You've Got Another Thing Coming

“Crap, crap, crap, crap,” I muttered through clenched teeth with each step I took. Rose and Cherokee were walking along side of me, they too muttering curses under their breath as we strode through the tall wild grass of Narnia’s heaths.

From the very beginning I had suspected there was something wrong with the gay, silver-haired King of this Dreamland. I also knew, judging by inter alia Rose’s obvious dislike of the woman, that the Queen was a bit strange as well.
I pondered at the subject for quite some time before I concluded I needed a second opinion to help me make my own judgements.

“What is the Queen like?” I wondered out loud, expecting a rushed and rather biased answer from Rose. However, it was Cherokee who spoke in a hushed voice.

“The Queen is unbearable,” he shuddered involuntarily. “She is the most beautiful woman known throughout our lands, but she’s cold as ice and shrewd like few. Her mind is constantly revolving around power, and she craves for more. The Queen would go to awesome distances to get what she wants,” he explained. “Which she has – numerous times.”

Listening to Cherokee, I could feel the package in my arms grow heavier by the each word he spoke. Its contents seemed to make themselves known to my every sense, and I suddenly felt a strong aversion to my self-accepted delivery service.

“Hey, guys,” I stopped dead in my tracks, he two fairies a bit ahead of me as I halted. They turned back to look at me, both with a resigned gleam in their eyes.

“Do we really need to do this?” I wondered, holding out the package towards them for emphasis. “I mean, can’t we just leave this thing here and then go back as if nothing ever happened?”

Rose wandered back to my side, grabbing the package from me and tucking it under her own arm. “Yes, we do,” she said simply and continued walking into the darkening night.

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“Hey, I’ve been thinking,” I said as we all lumbered across a particularly soggy moor in pitch black darkness. “We’re in Narnia now, right?”

Rose and Cherokee stopped for a while. Rose gobbled herself over to my side, wading through the muddy earth with much difficulty.

We had been walking for a couple of hours, and we were all getting rather tired and irritable. There had been huge fights over who would be leading our little expedition, there had been huge fights over who would be carrying the package and the luggage, there had been huge fights over various alpenstocks, and there had been huge fights over whether pizza had first derived from Greece or Italy – and who was supposed to carry the lighter which now provided us with our only light, except for the moon.

Needless to say, it was for the better if no one spoke; so when I did so, there was a quite tense atmosphere between the three of us.

“Yes,” Rose answered. “We’re in Narnia. As you can quite tell by the mouse with Eddie Izzard’s voice.”

She pointed to a larger-than-life-sized mouse that was standing on a rock a couple of feet from us. He was waving his tiny sword about, shouting and growling things at an impossible speed that exited his spectators (which consisted of three normal-sized mice, a crow and a snail) to the point where they began shouting along at his words, even though they had no idea what they were.

“I see,” I said and studied the small assemblage. I looked away. “But, if we’re in Narnia, who’s the king? Aslan or our King?”

Cherokee, who had been listening very intently to the mouse-speech, now spoke up.

“Technically, our King is the king. Aslan is the king, or ruler, of Narnia – but our King is the king of the entire kingdom of the Kingdom of Dreams, of which Narnia is nothing but a small part.”

I nodded – understanding after reading through the previous statement twice.

“Then, how about the Ice Queen that Aslan defeated?” I wondered.

“Oh,” Cherokee smiled sarcastically. “That was our King’s mother in law. Our current Queen is the Ice Queen’s illegitimate lovechild with Elvis Presley. The King was just happy to be rid of her.”

Classic mother-in-law relationship, I figured.

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“Cher,” Rose croaked. “It’s near dawn, and I’m tired!”

She had been stating this since about three minutes after we left the Wizards home, so both Cherokee and I ignored her nagging voice and continued to drag our feet forward.
According to Cherokee’s magical map, we were a couple of hours walk away from a hulleon that could transport us back to the castle grounds in no time.

A hulleon, Rose explained to me, was somewhat like a magical bus stop. There was a current of magic that rushed through marked out places, hulleons, in steady intervals; and this current would transport you to another hulleon, where you could hop off, if you’d like.
We were, as previously stated, a couple of hours away from such a magical bus stop. We were also hungry, tired and filthy from trudging through wet moors throughout the night.

Needless to say, none of us were in a very good mood.

As it were, Rose decided she’d had enough, and defiantly plopped down on a large rock.

“I am not going an inch further before I’ve got some rest,” she declared and kicked off her thin moccasins.

Cherokee and I stared at her, our backs aching and our shoulders slumped, and we sighed in unison.

“Rose, we need to reach the hulleon by sunup,” Cherokee explained for what seemed like the thousandth time.

Since I had, through experiences on our little journey, learned that Rose was one of the most stubborn creatures alive, I shrugged off my backpack and sat down on a nearby rock. I stretched my legs with a slightly throttled sigh of relief.

“Relax, Cher,” Rose grimaced and wiggled her feet. “We’ll have more than this one shot at catching a hulleon.”

Surprise did not pass by unnoticed by me. “We will?” I wondered, feeling the stress that had been clinging to me ever since Rose had suggested we’d try the hulleon as a mode of transportation now evaporating like water vapour.

“Sure,” Rose said, turning on her rock so that she could face me instead of her exasperated brother. “The hulleon parts quite often; twice a day or so, depending on your destination.”

