Floods 10 (16 page)

Some places didn't need the dictionary. They simply named themselves. A single cottage beside a
bubbling bog was named
.
⁵⁹

Spudly wasn't left out of the naming. He couldn't actually read, not because he was too young or stupid, but because he hadn't been taught. Goblins think that reading is one of the five deadly sins
⁶⁰
and responsible for many of the world's problems.

‘We know what a turnip is,' they said. ‘We don't need to see it written down.'
⁶¹

Spudly did have a picture book, though, and was allowed to use that.

‘I'm not sure anyone will want their village to be called
or
,' said Maldegard, but they did.

In fact
became a very popular holiday destination simply because of its happy name.
also became very
popular indeed, for all sorts of reasons.

In their eagerness to get the job done, Maldegard and Edna skipped over many other things that needed names like rivers and mountains. They sent word back to Dreary and a horse and cart set out after them loaded to the top with dictionaries to be handed out in each village so the inhabitants could name all the stuff around them themselves.

This meant there were still lots and lots of places called
and
because Spudly was not the only who couldn't read. Neither could ninety-seven per cent of the population of Transylvania Waters.

‘What does that say?' Spudly asked, holding his book up to Edna.

‘Printed in Belgium.'

‘I name this place
,' said Spudly, pointing at a group of three thatched cottages.

‘And that bit?'

‘That says:
on environmentally sustainable paper
,' said Edna.

‘And I name that little village on the hillside over there,
,' said Spudly, who was a long-word-free zone.

Maldegard took the book from him and told him it was time for his afternoon nap, to which Spudly said he didn't have afternoons naps, to which Maldegard said, ‘Well, you do now,' and zipped up the saddlebag the young goblin was travelling in.

Winchflat had chosen his Number Six Laboratory
⁶²
to do his DNA experiments in. This was because it was at the top of one of the tallest towers in Castle Twilight, with only one set of narrow stone stairs spiralling down to the rest of the castle. It also only had two windows and they were just big enough for a chicken to fall out of.

‘That way if something big and dangerous develops, it won't be able to get out,' he said.

No one said, ‘Unless it is so big and dangerous, it smashes through the wall or rips the roof off,'
though a lot of people thought it.

It took all afternoon to get Ethel and the other live chickens herded up into a chicken run with the rest of the Castle's chickens, and another hour to stop falling about laughing as Ethel strutted around the coop trying to get the modern chickens to understand her. The modern chickens just ran and hid in the nesting boxes. They knew that chickens were not supposed to speak and were very disturbed, particularly as they were French hens and couldn't even understand what it was Ethel was saying to them, which was stuff along the lines of how pathetic they were and it was high time they stood up for themselves.

‘Don't you realise there's more to life than corn and laying eggs,' Ethel said. ‘There's a whole wide world out there waiting to be discovered and all you stupid creatures want to do is make silly clucking noises and scratch in the dirt.'

‘Cluckalors,' said a modern chicken in French Chickenspeak.

‘Mais cluck-a-doodle doo,' clucked her sister.

Just as the Keeper of the Royal Chickens had collected the last of the re-created hens, there was a shout from above, followed by the final chicken being thrown out of Number Six Laboratory with such force that it shot right over the courtyard and landed on the far side of the opposite roof where it slid down the tiles and landed on a passing donkey that was also a descendant of Queen Scratchrot's donkey, but only distantly related to the two donkeys that Maldegard and Ethel were travelling on.

‘Take me to the forest,' the chicken demanded.

‘You what?' said the donkey.
⁶³

‘I said …'

‘Yes, I heard what you said,' said the donkey. ‘It's just that I'm not used to being ordered about by an egg machine.'

‘Well, get used to it,' said the chicken. ‘We are
the rightful rulers of this country and there are going to be some big changes around here.'

‘You know,' said the donkey, ‘there are times when I'm really upset donkeys can't laugh like humans can. This is one of those times.'

‘Are you questioning me?' snapped the chicken. ‘I said take me to …'

Donkeys can't laugh, but they can bray and it sounds a bit like laughing and, like laughing, it makes you shake all over.

The chicken fell off the donkey.

‘OK,' she shouted. ‘I'll walk.'

‘Oh, you mean you can't fly,' sneered the donkey. ‘Obviously a new advanced form of bird that has evolved beyond flight.'

‘Unrepeatable Prehistoric Swear Word,' said the chicken and walked off.

As luck
⁶⁴
would have it,
⁶⁵
she turned into
.

The sound of voices began to drift down from Number Six Laboratory – not chicken voices, not donkey voices, but human voices.

