Lola had made herself comfortable in the pilot’s seat. ‘Don’t worry, humklumpupus,’ she said as she put a spanner and the signal pistol on her lap. ‘I’ll wake you if a masked Someone or a bintuwhatsit turns up. I can easily go for a week without sleep anyway.’
The yawn that she hid behind her grey paw made that assurance a little less credible, but as usual, Lola’s confident manner finally made Twigleg close his eyes.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Night is Long in the Jungle
Waiting is uncanny when you are
waiting for something uncanny.
Astrid Lindgren, The Brothers Lionheart
It was a dreadful dream! One of the worst that Twigleg had ever had. They were pulling his master to pieces the way children take an insect apart! Crowds of monkeys, screeching and baring their teeth, and he was kneeling in front of the parts trying to put them together again, but he simply couldn’t remember what Ben had looked like. How was that possible?
Twigleg was hugely relieved when Lola shook him awake and the dream images dissolved in green twilight. But his relief didn’t last for long.
‘At last!’ hissed Lola. ‘Heavens, you’re a sound sleeper. That bird would wake me even if I was dead!’
Me-Rah was fluttering above them among the phosphorescent fungi, screeching, ‘Binturong! Binturong!’
Twigleg searched his mind for a translation of the word, but Me-Rah’s panic-stricken squawking seemed to have obliterated all his knowledge. Lola told him to do up his seat belt, but his fingers were shaking as if they belonged to someone else. Something was snorting and wheezing outside the opening in the trunk of the hollow tree. A muzzle pushed its way in, followed by a stocky body with sturdy bow legs, a badger-like head, and shaggy grey-brown fur. A binturong.
Lola started the engine, but it would only spit and judder. The jungle climate really didn’t suit the plane. Fly, thought Twigleg, oh, please fly! He really wouldn’t have thought he’d ever want that so passionately. Luckily for them, the binturong didn’t move very fast, but it was making purposefully for them, and Lola’s plane wasn’t much larger than its head! Its paws would scoop them out of the tiny aircraft as easily as scooping the flesh out of an avocado!
But when the attacker was only a few padding footsteps away, Lola finally got the engine to catch. The binturong stopped and looked in surprise at the humming thing rising and lurching in the air in front of it. Then it straightened up, as clumsily as a dancing bear hitting out at a moth, and raised its paw. The first blow hit the left wing. The second only just missed the fuselage of the plane. Groaning, Twigleg put his head between his knees as Lola brought the spinning aircraft up just in time, before it could crash into the wall of the hollow tree. But the hairy paws were still reaching out to it. This time they missed the propeller by a centimetre, and almost tore off one of the wheels. Next moment the world was upside down, and only Twigleg’s belt kept him in his seat. Lola steered in reverse through the animal’s shaggy hind legs, and so narrowly escaped another blow of its paw. The draught of that blow almost carried the plane out into the night.
‘Fly higher! Higher!’ cried Twigleg.
‘Oh yes?’ Lola shouted back. ‘So that we get caught in the lianas and drop appetisingly in front of this creature’s paws?’
Then binturong was obviously enjoying the hunt. It snorted and grunted like a dog chasing a ball, and Twigleg saw, in alarm, that Lola was checking the amount of fuel she had left, with a look of concern on her face. The engine began spluttering again, but just as Lola was reaching for the signal pistol in this emergency, Me-Rah came to their aid. She bravely pecked the binturong’s ear and then dive-bombed its sensitive nose. Twigleg felt ashamed to see so much courage from the parrot, but the binturong soon recovered from its surprise, thrust at Me-Rah with its head and swept her out of the air.
Now it was Lola’s turn to help the heroic parrot. She sent the whirring plane so boldly past the attacker’s nose that Twigleg found himself wedged between the seats once more. But Me-Rah was so dazed after being head-butted by the binturong that she was still on the floor when it turned to her again.
Oh no! It was going to eat Me-Rah before their eyes!
