Free Camelot by Colin Thompson

quest.’
    â€˜Mind you, if you’re still stuck when we’ve finished questing,’ said the third Brave Knight, ‘do look us up again, by all means.’
    â€˜Great quest?’ said Sir Barkworth.
    â€˜Oh yes, extremely great,’ said the fourth Brave Knight, ‘and unfortunately also top secret.’
    â€˜Rightio, jolly good,’ said Sir Barkworth.
    â€˜But I say, old chip,’ said the first Brave Knight, ‘there is something you could do for us before you go, if you wouldn’t mind.’
    â€˜Indeed, old chap, just name it.’
    â€˜Just give my toenails a quick trim, would you?’ said the Brave Knight, pulling off his boots.

    The next morning, with his trusty squire by his side, Sir Barkworth set off, not surprisingly in the wrong direction. Because he had a bit of toenail clipping in his left eye, which forced him to keep it closed, he rode in circles all day until, as night fell, they came to an inn.
    â€˜This looks like a nice place,’ said Sir Barkworth.
    â€˜It is indeed, my lord,’ said Nymrod.
    â€˜Oh, you have stayed here before?’
    â€˜Indeed, my lord, and so did you, last night.’
    â€˜Ah. Well, yes, it is a nice place and we will stay here tonight as well.’
    To make sure he wouldn’t make the same mistake again, the next morning Sir Barkworth closed his left eye and set off in the opposite direction. And it worked. After a long day’s ride they reached a magnificent castle.
    â€˜I say, Nymrod, that’s a magnificent castle,’ said Sir Barkworth.
    â€˜Indeed, my lord.’
    â€˜Methinks it may be paradise,’ said Sir Barkworth. ‘For I have seen it in my dreams.’
    â€˜In your dreams, sire?’
    â€˜Absolutely, for how else could I have seen it?’
    â€˜It is Camelot, my lord,’ said Nymrod.
    â€˜Really? I never knew there were two castles with that name.’
    â€˜There aren’t, my lord.’
    And so it was that the first Royal Messenger failed in his quest, though having managed to have such a long conversation without falling off his horses did prove his motor skills were getting better every day.

 
    When Arthur became King, he did indeed banish his mother to the Island of Shallot, which he renamed the Island of Vegetables as he had promised. King Arthur then told Merlin to search the castle for the ugliest, smelliest old crone he could find and that she was to be sent to the Island of Vegetables as Igraine’s servant.
    Sewyr lived in a crack in the wall of Camelot’s main sewer. Her family had lived there for seventeen generations, since they had been granted the right to do so by one of Arthur’s ancestors. Sewyr had been named in honour of her home. Now that the drains were blocked and overflowing, her family had been forced to move out and had taken up temporary residence in a broken gristle storage bin in the castle tip. All except Sewyr’s grandfather, who said he was too old for change and instead stayed in the drain, coming up for air every fifteen minutes.
    Merlin had held auditions and Sewyr had stood out as the winner. She had out-smelled and out-uglied all the others. The fact that she still hadone tooth had gone against her, but it was a lovely shade of green and the frothy dribble that came out of her nose every time she spoke had won the day. She had been put into a big sack and ferried across to the Island of Vegetables.
    To call it an island was to flatter it. The Island of Vegetables was little more than a rock shaped, remarkably, like a big potato. To call the castle on it a castle was to flatter it too. It was more like a garden shed with a couple of half-hearted towers, seven windows and a mould-covered door that had once been the side of a cattle stall on Noah’s Ark.
    â€˜I’ll teach the Queen to be such a horrid mummy,’ Arthur said. ‘Let her eat nothing but gruel with a goat’s hoof in it, and