CHAPTER TWO
In which the history of the Kingdom of Vanillia
is still not explained,
and probably never will be,
the author being such a
careless narrator.
Night lay over the Kingdom of Vanillia, as its residents snored and whistled and sighed and rolled about in their beds. Candles were very dear, since they were made from elephant ear wax, so most people, even very rich people, even the King and Queen for the most part, went to bed when the sun was gone and got up when it reappeared in the morning.
There was an exception to this; a rat creeping along the dank Vault stairway in the wizard Brumpton's decrepit castle. It sniffed the air, wrinkled its nose, then climbed up a bit of crumbling mortar to fetch a bent piece of metal and wood -- the Wand of Odemer, which Mortlock had casually stuffed into a crack instead of shutting it up securely in the Vault, as his master, the wizard Brumpton, had instructed him to do.
The rat thought the object might be a bit of food -- when it comes to something to eat, rats are eternal optimists. So it bit and chewed on the Wand, mutilating and bending it until it looked like a poorly planned pretzel. Still unsure if the object were edible or not, the rat scurried back up the stone stairway with it in its mouth. It squeezed through a barred window, ran along an alley overgrown with snitchweeds, and settled down to determine once and for all if the Wand could be digested. It could not be digested, the rat finally decided, and so it carelessly dropped the Wand into a little stream that flowed at its feet and went looking for something else that offered better nutrition for a poor rat on a dark night.
The Wand of Odemer, or perhaps it might be more accurate to now call it the Pretzel of Odemer, was carried away by the stream. It's fate will be told of later on.
Returning to the rat, a strange thing happened to it after gnawing on the Pretzel of Odemer. The potent magic of the Wand, or the Pretzel, wrought a weird change in the rat; it became sentient. It suddenly realized that it was a rat, a member of the rodent family that was hunted down for food by beasts of prey, and despised and poisoned by men because it destroyed crops and spread disease.
"I didn't ask to be born this way!" the rat wailed in despair, having suddenly developed a bright squeaky voice to express itself.
The rat then decided that its name would be Rudolph, and that it would not give in to existential despondency, but instead work to become a benefactor to all mankind.
The noble rat Rudolph at once set off to find a place where it might ponder and plan, and possibly find a bit of rancid offal to sustain itself. It settled under the floorboards of a cobbler's shop, where the remains of several dead beetles kept it going as it observed how humanity kept its feet protected with simple wooden clogs. For at that time cobblers were more carpenters than leather workers -- no one had yet thought of using something supple to wrap around the feet. So everyone stumped about in wooden clogs, and even the best made clogs occasionally contained a splinter that made the wearer wince, stop, extract the splinter, and use an assortment of bad words that were banned in Bub Town. A small band of artisan cobblers were trying to sculpt clogs out of small blocks of granite, but their efforts and originality went unappreciated by anyone who bought a pair and wound up with amazingly painful blisters. And besides, the stone clogs weighed a ton.
And so Rudolph came up with the concept of socks.
Knowing that mankind was not yet ready to accept a talking rodent, the wise Rudolph waited for the cobbler and his wife to go to bed, and then crept stealthily into their bedroom, to whisper and cajole the cobbler into dreaming about cloth tubes to protect the feet of his customers from splinters.
The next morning the cobbler arose with something rattling around in his head -- an idea for the invention of socks. He got his wife to knit him two tubes from her woolen yarn, with one end open and the other closed, and began offering the tubes, the socks, to his customers, as protection against splinters, and as a way to keep their feet cozy and warm.
In a matter of weeks everyone in the Kingdom of Vanillia was wearing socks, or at least had heard about them and wanted a pair. King Tubal knighted the humble cobbler, who then became Sir Cobbler and lived in lofty splendor with his wife in a Mansion by the River Purn.
As for our friend Rudolph the noble rat, there is little more to tell, and what there is of it is sad. Set upon by alley cats one night after venturing out to investigate the tantalizing odor of a spoiled bloodwurst sausage, Rudolph perished ignominiously, with these words on his filthy gray lips: "The sooner the better!"
****************************
Now we had better be getting back to the wizard Brumpton and his lazy demon servant Mortlock.
