by Eva Ibbotson
His brother nodded. ‘It is big with the cows,’ he said. ‘I think perhaps it is tonight.’
Then they shook hands one by one. ‘You can rest here,’ they said. ‘But soon you must go back and tell.’
And the children were left alone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The Mundanians had gone. The three children huddled together in the empty hut, stunned by what they had seen. They had to get back to the mainland and tell the world about this evil place – and quickly.
Ned opened the door a crack.
‘There’s no one about. If we drop down on to the beach and go round by the shore we should make it.’
They hadn’t gone far when they heard a sound which brought them up short: the desolate yet frantic mooing of a cow who has been separated from her calf. Then men shouting orders, the stamping of hooves ...
‘It is big what will happen with the cows,’ the brothers had said. ‘It is big and it is soon. Perhaps it is tonight.’
Without hesitation, the children turned and ran back towards the buildings.
They had come to a kind of forecourt, a concreted yard with drainage channels which had been swabbed down with disinfectant. A big incinerator took up one side of the courtyard. On the other side was a very large building: grey and forbidding and windowless. It looked like an aircraft hangar or an industrial workshop.
Beside the incinerator was a row of large waste bins. The children ducked down behind them and waited.
They waited for what seemed a very long time. And then slowly – very slowly – the huge steel double doors began to draw apart. The gap grew wide, and wider – and there, as on a stage, lit up by arc lamps more brilliant and dazzling than any daylight, they saw an operating table, high and clinical and white. Chrome cylinders of oxygen stood beside it, and pressure gauges and trolleys loaded with jars of liquid and coils of rubber tubing. And close by was a rack of glittering, outsize instruments: scalpels and scissors and forceps and clamps.
Rollo gasped and Madlyn put an arm round his shoulder.
There was no one in the lab at first, but then a man in a white coat came in from a door at the back and walked over to a large sink and pulled out a long curled horn that had been soaking there.
The man turned, and they saw his face.
It was the vet with the black beard who had come to Clawstone to tell them that the cattle were sick. He had shaved off his beard but they knew him at once. It was this man that Rollo had glimpsed out of the window of the hotel.
But before they could work out what this meant they heard the sound of hooves and, walking past them, his head hanging, came a calf, led by a man in overalls.
The calf was snow-white and it walked as slowly as the beasts must have walked in the olden days on the way to the temple to be sacrificed, sensing their terrible fate. When it reached the stream of light coming from the double doors, it stiffened its legs and tried to dig its hooves into the concrete, but they slipped on the wet floor and the man jerked the rope and led it forward.
Rollo had recognized it at once. It was the youngest calf, the one he had watched being born. His calf.
Ned held him back as he tried to leap out of his hiding place.
‘Wait,’ he hissed. ‘We have to know.’
The man leading the calf tugged at the rope once more and the calf was dragged into the operating theatre.
The door on the right opened again and Dr Manners came in. He was dressed in a high-necked operating gown; a surgical mask was strung round his neck.
‘Is everything ready, Fangster?’ he asked, and the vet who had called himself Dr Dale nodded and lifted up the curled horn with the pointed end which he had taken from the bag that the whalers had brought ashore.
‘This is the smallest. We’ll need to pack the wound tight, but it should close over all right. And if not ...’ He shrugged.
‘Quite so,’ said Dr Manners.
The calf was dragged up on to the operating table. It was mad with fear, fighting every inch of the way.
Dr Manners was filling a great syringe. The vet picked up the narwhal horn and held it above the head of the tethered beast.
And in that instant the children understood everything.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
It had begun in a faraway country, in the Kingdom of Barama, with a small, unhealthy prince who could not sleep.
Barama is in South America and it is very beautiful. It lies between Venezuela to the east and Guyana to the west and many people have not even heard of it, although the man who rules it is possibly the richest person in the world.
Barama is very beautiful; it has a palm-fringed coastline and mountains covered in green-blue trees and meadows filled with flowers. But what makes Barama special is one thing and one thing only: oil.
Oil gushes and bursts and erupts out of the sandy desert, and the more it is dug up and barrelled and sold to oil-hungry countries, the more seems to come out of the ground.
Before the oil was found, the princes of Barama led busy and active lives. They were strong men with big moustaches and they hunted and shot and fought their neighbours and each other.
But as they became richer and richer all this changed. They built themselves enormous palaces and filled them with priceless furniture. They bought themselves cars and aeroplanes and yachts and they covered their wives and daughters with fabulous jewels. They bought hundreds of suits and pairs of shoes and sumptuous ceremonial robes, and ate larger and larger meals and got more and more servants to wait on them.
The result of all this was exactly what you would expect. They became bored and miserable. Their muscles got flabby because they never walked anywhere but were always driven in cars and their stomachs boiled and bubbled with indigestion from all the rich food that they ate. So while their palaces got bigger and bigger, the rulers of Barama got smaller and sadder and feebler, and the present ruler of Barama, King Carlos, was a very little man indeed.
