It was a very large barn with wide double doors, neither of which moved.
‘Yeah, well.’ Neil lifted the long wooden latch instead and pushed.
The door swung quietly open and they stood on the threshold, peering in. The barn smelt of wool and petrol and hay. Daylight filtered through a dirty window.
‘Close the door so they can’t escape,’ ordered Neil.
Luke did as he was told and they had to wait a moment until their eyes adjusted again.
‘They’re not here,’ said Luke.
‘Who said they were?’ asked Neil angrily. Then he grabbed Luke’s arm. ‘But how handy is that?’
Luke peered and saw two quad bikes, parked near the opposite wall. Neil hurried towards them. He was suddenly jubilant.
‘Some shepherds use quad bikes to round up their sheep,’ he said, as if he knew all about it. ‘Hop on.’
But as he swung into the saddle, a figure stepped out from behind the hay bales in the corner of the barn. His Very Nasty Boss.
Better known as Lady Caroline Babcott.
19
Bony Peak
Tod and Ida were shocked rigid. They had followed Lady Babcott into the barn, looking for the sheep, then they had all hidden behind the hay bales when the men arrived. But as Lady Babcott stepped out and showed herself, the kind smile they were used to disappeared. She clearly knew one of the men and he was afraid of her. He was shaking inside his filthy, torn parka.
‘It’s all Luke’s fault,’ he gabbled. ‘It was him who chucked the phone out of the balloon basket. It was him who . . .’
‘Neil.’
‘Yes, Lady B.’
‘Shut up.’
‘Yes, Lady B.’
‘I didn’t become very rich by listening to excuses.’
‘No, Lady B.’
‘And I don’t intend to go to prison for the mistakes of a couple of bungling lightweights. What are you, Neil?’
‘A couple of bungling lightweights, Lady B.’
‘Exactly. Which is why I’m here in person. You may have been outwitted by a bunch of sheep; I shall not be. This is Tod and Ida, devoted owners of the mangy woolbags. They will retrieve the phone for us.’
She turned and smiled at Tod and Ida in her new cruel way.
‘Won’t you, dears?’ she said sweetly. Then the smile snapped shut. ‘Let’s go.’
She swiftly mounted a quad bike. ‘On this one with me, please, Ida. Tod, go with Neil.’
Tod didn’t move. He glared at Lady Babcott, feeling betrayed but defiant.
‘Why should I?’ he eventually said.
‘Because you want to see your sheep again,’ said Lady Babcott. ‘Alive.’ Then she looked sharply at her bungling lightweight. ‘You can drive one of these?’
‘Oh, sure, sure,’ said Neil quickly.
‘Open the doors, geek,’ ordered Lady Babcott.
Luke scurried to obey. Lady Babcott’s quad bike blasted into life. The noise terrified Saffron, who yelped and darted out of the door with her tail between her legs. Neil fiddled with the controls on his bike but when nothing happened, Lady Babcott gave him a pitying look, leant over and started it for him.
‘Hold on tight, kid!’ snarled Neil at Tod, who had climbed on reluctantly behind him. ‘I don’t hang around.’
He didn’t. He reversed rapidly into the hay bales, drove forward into a wall, then finally shot backwards out of the door.
‘You’re with us, geek,’ Lady Babcott told Luke.
She drove out after Neil. Luke clung on desperately behind Ida as the bike accelerated up the icy path.
‘It’s all right, dear,’ Ida assured him. ‘I won’t let you fall off.’
Luke felt more awful than ever. He would never be able to get her money back for her now, and here she was being kind to him.
The Warriors had climbed beyond the snow, up where the air was thin, clear and bitterly cold. Every few moments, a drifting icy mist enveloped them, then floated on. The path became narrower still, with a wall of slippery rock on one side and nothing on the other except a long drop to certain death.
They climbed head to rump, supporting one another as they sought each foothold, with Oxo as anchor ram at the rear, bracing himself and heaving his shoulders to help the stack of Warriors ever upwards.
Sal was beginning to weaken but she was determined not to fail. They must be close to the summit now. Desperately, she tried to inspire herself by chanting the Songs of the Fleece.
‘High above the clouds, in the pasture of Great Aries . . .’
