The Cockatrice Boys

by Joan Aiken

  Pressing his lips together, knuckles white with strain, Upfold at last found the correct point in the invisible dome of air above the kettle, and stood like a statue while Colonel Clipspeak enjoyed a brisk, businesslike conversation with General Grugg-Pennington, who happened at that very time to be holding a conference with Lord Ealing in Leicester Square tube station.

  “Sir, is it true that you are arranging for despatch of Gridelin hounds to Willoughby-on-the-Wolds?”

  “Now, how in the world did you know that?” said the general, utterly astonished. “Why, yes—I have the intention of doing so, but how you can have received news of the plan I can’t imagine, for the beasts have not yet embarked. They come from Hanover and are to be sent by submarine from Amsterdam and by canal boat from Harwich to Willoughby. The journey should take two days. But the risks are severe, and the chances of their safe arrival are not encouraging. I do not like this at all, Clipspeak. By what means did you get wind of our intentions? Can there be a leak in our security?”

  “Pray don’t be concerned, General. There is no leak, I believe I can assure you. It is just that by remarkable good fortune we rescued from Manchester a young person who has unusual telepathic and precognitive dexterity. Indeed, it is only because of this that I am able to talk to you know.”

  “Oh, very well. If you say so. But now, listen, Clipspeak, in case we have more trouble making contact. I want you to take the Belle on to Scotland. It appears that this whole evil invasion of our island is being directed from somewhere in that locality. The rest of Europe is clear, so far.”

  “Oh, indeed, sir, how singular. That is in fact what Scanty—but I—”

  “Don’t interrupt, Clipspeak. It is being directed from a command post in Scotland. We have been given two possible names: Crook of Devon and Rumbling Bridge. Your mission is to discover this post and destroy it. So after Willoughby and the acquisition of the hounds, proceed northwards.”

  “Who is—?”

  “Who? We don’t know. Nor why. But our intelligence is positive that orders are being issued from somewhere in the triangle between Crook of Devon, Rumbling Bridge, and the town of Dollar.”

  “Is there a railway station at one of those places?” Colonel Clipspeak asked doubtfully.

  “That is for you to ascertain! Possibly the nearest rail point may be Gleneagles—”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Do not fail us, Clipspeak! The safety of the kingdom may rest with you. Indeed, that of all Europe! The plague may spread. You must set out at once. Do not forget to pick up the Archbishop, who will be expecting you.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Clipspeak faintly.

  “Over and out.”

  Colonel Clipspeak mopped his brow with his stiff white pipe-clayed gloves. Sauna quietly prised the lid off and peered inside the kettle.

  “Could you switch off?” she whispered to the lieutenant. “It’s just a-going to boil dry.”

  Thankfully laying down the heavy sabre, Upfold switched off the kettle at the wall plug.

  Major Scanty was trembling with excitement.

  “Then what those chaps in Hungary told us is true!” he exclaimed. “The main part of Europe has not been troubled by this plague of monsters. It is only our own kingdom which has been so afflicted. Now why, I ask myself, should that be?”

  “I can think of plenty of likely reasons why,” muttered the lieutenant. But Colonel Clipspeak had bent on Sauna his piercing dark eyes, all the more brilliant for being set deep under bristly thickets of white eyebrow.

  “Now then, miss! It’s high time we knew more about you. All we know is that Dakin the drummer rescued you from this siege city. And that you are his cousin.”

  “Yessir, my mam and his mam were sisters. But my mam and dad died, you see, and I’ve been looked arter by my Auntie Floss.”

  “How did your parents die, child?”

  “In a plane crash, sir. We was all going together for a holiday in Marbella, when the plane engine conked out.”

  “And your parents were killed?”

  “Yessir,” faltered Sauna, wiping away a couple of tears with a corner of her apron.

  “And you? How was it that you did not die also?”

  “I’d put on my life jacket, sir, like they told us, and the strap caught in a fig tree as I fell. And, by and by, some Spanish chaps lifted me down. And the next thing I knew, my Auntie Floss Monsoon had come to Spain to fetch me home. A’cos Mam and Dad were dead.”

  “Their names were?”

