The Dragons 3 (10 page)

As the two rafts carrying Mordred and his small army of fake washerwomen drifted closer to Camelot, the sky suddenly lit up with fire. They didn't know the dragons had been planning to attack Camelot, so their first thought was that somehow Merlin had got news of their own plans and sent dragons out to light up the sky and look for them.

Captain Shortbread Silver, who was sailing the first raft, pulled it into the darkest shadows at the back of a small island, tied up and clambered ashore. The crew of the second raft tied up behind him and everyone crouched beneath the dense bushes that covered the island.

‘We shall not be seen here,' said the Captain, ‘and our rafts look like they're part of the island.'

Of course what they were seeing actually had nothing to do with Mordred and his crew at all. It was the dragons attacking Camelot and getting roasted. It took them a while to realise that the dragons seemed to be attacking each other.

‘We could use the chaos to slip quietly into the castle,' said the Captain as the flames and chaos
grew louder and louder.

‘WHAT?' Mordred shouted. ‘The flames and the chaos are so loud I can't hear a single word you're saying.'

‘I SAID …' the Captain started, but then he just waved for everyone to follow him.

They paddled across to the castle and were about to set their rafts adrift when Culvert stopped them.

‘Won't we need those to get away again?' he said.

‘Of course not,' said Mordred. ‘We would only need the rafts to escape if our mission fails and of course it will
not
fail.'

‘But …' Culvert began but stopped himself.
But Tracyvere and I need the rafts to take us back to the mainland
, he thought.

‘Why not keep the rafts here?' Tracyvere said. ‘Then we could set our prisoners adrift and fire flaming arrows into the rafts when they are out in the middle of the lake, where they would all get eaten by the olms.'

‘Now that is a great idea,' said Mordred.

So they hid the rafts in the bulrushes and crept towards the back door of the castle.

Their timing was not very good. When they were about five metres from the castle wall, an enormous burning dragon came crashing down and killed twelve fake washerwomen.

This meant that they had already lost fourteen raiders before they had even got inside the castle. The other deaths had been when they had been hiding the rafts and someone had said, ‘I wonder why they are called bulrushes?' and had been trampled by a rampaging cow. Someone else was about to say, ‘Shouldn't they be called cowrushes?', but before he could he was trampled to death too.

They had actually lost sixteen people because Culvert and Tracyvere took advantage of the falling dragon to slip quietly back to the rafts. As far as they were concerned it was a wonderful stroke of luck. No one was going to pick through the dead bodies to count them, so it would be assumed that the Clapshamshires had been two of the victims. Culvert threw his hat into the embers just to aid the deception.

The two of them untied both rafts, climbed onto one of them and set themselves adrift. By the time anyone noticed, they would be safely away.

‘And if anyone ever finds out we are here,' said Tracyvere, ‘we'll tell them that we were kidnapped by Mordred but managed to escape.'

‘You are the most devious person I have ever met,' said Culvert. ‘No wonder I love you so much.'

‘I see that the Clapshamshires have left the others and are paddling the two rafts away from here,' said Merlin, taking out his pocket crystal ball.

‘Maybe they'd been kidnapped and have managed to escape,' said King Arthur.

‘I'm sure that is what we will be told,' said Merlin. ‘I don't think we'll have any more trouble from them, but just in case, we'll deal with them later.'

Mordred took a hairpin from one of the fake washerwomen's hair and picked the lock, letting the remaining attackers into the castle. It was pitch black.

‘Er, anyone got a lantern or a candle?' said Mordred.

‘I have a lantern and a flint with which to light it,' said Captain Shortbread Silver. ‘A well-prepared sailor never goes anywhere without such things.'

‘Excellent,' said Mordred.

‘Indeed,' said the Captain.

‘So perhaps you could light your lantern?'

‘I left it on the raft,' said the Captain. ‘I'll just nip back and get it.'

‘Take a couple of soldiers with you,' said Mordred, ‘in case any guards come by.'

What he really meant was that he didn't completely trust the Captain and wanted to make sure he wouldn't run away.

Suddenly, there was a small outbreak of more bad timing as a second falling dragon killed Captain Shortbread Silver and his two companions. Mordred, who had been watching from the doorway, was hit full in the face by an unspecified lump of burning sailor.
It burnt off both his eyebrows and left him with a nasty scar in the middle of his forehead that was shaped like a rude sign.

So now the invading army was reduced to seven.

‘I was doing some wondering,' said Sergycal, ‘and my wondering was thinking that maybe we should be quietly withdrawing in order to be building up our army.'

‘I don't think so,' said Mordred. ‘Remember, we are the Knights Intolerant and the Knights Intolerant never retreat.'

‘No, no, of course they don't,' said Sergycal, ‘but this will not be a retreating we are making. This will be a
tactical withdrawallery
. It's the sort of things great soldiers do all the time.'

