CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
In The Jungle
‘What is this,’ said the leopard, ‘that is so ’sclusively
dark, and yet so full of little pieces of light?’
Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories
The screech with which Me-Rah welcomed the rising sun woke Ben from his restless sleep. He had been dreaming of Firedrake. Of course. In his dream, he had summoned him with the scale, and they had flown together over the thousand times one thousand islands. The dream had felt so real that before Ben crawled out of his tent he instinctively reached for the locket with the scale inside it. Barnabas had given him the locket when he showed him the scale. ‘You’d better not carry that present around in your jeans pocket,’ he had said, taking the tarnished silver locket out of his backpack. The head of a unicorn was moulded inside the lid. ‘I once bought it from a silversmith to remind me of all that we’ve lost already,’ Barnabas had said. ‘But it’s time it had a less tragic purpose.’
The locket was just large enough to take the dragon’s scale, and the clasp closed with a reassuring snap. Ben had not touched Firedrake’s present itself again, for fear that it would make the dragon sense his longing to see him. Now that he and Twigleg had heard those screeches in the night, the danger that the griffins represented seemed much more real, and Ben was glad that Firedrake was far away, in safety – although he kept catching himself closing his hand around the locket.
Hothbrodd was lashing his plane down with another rope when Ben crawled out of the tent-louse. The troll had used one of the griffins’ poles to help him, ramming it between the rocks.
‘By Odin’s ravens, I hope the griffins don’t take that as a challenge!’ murmured Barnabas, as he let the tent-lice scurry back into their box. ‘Trolls aren’t the most sensitive beings on this planet.’
‘But they have very good hearing, Barnabas!’ called Hothbrodd, throwing the crabs that had settled on his green skin overnight back into the sea.
Lola was refuelling her plane on the beach, and as usual the troll was winding her up by saying that her tiny aircraft consumed higher-proof fuel than his own plane. The arguments between the two of them were getting more imaginative and extensive every day, as if every insult that they exchanged consolidated the friendship that linked them.
Ben had stowed provisions and tools in their backpacks the evening before. Hothbrodd’s was larger and heavier than a fridge, but the troll slung it over his shoulder as if it hardly weighed any more than Twigleg. Ben was very glad to have Hothbrodd with them, even if it was confirmed, yet again, that trolls interfered seriously with reception on mobile phones and by radio. On the other hand, the jungle waiting for them had no power sockets anyway, and it was a fact that Hothbrodd wasn’t the only reason why their mobile phones hadn’t been able to send messages for days now. They had sent their latest news through to MÍMAMEIĐR over the transmitter on the plane.
Lola had suggested that she could spend another day investigating the island from the air before the others set out to explore it on land. But the thought of the Pegasus eggs made Barnabas forget his usual caution. His idea was to venture on a preliminary expedition with Hothbrodd, while Ben and Twigleg stayed with the plane, trying to get in touch with Vita and Guinevere, but Ben replied only that he hadn’t flown from Norway to Indonesia just to sit on a beach getting worked up over the lack of radio reception.
Twigleg ventured to interrupt them. ‘There are forty-seven species of Indonesian snake whose venom can be fatal to human beings, master!’ he said. ‘Maybe you ought at least to sit on Hothbrodd’s shoulders!’
‘Heavens above, this is my first time ever on a desert island!’ cried Ben. ‘And I’m a dragon rider! I’m not going to have myself carried around by a troll!’
Hothbrodd wrinkled his bark-like brow as if he wasn’t sure whether to take that as an insult. ‘This troll will soon be nothing but a green puddle anyway!’ he grumbled, with glance of disapproval at the sun, burning down fiercely even at this early hour. ‘I’m surprised the parrots hereabouts don’t fall from the air ready-cooked, like a shower of roast chicken.’
To Me-Rah, at least, that did sound like an insult. She announced, with a shrill squawk, that the weather on Pulau Bulu was perfect, and favoured Hothbrodd with a curse in Trollish – very impressive evidence that chattering lories really are past masters at imitating other people’s voices.