It came out as a gasp, but to her surprise, the immortal words were taken up behind her, by Links. Sort of.
‘Where all sweet sheeps will graze, man,
An’ there ain’t no fence or boundaries . . .’
Then by Wills.
‘The wise and ancient Soay lies
Upon his Unspun Fleece . . .’
Even Jaycey.
‘And there is – ohmygrass! What was that!’
The long dark shadow that had passed over them on the lower slopes loomed again. A sense of foreboding flooded over them too. Some new terror was about to strike. They all felt it. Surely this time it was Lambad! Only Wills risked glancing up and losing his hoofhold. What he saw made his blood run cold. Floating not far above their heads was a long, black, narrow machine with wings. The worst thing about it was its absolute silence. It was a glider, though Wills didn’t know that. And it was Top Secret, like the building on the summit of Bony Peak from which it had emerged. The building Kraw had warned them about. The building that was the headquarters of British Alien Research Military Intelligence. (BARMI for short.)
In the glider sat a grim-faced pilot in military uniform, two equally grim-faced observers also in military uniform, Nisha Patel and Tony Catchpole.
Tony wasn’t grim-faced at all. He was very excited. A lot had happened to him since he’d left the sheep in the trailer and run off to Loch Glooming to meet Nisha.
The most exciting thing was that Nisha had been waiting for him, and had seemed really pleased with the thistle he’d picked for her because he couldn’t find any daffodils.
The second exciting thing was that he’d been taken seriously.
As he’d gabbled away to Nisha in the little café near the station, two men had sidled up and joined them. They offered to buy Tony a cup of tea. They had seen him on television talking about the sheep he’d witnessed being abducted by aliens. They believed in aliens.
‘Do you know why the sheep have come here?’ they asked.
Tony didn’t.
‘Do you know where they are now?’
Tony did. They were in the trailer where he had left them. Except that when they got back to the trailer, the sheep weren’t there, after all.
‘Will you help us find and identify them?’ asked the men.
It was an invitation Tony couldn’t refuse. They told Nisha that she must come too. There were to be no more news broadcasts until the sheep were found.
‘Why ever not?’ asked Nisha, but the men remained silent in a Top Secret sort of way.
So here they were in the black glider. Nisha was not excited. She was worried.
Tony’s face was pressed against the window beside her, peering down at the clambering sheep.
‘Is that them?’ asked one of the observers.
‘Definitely, definitely,’ replied Tony.
The observer spoke quickly into his radio.
‘Black Dog to BARMI HQ. Target confirmed.’
‘Target!’ Tony turned, reacting to the word. He stared at the observer. ‘Target?’ he said again.
The observer merely nodded, grim-faced as ever.
The panting sheep had finally reached the top of Bony Peak, just as the sun was starting to set again. They’d spent a whole day climbing. They gathered close, recovering their breath, then gazed ahead. The huge dark shadow cast by the silent sinister machine still fell across them, but they tried to ignore it. Their eyes
were fixed elsewhere.
The summit was not a sharp point as it had appeared from below, but a small rocky plateau, on the far side of which stood the humans’ building, as grey and forbidding as the mountain itself. In front of this fortress was some grass. Not that even Oxo was interested in eating at this special moment: the moment they had striven for; the purpose of their quest; the reason they had risked their lives. For there before the Rare Breed Warriors stood an ancient Soay.
He wasn’t at all what they had expected. He was small and brown and scruffy and his horns, though down-turned, were chipped and dirty grey, not golden. He blinked at the Warriors but said nothing.
‘Aries . . .?’ breathed Sal, her four stomachs merging into one great trembling wobble of awe.
The Soay didn’t reply.
Sal heard a little cough behind her. It was Wills.
‘Umm . . . Sal.’
Sal turned and as she did so she saw, dotted amongst the rocks, more Soays. Hundreds of them. There were Soays everywhere. And lots of them looked old.
‘Which one is Aries?’ asked Wills.
Sal didn’t know. She stared around, confused, panic rising inside her.
‘These is just sheeply sheep, innit,’ said Links, at last. ‘Way too small to be the Golden Horn Dude.’
‘Way too small,’ agreed Oxo.
There was an uncomfortable silence, then Sal spoke again.
