Eva Ibbotson - Let Sleeping Sea-Monsters Lie

At first the worm did not notice what was happening. This was because worms like that are so long that it takes ages for messages to get from one end to the other.

But in the end it did notice and then a long and bloody fight began. The worm reared round and snapped at the Knight with its teeth and blew at him with its poisonous breath and roared horribly. But the Knight, though old, was nimble and the Knight’s armour, though rusty, was poison-proof and he just went on leaping out of the worm’s way and chopping more and more bits off the worm and throwing them away so that the poor worm got weaker and weaker and weaker.

The Knight had got almost to the head end of the worm when something odd happened. He had just chopped off a rather fat and bulgy bit and was picking it up to throw it over the gate when there was a slithering, slurching kind of noise and out on to the grass fell the Princess!

She was in an awful mess! You know what the insides of squashed animals are like. Little bits of mince stuck to her all over. She was wet; she was crumpled; and she was bald, too, because the Knight had chopped so close to her head that he had cut off her hair. What’s more, she was covered in bright red spots because inside the worm she had got the measles.

Still, she was alive. So the Knight shook her out and dried her and when he had finished chopping up the worm he put her over his saddle and rode back to the palace.

The King was terribly pleased. “You brave and noble Knight,” he said. “I offer you my daughter’s hand in marriage.”

“No, thank you,” said the Knight. “Your daughter is not at all the kind of person I should like to marry and anyway I am too old.”

“She looks better when she’s cleaned up,” said the Queen.

“And when she hasn’t got the measles,” said the servants.

But the Knight went on shaking his head. He didn’t want half the King’s treasure either because it was too heavy and would tire his horse. He just took three gold pieces and rode away.

But what of the poor worm? There it lay in the middle of the field with its sore, sad head chopped off in a pool of blood and its cornflower-blue eyes full of tears, and everywhere — strewn over the hedges and the haystacks and the bushes — its hacked-up pieces of body.

Slowly, bravely, all that day and the next day and the next the worm went about joining itself up and joining itself up and joining itself up. It would get three bits that fitted together and then the fourth bit would roll away into the ditch and get lost and it would have to hunt everywhere to find it. Once, it had thirteen bits of its tail all together but the fourteenth just couldn’t be found because the Knight had thrown it into a tree and some rooks had used it to hold meetings on. And the bit the Princess had been in was particularly difficult to fit on because it had got stretched and flabby at the edges. But the worm just worked and worked and worked…

Just before noon on the third day it finished joining itself up and then it slithered away over the fields and hills and valleys till it came to a clear, deep lake because it wanted to see what it looked like. But when it stared into the water and saw its reflection, the worm gasped with surprise.

It had made a sort of mistake. It had put its head in the middle and stretching away to either side of it, as long as half a train or one football pitch or two thousand, one hundred and seventy-five pork sausages, were its two bits of body. It had a body to the right of it and a body to the left of it and in the middle was its head.

For a while the worm just stared into the water and then a pleased and happy smile spread over its face and its cornflower-blue eyes danced with joy. And it said to itself: “It was a bad day when the Princess came and said ‘Phooey’ to me and I swallowed her and the Knight chopped me up but now I am probably the only worm in the whole world with a head in the middle of my long, long body — and thus I shall remain until the end of time!”

And thus it did.

As for the Princess, no one ever came to marry her — not a prince or a plumber or a roadmender or a window cleaner — not anyone, because if you start life by kicking people in the stomach and go on by yelling with temper if you are supposed to wear plain knickers instead of lace ones and then say “Phooey” to a worm, you are going to have a very lonely life. Which is what she did, and serve her right.

Mostly when you climb a hill or scramble through the heather and come across a large rock it will be just what it seems: a large rock.