The Tale of Despereaux (16 page)

“I can’t hear you,” sang the king.

“I’ll have to do it myself,” said the mouse. “I will be the knight in shining armor. There is no other way. It has to be me.”

Despereaux turned. He left the weeping king. He went to find the threadmaster.

THE THREADMASTER was sitting atop his spool of thread, swinging his tail back and forth and eating a piece of celery.

“Well, look here,” he said when he saw Despereaux. “Would you just look at that. It’s the mouse who loved a human princess, back from the dungeon in one piece. The old threadmaster would say that I didn’t do my job well, that because you are still alive, I must have tied the thread incorrectly. But it is not so. And how do I know it is not so? Because the thread is still around your neck.” He nodded and took a bite of his celery.

“I need the rest of it,” said Despereaux.

“The rest of what? Your neck?”

“The rest of the thread.”

“Well, I can’t just hand it over to any old mouse,” said the threadmaster. “They say red thread is special, sacred; though I, myself, after having spent so much time with it, know it for what it is.”

“What is it?” said Despereaux.

“Thread,” said the threadmaster. He shrugged and took another loud bite of celery. “Nothing more. Nothing less. But I pretend, friend, I pretend. And what, may I ask, do you intend to do with the thread?”

“Save the princess.”

“Ah, yes, the princess. The beautiful princess. That’s how this whole story started, isn’t it?”

“I have to save her. There is no one but me to do it.”

“It seems to be that way with most things. No one to do the really disagreeable jobs except oneself. And how, exactly, will you use a spool of thread to save a princess?”

“A rat has taken her and hidden her in the dungeon, so I have to go back to the dungeon, and it is full of twists and turns and hidden chambers.”

“Like a maze,” said the threadmaster.

“Yes, like a maze. And I have to find my way to her, wherever she is hidden, and then I have to lead her back out again, and the only way to do that is with the thread. Gregory the jailer tied a rope around his ankle so that he would not get lost.” As the mouse said this, he shuddered, thinking of Gregory and his broken rope, dying, lost in the darkness. “I,” said Despereaux, “I . . . I will use thread.”

The threadmaster nodded. “I see, I see,” he said. He took a meditative bite of celery. “You, friend, are on a quest.”

“I don’t know what that is,” said Despereaux.

“You don’t have to know. You just have to feel compelled to do the thing, the impossible, important task at hand.”

“Impossible?” said Despereaux.

“Impossible,” said the threadmaster. “Important.” He sat chewing his celery and staring somewhere past Despereaux, and then suddenly he leapt off his spool.

“Who am I to stand in the way of a quest?” he said. “Roll her away.”

“I can have it?”

“Yes. For your quest.”

Despereaux put his front paws up and touched the spool. He gave it an experimental push forward.

“Thank you,” he said, looking into the eye of the threadmaster. “I don’t know your name.”

“Hovis.”

“Thank you, Hovis.”

“There’s something else. Something that belongs with the thread.” Hovis went into a corner and came back with a needle. “You can use it for protection.”

“Like a sword,” said Despereaux. “Like a knight would have.”

“Yes,” said Hovis. He gnawed off a length of thread and used it to tie the needle around Despereaux’s waist. “Like so.”

“Thank you, Hovis,” said Despereaux. He put his right shoulder against the spool of thread and pushed it forward again.

“Wait,” said Hovis. He stood up on his hind legs, put his paws on Despereaux’s shoulders, and leaned in close to him. Despereaux smelled the sharp, clean scent of celery as the threadmaster bent his head, took hold of the thread around Despereaux’s neck in his sharp teeth, and pulled on it hard.

“There,” said Hovis, when the piece of thread broke and dropped to the ground. “Now you’re free. You see, you’re not going into the dungeon because you have to. You’re going because you choose to.”

“Yes,” said Despereaux, “because I am on a quest.” The word felt good and right in his mouth.

Quest.

Say it, reader. Say the word “quest” out loud. It is an extraordinary word, isn’t it? So small and yet so full of wonder, so full of hope.

“Goodbye,” said Hovis as Despereaux pushed the spool of thread out of the threadmaster’s hole. “I have never known a mouse who has made it out of the dungeon only to go back into it again. Goodbye, friend. Goodbye, mouse among mice.”

THAT NIGHT Despereaux rolled the thread from the threadmaster’s lair, along innumerable hallways and down three flights of stairs.

Reader, allow me to put this in perspective for you: Your average house mouse (or castle mouse, if you will) weighs somewhere in the neighborhood of four ounces.

