Tanya Grotter and the Throne of the Ancient One
Шрифт:
“There! You know this spell, Sardanapal. And you know the rules! There will not be a match between the Invisibles and Tibidox in the next two years under any condition. Now even The Ancient One wouldn’t be able to do anything,” Grafin smirked. Sardanapal clutched his heart. His beard rushed forward and made an attempt to wind around Cagliostrov’s neck. The academician barely had time to hold it with a hand.
A bench fell with a deafening bowling strike. Tararakh got up. His huge lower jaw trembled. In his eyes were tears. “This mole interrupted the match… He interrupted when his celebrated Invisibles already almost lost! What is created now in the children’s minds?” he said hoarsely.
Grafin Cagliostrov alarmingly looked sideways at the pithecanthropus and began to move back. Tararakh moved slowly but determinedly. The benches fell one after another. “I’m warning you, I’ll defend myself! I have a blue belt in combat magic!” Cagliostrov began to yell.
“I have a fist the size of your head!” Tararakh said affectionately. “Better stand on the spot, slug, or it’ll be worse!”
“Academician! What, aren’t you going to interfere? Get your gorilla away from me! He has the eyes of a killer!” Grafin began to whimper.
Sardanapal turned away. “What, in fact, is happening? My laces are untied. I see nothing,” he said, ruefully examining his boots. The laces on them not only were untied, but also were so tangled up by some mysterious means that they presented a big enough threat to life and demanded immediate attention of the academician.
Tararakh finally overtook Cagliostrov, shook a barely noticeable speck of dust off the shoulder of the chair of the board of arbiters and, having almost tenderly picked him up off the ground, pulled him by the jacket lapel towards himself. “You’ll not get away with thi-i-i-is!” Cagliostrov said wistfully and, having tucked in his elbows, blinked in a doomed manner.
The dragon Keng-King of the Invisibles, not having had time to be taken away from the field yet, was considerably surprised. It had never seen a flying person with a trashcan on his head. This striking spectacle became so ingrained in the soul of the impressionable pangolin that for a long time it still did not spit out the swallowed players and only languidly sighed… Nevertheless, the match had already been put off, and nothing could be done about it.
The cabins participating in the races began to arrive the next morning, when the school day had only just started for the third years. Good that the first lesson was veterinary magic, and Tararakh himself would also enjoy taking a look.
The pithecanthropus wavered for about five minutes, casting askance looks at the window, from which a large part of his students no longer tore themselves away, and then stated, “Ahem, attention! I propose to change the theme of the lesson! Write! Cabins on Chicken Legs. Hmm… Special maganatomical features and all such in this vein. Ready? Then I don’t understand why you’re still sitting? Get on your feet and march to the courtyard! What hints don’t you understand?”
The third years jumped with a triumphant roar, overturning desks, and moved towards the doors. Only Shurasik alone remained on the spot. “But what about the seven-headed hydra? Really, will you not dictate the symptoms of diarrhea in aquatics?” he squeaked in protest.
The pithecanthropus stopped. The question caught him by surprise. “Eeee-ehhh… Excellent, Shurasik! I was thinking exactly whom to entrust with guarding the hydra! Keep an eye on it, lest it climb out from the portable tub!” he said, shutting the door.
Shurasik remained in class alone. Water splashed. The third of the hydra’s seven heads leaned out of the tub. The small spitefully derisive eyes stopped at the unhappy guard. “Shoo! Quick! March! Ugh, you’re told!” Shurasik shouted in a cowardly manner. He took a mop and started to push the hydra back into the tub. The third head disappeared, but the fourth appeared almost immediately. The wood crunched. The mop broke into two and disappeared in the hydra’s mouth. Shurasik even did not have time to notice precisely which one. After dropping the remaining stub, he clutched his stomach. “O-o-oh, no! I’m not okay! But only bears and hydra suffer from diarrhea!” he shouted in protest.
They poured out into the courtyard just in time. The first cabin was already marching onto the drawbridge. The guard cyclops Dumpling Maker saluted it, placing a huge hand against a protruded ear.
The cabin moved with a quick march step, throwing the pimply chicken legs out far. A moss-grown hag with one tooth in her mouth and bushy eyebrows looked out of its window. The straw roof of the cabin, similar to a mop of wheaten hair, bounced. Sparks fell from the chimney.
Slander Slanderych winced and attempted to send the genie Abdullah for the reference book on fire prevention. “Go yourself, worthless! Don’t load the snowy donkey of my patience with granite blocks of your mistrustfulness!” the quarrelsome genie began to roar. He was upset with the principal for not allowing him to read solemnly to the guests his Poem of a Thousand Curses. After hearing that a snowy donkey served as the genie’s patience, Slander was so puzzled that he gave up and went unnoticeably away to the side.
Following the first cabin, its friends were already rumbling on the drawbridge. Dumpling Maker was standing so still, chest out, eyes staring, with a hand exactly stuck to one ear. Miraculous bliss did not disappear from his face even when one of the cabins, making room for a neighbour, carelessly bumped him into the ditch. I’ll not understand vhere ze natural Greek gets such sergeant-major zeal from! Russia treats all alike!” Professor Stinktopp muttered disapprovingly.
In total the participants in the prospective races were seven Russian cabins, two Ukrainian huts, three Northern yurts on deer hooves, and the highlight – High-rise on Broiler Legs. The latter was so enormous that it was necessary to enlarge the gates with a special spell. When finally it managed with improbable efforts to squeeze through into the internal courtyard of Tibidox, it began to seem from the outside that an additional tower had appeared in the school of difficult-to-raise magicians.
“Perhaps we’ll persuade it to stay?” the academician Sardanapal asked.
“No way! I’ve heard about it! It has such a temper that it’ll start to kick all of them here. It spends its entire life on foreign tours for this very reason… Hey, Tararakh! Take the children to the side! Don’t get any closer!” Medusa began to worry. The students unwillingly moved aside.
Worked up by the long passage, the cabins still trampled for a while in the courtyard before they agreed to move up to the previously marked areas. The distance between the areas was measured such that one cabin could not kick another. Here they stood, occasionally creaking from time to time and shifting from foot to foot.
Yagge walked between the cabins and cordially greeted their mistresses. It was obvious from everything that Yagge had been acquainted with the majority of them already for about seven hundred years, no less…
“Granny also had such a cabin once. Someone chased it away. Granny went for slippery jacks – returned, and tsk-tsk! Really, there’re such snakes!” Bab-Yagun informed Vanka.
“What, so she didn’t find it?” Kuzya Tuzikov asked, putting his tousled head between the friends.