Scorpion Soup (3 page)

The keyhole was in line with his lips.

Reaching up, he prised the lid open, his small fingers forcing the hinges apart.

He craned forwards, straining on tiptoes, holding his breath.

‘Oh,’ said Mittle-Mittle in a whisper. ‘I see.’

A few inches away in the box, laid on a bed of dusty green felt, was a nail.

It was rusty, bent at one end, and appeared to be very old. Without thinking, Mittle-Mittle snatched up the nail.

Leaving the lid of the box wide open, he hurried away backwards, so that if anyone saw him they would imagine he was arriving rather than on his way out.

In his bedroom that night Mittle-Mittle made a careful inspection of the nail. But, after a considerable amount of examining, even with a scratched magnifying glass, he came to the conclusion that there was nothing unusual about it at all.

As he regarded it again, his mother slipped in to kiss him goodnight. Her face was fraught with worry, her eyes red from weeping.

‘A terrible thing has happened,’ she said.

Mittle-Mittle asked her what.

‘The sacred box in the sacred shrine has been opened, and its contents have been stolen! The entire kingdom is in disarray. Every home is being searched by the guards, and every woman is weeping a little extra, to rinse the sacred steps that have been so unpardonably defiled.’

‘But how can the guards find what is missing if they don’t know what was in the box in the first place?’

Mittle-Mittle’s mother frowned.

‘They will know,’ she said decisively. ‘Believe me, they will know.’

When his mother had tucked him in bed and was gone, the boy opened the window a crack. He was about to toss the nail out, when he had an idea. He had often heard his father talk of a wise man that lived in the dark impenetrable Forest of Empty Souls – a wise man who wore an amulet made from a dodo’s skull.

The wise man would know why there was an ordinary nail kept in the box.

Slipping on his clothes, Mittle-Mittle climbed through the window, the old nail clutched tight in his palm. He hurried through the empty streets until he was at the edge of town.

A little further, and he found himself at the forest.

Most other boys might have felt a pang of fear in their gut, but Mittle-Mittle wasn’t fearful of anything at all. Slinking between the trees, he snaked his way towards the middle of the forest where he expected the wise man to live.

Meanwhile, in the town, the guards were searching from house to house, questioning one family after the next. Eventually they arrived at Mittle-Mittle’s home. The boy’s father opened the door to them courteously, inviting them in. A moment later, their son’s empty bed was discovered, the window open.

Mittle-Mittle’s parents were dragged away to the cells.

Deep in the Forest of Empty Souls, an elderly man was huddled over a fire at the base of a towering green winter oak. With eyes closed, he was murmuring incantations, scribbling figures in the air with the tip of one finger.

Around his neck was an amulet fashioned from a dodo’s skull.

Mittle-Mittle watched from a distance.

For the first time in his life, he sensed fear. It was not so much a fear of the wise man, so much as a fear of something he didn’t understand. Why would the people of the land in which he lived keep an old rusty nail in a box, and protect it from one generation to the next?

Very slowly, with sure footsteps over moss, the boy approached the wise man. As he drew nearer, Mittle-Mittle could feel the heat of the flames on his face.

‘Excuse me,’ he said when he was close.

The wise man froze. He opened an eye. Then the other.

‘And who are you?’ he asked.

‘I am Mittle-Mittle.’

‘And what do you want?’

‘I want to know why the people of our kingdom keep an old rusty nail in a box, guarding it day and night, and washing the steps to its shrine with tears.’

The boy held up the nail and, as he did so, the old man smiled, his teeth reflecting the firelight.

‘Come and sit beside me,’ he said, ‘and I shall tell you.’

The boy sat down on the soft green moss. As soon as he was comfortable, the wise man began to talk:

There was once a tyrannical emperor in Ethiopia who spent his days counting the sacks of treasure in his many vaults. They were piled from floor to ceiling in rows of a hundred and one – each of them bursting with rubies and emeralds, diamonds and with gold.

