Talina in the Tower

  ‘Must have been the wind,’ she told the tense faces. ‘Oh, there it is again!’

  But again there was nothing.

  It was only the third time that Talina thought to look in the little pane of glass in the top of the door.

  And there she saw the somewhat flattened face of an unhappy winged cat – one of the attendants from the Chamber of Conversation.

  ‘My wing got stuck in the knocker,’ the cat complained. ‘Now I am deaf and mad from being slammed against the wall all those times. I suppose you want me to remember the very important message I brought you? Well, you’re going to have to wait till I stop seeing stars.’

  ‘Wait’ was not the word that Talina or her friends, now crowding around the door, were able to digest easily. But soothed with stroking, mollified with milk, and flattered with grovelling apologies, the cat eventually remembered what she’d come to say.

  ‘You are summoned to the Chamber of Conversation. The Ravageur Lord has been found and now faces the Chamber. One of the owls had the clever idea of checking on the glassblowers of Murano. Sure enough, Grignan was holding hostage the Master of Salviati’s glasswork, trying to force him to make a new fake “vision” in glass. Aaah!’

  Something slender and silver flashed through the window.

  The cat fell to the ground, a fork impaled in its wing.

  While Talina gently extracted the fork, and the professor applied Sanitary Spider Web to the wound, everyone else ran to the window. The screams of humans and animals pierced the air.

  Hundreds of forks and knifes pelted through the streets, followed by hurtling pots, baking trays and mixing bowls.

  ‘That’s Grignan returning the batteries de cuisine to the bakeries he stole them from!’ said Ambrogio. ‘So he really must be in custody. The Chamber must have ordered him to do that.’

  ‘Meanwhile, he’s still battering as many Venetians as he can.’ Tassini shook his fist at the sky.

  Professor Marìn rushed to the shelves for his stock of Venetian Treacle.

  ‘The Chamber will wait on us a short time, while we attend to the wounded,’ he said, distributing bottles.

  Grignan stood defiantly on his back legs, rattling at the bars of a newly constructed cage, this one reinforced with silver wires threaded through the slats. The witches were chanting a Retention Spell.

  ‘To contain his spirit, too, this time,’ Professor Marìn explained. ‘They’re regretting not doing that the first time.’

  The Doge pronounced, ‘We shall hear the prisoner’s words at least.’

  ‘They are these,’ snarled Grignan. ‘If I am to renounce my claim on Venice, I want three human babies and a recipe book every year.’

  ‘Your savagery and effrontery astonish the Chamber,’ gasped the Doge.

  Below them in the city, the bells of San Giacometo struck two o’clock.

  Talina suddenly swayed in her chair. Her breath snagged in her chest. She rose unsteadily to her feet and gasped, ‘You are mad, Grignan! What court in the world would give you children to cook and eat?’

  ‘You are not looking in the best of health, Ratfood, are you?’ taunted Grignan, winking at her as if they shared some kind of secret. ‘In your weakened state, your imagination runs away with you. We do not plan to eat them. Our tastes are more refined. No, they are to work in our kitchens.’

  At the words ‘weakened state’, Professor Marìn glanced sharply at Talina. She steadied herself and took a deep breath.

  Ambrogio raged, ‘As slaves? Always slaves. Even your own kind are your slaves. You deliberately spread the mange and Furious Rabies among your Ravageurs to make them savage, didn’t you? To make them hurt and menace other creatures!’

  ‘What if I did?’ drawled Grignan, rolling over on his back playfully, and licking the tip of his tail.

  ‘It’s not a game!’ shouted Ambrogio. ‘Show respect to this court!’

  Talina wanted to put a warning hand on Ambrogio’s arm – already swelling visibly and sprouting black hairs. She wanted to say, ‘Keep your temper, Ambrogio. Don’t turn Ravageur!’ But her own hand burned with pins and needles, and felt too heavy to lift.

  ‘The defendant confesses to a crime against his own species. Record this detail,’ the Doge ordered the court clerk, a solemn badger. He turned to the professor. ‘The most ancient charter of the Chamber holds that Venetians cannot be enslaved, not for any reason. It would be eminently improper to agree to such a thing.’

  The Ravageur Lord insisted, ‘I reject your piffling judgement. Paying back the dishonest price – that’s not enough retribution, not by a long way. The deal is still dirty. The humans must pay for what they did to my race.’

