In Which I Beat Up My Friend And Get Turned Into A Frog

The next few days were a drunken blur. I vaguely recall being abducted by a gang of squat-legged woodland orcs and roasted on a spit for a while, and I obviously escaped with my life intact and my skin unroasted but I’ve no idea how. It seems I was also hexed by a warlock at some point, because although I have no memory of meeting and/or being cursed by such a character, for a whole 24 hours I couldn’t speak. Instead, every time I opened my mouth there came a series of shrieks like the bewildered mooing of a cow.

*****

I was several days’ ride from home, slumped in the corner of an inn called the Mare’s Gut, when a familiar pirate in a dashing feather boa strode into the smelly gloom carrying a three-foot worm. Behind him came a young girl with ragged elbows and a daggers squint, and at the rear came a docile old lady with tightly wound hair. I watched them as they breezed through the premises, oblivious to my presence. A large hairy man sitting at the bar sniggered at the pirate’s attire and was promptly shot in the foot. Selladore addressed the innkeeper to order a large ale, a small ale, a wine and a cocktail (cocktails at this point in time were extremely primitive, consisting mostly of ale with a vegetable bobbing around in it). Glob took the large ale, Edgar the small, Boomlay the wine and Selladore quaffed his parsnip daiquiri with a gasp of satisfaction. They spotted me as they turned to look for seats, and froze as one.

Glob grunted at me in a personable fashion. Boomlay gave me a slight nod, which I thought was probably apt considering the last time we actually exchanged any words I told her she was an ugly old crone who ought to bugger off and turn to dust. Edgar tumbled off the pirate’s shoulder and wrapped himself around my leg. The peculiarity of the once-captain of my guard lovingly rubbing his cheek on my upper thigh was not lost on me. Selladore clapped me on the back, and I winced.

“My boy! We’ve been so worried about you! We lost you in the crowds in Bloodroot and we’ve been searching for you ever since. We had almost given up hope. Tell me, what happened to ye?”

I was drunk and tired and I offered no response beyond a slight head loll. I had not anticipated it, but seeing my companions once more brought a slew of new, unwanted emotions. I felt flushed and embarrassed before them and, despite my immediate happiness to see them, I found myself wishing to be left alone.

“Athelstan? Are you alright? What happened?” pressed the pirate.

I didn’t want to explain. I’d already repeated the same pathetic tale a dozen times to myriad bandits and barkeeps down the Valley Road, and my desire to take a stroll down a tack-strewn memory lane was nil.

“Athelstan? Matey? We were all worried about you. Even Glob,” said Selladore, as Glob shrugged amiably. “What happened in the tower, Athelstan?”

I could feel my blood pressure rising. I didn’t want to talk about it. Why don’t people ever let you not talk about things you don’t want to talk about?

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, annoyed at how fraught my voice sounded.

To counter the effect of my quavering tones, I reclined in my seat and put my feet on the table. I laced my hands behind my hand, immediately realised this was overkill, but judged that it was too late to turn back.

“I do not wish to talk about it,” I repeated.

Selladore wasn’t getting the hint. Boomlay and Glob were quicker on the uptake, sensing my strained tone and exchanging concerned glances.

“Athelstan, come on,” he said, “let us help you. What happened in the tower? Where is your wife?”

“She’s gone!” I roared.

I lifted my legs from the table in an attempt to leap to my feet, misjudged the precariousness of the angle at which I was balanced, and clattered to the floor in a heap. Before the second was over I sprang back up, nose to nose with the confused pirate.

“She doesn’t want me anymore! She left me for the prince!” I cried. “And it’s all your fault!”

“My fault?” shrilled Selladore.

“Yes, you! You stupid grubby pirate, you captured us, you slowed us down, you wasted time! If we’d gotten there sooner she wouldn’t have fallen in love with him. She would still be with me!”

I had no idea where all of this was coming from. These were ideas that had never formed fully in my head before, held at bay by logical thought and occasional half-sobriety. To my horror, I now found a deluge of monstrous accusations pouring out of me, coating Selladore with the foul rust of blame.

“Athelstan, you’re being foolish, I–“

“Don’t call me a fool, you coward!” I yelled.

“Coward?”

“Aye, coward, and a bad friend!”

“Lies!”

“Truth! And you dress like a dirty flamingo,” I howled.

“Athelstan,” warned Selladore.

“I’ll smash your nose right through that bar, pirate!”

“You bloody won’t,” murmured the barman.

“I bloody will!”

