The Ogre of Oglefort (9 page)

But the aye-aye was not the last of their discoveries.

The glimmer of blue they had seen when they first crossed the drawbridge turned out to be a beautiful lake, large and silent, with water lilies covering the surface. In the middle of the lake was a flat rock, the kind that mermaids used to sit on and comb their hair.

Then one day, after a hard morning's weeding and digging, Ivo and Mirella went down to the water to cool off. They sat under an overhanging willow and dabbled their feet in the water, and they were just wondering whether to plunge in and have a proper swim, when there was a great swirl on the surface of the lake, and then slowly a head came above the surface. In the head were two round piggy eyes and a huge mouth, which opened to show vast pink gums.

As they watched, the animal pulled itself slowly and laboriously out of the water and heaved itself onto the rock, where it stood for a moment—yawning and shaking itself and looking about.

It was a hippopotamus. Not a full-size beast but a pygmy hippo about the size of a small cow, but with all the characteristics of its bigger brethren. Its hide was smooth and shiny in the sunlight, and it looked very clean and appetizing. A piece of waterweed hung from the side of its mouth, and it gazed at the children for a long moment before it slid into the water once again.

B
ut it was not only the unusual animals that were to be found in the ogre's enchanted gardens. After they had worked steadily all week, the Hag said she thought they should have Sunday off and explore the surrounding countryside.

When they had crossed the drawbridge they all went their separate ways. The troll went off toward the line of trees in the distance; the children followed the stream which fed the lake to see where it led; the wizard wandered along the hedgerows looking for interesting plants for his potions. But the Hag went east, to where the flat ground stretched toward the sea.

She walked on, watching the cloud shadows scudding across the fields. She was worrying about Ivo. He seemed to have settled in to life in the ogre's castle as though he had been born to it, but of course they couldn't stay here forever. The ogre would get better, and if the worst happened and he didn't, then his relatives would come and take over. And she simply could not face taking Ivo back to the Riverdene Home. Would they let her adopt him? Almost certainly not. They were more likely to put her in prison for having abducted him.

She had been so busy worrying that she had not looked carefully enough at the ground. Now she found that she was walking on marshy land. Her shoes were beginning to sink into the soil and make a squelchy noise.

The Hag became alert and excited. She looked down at the plants: bog myrtle and cotton grass and bog asphodel—she knew them all. Now the ground was getting wetter and wetter; the squelchy noise made by her shoes was getting louder. Then a frog plopped up in front of her and disappeared into a puddle. A puddle that was almost a pool. She knew it all so well, the way a puddle could become a pool and a pool become a puddle. She knew the dragonflies that hovered over them, the water boatmen scurrying about on the surface. She looked up at the sky, which was reflected in the still water, and saw the swarm of midges which hovered above her head. Now, as she made her way between a clump of bulrushes, the water was almost over the top of her shoes. Almost, but not quite. Because she was not walking in a lake or a drain or a ditch. She would not sink completely—there would always be enough soil to hold her weight.

The Hag made her way to a boulder sticking out over the surrounding marsh and sat down. She was suddenly overcome with joy. As she sat there quietly she could feel the wetness seep up her stockings and reach her knickers . . . then the bottom of her vest . . . and she closed her eyes, blissfully remembering.

“Oh thank you, God,” said the Hag. “Thank you.”

Here in this far-off place she had found what she had never hoped to see again.

A Dribble.

It was not only the Hag who had found her heart's desire. The troll, making his way to the distant line of trees, had found a forest as rich and varied as the woods of his homeland.

“There's a lot of work to be done there, of course,” he said when he and the Hag met again on the bridge on their way back. “The trees need thinning out, old wood has to be cut away—but it's a real forest, not silly rows of Christmas trees waiting to be felled. If only my brother were still alive . . . There's an oak there that must be five hundred years old.” He shook his head sadly. Here was man's work, work for a lifetime, not wheeling trolleys up and down hospital corridors. “Well it can't be helped,” he went on. “We've got a few weeks, so we'd better make the most of them.”

Dr. Brainsweller was in the garden, picking interesting herbs which might be useful for magic potions, and thinking about his childhood. It seemed to him that he had not really had much of a childhood at all. When he was a little boy he had wanted to be like other children—he did not feel called to wizardry and magic in any way—but his mother had put him in for every single wizardry competition and had got him the best tutors in the dark arts that she could find.

