“Your father was a brave centipede. When we went Up the Up-Pipe together, we were young and foolish, and we didn’t know what was up there. The Hoo-Min chased us, and your father—” She stopped.
“Yes? Go on!” crackled Harry.
“Your father turned on the Hoo-Min and attacked him, and let me escape down the Up-Pipe. I… I never saw him again.” She dropped her head and trailed her front feelers on the ground, a sign of deep sorrow.
Both centis were speechless.
“He gave his life for me, so I could look after you and the other little centis in my basket,” Belinda said quietly. “It’s time you knew, Hxzltl.”
“So that’s why you told me never to go Up the Up-Pipe,” Harry breathed. “That’s why it’s the worst place in the world for you.”
“I never dreamt,” said Belinda, “that one night I’d send you up there myself, and that it would save all our lives.”
They were all very quiet. The toad lay among them and nobody thought of eating it. George was thinking, “Maybe the Hoo-Min we climbed on is the very one that killed Hx’s daddy.” The idea made his cuticle cold on his back.
That was when Harry said, in a choky crackle, “My daddy was a hero.”
Only he didn’t say “hero”. There was no word, then, for hero in Centipedish. He made one up, and afterwards it spread – the way new words can – until all centipedes now use it to mean “the bravest of the brave”.
What Harry said was, “My daddy was a centipede-who-tackled-a-Hoo-Min.”
And in case you’re wondering if, in that case, Harry and George became centiheroes because they’d actually climbed on a sleeping Hoo-Min and gone in its mouth – they didn’t.
They didn’t because they never told Belinda, and they never told any other centipedes about their adventure. They kept quiet because they knew they hadn’t been brave – only reckless and foolish.
But every once in a while, when they were alone together, they would nudge each other, and one of them would say…
“I wish we’d just had one good bite each, though – don’t you?”