“Athelstan!”

And, I’m not proud of this (come to think of it, I’m not proud of anything that has happened for the last 70 pages), but I leapt at Selladore, yelling. Much later, Glob informed me that I was yelling something about ‘perish, heathen scum’, which has always baffled me because I’ve never used the word ‘heathen’ in my life, and I rarely use the word ‘scum’, and I only use any variant on the word ‘perish’ when discussing the expiration date of certain foodstuffs, which is to say, almost never. Rage is certainly a wordsmith.

Boomlay is sharper than I took her for, for as I drew my blade I found it immediately turned to a long, thick strand of spaghetti, and rather than stabbing wildly at my friend in a bloody rage, I found myself whipping him across the cheek with my great floppy length.

Interlude: I wish it be known that I regret writing the previous sentence, however I have penned the first edition of my tale with irremovable magic ink, lest it be tampered with, and unfortunately I am helpless to go back and erase anything I put down on paper.

Selladore drew his cutlass in retaliation, and immediately found himself waving around a large haddock. I feel that Boomlay’s middling dislike of me factored into this magical exchange somewhat, because while a large spaghetti strand is quite harmless, a haddock still bloody hurts to be clobbered in the mouth with, and I was sent tumbling backwards over a table where a family of five were tucking into Sunday lunch. I crashed down among them, frantically apologising as I barrelled over the assorted vegetables dishes. I felt my blood boil as I arose from the plated heaps of spuds and sprouts. The pirate was going to pay for that.

I hurled a potato at Selladore’s forehead before he could duck. Boomlay’s magic intercepted it, but as she had no time to prepare the spell, she succeeded only in transfiguring it from roasted to boiled. The spud rebounded off the pirate’s head and landed in the pint of the large hairy man Selladore had shot in the foot four or five minutes previously. It was not his day.

Shorn of metalwork and vegetables, I ran at Selladore with my head lowered. He brought his knee up and cracked my nose AGAIN, and can I just say at this point – how many times does the average person break their nose in a lifetime? Once, maybe twice? Never? I’d lost count of the number of times my nose had been exploded that week. I was going to have to employ a talented warlock to craft me a new one when I got home. Or just where a false beak forever, like those old plague doctors.

I span flailing across the room and I heard Selladore swear; it seemed he had hurt his knee smashing it into my face. I landed on all fours beside the Sunday lunch family and grasped the chair leg of a small blonde boy, who looked down on my bloodied face with innocent eyes. I stood up shakily, tipped the brat out of his seat, and flung the chair at my one-time friend. With a small ‘pop’ sound, it turned into a sword in mid-air, twirled across the room, and buried itself in the pirate’s shoulder.

The tavern fell silent. Selladore looked from me, to the blonde boy lying face down on the floor, to the sword still quivering in his body, back to me, and finally at Boomlay. His jaw opened and closed silently.

“Shit, sorry,” said Boomlay. “I’m really sorry.”

It seems magical beings are just as prone to cock-ups as the rest of us.

With a wince, Selladore heaved the sword from his flesh and it dropped to the floor with a clang, where after half a second it sprang back into chair form, its rapidly elongating legs cracking into his ankles and buckling them.

“Boomlay!” yelled the battered pirate.

“Sorry, sorry! Oh gods, I’m so sorry.”

Selladore turned his furious glare to me. During the pause in the action my pulsing rage has abated somewhat, and I felt about ready to make friends. Selladore, however, looked as though he were on rather a different page. He raised a trembling finger, pointed to me, then drew it across his own throat. The red coursing sands of the Goochi desert flashed in his eyes, and battle fury gripped him.

“Hey, Selladore,” I said, in the tones of a sibling who has gotten a bit too excited in an afternoon tumbling match and accidentally smashed a picture frame over their older sister’s head, “shall we call it a draw?”

The pirate made a noise that can best be described as ‘if a werewolf was jilted at the altar’, and dived at me.

“I’ll whip your teeth out, ye belch-hocked throat globule! I’ll ripple yer gizzard!” he yelled, which proves my earlier point: rage is indeed a poet.

As the bleeding pirate twirled through the air towards me and I resigned myself to a spectacularly violent death, I quietly pondered as to whether much poetry gets written in a furious frenzy. To my knowledge, you don’t get much rage-poetry. Perhaps I could begin a new genre. Although, well, I’d be dead momentarily, so no, I concluded. Athelstan’s Anthology of Apoplexy would never see the light of day. Shame.