  “Ted and Emily Blow, sir. Dad used to be a chimney sweep in Newcastle, sir. That was where we lived.”

  “So then you went to live in Manchester with your aunt. Had you known her before?”

  “No, sir, never. Mam nor Dad never spoke of her, but she told me she was a cousin of my da.”

  “Was she kind to you?”

  “She was strict,” said Sauna, after some thought. “It was having my hands tied all the blessed time that was the worst.”

  “And this gift of yours—being able to see and hear events and information before they have come to pass—have you had that always?”

  “Oh no, sir,” said Sauna simply. “Only since the plane crashed, and Mam and Dad died, and I hung for six hours in that-there fig tree.”

  “And did your aunt know of your gift?”

  “Yes, sir. She didn’t like it.”

  “I see. Thank you child. Ahem. You may return to your duties.”

  “It is the most remarkable piece of luck that we should have happened to take her on board,” said Colonel Clipspeak, when Sauna had slipped thankfully away to her button polishing.

  “I wonder, though, was it pure luck?” mused Major Scanty. “Or was it preordained?”

  “What can you mean?” demanded the colonel.

  “Did you hear, sir, that singular little passage before Upfold here found the correct frequency for command headquarters?”

  “All that idiocy about crabs and goats and herrings? Sounded like balderdash to me.”

  “No, just the two brief exchanges about the tempest. And a loose connection.”

  “Can’t say I paid it any heed,” said the colonel.

  “It make me think,” said Major Scanty. He stopped and rubbed his chin, looking thoughtfully at the colonel, who was beginning to fill in a large form, muttering to himself, “If we are to take on board the Archbishop of Lincoln, we shall need to make certain that all the formalities are most duly and carefully observed.”

  But Lieutenant Upfold threw a keen glance at the major.

  “You mean, sir, when that voice said ‘Unloose the tempest!’ And a blue flame ran down the sword blade? I must confess it sent a cold shiver down my spine.”

  “Oh, fiddle-de-dee!” snapped the colonel, hunting among all his pens for one that would write. “Why, if that was anything at all to the purpose, it was just some meteorological station giving a forecast. Probably in Japan. Much good that will do us.”

  “I fear you may be right,” sighed the major.

  But Lieutenant Upfold shook his head.

  “Those voices were deuced queer, if you ask me. Gave me the shivering hab-dabs. There was something—” he searched for words—“something not at all the thing about those voices. Specially one of them. Not like anything I’ve ever heard in my life before. Nor,” he added after some thought, “anything like what I’d ever want to hear again.”

  “Oh, go along with you both and leave me in peace,” growled the colonel. “If we are to leave for Lincoln this afternoon, there’s a whole lot of paperwork to be done. Bellswinger!” he barked on the intercom.

  “Yessir!”

  “Send me Quartermaster Garble. And muster the men for embarkation. Make sure there’s none of them left fossicking about on the station platforms. We depart at two sharp!”

  “Yessir. What about the men’s dinner, sir?”

  “Mrs. Churt must serve it in transit.”

  “Mrs. Churt won’t say thank you for that,
” remarked Bellswinger, when he had replaced the receiver. “You’d best stop polishing buttons, lovey, and go give her a hand.”

  Nodding, Sauna laid a folded mess-jacket with brilliantly polished buttons on a pile of fifteen others and rose to her feet. As she did so, the phone rang again.

  “Now what does His Nibs want?” mumbled Sergeant Bellswinger, snatching the instrument off its hook.

  But this time it was not the colonel.

  “Sauna, Sauna, I want to speak to my little Sauna!” came a high, strident, queerly disembodied wail from the mouthpiece. It seemed as if the phone itself were speaking, rather than a real, live human being far away.

  “Bless my buttons, girl, whoever can that be?” grunted the sergeant, greatly astonished. “And how in the world come she’s got on to our internal line?”

  Sauna had turned white as pipe clay. Her teeth chattered.

  “It—it sounds for all the world like my Auntie Floss!” she gulped. “B-b-but how can it be? She can’t be on the train! Nobody knows what happened to her … I thought she was dead!”

  “Sauna! Sauna! Come to your loving auntie!” wailed the phone.

