Never Trust a Witch (chap 1)

Chapter One : In a land far, far away

This is a story of a simple farm boy, bored of a life where every day
was exactly the same and nothing ever happening, who went to the big
city, looking for something different. And how that boy saw kings and
queens and strange creatures, then ended up on a mission, where he met
even stranger creatures, such as this rabbit.

The second thing you'd notice about the rabbit was that it could
talk.

The first thing was that it moved about a lot, jumping up and down in
front of you, getting very agitated, crashing its head against pots and
pans, biting your trousers, that sort of thing. The rabbit would
actually just be trying to attract your attention, but really it would
only succeed in making you wonder, 'I wonder what's wrong with that mad
rabbit'.
That certainly happened when I first saw it.
I've known the rabbit for quite some time now and the more I know him
the madder he gets. He still owes me for the trousers.
The main thing is that he doesn't think he's a rabbit. He will accept,
after argument, that he is rabbit shaped, rabbit sized and a good bit
like a rabbit in some respects, floppy ears being one example, except
he's not one. Rabbits don't talk, he does, enough said, he says.
He's a prince that has been made into a rabbit by a very bad, meaning
wicked rather than poor at magic, witch, very skilful in fact, but
nasty, obviously. Well, he isn't and she didn't, but that's what he
says. Says it all the time. On and on. Never shuts up, in fact. Mad
rabbit.

There is a witch, that is true and I did find the rabbit at the witches
little cottage out in the hills, but she's probably not that skilful
and doesn't really have any arguments with royalty as such. Personally,
I'm not that happy with the royalty around here, but that's another
story, or put it another way, it's the start of this story of how I
came to be meeting up with witches, well just one, and chatting with
talking rabbits, again just the one, only one. If he is a rabbit, of
course, which he is, sorry, it is.

To go back to the start, once upon a time, a little while ago, I was at
the palace. I don't suppose it's a very big one, as palaces go, more of
a castle with a few flags, but we're not a very big country and it's
the biggest building I'd ever seen. In the biggest city by far, though
probably very small really.
I'd lived all my life on our small farm, in a smallish valley, never
having gone beyond that, in our small country and so when I went to the
city and the palace they did both look very big to me.
The cow I was taking to the city, well town, didn't seem shocked or
surprised by the massive scale of it all. Which was good as I was
riding on her through the city gates at the time, so I'm glad she
didn't jump up in alarm.
Did I feel foolish to be seen riding on a cow ? No not really, she was
a good cow. I have to agree that I felt a bit foolish when I had left
our farm for good, taking the cow to sell and have that money to start
my new life, and found that riding out on a cow was not the most
spectacular or speedy get away imaginable. My father had strolled
alongside taunting me, 'So, running away then are you?' and my mother
had time to go back to the house, pack me some food, and catch up
again, all at walking pace. Neither had made much effort to talk me out
of it. Actually they made no effort at all. They probably thought it
was another daft scheme of mine, just as crazy as all the others, and
I'd soon be back. So there I'd been, being mocked and stuck on a cow,
going at a cow's pace, unable to get away from the mockers, till they
remembered better things to do and wandered off. I admit I felt a fool
then, but entering under the castle gates with all the hustle and
bustle, so much going on, I felt excited. This was where it was all
happening and it would happen to me too. So I sort of forgot I was on a
cow.

I'd forgotten all about that cow again, till I just told you about it.
I sold her very quickly, almost as soon as we'd arrived in the market
place and I've been very busy since. But thinking of her now, I do miss
her. She was a good companion on that journey, letting me think my
thoughts and make my plans, while she did all the walking, steady,
comfortable and relaxing. I might have been a little frightened or over
excited about setting out alone like that, but somehow her unhurried
manner calmed me down. She kept the rain off me during that storm when
I sheltered behind her. She was a good cow, warm at night, nice milk
too. Now, of course, I go around with the rabbit, who is no help at
anything and does all this talking, and wants feeding even though there
is grass all around. What a cow.

