Floods 3 (10 page)

This was not one of those weeks.

Vessel went into the cabin and looked through the ship's library. There was a copy of
How to Sail in Seriously Dangerous Seas for Dummies
but it was all in French. There were also some dictionaries – French/Belgian, Belgian/Serbo–Croat, Serbo– Croat/Cajun and Cajun/English.

‘You,' he said, hauling Cliché up into the cabin. ‘You've got a French name, what does this book say?'

‘Have I?' said Cliché.

‘Have you what?'

‘Have I got a French name?'

‘Yes, Cliché is a French word,' said Vessel.

‘What does it mean?'

‘I don't know,' said Vessel. ‘Hang on, I'll use the dictionaries here. Let's see.'

He flicked through the pages, translating language after language, and finally said, ‘Cliché in English translates as … umm, cliché.'

‘Oh, thanks for clearing that up.'

Since it had taken five minutes to go through the four dictionaries to find out Cliché meant cliché, by the time Vessel had translated a single sentence, they would have smashed into the dangerous rocks that were now on all sides of them.

‘Here, give it to me,' said the Queen, doing the French cafe dancer trick again to make sure they would obey.

Vessel and Cliché both fainted. When they came round, Vessel locked Cliché back in the hold and slapped him for fainting at the Queen's beauty, which only Vessel was allowed to do.

‘It says,
ma cherie
,' the Queen said, turning the pages of the book, ‘zat unless you are a sailor extraordinaire
avec le
tons of experience, you should keep away from ze rocks
avec
ze sharp pointy bits.'

‘I think we kind of knew that already,' said Nerlin.

‘
Exactement
,' said the Queen. ‘It ees a stupid
livre
.'

There was a list of correct sailing terms in the back of the book, which only confused them even more. Apparently the ropes that were tied to the sheets were called sheets. The things they had called sheets were called sails and the pointy end of the boat was called the front.

‘So what are the white cotton things we put on our beds then?' Mordonna asked.

‘It doesn't say,' said the Queen, ‘but seeing as
how the ropes are the sheets I imagine the sheets would be the ropes.'

‘The sooner we get to dry land, the better,' Nerlin muttered.

The Hearse Whisperer had landed on top of Cape Horn and changed back into the closest thing to a human she could manage. As she stood looking down into the angry sea, the
Maldemer
sailed into view. Tierra del Fuego was not called the land of fire for nothing and it didn't take much effort on the secret, secret agent's part to whip the storm up into an almighty frenzy.

Two hundred and seventeen penguins huddled together on the rocks at the foot of the cliffs waiting for the storm to pass. The Hearse Whisperer lifted the birds into the air and dropped them onto the
Maldemer
. They waved their sad little wings and
stuck their feet out in front of them in a feeble attempt to fly, but instead they fell into the already fragile sails, tearing them to shreds, before they landed in a wet, miserable, confused pile on the deck. The violent wind ripped the tattered sails from the mast and carried them away. With each giant wave, the poor penguins ran from one side of the boat to the other. Instead of sinking it as the Hearse Whisperer had hoped, they helped to keep it upright.

One penguin missed the deck and got stuck in the top of the narrow funnel that ran up from the engine, which Vessel and Nerlin had built out of
the rest of the chopsticks, an enormous jellyfish and four of Mordonna's toenail clippings,
³⁸
bringing the ship to a sudden stop. No matter how hard Nerlin pulled on the rope, the engine refused to restart.

‘Right, you three,' said Vessel, hauling Cliché, Stain and Ooze up from the hold, ‘up on deck, you have to man the oars.'

The three spies complained and begged and promised that if they ever got safely home again they would devote the rest of their lives to helping little old ladies cross the street, even little old ladies who didn't know they wanted to cross, but Vessel and Nerlin poked and pushed them up onto the deck.

‘Start rowing,' said Vessel.

‘Aren't you guys going to row as well?' Ooze whimpered.

‘There are only three sets of oars,' said Nerlin, ‘and besides, I've got to steer the ship and Vessel's got to do the washing up.'