‘Look over there . . .’ Her voice was hushed.
The others followed her gaze. In the grass, close to the human fortress, was a large hollow in the ground.
‘Of course!’ Sal cried in relief. ‘We won’t actually see Lord Aries. We are not worthy to look upon him. But that sheep-shaped hollow is surely the resting place of the Ram of Rams . . .’ She turned quickly to the others. ‘We’ll place the Baaton there for him. Don’t be frightened, Jaycey dear. Come forward . . .’
‘Ohmygrass . . . He won’t come back and sit on me, will he?’ whimpered Jaycey.
‘No, dear. Sitting on you is not in the prophecy. Quickly now.’
‘Um,’ pointed out Wills anxiously, ‘Kraw did say the human building was a bad place . . .’
But nobody was listening to him, least of all Sal. Even the circling black shadow that might be Lambad was shut from her mind. They were in the right place and they were in time. The prophecy was about to be fulfilled. She urged Jaycey and the Baaton towards the hollow.
The others followed, but as they did so, they heard a roar behind them. The roar of engines. Turning in alarm, they saw humans on quad bikes charging up the steep path towards them: the two men who’d been chasing them, a woman they didn’t recognise . . . and Tod and Ida.
The quad bikes surged towards the sheep, then suddenly veered away, as if they were going to drive straight off the top of the mountain. Instead, they skidded to a halt at the last moment.
Tod’s heart was thumping with fear as Lady Babcott leapt nimbly from her bike. To his horror, she dragged Ida with her and stood holding her at the very edge of the precipice.
‘Right,’ she said harshly to Tod. ‘Get that phone from the sheep or your dear old granny goes for a walk in thin air.’
20
BARMI
Ida stayed very calm. Which is more than could be said for Tod.
‘Gran!’ he screamed, running towards her.
‘I’m not bluffing,’ warned Lady Babcott, and to prove it she gave Ida a little nudge. One of Ida’s feet slipped off the edge. Lady Babcott let it dangle for a second, then dragged Ida back a fraction.
Luke gasped in horror but Neil didn’t even blink. Lady B was ruthless. He was just glad it wasn’t him she had hold of.
‘Best do as she says,’ he advised Tod.
Tod turned and raced, slipping and tripping, over the rocks towards the sheep.
He ran straight up to Jaycey and tried to grab the Baaton. Jaycey backed away and the others surrounded her protectively.
‘Please!’ cried Tod. ‘Please let me have it.’
‘Baaton . . . Baaton . . . Baaton . . .’ bleated the Warriors.
Tod crouched in front of them and tried to explain.
‘That lady wants the mobile phone,’ he said, ‘and if she doesn’t get it, she’s going to murder Gran.’ He looked at Wills and pleaded. ‘You understand, Wills. Can’t you explain to the others? Please. Gran’s going to die!’
Wills gazed at the sobbing boy, then turned to his fellow sheep.
‘Warriors, the humans think the Baaton is just a mobile phone. They want it badly. So badly that Ida will be killed if we don’t give it to them.’
‘But we can’t possibly give it to them!’ gasped Sal. ‘We brought it here to save Lord Aries. To save sheepdom from torment and death.’
‘And we’s only just in time, innit,’ added Links.
Oxo and Jaycey nodded their heads in agreement. The black shadow had stopped passing over them but that didn’t mean Lambad had gone. Maybe he had come down amongst the rocks. He could be anywhere.
Wills glanced across at Ida and the woman holding her.
‘We can save Aries and thereby the whole of sheepkind,’ he said. ‘Or we can save Ida. There is only one Baaton. The choice is ours and we must make it now.’
The others turned to Sal.
‘Your call,’ Links said to her quietly.
Sal wished it wasn’t. She looked at Wills, who gazed steadily back at her.
‘Would Aries want Ida to die so he can live?’ he asked. ‘Aries, Ram of Rams, symbol of goodness?’
Sal’s head was spinning. She gulped, then turned abruptly to Jaycey, mouthed up the plastic bag containing its precious Baaton, and dragged it roughly over Jaycey’s head. She crossed slowly to Tod and dropped it at his feet.
‘Thank you . . .’ he said, but Sal had already turned away to hide her distress.