There was a lot happening in that market place and I now had some
money, all ready to go. But, truth be told, even though I'd made lots
of plans, it was all a bit new and foreign to me. I didn't understand
what was going on, much too fast to get to grips with. I'd been to the
village market so many times, and this one probably took up about the
same sort of area. But there was so much more of it all, the people,
the noise, the smell, the stalls of vegetables or fruit I'd never seen,
and such colours. The city walls were so high all around and the
buildings. It was all so much that I wasn't sure where to start or what
to do. So it was really very good when that man said, "Hey you boy,
what do you think you're doing ?". Obviously I couldn't think of
anything and he was happy with that. It's what he wanted, just what he
said. "Nothing. Good, just what I need". That's when he gave me the job
to do. It wasn't difficult and suddenly gave me something to do. He was
too busy and he paid me a coin, which I didn't have a chance to look at
till later because straight away my hands were full, holding the
basket. When I did look it wasn't much. But the basket was for the
kitchens at the palace. I'd have gladly gone there for nothing, so it
wasn't bad that he cheated me.
I don't know what was in the basket. I knew the name of a man to give
them to, but never looked myself. I had both hands on the handles, so
nothing left to lift the cover with. The guard looked inside, but I
don't think he knew what it was even then, and let me pass. The great
kitchens themselves were full of fires in fireplaces, big as our barn
door, with huge brass pots hanging on hooks, dangling from chains that
went up to the high curved ceilings, lost in smoke, and so many people
and animals. Live ones, some of them, which surprised me, and made it
very noisy. Particularly when some girl started trying to pluck a real
goose instead of a dead one. All in all it was very difficult to find
anyone who wanted the basket, everyone too busy, or telling them who it
was for, as they couldn't hear. Maybe I was getting the name wrong. It
was very confusing. Several cooks in white aprons and horrible stains
looked under the cover on the basket and I shouted the name at them,
but they shrugged, gave up and just waved me on.
I think it was a mistake, but a line of people were carrying trays,
jugs and even baskets, up some stairs. I had a basket and ended up in
that line going up the stairs, along corridors full of tapestries, and
colour and women in dresses down to the floor like tents and soldiers
with spears and shiny helmets, and on into the great banqueting hall,
which looked like a dream to me. The person ahead of me walked around
to the front of a long bench table and placed her tray down there. So I
did too. Whatever was in the basket jumped out, grabbed the chicken off
that tray and ran a little way along the table, knocking so much over
that I never got a good look at it. Someone swiped at it with his fork.
Someone tried hitting it with what looked like a loaf of bread. It
jumped down off the table, under some ladies dress, which made her jump
up. Lots of other ladies jumped up too. Three or four of the spear
carrying soldiers clattered into each other very noisily and I picked
up a tray of food and carried it away to the furthest other table I
could find. Then I picked up a jug and stood at the back of the table,
behind the guests, because there were some other people stood there
holding jugs too.

The show was about to begin.

Of course, I had no idea what was going on at the time, but I do now,
vaguely, though I still find it hard to believe. I had happened upon
one of the biggest ceremonies of the year, with the Guessing
Bird.
Our country is such a small country, surrounded by many, much bigger
countries. We don't do much apart from farm and live lives in our few
valleys and hills where nothing much ever happens. You'd hardly notice
we were here and that's what makes the Guessing Bird so important.
We're the only country that's got one. So instead of forgetting us, all
the foreigners know us. We're that place with the Bird. And lots of
those foreigners, princes and dukes and things, were there at the Bird
ceremony, so that they could see it and talk about it and remember that
our country was the place where they saw it, so we must exist. I'd
never heard of it.

I'd never heard of it and had no idea what it was when I saw it. I
would never have guessed that it was a bird. There is a farm in our
valley that has turkeys. I must have seen one or two at the village
market, maybe. This Bird had a body about the size of one of those, or
quite a bit bigger. But its legs were as long as mine, longer even.
There were only two of them and animals have four, so it could have
been a bird. But it was bald. Very stupid looking, made far worse by it
being dressed, of sorts. Rings of bells tied here and there, a ruff on
the neck, a coat thing and that hat come crown that kept falling off,
so that the man in the yellow get up seemed only to be there to keep
picking it up and putting it back on again. The man in the more orangey
costume and the bad hat seemed to be there to just point at the Bird to
show everyone where it was. It was hard to miss. Apart from being right
in the centre of the hall in the middle of the ring of tables, it was
not the sort of thing you wouldn't be looking at. It was pretty ugly.
No surprise they're so rare. They'd be impossible to breed, who'd fancy
that. And then there were a couple more men in costumes that just stood
around, although one of them did seem to have the job of handing the
main man, the one in the red and gold and very bad hat, the scroll that
he read the long speech from.

