The Last Slice of Rainbow Page 7

  “Good day, shepherd!” called the knight. “Am I going right for the dragons’ castle?”

  Dan had to work his jaws and his throat and his tongue for quite a few minutes before he was able to answer—so many months had it been since he had spoken last.

  “Umph—dragons’ castle?” he croaked out at last. “Dragons’ castle? I’m not sure I know of any dragons’ castle.”

  “Oh, come on! You must know of it! Where they have a hundred princesses shut up together inside—and a hundred dragons on the rampage outside. You mean to say you live up here in the mountains and you haven’t heard of that?”

  “I mind my own business,” croaked Dan.

  But when the knight told him that the castle clung like a cork in a bottle to the tip of a steep island in a mountain lake, Dan was able to set the knight on his right way.

  “Up the pass, keep left, around a mountain shaped like a muffin—that’ll take you there.”

  “You seem to live here safe enough, shepherd,” said the knight, rather surprised. “Aren’t you afraid for your flock, with so many dragons about?”

  “They can’t land here. The slopes are too steep,” Dan told him. “A dragon needs a flat landing strip, or a stretch of water. Or a big rock that he can grab hold of. Slopes are too slippery for them.”

  All this Dan brought out very slowly. Finding the words was hard work, and tiring, like a walk through deep mud.

  “I can see that you know a lot about dragons,” the knight said, looking at Dan with respect. “I wonder—can you suggest any way to deal with them?”

  “Dragons don’t trouble me,” mumbled Dan.

  “No—but when I meet one of them—what should I do?”

  Dan began to wish that the stranger would go away and leave him in peace.

  “Oh,” he said quickly—anything to get rid of the fidgety young fellow—“just write a word on your forehead with the tip of your finger dipped in morning dew. If you do that, then you’ll have power over the dragons.”

  “Well, fancy, now!” said the knight. “What word should I use?”

  So Dan quickly told him a word, and he set spurs to his horse and shook the reins. But then, pulling back, he turned and called, “Don’t you want to come and rescue those hundred princesses?”

  Dan shook his head, and the knight galloped away up the pass.

  Sitting down again, Dan gazed at his flock, peacefully nibbling and munching. What? Rescue a hundred princesses? Not likely! Just think of the chattering and giggling and gabbling—the very thought of it made his head buzz. But still, he wished good fortune to the young knight. And now he began to feel a trifle anxious and bothered; for the advice he had given was thought up quite hastily on the spur of the moment. The words had come into his head and he had spoken them. But he hadn’t the least notion in the world whether the idea would work or not.

  “Maybe I ought to go after that young fellow and tell him not to try in case it doesn’t work,” he thought. “Only, if I did that, who would keep an eye on my sheep?”

  Buff opened one eye and gave a bit of a growl.

  “What’s troubling Buff?” Dan wondered. “Are there more strangers about?”

  And then he turned around and noticed a skinny old lady perched nearby on a ledge of rock. Quite comfortable she looked, and as if she had been there a good long time.

  “Found out the use of words, have you, then, Dan?” said she cordially. And Dan answered her right away, as if the answer had been tucked away in a cupboard of his mind, waiting for this moment: “Trees are swayed by winds, men by words.”

  “Right,” said the old lady, nodding her head energetically. “And now you’ve learned that, don’t you forget it, Danny my boy. But,” she went on inquisitively, “what was the word you told that young fellow to write on his forehead?”

  “That was a word for him,” said Dan. “Not for any other.”

  “Right again,” said the old lady, nodding some more. “Words are like spices. Too many is worse than too few. Learned a bit of sense, you have. Remember it, and maybe you’ll be some use in the world by and by.” With that she vanished, like a drop of water off a hot plate, and Dan picked himself a blade of grass and stood chewing it thoughtfully, looking at where she had been.

  Next morning early, Dan heard a distant sound that was like the chirping and twittering and chattering of a thousand starlings. And gazing down at the main highway that led out of the mountains, he saw them going past—what seemed an endless procession of princesses, with their fluttering ribbons and laces and kerchiefs, cloaks and trains and petticoats and veils a-blowing in the wind. A whole hundred of them, in twos and threes, jabbering and jostling, singing and laughing and giggling, down the rocky pass.

  “I’m glad I’m up here, not down there,” thought Dan.

  But by and by, he heard the tramping of a horse’s hoofs, and here came the young knight in his gold crown, with a princess, very young and pretty, sitting pillion on the saddle behind him. And a droopy dragon following them, at the end of a long cord.