“Then why have we been hurrying like this?” I muttered, frankly too tired to be able to muster some real anger and/or voice volume.

Cherokee shrugged and waved his map about a bit.
“I thought you wanted do drop off that package as soon as possible, and be done with it.”

By the by, I had for some time now wondered what was up with Cherokee; ever since I got turned back to a girl, Cherokee had become frighteningly pleasant towards me. Honestly, it was creeping me out…

“That’s true, I guess,” I mumbled. “But I’m so tired right now I’m seeing three ogres with big teeth and serious dandruff problems standing behind you, Cherokee. Can’t we just rest for a bit and catch a later hulleon? Just a Danny DeVito-break?”

Cherokee’s face lightened, but just a little bit. “A Danny DeVito-break?” he wondered.

“A really tiny one,” I grinned and winked.

Rose giggled and turned to her brother, and choked on her air.

“Three…!” she howled, unable to carry on.

Cherokee spun around to face three large, greyish, enormous ogres with dental issues and large specks of dandruff covering their shoulders.
As he spun, the air was jostled and my nose caught the gust of wind. My gagging reflexes kicked into gear, and soon I was on the ground, hulking and gasping for fresh air.

“Good evening, dear visitors!” greeted the biggest, bulkiest and ugliest of the three ogres over the commotion. He poked his two comrades, making them echo is words mechanically:

“Good evening!”

Rose had, in some unfathomable way, managed to stay upright. She was now clutching her nose for dear life, but she smiled insincerely at the three, who obviously couldn’t tell the difference.

“Good evening to you, too,” she croaked nasally.

“Although it’s practically morning,” I groaned under my breath, which I shouldn’t have because the stench went straight to my stomach reflexes, and I gagged again.

“What can we do for you, sirs?” Rose carried on, undisrupted by my noises.

The three ogres exchanged weary glances, and then fixed their eyes on Rose, whom they seemed to have taken a superficial liking to.

“We’re looking for Prince Caspian,” the head ogre admitted. He took one step forward and opened his mouth, but one of his less intelligent follow ogres beat him to it;

“We’re gonna kill him!” he exclaimed proudly and puffed his chest.

It was right about now that I surfaced from the ground and caught sight of the large axes that hung from their belts along with dead rabbits, voles and budgerigars. That was enough for me to plunge head-first into the ground again.

“Shut up!” the head ogre roared and knocked the blabbermouth with the butt of his axe. He then donned a lighter, faker voice and giggled freakishly. “Ha ha, stupid little rascals!”
He patted the blabbermouth’s shoulder with a hand that was as large as my torso.

“But really, though,” he carried on. “We’re looking for Prince Caspian. He’s about this tall,” he held his hand up in height with his enormous chest, “brown hair, brown eyes, pretty little face and an incomprehensible accent. He usually wears armour,” he finished, looking at the three of us hopefully, as if we were hiding said prince in our pockets.

Rose stared at the ogres, seemingly in thought as she processed the information.

“New ruler of Narnia, after the four human kids?” she wondered, and the ogres nodded joyfully. “The last time I heard from him he was in Disneyland.”

The ogres’ shoulders slumped, and they all sighed in a way that made small clouds of thunder roll by.

“Oh, well,” the head ogre summoned up his strength. “Then we just have to go get him there. The one in the States or the one in Europe?”

“The one on Jupiter,” Rose replied, casting a doubtful look at Cherokee, and I wondered if they’d really buy it.

“There’s one on Jupiter?” the blabbermouth wondered, amazement shining through his pig-like eyes.

“Sure thing,” Cherokee cut in. “It’s brand new. Opening day was last week, and Prince Caspian is there to advertise the whole thing.”

“Oh,” said the head ogre. “Then we’d better get going.”

“Yes, I think you’d better have”, I interrupted; sickly feelings taking over my brain and making me say stupid things. Thankfully, though, they all thoroughly ignored me.

“Goodbye,” five voices shouted out eagerly at the same time, and within a minute, the only trace left of the ogres were a foul smell that seemed to linger on in the air, and three piles of dandruff where they had been standing.

“Geesus,” Rose smacked her forehead. “That was a close one!”

“So – do we like Prince Caspian?” I wondered, the nausea slowly fading as fresh breezes swept by us.

Rose stared at me in amazement. “Have we seen Prince Caspian? Of course we like him!”

“Just making sure,” I muttered. “I want to know who I’m doing a favour.”

“If it makes you feel any better, you didn’t actually do anything,” Cherokee intervened.
“Now, I think there’s supposedly a bar around here somewhere. Let’s find that, get ourselves a couple of drinks and maybe they have a room we can rent, or something.”

Rose and I had nothing against that, and we slung our backpacks over our shoulders. Rose wiggled her sore feet into her moccasins, and held on to me as she did so. She whispered slightly in my ear, inconspicuously so:

“I think Cher’s warming up to you.”

I turned to face her, but let my eye linger on Cherokee as he stood a couple of feet away, back towards us.

“Hopefully,” I agreed. “I don’t like it when people try to bite my head off every third seconds.”

“I wonder…” Rose said, but trailed off as she, too, glanced at Cherokee.

“What?” I urged, wiggling slightly to upset her balance and make her refocus.

“Nothing,” Rose mumbled. “It’s probably nothing…”