But now, as he bent down and gathered up a bunch of dandelion leaves, he couldn't help thinking that it had not really been worthwhile. In his workshop at Whipple Road he had tried to make gold from ordinary metal, and all that had happened was that he had burned a hole in the ceiling. He had tried to make an elixir which would make people live forever, and it had only given the people he tried it on a stomachache. And anyway, thought the wizard, bending down to pick a bunch of chives, was it really a good idea that people should live forever and get creaking bones and have to have hearing aids in their ears which whistled and honked?

And he had to admit that he had been a failure as a warrior. When they charged into the Great Hall, meaning to slay the ogre, he had been muttering every spell he could think of for destroying things—the smiting spell, the thrusting spell, the spell to make a man drop dead—and it hadn't seemed to make the slightest difference.

Was he doing the right thing with his life? Not that it mattered—there wasn't anything else he could do.

He had come on a patch of spring onions behind the broken greenhouse, and though he had never used spring onions in a potion before, he thought they looked rather nice. Then he plucked a young shoot from a vine and found a radish under a broken cloche.

The radish with its bright red coloring cheered up his little bunch, and he returned to the kitchen to try and see what he could do. Since he no longer had a workshop he had taken over a corner of the kitchen, and he went there now and fetched a wooden bowl and started to mix up what he had found.

He was turning the leaves over and over when he realized that it had happened again. There was a sound like the soughing of the wind, and then as the mist cleared, he saw it. His mother's face was looking down on him—and her expression was one of horror.

“Bri-Bri, what are you
doing
?” she began. “You're supposed to be a
wizard
.”

And then this odd thing happened again. Two very large spiders came hurrying across the ceiling, and as they did so their webs swung out from a rafter and completely covered Mrs. Brainsweller's face in a mass of cobwebby lace. She could be heard getting fainter and fainter and then she gave up, and her long worried face and spectacles disappeared.

The wizard looked up, meaning to thank the spiders, but they had already scuttled away, leaving the webs hanging on the rafter.

When the Hag returned she found Dr. Brainsweller staring down at a bowl full of mixed leaves and looking very shaken.

“What is it, Brian?” she asked him. “You look upset.”

The wizard explained, and the Hag, who was feeling uplifted after her time in the Dribble, did her best to comfort him.

“She's just worried about you,” she said. “Mothers are like that.”

The wizard sighed. “I'm afraid I'm a disappointment to her.” He looked down at the contents of the bowl, which he was stirring absently. “You can't blame her for being worried. I mean, it doesn't look much like a magic potion, does it?” he said sadly.

The Hag looked. She looked again. She fetched a bottle of olive oil from the larder and a bottle of vinegar. She fetched a fork. . . .

Her face was shining. “No,” she said. “You're right. You haven't made a magic potion, Brian, but you have made something much, much better. You have made a salad!”

And from that day, the wizard did more and more of the cooking. He learned to make excellent soup from the vegetables in the garden—because after all soup is not so different from a magic potion; it is all about stirring and mixing—and sometimes a little muttering—and he tried out other recipes. He took great pride in the job and was happy for the first time in his life, and Mrs. Brainsweller stopped appearing to him because the kind spiders always blotted her out with their webs, and gradually she gave up and left her son alone.

So the wizard was happy and so was the troll—and the Hag was in a state of bliss because she knew that the Dribble was
there
even on days when she couldn't get to it.

As for the children, they couldn't imagine a better life than the one they now had.

W
hen they had been at the castle for nearly three weeks they saw a man in a jerkin come over the drawbridge carrying a large churn of frothy milk, which he wanted to sell them. His name was Brod and he kept a cow and some chickens in a small farm on the other side of the ogre's land. He used to supply the ogre with milk and eggs in the old days but the ogre's servants had cheated him so badly that he'd stopped coming.

“But I saw them skiving off,” he said. “So if you give me a fair price I'll do business with you.”

The Hag was delighted but worried, too. “I don't think we have any money,” she said.

Brod stared at her. “The ogre's got a pile of gold pieces. Keeps them in his sock. You go and ask him and tell him it's Brod. He knows me.”

The ogre was not at all pleased to be interrupted, but he admitted that he knew Brod and said that they could look in his sock drawer for the gold pieces.

The drawer was not a pleasant place, but after a long search they found the gold coins and took one down to Brod.

“I'll supply you for six months for that,” he said when he had bitten it to make sure it was genuine.

So now they had milk and eggs, and the larder was filling with blackberries and dried mushrooms, and they picked blackberries and rose hips in the hedgerows.

“What an idiot I was wanting to be a bird up in the cold sky,” said Mirella. “No trees, no grass, no water, no work to do—just empty space.”