Each year, as his wealth doubled once and then again through taxes and foreign wars, the people grew eager for change. Their sons slaughtered in battle, their precious savings confiscated to satisfy their ruler’s insatiable greed, they sought a secret way by which to end his run of tyranny.

The problem was that the emperor rarely left his palace, a vast marble structure twenty storeys high, set on the banks of the sprawling River Walaqa, a tributary of the Blue Nile. The kingdom had been plundered to construct the palace, and to fill its magazines with treasure. And, with such poverty surrounding him, the emperor had no interest in ever leaving the luxurious quarters of his home.

So, instead, he reclined in his gardens, or in his grand salons, and allowed his retinue of servants to drop peeled grapes into his mouth, one at a time.

Every so often the secret police caught a group of citizens conspiring against their emperor. The conspirators would be dragged away, hung, drawn and quartered in the main square.

Then their heads were skewered onto spikes as a warning to others.

Now, in this land there lived a small boy, about your age. He had never known his parents because they had been imprisoned in the Slate Tower, which lay on an island in the middle of the River Walaqa. Their crime was daring to question out loud why their emperor required so many sacks of loot when beyond his palace walls there wasn’t enough food to eat. So the boy lived with his aunt, a fresh-faced woman with a limp, who was very good to him indeed.

His name was Rintin, and he was the cleverest boy in his school. He never said much, but when he did say something others listened, because what he said tended to be very clever indeed.

One day, Rintin was on his way back from school, when he saw his elderly neighbour in chains, being led towards the gallows in the main square. On that day there were so many others in line to be hanged that the neighbour was forced to crouch down and wait his turn.

Nimbly, Rintin hurried over to the old man, greeted him, and said:

‘I will save you, I promise, I will save you.’

The wizened old man smiled at seeing the boy, then held up his wrists, weighed down with manacles.

‘Keep away from me dear Rintin,’ he said softly, ‘before they take you too.’

The boy charged off into the back streets, and stopped at the first house he could find. A little girl was playing with her doll outside.

‘Tell your parents to go to the palace gates at dusk,’ he said. ‘The emperor is going to make an announcement. Your parents must spread the word.’

Clutching her doll, the little girl ran into the house.

As for Rintin, he ran on, through the streets, warning everyone he passed to gather at the palace at dusk. Once he had reached the end of the town, he made his way to the banks of the river.

With the palace itself so heavily guarded, the only way to observe it unobserved was from the water.

Borrowing a canoe from a fisherman, he pushed out and paddled his way into the middle, halfway between the palace and the Slate Tower, in which his parents were imprisoned.

Turning his back on the island, Rintin looked carefully at the pleasure dome of the emperor. He scanned the walls, taking in every detail, questioning why it was as it was.

Now, the lad’s cleverness derived from the fact that he observed very keenly. Almost nothing ever escaped his attention. He knew, for example, when a storm was approaching because he could sense the trembling of the leaves. And he could tell when his aunt was unhappy because her handkerchief smelled very faintly of salt from her tears.

Rintin’s gaze moved over the blocks of marble, looking for gaps, or for an unguarded window amongst the sheering white walls. The stones were flush together, joined in a zigzag edge so that nothing could ever prise them apart.

All afternoon, the boy gazed at the palace.

As the shadows lengthened, he felt a pang of worry, after all the townspeople would be making their way to the gates to hear the announcement. No one would dare stay away, for the emperor was very strict indeed about announcements.

An hour before dusk, Rintin paddled the canoe a little closer to the wall, which was now deep in chill shadow. Approaching, he noticed something strange. Where the walls disappeared at the waterline, there was a knotted mesh of reeds.

The palace was, it seemed, constructed on a kind of giant woven raft, one made from bulrushes. It was incredible that such a mighty structure could sit securely as it did on a foundation so flimsy and feeble.

Scanning the zigzag lines between the blocks of stone, Rintin noticed that there was an unevenness near the waterline. A piece of marble had been wedged into a crack where the zigzag joins were broken, and a definite force was being exerted upon it. But, even stranger still, was the fact that a fragment of wood, no bigger than a matchbox, had been hammered into place beside the sliver of marble.