When the piece of bark dropped from above, and hit the binturong right on the head, Twigleg thought at first it was a lucky coincidence. But a second piece of bark followed the first, and this time it hit its mark again, right between the binturong’s ears. The robber howled, and rubbed its shaggy head, baffled. A third missile struck its muzzle, and was followed by such a loud screech that the hollow tree echoed to the sound. That was too much for the nocturnal hunter. The binturong retreated with a disgruntled puffing, and scrambled hastily through the gap in the tree trunk and out into the night. Another piece of bark flew after it, followed by a chatter expressing considerable satisfaction.
Twigleg exchanged an enquiring glance with Lola, but she seemed to have no more idea than he did what to think of the help they had received. Lurching through the air, she came down beside Me-Rah, who was still sitting on the floor, stalled the engine, and threw the signal pistol into Twigleg’s lap.
‘Give me cover, humklupus!’ she hissed, while Twigleg stared blankly at the pistol. ‘I’m afraid this unexpected help just means we’re going to land on a different dinner-plate!’ Then she jumped out of the plane, with the spanner in her paw, and placed herself protectively in front of Me-Rah, who was wailing and plucking at her left wing.
‘Hey!’ called Lola into the darkness from which the chattering sound came. ‘I don’t know who or what you are, but one thing’s for sure all over the world: rats are poisonous to eat, and this one will be particularly difficult to digest. Especially when people want to have her friends for dinner!’
The chattering that replied sounded much amused.
At this Lola lost the last of her sense of humour. ‘Oh, so you think it’s funny?’ she shouted shrilly up to their rescuer. ‘Seems to me you’ve let our size mislead you. You’d better be warned: there are three of us!’
And so there were. Twigleg climbed out of the plane to prove it. Why die alone as a coward, when he could do it in the company of friends? He stationed himself beside Lola and raised the pistol, though he hadn’t the faintest idea how to fire it.
‘A jenglot! By the hair on the head of the Golden Gibbon!’ came a reply from above them. ‘Why didn’t you let him loose on the binturong? Although he looks very pale, and instead of pointed teeth he seems to have only a pointed nose!’
‘A jeng-what? Nonsense, he’s something far worse!’ Lola replied, raising the spanner threateningly. ‘He’s a homunculus!’
So there it was! Twigleg had known all along that she got the word for him muddled up on purpose.
‘Go on!’ Lola whispered to him. ‘Look as ferocious as you can!’
Twigleg did his best, but it took all his courage to stay put when a figure emerged from the lianas above them.
A very long-armed figure with dark body hair.
Their rescuer was a gibbon.
Wearing a man’s jacket.
He landed smoothly on the withered leaves and bent down first to Me-Rah, then to Lola, and finally to Twigleg.
‘Very unusual clothes for a jenglot,’ he observed in an ape dialect that reminded Twigleg of the language of Madagascan lemurs.
Lola clutched the spanner even more firmly in her paw.
‘What’s he saying?’ she whispered to Twigleg, looking darkly up at the gibbon. ‘Can we trust him?’
Their rescuer didn’t seem to make Me-Rah uneasy. She was paying a good deal more attention to her hurt wing, which Twigleg thought was reassuring. He was also beginning to get really curious about these jenglots.
‘Ha!’ said the gibbon. ‘Now I know what you remind me of!’
Twigleg raised the signal pistol again as the gibbon bent over him, but he saw no ill will in the dark eyes bent on him. All that Twigleg saw there was curiosity. And a clever mind.
‘I kn
ow! You look like a dwarf version of the whiteskins who come here on their big ships,’ observed their rescuer. ‘Do you go as red as a boiled lobster too when you’ve had too much sun?’
He prodded Twigleg in the chest with one finger, as if to make sure that he was real.
‘Hey, watch out!’ cried Lola, threatening the gibbon with the spanner again. ‘He has very fragile limbs, and he really is not a toy for apes!’
Twigleg was much moved by her concern for him, not that the gibbon seemed particularly alarmed by either the spanner or the signal pistol.
‘This island has had some very strange visitors recently,’ he said, picking a beetle out of his white beard.
Visitors…
Even Me-Rah forgot her wing.
‘Have you seen other strangers?’ Twigleg almost swallowed his own tongue in excitement. ‘Was there a boy with them, dark-haired, medium height? And a man with glasses and grey hair…’
‘… and don’t forget the green-skinned giant,’ said the gibbon, ending his sentence for him.
