230. The Hunt is Filmed

230. The Hunt is Filmed

After casting a few dozen stones each, our uncles decided they were ready to go seize the egg. Lady Grandma’am Celstial appeared with refrshments and everybody had some. Mostly they drank, and not precisely coffee or hot tea.

“What’s that slinking in the bushes?” cried Alpin.

I don’t know where he saw bushes. There were only mounds of snow everywhere except where we had been practicing. Well, even there too, though much trodden on. I looked about me  thinking of a worm attack first, and then of my broter Cespuglio. But what Alpin had seen had nothing to do with either.

There was a flattened bush halfway under a large rock, and that was where I went to, and there, croucing half-buried in the snow, I discovered Intrepid Patty and Parrot Peter. 

“What on earth are you doing here?” I asked.

“Shhh!” said Intrepida. “We’ve been looking for you everywhere but now we´ve stumbled on fresher news.”

“Don’t betray us or you’ll never hear the last of it,” said Parrot Peter.

“We’ll hound you to death,” said Patty.

“Betray you?” I asked with surprise.

“Give us away. We mean to follow your uncles and spy on the egg hunt.”

“Why?” I asked, with even more surprise.

“Because nobody has ever heard of this egg hunt, and it looks to us like it could be controversial, the way Excelsius won’t take part in it. This might make a noise.”

“You think the egg hunt is a scoop?”

“You said it,” Intrepid Patty answered.

“We’re going to risk our lives following you to the nest. And risk the rage of your uncles and your grandfather too.”

Patty Intrepida, or Intrepid Patty,  was a once human cub reporter who became too nosey about the fay in her neighborhood and got herself kidnapped by the fairies. The authorities decided to keep her instead of blowing her mind, because she was lucky enough to save three fairies that had been kidnapped by humans herself. She didn’t do this on purpose, but she did do it, so the members of the fay press who had been following this story adopted her and she is now one of them. As for Parrot Peter,  he is a bird fairy who owns a radio station with a perpetual program on it that lasts like twenty four straight hours when it airs. Nobody listens to it unless they are in transit, like when humans turn on the radio while driving a car. But he makes a lot of noise and never shuts up and he sometimes delivers news as if he were a rapper. Why do I know these people? I don’t know them much. I was told to have nothing to do with them by my nanny and more serious members of the press when I was like five years old and they tried to make me tell them what life was like at home with my folks. Among the questions they asked me was if I got hit with clothes hangers. I still have no idea what that was about. But seeing them boded no good.   

“I suppose it won’t do for me to ask my uncles to let you tag along, will it?”

“Henry and Freddie and Bertie and whatever his name is give us permission to follow them? No, not ever,” said Patty. “They would turn their pet wolves on us if they knew we were here.”

“With the airs they give themselves,” said Parrot shaking his head. “They only talk to Magus Magnus,” he explained, mentioning a name that most likely belonged to some  big shot in their profession. “And they convene a meeting when they want to do that.” 

“Maybe if I speak to them,” I began to say, but Patty cut me off.

“We´ll consider it treason and hound you to death."

“Look, if you think I am going to let you defame my family, you’ve misjudged me. Let me talk with my grandmother. I’m sure she will come to terms with you.”

“Lady Celestial? The butler’s mother?”

And they both guffawed.

“You don’t like my Uncle Gentlerain either?”

“The scarf  deliveryman,” laughed Patty. “Working for the primrose planting foggies! How could anyone be sillier? Look, Arley, we don’t like anybody. We just create news. And there’s worm murder going on in these darned hills.”

“This may not be my line of business, but maybe you should take my advice. You should have brought those scarves here with you because it’s freezing cold here, and you had better turn yourselves invisible because Parrot might go undetected, though there’s not much green around,  but that stand up tassel hairdo with the scrunchy and your pink and yellow hair won’t camouflage you much, Patty. You couldn’t even pass for a partridge.”

 “You keep your mouth shut and we´ll worry about the rest,” she replied.

“I have to go,” I said, because Alpin was approaching the rock. He would have come sooner if he hadn’t been eating flat peach cheesecake.  It is incredibly good.