Tod understood that something was upsetting her dreadfully but he didn’t have time to think about it. He grabbed up the plastic bag and turned back to his gran and Lady Babcott.
Lady Babcott smiled and moved away from the edge, though she didn’t release her grip on Ida’s bony arm.
‘There!’ she said to Neil. ‘That’s how it’s done.’
Tod began stumbling back over the rocks but the panic had subsided and his heart was thumping less loudly. He stopped and took the phone from the bag. Lady Babcott wasn’t going to get it until his gran was safe.
Lady Babcott frowned, gripped Ida’s arm more tightly and moved towards Tod, her other hand outstretched for the phone.
Tod didn’t move. ‘Not until you let Gran free,’ he said.
Lady Babcott came a little closer. Then closer still. Tod put the phone behind his back. ‘Let her go!’ he demanded.
Lady Babcott snorted, released her grip on Gran’s arm and gave her a little shove. Tod held out the phone again but as Lady Babcott’s fingers curled to grasp it, she and Tod were both blinded by the beam of a huge searchlight. It swept backwards and forwards across the small plateau and a voice boomed through a megaphone.
‘Drop that! And move away from the sheep at once! All of you.’
Tod turned and saw heavily armed soldiers in camouflage uniforms running towards them from the fortress. The megaphone boomed again.
‘I said drop it!’
Lady Babcott dropped the phone.
‘Over by the wall. All of you!’
The soldiers quickly surrounded Tod, Ida and Lady Babcott and began driving them towards the fortress. Other soldiers were driving Luke and Neil towards it too.
‘Don’t you know this is a top-secret establishment!’ shouted an officer as they stumbled across the grass.
‘If they did, sir,’ pointed out a sergeant, ‘it wouldn’t be top secret.’
‘Quite right, quite right. Move it, move it!’
Just in front of the fortress, there was a great wall of sandbags. The kind of thing soldiers shelter behind when there’s going to be an explosion.
‘Through there.
Double quick!’ The officer ushered them behind the sandbag wall.
To Tod and Ida’s astonishment, Tony Catchpole and Nisha were already there.
‘I’m ever so sorry, Ida,’ Tony whispered, as the newcomers were herded in.
‘What for?’ Ida asked. She noticed that Nisha was wearing her cream suit again, which was asking for trouble on a mountain-top full of sheep.
‘For identifying them from the glider,’ said Tony. ‘As the sheep the aliens abducted.’
‘They can’t believe in that nonsense, Tony dear,’ smiled Ida.
‘But they do.’ Tony was almost weeping. ‘They think your sheep are acting as spies for aliens. They think the thing Jaycey’s been carrying round her neck is a transmitter sending information back to the spaceship: information about their top-secret headquarters. They’re BARMI, you see.’
Ida didn’t see. Neither did any of the others.
‘So why have they made us all come behind here?’ asked Tod.
Tony swallowed hard. ‘They say the sheep have got to be destroyed before they can pass on any more secret information.’
‘No!’ Ida grabbed Tony’s arm. ‘Tell them they’re wrong. Tell them they’re mad.’
‘I have,’ said Tony miserably. ‘But they won’t listen. They’re preparing the explosives now. They’re going to blow your sheep up!’
Tod put his arm around Gran’s shoulder. Tony put his arm around Nisha’s. Luke sniffed and used the sleeve of Neil’s jacket to wipe tears from his eyes. He didn’t even notice the smell. Only Neil and Lady Babcott were unaffected. In fact, they were delighted.
‘You’re a lucky lightweight,’ Lady Babcott told Neil. ‘The mobile’s going to be blown to smithereens. Bang! End of all your problems.’
Neil risked a reply. ‘All our problems, Lady B. All our problems.’ And he grinned back. ‘Cheers!’
Out in the grassy, sheep-shaped hollow, the Warriors were confused by the searchlight and the megaphone, and all the human comings and goings. Wills had no idea what was happening, but he felt very uneasy, even though Ida seemed to be safe now.
The Baaton lay face down on the grass, a little way off, where Lady Babcott had dropped it. Delight and relief surged through Sal’s stomachs: Aries’ power would be restored after all!
The Quest of the Warrior Sheep Page 10