The Guessing Bird was the thing the foreign princes weren't supposed to
forget and so the speech man told them all about it, over and over. A
long speech with very long words. It seemed there was much more than it
being the only one there was. There was the Mystery and the
Guessing.

What the red man said was that the Bird would swallow an object and it
would disappear. Not just disappear as in it'd just ate it, but in the
sense that it would vanish and re-appear somewhere entirely else. But
no one knew where because it appeared in some hidden place. And the
Bird would guess where it was and it was a Mystery how it did it.
It was a big ceremony and all very, very important, so he said. It
sounded crazy to me. The bird probably didn't swallow. It just kept the
thing in its beak, that didn't look at all beak-like, and when it was
poking around in the hidden spot, just dropped the object down. Or
maybe it never even had the object in its beak in the first place.
Whoever fed him would keep it hidden in his hand and then sneak it off
to some hidey place. But that would be nonsense. This is the big
Mystery that our country is famous for and invites people from far and
wide to watch. Clearly it couldn't be a fake. We'd get in trouble and
never get away with it. Those princes weren't fools. Apart from the one
with the big, silly, twisty black moustache, obviously.

And then he got up and went over to the Bird, the fool with the
moustache. He turned out to be probably the most seriously important
person in the whole room. He looked worse than the bird, although he
managed to keep his crown on. He was bald and his legs looked way too
long for his fat, small, round body. Count Otto Helmflick, prince of
Bradonia, which is right next to our country and very big,
apparently.
The Count seemed to think the whole show was as fake as I had. He
insisted that the object the Bird swallowed would be one of his and
then he couldn't find one. He went back to the table to his Queen to
get something. She wasn't his queen, just his wife, a countess, but she
had all sorts of clothes and jewels and a crown, so she looked like a
queen. I was told her name. Very odd, sounded like a disease, but I
forgot it. He asked for a ring and she wouldn't. She told him to use
that key he has round his neck and he told her not to be so silly. She
started crying and everyone tried telling her he had said 'That sounds
thrilling'. Our King even ran across and told her just that, 'It
sounded thrilling', but that it was far too important an object to play
around with and that it would be best, in the end, to use one of the
objects they had already.
I didn't know he was our King. Up until a few days before I didn't even
know we had one. When my father had been laughing at me for wanting to
dash off to the big city on the other side of the blue hills beyond our
valley, he'd asked if I was off for tea with the King. It was the first
I'd heard of the city either and that was when I decided to head in
that direction. There had been a time when I was very small, that
everyone from every farm had been gathered up and forced to go to the
nearest village. There they had had a big party, which I slept right
through, which was to do with the King having a child. The Queen. It
was the Queen that had the child, but it was when I was little and
hasn't happened since, so maybe that's why I'd not heard of him.

Count Otto wasn't persuaded. He looked around, pulling a funny face,
perhaps. It was difficult to tell, what with his normal face being what
it was. He pulled on his moustache and said something about the key
being so splendid, with two jewels and a engraved crest, no time to get
a duplicate of that. I think that's how he thought it was done.
Duplicates. The Bird really did swallow the object after all. But it
never vanished, just stayed in that stomach forever, which is maybe how
it lost all its hair, or feathers. Then the Bird just pointed to the
copy that someone had hidden away. Otto didn't say all that. He just
mentioned there being no time to make the duplicate. But obviously he
thought the only mystery was why anyone hadn't spotted it before.

Everything had taken a long time up till then; the red man's speech,
Count Otto going on and the queen, countess person, crying and all
that, but after that things happened very fast.

