Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower - Tamsyn Muir Page 0,17

all the carpets,” she said. “Mightn’t I put the water flask at the top of the stairs, and let it pour out, and flood everything? The beasts might try to escape themselves, if I got them damp, and they might even drown.”

Cobweb sucked her breath through her teeth like the man who comes to fix your plumbing and asks you what kind of cowboy put that in.

“That’s a much more interesting idea than any you’ve had thus far,” said the fairy, “but the tower isn’t watertight, and anyway it would take a much longer time than you think. You might as well just tip the flask out the balcony and wait for the earth around the tower to become so soggy that the foundations sink.”

“What would happen then?” said Floralinda, eagerly.

“The tower might come down altogether, and smash at the bottom,” said Cobweb.

Floralinda didn’t like that idea much; so she thought again and said, “I might throw bread down to the base of the tower until it piles up, and jump off into it, and land safely.”

“That’s also interesting, but quite stupid,” said Cobweb. “Keep going.”

“That’s four ideas; I’m quite out,” said Floralinda. “Dear Cobweb, you are so clever. Don’t you have any?”

The fairy preened in her sunbeam. She was also very susceptible to flattery and thought quite a lot of herself, which Floralinda also did not think was quite appropriate now that she was a girl. But Cobweb was clever, and knew all sorts of things Floralinda didn’t know, and was pretty besides; she supposed that some girls simply had all the luck.

“I can’t have ideas until I have all the facts,” said Cobweb. “I don’t even know what kinds of beasts the witch has put in the tower. The dragon and the goblin were the only confirmed ones. The rest of the tower could be filled with gorgons, or rattlesnakes, or goodness knows what. Mark my words, it’s them you ought to be thinking about. Jumping out the window is nonsense; it would take you years to get the bread thick enough and high enough, and then you’d probably just jump into a pile of stale bread and drown. You’re the type. Why can’t you do what you’ve done so far, and try to fight the things?”

“Oh, don’t say ‘fight’;” Floralinda begged, “I positively couldn’t fight anything.”

“Then get rid of them, you absolute goose. You could at least go and see what’s in the floor you haven’t seen. I would have gone and looked at it in a trice, but I am an intellectual.”

That is how Floralinda found out the truth about the spider. She had discovered that if she put one of the burning coals in a dish, she could carry it about with her like a lamp; and Cobweb had cunningly tied a handle over it out of knotted silver gauze, and damped the gauze so that it wouldn’t catch alight, and Floralinda was pleased as Punch with this invention. She went downstairs and lowered the lamp down the trapdoor to flight thirty-eight. When she saw the dead spider, she screamed and screamed, and dropped the dish altogether, which clattered all the way down to the next floor: but the coal thankfully fell onto the cold stone and didn’t do any harm; and the spider had stiffened all its legs up and made itself much smaller, as spiders always do when they die.

Cobweb, when she reported back, was unsympathetic.

“I don’t know why you’re not more cheerful about it. Don’t you see, that’s another creature down,” she said.

“But I can’t see how it died,” said Floralinda. “I hope something worse didn’t kill it; it’s so big and dreadful. It’s at least the size of the bed, Cobweb dear.” (In death it was the size of her bed, so in life it would have probably looked more like the size of three beds, but Floralinda wasn’t to know this.) “I do hope it is dead, and not just asleep.”

“Poke it with a stick and see,” Cobweb suggested; but Floralinda shuddered and said she absolutely couldn’t. “Maybe it died of boredom. I am experimenting currently to see if this is possible. Say, did it have a web around? Spider-web is useful stuff, you know.”

But Floralinda said No, it hadn’t, and Cobweb said it must have been the other kind, who build a cunning little burrow underground and wait for you to walk over their front door, and then pop out at you; and this did not make Floralinda love