Camelot (8 page)

The next morning, with his trusty squire by his side, Sir Barkworth set off, not surprisingly in the wrong direction. Because he had a bit of toenail clipping in his left eye, which forced him to keep it closed, he rode in circles all day until, as night fell, they came to an inn.

‘This looks like a nice place,' said Sir Barkworth.

‘It is indeed, my lord,' said Nymrod.

‘Oh, you have stayed here before?'

‘Indeed, my lord, and so did you, last night.'

‘Ah. Well, yes, it is a nice place and we will stay here tonight as well.'

To make sure he wouldn't make the same mistake again, the next morning Sir Barkworth closed his left eye and set off in the opposite direction. And it worked. After a long day's ride they reached a magnificent castle.

‘I say, Nymrod, that's a magnificent castle,' said Sir Barkworth.

‘Indeed, my lord.'

‘Methinks it may be paradise,' said Sir Barkworth. ‘For I have seen it in my dreams.'

‘In your dreams, sire?'

‘Absolutely, for how else could I have seen it?'

‘It is Camelot, my lord,' said Nymrod.

‘Really? I never knew there were two castles with that name.'

‘There aren't, my lord.'

And so it was that the first Royal Messenger failed in his quest, though having managed to have such a long conversation without falling off his horses did prove his motor skills were getting better every day.

When Arthur became King, he did indeed banish his mother to the Island of Shallot, which he renamed the Island of Vegetables as he had promised. King Arthur then told Merlin to search the castle for the ugliest, smelliest old crone he could find and that she was to be sent to the Island of Vegetables as Igraine's servant.

Sewyr lived in a crack in the wall of Camelot's main sewer. Her family had lived there for seventeen generations, since they had been granted the right to do so by one of Arthur's ancestors. Sewyr had been named in honour of her home. Now that the drains were blocked and overflowing, her family had been forced to move out and had taken up temporary residence in a broken gristle storage bin in the castle tip. All except Sewyr's grandfather, who said he was too old for change and instead stayed in the drain, coming up for air every fifteen minutes.

Merlin had held auditions and Sewyr had stood out as the winner. She had out-smelled and out-uglied all the others. The fact that she still had
one tooth had gone against her, but it was a lovely shade of green and the frothy dribble that came out of her nose every time she spoke had won the day. She had been put into a big sack and ferried across to the Island of Vegetables.

To call it an island was to flatter it. The Island of Vegetables was little more than a rock shaped, remarkably, like a big potato. To call the castle on it a castle was to flatter it too. It was more like a garden shed with a couple of half-hearted towers, seven windows and a mould-covered door that had once been the side of a cattle stall on Noah's Ark.

‘I'll teach the Queen to be such a horrid mummy,' Arthur said. ‘Let her eat nothing but gruel with a goat's hoof in it, and use the same hoof I had to use for all those years. And let her eat the gruel from a really rough wooden bowl that has been eaten away by so many woodworms that she only has five minutes before the gruel leaks out all over the table and let her spoon be made of rusty iron with sharp bits and, and…'

‘Sire, surely you would not punish the lady who gave you life with such cruelty?' said Merlin.

‘Oh, all right,' said Arthur. ‘Don't give her a rusty spoon. Give her a piece of the finest silver cutlery for her watery gruel.'

‘Indeed, sire.'

‘But make it a fork.'

‘Sire, there are many at court who would say your mother has a heart of gold.'

‘Yes, her heart is gold like a hard-boiled egg,' said Arthur. ‘Dry with the texture of sawdust.'

Merlin knew there was no changing the boy's mind and if he was honest with himself, he hated the old Queen too.

‘But to show that I am not totally heartless,' Arthur added, ‘we shall give my mother a servant who reflects her importance as the mother of the King.'

‘So I should send Sewyr back to her drain?' said Merlin.

‘Not likely,' said Arthur. ‘No, we shall give her an important title. We hereby name her Lady Sewyr of the Slime.'

‘Your majesty's generosity,' said Merlin in a sarcastic voice that went completely over the King's
head, ‘is only exceeded by your personal kindness.'

‘Maybe you're right,' said Arthur. ‘Maybe I'm being too nice. I know niceness is one of my weaknesses. I think that is why my subjects love me so much.'

Change love to loathe and you're absolutely right,
thought Merlin.

‘Oh, woe is me,' Queen Igraine cried. ‘That I should end my life so. After all I did for that ungrateful boy.'

‘Maybe, my lady,' Lady Sewyr of the Slime dribbled, ‘if you were to write down all the things you did for your son and send it to him, he might change his mind.'

‘It's worth a try, I suppose,' said the Queen. ‘Bring me paper and a quill that I may write.'

‘Paper?'

The only paper Sewyr knew had fallen out of the holes above her head in the drains. It had been
soft and crumpled with perforations and full of extreme unpleasantness.

‘Umm, well now. I'll see what I can find,' said Sewyr and went off to rummage through the castle cupboards.

There were only two cupboards as it was a very small castle. One was full of dried gruel and the other was empty apart from a goat's hoof. Nor was there any wallpaper in any of the rooms, but for all her grossness, Sewyr was a resourceful person. She went down to the kitchen and got a sharp knife.

‘As you know, your son forbade you writing materials so this is all I can find, my lady,' she said, handing Igraine a square of grey material.

‘It's hairy,' said Igraine. ‘Is that the best you can do?'

‘It is, my lady.'

‘What is it? I mean, where did you get it?'

‘It is skin, from my back, my lady, and I brought you some ink and a nib,' said Sewyr.

‘Red ink? It's not a very friendly colour, is it?'

‘Sorry, my lady, but that is the colour my blood is.'

