He panted and wheezed as his short legs carried him to the castle, through the muddy streets of Vhadeggot. He was going to be late. His red thistlescrew was askew on his head, and he had been in such a hurry, searching fretfully for his groovesreader, that he had put on the wrong boots. Fortunately, they were already so covered with greenish dirt that the King was unlikely to pay attention to this unforgivable breach of court protocol. He looked up. The castle seemed so far away, so close to the sky. They were the only people in the Land of Eggot whose King daily conversed with the clouds who passed by his window. But what would have seemed a foolish routine anywhere else was a sanctified pastime in Vhadeggot. Perhaps the King would be still talking strategy with a friendly cirrus when he would arrive, and his lateness would go unnoticed. When the King would appear in all His glory, he would drop on his knees, throw himself on the ground, and, carpet-like, would hear the reason why he had been summoned. The reason... He knew the reason. As the castle loomed more and more darkly above his head, he started to fear that the King would not let him say a last goodbye to his family, before sending him to this idiotic mission, probably demanded by a hairy cumulus. And he had his reader in his pocket, so he was technically ready. Before he knocked on the castle door, he turned to the city below him. Vhadeggot was still lost in a grey-brown mist, but the low hills had already emerged, and over the hills was the immense boring countryside where he would be trudging wearily for months, or even years, under the stern surveillance of a party of dim-witted knights-priests, and doing nothing but looking at fingers, fingers, fingers, fingers, peasants' fingers, slaves' fingers, vicars' fingers, measuring them, weighing them, and trying with his groovesreader to decipher God's message in the little lines written on everybody's fingertips. His last mission had kept him away two full years, and he had come back almost empty-handed, with only a mysterious ditty read on a little girl's sticky pinkie. His Majesty had fainted with joy when hearing the ditty, and, though He recognised it to be too far from godliness to be the Message He expected, the King nonetheless added the ditty to His list of personal mottoes. Since, the King had