  “Shouldn’t you better speak to her, girl? Ask her maybe where she is?” suggested Bellswinger, holding out the receiver. Sauna gave him a desperate look. The very last thing she wanted was to be back in touch with her Auntie Floss—but she could see that Bellswinger thought she ought to take the call, expected her to do so—and therefore, with great reluctance, she took a step forward, holding out her hand for the mouthpiece. But the instant before she reached it, the sergeant shuddered from head to foot with a violent jerking movement and dropped the receiver, which smashed to pieces on the metal floor. Oddly enough, even after the telephone had shattered sound continued to come out of it for several minutes—or perhaps the sound came not from the phone but from the wall and ceiling nearby.

  “Sauna! Sauna! I’m up in the north country. I want you so badly. So ba-a-a-dly! Come to your grandfather’s house! At Glen Grief! Your great-great-great-great-grandfather’s house. Come! Oh, come!”

  The voice rose to a frenzied shriek, then faded away.

  “Blimey!” gasped Sergeant Bellswinger, picking himself off the floor where he had collapsed after the convulsion shook him. He flopped heavily on to a chair and blew out a long breath. “Blimey!” he said again. “That was an electric shock, that was. Like a bolt o’ lightning. Did you feel it, gal?”

  Sauna shook her head.

  “No, but I saw you, Sergeant,” she said. “It was awful! I thought you was a goner, for certain sure!”

  “Was that voice your Auntie Floss?” he demanded. “Or—or who? If not her, who?”

  “I dunno, Sergeant! I suppose it could have been Auntie Floss—after all, I ain’t got nobody else, but she never called me her little Sauna before. Never! She called me Gal, or You, Whatsyername, and she never in her whole life said she wanted me badly. She never wanted me at all! She only took me a’cos Mam and Dad were dead and there was no one else to take me. She often told me that. She said it was a right pain having to have me in her house. And,” said Sauna shivering, “if she wasn’t killed by the Snark, where is she? In the north country? Where’s that?”

  “There’s summat pesky rum about it all,” grunted the sergeant. “But, anyway, she’s off the line now. And that’s just as well. You don’t have to answer her. You run to Mrs. Churt, gal, and on your way tell Corporal Nark to come along and repair this-ere phone.”

  Sauna found Dakin with Mrs. Churt, helping to chop up spinach and sassafras which had been snatched from the marshes round Manchester under covering fire.

  “It’ll have to be soup for the boys’ dinner,” Mrs. Churt was saying. “But thick soup, mind you, so it won’t get all splashed about when the train picks up speed. It’s lucky I’ve got plenty of lentils. Now, Sauna, what are you looking so down in the mouth for, all of a sudden?”

  “I had a message from my Auntie Floss, what we thought was took by a Snark.”

  “And she weren’t after all? Where is she, then?”

  “Up north, she said. She asked me to go to her—but she never gave an proper address. Except something about Grief. She sounded ever so queer.”

  “Well, we are going up north, by all accounts,” said Mrs. Churt—for, of course, news of the troop movements had already flashed about the train like lightning—“so you needn’t trouble your young head about that. Maybe she’ll get in touch again. Nothing you can do about it till she does.”

  “But, Mrs. Churt,” said Sauna, “I don’t want to go back to her. I don’t like her. I like it much better on this train.”

  “She’s your auntie, though,” pointed out Mrs. Churt. “She took you in. She didn’t have to.”

  “I wish she hadn’t! I’d sooner have gone to an orphanage!”

  “You can’t prove that,” argued Dakin. “For you don’t know what the orphanage might have been like.”

  “Anyway, perhaps your auntie wasn’t used to children,” suggested Mrs. Churt.

  “I reckon she wasn’t.”

  “Yet she did put up with you. You gotta remember that.”

  “Only just,” said Sauna. “And I can’t think why she wants me back now. I’m not even sure if that really was her voice. It sounded so squeaky and queer.”

  “Who else could it have been?” asked Mrs. Churt unanswerably. “Still and all, dearie, you don’t have to live with her if you don’t want to. Nobody can oblige you, not these days.” Sauna nodded in relief, and they got on with making the men’s dinner. Then all of a sudden the Cockatrice Belle, which had been stationary for so long, gave herself a gentle twitch, a slow heave like a cat stretching and slipped off along the rails in a south-easterly direction.

