Of Lions and Unicorns

by Michael Morpurgo

  “Thank you,” said Cherry. “I won’t forget. I doubt anyone is going to believe me when I tell them about you. No one believes in ghosts, not up there.”

  “I doubt it too. Be happy, little friend,” he said. And he was gone, back into the tunnel. Cherry waited until the light from the candle in his hat had vanished and then turned eagerly to the ladder and began to climb up towards the light.

  She found herself in a place she knew well, high on the moor by Zennor Quoit. She stood by the ruined mine workings and looked down at the sleeping village shrouded in mist, and the calm blue sea beyond. The storm had passed and there was scarcely a breath of wind even on the moor. It was only ten minutes’ walk down through the bracken, across the road by the Eagle’s Nest and down the farm track to the cottage where her family would be waiting. She began to run, but the clothes were still heavy and wet and she was soon reduced to a fast walk. All the while she was determining where she would begin her story, wondering how much they would believe. At the top of the lane she stopped to consider how best to make her entrance. Should she ring the bell and be found standing there, or should she just walk in and surprise them there at breakfast? She longed to see the joy on their faces, to feel the warmth of their arms round her and to bask once again in their affection.

  She saw as she came round the corner by the cottage that there was a long blue Land Rover parked in the lane, bristling with aerials. “Coastguard,” she read on the side. As she came down the steps she noticed that the back door of the cottage was open and she could hear voices inside. She stole in on tiptoe. The kitchen was full of uniformed men drinking tea, and around the table sat her family, dejection and despair etched on every face. They hadn’t seen her yet. One of the uniformed men had put down his cup and was speaking. His voice was low and hushed.

  “You’re sure the towel is hers, no doubts about it?”

  Cherry’s mother shook her head.

  “It’s her towel,” she said quietly, “and they are her shells. She must have put them up there, must have been the last thing she did.”

  Cherry saw her shells spread out on the open towel and stifled a shout of joy.

  “We have to say,” he went on. “We have to say then, most regrettably, that the chances of finding your daughter alive now are very slim. It seems she must have tried to climb the cliff to escape the heavy seas and fallen in. We’ve scoured the cliff top for miles in both directions and covered the entire beach, and there’s no sign of her. She must have been washed out to sea. We must conclude that she is missing. We have to presume that she is drowned.”

  Cherry could listen no longer, but burst into the room shouting.

  “I’m home, I’m home. Look at me, I’m not drowned at all. I’m here! I’m home!”

  The tears were running down her face.

  But no one in the room even turned to look in her direction. Her brothers cried openly, one of them clutching the giant’s necklace.

  “But it’s me,” she shouted again. “Me, can’t you see? It’s me and I’ve come back. I’m all right. Look at me.”

  But no one did, and no one heard.

  The giant’s necklace lay spread out on the table.

  “So she’ll never finish it after all,” said her mother softly. “Poor Cherry. Poor dear Cherry.”

  And in that one moment Cherry knew and understood that she was right, that she would never finish her necklace, that she belonged no longer with the living, but had passed on beyond.

  his morning I met a whale. It was just after five o’clock and I was down by the river. Sometimes, when my alarm clock works, and when I feel like it, I get up early, because I like to go bird-watching, because bird-watching is my favourite hobby. I usually go just before first light. Mum doesn’t mind, just so long as I don’t wake her up, just so long as I’m back for breakfast.

  It’s the best time. You get to hear the dawn chorus. You get to see the sunrise and the whole world waking up around you. That’s when the birds come flying down to the river to feed, and I can watch them landing in the water. I love that.

  If you’re already there when they come, they hardly notice you, and then you don’t bother them. Hardly anyone else is down by the river at five o’clock, sometimes no one at all, just the birds and me. The rest of London is asleep. Well, mostly, anyway.

