Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower - Tamsyn Muir Page 0,25

say that no marriages involve that, but it wouldn’t be altogether truthful.

And Cobweb, for her part, was not a nice wife at all, though it cannot be said that Floralinda was a nice wife either, considering the terrible thing she had done. It was not as though Floralinda wasn’t sorry about it, but she was not really as sorry as she ought to have been, and a tiny part of her was even relieved. A princess should have wept to hear about it.

The next thing Cobweb said was, “You need a weapon.”

When Floralinda first imprisoned Cobweb, the fairy was really just saying any old thing that came into her head, to try to buy enough time to sit back and think how to get out of her predicament; but once she had said this, she realised how true it really was. Any cave dweller in the Iron Age would have understood the same principle, which is why we have such a rich resource of arrow-heads and flints for museums now.

Floralinda had said Oh, such as a sword?; but Cobweb had pooh-poohed this, still thinking hard.

“No, swords are for strong men, who have been trained. You’d only cut yourself, and you’re not strong or good for much. You mustn’t get very close to anything. I would say that you needed a bow and arrow, only we haven’t got a bow and arrow, and I don’t know anything about making one,” (Cobweb was at least very honest about things she didn’t know) “and I know enough to be sure that arrows are a lot of trouble to make fly. You need to be able to fletch. I will return to chemistry as my starting-point, and educate myself in other areas. Go and count up all the books on the bookshelf, and tell me what they’re about.”

Floralinda dutifully went to count up all the books on the bookshelf, and reported that there were thirty-two, with twenty being about general economics, and ten being about the need for leather imports, grain imports, iron ore imports, and imports of all kinds of cloth; and the last two were Reader’s Digests.

Cobweb had written all this down, and thought about it some more.

“Tell me how many needles there are in the embroidery hoop,” she said at last.

Floralinda was bewildered by this, but felt much more at home, and could answer after checking that there were forty, of assorted sizes, with the most numerous being the large blunt-eye tapestry kind, and the second most numerous double-endeds.

Cobweb wrote all of this down too and thought about it all for at least thirty minutes, or so it felt to Floralinda.

“H’m! Things we could use if only we had more of them, and things we have in abundance that we can’t use,” said the fairy. “I’ve decided. Take down one of the wooden poles that holds up the curtain—you’ll have to climb up there somehow, and for goodness’ sake don’t break your neck, or that’s the end of me.”

It took quite a lot of balancing—the curtain-pole was hung very high, and Floralinda had to stand on a chair and then tip it off using other things, and it hit her on the cheek, which smarted; but once she had slid the curtain-rings off they had six feet of fairly solid wood, about two inches thick in diameter. It was rigid but not totally inflexible, and not too heavy.

Then came the curious part. Cobweb looked over the wood, and hemmed and hawed, and at last said—

“Now let’s put the end on some of those coals. Tie a wet rag around it—just so—so the rest of it doesn’t catch alight, and take it out when I say so.”

That was a very long day. Floralinda sat in her underthings and got quite sooty and hot, with a red face and hands, holding that curtain-pole into the fire. Cobweb had her take it out whenever the exposed end got charred, and then she had to sit with the pole on the stone floor, and take the knife that had been meant for cutting the bread, and use it to scrape the ashes off until the pole started to have a point. Halfway through Cobweb changed her mind and made Floralinda get the iron dustpan from the hearth instead, and use the flat flanged end to scrape with; that was much easier, although being ornamental it cracked in two quite early, and she had to use one half and be careful not to cut herself on