‘Vet, vet, vet, Snip-Snip got vet on head,' said Parsnip. ‘Vith the tovel make Snip-Snip dry as.'

After three minutes pulling the oars with all their might, the three spies collapsed from exhaustion. The ship had moved three-point-six centimetres eastwards.

‘Faster!' Vessel demanded.

‘We can't,' said Cliché.

‘We're done for,' cried Stain.

‘We're all going to die,' sobbed Ooze.

‘You're forgetting something,' said Vessel. ‘Five of us are wizards. Wizards do not drown at sea. Wizards can only be drowned in the Terrible Pool of Vestor and that is thousands of miles from here.'

‘We're not wizards,' Cliché cried.

‘True,' said Vessel. ‘You three could very well be going to die.'

‘That,' said Nerlin, untangling a penguin from his hair, ‘is why you need to row faster. The faster you row, the faster we get out of here into the Atlantic.'

‘Boat sink, then Snip-Snip do Albert Ross and sore on vind,' said Parsnip. ‘Snip-Snip safe bee.'

The storm increased in ferocity. It made no difference how hard the three spies pulled on their oars. They were drifting slowly backwards out of control towards the sharpest pointy rock in the whole area. The sea was so wild that rowing was
like trying to stir sugar into a fifty-metre-wide cup of tea with a very, very tiny twig. If there had been a hundred people rowing, it would have made no difference, except, of course, that if there
had
been a hundred people on the
Maldemer
, it would have sunk because it was a small boat.

The waves began lifting rocks right up from the ocean floor and the first thing the rocks did was smash the ends off the six oars the spies were rowing with.

‘That's better,' said Stain, pulling his sticks backwards. ‘I seem to have found a new strength.'

‘Me too,' said Cliché and Ooze in unison.

The Hearse Whisperer summoned massive heavy clouds that turned the day to night and dropped raindrops as big as footballs. Nerlin ran round the deck picking up stunned penguins and passing them down to Mordonna in the cabin below, where the soggy birds waddled around drinking all the water that was coming into the boat.

It is often said that every cloud has a silver lining, but no one ever says that some of them have a vulture lining too.

Mordonna's faithful old bird, Leach, who had been slowly making his way towards Patagonia, had been swept up high into the air by an angry trade wind as he had crossed the equator. It had carried him right into a bank of rain clouds that were so far above the world that he could hardly get enough oxygen to breathe. He had tried to fly down or even fall down, but the clouds had kept him imprisoned in their thick folds. Fortunately the clouds were on their way to South America, having been summoned there by the Hearse Whisperer to join in the storm, and as they dumped all their rain over land and sea, they dropped Leach into a clump of stunted bushes on the mountain above the Hearse Whisperer.

Leach had limited powers, nothing like those of a true witch or wizard, but he had enough to screech at the sky until it began to calm down.

The Hearse Whisperer spun round to find
whoever was calming her storm but, squashed between scrubby bushes, Leach was too well hidden.

No matter
, thought the Hearse Whisperer.
We will move on. Time to leave this godforsaken place.

The sea grew calm and the current carried the
Maldemer
out into the vast emptiness of the Atlantic Ocean. By taking all the sheets off the beds – which took some organising because they kept calling them ropes and then forgetting they'd swapped the names around – and cutting up everyone's spare undies, Mordonna and the Queen managed to stitch together the tattered remnants of the old sails that hadn't got blown overboard, and make a small sail. The trouble was that the wind had not only stopped blowing a storm, it had gone off for a lie-down and the sea was as flat as glass.

‘Where are we going?' Nerlin asked as they drifted helplessly on the ocean current.

‘Well, according to my compass,' said Vessel, taking out his geometry set and drawing a circle with a pencil and compass on a sheet of paper, ‘we are heading in a sort of northerly direction, give or take three hundred and sixty degrees.'

‘OK,' said Mordonna, ‘so where is the nearest land?'

