Free Legend of the Three Moons by Patricia Bernard Page B

who can't dance.'
    At this last insult Chad jumped to his feet. `Clarissa is the best stilt dancer I've ever seen!'
    `You again,' hissed Arnolt Beetlehead, swinging his right stilt at Chad. He missed him and hit Clarissa's stilts instead. The crowd moved aside as Clarissa began to fall and, thinking this was all part of the show, the pink-clad women in their rickshaw applauded loudly.
    Worried that Clarissa would crack her head on the kerb, Lyla and Chad ran to catch her.
    `Sorry,' she gasped as the three of them went sprawling backwards almost squashing a barking Nutty.
    `It wasn't your fault,' said Chad, scrambling up. He untied her right stilt while Lyla undid the left one.
    Clarissa dragged the beribboned dress and petticoats over her head and flung them and the bell bracelets, the flower crown and the stilts at the stilt man.
    `Now,' she yelled, with her hands on the hips of her patched tartan skirt. `Give me my tickets or I'll get my Grandnono to write a spell that will stop you from walking on the ground, let alone on stilts.'
    `If he could do that he would have done it already,' sneered Arnolt Beetlehead, throwing five tickets at her.
    Scrambling to pick them up before someone else did, Clarissa whispered for Lyla and Chad to follow her. Then dodging behind the rickshaw and the pink-clad umbrella holder she disappeared between two balloon and toffee apple stalls. Chad, Lyla and Nutty raced after her.
    `It is always a gamble as to what I'm paid,' she gasped, after they caught up with her at a singing toad stall. `And always a gamble that I will get the tickets home before someone bigger than me steals them. But I have them now and we will soon be at my Grandnono's house. When he finds out how you saved me from breaking my neck he will give you what you want.'
    `I doubt that,' said Lyla. `We want a boat.'
    Clarissa nodded knowingly. `That's what my Grandnono said. But as you aren't fisher people and as no one on the Ifraa Peninsula is allowed to put into any port other than their own, I don't understand why.'
    `Does that mean that Mussel Cove fishermen aren't allowed to visit other M'dgassy ports?' asked Chad.
    Clarissa nodded again. `That's how my father died. He sailed into Tsal Harbour in search of my mother and the Raiders sent a Bulgogi to eat him.'
    Chad and Lyla looked shocked then sympathetic, so Clarissa added, `It was when I was a baby so I don't remember him.'
    `What's a Bulgogi?' asked Chad.
    `One of the High Enchanter's becamed night monsters. Even the Goch are afraid of them.'
    Lyla tried, and failed, to imagine something so terrifying that it would frighten a Goch. So she asked Clarissa why the Raiders had taken her mother.
    `After I was rejected, the Raiders took her to sing for General Tulga. My mother comes from Whale Island where the women are famous for their singing.'
    Lyla looked at Clarissa curiously. `Why were you rejected?'
    `Because I have Mer blood. Which is good for me, as I did not want to leave my Grandnono but bad for me because the Mussel Cove people whose sons and daughters were taken, hate me because I wasn't. That's why Arnolt Beetlehead treats me the way he does. They took his twin sons.'
    `So what's Mer blood?' asked Chad.
    Clarissa laughed. `You really are outlanders aren't you?'
    She gave him a quick hug to show she wasn't making fun of him. Chad turned red, but she didn't notice. `Mer comes from the Merpeople who live in the sea. Raiders hunt them the way Mussel Cove fishermen hunt whales. Most Whale Islanders have some Mer blood which means they can't be Raiders.'
    Hoping that she would hug him again Chad asked her to describe a whale.
    `It's a very big mammal that lives in the sea,' she told him. But she didn't hug him even when he asked what a mammal was. `It looks like a giant fish almost as big as a Goch.'
    By the time they reached her grandnono's cottage Clarissa had told them about how, when he was young, her father's boat had been wrecked close to Whale Island, how he had