TerTaWa had not been the only one to lower his head when Shrii’s name was mentioned. Knowing that the young griffin was still Kraa’s prisoner made all his friends feel that their own freedom was a betrayal. It was the same for Ben and Barnabas too.
‘Did this have to be our meeting place?’ asked Patah with a disapproving glance at the Whispering Tree.
Twigleg had asked Me-Rah to dictate him an account of the way to it, and had left it and his backpack in the dish in front of the griffin statue, trusting Lola to find it there. Of course the rat had not disappointed him.
‘The parrot’s idea, was it?’ Patah nodded to Me-Rah in annoyance. ‘Did she tell you what we call this tree?’
Even TerTaWa looked at him with obvious discomfort.
‘Monkey Strangler!’ called Patah accusingly.
The branches, laden with blossom and birds, rustled as if the tree thought Patah’s hostility was amusing.
‘Hey, it’s laughing!’ observed Hothbrodd, delighted. ‘And it says it doesn’t strangle you unless you steal eggs from the nests in its branches.’
He approached the huge tree as hesitantly as a child approaching Father Christmas. Not because he was afraid of it (he was afraid of nothing but wasps, a secret that the troll carefully kept to himself). No, the Whispering Tree of Pulau Bulu made Hothbrodd so happy that his own feet would hardly obey him, and he stepped under its crown, which smelled of cinnamon and nutmeg, with bated breath. When he touched the silky, pale grey bark, a shower of blossom fell on him. The laughter with which Hothbrodd picked the pale green flowers out of his hair was so loud that all the birds above him, pecking at the golden pollen, flew up in alarm. Only when the tree whispered soothingly to its leaves did they disappear into the deep flower-cups again.
In the protection of a tree that spread so much peace and joy, it seemed to Ben almost disrespectful to be planning a rescue that couldn’t take place without a fight, not to mention the theft of a sun-feather. Winston felt the same. He couldn’t remember any place where he had ever felt so safe and at peace with the whole world. The poachers, the griffins, the noise and restlessness of the human world where he had been born, all seemed nothing but a bad dream from which the Whispering Tree had woken him with the rustling of its leaves. All you wanted to do under this tree was to sit between its roots and forget the world! But Barnabas knew trees almost as well as he knew fabulous beings, and he saw that the Whispering Tree of Pulau Bulu would have to withstand many battles to protect those who took refuge in and under its crown.
‘My dear Me-Rah!’ he said, lowering his voice so as not to offend the monkeys. ‘Thank you. You have brought us to a perfect place! Here, maybe we can make a plan not only to save the Pegasus eggs, but also to set Shrii free!’
‘Oh, yes,’ growled Hothbrodd, running his green fingers over all the marks left by claws, teeth and machetes in the bark of the Whispering Tree. ‘We’re sure to think of something under this tree.’
A long scar, black as soot, showed where lightning had once struck the tree, and more than a dozen lead bullets had grown into the bark. The Whispering Tree told the troll the story of each of them, while the dragons rested on the flower petals covering the ground between its roots with a fragrant cushion. The branches above them spread so far that in spite of their own size, both dragons could easily find room under the tree. When Ben knelt between Firedrake’s paws, Winston knelt between Tattoo’s, whereupon Berulu looked at the dragon with unconcealed jealousy, but Winston tickled him behind the ears to reassure him as he himself leaned back against Tattoo’s scales. After all, new friends shouldn’t make us forget old ones.
‘Unfortunately, as you all know, time is short,’ Barnabas began. ‘And not just because of Shrii. Twigleg has just been working it out again. We must set off for home tomorrow if the mission that brought us here is not to fail! So we only have tonight to carry out our plan!’
‘Right!’ twittered Kupo. ‘What is the plan?’
And the discussion began. The light of thousands of glow-worms flickered over the dark water of the river. Fluorescent tree fungi bathed the jungle around them in ghostly green light, and countless eyes peering through the thickets of leaves and twigs watched the strange assembly that had gathered: animals, humans, fabulous creatures. Even for Pulau Bulu, where so many living things existed side by side, it was a unique meeting, and not only because for the first time since the island had emerged from the sea, it had two dragons visiting it. But by dint of good luck – or maybe because of the protection of the Whispering Tree – out of all the pairs of eyes observing the dragons and their friends, not one belonged to a servant of Kraa.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
A Shortage of Space
To achieve great things two things are needed:
a plan and not quite enough time.