‘Right, you come with us, then,’ Barnabas told Ben, ‘and I apologise for my paternal anxiety. One of these days you’ll understand. But Twigleg ought to go with Lola in her plane. It’s nice of him to worry about our safety, but I’m sure there must be over four hundred species of snake on this island that can kill people of his size.’
In any other place, the mere idea of getting into Lola’s plane would have brought Twigleg’s pale forehead out in a sweat of fear. The memory of his last flight with her still made his heart beat faster, although it had been over two years ago. But in this case, it really did seem the more tempting prospect – even though, as usual, he hated to be separated from Ben.
They had all been expecting Me-Rah to say a last goodbye as soon as it was light, but when Lola imperiously waved Twigleg over to her plane, the parrot settled on Ben’s shoulder without any comment.
‘My dear Me-Rah,’ said Barnabas as their feathered guide told them, courageously keeping her voice under control, that she wanted to help them in their search for the griffins, ‘my dear Me-Rah, we can’t possibly accept your generous offer! You’ve done more than enough for us. But it would be extremely helpful if you could tell us once more exactly where you think the griffins may be nesting.’
Me-Rah could not conceal her relief. She advised Barnabas to search the mountains rising beyond the treetops to the southwest. Then, by way of farewell, she flew three times in a circle around each of them, and disappeared into the dense growth of trees along the beach. It swallowed Me-Rah up as the sea swallows up a fish, and Ben wondered whether that was just what a forest meant to a bird while he followed Barnabas in under the trees: a sea of leaves and branches in which she moved as naturally as fish move in the salty waves of the sea.
To Ben, on the other hand, it was like entering another world when, after the bright sunlight, shadows suddenly cast chequered patterns on his clothes. The hot air was humid and moist, like the hothouses in the zoo where tropical lizards dreamed of the heat in their native lands, and when he looked up he saw not one but a dozen canopies of leaves: it was a multi-storied structure of branches, creepers, flowers and foliage, and made you doubt that anything like sky existed. Guinevere would probably have been able to name any flower that added a touch of colour to the greenery. She had inherited, from her mother, a passion for everything that grew and flowered. ‘Never eat anything if you don’t know what it is!’ she had warned Ben. ‘Don’t touch any leaf without gloves on, and don’t trust plants that shoot their seeds into your face.’
Easier said than done. How was he to avoid touching leaves when they were all over the place? Luckily Hothbrodd trudged ahead, ploughing a path through the dense thickets that allowed them to walk on with reasonable ease. But all the same, Ben had to keep freeing himself from tendrils and thorns, or picking tiny frogs and furry caterpillars off his clothes. He had never seen such large butterflies before, or such colourful beetles. And the monkeys! If he put his head right back, he saw them swinging from tree to tree high above him. Well, it was going rather too far to say he saw them… they weren’t much more than shadows in the shade, a leap from one tree to the next, gone before his eyes could tell him if it was a gibbon or a macaque moving between the sky and the ground up above him.
In view of all these marvels, it was difficult to think of the dangers that came with them: the coral snake that Ben noticed only because Barnabas reached for his arm to warn him; the mottled coat of a marbled cat among the trees… When Ben nearly trod on a sleepy white-lipped pit viper, and Barnabas could hardly take a step without wiping spiders’ web
s and mosquitoes off his glasses, Hothbrodd finally put them on his shoulders after all, and Ben had to admit it was a great relief. No insects bothered Hothbrodd, maybe because his bark-like skin was too thick for any sting to get through it – or because he looked like a walking tree. Lola would certainly have added that it was on account of the fishy smell that all trolls gave off. Whatever the reason, Ben enjoyed not having to take care where he put his feet, and being able to look up undisturbed. He particularly liked the flying squirrels, and he had never seen so many fantastic birds, not even in the temple of Garuda. They made up for the sweat that drenched his clothes and the seasickness he felt because of the way Hothbrodd swayed as he walked, even if their whistling, croaking and screeching filled the hot air with deafening noise.
