Kate DiCamillo - The Tale of Despereaux

“Sir, Most Very Honored Head Person, that is not true. Hundreds of rats live in the dungeon of this castle. One of them has taken your daughter and if you will send —”

The king started humming. “I can’t hear you!” he stopped to shout. “I cannot hear you! And anyway, what you say is wrong because you are a rodent and therefore a liar.” He started to hum again. And then he stopped and said, “I have hired fortunetellers. And a magician. They are coming from a distant land. They will tell me where my beautiful daughter is. They will speak the truth. A mouse cannot speak the truth.”

“I am telling you the truth,” said Despereaux. “I promise.”

But the king would not listen. He sat with his hands over his ears. He hummed loudly. Big fat tears rolled down his face and fell to the floor.

Despereaux sat and stared at him in dismay. What should he do now? He put a nervous paw up to his neck and pulled at the red thread, and suddenly his dream came flooding back to him . . . the dark and the light and the knight swinging his sword and the terrible moment when he had realized that the suit of armor was empty.

And then, reader, as he stood before the king, a wonderful, amazing thought occurred to the mouse. What if the suit of armor had been empty for a reason? What if it had been empty because it was waiting?

For him.

“You know me,” that was what the knight in his dream had said.

“Yes,” said Despereaux out loud in wonder. “I do know you.”

“I can’t hear you,” sang the king.

“I’ll have to do it myself,” said the mouse. “I will be the knight in shining armor. There is no other way. It has to be me.”

Despereaux turned. He left the weeping king. He went to find the threadmaster.

THE THREADMASTER was sitting atop his spool of thread, swinging his tail back and forth and eating a piece of celery.

“Well, look here,” he said when he saw Despereaux. “Would you just look at that. It’s the mouse who loved a human princess, back from the dungeon in one piece. The old threadmaster would say that I didn’t do my job well, that because you are still alive, I must have tied the thread incorrectly. But it is not so. And how do I know it is not so? Because the thread is still around your neck.” He nodded and took a bite of his celery.

“I need the rest of it,” said Despereaux.

“The rest of what? Your neck?”

“The rest of the thread.”

“Well, I can’t just hand it over to any old mouse,” said the threadmaster. “They say red thread is special, sacred; though I, myself, after having spent so much time with it, know it for what it is.”

“What is it?” said Despereaux.

“Thread,” said the threadmaster. He shrugged and took another loud bite of celery. “Nothing more. Nothing less. But I pretend, friend, I pretend. And what, may I ask, do you intend to do with the thread?”

“Save the princess.”

“Ah, yes, the princess. The beautiful princess. That’s how this whole story started, isn’t it?”

“I have to save her. There is no one but me to do it.”

“It seems to be that way with most things. No one to do the really disagreeable jobs except oneself. And how, exactly, will you use a spool of thread to save a princess?”

“A rat has taken her and hidden her in the dungeon, so I have to go back to the dungeon, and it is full of twists and turns and hidden chambers.”

“Like a maze,” said the threadmaster.

“Yes, like a maze. And I have to find my way to her, wherever she is hidden, and then I have to lead her back out again, and the only way to do that is with the thread. Gregory the jailer tied a rope around his ankle so that he would not get lost.” As the mouse said this, he shuddered, thinking of Gregory and his broken rope, dying, lost in the darkness. “I,” said Despereaux, “I . . . I will use thread.”

The threadmaster nodded. “I see, I see,” he said. He took a meditative bite of celery. “You, friend, are on a quest.”

“I don’t know what that is,” said Despereaux.

“You don’t have to know. You just have to feel compelled to do the thing, the impossible, important task at hand.”

“Impossible?” said Despereaux.

“Impossible,” said the threadmaster. “Important.” He sat chewing his celery and staring somewhere past Despereaux, and then suddenly he leapt off his spool.

“Who am I to stand in the way of a quest?” he said. “Roll her away.”

“I can have it?”

“Yes. For your quest.”

Despereaux put his front paws up and touched the spool. He gave it an experimental push forward.

“Thank you,” he said, looking into the eye of the threadmaster. “I don’t know your name.”

“Hovis.”

“Thank you, Hovis.”

“There’s something else. Something that belongs with the thread.” Hovis went into a corner and came back with a needle. “You can use it for protection.”

“Like a sword,” said Despereaux. “Like a knight would have.”

“Yes,” said Hovis. He gnawed off a length of thread and used it to tie the needle around Despereaux’s waist. “Like so.”

“Thank you, Hovis,” said Despereaux. He put his right shoulder against the spool of thread and pushed it forward again.

“Wait,” said Hovis. He stood up on his hind legs, put his paws on Despereaux’s shoulders, and leaned in close to him. Despereaux smelled the sharp, clean scent of celery as the threadmaster bent his head, took hold of the thread around Despereaux’s neck in his sharp teeth, and pulled on it hard.

“There,” said Hovis, when the piece of thread broke and dropped to the ground. “Now you’re free. You see, you’re not going into the dungeon because you have to. You’re going because you choose to.”

“Yes,” said Despereaux, “because I am on a quest.” The word felt good and right in his mouth.

Quest.

Say it, reader. Say the word “quest” out loud. It is an extraordinary word, isn’t it? So small and yet so full of wonder, so full of hope.

“Goodbye,” said Hovis as Despereaux pushed the spool of thread out of the threadmaster’s hole. “I have never known a mouse who has made it out of the dungeon only to go back into it again. Goodbye, friend. Goodbye, mouse among mice.”

THAT NIGHT Despereaux rolled the thread from the threadmaster’s lair, along innumerable hallways and down three flights of stairs.

Reader, allow me to put this in perspective for you: Your average house mouse (or castle mouse, if you will) weighs somewhere in the neighborhood of four ounces.

Despereaux, as you well know, was in no way average. In fact, he was so incredibly small that he weighed about half of what the average mouse weighs: two ounces. That is all. Think about it: He was nothing but two ounces of mouse pushing a spool of thread that weighed almost as much as he did.

Honestly, reader, what do you think the chances are of such a small mouse succeeding in his quest?

Zip. Zero. Nada.

Goose eggs.

But you must, when you are calculating the odds of the mouse’s success, factor in his love for the princess. Love, as we have already discussed, is a powerful, wonderful, ridiculous thing, capable of moving mountains. And spools of thread.