  From our flat in Battersea it takes about five minutes to walk down to the river. The first bird I saw this morning was a heron. I love herons because they stand so still in the shallows. They’re looking for fish, waiting to strike. When they strike they do it so fast, it’s like lightning, and when they catch something they look so surprised and so pleased with themselves, as if they’ve never done it before. When they walk they will walk in slow motion. When they take off and fly they look prehistoric, like pterodactyls almost. Herons are my best. But soon enough they all came, all the other birds, the moorhens and coots, the crested grebes and the swans, the cormorants and the ducks. This morning I saw an egret too, perched on a buoy out in the river, and you don’t see many of those. They’re quite like herons, only much smaller, and white, snow-white. He was so beautiful. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

  I was watching him through my binoculars, and he was looking right back at me. It was like he was asking me, “Hey you, what are you doing here? This is my river, don’t you know?” Suddenly, without any warning, he lifted off. Then they all lifted off, all the birds on the shore, all the birds in the river. It was really strange. It was just as if I’d fired a gun or something, but I hadn’t. I looked around. There wasn’t a single bird anywhere. They’d all disappeared. For a while the river was completely still and empty and silent, like it was holding its breath almost, waiting for something that was about to happen. I was doing the same.

  Then I spotted something slicing slowly through the water towards me. It was a fin. Shark! I thought. Shark! And a warm shiver of fear crept up my back. Then I saw the head and knew at once it couldn’t be a shark. It was more like a dolphin, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t quite the right shape. It was too big and too long to be a dolphin. It was big enough to be a whale, a real whale. Now I knew what it was. With a face like that I knew at once that it had to be a bottle-nosed whale. It’s the only whale that’s got a face like a dolphin. (I know quite a lot about whales because my uncle sent me a whale poster he’d got out of a newspaper, and I’ve had it pinned up in my bedroom over my bed ever since. So that’s why I can recognise just about all the whales in the world, narwhals, belugas, sperm whales, pilot whales, minkies, bottle-nose whales, the lot.)

  To begin with I just stood there and stared. I thought I was still dreaming. I couldn’t take it in. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I mean, a whale in the Thames, a whale in Battersea! He was close to the shore now, in shallower water, and still coming towards me. I could see almost all of him, from his head to his tail. But after a bit, I could see he wasn’t really swimming any more, he was just lying there in the shallows, puffing and blowing a bit from time to time. He must be resting, I thought, tired out after a long journey perhaps. And then I noticed he was watching me as hard as I was watching him, almost like he was trying to stare me out, except I could tell from the gentleness in his eye that he wasn’t being unfriendly towards me. He was interested in me, that’s all, as interested as I was in him.

  That’s when I knew – don’t ask me how, I just knew – that he wanted me to come closer to him. I climbed the wall and ran along the shore. The tide was already going out fast. I could see at once that he was in great danger. If he stayed where he was, he’d soon be stranded. I was walking slowly, so as not to alarm him. Then I crouched down as close as I could get to him, the water lapping all around me. His great domed head was only just out of my reach. We were practically face to face, eye to eye. He had eyes that seemed to be able to look right into me. He was seeing everything I was thinking.

  I was sure he was expecting me to say something. So I did.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked
him. “You’re a bottle-nose whale, aren’t you? You shouldn’t be here at all. You don’t belong in the Thames. On my whale poster it says you live in the North Atlantic somewhere. So you should be up there, near Iceland, near Scotland maybe, but not down here. I’ve seen bottle-nose whales on the telly too, on Planet Earth, I think it was. There were lots of you all together. Or maybe it was pilot whales, I can’t remember. But anyway, you always go around in schools, don’t you, in huge family groups. I know you do. So how come you’re all alone? Where’s the rest of you? But maybe you’re not all alone. Maybe some of your family came with you, and you got yourself a bit lost. Is that it?”

  He kept staring back at me out of his big wide eye. I thought the best thing I could do was to just keep talking. I couldn’t think what else to do. For a moment or two I didn’t know what else to say, and anyway I suddenly felt a bit stupid talking to him. I mean, what if someone was watching me? Luckily, though, there was no one about. So instead, I looked upriver, back towards Battersea Bridge, to see if any of his family might have come with him, but everywhere the river was empty and glassy and still. There was nothing there, nothing that broke the surface anyway. He was alone. He’d come alone.