Hothbrodd wasn’t interested in the birds, or the flying squirrels, or the monkeys. The troll had only a fleeting glance to spare for the gigantic, humming flowers of the Singing Plant-Wolf that had shown them the way to Pulau Bulu. Hothbrodd took an interest in only one species of living thing in this jungle: the trees. He kept stopping to whisper a few incomprehensible words in Trollish to them, or to stroke their bark affectionately, and he looked up at the enormously tall trunks with such delight that, in the end, Barnabas had to remind him gently of their quest.
Of course, the troll’s presence attracted other fabulous beings. A fist-sized spider with a frog’s head let itself down from a teak tree. A cat with fur that shone like molten gold made its way out of the thicket, and looked at the troll in amazement. Not even Barnabas knew all the fabulous creatures that Hothbrodd lured out of the jungle, and Ben could see how much his adopted father would have liked to talk to every one of them – although some were looking at their party in a far from friendly way. Once they saw a tiny figure on a branch that looked faintly reminiscent of Twigleg. But when Ben hastily asked Hothbrodd if he could take a closer look at it, the tiny being bared sharp fangs, and narrowed its red eyes with such hostility that Ben’s hope of having found a companion for the homunculus died down as quickly as it had flared up. Of course, he knew how much Twigleg longed for someone like himself, but this creature would probably have eaten him.
In spite of Hothbrodd’s long strides, it was not until noon that they reached the foothills of the mountains where Me-Rah thought the griffins had their nesting places. The slopes were soon rising so steeply that Hothbrodd had to stop, more and more often, to lean against a tree, gasping for breath.
‘By Surtr’s flaming sword!’ he cursed, raising his arms, which were dripping with sweat. ‘Trolls aren’t made for such weather, Barnabas!’ he complained. ‘This island is like an oven! Nifhel on earth! I just hope the rat has had better luck than us in finding the griffins!’
After another hour, during which a tropical rainstorm drenched their sweaty clothes yet again, they came to a clearing burned in the jungle by a flash of lightning. Creepers had covered the charred tree stumps with fresh green, and for the first time since they set out, they could see the sky above them through the branches. Hothbrodd bent down to pick up a couple of snakes. Their teeth had as much difficulty as the insect stings in getting through his skin, and the troll was just throwing a particularly venomous viper into the surrounding trees when Ben heard a rustling above him.
At first he saw only the gibbon.
Then the two macaques.
And then he felt a sharp pain, and realised that Hothbrodd was swaying under him.
And all the green around him turned black.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
A Mysterious Find
You haven’t seen a tree until you’ve
seen its shadow from the sky.
Amelia Earhart
Twigleg soon felt sorry that his fear of snakes had made him forget his fear of Lola’s skill as a pilot. That crazy rat! Lola took advantage of every upwind and strong gust to indulge her fatal passion for looping the loop, climbing steeply and diving! Twigleg had once asked her why she didn’t appear in an aerobatics show. ‘Oh, you’re such a dreamer, humpelclumpus!’ was all she said, pinching his cheek. ‘Who wants to watch a rat aviatrix? Anyway, why would I want to feature as a trained performing animal when I can be wild and free?’
Yes, Lola was nothing if not wild and free. In all his long life, Twigleg had regarded rats as his natural enemies. After all, to someone of his size they were terrifying beasts of prey. In his younger days, he had almost lost one arm to a rat bite, and he couldn’t count the number of times he had run away from them. He’d have bet his life that he would never call a rat his friend, certainly not one who liked to loop the loop and always made out that she couldn’t remember his name, because she had so much fun playing around with the word homunculus. But it was a fact that he had been friends with Lola Greytail for a long time now. Indeed, very good friends, even if she drove him demented with her taste for living dangerously.
As usual, the rat was singing out loud to herself while she steered a slalom course around the trees. Pirate songs, robber songs, drinking songs. Lola had an inexhaustible stock of them. After two minutes, Twigleg had already thrown up twice through the window, and couldn’t wait for the moment when they would finally break through the leaf canopy and see the clear sky ahead, Suppose a liana disabled Lola’s propeller, or one of the branches under which she zoomed at such breakneck speed skewered her plane along with the two of them inside it? But of course Lola was enjoying all this, and she was in no hurry to fly higher.
