Porcelain Princess (2 page)

‘
You…you were
children
?’ Karl’s eyes widened in
horror.

Each of the
puppets nodded gloomily. Even the dog, who added a sad
bark.

With a warm
smile, the Joker deftly slipped to the floor once more.

‘
The
Master will be
so
glad you’ve decided to join
us.’

‘
Wwwwaarggghh,’ the boys howled.

*

With a sharp
shrug of her shoulders, Carey moved the heavy sack on her back into
a relatively more comfortable position.

Fully loaded
with the posters she’d collected, the sack was awkwardly
unbalanced. There was a danger she might tip everything out as she
leaned back to look up towards the very top of the town’s old bell
tower.

‘
That’s obviously another one that the others will have to
collect when they head out later,’ she said, marvelling at how they
had managed to place the poster way up there in the first
place.

Grudo nodded in
agreement. The tower was suffering so badly from the Fading that it
hardly had any more substance than a mirage. It was now nothing
more than a mere wisp of reality in the evening light. It would
probably be gone completely in a few days.

‘
We
might have to leave it, Carey,’ Grudo pointed out sadly.

‘
We’ll see; they’ll have to come out here as soon as we’re
sure there’s no one around to see them.’

Carey didn’t
like to leave any poster behind. She spent a lot of time painting
them, and almost as long making the thick, hardy paper from a mix
of pulped bark and leaves. Sometimes, however, by the time they
came to the end of their shows, a poster placed earlier on a Fading
building was now irretrievable, as the structure was no longer
capable of supporting even Ferena. (There didn’t use to be any
problem, of course, when Ferena’s wings had still
worked!)

Still, placing a
poster on a high, Fading building always helped draw the crowds in.
The townspeople might not be able to read the poster’s details, but
from its vivid splashes of bright colours they would recognise it
as yet another promotion for the String Theatre that had been
pasted all around town overnight. And no one ever failed to wonder
how it had been placed there, especially when it shouted out its
promise of thrills and magical tales from a building that was now
so insubstantial people could effortlessly walk through its
walls.

Even when a
poster had to be left behind, it became a reminder to the
townspeople of the wondrous, almost unbelievable stories they had
been entertained with when – the building finally unable to support
even something made of paper – the poster slowly fluttered down
through ghostly floors and walls to come to rest on the bare
earth.

Placing a huge,
consoling hand on Carey’s shoulder, Grudo deftly used the move to
remove her back pack and swing it up onto his own shoulder. Here it
joined the half-dozen sacks of posters he’d collected.

‘
If
only Ferena could still use her wings…’ he said
wistfully.

Carey burned
with shame. Of course, she had thought of the very same thing only
seconds ago. But, somehow, coming from Grudo – even though he
didn’t mean it in such a way, and even though he would be horrified
to realise how much it hurt her that her failings were so obvious
to everyone – it sounded like an admonishment.

‘
I’m
sure we’ll find the land where the Illuminator lives one day,
Grudo,’ she pronounced determinedly as they both turned away from
the tower and started heading back towards their caravan. ‘The
lands we’re passing though at the moment are suffering from the
Fading far more than those we performed in only last week. I’m
sure
it’s a sign that we’re drawing closer!’

Grudo’s eyes
widened in distress as it dawned on him that Carey had taken his
comment as a criticism of her skills.

‘
Carey, I didn’t mean–’

‘
I
know, I know,’ Carey reassured him with a wan smile. ‘Like you, I
was just thinking out loud.’

‘
You
know Carey, even if you’re right that we’re drawing closer to the
Illuminator’s lands, we don’t know for sure that he’ll be able to
help us. Even the stories that contain truths often also contain
lies – and we can never, ever be sure which is which.’

Grudo may have
looked like the offspring of a giantess and an even uglier ogre,
but his heart was the equal of Ferena’s, his mind even sharper than
Durndrin’s when it came to wisdom.

Carey
shrugged.

‘
I
know
I often read too much into the stories; I
know
I
believe parts of the stories that others dismiss as remnants of
fairy tales – but as I can’t think of any
other
solution, we
have
to try!’

‘
And
I
know there have been many many times when we thought we
were almost there, only to be disappointed yet again. You’re taking
too much responsibility on your shoulders, young girl – none of us
blame you, you know that!’

Their home was
now just a few more strides ahead of them. Even in the poor evening
light, the immense, ornately carved caravan appeared to be aglow
with colour, despite the moon’s best attempts to subdue its bright
reds, yellows and greens.

‘
But
didn’t you notice, Grudo,’ Carey persisted, ‘that not only were
there far more people in the audience suffering the Fading than
I’ve ever seen before, but they also seemed strangely untroubled by
it; just as, the stories tell us, people in the Porcelain
Princess’s kingdom accept the Fading as a blessing!’

‘
All
I
noticed, Carey,’ Grudo replied sagely, ‘was that
everyone
enjoyed our retelling of the story of the
Porcelain Child
;
even
those poor people who were
Fading. Whom, I’m glad to say, we cheered up enough to be rewarded
with their laughter and smiles!’

Carey frowned,
trying to think of any fact she could recall from the many stories
she had read to contradict Grudo’s scepticism. But there were too
many gaps in even her knowledge of the tales. And, as Grudo had
rightly pointed out, there was nothing in any of the stories she
had managed to collect that implied an increase in people suffering
from the Fading was a sign that your were drawing nearer to the
Porcelain Princess’s kingdom.

She reached for
one of Grudo’s huge, gloved hands, nestling her fledging-like hand
in his.

