The Ogre of Oglefort

CHAPTER 20 The Ogre’s Aunts

Ivo and Mirella had soon worked out that the magic beans, like all the Norns’ gifts, were a little faulty: they only worked on animals who had once been humans. But this was useful in a way, for once all the rescuers had eaten the beans they knew exactly which fish they should eat and which animals might help them in their work.

The spiders who had protected Dr. Brainsweller from his mother were two middle-aged sisters who had been turned out of their home by a greedy landlord. They had been very fond of knitting and thought being spiders might suit them. And there was a hedgehog who used to be a shop assistant in a department store and only wanted to be alone.

Most of the animals in the castle, though, were just what they seemed. The spittlebug in the ogre’s nostril was simply a spittlebug. The wood lice behind his ears were simply wood lice and the bats in the rafters were bats.

But the children’s new friends in the garden were wonderfully helpful. The gnu made seed furrows with his cloven hooves; the aye-aye tied in the young shoots on the vines; and Bessie began work on clearing the moat. Soon the grounds began to look really well tended and tidy, and everyone was proud of this because it seemed that visitors would soon come to the castle.

The ogre’s bath ended better than it began, but it was not long before he became restless again and said he could feel himself becoming weaker by the hour and it was time to send off the invitations to the aunts for his funeral. He still hadn’t quite decided which aunt to leave the castle to, and if they came a few days early it would help him to make up his mind.

“Once I see them in the flesh I shall know,” he said.

So he sent a messenger to the three aunts asking them to come, and he told them they could bring Clarence if they had nobody to leave him with.

The messenger he used was not a magical person but a cousin of Brod’s, the man who brought the milk. This cousin rode around the countryside on an old gray horse, and though he was not speedy he was reliable.

The messenger went first to the Aunt-with-the-Nose.

This aunt lived in a huge, dark cave — a cavern really. She was very pale because of living in the dark, but her swollen nose glowed slightly, which helped her to sniff her way about. She wandered about in the cave, smelling everything that lived down there: roots, earth, stones — and of course feet when anybody came to visit. She could even smell crystals and stalactites.

This aunt was a vegetarian: she ate roots and leaves and her hobby was worm-collecting. She collected them because they did not smell in the way that furry animals do and were no bother. She had the best worm collection in Norland, and sometimes she swapped worms with other collectors or took them to worm shows.

When she got the message about coming for the funeral, she came out of her cave, nose first, and shuddered a little because the scent of the grass and the trees and the flowers always overwhelmed her, they were so strong. Then she set off down the hillside, up another hill and down again till she came to the house of her sister, the Aunt-with-the-Ears.

The Aunt-with-the-Ears was waiting for her, because she had heard her sister’s footsteps as soon as she left her cave. She was a giantess, with ears the size of footballs which drooped down on either side of her face. Her home was an old abbey with a carp pond which had been lived in by monks, and she kept to the inner rooms so that as little noise came to her as possible, but she also had outsize earplugs made from old footballs which she’d cut up. Even so, sometimes the sound of the rain plopping into the pond gave her a headache.

“Have you had your invitation from Dennis?” asked the Aunt-with-the-Nose.

Her sister nodded. “He seems to think he’s dying,” she said.

She wasn’t particularly upset because ogres don’t go in for family feeling. All the same, she thought they had better go.

“He says we can bring Clarence if we want to,” said the Aunt-with-the-Nose. “We could put him on a trolley.”

“Yes, we’d better do that. I don’t want to leave him — he just might be ready.”

The Aunt-with-the-Ears did not collect worms; she collected eggs. She collected every sort of egg, and because Norland was an unusual place she collected some very unusual eggs. Some of these had hatched into ordinary birds or reptiles; some had hatched into phoenixes or small dragons and flown away.

But Clarence hadn’t hatched. He was by far the largest egg that any of the aunts had seen — and though eggs can’t really keep on growing, it seemed to them that Clarence inside his egg was somehow forcing the shell outward without breaking it.

He had been with them for six years and still hadn’t made his way out into the world, yet they were certain that he wasn’t dead. Sometimes noises came from him — not cheepings, not cluckings, but… sighs, slight groans as though Clarence would have liked to get around to hatching, but couldn’t quite make the effort.

So now they put him on his special trolley and covered him with his egg cozy to stop him from getting chilled and wheeled him around to the third aunt, the Aunt-with-the-Eyes.

This aunt lived at the top of a tall tower which had once been a lighthouse. It was right at the edge of the sea, and when the aunt stood and looked out with her great eyes she could see every ship within hundreds of miles. She too collected things, but not worms or eggs — she collected the bones of sailors who had drowned. She gathered them up and bleached them and kept them in a special room in the tower: toe bones and ankle bones and thigh bones and ribs. This aunt was very thin because of running up and down the stairs of her tower. The Aunt-with-the-Ears was very tall and the Aunt-with-the-Nose was portly.

And when everything had been settled, the aunts set off, pulling Clarence behind them on his trolley.

“After all, Dennis is our nephew,” they told each other. “And we’ll have to see what’s to become of the castle.”

“Yes, that’s true. Who is he going to leave the castle to?”

They wondered about this all the way to Oglefort. The castle was the biggest and most important in the area — it must go to someone who mattered. And of course it should be someone from within the family.

If Clarence had only hatched and become someone remarkable, perhaps he would have had a chance to inherit — but the aunts were sensible women and they realized that the ogre couldn’t leave his castle to an egg.