  The Doge said quietly, ‘In such a case, there can be no resolution that is stainless or perfect. We have found the least worst way to settle it. The Chamber shall now commence the sentencing of the defendant for his acts of terror against Venice, and to prevent him from menacing the innocent in future.’

  Talina sagged down into her seat, green spots forming in front of her eyes.

  ‘What on earth,’ she wondered desperately, ‘is happening to me?’

  The Ravageur Lord stood up on his back legs again. ‘Well?’ he shouted. ‘What pathetic punishments have you dreamt up for me, you cowards?’

  ‘Grignan, for your demerits, you deserve to be shaved, hanged on a common gallows, and then burnt, with your ashes strewn to the wind,’ pronounced the Doge.

  Grignan’s sneer wobbled, but no words came out of his mouth.

  ‘Yes, that’s what he deserves, and worse!’ screamed a squirrel. ‘The Devil’s busy diggin’ his grave right now.’

  ‘Silence!’ called the Doge. ‘I have not finished.’

  The mounted heads drew in a collective breath.

  ‘But the opinion of this Chamber is that violence begets violence. But shame begets reform. We do not wish to murder you, Grignan, but we want to show your fellow beasts that you are not a worthy leader. So you shall live, but you shall be shaved.’

  A rabbit chittered, ‘He gave his friends the mange – of course Grignan should have his own hair cut off!’

  ‘He should get a willow-wand whipping while they’re about it,’ mumbled a witch, ‘treating his own womenfolk like that!’

  ‘Shaved!’ Grignan screamed at last.

  Then the Ravageur Lord lamented not in words but in long, rhythmic howls. The fact that his life was spared appeared to be no consolation at all. The Penitent Hags cried too, tears of compassion.

  ‘We know what it is to have done wrong,’ one cried. ‘Desperate sad, it is, oooh!’

  The Doge rapped the broken stem of his gavel. ‘The sentencing is not yet complete! Once the prisoner is shaved, then he and his cohorts shall be despatched. Back to Siberia. It is there that you shall find your true ancestral lands, Grignan.’

  ‘How they gonna make him?’ whispered a squirrel.

  Talina wanted to say, ‘Yes, how?’ but her tongue was swollen and furry inside her mouth.

  ‘On the way,’ said the Doge, ‘your course shall be supervised by German witches from the Hartz Mountains and Swedish witches from Blocken. Let us hope that your wolfish brethren welcome you back with open arms.’

  ‘Or open jaws,’ muttered Ambrogio. ‘Especially given the disease you bring with you.’

  ‘What is more,’ the Doge continued sternly, ‘the Ravageurs will cease to be magical creatures. Your magic shall be confiscated and distributed to good causes. You will become visible to adult humans.’

  ‘Humans with shotguns and hunting dogs!’ mouthed a rabbit on the wall, with an air of someone who knew something about such a tricky situation.

  Grignan demanded in a shaking voice, ‘Our rat-slaves shall attend us on our journey.’

  ‘Demand denied. They are free Venetian creatures. If any choose to accompany you of their free will and out of love for you, then they shall also have safe conduct to Siberia. Rodents, how say you?’

  The rats in th
e Chamber chittered excitedly. Then they stood up on their back legs and stuck their noses in the air. They lifted their tails and waggled them rudely at Grignan.

  ‘You can kiss our—’

  The Doge summarized swiftly, ‘The rats refuse.’

  Grignan stood frozen with anger, unable to speak. Then his head suddenly dropped, his tail curled between his legs.

  ‘How and when?’ he muttered.

  ‘The members of the Company of Christ and the Good Death will carry you and your kind in their boats to the mainland,’ continued the Doge. ‘They will conquer their fear of you for they are men of faith, who will know that they are lifting a great weight of vileness and pestilence from Venice.’

  ‘What about the vultures, sir?’ asked Ambrogio. ‘They are also extremely vile and pestilent.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Talina, with feeling, ‘and riddled with fleas.’ But no one heard her words, which emerged in tiny whispered gasps from her constricted throat.

  ‘There shall be a roost roast in the Stake House on the island of the Ravageurs. With nowhere to live and no one to feed them, the vultures too shall then be obliged to fly away and follow their masters.’

