‘All right,’ Desmond grunted. ‘Eugene, get his ears. Now then; one, two, and heave!’

Fang landed in the well of the table with a bump, too exhausted to do more than wag his tail feebly. Julian, however, was in a hurry.

‘Now listen,’ he said, grabbing Fang by the scruff of his neck and lifting his head. ‘You see that archway over there? Good. Now that’s the way out on to the battlements — we’re floating level with them right now. If we can get this raft over there before the sud level rises much more, we can get out on to the ramparts and shin down the drawbridge ropes. Piece of cake. All you’ve got to do is blow in the sail, right? I said right?’

 ‘I don’t care. You used to be bloody good at huffing and puffing and blowing things down when it was a real pain in the bum. If you need an added incentive, how about if you don’t get huffing and puffing before I count to three, you’re going to be breakfast, lunch and dinner until further notice? You like that idea? Okay then. Get huffing.’

Quickly, with his ears right back against his skull, Fang huffed. Then, more from force of habit than anything else, he puffed. And then the raft skimmed across the surface of the great hall like a speedboat, cutting a huge wake of froth and bubbles as it went and spewing out a tidal wave that turned the great hall into a jacuzzi.

‘Too fast!’ Julian screamed, as the raft shot towards the archway like a torpedo. ‘Too fast…!‘

His words dopplered away into nothing as the raft shot through the arch, bump-bump-bumped down a flight of steps and slid off through another archway and over the parapet like the crew of the Enterprise doing warp nine back to the nearest starbase in time for Happy Hour.

‘We’re flying!’ Eugene shrieked above the scream of the wind all around them.

‘In a sense,’ Julian yelled back.

Fortunately, and at odds somewhere in the region of seventy million to one, they touched down on the moat, bounced like Barnes Wallis’ celebrated bomb, and skimmed along the lush grass of the castle foregate before coming to a gentle, civilised stop in the middle of a cesspit. Almost immediately after stopping, the table submerged with a loud and flatulent glop! leaving Julian and his brothers struggling out of the smelly mire, happy as pigs in muck (which is to say, not very).

‘Don’t say a word,’ Julian warned, as they scrambled out of the pit and collapsed on the grass. ‘I’ll just mention this. If the Wright boys had made a nice soft landing like that at their first attempt, they’d have been hugging themselves with glee.’

‘Yes,’ Desmond muttered, after spitting out a mouthful of cesspit. ‘Well. I think the basic idea was bad and getting that bloody wolf to blow in the sail was about as daft an idea as anybody’s ever had in the history of the world. On both counts…’

‘What’s he’s trying to say,’ Eugene interrupted, ‘is that two wrongs don’t make us Wrights. So what. We’re still in one piece. I say we forget about the whole thing, and…’

‘Hang on.’ Julian held up a trotter for silence. ‘Where’s the wolf?’

The three little pigs looked round. Sure enough, there was no trace of Fang to be seen anywhere. The pigs exchanged glances and stared at the bubbling, glopping surface of the cesspit.

‘May he rest in peace,’ said Desmond, after a long while. ‘And whatever else is in there, of course.’

‘Maybe we ought to try to fish him out,’ said Eugene reluctantly. Julian shook his head.

‘Nice thought,’ he sighed, ‘but he’s been under — what, forty-five seconds? A minute? He’s huffed his last puff and that’s that. What a way to go,’ he added with a shudder. ‘Apt, but nasty. Come on, let’s find a stream or a pond or something, before anybody sees us.’

Desmond nodded thoughtfully. ‘Forgive and forget, huh? Oh well, why not? It’s no skin off my snout, provided it’s guaranteed he’s not coming back.’

Julian stared at the billowing mere, then shrugged his sloping shoulders. ‘One thing’s for sure,’ he said with a sigh. ‘If the bugger does manage to survive, we’ll never have any trouble about him creeping up on us unawares. Not unless the wind’s in the other direction and we’ve all got really bad colds.’ He shook his head, then pulled himself together. ‘Move it, you two,’ he said. ‘First a bath, then we’ve got a house to build. It so happens I was reading the other day in Scientific Gloucester Old Spot about a way to make high-tensile breezeblocks from straw. Game, anybody?’

‘At last,’ muttered Tom Thumb. ‘Now I understand.’

‘Understand what?’

‘Why it’s such an unfair advantage being small.’

The elf grunted. ‘Good for you,’ she replied. ‘Now it’s your turn to bail.’

As well as being magical and containing a simultaneous translator/amplifier unit that’d have most terrestrial electronics manufacturers sobbing themselves to sleep from envy, Tom Thumb’s hat was watertight and therefore suitable for bailing soapsuds out of an up-ended floating contact lens. It had been Thumb’s suggestion that they name the lens the Nelson; something to do with being temporarily blind in one eye was the reason he gave, and the elf was too busy sloshing suds over the side in a soggy hat to object.

‘Anything to report?’ he asked, as he took the hat and stooped to dip it in the suddy bilges of the lens.

‘Just listen to yourself, will you?’ the elf snarled back. ‘Ye gods, it’ll be splice the mainbrace and make it so, Number One in a minute. No, there’s nothing to report, just a lot of damn great big soapy bubbles as far as the eye can.

The lens lurched alarmingly, and if the elf hadn’t had reactions like a caffeine-addicted rattlesnake, Thumb would have been lost over the side for sure. As it was, the lens was only a degree or so of tilt away from capsizing.

‘What the hell…?‘Thumb spluttered, through a mouthful of soap.

The elf craned her neck to see. ‘Styrofoam cup ahoy,’ she replied. ‘What careless maniac left that there, right in the middle of a shipping lane? And why are you talking in that funny voice?’

‘I lost the hat over the side,’ Thumb wailed. ‘it’s no good. We’re shipping too much soap, and without the hat I can’t bale out. We’re going to sink. All we need is a string quartet in full evening dress, and we could do an utterly authentic Titanic re-enactment.

 ‘You’re the captain,’ the elf snarled back, one leg over the side. ‘If you insist on going down with your lens, that’s your business. I’m going to jump for it.

‘Wait for me!’

 There was a tiny plop, followed shortly afterwards by another, similar. Not long after that, a wee small voice cried out, ‘heeelblgblgblggbgbgggbbbllgb!’

‘Hang on, I’m coming!’ the elf yelled, kicking frantically. ‘Don’t you dare drown on me, you big sissy, not after all I’ve… Just a minute,’ she added, standing up. ‘You clown, it’s only knee—deep.’

‘You sure about that?’

 ‘Stand up and try it for yourself, idiot.’ The elf grunted, and wiped suds off herself. ‘Marvellous,’ she added, ‘we’re standing on top of the gallery rail. Here, give me your hand, I’ll pull you out.’

‘Just a minute, I think I can see the hat. That’s better,’ Thumb went on, scrambling on to the rail with the hat pulled lopsidedly over the back of his head. ‘You know, I really thought we’d had our chips that time. You know how you’re supposed to have your whole life flash before you when you’re about to drown? Well, it’s true. I saw it, the whole thing; us getting married, the reception, with your Uncle Terry getting drunk and falling down the back of the chair, little Tom junior’s first day at medical school…

‘Just a second,’ the elf interrupted. ‘That’s your future life, you idiot.’

‘Oh? Oh,’ Thumb repeated, as the implications hit him. ‘Oh, right,’ he added pinkly. ‘It’s a pity I didn’t notice how we get off this rail, then.’