But the ogre was beginning to be a worry. At first they simply waited for him to give up the idea of dying, but he wouldn't. And if you get an idea like that into your head, you can seriously make yourself weaker and weaker. He was also getting not just ordinarily disgusting, but very disgusting indeed, and there came a morning when they all stood around his bed and told him that he had to have a bath.

“Ogres don't have baths, I've told you,” he said. “I never had one when Germania was alive.”

But Ulf said if he wanted them to go on looking after him, a bath was essential, otherwise he was on his own. “And anyway your aunts are coming. And Clarence.”

“Ah yes, Clarence.”

They waited for the ogre to tell them more about Clarence, but he just sighed as he always did when he mentioned his name—and the moment passed.

“And you must change your pajamas,” said the Hag. “Leave those outside the door and I'll take them to be washed.”

Since the ogre could not fit into an ordinary bathtub except in bits, they decided to sluice him down in the laundry room near the dungeon, where there were two huge copper vats which were used for boiling clothes, and a stone floor covered in wooden slats so there would be no trouble with flooding.

“But we must make sure that the insects that are living on him are safe,” said Mirella. “They'd die in all that water and steam.”

So she fetched all the jam jars and containers she could find and started to scoop out the wood lice from behind the ogre's ears and the spittlebug from his nostril and the leeches between his toes. The ogre lay very quiet while this was going on, because it put off the evil moment when he had to get up and go to his bath.

“What about the bedbugs?” he said. “Don't forget those.”

But at last every single creature was safely stored and labeled, and the dreaded event could be put off no longer.

Ulf meanwhile had lit the fire in the range and dragged two enormous copper cauldrons out into the center of the room and scrubbed them clean. He had placed a stool between the tubs and found a rack for the ogre's towels and laid out a long-handled brush and some soap neatly, as he had seen the nurses do in the hospital. He added a large pot scourer and some cleanser to be on the safe side. Then he climbed back up the stairs and started to get the ogre out of bed, which was a terrible business. The room had to be cleared because he was shy, and as soon as he was standing upright and Ulf tried to help him on with his dressing gown, he sat down again, panting horribly and clutching his heart.

“You'll kill me before I've got my funeral sorted,” he said. “And I've told you, ogres are better when they smell.”

“Ogres may be, but we aren't,” said Ulf, who was longing to get out into the forest. “Come on.”

Slowly—very slowly—grumbling furiously, collapsing again and again on the stairs, the ogre arrived in the laundry room. Clouds of steam were rising from the hot tub and he gave a bellow of rage.

“You're going to boil me alive,” he roared. “It's a plot.”

Ulf took no notice. He took the ogre's dressing gown and hung it on a hook. Then he poured two more buckets of warm water into the first of the gigantic tubs, and the whole room filled with steam.

“Get in,” he said.

“Very well,” said the ogre. “You are hurrying me on to my death but nobody cares. Germania would have cared, but she's under the mound.”

Ulf waited.

Still grumbling, the ogre began to lower his bulk into the tub. Water slopped onto the floor. Ulf picked up his long-handled back scrubber and the cake of soap. The ogre, complaining the whole time, lowered himself farther, and then a little farther still, into the water. . . .

The children had gone into the orchard to pick the last of the apple crop when Mirella suddenly said, “Oh no! I'm an idiot—the poor little bat—it'll be boiled alive in the heat.”

Ivo stared at her.

“What are you talking about?”

“The fruit bat in the laundry room, don't you remember? The very young one that was hanging above the range. I bet Ulf won't have had time to collect it and let it out.”

She ran like the wind toward the castle and threw open the door of the laundry room. Clouds of steam billowed toward her; the fire roared. She could make out nothing at first, then saw what she had expected.

The little bat had fallen to the ground and was fluttering, stunned and frightened, in a corner, half drowned, getting caught on the wooden slats. Ignoring everything except the animal she had come to save, Mirella knelt down on the floor, groping and searching. As soon as she had fastened her hand around the petrified, quivering creature, it squealed and bit. Her clothes were soaked, her hair trailed in the puddles, but she saw nothing except the plight of the terrified bat.

The ogre had lowered himself farther into the tub—but as his behind touched the water, he rose up again, pointing a furious finger at Ulf.

“It's too hot! I told you it was too hot. You're trying to kill me.” He grabbed a towel and wrapped himself in it. It was only now that he saw Mirella crawling on the floor.

“And WHAT IS THAT?” he roared, wrapping himself tighter in the towel. “Get it out! Get it out at once!”

Mirella neither saw nor heard him. She went on crawling along the soaking floor, while the ogre yelled and cursed, and more and more steam billowed through the overheated room.