‘Suppose we can’t see the griffins’ nests from up there?’ she called to Twigleg when he cautiously reminded her of their mission. ‘No, no, we ought to search down here some more first.’ Whereupon they got caught in a gigantic spider’s web, and couldn’t break free until Lola roared the engine so that it sounded like a desperate bumblebee. And then they almost collided with a flying squirrel.
‘By all my bare-tailed cousins, what was that?’ cried Lola indignantly as she throttled back the engine, much to Twigleg’s relief, and the plane finally climbed higher.
‘A member of the Sciuridae genus,’ replied Twigleg, pressing one hand to his queasy stomach. ‘Not unusual in this climatic zone. Indonesia has thirty-seven known species of flying furry animals. Of course they don’t really fly. The membrane under their arms—’
He stopped abruptly as Lola steered the plane into a tangle of wild orchids, just before it collided with a gibbon swinging from tree to tree by its long arms.
‘This is impossible! How’s a girl pilot supposed to manoeuvre in territory where squirrels and monkeys think they can fly?’ said Lola angrily as she looked for a way out of the orchid roots. ‘Spoilsports! I love to fly a slalom around trees… you know, like in that film with the spaceships and the talking bears on the strange planet.’
Twigleg hadn’t the faintest idea what she was talking about. He and Lola had very different tastes in films.
‘Whatever,’ the rat murmured, putting the plane into such a steep climb that Twigleg thought his stomach had moved to just behind his forehead.
They were shooting up to the leaf canopy as if Lola was trying to fly to the moon. But suddenly Twigleg let out a loud shriek.
‘Lola! Lola, there they are!’ he cried – and bumped his head on the roof of the plane as Lola abruptly cut out the engine. A tree ahead of them spread mighty branches on which feathery, evergreen leaves grew. But it wasn’t the leaves that had attracted Twigleg’s attention, it was the fruits that the tree bore, round as melons but considerably larger.
Twigleg’s heart was in his mouth as Lola made for the tree, but this time it wasn’t just fear that made it beat so fast. He had found several descriptions of griffins’ nests in the library at MÍMAMEIĐR. They all agreed that griffins had the caverns where they nested built for them by flocks of smaller birds, relations of Furnarius rufus, also known as the hornero or oven-bird.
As its name suggests, it builds oven-shaped nests out of mud. The oldest description – Twigleg had found it in a fifteenth-century Persian manus
cript – claimed that griffins’ nests were like the palaces of the Mesopotamian kings whose treasures the griffins had once guarded. When Lola approached the top nest, which clung to the trunk of the tree under a huge branch, Twigleg could see with his own eyes that the manuscript had been correct. The entry hole, as wide as a barn door, was framed by an artistic carving like the reliefs on the ruins of Persepolis. It was an incredible sight in the Indonesian rain forest. However, the relief looked unfinished, as if work on it had been abruptly interrupted.
‘Wait! What… what are you doing?’ cried the horrified Twigleg as Lola made for the entrance. ‘Barnabas only asked us to find the nests! He didn’t say anything about flying into them!’
‘Take it easy, humpelcluss!’ cried Lola, her voice competing with the noise of the engine as she pointed to the side of the nest. ‘I don’t think we’re going to meet the masters of the house.’
She was right. Only now did Twigleg see that the nest had been wrecked. In many places, the mud walls looked as if gigantic claws had torn them apart. It didn’t make sense. Why would the griffins destroy their own nests? The smaller nests, clinging to the branches and trunk of the tree lower down, had also been destroyed. Creatures in the service of the griffins had lived in those; in Mesopotamia, they had often been snakes, cats, or other birds of prey.
‘All the same, I really don’t think flying into one of these nests is a good idea!’ shouted Twigleg.
But Lola’s plane was already whirring through the gateway like a fly into the invitingly open mouth of a toad.
Brown twilight surrounded them.
The mud floor of the nest was so badly raked up by claws that Lola had to fly around it a couple of times before she found a place to land.
‘Oh, mouse-droppings, they’ve gone!’ she cursed as she jumped out of the cockpit. Lola’s curses were not quite so imaginative as Sorrel’s, but she enjoyed them just as much.