’t the faintest idea was salsify was. He knew his sister was named after it, but all that meant was that it was probably short and fat and covered in spots. He had never tried to eat his sister so he didn’t know what salsify actually tasted like, though according to all the goblins who had eaten it, it was the best taste in the world. 55 Yet there it was, inside his head, although the image was slightly wrong. Salsify is a root vegetable that looks a bit like a carrot, but in Spudly’s dream it was a very big tree with thousands of mauve parrots nesting in it. Either way, it was delicious to eat. 56
    Turning right out of Dreary could not have been