Leonard Bernstein
Cling-clang. The foals were growing, and their tiny hooves were now hitting the eggshells so hard that Guinevere jumped every time she heard the sound, and the geese and swans keeping the eggs warm craned their necks in alarm. But the shells would not break. They would soon turn into prisons, and in the end they would suffocate the three foals instead of protecting them.
Ànemos began avoiding the stable again, simply so as not to see how short of space his children were. By now, however, Guinevere knew the Pegasus well enough to realise that he was grateful for her company.
‘Have you noticed how strong Ouranos is already?’ she asked, when she found him down beside the fjord again. ‘I think he likes to play the clown! Vita tells me that the swamp impets are betting their caps and boots on him to be the first to hatch. And the nisses are betting acorns on which of the foals will fly fastest!’
Nisses and impets would bet on anything. It was stupid, but perhaps doing stupid things helped to keep fear at bay.
Ànemos looked at the sky and pricked up his ears. But it was only an ordinary airplane reflected in the water of the fjord. And Guinevere was certain that the Pegasus knew how many days they still had left, even though she had hidden the calendar.
Tomorrow the last three days began. And maybe the third of those days would bring the death of the foals.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
The Greatest Task for the Smallest in the Team
You know how you let yourself think that everything will be all
right if you can only get to a certain place or do a certain thing.
But when you get there you find it’s not that simple.
Richard Adams, Watership Down
The thing about plans is that they don’t always work out as expected.
The plan thought up by many heads under the Whispering Tree sounded, from the first, as if it could never, ever succeed. It contained so many maybes and what ifs, so many question marks about what awaited them in the griffins’ tree, that all of those involved thought of it with a sense of foreboding. With two exceptions: nothing and no one gave Lola a sense of foreboding, and Tattoo… well, Tattoo hadn’t forgotten how frightened he had been of his own anger on the beach, but all the same he could hardly wait to prove himself again. Above all because, for the first time in his life, he would have a dragon rider. Although the task given to him and Firedrake that night sounded far from exciting.
‘You’re only our backup! You don’t come to the rescue unless it’s a genuine emergency. Promise?’ Barnabas Greenbloom had repeated that so often that after a while even the tip of Firedrake’s tail would have shown his impatience, and not only Tattoo but also the two dragon riders were secretly hoping that in the end the two dragons would play more of a part in the operation. Even Barnabas couldn’t conceal the fact that, to his mind, that seemed more probable than he liked to admit. After all, what they were planning to do really was rather crazy.
So what exactly was the plan?
For many years now, Kraa had been hunting only by day. His great old age had made him blind at night, and Patah, Kupo and TerTaWa all swore that he was certain to be
asleep in his palace nest when they carried out their plan before the first light of dawn. That sounded like a good opportunity to steal one of Kraa’s sun-feathers. Particularly since the other griffins were usually out hunting until it was day, and that too would make it considerably easier to set Shrii free. Of course they could only hope for Kraa to sleep so soundly that he wouldn’t notice the theft of the feather. And that the other griffins didn’t come back before Shrii was free. Hope was a crucial part of the plan. Rather more crucial than Twigleg liked.
As well as the griffins, of course, there were a number of other creatures in Kraa’s royal tree who might present problems. The jackal scorpions guarding Kraa’s nest, the monkeys, snakes and birds who served him and kept watch in the branches – they all had to be distracted or rendered harmless in various ways. But after all, the expeditionary team that set off just before midnight itself consisted of very different participants with very different qualities: macaques, humans, dragons, a brownie girl, a troll, a homunculus, a rat, a parrot, a gibbon, and last but not least a loris and a maki. That was nothing, of course, compared to the number of enemies waiting for them in the griffin tree. All the same, they were so numerous that they had decided to approach their target by six different routes, so as to pass unnoticed. Luckily they would also get help from the many sounds of the jungle: the rain that, as so often on Pulau Bulu, was falling from the sky, pouring and pattering; the night calls of the birds; the chorus of toads and cicadas… all that drowned out even Hothbrodd’s footsteps.