‘
Still,’ she said, glancing up at him with a warm smile, ‘I
can’t think of any
other
way of recognising that we might be
drawing closer,
so
–’

Directly in
front of them, the caravan’s heavy rear door suddenly flew open
with a loud crash. Two boys almost fell out, careering wildly down
the short flight of wooden steps in their eagerness to get
outside.

To stop them
falling and hurting themselves, Grudo instinctively spread out his
arms as both boys unavoidably barged into him.

‘
Well, what
have
we here?’ he asked gruffly, looking
down on the boys captured in his arms with a huge grin.

‘
Wwwwaarggghh,’ the boys howled.

*

‘
Please please mister,’ Karl wailed miserably, ‘I don’t want
to be a goat puppet!’

‘
And
I don’t want to be a
pig
, either!’ a horrified Kraig agreed.
‘We won’t tell anyone, mister, honest!’

Carey and Grudo
swapped confused glances; then they both heard the laughter coming
from inside the caravan.

Grudo glared
down at the two boys.

‘
All
right, you can go!’ he growled as menacingly as he could manage
without bursting into laughter himself. ‘But if I
do
hear
you’ve been telling anyone – you know what’s going to happen to
you, right?’

‘
Waaarggghh!’ the boys cried, tears in their eyes.

As soon as Grudo
released his grip on them, the boys stumbled free, tripping over
their own feet in their urgency to get away and falling to the
ground. Picking themselves up, they ran off into the evening’s
darkening light.

‘
Now,
what do you suppose all
that
was about?’ Carey said with a
suspicious scowl as she ascended the caravan’s steps

It was still
dark inside, though Ferena was in the process of carefully lighting
a lamp. In the dull glow of both this flickering, yellow flame and
the dimmer evening light spilling in before her from the open door,
Carey was witness to what could have been nothing more than a
typical, well-practised costume change.

Durndrin was
slipping out of a wizard’s gown, while also deftly untying a long,
white beard fixed around his chin. Neris was already rehanging the
witch’s dress and hat she’d obviously been wearing, while Peregun
was detangling himself from a pair of antelope horns he’d borrowed
from another puppet and tied around his head. Only Ferena was still
dressed in her regular garb of short green dress, but as her wings
were hidden under a hooded cloak, she presently looked more Elvin
than fairy-like.

The
self-congratulating laughter, too, was a commonplace of these
costume changes. But what made all this so different from a normal
post-show celebration was the mischievous delight they were all
taking in the way they had scared the two boys.

‘…
their
faces
…’

‘…
and
when you said we could do with a few more
animals
…’

‘…
goats, pigs, ho ho ho – oho.’

Peregun stopped
in mid laugh as soon as he spotted Carey standing in the doorway.
She was angrily glowering at them all.

‘
Well
you
all seemed highly pleased with yourselves!’ she stormed.
‘And I’m not sure why; considering you’ve just revealed that you’re
alive to what’re probably the two most untrustworthy characters in
town!’

They had all
come to a rigid halt now, frozen in mid-action; Durndrin with the
beard’s string still painfully caught on his ear, Peregun detaching
a devilish tail, Neris half-way through flouncing up her hair.
Fortunately, Ferena had safely finished lighting and closing a
lamp, and this was now the only light illuminating the room. Grudo
blocked off any glow from outside as he entered behind Carey and
closed the door behind him.

Durndrin spoke
first, if a little nervously.

‘
Ah,
yes, well, we
thought
of that, see, Carey, when we said,
when we
said
that if they even
attempted
to tell
anyone, right, well, they’d be
instantly
and
magically
turned into a puppet
goat
!’

‘
Or a
pig
!’

Carey glanced
down towards the dog partially hiding beneath a rack of costumes.
Going by the way he’d pronounced the word ‘pig’ with such obvious
satisfaction, she reckoned she could safely assume that this had
been his own contribution to whatever they’d all been saying to
those two poor boys.

‘
A
goat or a pig that can still talk just like you, right, Dougy?
Meaning they might take the not
unreasonable
risk that they
could always tell people what we’d done to them, so we could be
hunted down and forced to change them back – if, of course, we
actually
had
this wondrous magical power to change them in
the first place!’

‘
Ah,
no no, Carey,’ Peregun insisted, ‘we
did
also say that
they’d only be able to manage grunts or bleats.’

‘“
Grunts” was
my
idea,’ Dougy quickly added, once again
with undisguised satisfaction.

Just behind her,
Carey heard Grudo chuckling as he placed his sacks of posters on
the floor.

‘
Well, they seem to have thought of everything, don’t they
Carey?’

The puppets
relaxed and smiled once more.

‘
Oh,
er, as everything’s happily cleared up now,’ Peregun said, still
partially locked in the position of removing his tail, ‘could
someone please help me here? The rheumatism again, I’m
afraid.’

‘
Thought of everything?’ Carey snapped, making Durndrin jump
as he helped Peregun move his arm once more.

The smiles
instantly disappeared.

‘
They
didn’t
seem to
think
at all!’ Carey snapped again.
‘Did they even
think
that it would’ve been best in the first
place if they hadn’t revealed that they were alive? How many times
have we told them, Grudo, that they should remain
perfectly
still whenever anyone else is around or even nearby?’

‘
Ah,
but, Carey, they were stealing, see, and–’

‘
Stealing?’ Carey’s angry interjection almost made Durndrin
jump. ‘Better they steal every coin we’ve collected today, than
that they go around telling everyone we’re witches or what have
you!’

Neris hurriedly
pushed the witch’s gown she’d been wearing farther back amongst the
rest of the hanging dresses.