One day the Intrepid Dumpling turned up at the court of the Troll Queen. They were lying on her sofa after dinner and the Troll Queen said, ‘Tell me a story’.
‘What about?’ asked the Intrepid Dumpling.
‘A dugong,’ said the Troll Queen.
‘Once upon a time,’ said the Intrepid Dumpling, ‘a beautiful young dugong was strolling through the forest,flapping her floppy feet and bending her skinny knees, so her fluffy round body rose and fell among the ferns the way dugongs do…’
‘Hold on a minute,’ said the Troll Queen. ‘You don’t know what a dugong is, do you?’
‘I didn’t think they were,’ confessed the Intrepid Dumpling. ‘I thought you wanted me to invent one.’
‘A dugong is a sea cow,’ said the Troll Queen. ‘It’s like a giant seal, or very beautiful sea lion. In the Olden Days sailors used to mistake them for mermaids.’
‘I thought it would be like an ostrich,’ said the Intrepid Dumpling.
‘Well it’s not,’ said the Troll Queen. ‘Go on.’
The Intrepid Dumpling started again, and this is the story she told:
Once upon a time, a beautiful young dugong and her old, old grandmother were splashing along the beach, dipping their noses in the rockpools, looking for oysters to do business with. The reason they were doing it was this: the King of the Dugongs had a son, who was absolutely horrible. He was as slimy and grimy and horrible as our dugong was sleek and golden and sprightly. He had atrocious manners and only ever thought about himself (our dugong, on the other hand, was kind and courteous, and particularly good to her old Grandma).
Well, the King of the Dugongs wanted his son to get married, and he wanted him to marry someone wonderful, because that way, he said, he had a chance of getting some halfway decent grandchildren. And he wanted him to marry soon because the sooner the halfway decent grandchildren were born, the sooner they would be old enough to take over from their horrible father, and save the Dugong Kingdom from a terrible ruler.
So the King of the Dugongs rang up all his friends on his beautiful long curly shell telephone and asked them who was the best and nicest and cleverest young dugong girl in the kingdom.
The first three girls who were suggested were indeed very good and nice. They were thoughtful and clean and intelligent and one even had a sense of humour. But they were also rich, and their kind thoughtful intelligent rich parents were so upset at the prospect of their daughters marrying the bilious scurrilous prince that they each took the Dugong King aside in turn and had a word in his lustrous furry ear. As each of them whispered in turn, the King’s face went from hopeful to sad to hopeful to ashamed to resigned. Each of the parents gave the King a large cheque and, because the Dugong Prince’s extravagant gambling habit and taste for expensive foreign ice-creams had almost bankrupted the Dugong Kingdom, the King shamefacedly accepted the money and let the nice young dugong girls go home to their fond families and relieved boyfriends.
And this is where our dugong comes in - because our dugong was the fourth best and nicest dugong girl in all the kingdom (according to some. Others felt she was nicer than that). And our dugong had one quality that the other three had lacked - she was penniless. Her old grandmother couldn’t afford a large cheque, and that is why, on that cloudy day, the two of them were splashing along the beach, trying to persuade the oysters to part with their pearls. They hoped they might collect something to offer the King in place of our dugong’s flipper in marriage.
They weren’t doing very well. And their hearts weren’t really in it, because they knew that the oysters needed their pearls for a rainy day. Even though they could grow new ones, few of them could afford to give up their nest eggs. So our dugong and her Grandma had only collected three pearls when a palace guard appeared, saying ‘Tssccchh! We’ve been looking for you everywhere. You have to come to the palace, right now.’ And then our dugong gave even those three pearls away, to a tattered family of little sea squirts who had lost their mother, sitting by the side of the road leading to the King of the Dugongs’ strange and beautiful underwater palace.
‘Whatever shall we do?’ whispered Grandma, as they were ushered in to the King of the Dugongs’ palatial audience chamber. It was lined with conch shells as pink and shiny as the curlicues down on our dugong’s pretty ears, and illuminated by thousands of iridescent squid, whose luminous multi-coloured tentacles dangled from the murky, cavernous depths of the ceiling. Beneath them hovered tiny gleaming jellyfish, red and gold and green, whose job was to dash to the side of anybody who didn’t have enough light to read by.
