Potlendh Page 13

  Finally, the Queen reentered the throne room and announced that the potion had been completed. Her head physician carried a small, round, transparent orb, and the children could see an orange liquid moving languidly inside. The Queen took the orb from her physician and gave it to Karen. (The children had very politely risen to their feet as soon as they heard the Queen’s footsteps.)

  “Tell your Colonel to swallow this orb whole,” she instructed Karen. “If he bites into the orb, he will find the liquid inside very bitter and try to spit it out. If he should spit out just even a drop of the potion, there is a very good chance that the magic will not work. At worst, he will grow no tail at all. At best, he will have nothing but a stub of a tail. But if he wants a beautiful tail to match his Guerrilla band, he must swallow the whole thing and let the magic work.”

  “How long will it take for him to grow a tail?” Carl asked.

  “That is a good question,” the Queen answered. “In all honesty, I really do not know. It might take a few minutes or it might take a full day. It all depends on the body weight and disposition of the Colonel. The more he truly desires to grow this tail, the faster the magic will work on him.”

  “Will it be a real tail?” Karen asked in wonder. “I mean, will it be functional like a tail? I’ve never had a tail. Nor do I want one. I mean, it might be like having a third arm or a third leg, and I can’t imagine what it would be like to try and use one.”

  The Queen smiled. “Don’t worry. And neither should your Colonel. When the magic has finished its work, it will as if he had been born with a tail, and his brain will know how to use it well.”

  “Thank you, your Majesty, for all of your assistance,” Uniqua interjected.

  “And now for the other half of the bargain,” the Queen added. She took three small, beautifully shaped pearls from the physician’s other hand. “These are the pearls that I spoke to you about earlier. Eat these, and our bargain is sealed.”

  The children each took one pearl.

  “I do not see why I should eat one of those pearls,” Uniqua objected. “As a creature of magic, I am entrusted with many secrets of the magic world. Surely you would expect me to keep your secret as long as I am alive.”

  “It is not that we do not trust you, wise Unicorn,” the Queen responded evenly. “But when the children made the bargain, they made the bargain for you, whether or not you also agreed to the terms. Besides, since I believe that you have already promised to help the children keep their other promises, this will doubly ensure your promise to them, especially should your adventures become even more dangerous and you might feel like quitting.”

  “I have never been more insulted in all my life!” Uniqua growled.

  “Please, Uniqua,” Karen pleaded. “Just eat the pearl, and let’s get out of here. We’re wasting time, remember?”

  Uniqua looked at Karen and for once in her life she could not find any countering words. “So be it,” she said at length. She allowed the Queen to push her hand through the air bubble far enough so that the Unicorn could grab the pearl with her teeth.

  So, all three of them ate a pearl. It had no immediate effect.

  “You have one week to complete your promise,” the Queen told them. “After that, you will begin to grow weak and sick. Following that you will have one more week of life. Then—” She simply shrugged her shoulders and allowed her head to slant to the right.

  “Now she tells us,” Uniqua grumbled to herself. “I wonder if that is one week of Submarian time or Island time.”

  “We’ll know soon enough,” Carl told her.

  The trip back to the surface was uneventful. The guards escorted them up to the rim of the lake bowl and would not proceed any further. The trio then walked along the floor of the lake and finally emerged before the Colonel and his band of Guerrillas.

  “Hey!” the Colonel shouted at them. “What’s the matter? What happened?”

  “We have returned,” Uniqua told him.

  “Returned? How is that possible? You just went into the water a few minutes ago!”

  The twins looked at each other, their thoughts passing back and forth. Was this one of the mysteries about time that Queen Piscis was talking about? That all their “time” in Submaria was equal to just a few minutes of “time” on the surface? Their minds were boggled, and the only thing they could say to describe the past events was “weird.” Then again, Uniqua’s unanswered question began to bug them: how much time did they really have to keep their promise to the Queen? A minute might be an hour; an hour might be a day; a day might be a week—they stopped thinking about the possibilities before they started going crazy.

  Uniqua must have been thinking along the same lines as the twins, but she had the sense to worry about the matter at hand and thus answered the Colonel. “Nevertheless,” she began, “we have brought back the potion you asked for. Now you can release your hostages and allow us to continue on with our adventure. We have other pressing promises to fulfill.”

  “No, no. You give me the potion first. Then we’ll see if it works. Then we’ll talk about releasing your friends.”

  Uniqua was afraid of this, but since they were really all in a pickle, there was nothing that she could do at the moment. “Give him the orb, Karen,” she instructed the girl.

  “What’s this?” the Colonel demanded.

  “Your potion,” Uniqua answered. “And now a word of warning: swallow this orb whole. Bite into it, and the potion will not work.”

  “How do I know it is not poison?” the Colonel said with a look of wariness, for he fully expected not only a trick, but a part of him did not really believe that magic potions existed or could work.

  “Colonel!” Uniqua’s voice rose a full octave, as she was really angry by now. “We have just risked our lives to keep our promise.”

  “You also just entered the water and came back out again,” the Colonel roared. “How do I know if you just didn’t pick something up from the bottom of the lake and bring it out with you?”