And then Uncle Henry whistled and all the stones rose up in the air, including the one behind which the spies were hiding, and bunched together. Patty and Parrot must have taken my advice and turned invisible, because they couldn’t be seen.

“Marchez, marchons!”  Uncle Henry cried,  and everybody, with their snowshoes on, began to march towards the mountain peaks, the boulders all floating in formation beind us.

 It did not take us as long to reach our destination as I thought it would. Maybe the mountain song my uncles and aunts were singing had something to do with that, lifting more than morale.

It was just past noon by then, and though I had thought we would have to enter caverns and chase after the gigantic worms through tunnels they had dug, and be chased by them ourselves, we were also fortunate in that the She-worm who lays the egg has to do this at noon under the sun. And there it was, with this blinding, golden light, like a second sun, resting on a nest of stones.

 

The minute the worms spotted us, the combat began. They began to open their huge mouths and lift rocks in the air with them and cast the stones at us. And we started bouncing about to avoid them, flying so as not to fall off the mountainsides. My aunts were the first to cast stones back at the she-worms, and my Uncle Henry kept whistling to call the stones back so we wouldn’t be giving the worms extra munition. I saw he had a different way of whistling to call back each stone individually, not like before when we were practicing, when he called them all back at a time.

After a while of frentic skipping and hopping and flying out of the way of the stones, the worms began to retreat. It couldn’t be easy for them to carry and cast those stones with their mouths, plus they had no whistling system to make them return to them like boomerangs, and the worms were becoming clearly exhausted. Then Intrepid Patty suddenly burst out of nowhere and landed on her feet next to the egg. As she was taking a close up of it, a worm lunged up and would have swallowed her if I hadn’t seen it coming and snatched her away. And that was the moment Uncle Bertie flew up and dashed off with the egg.

As everyone started to fly off to avoid the enraged worms, I asked Patty where Parrot was.

“How should I know?” she said. “I’m after that egg!”

And she flew off after Uncle Bertie.

The married aunts each grabbed hold of one of her wings and carried her away screaming accusations of thievery, because they thought Patty was one of those senseless fools that try to sequester the egg for its value in gold. And I, happy to see Alpin was flying safely off, turned and looked all about in case Parrot had been left behind.

And he had. An arm and a wing of his were trapped under a boulder that was not one of our own. Ours were flying back home in stirct formation. I raised the stone so he could be free, and then grabbed him by the neck of his sweater and flew off with him, he still trying to film the spectacle with his crystal ball.

When we got to the castle, there was a lot of yelling and screaming. More than there had been during the battle. I managed to get Patty Intrepida exonerated of thievery and therefore she wasn’t sent to the dungeons the aunts had threatened her with.  We fed some of the egg white to Parrot, whose crushed arm and torn wing immediately began to look whole again.

But the arguing continued.

“These mountains are in my father’s territory and if you publish anything that has to do with the hunt, we will not only sue you,” threatened my Uncle Henry. “We’ll have you sent back to the mortal world and you’ll wake there being an octogenarian, you thirteen year old twerp,” he said to Intrepid Patty.

“How about if we just say nice things about this hunt?” she replied undaunted.

“How can anything nice be said about stealing an egg?” hissed Uncle Henry.

“Even dour AEternus is kinder to the press than you guys are,” said Patty. “And your half-brother is so sweet he even gives out scarves and sandwiches and tea and coffee. I adore him.”

“Invite them to dinner, Henry,” said Lady Grandmother Celestial to her son as soon as she heard Patty praise Gentlerain.

Grandfa Excelsius, suddenly turning around from where he was sitting by the fire, added, “Tell the cooks not to bother to poison the soup.”

There was a huge pile of wood shavings on the floor next to his armchair. He took a broom there was by the fireplace and swept them into the flames. Then he showed me what he had carved. It was a tiny pelican. Had that taken him all day? He did say one had to find what there was within a block of wood. And I suppose this was it.

“You can have it,” he said to me, and I kept it.

In the end, Pat and Parrot promised to use the material they had gathered in a documentary about worms that would be previously viewed and approved by my uncles. And after having an early dinner with us they flew off to cover the recital of the pupils of the Sweet Voice of the Siren School of Voice Culture.

And I suddenly remembered I had promised to assist to this recital.