‘And the nib?'

‘I had no need of that toenail,' Sewyr whimpered. ‘Would you excuse me, my lady? I must go up to the roof and scream in agony for a while.'

‘Yes, yes, off you go,' said Igraine, ‘but do try to scream quietly. I am trying to concentrate on a letter to my son, you know.'

‘Thank you, my lady,' Sewyr cried and left the room.

As luck would have it, Sewyr's screaming was no distraction at all. The old servant had gone no more than ten steps from her mistress's door when she fainted. By the time she came to, several hours later, the Queen had finished her letter and was calling for her dinner.

‘Just give me a few minutes, my lady,' Sewyr cried and crawled off towards the kitchen.

‘Well, hurry up, I'm hungry,' shouted the Queen after her. ‘And make sure you wash the goat's hoof properly, it was covered in hair and cobwebs last time.'

‘Yes, my lady.'

Even I, who am the humblest of the humble,
should not be treated this way,
Sewyr whispered inside her head. She decided to flee the Island of Vegetables at the earliest opportunity. She spat into Igraine's gruel and carried the bowl up to her mistress.

‘I'm not sure if I am just forgetting how wonderful proper food is, or if I am, heaven forbid, actually learning to love gruel,' said the Queen, ‘but it actually tastes better than usual.'

‘That'll be the secret ingredient, my lady,' said Sewyr.

‘Secret ingredient?' asked the Queen. ‘What secret ingredient?'

‘Can't say, my lady. If I did, it wouldn't be secret and it would lose its magic,' said Sewyr.

She may have been filthy, a peculiar shape and covered in scabs, which were another of her secret ingredients, but Sewyr was not stupid.
If I was,
she thought,
I would consider it an honour to serve a queen.

She thought back to the crack in the sewer wall that had been her home for so many years, and it didn't seem so bad after all. At least there, no one had taken the skin off her back or made her clean under their toenails with her teeth. At least there she had
people who loved her – not much, admittedly, but enough to apologise after they had kicked her. Back then she had been sick of her home. Now she was homesick.

And of course, there was Gerald. For years Gerald had begged for her hand in marriage, and not just her hand, in fact, but all of her. She had spurned him, selfishly thinking she could do better than a husband with only one eye, and more warts than a giant warty toad. But now, as she curled up in her bucket and tried to sleep, she realised that love was more important than looks and Gerald certainly loved her with all his heart. Not just his heart, too, but his liver and kidneys and even his strange left foot shaped like the hoof she put in her mistress's gruel each night.

‘Oh Gerald,' she cried out, ‘how could I have been so blind?'

‘Shut up,' the Queen called down from above. ‘I'm trying to sleep.'

‘Here is my letter to the King,' said Igraine the next morning. ‘How are we to get it to him?'

‘There is only one visitor to our island, and he comes but once a month, my lady,' said Sewyr. ‘It is the Gruel Delivery Man in his coracle.'

‘Can he be trusted?'

‘That I cannot say, my lady,' said Sewyr, seeing an opportunity opening up. ‘Perhaps I should go in person and make sure your precious letter reaches the King.'

‘I'm not sure that's such a good idea,' said the Queen. ‘How can I be certain you will return?'

Oh deary me,
thought Sewyr,
not quite as stupid as you look.

‘But my lady, how would anyone in their right mind prefer living in a smelly drain over serving a great queen?'

The Queen was not as clever as she looked either and when Sewyr told her that the Gruel Delivery Man was Sewyr's own twin brother and that he would be happy to stay and look after the Queen while Sewyr was away, that seemed to allay her suspicions.

‘Besides, my lady,' Sewyr continued, ‘the coracle
is only large enough for one person, so if I am to go to Camelot, then he must stay here until I return.'

‘All right,' said the Queen, ‘but if you fail to deliver my letter and secure my release, I shall put the Curse of the Bagpipes on you.'

The Curse of the Bagpipes was one of the worst curses known to medieval man. For seven days and nights the victim could hear nothing but the awful noise of bagpipes inside their head. It was so loud that it drowned out every other sound. On the eighth day, the bagpipes themselves tracked the victim down and kicked them to death. Only one curse was worse and that was the Curse of the Endless Bagpipes, where they didn't kick you to death, but just kept wailing for ever and ever until you died screaming or actually started to like their awful noise. If that did happen then they stopped playing immediately. It was a very powerful curse and it could tell if you were just pretending to like their wailing.
⁴¹

At the end of the week the Gruel Delivery Man arrived. Before the Queen could speak to him, Sewyr whisked him down to the kitchen.

‘If you will pretend you are my twin brother, Tyrd, and do as I ask, I shall be forever in your debt,' she said.

‘But I am your twin brother, Tyrd,' said Tyrd. ‘Do you not recognise me?'

‘Oh,' said Sewyr. ‘Of course I don't recognise you. We lived in almost total darkness in the sewers, remember, not to mention being covered from head to foot in unmentionable stuff. Half the time, I couldn't even recognise our own mother. You've no idea how many times I cried myself to sleep thinking my mother had thrown me into the sewage, only to find out later it had been a complete stranger I had been trying to snuggle up to.'

‘You too, eh?' said Tyrd.

‘Mind you,' said Sewyr, ‘now I look at you, I can see we're identical.'

‘Well, not completely,' said Tyrd. ‘I mean, I'm a man and you're a woman. You are a woman, aren't you?'

‘I think so.'

Not realising that Sewyr had no intention of returning, Tyrd agreed to take her place while she delivered the Queen's letter.

As she paddled the coracle back to the castle, Sewyr slid her fingernail under the Queen's seal and opened the letter.