Читаем The Ogre of Oglefort полностью

“I’ve had so many funerals this week I hardly know which way up I am,” she said, “and it’s made me all behind with the shopping.”

Mrs. Brainsweller was a banshee—one of those tall, thin feys who wail when people die, and they are very much in demand at funerals. She could also levitate, that is to say she could float up to the ceiling and lie on her back looking down on the room, so she was a person who missed very little.

“You look a bit down in the mouth,” she said when the Hag had fetched the sugar. So they told her what had happened at the zoo.

Mrs. Brainsweller hit her forehead. “Of course, I should have thought of it sooner,” she said. “Bri-Bri will make you a familiar. There’s nothing he couldn’t do if he tried.”

The troll and the Hag looked at each other. Making familiars can be done, but it is very difficult magic indeed.

Bri-Bri was the banshee’s only son. He was a wizard, a small man with thin arms and legs and an absolutely enormous head almost entirely filled with brains. His name was Dr. Brian Brainsweller and there was nothing he hadn’t learned. He had learned spells for turning cows blue and spells for turning sausages into boxing gloves and spells for making scrambled eggs come out of people’s ears, and he had seven university degrees: one in necromancy, one in soothsaying, one in alchemy, and four in wizardry.

But he didn’t have any degrees in Everyday Life. Though he was thirty-four years old he was not good at tying his shoelaces or putting on his pajamas the right way around, and he would have eaten furniture polish if you had put it before him on a plate.

Fortunately this didn’t happen because Dr. Brainsweller lived with his mother.

“What are you doing, Bri-Bri?” she would cry as he came down to breakfast with both his legs in one trouser leg, or tried to go to bed in the bath.

It was Mrs. Brainsweller who had seen to it that Brian took all his wizardry exams, and stopped him when he wanted to do ordinary things like riding a bicycle or eating an ice cream, because she knew that if you want to get to the top in anything you must work at it all the time.

The Brainswellers lived two doors down from the Hag’s boardinghouse, and Brian had a workshop in the garden where he spent the day boiling things and stirring things and shaking things. Though he was shy, the wizard was a kind man, and he listened carefully, pushing his huge spectacles up and down, while the Hag and the troll explained what they wanted.

“Your mother thought you might make me a familiar,” said the Hag. “It could be something quite simple—a spotted salamander perhaps?”

Dr. Brainsweller looked worried.

“Oh dear,” he said. “Of course if Mummy thinks . . . But I tried once and . . . well, come and look.”

He led them to a cupboard and pulled out a plate with something on it. It looked like a very troubled banana which had died in its sleep.

After that, the Hag lost heart completely. When she got back to her kitchen at Number 26, she found it full of friends who had come from all over the town to drink tea and tell her how sorry they were to hear of her trouble. A retired River Spirit, a man who now worked for the Water Board, offered to climb into the drains and look for an animal that had been flushed down: perhaps a water snake or a small alligator which someone had got for Christmas and didn’t want anymore. But the Hag said it was now clear to her that she wasn’t meant to have a familiar, and that the Powers-That-Be intended her to be shamed at the meeting, if indeed she went to the meeting at all.

And when all her visitors had gone, she put on her hat and smeared some white toothpaste on her blue tooth and left the house. She wanted to put magic and strangeness behind her and talk to someone who belonged to a different world. Someone completely ordinary, and friendly—and young!

CHAPTER3THE BOY

The Riverdene Home for Children in Need was not a cheerful place. It was in one of the most run-down and shabby parts of the city. Everything about it was gray: the building, the scuffed piece of earth which passed for a garden, the walls that surrounded it. Even when the children were taken out, walking in line through the narrow streets, they saw nothing green or colorful. Though the war against Hitler had been over for years, the bomb craters were still there; the people they met looked weary and shuffled along in dingy clothes.

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