And then my murderous friend and I suddenly found ourselves transmuted into a pair of small green frogs.

Now, I could write a whole new book on the sensation of being a frog, and perhaps I will one day, but I feel as though to set loose a hundred pages of ranine science upon you at this stage would rather detract from the urgency and tragedy I have endeavoured to lace my story with. Suffice to say that being a frog is weird. Your mouth is very big, and you don’t have ears, and your fingers are all stuck together. I noted with some sadness that I was lacking a left hand, or flipper, or whatever frogs have. As I say: weird.

Selladore was transformed in mid-flight, of course, and his green nude oily body slapped into my own green nude oily body. It seemed he was still very angry (though he lacked the eyebrows to frown) because he continued his assault on my person. With our being frogs, however, nothing much happened beyond a lot of leg waggling and mouth opening and closing, and lots of little wet clapping noises. The deep discomfort of the situation soon quelled his anger, and the two of us sat, panting, side by side, avoiding eye contact. A hundred stories tall, Boomlay loomed over us.

“Will you both be good now?” she said.

“Ribbit,” I said.

“Ribbit,” said Selladore.

Boomlay turned to Glob.

“Glob. Do you speak frog?”

“Gi’o’er” said Glob.

“Er, right,” said the witch, crouching to level her massive face with our very little ones. “Now, ribbit once if you promise you won’t fight anymore, and twice if you intend to keep at it.”

“Ribbit,” said I.

“Ribbit,” said Selladore, and then “ribbit.”

I glared at him with my massive frog mouth hanging open. He squinted at me in what I suppose was intended to be a fearsome manner, but have you ever seen a frog squint? It’s adorable.

“Selladore,” said Boomlay, “you need to let it go. Let’s all be adults and put all of this ugliness behind us. Now I’d like you to try again.”

The furious pirate frog sighed deeply (which is, incidentally, a sentence that has never before been written in the entire history of humanity). We don’t really think of frogs as creatures that can convey emotion, much less as animals that would have any concept of disagreement, and far less as organisms capable of communicating their disdain at a concept as nuanced as reluctant resignation for the greater good, but here we find ourselves:

“Ribbit,” said Selladore, defeated.

And, with a sound like someone dropping a hammer into a bowlful of jelly, we were magicked back into humans; moist, nude humans.

“Where did our clothes go?” I asked the witch, who pretended not to hear and instead busied herself with emptying her cup of wine.

Then I looked over at Selladore and found him fully clothed.

“Hang on. Boomlay, where are my clothes? Why am only I naked?”

The witch tried and failed to hide the gleeful smirk on her face. I turned a circle in the tavern, my genitals exposed to the congregation of drunks and mercenaries. The Sunday lunch parents were desperately shielding the eyes of their children. The large hairy man with the hole in his foot and the potato in his beer was keeping well out of it. The barkeeper looked very tired.

“Why am only I naked?”

“Oh, sorry. Spell must have gone wrong. Here.”

After pausing several more seconds to relish my public humiliation, Boomlay lazily clicked her fingers and I found myself clad in an eye-poppingly tight pair of Lederhosen.

“Boomlay! Where the hell have my kingly clothes disappeared to, woman?”

But the witch just shook her head in apparent innocence.

“I think you two had better apologise,” she said.

“But he-“ began Selladore.

“No buts! You both drew your weapons. Now apologise. Athelstan, you first.”

“No.”

Her fingers snapped and in a flash I was arse-slappingly nude once more.

“For goodness sake, fine!”

Snap, and I was dressed once more. I turned to Selladore. His shoulder had stopped bleeding and the gash had closed up. I suddenly felt very sober. Partaking in a magical bar brawl that culminates in you being turned into a small wet amphibian will do that to you.

“I’m sorry, Selladore. Nothing was your fault. I didn’t mean it.”

“And?” said Boomlay.

“And I like you and I’m sorry I stabbed you.”

“Aye lad, I’m sorry too. Sorry I exploded your nose again.”

“It’s okay,” I sniffed.

We both shuffled our feet and avoided each other’s eyes in the centre of the silent inn.

“She left me, Selladore. After all I – after all we did for her, she didn’t want me. I don’t know what to do with myself. I really don’t.”

I felt the familiar sting behind my eyelids as traitorous tears misted my vision.

“I don’t know what to do,” I sobbed. Selladore took me in his arms and I buried my head in his shoulder. It was still sticky with blood, but I didn’t think it would be  appropriate to complain.