That made Lola raise the spanner again at once. When she was in fighting mood, she wasn’t about to make peace in a hurry.
‘Oh, I see!’ she said. ‘You were one of the kidnappers! Where are our friends? Come on, out with it!’
The gibbon looked at her with as much interest as if he had discovered a strange clockwork toy.
‘I’ve never seen anything like you before,’ he stated. ‘The rats on this island don’t usually wear clothes. Or travel around in…’ here he cast Lola’s plane a mocking glance… ‘or travel around in toy aircraft!’
Lola was about to answer him sharply, but the gibbon cut her short with a long-armed gesture.
‘Your friends are in the same unfortunate situation as mine. And yes, I can take you to them. Although it looks,’ he added, tapping the propeller of Lola’s plane with one finger, ‘it looks as if you’ll need some other means of transport.’
Unfortunately the gibbon was right. The binturong had done a good deal of damage to Lola’s plane. One rotor blade was cracked, and the left wing of the little aircraft had a nasty split in it. Lola looked at the plane as unhappily as if it were an old friend who had been injured, which was understandable after all the adventures they had been through together.
‘Some other means of transport?’ she asked sharply. ‘And where are we supposed to find that?’
The gibbon mockingly bared his teeth, and pointed to his own chest. ‘TerTaWa, at your service. But we’d better wait for morning.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The Griffins’ Royal Tree
There is nothing in which the birds differ more
from man than the way in which they can build
and yet leave a landscape as it was before.
Robert Lynd, The Blue Lion and Other Essays
Before Twigleg had met TerTaWa, he’d have bet his five fingers (and he was greatly attached to his fingers) that no kind of travel could be more uncomfortable than flying in Lola’s infernal plane. He’d have lost the bet, and with it his fingers. It was a pleasant sensation when the gibbon put him on his hairy shoulder. But then TerTaWa began swinging from tree to tree – so high above the ground that in his mind’s eye Twigleg saw himself smashed down there like the test tube that had given birth to him!
Aaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!
And what did that totally crazy rat do? Lola was humming happily to herself! Even though she’d had to leave her beloved plane behind in the hollow tree. It’s all for my master, Twigleg reminded himself. For my master… Ma-ma-maaaaster!
Close your eyes, Twigleg!
Yes, that did improve things a bit.
He didn’t open his eyes again until the gibbon stopped. Although it felt to him as if they had been jumping from tree to tree for days on end.
‘By all the three-humped camels of Samarkand!’ whispered Lola. ‘Take a look at that, humklupus!’
Such an enormous tree spread its canopy in front of them that all the others seemed to retreat respectfully from it. Mud nests exactly like the ruined nests that Lola and Twigleg had found hung from its mighty trunk and its countless branches. But high above, in the crown of the tree, there was a structure, complete with battlements, beside which the other nests looked like hovels in the shade of a princely palace. Its walls shone in rich shades of red and green, as if they were set with rubies and emeralds.
‘Let me make the introductions,’ whispered TerTaWa. ‘The Royal Tree of Kraa the Terrible! No, wait a minute. He prefers the title of Kraa of the Murderous Beak. Kraa who kills with talons, venom and claws, Kraa of the Blood-Drenched Feathers, Eater of a Thousand Hearts…’
The entire tree was in motion. Crowds of monkeys and apes – lorises, macaques, gibbons, sirulis – were climbing up the trunk and along the branches to a platform that had been built right below the palatial nest like a great square in the crown of the tree. There was a throne in the middle of it, with a griffin’s head carved on its back, and above the throne – the sight almost made Twigleg drop Lola’s binoculars – hung a dozen woven cages. Twigleg could make out the outlines of prisoners behind the twigs from which the cages were made.
The basketwork cage hanging directly over the throne was far and away the largest, and TerTaWa uttered furious chattering when green feathers appeared, pressed against the woven side of the cage.
‘Why all the excitement?’ whispered Lola. ‘Is this some kind of assembly?’