  “Because we met with Queen Piscis, and her physicians made this potion just for you!” Carl blurted out.

  “Careful, Carl!” Uniqua warned. “Remember your promise!”

  “What promise?” the Colonel wanted to know.

  “We promised to help the Submarians, but we are now on a critical timetable. In fact, our very lives depend on you swallowing that orb, growing your tail, and allowing us to leave. We have a long journey ahead of us yet.”

  “And, time is wasting away,” the twins chorused together.

  “Seize them,” the Colonel commanded several of his Guerrillas. “If I die, they are to die.” Three Guerrillas, trying to act very brave, strode up to the children and the Unicorn. They brandished their spears to show that they meant business, but I think that in their hearts they were very afraid. “Do you still want me to eat this orb?”

  “Yes!” Carl shouted.

  “No!” Karen responded.

  “Yes? No?” the Colonel repeated. “Which is it?”

  “You don’t eat it!” Karen instructed him. “You swallow it! Now, please, just do it!”

  The Colonel still looked dubious. He tentatively stuck out his tongue and licked the small orb. Then he smacked his lips and made a small sound of pleasure in his throat. “Hmm. Tastes rather fruity, almost like an orange.”

  “But don’t bite it!” Karen pleaded. “If you bite into it, you might find the liquid bitter. That’s what Queen Piscis warned. You have to swallow it whole. If you spit out just one drop of the liquid inside, the whole spell will be ruined!”

  “Ah-ha!” the Colonel cheered. “You mean that the poison will not work unless I eat all of if!”

  “Oh, this is ridiculous!” Uniqua declared. And then she did a surprising thing. She moved very quickly towards the Colonel and stepped hard on his foot. The Colonel opened his mouth wide open in pain. Then, by rising up on her back legs, she slapped at the orb in his hand. The orb flew into his open mouth and
down into his throat. Then, Uniqua used the bottom of her jaw and hit the man on the head so that he had to swallow the orb.

  The Colonel, aghast at having been forced to swallow the orb, grew red in the face and was about to advance on Uniqua when suddenly he straightened up very stiffly. A strange look came over him, and then he toppled over backwards dead away.

  “You killed him!” the leader of the Guerrilla band that had initially captured the Group cried, and all of the Guerrillas were aghast at seeing the Colonel lying on the ground, stiff as a board, on his back. (Now, if you think that these Guerrillas were going to attack our friends, I’m afraid that you would be very wrong, because they all began to cry.)

  The second surprise came when a loud voice suddenly shouted: “Leave my friends alone!” That caused all of the Guerrillas to turn towards Cassandra, and boy! did they ever have a fright. For you see, Cassandra’s anger had finally built to the point where she had enough of this nonsense, and the angrier she became, the larger she grew until she was about the size of a one-story house. And, if you can believe this, smoke was actually pouring out of her nostrils.

  She took one step forward, and the ground shook.

  “Uh, Cassandra,” Carl started to say.

  She took a second step forward, and the ground trembled. At this point, all of the Guerrillas began to shriek and start holding one another.

  “Uh, Cassandra,” Carl tried to get her attention, but the Dragon took another step forward, and the ground rippled.

  Then Cassandra opened her mouth and let forth a loud noise that sounded like a hundred lions roaring. That sent the Guerrillas running, forgetting even their Colonel who still lay on the ground. She took another step, and the ground barely moved at all.

  “Uh, Cassandra!” Carl shouted. But Cassandra did not hear him. She merely continued her advance on the Guerrillas who were now running as fast as they could back to the forest. She opened her mouth a second time, and a squeak came out.

  Carl then approached Cassandra, and she had to look up to see him. “I tried to warn you,” he told her. “Each time you took a step, you were getting smaller.”

  “Oh, drat,” Cassandra sighed. “It always happens. I can get good and mad and grow to be quite big. But I just can’t keep my anger in long enough. I guess I’m just too nice a Dragon. I can’t stay mad for very long.”

  “Well,” Uniqua comforted her. “You did good, girl. You were mad just long enough to chase those fellows away. Now, let’s take a look at our dear Colonel. Roll him over, will you please, dear?”

  Carl stepped beside the Colonel and grabbed his shirt and pants so that he could roll the man over onto his side.

  “Hmm,” was all that Uniqua said at the moment. She bent down and with the sharp point of her horn, she rent a hole in the Colonel’s pants. All of a sudden, a tail popped out of the hole. “That should make him feel better,” she commented. She also examined the tail and nodded approvingly. “It’s growing quite nicely. By the time he wakes up, he will certainly have a nice tail.”

  “So, the potion works, hmm-hmm, hmm-hmm,” the Rabbits proclaimed in a happy chorus.

  “Which means that we have kept our promise,” Uniqua announced. “We have to get to Portaland to fulfill our promise to the Queen.”

  “How are we going to do that?” Karen asked. “We can’t go back into the lake. We can’t swim, and we can’t walk around it, and we have no boat to cross it.”

  Uniqua unexpectedly spit, and the pearl that she had pretended to eat flew out of her mouth and landed on the sandy beach.