Despereaux, as you well know, was in no way average. In fact, he was so incredibly small that he weighed about half of what the average mouse weighs: two ounces. That is all. Think about it: He was nothing but two ounces of mouse pushing a spool of thread that weighed almost as much as he did.

Honestly, reader, what do you think the chances are of such a small mouse succeeding in his quest?

Zip. Zero. Nada.

Goose eggs.

But you must, when you are calculating the odds of the mouse’s success, factor in his love for the princess. Love, as we have already discussed, is a powerful, wonderful, ridiculous thing, capable of moving mountains. And spools of thread.

Even with the love and purpose in his heart, Despereaux was very, very tired when he reached the door to the castle kitchen at midnight. His paws were shaking and his muscles were jumping and the place where his tail should be was throbbing. And he still had a very, very long way to go, into the kitchen and down the many stairs of the dungeon, and then, through, somehow, someway,
through
the rat-filled darkness of the dungeon itself, not knowing where he was going . . . and oh, reader, when he stopped to consider what lay ahead of him, Despereaux was filled with an icky feeling of despair.

He leaned his head against the spool of thread, and he smelled celery there and he thought of Hovis and how Hovis seemed to believe in him and his quest. So the mouse raised his head and squared his shoulders and pushed the spool of thread forward again, into the kitchen, where he saw, too late, that there was a light burning.

Despereaux froze.

Cook was in the kitchen. She was bent over the stove. She was stirring something.

Was it a sauce? No.

Was it a stew? No.

What Cook was stirring was . . . soup. Soup, reader! In the king’s own castle, against the king’s law, right under the king’s very nose, Cook was making soup!

As the mouse looked on, Cook put her face into the steam rising from the pot and took a deep breath. She smiled a beatific smile, and the steam rose around her and caught the light of the candle and made a halo over her head.

Despereaux knew how Cook felt about mice in her kitchen. He remembered quite clearly her instructions to Mig regarding himself: Kill him. The only good mouse is a dead mouse.

But he had to go through Cook’s kitchen to get to the dungeon door. And he had no time to waste. Soon daylight would dawn and the whole castle would be awake and a mouse would have no chance at all of pushing a spool of thread across the floor without attracting a great deal of attention. He would have to sneak past the mouse-hating Cook now.

And so, screwing his courage to the sticking place, Despereaux leaned against the spool of thread and set it rolling across the floor.

Cook turned from the stove, a dripping spoon in her hand and a frightened look on her face, and shouted, “Who’s there?”

“WHO’S THERE?” shouted Cook again.

Despereaux, wisely, said nothing.

The kitchen was silent.

“Hmmmmph,” said Cook. “Nothing. It’s nothing at all. Just my nervous Nellie ears playing tricks on me. You’re an old fool,” she said to herself as she turned back to the stove. “You’re just an old fool afraid of being caught making soup.”

Despereaux slumped against the spool of thread. And as he leaned there, his heart pounding, his paws shaking, a small wonderful something occurred. A midnight breeze entered the kitchen and danced over to the stove and picked up the scent of the soup and then swirled across the floor and delivered the smell right directly to the mouse’s nose.

Despereaux put his head up in the air. He sniffed. He sniffed some more. He had never in his life smelled anything so lovely, so inspiring. With each sniff he took, he felt himself growing stronger, braver.

Cook leaned in close to the kettle and put the spoon in and took the spoon out and blew upon the spoon and then brought it to her lips and sipped and swallowed.

“Hmmmmm,” she said. “Huh.” She took another sip. “Missing something,” she said. “More salt maybe.” She put the spoon down and took up an enormous saltshaker and sprinkled salt into the kettle.

And Despereaux, feeling emboldened by the smell of soup, again set to work pushing the spool of thread.

“Quickly,” he said to himself, rolling the spool across the floor, “do it quickly. Do not think. Just push.”

Cook whirled, the saltshaker in her hand, and shouted, “Who goes there?”

Despereaux stopped pushing. He hid behind the spool of thread as Cook took the candle from the stove and held it up high.

“Hmmmmmph,” she said.

The candlelight came closer, closer.

“What’s this?”

The light came to rest directly on Despereaux’s big ears sticking up from behind the spool of thread.

“Ho,” said Cook, “whose ears are those?”

And the light from the candle then shone full in Despereaux’s face.

“A mouse,” said Cook, “a mouse in my kitchen.”

Despereaux closed his eyes. He prepared for his death.

He waited, reader. And waited. And then he heard the sound of laughter.

He opened his eyes and looked at Cook.

“Ho,” said Cook. “Ho-hee. For the first time in my life, I am glad to see a mouse in my kitchen.

“Why,” she asked, “why am I glad?