Carlos had not been a healthy child. His muscles were so weak that a servant used to go upstairs behind him and help to push his leg up to the next tread, and he had mostly been fed on slops – semolina pudding and lentil soups and things of that sort, because solid food gave him a stomach ache.
Prince Carlos’s mother had died when he was a baby, and after that his father had married five more times, choosing women from all over the world. Having five stepmothers had made little Carlos very worried and unhappy – there wasn’t one among them who had loved him or been kind – and when Carlos’s father had divorced them they had gone off in a huff, with their jewels and their money, and the little boy had never seen them again.
But there was one person in the child’s life who never went away, and that was his nurse, Nadia.
Nadia had come to Barama from a long way away – from the border of Russia and China. By the time she came to Barama the little prince was so unhealthy and spoilt and sad that he couldn’t get to sleep at night and lay in his canopied bed in his vast bedroom, staring at the ceiling and imagining devils and ghouls armed to the teeth who would fly down and cut his throat.
Nadia was sorry for the frightened little boy whom nobody loved, and she sat by his bed, night after night, and told him stories.
The stories Nadia told were the ones she had been told in her own faraway country. They were stories about mythical beasts – good kind beasts who helped travellers and comforted wayfarers. She told him about griffins and dragons and horses with wings. She told him about dogs that could speak and golden cockerels and kindly snakes that wound themselves round children and kept them from harm – and she told him about one beast in particular, a beast which her people loved more than any other in the world. And when she sat beside little Carlos and spoke in her soft, low voice, he could sleep.
Then came the day when Carlos’s father was drowned, diving off his latest yacht, and Carlos became the ruler of Barama.
He could now do anything he liked, but the trouble was he didn’t kno
w what he did like. His five stepmothers had put him off women and his indigestion put him off food and there wasn’t really any work to do governing his country because his ministers did it perfectly well.
For a while he drifted sadly through his palaces, and sat gloomily in his Turkish baths and bought a large number of dressing gowns with gold tassels which he stumbled over.
But one day as he was staring miserably out of the window, he had a vision. He would make a great garden – a paradise garden – and he would fill it with rare trees and with beautiful flowers and animals that you could see nowhere else: with the animals that Nadia had told him about in her stories. And above all with the beast she had said was the most beautiful and gentle and powerful of all – the beast which her people had loved more than any other in the world.
If he could get this amazing, swift and gentle creature for his paradise garden he thought he would be a happy man. So he called together his advisors and his courtiers and his ministers and told them what he wanted.
‘Only I don’t just want one,’ he said. ‘The Kings of Barama never have one of anything. I want a whole herd.’
So his advisors began to look for somebody who could get the King what he wanted, and after a long search they found Dr Maurice Manners of the Blackscar Animal Centre in Great Britain.
When Dr Manners heard what the King of Barama wanted, he hesitated. It was the biggest order he had ever had and there were all sorts of technical difficulties – but when he learnt that the King was offering five million pounds, he stopped hesitating quite quickly and tried to think what could be done.
Manners had come to Blackscar after a series of unfortunate accidents to the ladies he had operated on so as to make them more beautiful. There was a tummy tuck which had gone septic and a nose job which had ended up behind the patient’s ears, and, instead of standing by him and protecting him, his fellow doctors had said he was a disgrace to the profession and he was not allowed to be a doctor any more.
Some people would have been so hurt that they would have given up, but not Dr Manners. He had met up with a brilliant vet called Dr Fangster, who was bored with simply making animals better and had worked out all sorts of interesting experiments, like joining one animal’s lungs to another animal’s heart and then to a third animal’s stomach, and together they had come up with the idea for the Blackscar Centre.
For, as Manners said, if people want animals that don’t exist and will pay a lot of money for them, we will simply make these creatures. Between us we know everything there is to know about implants and bone grafts and tissue transfers, so what’s to stop us turning a chicken into a dodo or an ostrich into an auk? What’s more, the people we supply will be so pleased to get their animal they’ll be certain they’re getting the real thing.
And Manners was right. The collectors believed what they wanted to believe and hid the rare beasts they had asked for in secret zoos and private parks all over the world.
Nevertheless, when the order came through from the King of Barama, they had at first been baffled. It would mean getting hold of a herd of pure white horses and that would take a long time and be very expensive. But when they started to look up what was written about the beasts they were supposed to be making they learned something very interesting. Their hooves had not been rounded and solid like the hooves of horses; they had been split in the centre. The beasts had been cloven-footed. Their feet had a cleft in them like the feet of cows or sheep or goats.
Not only that, but all the books which Manners and the vet consulted were agreed on one thing: the creatures came of absolutely pure bloodstock, and always bred true.
And when they heard about the Wild White Cattle of Clawstone Park, they knew that their search was over – and that the King of Barama would get his unicorns.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Dr Manners stepped up to the operating table. He pulled on his rubber gloves. He smiled.
The calf lay helpless and tethered, silent now, its eyes rolling in terror.
‘Time to anaesthetize the patient,’ he said.