  “It worked!” shouted the young knight joyfully. “It really worked! A thousand, thousand thanks! I’m everlastingly grateful to you—and so are all the princesses.”

  The one riding behind him smiled down at Dan, very friendly. She didn’t seem to notice the glass patches all over his skin.

  “Won’t you come down with us to the city?” said the young man. “I shall be king one day, and I’ll make you my prime minister.”

  “No, I thank you, Your Worship,” said Dan. “I’d sooner stay here. Besides, people might not respect a prime minister with glass patches all over him. But I’m much obliged for the offer. Only tell me,” he went on, full of curiosity, “what happened?”

  “Why! As soon as the dragons saw the word written in dew on my forehead, they all curled up and withered away in flakes of ash! All except this one, which I’m taking to the zoo. I’d say,” the knight told Dan, “there wasn’t a dragon left now between here and the Western Ocean. Which is all due to you. So I thank you again.”

  And with that he set spurs to his horse, and started slipping and sliding, with the dragon limping along behind, and the princess waving thanks and blowing kisses to Dan, until they were out of sight.

  All the time they were in view, Dan stood gaping after them. Then he slapped his thighs. Then he began to laugh, and he laughed so hard that he fell down, and Buff stared at him in disapproval.

  “It worked!” shouted Dan. “It really worked! Dragons are bound by cords, and men by words.”

  He lay laughing up at the sky, with the larks twittering overhead.

  Then he thought, “What word shall I think of next?”

  He damped his finger in the morning dew and wrote on his own forehead.

  A growl of thunder rumbled above him, and a lance of lightning flashed like a knitting needle out of a black ball of cloud.

  “All right, all right,” shouted Dan, waving gaily to the sky. “Just keep calm up there, will you? We won’t have any of that for the moment. One word at a time is enough.”

  And he sat himself down on a rock to watch his sheep.

  A Biography of Joan Aiken

  Joan Aiken had a very happy childhood, and her memories centered around her two much-loved homes: a haunted house in the historic town where she was born, and a tiny old cottage in a country village where she grew up. These magical places became the settings for many of her stories, as you will be able to easily imagine if you read on …

  The house where Joan was born in 1924, nearly a hundred years ago, was in the small medieval town of Rye, in the county of Sussex, England—a place of cobbled streets and red-brick houses jostled tightly together on a high little hill rising out of the flat green plain of Romney Marsh. The English Channel was two miles away. Some of Rye’s castle walls and fortified gates still remained fro
m when the village served as a stronghold against French invaders. Jeake’s House, where Joan was born, stood halfway up the steep, cobbled Mermaid Street. It was built in 1689 and was owned by several members of the Jeake family. One of them, Samuel Jeake, was an astrologer and mathematician; a huge leather-bound book written by him once belonged to the Aikens. Samuel Jeake had invented a flying machine, and, trying it out, he boldly leapt off the high wall of the town. Sadly, it did not work, and he crashed down into the tidal mud of the river Rother, which ran around Rye. Joan certainly included that in one of her stories!

  There was a very ghostly feeling about Jeake’s House, which Joan described as follows: “[Its smell was] a delicious blend of aged black timbers, escaping gas, damp plaster, and mildew; I can remember the exact feel of the brass front-door knob turning gently in one’s hand, the shape of the square black banister post, and the look of the leaded windows with their small panes.”

  Just as clearly, Joan remembered the stories she first heard at the house, which were read aloud by her mother and her older brother and sister, John and Jane: “First there was Peter Rabbit, and then The Just-So Stories, fairly milk-and-honey stuff; then Pinocchio, rustling with assassins, evil plots, death, moonlight, and irony; then Uncle Remus, told in a mysterious dialect, full of wild characters, with the wicked Br’er Fox.” No wonder this house haunted her memories!

  When Joan was five, her father, the American poet Conrad Aiken, returned to the United States, and her mother, Jessie, married an English poet. Along with her mother and new stepfather, Joan went to live near the rolling green hills of Sussex Downs, five miles away from the closest town. John and Jane were sent away to boarding school, but for the next six years, until the age of twelve, Joan was homeschooled by her mother.