‘Umm, err, there isn't any,' said Vessel. ‘Though I think I can say with some confidence we are probably going to a country that begins with “A”.'

‘Snip-Snip wery pleased not country with a wubble you or a wee,' said Parsnip.

‘Yes,' Vessel continued. ‘I'm pretty sure we are headed for Africa. Or America.'

‘Not Austria then?' said Nerlin, who had a terrible sense of direction and hadn't even heard of the word geography.

‘Well, this is just brilliant,' snapped Mordonna, slapping the three spies, who were slumped over their broken oars, with a wet fish. ‘You do know
I'm going to have another baby quite soon, don't you?'

No one did, though they could see why it might make her annoyed enough to slap people with a wet fish.

The Atlantic Ocean is seriously big. You could sail for days and days all over it, or even months if you kept getting your ropes and bed clothes tangled up with your sheets. You would see nothing except water, bits of dead seaweed, bits of alive seaweed, discarded burger boxes, lost thongs, fourteen albatrosses and more water that looked exactly the same as the first bit of water.

However, right in the middle of this cosmically huge desert of wet nothing, there is one tiny island. It is the tip of a huge underwater volcano, and it's called Tristan da Cunha. It is such a tiny and remote place that it wasn't even on the map that Vessel was using – and he had one of the best maps that had ever been given away as a free insert in
The Junior Wizard's Fun Weekly
comic.
³⁹
So when it appeared on the horizon directly ahead of them, they thought it was Africa.

‘Isn't that amazing?' said the Queen. ‘I always thought Africa was bigger than that.'

‘Maybe it's a lot further away,' said Nerlin.

‘Go see,' said Vessel, and Parsnip flew off, circled the tiny island, all thirty-eight square miles of it, and was back five minutes later.

‘Africa shrunk done,' he said. ‘And ahoy no pymarids, all stolen.'

‘Maybe it's Atlantis,' Nerlin suggested.

‘Ahoy not Atlantis, big bang come say hello,' Parsnip called down from his crow's nest. A second later the
Maldemer
came to a sudden halt due to the fact that it had hit Tristan da Cunha, proving that it
is
possible to find a needle in a haystack.

Fifteen sheep wandered down from a field and looked at them.

‘Ah,' said the Queen, ‘it's the welcoming committee.'

The fifteen sheep were followed by a man and a dog.

‘Have you got permission to land?' said the man. ‘Permission?' said Vessel. ‘We are shipwrecked mariners in dire need of assistance.'

‘Fair enough,' said the man. ‘Have a potato.'

‘Wonderful,' said the Queen. ‘What we actually need is hot water and towels. My daughter is about to have a baby.'

‘What's a towel?' said the man. ‘Could you use a potato instead? We've got lots of them. Or a prawn? We've billions of them.'

After a few more minutes of this weird conversation, the man led them up the beach to a place called Potato Patches, where there was a small hut. While the man wasn't looking, the Queen cast a spell over a pile of potatoes, turning them into a comfy bed, several hot towels and a heated bottle of French mineral water with a dash of lime. At least, that was what she had intended to turn them into. What she ended up with was an armchair covered
in the tartan of the McSnaughty clan, three tea towels showing detailed maps of Tristan da Cunha
before
the new hut had been built, bordered with a frieze of potatoes, and a bottle of Belgian beetroot-flavoured mineral water. Her wand wasn't working properly because the strange man had turned it into a seafood kebab by sticking six prawns and a potato ring on it.

‘Damn wand,' she said, bashing it against the doorframe to shake off the food.

As Mordonna's second child, Satanella, was born, the Queen hit her wand a second time. There was a flash of lightning. The air was filled with the smell of fried prawns and the tiny, perfectly formed little baby, lying in Mordonna's adoring arms, was turned into a small black puppy with pointy teeth. Before the Queen could reverse the spell, the wand turned to dust and vanished in the wind.

‘Oops,' she said.

‘Snip-Snip love puppy wery cuddling,' said Parsnip. ‘Big hugs, wery, wery good luck blessing.'