This was the beginning: the first calf in the world to be turned into a unicorn. They had chosen a young one because the tissues were soft – it would be easier to make a hole in its forehead and implant the narwhal horn – and because its own horns were not yet formed, it would not be necessary to scoop them out, as they would have to do with the larger animals. Of course, being so young, it was more likely to die during the operation, but there were plenty more of the beasts in the paddock.
Five million pounds’ worth of beasts ...
The sawn-off narwhal horn was ready in its jar of disinfectant. It was incredible how like a unicorn’s horn it was: no wonder narwhals in the olden days had been called the unicorn fish. An assistant, also gowned and masked, had laid out the sterile instruments: the razor to shave a patch between the creature’s ears; the drill to bore a hole in its skull, the scalpels and sutures and pads of cotton wool. A cylinder of blood for emergencies stood on a trolley close by.
‘See to the doors,’ ordered Manners. The assistant pressed a button and the doors to the forecourt moved together.
Outside, the children threw themselves frantically against the heavy steel partitions, trying to push them apart.
It was impossible. There was only a small gap now and it was shrinking fast. Rollo managed to slip through, and then Madlyn.
But not Ned. Before he could follow, the doors clanged relentlessly shut and Ned was left outside.
Dr Manners had reached for the syringe. It was poised above the head of the little calf; he was about to plunge the needle into a vein on its throat.
It was at this moment that Madlyn and Rollo almost fell into the room.
‘Well well, what have we here?’ the doctor said. And then in his usual calm voice: ‘Tie them up. We’ll deal with them later.’ He turned to the children. ‘Since you’re here you might as well watch. It isn’t every nosy child who sees the creation of a completely new beast.’
‘You can’t,’ shouted Rollo. ‘You—’
And then a hand came down over his mouth.
The children had no chance against Fangster and the assistant as they were thrown to the floor and trussed up with surgical tape. They were as defenceless as the wretched beast on the operating table.
And there was nobody to help them. They were quite alone.
The operation was going forward now. Fangster had selected his razor, the assistant had taken the drill out of its sterile wrapping.
Manners had put the syringe down on the trolley to deal with the children. Now he put out his hand to reach for it.
Except that it wasn’t there. It had rolled over twice on a perfectly flat surface and crashed on to the floor.
‘What on earth are you doing, you idiot?’ shouted Manners.
‘It wasn’t me,’ said Fangster angrily. ‘I didn’t touch it.’ He turned to the assistant. ‘You must have knocked it with your arm.’
‘No, I didn’t. I wasn’t anywhere near.’
‘Prepare another one,’ ordered Manners.
A second syringe was taken from its wrapping and filled with anaesthetic. Manners was angry now. He jabbed the point of the needle hard into the throat of the little calf, which gave a bellow of pain.
But before he could press in the plunger, the syringe jerked itself out of his hand, flew up into the air, and impaled itself in a fire bucket.
Manners took a deep breath. There wasn’t really anything wrong. It was just operation nerves. People didn’t realize that even the most famous surgeons felt anxious before an important operation. He was seeing things.
Fangster had pulled the narwhal horn out of its jar and was holding it. And then suddenly he wasn’t holding it any more. The horn was floating quite by itself up into the air ... high it floated and higher, before it did a somersault and came down again behind him.
‘Ow, ow – what are you doing?’ yelled Fangster at the assistant. ‘Stop it, that hu
rts!’
‘I’m not doing anything,’ said the assistant. ‘It’s the horn – it’s digging itself into your backside.’
Madlyn managed to turn her head and look at Rollo. They had felt alone and friendless and they had been wrong.
Manners had pulled himself together. If he couldn’t make the syringe work, he’d have to stun the creature instead.
‘Get me a hammer,’ he shouted.
But before the assistant could obey him, a coil of rubber tubing had unwound itself slowly ... very slowly, like a snake uncoiling from a long sleep, and then – still slowly – it rose, floated dreamily across to Manners and began to wind itself around the doctor’s neck.
‘Ugh! Glup! Let go,’ spluttered the doctor.
‘Brenda,’ whispered Madlyn. ‘She does so love strangling.’
Fangster was going wild. He went to pull a scalpel out of the rack, determined to make an incision and implant the horn somehow – but before he could reach for the scalpel, the scalpel reached for him. It moved by itself out of the rack and came towards him, and he just had time to duck as it flew past him and embedded itself in the wall.
An arc lamp on the ceiling swayed, then crashed to the ground. Sunita always did her best work on ceilings. A second lamp followed it – and a splinter of glass hit the assistant on the shoulder.
‘I’m off,’ he cried, and disappeared through the door at the back.
A cylinder of blood fell on its side. The sticky liquid oozed out on to the floor and Fangster slipped and lay on his back.
‘Stop it,’ he screamed to the empty air. ‘Get off me. I know you’re there, I can feel you. Stop tramping on my chest.’
The children turned to each other. So The Feet too had put aside their own troubles and come to help.
Manners had managed to tear himself free from the rubber tubing. But now he went berserk. He seized the drill with its lethally sharp point and rushed at the children. It was their fault. This madness had started when they got in. Crunching through broken glass, slithering, cursing, Manners lifted his arm, ready to bring the point down on Rollo’s head.