‘Oh Lawdy,’ said Grandma, looking up through the crowd of shining courtiers to the dais where the King sat resplendent on a huge plush sea cucumber. ‘Oh Lawdy.’ For beside the King, sprawled across a smaller cucumber, covered in gungey barnacles, whiskers dripping with slime, eyes dull and shifty, snout curled in a sneer and flippers stained yellow from smoking, lounged the Dugong Prince. Even his nasty ears were limp and unfriendly.
Oh Lawdy Lawdy,’ said Grandma. ‘Oh Lawdy Lawdy Lawdy.’ But our dugong just looked at the horrible prince, shook her pretty golden head, blinked her dark golden eyes, and set to thinking.
Then the King stood up, and coughed, and addressed them. ‘Um… excuse me!’ he said. ‘Could you come over here?’
Our dugong and Grandma slithered between the courtiers (silver and crimson) up to the front of the dais, and looked up at the king. No-one else was taking any notice of him at all; they were all too busy flapping their flippers and wiggling their fins and wrinkling up their snouts. But then the King coughed again, very loudly, and said: ‘Oy, you lot, straighten up, would you?’ And all the courtiers sprang to attention in elegant and impressive rows against the pink curly walls.
‘Now,’ said the Dugong King.
‘Oh no,’ whispered Grandma.
‘Ahhh,’ sighed the courtiers.
‘Well actually,’ said our dugong, ‘it’s all right.’
‘Is it?’ said the King, in surprise. ‘I’m sure it’s not. You see, I want you to… I’m so sorry, my dear, but I want you to marry him. He’s just got to have decent children, you see, or just imagine what everyone will have to put up with when he’s king…’
The Dugong Prince was picking his snout, ignoring everyone.
‘And you see,’ continued the King, ‘You’re the best and nicest girl in the kingdom who’s not rich enough to get out of it. You even gave those seasquirts the three pearls which were your only hope of escape from marrying that…’ and the King gestured towards his son, who was rolling up a big bogey between his flippers.
‘But it’s all right,’ said our dugong.
The Prince opened up his mouth to pop the bogey in.
‘I’ve already decided to marry him.’
The Prince’s mouth opened wide with astonishment.
‘I’ll marry him happily,’ she said. ‘Someone has to,
and it might as well be me, if you want me. I’ll be glad
to marry him.’
At that the Prince opened his mouth so wide that the top of his horrible head began to fall back, and back, and back. And suddenly it fell off entirely, and the ever-widening astonished mouth split the slimy green barnacled head right in half. And then out of the scummy green throat came a cry—and suddenly the whole limp, splodgy, scurfy body fell in two, and from it leapt a handsome young dugong as sleek and dark and golden and sprightly as our own, with perky whiskers and a dashing look in his eye.
‘Dad!’ he cried. ‘I’m so sorry! Do you remember when I ran off when I was four? I stole some of Neptune’s apples and he cursed me with horribleness so no-one would marry me. He said that only someone volunteering to marry me of their own accord would break the spell! Nasty, eh? But you—’ and here he turned to our dugong, clasped her to his sleek bosom and gazed into her golden eyes ‘—you have saved me and the Kingdom from a horrible fate.’ And on the spot he presented her with a crown of trained seahorses, who would swim in circles above her golden brow, and a pair of beautiful seahorse earrings, who would swim forever just beneath her pretty ears, and every now and then wiggle up to whisper jokes into them, for seahorses are famous for their sense of humour.
The Intrepid Dumpling leaned back on the sofa and looked at the Troll Queen expectantly. The Troll Queen looked back.
‘Then what happened?’ she asked.
‘They got married and lived happily ever after, of course,’ said the Intrepid Dumpling. ‘Don’t you know anything about stories?’
‘Well you didn’t say so,’ said the Troll Queen.
‘Well they did,’ said the Intrepid Dumpling.
‘I thought it might be different this time,’ said the Troll Queen.
‘Oh no,’ said the Dugong. ‘It’s just the same. That’s one of the nicest things about stories.’