  “Oooo!” cried Sauna, enraptured. “We’re moving! We’re really moving!”

  “Don’t get your feathers in a twitch,” Dakin teased her. But he too was filled with excitement and joy at being on the go again after remaining in one spot for so long; and all along the train there were loud sounds of the soldiers’ joy at the prospect of change and action. And new recruits who had come on board at Manchester to replace the men lost in battle were being told by their mates of the pleasures in store.

  “We’re rolling, we’re rolling!”

  “Huzza!”

  “Ho, ho, jubilo!”

  The whole train rang with shouts of enthusiasm as it came out of the underground station. And, overhead, the massed clouds of Snarks and Telepods, who had been circling aimlessly, began to concentrate their movements and to make vicious repeated dives at the snaky moving object. Sergeant Bellswinger bustled up and down the corridor briskly reminding the men that they were now much more at risk and must keep a sharp look-out every minute of the time in case a stray beak or talon or a razor-edged tusk or spine penetrated the train’s outer armour.

  Indeed a swarm of Flying Hammerheads carried off Ensign Peascape and Corporal Hunt when they leapt off the train to change the points at Buxton; this made a grim, if salutary reminder of the dangers that surrounded them. Chesterfield was an empty, ravaged city with not a soul to be seen in its grass-grown streets or among its battered houses; they hurried through without stopping. The bent church spire had been bent even more and a large Bycorn was to be seen, twined around it. This made the colonel so indignant that he had a trench mortar fired at it, but this merely dislodged a piece of the spire without dislodging the Bycorn.

  * * *

  Dusk had fallen by the time they reached Lincoln, and the Cockatrice Belle crept cautiously and quietly into the station, which had been fortified and made into a kind of castle. Some Snarks and Telepods had to be despatched before it was safe for the mayor and corporation to welcome Colonel Clipspeak and his troops, but Lincoln had not suffered so severely as Manchester and the citizens were in better shape. Stores were waiting ready to be loaded on board.

  “We get supplies smuggled up canals from the coast,” explained the mayor, Sir Lionel Dri
tch. “Fish and seaweed. Only difficulty is, the smell of the seaweed attracts the Foot-monsters. That’s what we suffer from worst, here. They fly upside down, you know, with their foot in the air; and their sense of smell is so sharp that one of ’em can locate a single rotten egg on Spurn Head light.”

  The townspeople of Lincoln were so happy to be visited that they had arranged a gala reception in the station for the crew of the Cockatrice Belle, with smoked herring roes served on slices of dried turnip, candied salt beans, and a fearsomely potent drink made from distilled seaweed.

  “Upon my word, that is stingo stuff!” said Colonel Clipspeak to Sir Lionel, and he issued an order on the spot that none of his crew were to take more than two glasses of it, and Driver Catchpole only one.

  The party was a great success. There were more children in Lincoln than in many English cities, due to the fact that the Footmonsters, very short-sighted beasts, were unable to see any prey less that one and a half metres in height or forty-two kilos in weight. In London and Manchester it was rare to meet anybody under twelve, but in Lincoln Station there were forty pupils from a mixed junior school waiting to greet Dakin and Sauna, who had a fine time describing life on the train to an admiring audience.

  Meanwhile Sir Lionel introduced Colonel Clipspeak to his new passenger, Dr. Wren, the Archbishop of Lincoln.

  Archbishop Wren was a cheerful little round man (“More like a robin than a wren,” whispered Sauna to Dakin, looking along the station platform).

  “Sad times we live in, sir,” said Colonel Clipspeak. “Sad times indeed. But we are delighted to have you as a passenger.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Colonel,” said Dr. Wren cheerfully. “I think I’d call them rousing times. A challenge to us all. And how splendidly you are responding to it!” He cast a glance of admiration at the glittering train.

  “But I understand you have lost a great many of your clergy, Archbishop?”

  “That is true, Colonel, but it puts the others on their mettle, you know! I have some excellent young vicars in homemade Snark masks who venture about the countryside putting heart into the people. No, no, I feel this invasion of monsters is sent to test us, and I sincerely believe that we shall pass the test!”