Aurelius and I (25 page)

“There is,” said Ophelia, “but I don’t think you’re going to want to eat it.”

I followed the gaze of the young princess down to the wooden floor where my eyes were met with the answer to the question of what had happened to all the food. There it was, right there in front of us. All of it. All mixed in together. Whoever had ransacked the place had emptied every cupboard during their search for who-knew-what, with little care for their contents. As a result, all the jars and tins of various food products now lay together in a disgusting gloop on the floor. Strawberry Jam created a marbled effect with baked beans, chocolate ice cream melted unappetisingly over beef stew, mayonnaise was united in an unholy alliance with a tub of hundreds and thousands. It was revolting - and, of course, entirely inedible, not least because tiny shards of glass from the shattered jars that glittered throughout the concoction.

“Oh that’s just great,” moaned Grahndel, “what are we supposed to eat now?”

“I don’t know, okay,” I snapped, the anger building inside of me. “I haven’t got all the answers you know. I’m not even a Protector. I don’t even know why I’m here. I definitely don’t know what were going to eat. I JUST DON’T KNOW!”

I screamed with rage, hurling a half-empty tin of tuna fish across the room as I did so. My friends each closed their eyes and dropped to the floor, waiting for it to bounce back off the wall and hit one of them on the head.

But it didn’t hit any of them. Indeed, it didn’t bounce back at all. I had thrown the little tin with such strength that it had become a missile, tearing a hole clean through the wall in the corner of the room on impact. For a moment I just stood there staring, unable to believe my own strength. And then, something struck me as odd. It was a beautiful, sunny day outside, if I had torn a hole clean through the wall, the dingy cottage should have been instantly filled with a stream of bright light. Yet this had not been the case. No light at all was forthcoming. Indeed, if anything, the hole I had made seemed darker than the rest of the room.

I wandered over to inspect the damage I had done – it was just as I had suspected, I had not been strong enough, even with my magical powers, to hurl a relatively light piece of metal through a solid brick wall. I had however, been strong enough to hurl it through a wall of thin plasterboard.

“I knew there was something suspicious about corners in a round house,” I said to myself as I began pulling the flimsy plasterboard away with my bare hands.

“He’s gone crazy,” said the dragnor, finally daring to look up from his position on the floor. “He’s gonna tear the whole place down.”

I ignored Grahndel’s faithless, pessimistic cries of and carried on my destruction, too eager in my work to provide reassurance to my companions that I had not lost my mind as they looked on with great concern. After several minutes of intensive labour I had created a gap big enough to allow the entire hidden space to be illuminated enough for me to see inside it. Empty. I walked quickly across to the opposite corner and promptly put my fist through it.

“Charlie?” I heard Ophelia behind me, speaking more quietly and timidly than at any time since I had met her. I couldn’t tell whether it was fear I could hear in her voice, or simply concern. I suspected it was a little of both. “Charlie, it’s going to be okay, we’ll get some food eventually. Destroying this place isn’t going to help.”

“I’m not trying to destroy the place,” I said, pushing past her and making my way across to the third corner. On my way there I saw a hammer laying amongst the mess on the floor, which I picked up gleefully before turning to Ophelia and informing her with what I now realise must have seemed a quite maniacal smile, that I was merely ‘looking for something.’

“I don’t think you’re going to find any food in their, Charlie,” she answered gently, but patronisingly as I made light work of the third poorly constructed, fake wall with my new-found, specialist utensil. This time I could not even be bothered to reply. I was all too aware of how mental I must have looked, sweating, hammer-wielding and appearing to have been turned rabid by hunger, but I was simply too excited to explain. Too eager to continue with my task. I was certain that I was on the brink of some greatly important discovery. I had no clue as to what that discovery might be when I found it, or how it might serve to help us in our cause, but I was certain it was there to be found. Well, almost certain. I mean, who would build corners in a circular house for no good reason, right?

Aurelius-Octavius Jumbleberry-Jones, that’s who.

I suppose this should not have come as any great surprise. Aurelius was, after all, quite the most eccentric man I had ever come across. And, as everyone knows, ‘eccentric’ is really just a polite way of calling someone a nutter that is reserved for those occasions when it is a posh person who has well and truly lost all trace of any marbles they may once have had. And yet surprise me it did. Indeed, more than that, it angered me. I had really thought I was on to something, but how could I expect to use logic to solve the puzzles of a man who seemed to have so little understanding of the concept of logic?

“AAAARRRGGH!” I screamed in despair, hurling my hammer at the final corner as I did so. Daisy, Ophelia and Grahndel covered their heads and winced in unison as they awaited the inevitable thump of iron hitting concrete. It duly arrived, and was quickly followed by a second, equally loud thump as the hammer fell to the floor, severely denting the wood as it did so.

And then came a third.

The four of us looked immediately to the ravaged corner where the hammer now lay. There should have been no third thump. Something else had fallen, something unseen. Something from behind the plasterboard.

I rushed over to the substantial hole I had created and peered inside. As my eyes adjusted to the light, a smile returned to my face. There, laying on its side and covered in plaster and splintered wood, was a small wooden chest.

I carefully removed the chest from its hiding place within the wall and placed it on the ground before my companions. It was made of a strange, dark wood, the likes of which I had never come across before, and was intricately carved with pictures of dragons, and unicorns, and great warriors. Bordering each of the images was a series of strange symbols which appeared somehow other-worldly. Even though I had no experience of such things, the chest appeared, to my young eyes at least, to be very, very old. Perhaps even ancient.

“Where did that come from?” asked Grahndel, his yellow eyes never leaving the chest. In fact, no-one’s did. We were all totally mesmerised by the intricacy of the carvings, and mystery of the symbols.