Barnabas and the troll were the only ones going to the griffins’ tree on foot, rather than through the branches of the trees or down from the sky. Theirs was the task that began the whole operation.
None of them had ever seen the griffins’ tree from below. Even Hothbrodd seemed to shrink to Twigleg’s size when its trunk came into sight among the other trees. The snakes lying in wait as guards between its roots bared their venomous fangs, but Hothbrodd simply lifted Barnabas up to his shoulders and threw any snakes who seemed particularly keen to attack into the bushes. Then he walked calmly over the others, and unimpressed by their hissing placed his green hands on the trunk of the griffins’ tree. The troll caressed its bark as gently as if he were stroking an elephant’s furrowed flank.
‘Oh yes, you have many tales to tell!’ he murmured lovingly. ‘And you didn’t choose the winged creatures living in you, did you? What do you say – shall we give them a bit of a fright?’
The huge tree shuddered. But Hothbrodd closed his eyes, pressed his hands more firmly to the brown bark, and began whispering in a language that every tree in the world understood. And every diurnal troll.
TerTaWa, sitting high above them with Twigleg and Lola in the crown of a neighbouring tree, saw the effect at close quarters.
The thinner branches of the tree began to bend without a sound, like fingers carefully reaching for something. That Something was the nests of the monkeys hanging in their dozens from the trunk of the tree or in its lower branches. The branches wound around them until the nests looked like the basketwork cages in which the griffins kept their prisoners. But that wasn’t all. The tree began to shake. Only very slightly, so slightly that neither the monkeys nor Kraa were woken. But the snakes winding themselves sleepily around the branches over Kraa’s palace nest fell out of the tree in their dozens, like dead leaves, and landed among the roots below. One of them brushed Barnabas’s shoulder, but he seized it with a practised grip before it could sink its poison fangs into his neck.
Hothbrodd laughed softly, as if the griffins’ tree had told him an amusing secret. Then he leaned his forehead against the bark and whispered words to it that sounded as if they were carved out of wood.
Another shudder passed through the trunk, and branches grew from the bark so that Barnabas could climb them comfortably, as if climbing a ladder.
‘They’re going to be sorry they shut a troll up in a cage like a bird!’ growled Hothbrodd. ‘Dum, ha! Meget dum!’
‘Hothbrodd!’ Barnabas whispered down to him, before continuing to climb. ‘Don’t overdo it! We don’t want the tree moving so much that it wakes Kraa!’
Hothbrodd replied with the usual grunt expressing his displeasure, and Barnabas put up a silent prayer to all the gods who, like him, were on the side of animals and fabulous creatures, hoping that Hothbrodd would be able to curb his wish for revenge. That was a great deal to ask of a troll.
Hope… yes, the success of this nocturnal mission had so much to do with hope.
Barnabas was an excellent climber, after spending weeks in the crown of a redwood tree in California to study some climbing coyotes three thousand years old there. But he had to hurry, because above him TerTaWa was getting ready to put Lola and Twigleg down on Kraa’s palace nest. The griffins had the branches of the nearby trees pruned by monkeys and parrots, so that no one could get near their nests. But no one could jump further than a gibbon.
When Twigleg saw the abyss that TerTaWa must cross, he felt sure that their whole lovely plan would break to pieces in front of Hothbrodd’s green feet. The troll was thinking much the same as he looked up at TerTaWa. He was about to ask the tree to catch the gibbon if necessary. But TerTaWa was already in the air. He leaped over to the mighty crown of the tree so gracefully, without a sound, that the jackal scorpions on guard, as usual, outside Kraa’s palace didn’t even look up. High above them, however, TerTaWa was moving from branch to branch, until the gigantic nest was just below him. Then he came down to settle, as silently as a moth, on the roof with its surrounding battlements.
‘There we go. Even a falling leaf makes more noise than a gibbon!’ he whispered as he put Twigleg and Lola down on the nest.