The morning after their great adventure and escape from the clutches of the warlock Black Eustace, Mortlock arose with a satisfied rumble, something very much like the noise a small volcano might make just prior to exploding with moderate violence and destroying a village or two. He stretched his leathery wings luxuriously, giving a prodigious yawn that showed to good advantage his yellow fangs. He scratched himself, and had just about decided that the world was a good old place after all when a troubling thought came to him -- his master Brumpton might decide at any moment to go down to the Vault to check on the Wand.
And the wand was not there.
"Not good. Not good. Not good!" said Mortlock to himself as he hopped down a trapdoor to descend the stone stairway to the Vault, hoping he could remember exactly which crack in the wall he had stuffed the cursed Wand into last night.
Mortlock was not anxious to have his dereliction of duty discovered, since his master was not known for his forgiving nature. And while demons are pretty much indestructible, they can be caused to feel a great deal of pain and embarrassment. This is usually done by tickling them. They hate it. It makes them lose control of their bladders and gives them a bad case of the hiccoughs. So if you ever encounter a demon some dark and moonless night, just brandish a feather in front of its snarling, fiendish face, and in most cases the demon will head for the hills rather than try to harm you. I just happen to sell a line of demon-banishing organic feathers online, so you can visit my website, as noted at the end of this story, to order them for yourself and loved ones.
When Mortlock discovered the Wand was not where he had left it the night before he set up a wail that could be heard in the pine barrens of Fistula. Then he ran back upstairs to his room to sprint in circles, crying out all the time: "Not good! Not good! Not good!"
Brumpton finally came to his door to discover what the ruckus was all about. Looking sternly at the demon the wizard demanded to know what was causing all the hullabaloo.
Now in the real world, not this fantasy world that I am carefully and patiently constructing bit by bit for you the reader, in the real world where we all have to live, when people make mistakes they are quick to own up to them and manfully take their medicine. But I regret to say that in the Kingdom of Vanillia servants feel very comfortable lying to their masters. And Mortlock had a story all set to go. He was a fast thinker, and his forked tongue was as smooth as pond scum.
"You may not believe what I'm about to tell you, master" began the demon, noticing how the wizard's beetling brows were about to crash into each other, "but I swear on a stack of pancakes that it's true." Mortlock stopped at this point, his red rimmed eyes bulging out of his head as if he were being strangled while a slow dribble of sulfur dripped from both ears onto the flagstone floor. He knew he had to make this whopper a good one, one of his best -- or the ostrich plume in his master's study would soon be at hand.
"Well, I'm waiting" said Brumpton impatiently.
"I went down to the Vault this morning to check on the Wand, and I discovered a large rat had gnawed its way into the Vault and was holding the Wand in its greedy mouth. I made a grab for it, but it evaded me and ran right up the stairs so fast that I couldn't catch it. It disappeared into a hole in the wall, in the wall, in the wall, and now . . . and now, I have no idea where the Wand of Odemer is!"
"Hmm" the wizard did not believe Mortlock's ridiculous-sounding tale for one second, and he had a sure way of checking its veracity.
"Come with me" he told the demon abruptly. They went into the wizard's study, where Brumpton began casting identification and tracking spells. The room filled with a purple haze as the incantations took effect.
And since, for the most part, Mortlock had unknowingly been telling the truth about the rat and Wand, the incantations confirmed his story. Mortlock, of course, had no way of knowing that his fib would not now prove fatal to him -- he was shaking so hard that his scales began shedding.
"Stop that!" commanded the wizard irritably. Now it was the wizard's turn to walk in worry circles. What would the King and Queen say when he told them he had lost the Wand of Odemer. More importantly, what would they DO?
"We must find that miserable rat" the wizard told his demon servant. "How good are you at summoning vermin such as rats?"
It just so happened that Mortlock was very good at summoning such disgusting creatures as cockchafers, silverfish, and even rats. He could make them come to him and dance a jig in front of him until they fell dead at his feet with exhaustion. But he was not about to tell the wizard this. Not on your beebaw.
"Not very good at all" replied the demon with mealy-mouthed modesty. "I'm more of a flying cobweb demon myself -- can make 'em shoot all over the place without batting an eye . . ."
"Useless creature -- out of my sight!" cried Brumpton, throwing a small, but hardly inoffensive, thunderbolt at the demon.
"As you wish, sir" replied Mortlock, deftly avoiding the sizzling bolt as he shut the door behind him.
The wizard went over to his lectern to stand and think. And since we cannot know his thoughts, we will leave him there.