  ‘He looks humble now, but I just cannot believe that Grignan will simply give up and leave Venice,’ said Ambrogio slowly.

  A Righteous Wraith murmured, ‘This is correct, I fear.’

  ‘And indeed you are right,’ replied Grignan, still towering on his back legs. ‘For my parting gift is a curse. It is not a curse that will destroy the city at once. It is a curse of baddened magic as yet but in bud. But it will gradually wax large and lustrous, like a pearl in an oyster, enfolding itself in more and more layers of evil. It shall lie here, hidden, quiet, unwritten, unknown, until the moment that it shall burst forth. And with it shall come the worst enemy Venice has ever known.’

  The Chamber fell silent, mesmerized by Grignan’s words.

  ‘There shall be no words or mystic runes that shall stop it,’ the Ravageur Lord hissed. ‘No enchantment will gainsay my curse. The Venetians may live happy for a generation, two generations even. But there will come a time when this curse will ally itself with ancient powers and take living form, destroying this place and laying to waste the souls and bodies of all who inhabit it.’

  Drops of perspiration trickled from Talina’s forehead as Grignan snarled, ‘Until that moment, when I shall return in triumph, I am happy to pursue my destiny far away from this accursed place. Farewell, Venice! And good riddance.’

  He lowered his voice, as below them the bells of San Giacometo tolled the half-hour. ‘One last thing. At the moment of my capture, my vulture Restaurant took a message to my minions Rouquin and Frimousse, who awaited me in … a certain place … in Venice. At two o’clock, exactly, they will have put the scorpion in the pot, with the hairs of the girl-thing’s head. And hidden it where you’ll never find it. That was thirty minutes ago. Neither the scorpion nor the girl have much longer to live.’

  With that, Grignan disappeared.

  ‘Come back!’ yelled the Righteous Wraiths. ‘Come back for your just deserts!’

  ‘No!’ screamed Professor Marìn. ‘Come back and tell us where the scorpion is! Now!’

  ‘What about the Retention Spell?’ cried Ambrogio.

  The small Doge said, ‘The Ravageur Lord is still here inside his cage. Retention Spell has taken care of that. He may not leave the Chamber without our express permission. He has simply made himself invisible.’

  ‘But he may as well be a thousand miles away,’ murmured Professor Marìn, ‘if he will not give us the information we need.’

  ‘What’s that about my hairs?’ gasped Talina. ‘Why does everyone keep talking about my hairs?’

  ‘I’ve been trying to warn you, child,’ said the professor. ‘It is an ancient Venetian belief that if you bind a scorpion with the hairs of a person, and then bury it in a pot of sand, and hide it … then that person is doomed.’

  ‘Doomed?’ asked Talina faintly. Her parents put their arms around her, their lips tense.

  ‘As the scorpion slowly suffocates, so does the person,’ the professor explained sadly.

  And Talina clutched her throat.

  ‘Does it hurt, kitten?’ soothed her mother.

  ‘We must find the pot and release the scorpion,’ cried Ambrogio.

  ‘Easier said than done, without Grignan to tell us where it is,’ said a squirrel.

  One of the Penitent Hags moaned, ‘If only we’d thought about this possibility! We could have got the witches to reinforce the Retention Spell with a Material Presence Binding. And an Open-Tongue Lock. Oh, why didn’t we do that? Woe is me! It’s too bad …’

  To Talina, the hag’s sobbing seemed to come from far away. There was a roaring in her ears and green spots seemed to float in front of her eyes. She swayed.

  ‘Talina,’ urged her father, ‘lie down and conserve your energy. Move as little as possible. Breathe slowly.’

  It was a painful struggle for Talina to snatch any breath at all.

  Tassini said, ‘We must think like Grignan now. Ambrogio, ladies, everyone … think hard. Where would Grignan hide a deadly pot? Where would he think we’d never find it?’

  ‘Or at least not find it in time to save Talina,’ said Ambrogio, in despair.

  ‘We’ve only just got our little girl back,’ wept Talina’s mother. ‘Don’t let her be taken from us for ever.’

  She pressed a little mirror against Talina’s lips and held it up for everyone to see. Only the faintest tracery of breath could be seen, like a shadow of a spider web.

  chaos in the Chamber of Conversation

  EVERYONE SPOKE AT once, including the mounted animal heads.