The Count wouldn't let the man in blue feed the key to the Bird. He
would do it himself, but never really got chance to. The Bird pecked it
straight out of his hand and gulped it down. The Bird started to do its
Mystery dance, hopping about a bit, crown tumbling off, yellow man
fumbling around to get it back on. Then my basket fiend appeared. It
may have been. I hadn't seen much of it before on the table. It was
furry, black, cat sized, but not a cat, obviously, as I'd have known it
was a cat, but it moved fast. The thing that came across the floor from
under the table was moving pretty fast too, but someone had tried
catching it by throwing a flag on it. Better that than trying to pick
it up with bare hands, definitely, but it meant that you could only see
a brief glimpse of black, furry paw underneath all the cloth. I don't
suppose the basket fiend could see much of anything as it raced across
the floor but it didn't bump into anything. The soldiers that were
chasing it did though. Mainly themselves, tripping over spears and
clanging into each others metal armour, very noisily. One did manage to
head butt the Count, not directly head on, else he'd still be stuck to
the helmets big spike, but it knocked him flying. No idea how many of
them landed on top of the Bird or which one trod on its neck, but I'll
never forget that noise. It was more a bellowing, like a high pitched
moose, but the notes went up and down and up and down so much, it made
you dizzy just to hear it. It certainly cleared the room. Everyone
seemed to run out, chairs kicked away, dresses trod on or tripped over.
I was pressed back to the wall clinging on to my jug, nothing spilt,
don't know how not. So much movement I never got a good look at the
fiend when it went out. Someone had trod on its flag and it shot out of
its wrapping. I should have been able to get a very clear view when it
started running up the wall, but some ladies hat fell right in my face,
lots of feathers and plumage. I think I glimpsed a tail as it went
through a window, so high up it was, who'd ever be able to look through
that.

After the storm the calm. One of the men in costume somehow shut the
Bird up. It didn't appear hurt at all, but no one could find its crown.
Yellow will have to knit another. Soldiers were scurried away and
brought back so that Otto could remember their faces and make sure
someone wrote their names down. Paper and pen seemed hard to come by,
but it all got done somehow. The guests began sneaking back into the
hall and then Otto exploded.

Otto was noisier than the Bird. His face changed colour at will, mainly
reds and purples. He shouted and screamed, and bellowed a bit not
unlike a moose too. Someone had told him the Bird was too upset to
continue. The key had gone somewhere, but the Bird was too flustered to
try Guessing where it was. It was an important key. The guests raced
from the hall again and I stood with the jug, baffled but intrigued to
see what would happen next.
If the beetroot with the black moustache had his way, the next thing to
happen would have been the Guessing Bird being sliced in two so that he
could get his key back. Our King, Rodwell the Cake, the man in red and
gold had said that in his speech, or maybe Eighth. King Rodwell talked
the Count of that. The whole thing about the Bird was that the key
wouldn't be inside its stomach. It would have been sent elsewhere by
some mysterious magic. So the Bird remained whole, for a while at
least. King Rodwell said that it all had something to do with the full
moon. The Count didn't believe that at first seeing as this was all
happening in broad daylight, or indoors in the gloom but mid afternoon.
Somehow Rodwell convinced Otto about the moon and that the Bird might
be able to do its Guessing when it recovered from its treading
incident, but not till the next full moon twenty eight days away.

Around that point I was kicked out of the palace. Everyone was out.
Count Otto wouldn't leave without the key. He had some small number of
soldiers that were his private bodyguard camped outside the city. They
weren't staying in tents for twenty eight days, so Otto, his queen, the
countess, his silly son and all of his guards were moving into the
palace. It wasn't too big a palace, so everyone else had to move out. I
think the King and Queen and a few servants stayed in their rooms, but
everyone else was out, including me. Fortunately, as I was ambling
about inside the city walls, half looking for the basket fiend, King
Rodwell himself, and a lot of other people too, appeared on a balcony
and shouted out an announcement, so I was able to find out how things
had progressed.
He told us all, the gathering throng, about the Guessing Bird and the
key and how an accident had led to it being unable to guess where it
was today. The Bird was now under lock and key in a cage in Count
Otto's new quarters. It was to be fed some strange mixture and someone
would be found to check its droppings. A name was mentioned. Yellow
costume laughed out loud and was escorted away by soldiers. Judging by
his looks the man in red and gold who'd made the long speech, had just
volunteered. I know his name now, Bernard, but I've forgotten his
title. He is very important and didn't look happy. At the next moon the
Guessing ceremony would be tried again to see if the Bird might find
the key. In the meantime the Count's soldiers would be searching the
palace room by room, inch by inch. This missing key was vitally
important for something, said our King. So much so that he would reward
massively anyone who could think of a better way of finding it than
cutting the Bird in half. That was still the Count's favourite option
and one he would insist on seconds after the next ceremony proved a
waste of time, which he thought it would. And if the axe proved a waste
of time and bird too, there might be war, or repercussions of an
equally unpleasant nature. After that outburst from Count Otto, the
reward got a bit bigger and I got tempted to go after it.

My mission was about to begin.

alfie works 00