  “I guess we’ll have to use another one of our wishes,” Carl grumbled unhappily.

  “Not so fast, young man,” Uniqua told him. “I think it is about time that I used a little of my own magic. Now, children and everybody, if you will please stand back, I’m going to need quite a bit of room to perform some powerful magic.” She waited until the twins rejoined Cassandra and the Rabbits. Then she looked up into the sky and saw one lazy, puffy, little white cloud. “Oh, well,” she sighed. “I guess that will have to do if that is all there is.” Then she started gazing at this little cloud, and her horn began to turn blue. Then it turned red. Then it turned yellow. Then it turned green. And then it started turning into all kinds of color very quickly as she worked her magic.

  Now, as to the little cloud, it started to shake and vibrate as if it were itching all over. Then it started zooming all over the sky overhead. It ignored the wind currents and moved according to the will of the Unicorn until it was in the right position between the beach and the sun overhead.

  If you don’t know how a rainbow is formed, let me tell you. Sunlight has to pass through raindrops—and there are plenty of raindrops in any cloud, I assure you—and Uniqua wanted to make sure that lots of sunlight streamed through lots of raindrops so that she could form the largest and strongest rainbow possible.

  This rainbow began to form, but unfortunately it was still too high up in the sky to be of any use. Uniqua began to really concentrate, still manipulating the cloud with her magic, and trying to bring the rainbow down to the beach. Finally, after it looked like she would not succeed, there it was: a magnificent rainbow that touched the beach right at the Unicorn’s feet and arched high into the sky.

  “Now! Quickly!” Uniqua shouted to the Group. “Get on the rainbow!”

  You and I would think that this idea of stepping on a rainbow would be pretty ridiculous. After all, a rainbow is merely light. But this was Uniqua’s rainbow, and it was just as solid as if it were made out of rock. And the twins, having already many adventures that boggled the mind, did not question their friend when she told them to climb up on the rainbow, and they moved very quickly towards it.

  “It’s not going to hold me,” Cassandra complained as she ran.

  “Well, you wouldn’t have to if you would learn to fly like a normal Dragon, dear,” Uniqua told her.

  “Yes,” chorused the Rabbits, “and we could just ride on you instead.”

  As each member of the group stepped on the rainbow, a curious thing happened. They all started moving as if they were riding on an escalator. You know: one of those moving stairs. High up into the air they were carried and when they had reached the center of the lake they started to descend to the beach on the other side. When they all had been safely deposited on this other beach, the rainbow disappeared.

  “Where’s Uniqua?” Karen suddenly realized.

  “Oh, no!” Carl echoed his fear. “She had to stay behind to make the rainbow. She couldn’t come with us!”

  When the Group all figured out that Uniqua had to stay behind and had not joined them, they began to cry.

  “We need her? What are we going to do without her? She was our guide! We’re lost! Everything is lost!” they all cried in their state of misery.

  “Hey!” another voice called out to them. “What’s all this noise?”

  Startled by the newcomer, the Group stopped their crying and turned as one to see who had intruded upon them. For several minutes they could not speak but only stare at the strange Engineer who had come to meet them. This person—I guess you could call it a person, for it did think, it did speak, and it did move—stood twice the height of a normal human being. But it had six hands and arms—that waved about a lot—but not feet. Instead, it rode around in a large cart—with a large letter “E” imprinted on its front—with six large wheels that looked a lot like railroad train wheels. (That was about the same time that Carl noticed that the ground was littered with rails, most of which were covered up by the sand.) The strangest part about him was that his head looked like a huge plastic bubble. You could almost see his brain working very hard behind these enormous black eyes that filled most of what you could say was his face. He really didn’t have much of a mouth; it was more like a radio speaker, a diaphragm that vibrates and produces quality sound.

  “Good grief,” Carl finally whispered. Then a bit more loudly he spoke to the Engineer. “Who are you?”


  “I’m E,” said the Engineer. The tone of his voice sounded a bit tinny, but it also sounded as if he were more curious about the Group than anything else.

  “What are you?” Karen asked.

  “I’m Me,” E answered.

  “So, you are a Me?” Cassandra questioned.

  “I never thought of myself as a Me,” E said. “Do you think of yourselves as a you?”

  “No,” Karen replied. “My brother and I think of ourselves as human. The Rabbits are Rabbits, and Cassandra is a Dragon.”

  E looked at Cassandra very closely. “That is very interesting. I would have thought you were a lizard. You look awfully small to be a Dragon.”

  Cassandra turned to look at the children who were trying not to laugh out loud. “First a chicken; now a lizard? The first one to make a joke gets fried,” she warned.

  “You’re improving,” Karen told the Dragon. “That means you’re getting better.”

  “Okay, so we’re human, Rabbits, and a Dragon,” Carl continued the discussion. “So, what are you?”

  “Ah, that helps. Well, I’m not human. I’m not a Rabbit. And, I’m not a Dragon. I guess you were right all along. I’m a Me.”

  “Let’s try this,” Karen said to her brother. Then to E she asked, “We have met many different kinds of people while we’ve been on the Island. We have met Dragons, Rabbits, Unicorns—”