  ‘How can we make the villain tell us where the pot is?’ a squirrel despaired. ‘We are clueless. And Grignan wants the girl to die.’

  ‘We could starve him until he tells us,’ suggested a sheep. ‘Ravageurs have to keep eating or they perish.’

  ‘Starving him would take too long. We don’t even have minutes. Look at the girl! She’s halfway dead already,’ mourned a hag.

  ‘Does he have any favourite places in Venice?’ asked a fox.

  ‘He just hates the whole place,’ sighed a mink. ‘Clearly.’

  ‘What kind of pot? A flower pot?’

  ‘A cooking pot?’

  ‘A chamber pot?’

  Talina struggled to raise herself on her elbow. She had an idea, but she could no longer talk. How to make them all understand? She tugged at Ambrogio’s wrists, and pointed to her numb mouth, rubbing her churning stomach with the other hand. She even managed a weak version of a blissful smile.

  ‘Something delicious, is that what you mean?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Grignan is a Ravageur … and Ravageurs love to eat—’

  ‘Sweets!’ chorused the mounted heads, the female Ravageurs, the Ravageur cubs and the witches.

  ‘And where do you find the sweetest sweets in Venice? Is that what you mean, Talina?’

  ‘I think she’s nodding.’ Talina heard Marco Molin’s voice as if through a wall. ‘She’s too weak to move, poor girl. Look at that blue skin. Even her eyelids …’

  ‘The sweetest sweets in Venice?’ mused Ambrogio. ‘That would have to be Golosi’s at Rialto, right under here. The Ravageurs are forever raiding that shop for jam and Mostarda.’

  ‘And what do they sell their jams in!’ shouted the professor.

  ‘Pots! Pots! Pots!’ squeaked a hundred different mammalian voices, Righteous Wraiths, Penitent Hags, witches and the three Admirals.

  Golosi’s had suffered another Ravageur raid in the last week. The windows and doors were boarded up. Ambrogio, Tassini and the professor tore at the planks with their bare hands.

  ‘We’ll never get through in time!’ Ambrogio despaired. ‘Isn’t there any magic you can do, Professor? Can’t you just magic us inside?’

  ‘I was just thinking the same thing, but I have none of my ingr
edients here. I’ll hum the nails out though.’

  He began to hum, and after a few notes the first nail popped like the cork of a shaken bottle of ginger beer. Then another. And another.

  ‘Stand back!’ Tassini cried. ‘Take shelter!’

  They cowered behind a column until the rain of nails had ceased, emerging just in time to see the entire canopy of boarding tumble to the ground. Light flooded into the looted shop.

  Ambrogio was the first to rush in, his face alight. ‘Now we’ll find it right away!’

  And then his face fell. All their faces fell.

  For what they saw now were ranks of dark mahogany shelves towering up to the ceiling. Only the lower shelves had been disturbed by the Ravageur robbers: they were empty except for shattered glass pots and trickles of jam. From above the height of a Ravageur’s head, the walls were solidly lined with regiments of neat glass pots, filled to their brim. The scalloped white labels announced the contents in delicate black copperplate: Strawberry Jam, Caper Jelly, Artichoke Paste, Quince Reduction and a whole wall of Golosi’s Mostarda.

  ‘There must be ten thousand pots in here!’ cried Tassini. ‘How can we ever find the right one?’

  ‘We must tap them!’ shouted Ambrogio. ‘That’s how we’ll find it. The ones with jelly and jams inside sound like this!’ He seized a tasting spoon from the counter and rang it against a jar of Maraschino Cherries. It tinkled richly.

  ‘If there was sand inside, there would be completely different noise,’ Ambrogio explained. ‘It would be dull and muted. Get a spoon, everyone. I’ll take the Sweet Jam Wall.’

  A crowd of Venetians gathered on the threshold to watch the great historian, the respected professor and a curly-haired boy inexplicably engaged in the action of climbing the Golosi ladders and tapping each jam pot in turn, listening closely to the result, as if they played the world’s biggest and most eccentric xylophone.

  ‘They’ve all gorn mad, they have,’ observed one woman. ‘Too many brains. It’ll get you every time.’

  ‘Here!’ screamed Tassini. ‘This one sounds different!’