‘No, Kraa is about to dispense justice!’ TerTaWa whispered back. ‘That crook-beaked monkey-murderer! He loves putting on a show!’ The gibbon struck the trunk of the tree where he was sitting with his fist. ‘He’ll kill them!’ he groaned. ‘Shrii, Kupo, Patah and all the others. Or sell them to the poachers to fill his treasury!’
‘How about a little more optimism?’ hissed Lola. ‘We must get closer to the cages. Can you do that without being recognised, TerTaWa?’
By way of an answer, the gibbon picked a fruit growing above them. He bit into it and rubbed the juice into his dark hair until it turned a reddish colour. Then he ruffled up the white whiskers on his cheeks, pulled the hair on his head over his eyes, made the tips of his ears look pointed – and bared his teeth.
‘What’s the plan?’ he whispered.
‘Plan? By my aircraft’s compass and elevator,’ hissed Lola, as Me-Rah stared in alarm at all the apes and monkeys still clambering up the tree, ‘what kind of a plan? We’ll improvise, that’s what! We’ll find our friends and let them know we’re working to set them free? Will that do for you?’
TerTaWa glanced doubtfully at the basketwork cages – and ducked hastily as a shadow fell on the tree where they were sitting. Rushing filled the humid, sultry air, and five griffins came gliding through the branches of the surrounding trees. They flew towards the platform, circled in the air above the throne, and finally, one by one, came down to perch on the branches above it. They dug the claws of their paws into the dark bark, they folded their wings as if clenching fingers into fists, and their eyes, the eyes of birds of prey, scanned the crowd that had assembled in the space around the throne below them.
They looked so much smaller in the pictures! That was all Twigleg could think. A ridiculous thought, for he had read often enough that griffins were the only fabulous beings that could compete with dragons in size.
As usual, of course, Lola’s reaction was rather different.
‘By all the storms of this world,’ she whispered, in a tone of admiration, ‘those creatures really are magnificent!’
‘Magnificent?’ hissed TerTaWa. ‘Plaguey rapacious felines! Brood of snake-tailed robbers! See the way they’re looking down at us? Roargh, Hiera, Chahska, Fierra, Greeeiiiir… there were more of them once, many more. But the rain and the humid heat don’t agree with the older ones. And they don’t often have young. There are only three females left, and Kraa claims them all for himself, so two of them flew away last year. Of course Kraa claims that Shrii persuaded them to go, but not
even he knows where they are.’
Another griffin came down through the canopy of leaves.
‘Tchraee!’ The gibbon bared his teeth as the griffin came down to perch on a branch above the others. ‘He’s Kraa’s adjutant, and almost as bad as Kraa himself. When Tchraee is in a bad temper he likes to eat one of the lorises that are always having to decorate Kraa’s nest with new pictures. Do you see how he’s staring down at the basket that holds Shrii? Tchraee has hated him ever since Shrii came out of his mother’s body.’
‘Out of her body?’ Lola was checking the ammunition in the signal pistol. ‘You mean griffin young don’t hatch from eggs?’
‘They’d bite your head off for that question, rat,’ whispered TerTaWa. ‘No, griffins have cubs in the same way as lions. Reee was Kraa’s sister, and Tchraee was in love with her, but Reee didn’t bother to conceal what she thought of him. Some say that Shrii’s father wasn’t a griffin but the god Garuda himself. The theory is that’s why he’s so brightly coloured! But I think his father was a Pelangi bird. They sometimes fly here from Sumatra.’
A Pelangi bird. Twigleg wished he was back in the library of MÍMAMEIĐR, with the books that told you all about the world, so that you didn’t have to board a rat’s plane to go and find out. Or ride on a griffin’s shoulder.
‘Duck down!’ whispered TerTaWa. ‘See those black macaques? They’re the guards. If they see you, they’ll feed you to the jackal scorpions without a moment’s hesitation!’
Jackal scor…? Before Twigleg had finished thinking about this alarming name, TerTaWa was taking a great leap over to the tree with the griffins in it. Twigleg really admired the silence with which he made that leap, even if it had him feeling that his stomach was in his mouth again. Didn’t the force of gravity affect gibbons? He couldn’t think of any other explanation!