Mordred was torn. The adrenaline that had been racing around his brain – hyping him up at the thought of stabbing King Arthur to death at least fifteen times, dragging Morgan le Fey off in rusty shackles and chains, throwing Merlin off the tallest tower in a really baggy pair of dirty grey tights covered in suspicious stains, and drowning Sir Lancelot in a vat of very bad
cooking sherry
⁵³
– was slowing down. Instead it was being replaced by the fact that there were only seven of them left and Camelot was a huge place overrun with people, all of who adored King Arthur and would defend him to the bitter end. A tactical retreat did make sense, but it still felt a bit like running away.

Mordred suggested that maybe they could go down to the kitchens and kill a few scullery maids or junior cabbage operatives, just to show they had been inside Camelot and were a force to be reckoned with.

‘But then they would know of us being here,' said Sergycal, ‘and then when they are not finding us they might be thinking we had done some runnings away.'

‘Good point,' said Mordred, but he really wanted to leave some evidence that he had been inside the castle.

They were, of course, still in complete darkness and blundered on until they found a door. It was the Number Twelve Turnip Store and it was full of turnips and a very small child.

‘Listen, you little brat,' said Mordred, dragging the child to the door. ‘I want you to go upstairs and …'

‘I aren't allowed upstairs,' said the child.

‘Yeah, OK then, just go to the cook and …'

‘I aren't allowed to talk to the cook.'

‘Well, just go and tell someone that Prince Mordred and his men were here and they did wee wee all over King Arthur's turnips,' said Mordred, doing exactly that.

The boy ran off into the darkness as Mordred and the others blundered back towards the door. Three of them totally managed to not avoid the open trapdoor that no one remembered being there on their way in, leaving the army of four to make its way out of the castle.

Fortunately, the dragons had finished falling out of the sky and the army of four were able to cross the four metres of narrow land and reach the bulrushes, where the two rafts were no longer hidden.

‘Maybe they were further along there?' said Mordred.

‘No, they were doing being here,' said Sergycal, bending down to pick up a button. ‘And if I'm not
mistakenly, this button is from the sleeves of Lady Tracyvere's dressing clothes dress.'

‘But she and her husband were killed when the first dragon fell on them, weren't they?'

‘It would appearing not,' said Sergycal.

‘But could she not have lost the button when we were coming ashore?' said Mordred.

‘She could have, but I am having thinkings that they took the rafts and fleeded before we entered the castle,' said Sergycal. ‘Your parents never did trusting the Clapshamshires. They did thought them to be up themselves, with all their stucking-up ways, like peeling turnips and trimming their body hairies and not letting the sheeps sleep on their bed.'

‘I think you're probably right,' said Mordred, ‘but without the rafts what are we going to do? Our retreat is not so much tactical as impossible.'

‘It would seem that we are having no choices but to do going back into the castle,' said Sergycal. ‘We could do swims to the nearest island, but that would not get us anywheres and we could get eatended by the olm things. Though if we swimming for it or do staying here, we will have nothing for eatings and the
nights are doing so cold now we could freezed to death be. No, we have no choices but to returning to the castle. At least we should be able to find some foods and shelter.'

As if to prove his point, it began to snow and hail and rain all at the same time. The four of them opened the door and re-entered the dark tunnel.

‘I be starvationing, cousin,' said one of the two of them who weren't Mordred or Sergycal.

‘We'll do going back to that turnip room,' said Sergycal. ‘At least can get something to eat there.'

On their way there, the two of them who weren't Mordred or Sergycal totally managed to not avoid the open trapdoor that they all remembered being in a quite different place, leaving the army of two to make its way back to the Number Twelve Turnip Store, where they were so faint with hunger they had eaten three turnips each before they remembered these were the very turnips they had peed on.

‘It wasn't supposed to be like this,' said Mordred, slumping down in the corner.

His one and only slight consolation was that it was so dark Sergycal couldn't see him crying.

‘Never mind, my lord,' Sergycal said. ‘It is times are doing like this that show us who the real mens are. Lesser mens than us would be doing slumped down in a corner crying like baby things, but us fearlessly Knights Intolerant just take firmly controls and tell ourselves that things can't do getting any worse.'

Mordred couldn't answer without letting Sergycal know he was crying. He was also shaking with fear and shivering with cold, though not necessarily in that order.

Sergycal had been wrong. Things could do getting worse and they did.

A bolt on the outside of the door slid shut, followed by seven more bolts, which rattled in a taunting sort of way before sliding shut too. Water began to rise up through the floor. It could have been worse. The water could have been freezing cold and kept rising until Mordred and Sergycal were drowned, but it didn't. It rose halfway up their thighs, gurgled in a taunting sort of way, then stopped. One by one the turnips rose to the surface and bobbed around in the darkness.

‘Oh well,' said Sergycal, ‘at least the turnips will be having our urines rinsed off them.'

‘Not exactly,' said Mordred.

It promised to be a long night.