‘Shut up, Parsnip,' said Vessel.

The sheep farmer poked his head round the door and, pointing at Satanella, said that his own dog was getting too old to round up the sheep and he'd be happy to give them sixty-five potatoes for the puppy.

‘I'm not a puppy, you stupid man,' said Satanella, who hadn't actually seen herself in a mirror yet. ‘I'm a baby girl.'

The man fainted. What Satanella said when
she looked down at her paws is too rude to repeat, but after a chew on a lamb bone, a bit of a run between the potato plants chasing a red rubber ball, and a lick of a few bits of her body that humans and even witches shouldn't be able to reach, she decided that life as a dog might not be that bad.

‘When we get out of here and settle down into a place of our own,' Mordonna said, ‘Granny will get a new wand and turn you back into a little girl.'

‘Maybe,' said Satanella. ‘But in the meantime, throw the ball again.'

When the islander came to and the Queen had wiped all memory of a talking puppy from his brain, Vessel brought the three spies ashore from the boat and the islander took them all along the track to Edinburgh, the largest settlement on the island. Being the only settlement on the island it was also the smallest settlement, the nicest settlement, the settlement with the best potatoes and the settlement most likely to get traffic lights if the island ever got any roads or traffic.

‘We've applied for a traffic light grant from London, just in case,' said the man.

The three spies were an instant hit with Tristan da Cunha's young women. There was a lack of eligible young men on the island and the sight of these three new men made the girls giggle and blush with excitement.

‘Nice sack,' said the boldest girl, sidling up to Cliché and stroking the coarse hessian.

The three spies couldn't believe their luck. Back in Transylvania Waters they were always the ones left on their own at dances and their most popular nickname among the Transylvanian Waters girls was ‘loser'. But now they had their choice of seventeen adoring fans.

The Hearse Whisperer, now in the form of a giant sea eagle, sat on the very top of Tristan da Cunha and watched everything. She was very pleased when the islander invited the three useless spies to stay on Tristan da Cunha. She could have simply turned Cliché, Stain and Ooze into lobsters, but she thought that maybe one day in the future
she might want them for something, and this tiny isolated island was the perfect place to store them. No matter how miserable their lives became, they would never be able to leave.

After a brief negotiation, which involved six potatoes and a lobster changing hands, it was agreed that Cliché, Stain and Ooze would give up spying and stay on Tristan da Cunha. There would be a lottery and the three winning ticket holders would each get an ex-spy as a husband. The three happy couples would get one week's honeymoon in a hut on Inaccessible Island and the runners-up
would each get a potato carved in the shape of a husband and a place at the top of the queue when the next boat with any spies on arrived.

The island had recently had a population increase of four, when some rams had been sent over four thousand kilometres from the Falkland Islands to increase the mutton gene pool. Now the three ex-spies would do the same for the human gene pool.

After a hearty meal of potatoes and prawns, washed down with lashings of potato and prawn wine, the visitors were given a souvenir potato each, personally autographed by the island council, and shown to their beds, where they slept like logs.
⁴⁰

Just after dawn, while the population of two hundred and seventy-four
⁴¹
was still fast asleep,
Vessel shook everyone awake and led them quietly back to the
Maldemer
.

‘We'll leave them a present to thank them for their hospitality,' he whispered as they left the village. Waving his wand, he conjured up a set of bright new traffic lights right in the middle of the village. Unfortunately, Vessel was not very scientifically minded and forgot to leave any controls for the lights, so they were permanently set on red. This caused a lot of problems in the village until someone made a new footpath so everyone could walk around the lights without breaking the law.

‘Next stop, err, somewhere beginning with “A”,' said Vessel.

‘America,' said Satanella. ‘I want America.'

‘I want Africa,' said Valla.

‘What about Argentina?' Nerlin suggested. ‘Or Australia.'

‘Or Amsterdam?' said Mordonna.

‘Or anywhere?' said the Queen.

‘Auntie Noreen's,' said Parsnip.