FORTIETH

Ambo flew by a castle tall in the hills. Pink, oh! How pink the walls of Castle Tall were in the hills. A people of mice lived there, standing, female, dressed in white robes, magical, and mysterious. Their language was a strange dialect.

Ambo landed. He picked a blade of grass. “Well,” he thought the grass looked like a sword. It was a sword. Ambo had a sword, green, and straight, supple. “Let’s go see them, the mice ladies.” By then, maybe you guessed it, he had dropped his magic pot of paint (remember it was deep blue) and the elephant-sized brush he wrote words with, onto the clouds.

They were forty mice in that castle. Coincidentally it was Ambo’s fortieth birthday. “What does it mean?” the magician wondered (how did he know they were forty? I don't know). Did I tell you Ambo was a magician? His power was based on this that he thought this looked like that, to such extend that for him this was that and that was it, almost always. Now why did Ambo need a blade of grass? Because it was his birthday, and birthday is almost always a strange day. Especially the fortieth.

A womouse greeted Ambo. "Holle," she said, "my nema is Edilo." Her eyes shone.

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[Picture: Number by reading_is_dangerous]