The wood was held in place with a nail, a bent brown rusty nail.

Touching a finger to his chin in contemplation, Rintin made a series of calculations.

By his reckoning, the entire palace was being held by this single nail.

How extraordinary, he thought, that the emperor’s mighty seat of power was so precariously in the balance, and all because a craftsman had cut a corner he imagined no one would ever spot.

Paddling his canoe over to the nail, Rintin knocked it up and down with his oar, until it was loose. Then, taking a deep breath, he pulled it away from the wood.

Nothing happened.

Not at first, anyway.

A minute passed. And another. The boy cupped a hand to his right ear. He had heard something – a faintest undertone of sound. He gasped, grabbed the oar, and paddled away as fast as he could.

A moment later, there was a deafening noise, as the zigzag joins began to part, and the palace began to fall.

Lost in his treasure vaults, the emperor was counting the sacks, ordering them to be rearranged in a new way.

All of a sudden he heard the sound of masonry collapsing in the distance.

‘What’s that?!’ he thundered.

His vizier swiped a hand through the air and oozed reassurance.

‘Surely it’s nothing, Your Importantness,’ he whispered unctuously. ‘But I will…’

Before he had time to finish his sentence, the floor of the treasure vault disappeared clean away beneath them.

The vizier, the emperor, and all the precious treasure, were plunged into the now choppy waters of the River Walaqa.

Spying their monarch struggling for his life, the guards fled, the palace nothing more than rubble around them. With the sun touching the horizon, the townspeople flocked to the imperial gate.

Rintin clapped his hands and addressed them.

‘You are free!’ he yelled. ‘And never again will you be prisoners!’

He held up the rusty nail, with a bend at one end.

‘This nail is a symbol that even the worst despot can be brought down in the simplest way. The great power is power that hangs by a thread.’

The crowd cheered.

Then a wizened old man pushed to the front.

Rintin recognised him as his neighbour, saved from the gallows in the nick of time.

‘This boy has saved us,’ the man exclaimed, ‘and so I vote that we make him our king!’

There were more cheers, and Rintin was carried at shoulder height through the streets. The emperor’s launch took him across to the island where he was reunited with his parents.

In due course Rintin was indeed made the king and he ruled for many years.

He married the little girl with the doll, and had six sons, each one wiser and more handsome than the last.

On his desk he kept an orb, and a walnut-coloured box.

And in the box he kept the nail.

After a great many years, King Rintin breathed his last, his beloved queen and many sons clustered around his bed. The royal family and their kingdom mourned the loss. And, according to his wishes, they buried their monarch in a simple grave on the island where the Slate Tower once stood.

In a letter left to his children, King Rintin decreed that the son with the keenest power of observation should follow him as ruler of the land.

‘But how shall we decide which that is?’ asked the queen.

The lord chamberlain, who was reading the letter aloud, motioned to the page.

‘“The one of you who can glimpse a secret level in a story,” he read, “will take my orb, my sacred wooden box, and my throne.”’

There was a pause as the sons eyed each other anxiously. The eldest took a step forwards.

‘Secret level,’ he spluttered… ‘Story…
what
story?!’

The lord chamberlain broke the wax seal on a second envelope, and removed several sheets of paper, written in the king’s own hand.

‘This story,’ he said.

The six sons eyed one another again.

‘Read it to us,’ they all said at once.

And so the lord chamberlain did.

A lifetime ago, in Upper Egypt, there lived a farmer and his wife.

They had very little money, and every month they grew a little more impoverished until, one day, the farmer could stand it no more.

‘Tomorrow I am going to the town,’ he said, ‘where I am going to sell the last of our possessions, so that we can have one good meal before the landlord ousts us from his land.’

‘But what will we do after that?’ asked his wife.

‘We will throw ourselves into the hands of fate,’ the farmer replied.

And so the next day, he piled the kitchen table, the chairs, the bedstead and the pots and pans onto the cart, and pulled them himself into the town, a handful of miles away.