  And that was when it happened. The whale spoke! I’m telling you the truth, honest. The whale spoke to me. His voice was like an echoing whisper inside my head, like a talking thought. But it was him talking. It really was, I promise you. “No,” he said. “My family’s not with me. I’m all on my own. They came some of the way with me, and they’re waiting for me back out at sea. And you’re right. We usually stay close to our families – it’s safer that way. But I had to do this bit alone. Grandfather said it would be best. Grandfather would have come himself, but he couldn’t. So I’ve come instead of him. Everyone said it was far too dangerous, that there was no point, that it’s too late anyway, that people won’t listen, that they just won’t learn, no matter what. But Grandfather knew differently. He always said I should go, that time was running out, but there was still hope. I was young enough and strong enough to make the journey, he said. One of us had to come and tell you. So I came. There are some things that are so important that you just have to do them, whatever anyone says, however dangerous it might be. I believe that. And besides, I promised Grandfather before he died. I promised him I’d come and find you. And I always keep my promises. Do you keep your promises?”

  I could just about manage a nod, but that was all. I tried, but I couldn’t speak a word. I thought maybe I was going mad, seeing things that weren’t there, hearing voices that weren’t real, and suddenly that really terrified me. That was why I backed away from him. I was just about ready to run off when he spoke again.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “Don’t be frightened. I want you to stay. I want you to listen to me. I’ve come a very long way to talk to you, and I haven’t got long.”

  His tail thrashed suddenly, showering me with water, and that made me laugh. But then I could see it was serious. He was rolling from one side to the other, rocking himself violently. Now I saw what it was that he was struggling to do. He was trying to back himself out into deeper water, struggling to keep himself afloat. I wanted to help him, but I didn’t know how. All I could do was stand there and watch from the shore. It took him a while before he was out into deeper water and able to swim free again. He was blowing hard. I could tell he’d given himself a terrible fright. He swam off into the middle of the river, and then just disappeared completely under the water.

  I stood there for ages and ages, looking for him up and down the river – he could have gone anywhere. I was longing for him to surface, longing to see him again, worried that he’d never dare risk it again. But he did, though when he came back towards me this time he kept his distance. Only his head was showing now, and just occasionally his fin. “I’ve got to watch it,” he said. “The tide is going out all the time. Grandfather warned me about it, they all warned me. ‘Stay clear of the shore,’ they told me. ‘Once you’re beached, you’re as good as dead.’ We can breathe all right out of the water, that’s not the problem. But we need water to float in. We can’t survive long if we get stranded. We’re big, you see, too heavy for our own good. We need water around us to survive. If we’re not afloat we soon crush ourselves to death. And I don’t want that to happen, do I?”

  Maybe I got used him speaking to me like this, I don’t know. Or maybe I just wanted to hear more. Either way, I just didn’t feel at all scared any more. I found myself walking back along the shore to be closer to him, and crouching down again to talk to him. I had things I needed to ask him.

  “But I still don’t really understand,” I said. “You said you’d come to talk to me, didn’t you? That means you didn’t get lost at all, did you?”

  “No, I didn’t get lost,” he told me. “Whales don’t get lost, well not that often anyway. We tell each other where we are all the time, what’s going on all around the world. What we see we share. So each and every one of us has a kind of map of the oceans, all the mountains and valleys under the sea, all the rivers and creeks, the coast of every continent, and every island, every rock – it’s inside our heads. We grow up learning it. That’s why we don’t get lost.” He paused for a while, puffing hard through his blowhole. Talking was exhausting for him, I could see that.

  “But we do get tired,” he went on, “and we get old too, and we get sick, just like people do. We’ve a lot more in common with people than you know. We’ve got this earth in common for a start – and that’s why I’ve come all this way to see you. We don’t just share it with whales, but with every living thing. With people too. I’ve come to help you to save yourselves before it’s too late, because if you save yourselves, then you’ll be saving us too. It’s like Grandfather said: we can’t survive without you and you can’t survive without us.”