“I don’t really know,” I answered, still fixated on the chest. “I guess there must have been some sort of hidden shelf, or perhaps a false ceiling.”

“Well, it’s here now,” said Ophelia. “So what are we going to do with it?”

“Open it, I guess.”

It seemed like the obvious answer, and yet it was not one I had put forward lightly. Somehow the box just seemed to have a sort of presence, a sense of power about it. Though it was simply a small wooden chest, one couldn’t help but feel that it was, at the same time, something much more than that. Something important. Something powerful. Something that should not be opened without a sense of foreboding. Something that, once opened, may serve to change the very course of our destiny.

“Open it! Open it!” yelled Daisy, who, just as you would expect from one so young, had all the patience of a three-year old on Christmas morning when it came to discovering what was contained in ostentatiously-decorated boxes.

Gingerly, and with shaking hand, I lifted the lid of the little chest. The interior was every bit as exquisite as the exterior had been. Inside though, there were no intricate carvings or stories told in foreign hand, but merely a lining of deep, dark green velvet, fringed with golden thread and blue diamonds.

None of us could speak. All we could do was stare at the open chest. But it was not the richness of the velvet that had mesmerised us, nor the shimmering of the diamonds. No, the discovery that had stolen the words from each of us was the discovery of what the chest contained, or rather, what it was built to contain, and the terrible realisation of what that meant. For the floor of the box was not simply flat, but artfully moulded so as to provide the perfect fit for one specific object – the curved blade of a scimitar.

Hungry and dejected, we left Aurelius’s cottage and wandered aimlessly and silently into the woods, each of us taking some time alone with our thoughts - except Daisy that is, who had once again fallen into slumber. I found it both incredible and incredibly tragic how one who lived for such a short time could spend so much of that life unconscious.

Not for the first time that day I was feeling the pressures of leadership and wondering whether my so-called gift was not in fact a curse when one considered the immense responsibility that it had brought with it. Only a short time ago the biggest questions in my life were based around how best to wangle my way out bath night and which flavour of custard was superior (a philosophical conundrum I am yet to settle with myself – chocolate seems more exciting on the face of it, but vanilla is far more versatile as an accompaniment). Now though, a great many lives hung on everything I said and did, and at that moment I had no clue of what to say or do, or even think.

Our discovery at the cottage had briefly rekindled my faith in Aurelius; Why, I had asked myself aloud, would he have gone to such trouble to hide the box of the scimitar if he was evil? And why would Blackheart and his men have found it necessary to ransack the cottage if Aurelius had handed them the scimitar willingly? The answer to these questions, which Grahndel had been so eager to point out, was as obvious as it was unwelcome; Aurelius and Blackheart had had no way of knowing that my companions and I would witness their collusion at the caves, and, had we not done so, our discovery of the fernator’s wrecked abode would have assisted in the tundrala’s web of deception by leading us to continue in our belief that Aurelius was still on our side and had been taken against his will.

Whilst I did not want to hear the fernator’s words I felt it impossible to deny the logic of them. In light of the ‘deal’ I had witnessed Aurelius and Blackheart discussing, and the confidence the latter seemed to hold in the successful completion of The Professor’s evil plan, their seemed no other plausible explanation for the fact that the scimitar was missing. As uncomfortable as it may have been, it seemed almost certain was that the man who I had called my friend, the man who had introduced me to all these wonders, was the very man who would seek to destroy them. I knew I couldn’t let that happen. What I did not know was how I could stop it from doing so. And so, with no answer to this question, and therefore no plan regarding what to do next, we simply walked.

I couldn’t tell you how much time passed while we wandered aimlessly in the cloud of hopeless silence which had fallen over us all in the face of yet another setback, but I suspect that it was well over an hour, for by the time we spoke again dusk had begun to settle on what was the longest of days.

“TOOWIT-TOOWOO!”

“What was that?” cried Ophelia, who had been buzzing her own way through the forest being as we had nowhere to go and hence no reason to hurry.

“What was what?” I snapped, unhappy to have been pulled from my own miserable private musings.

“That noise, didn’t you here it?”

“What noise? I didn’t hear anything.”

“TOOWIT-TOOWOO!”

“There, that noise, you must have heard it that time?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, ‘I didn’t hear anything, just an owl, that’s all.”

‘JUST AN OWL!’ screeched the winged princess, flying back toward me as fast as she possibly could, a look of true fear spread across her features for the first time since I had known her. “What do you mean
just
an owl? Mr aren’t-I-brave-because-I’m-a-giant. How would you feel if I was to say to you, ‘oh, don’t panic, it’s
just
a two-headed, fire-breathing, man-eating dragon’?”

Feeling slightly guilty at my initial, short-tempered response I knelt down and offered the frightened fairy the shelter of my rucksack, which she eagerly accepted. When I enquired with Grahndel as to whether he too would feel safer retuning to his position about my person he seemed insulted, explaining that Dragnors were a fearless race (something I had seen little evidence of thus far) and that he was more than capable of fending for himself against something as harmless as an owl.

“Besides,” he said with a sly smile at Ophelia, “they’re only really a danger to you if you look like you could be a rodent.”

We carried on moving forwards for a few minutes without again hearing the owl’s call and I was beginning to wonder if Ophelia had not been a little hasty in her retreat when, from out of the darkening sky above our heads, a large barn owl swooped down and perched itself on a low-hanging branch just a few yards ahead of us.

“TOOWIT-TOOWOO! TOOWIT-TOOWOO!”

“I told you it wanted to eat me!” the princess cried, from the tone of her voice I could tell she was bordering on hysterics.

“Don’t worry, you’re quite safe where you are, I’ll get rid of it,” I reassured her before picking up a pine cone and hurling it in the owl’s general direction with the aim of shooing it harmlessly away.