Very dreary, flat-sounding human voices such as are used by very boring people who spend a lot of time counting things or putting things into boxes or twittering to the world how many pencils they've got and what hardness the leads are and how they have managed to get four special pencils on eBay that were last made in 1958.
⁶⁷

The DNA had finished developing and was speaking.

‘Obviously, the first thing we need to do is find some beans,' said one of the voices.

‘And some chalk,' said another.

‘And slate.'

‘Seven hundred and fifty-four.'

‘What on earth are they talking about?' said Nerlin.

‘Haven't the faintest idea,' said Winchflat. ‘I'll fetch the chicken called Ethel. She might know.'

‘Oh no,' said Ethel. ‘That jar with the left over DNA belonged to the most boring creature ever to inhabit the Jurassic Age.'

‘What?' said Nerlin.

‘The prehistoric accountant – Homo calculus,' said Ethel. ‘Remember I told you that the dinosaurs died out because they kept arguing and fighting with each other?'

‘Yes.'

‘Well, that was only partly true. Far more creatures were bored to death by Homo calculus. They travelled the world counting everything. They wrote all of their numbers down on clay tablets and
filed them away in massive stone filing cabinets.'

‘Why didn't everyone just tell them to go away?' said Winchflat.

‘They were sort of hard to get rid of,' said Ethel. ‘Picture the scene. A happy, normal family of cavemen are sitting round the latest fashionable invention – a fire – chewing away on bits of half-cooked mammoth, not bothering anyone, apart from the mammoths obviously, when there's a knock at the cave entrance and there are a couple of -
Homo calculus
all clean and neat in their woven grass loincloths, none of your traditional animal skins for them, telling you they've come to count everything. It all seems harmless at first, even when they start counting everyone's toenails – us chickens got our feathers counted over and over again – but before you know it they want to count your eyelashes and know exactly how many times you went to the lavatory last month. Of course in Jurassic times there were no such thing as lavatories. In fact the hole in the ground hadn't even been invented back then.'
⁶⁸

Nerlin and everyone still couldn't understand
why everyone hadn't simply chased the
Homo calculus
away and Ethel couldn't really explain, beyond the idea that the accountant's weary droning had put everyone into a trance.

‘Some people solved the problem by eating the accountants, but they are very hard to digest, and another strange thing,' Ethel continued, ‘is that no one's ever seen a female Homo calculus. So how do they breed?'

This got Winchflat very excited. Maybe the creatures weren't prehistoric beings at all, but aliens from another planet who bred in an entirely different way to Earth creatures. They could have come to Earth to study it and then somehow got stuck there.

‘Do you think they would let me cut one of them in half?' he said.

‘Would you?' said Ethel.

‘Maybe I could just get a sample of their blood. That would be enough to tell if they were aliens.'

The problem was that at the moment
Homo calculus
was safely locked up in the laboratory. Winchflat disconnected the power, just in case they
worked out how to photocopy themselves, and then shouted through the door and asked them how many of them there were.

‘One.'

‘But who was doing all the talking?' said Winchflat.

‘I was,' said the voice.

‘You mean we was,' it said.

‘What?'

‘I – er, we – have four heads,' said the
Homo calculus
.

‘OK,' said Winchflat, ‘but who are you exactly or rather, what are you?'

‘We are Fiscal,' said another voice that sounded exactly the same as the first voice, which it could have been. ‘Fiscal Matters.'
⁶⁹

‘You don't breathe fire or anything like that,
do you?' Winchflat shouted and, turning to Ethel, added, ‘You never said they had more than one head.'

‘You didn't ask,' said Ethel. ‘And besides, they're just ordinary heads, nothing special like fangs or horns, just regular human heads.'

‘And just two arms and legs?'

‘Yes, and four moustaches.'

‘Eight hundred and thirteen,' said the
Homo calculus.

‘What are you counting?' Winchflat called.

‘The wall,' said the Homo calculus. ‘Can we come out now?'

Ethel reassured everyone that Homo calculus was not dangerous apart from being very, very, very boring.

‘Eight hundred and seventy-six. Please?'

‘Eight hundred and ninety-nine. Go on, please?'

While two servants stood on either side of him with a big stick and a net, Winchflat opened the door.

A small man, no taller than a twelve-year-old boy, came out. He was pale and skinny and wearing
a pair of shorts which Winchflat realised were made out of one of his laboratory experiment notebooks.

The man had four heads.

And four moustaches.

All his other bits were the same as humans and wizards with two arms and two legs.

‘Pleased to meet you,' said the man. ‘I am Fiscal Matters, but you can call me Fiscal.'

‘Nice origami,' said Winchflat, who had never seen a pair of trousers made out of equations before.

‘Thank you,' said Fiscal Matters. ‘I did notice that you've made a mistake on page seventeen. You've written
and everyone knows pies are round, not square.'