  I didn’t have a clue what he was on about, but I didn’t dare say so. But I felt his eye searching out my thoughts. “You don’t really know what I’m talking about, do you?” I shook my head. “Then I think the best thing I can do is to tell you about Grandfather, because it all began with Grandfather. When I was little, Grandfather was always going off on his travels, voyages of discovery, he called them. All over the world he went. We hardly ever saw him. Sometimes he was away for so long we all thought he was never coming back, and he wasn’t all that good about keeping in touch either. He was a sort of adventurer, my grandfather, an explorer. He liked to go to places where no whale had ever been before.

  “Then one day – it was some time ago now, when I was quite little – he came back from his travels and told us an amazing story. Ever since I first heard that story, I dreamed of going where Grandfather had gone, of seeing what he had seen. Grandfather had gone off to explore an unknown river, to follow it inland as far as he could go. No other whale had ever before dared to go there, as far as anyone knew anyway. All he knew of this river was that a couple of narwhals had been beached there in the mouth of the river a long time ago. They never made it back out to sea. The warning had gone out all over the oceans, and that was why whales had avoided the river ever since.

  “It took a while for Grandfather to find it, but when he did he just kept on swimming. On and on he swam right into the middle of the biggest city he’d ever seen. It was teeming with life. Everywhere he looked there were great cranes leaning out over the river, and towering wharfs and busy docks. Everywhere there were boats and barges. He saw cars and trains and great red buses. And at night the lights were so bright that the whole sky was bright with them. It was a magical city, a place of bridges and towers and spires. And everywhere there were people, crowds of them, more than he’d ever seen before, more than he’d ever imagined there could be. He wanted to stay longer, to explore further upstream, to discover more. It was a wonderful place, but Grandfather knew it was dangerous too. The further upriver he swam, the shallower the waters around him were becoming. There were boats and barges everywhere, and he knew that if he wasn’t very
careful any one of them could run him down, and be the death of him. When a propeller took a nick out of his fin, he decided it was time to leave. And besides, he was weak with hunger by this time. He knew he couldn’t go any further.

  “So he turned around and tried to swim back the way he’d come, back out to sea. But that was when he found that the tide was going down fast. He was having to keep to the deep channels, but so were all the boats and barges of course. There was danger all around him. He was so busy looking out for boats, that he didn’t notice how shallow the water was getting all around him. Grandfather knew, as all whales do, just how easy it is to get yourself stranded. He always said it was his own fault that he got stranded. He lost concentration. But Grandfather got lucky. Some children saw him floundering there in the shallows, and came running down to the river to help him. They helped him back into the water, and then stayed with him till they were sure he was going to be all right. They saved his life, those children, and he never forgot it. ‘When you get there, find a child,’ he told me, ‘because children are kind. They’ll help you, they’ll listen, they’ll believe you.’ So you see, it was only because of those children that Grandfather managed to find his way back out to the open sea again, and come back to us and tell us his story.”

  That was when I noticed that all the birds were back again, the egret too on his buoy out in the river. They had gathered nearby. There were pigeons and blackbirds perching on the trees behind me. On the shore not far away from me a beady-eyed heron stood stock still, and there was a family of ducks bobbing about on the river, a couple of cormorants amongst them, all looking at the whale but none of them too close. And like me, they were listening. Even the trees seemed to be listening.

  The whale spoke again. “Grandfather told me exactly how to get here, just how many days south I had to swim. He said I had to look out for the fishing boats and their nets, not to hug the coastline, because that was where there were always more boats about. He warned me about the currents and the tides, told me where the deep channels were in the river, and not to show myself till I had to. I mustn’t stay too long. I mustn’t swim too far upriver. I mustn’t go any further than I had to. ‘You’ll want to,’ he told me, ‘just like I did. When you find a child that’ll be far enough. And when you find him, tell him all I’ve told you, what we whales all know and people refuse to understand. Tell him it’s our last chance and their last chance. And you must make sure it’s a child you tell. The old ones are greedy. They have hard hearts and closed minds, or they would not have done what they have done. They’re too old to listen, too old to change. The young ones will listen and understand. Just like they saved me, they can save the world. If they know, they will want to put it right – I know they will. They just need telling. All you have to do is tell them.’ That’s what Grandfather told me. So that’s why I have found you, and that’s why I have come.”