  This new home was a different kind of paradise for Joan. Now she could roam the wild garden, climb trees, and explore the little village of Sutton, which had no “sidewalks”—as her Canadian mother called them—just one road with grass banks and little scuffed paths along the top where children had made tracks of their own. Sutton had one tiny store, which sold everything from bread to postage stamps. A four-minute walk from the shop was a forge, where the blacksmith, Mr. Budd, worked at his roaring bellows or clanged shoes onto the great, fringed feet of farm horses. In those days, a carter would go into the town once a week with his pony and trap and bring back goods for the village families. Joan’s household did not have a radio or a car—or even electricity! Water was pumped by hand from a well, and at night they lit oil lamps and candles. Much of their food came from the garden’s vegetable patch and fruit bushes; milk and cream or meat came from farms nearby. Even the poorer families in the area had help in their houses, and a village girl called Lily came to Joan’s to scrub and wash dishes. When she had finished her work, she sometimes took Joan to climb the slopes of the Downs, half a mile away, or pick cowslips and kingcups in the marshy meadow behind Lily’s mother’s cottage. Sometimes, Joan and Lily would walk two miles in the summer heat to a shallow pond where they could bathe.

  Jessie quickly taught Joan how to read, and gave her lessons in French, Latin, English, history, arithmetic, geography, and even Spanish and German. With no school friends to play with, books became Joan’s friends—she read everything in the house! First, she went through the novels from Jessie’s Canadian childhood: Little Women and the Katy series. Then, she read all of the fairy tales, The Jungle Book with its stories about Mowgli, and the books her older brother and sister left behind. When these ran out, she moved on to ghost stories or books about history, such as stories about the Three Musketeers and the Princes in the Tower. Joan’s mother would read longer works aloud before they had radio or television; this was their main entertainment. Every night at bedtime, or when the family went on picnics, or as they sat stringing beans for supper, Joan would be listening to stories, so it was not surprising that she soon started writing some of her own. She saved up her pocket money and bought herself a notebook at the village shop, then set to work writing exciting tales with titles like “The Haunted Cupboard” or “Her Husband Was a Demon.” She was so proud of them that she kept those pages for the rest of her life.

  It wasn’t until several years later that Joan had the company of a baby brother, David, and as soon as he was old enough, it was Joan who took him exploring on the Downs, and told him stories to cheer him along as he began to tire on the way home. Some of these short tales were published in her very first book many years later, such as “The Parrot Pirate Princess,” which she gave to David as a birthday present. Joan used to say that it was only by racking her brain to answer her little brother’s constant question of “What happened next?” that she learned how to write the exciting fiction she is known for today.

  I was lucky enough as Joan’s daughter to have many more of those stories told to me as she was writing them quite a number of years later. Then I was the one asking “And what happened next?” When the tales were finished, she would type them out and send them away to her publishers, and I would enjoy the excitement of seeing them come back as printed books with pictures, just as you are able to see these stories today on your own screens—wouldn’t it have amazed Joan to imagine that all those years ago?

  —Lizza Aiken, 2015

  Joan’s birthplace, the little town of Rye, England. This is a page from the picture timeline on the Joan Aiken website.

  Joan, age two, with her mother, Jessie, in the garden of Joan’s birthplace, the Jeake’s House, in 1926.

  Mermaid Street in Rye. They didn’t have many cars in those days!

  Some of Joan’s first picture books.

  Some of the stories were quite scary. Joan loved this one in which Pinocchio meets some robbers in the woods.

  Joan’s mother, Jessie, married again and the family moves to a small village. This is another page from the Joan Aiken website.

  The small cottage where Joan’s family lived. It was called Farrs.

  Joan’s family could only reach the nearest town of Petworth by horse and cart.

  Mr. Budd, the blacksmith, shoes carthorses in the village smithy.

  May Day in the village was a grand day. The little girl (at left) in a long coat is Joan watching the May Queen’s procession go by.

  Joan’s first notebook, where she wrote her stories. She kept it all her life!

  One of Joan’s early poems and a drawing of her cat Teglees.

  Joan (upper right), age ten, with her big brother and sister, John and Jane; her mother, Jessie; and her younger brother, David, who loved to listen to her stories.

  Where Joan and David took walks, up on the Sussex Downs.

  When she was older, Joan would go back to Rye to visit her father over the holidays, before she went away to school. Like Joan, he loved cats, and one year the family cat had kittens!

  All images courtesy of the Joan Aiken Estate.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 1985 by Elizabeth Delano Charlaff for the Joan Aiken Estate

  Illustrations copyright © 1985 by Margaret Walty

  Cover design by Jesse Hayes

  978-1-5040-2091-6

  This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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