Below them, the jackal scorpions were sitting on the gilded flight ramps that surrounded Kraa’s palace nest like a ring of long spines. It was up to Barnabas to put those guards out of action, with a few well-aimed shots from the fountain pen filled with anaesthetic that Twigleg and Lola, luckily, had found in the abandoned hollow tree along with his backpack. But Kraa’s guards still looked alarmingly wakeful.
‘TerTaWa, can you keep an eye on the jackal scorpions?’ whispered Twigleg.
There was no answer. The gibbon had gone. TerTaWa, Patah, Kupo… tonight all of them were interested in just one thing: rescuing Shrii, the griffin who had risked his life to protect them. Who could hold that against them?
So now it was only to be hoped that Kraa would sleep through the monkeys’ rescue operation. Twigleg looked up at the basket where Shrii was held captive. The only guard he could spot was a sleepy macaque.
‘Hey, Humpklupus! How about lending me a hand?’
Lola was already gnawing her way through the mud exterior of the palace nest. Hothbrodd had made the saw that she was holding out to Twigleg out of a seashell. All the equipment they had left were the few things that Lola and Twigleg had found in the hollow tree, but a stone was a good enough tool for the troll. He had made not just the saw, but also a few knives and shields and clubs for Ben and Winston, to protect them and the dragons from the claws and beaks of the griffins if necessary. Then he had fitted them all out with wooden breastplates, including TerTaWa and some of the monkeys. Of course Patah had turned down the offer of one with a scornful gesture, and when Kupo had asked quietly for a knife and protection for her own narrow breast, Hothbrodd’s answer had been a brusque No! The troll hadn’t forgotten how covetously the loris had put her tiny hand out to his own knife in the hollow tree, but in the end he provided Kupo too with a breastplate and a knife that fitted into her little hand perfectly. By way of a thank-you, she carved a surprisingly good likeness of the troll with it.
Yes, Barnabas had been right. Bringing Hothbrodd along on this journey really had been a good idea. The solid wood that Twigleg felt under his jacket at least made his heart beat a little more slowly.
‘I think that’ll do, Hummelklups!’ Lola took the creeper that TerTaWa had pulled out of the trees for them off her shoulder.
There was a hole in the roof of Kraa’s nest – a hole just large enough for a rat and a homunculus.
‘But the jackal scorpions…!’ Twigleg peered over the cornice that surrounded Kraa’s palace with gilded battlements. They were still awake! And one of the brutes was just below them. Lola, however, only shrugged her shoulders.
‘Huh! Barnabas will see to them!’ she said – and pressed the creeper into Twigleg’s hand.
Twigleg had expected Kraa’s palace to be dark at this time of night, but unfortunately that wasn’t the case. The huge nest into which they let themselves down was alarmingly bright. Countless shining glow-worms lit up the ornamental frescoes that the lorises had made along the interior walls of the nest. They showed pictures of events in Kraa’s long life. They told the tale of his time as treasurer to Cambyses, three times crowned king, and of battles when the griffin had flown in the vanguard of human armies. Oh yes, Kraa had dragged generals from their horses with his claws, and had eaten them before the eyes of their men. He had scraped gold off the walls of royal palaces, and screamed his name triumphantly into the hot wind blowing through the deserts that he still missed.
The griffin growled in his sleep as Twigleg and Lola made their way down the creeper, hand over hand. The pictures followed Kraa into his dreams, his tawny, gold-clad dreams. In the middle of his nest, the griffin slept on a platform that the lorises had built from the bones of his prey. It gleamed like polished marble in the light of the glow-worms, and Kraa’s snake-tail wound back and forth on the smooth surface, while he thrust his claws into the necks of invisible enemies. He had dark dreams, as he had done every night since he had found himself on this island, where his feathers were damp with rain all the time, and his sister’s son was born with plumage as ridiculously vivid as a parrot’s. It’s Tchraee’s fault, Nakal whispered to him in his dream. It was Tchraee who wanted to fly on further east! Nakal was right. What a fool he had been. But he knew better now. He trusted no one. No one!