The Cockatrice Boys

by Joan Aiken

  “What about bridges?” General Grugg-Pennington had said to Lord Ealing, who replied peevishly, “How can we tell? Who knows what condition the bridges may be in? The men will have to survey and repair bridges when they come to them, if necessary under covering fire from the train.”

  Luckily the bridges during the first part of the journey, as far as Oxford, were found to be in a fair condition; the Cockatrice Belle passed over them safely, gliding at a cautious twenty miles per hour.

  Meanwhile the men of the troop had their hands full. Many monsters attacked the train. Flying Hammerheads swooped down from above, their ugly jaws snapping and scooping, and were fought off with flame-throwers and crossbows; great herds of Griffins, Footmonsters, Cocodrills, and Shovel-tuskers roamed beside the permanent way, often crossing the rails, snapping and slashing and clawing at the men as they battled to clear the track. Progress was often exasperatingly slow.

  “Still,” as Corporal Dwindle said to Sergeant Bellswinger towards the evening of the first day, “every little helps, and we must have done in quite a few of the brutes. The men are getting used to ’em.”

  “Pity Private Quillroy had to go and get swallowed by that Shovel-tusker. If only he’d studied his drill and remembered to hold his crossbow sideways on—”

  “Ah well,” said Corporal Dwindle, “at least it’s a lesson to the others. Now do you see,” he told Dakin, “why you got to keep those windows crystal clear? We need all the view we can get.”

  “Beg parding, Sergeant!” exclaimed Private Bundly, coming into the men’s mess, where Dakin was cleaning the windows and the two NCOs were taking a cup of tea. “Beg parding, but we’ve found a stowaway in the arsenal. Hid away at the back behind a stack of December guns, she was.”

  “She?” demanded Bellswinger wrathfully. “And who the blazes may she be?”

  “Here she be, Ser’nt,” said Private Bundly, and he pushed into the mess cabin a rather strange figure, at first hardly recognizable as a person, for it was all tied up in sacks. However when these were removed, they saw a lanky, melancholy-looking, grey-haired woman wearing a homespun skirt, leather kneeboots, and a man’s forage jacket.

  “Why the pize was she wearing all those sacks?”

  “To make herself look like a bundle of hammunition, I reckon.”

  “The colonel will have to see her. Come along, you!” Bellswinger roared at the woman, who seemed too alarmed to speak; and he led her to the cabin of the colonel, who was playing waltzes on his grand piano.

  Dakin followed inquisitively. Dusk had fallen by now, and he didn’t see the point of cleaning windows if you couldn’t see out anyway. He stood in the cabin doorway looking in.

  “A stowaway? A female stowaway? On my train?” The colonel was scandalized. “What’s your name, woman? What d’you mean by it? Why in the name of blue ruin did you do it?”

  The stowaway seemed to pick up a bit of courage in the colonel’s presence. She looked at the grand piano and drew a disapproving finger over the dust on its lid.

  “Oh, if you please, sir, my name’s Mrs. Churt and I hid under all those pepper-grinders, or whatever they are, because I did so long to get a glimpse of anything green. I used to have a little garden, sir, before all these horrible Griffins and Footmonsters and Bonnacons come along. We lived out past Blackheath way, and I grew lettuce and Canterbury bells and radishes, and I can’t abide living all my life in the dark like a blessed earwig, sir! That was why I done it!”

  “Well, but, my good woman, other people have to put up with living underground; and so must you. There’s no room for you on this train. We’ll be obliged to stop, you know, and put you off.”

  “Beg pardon, sir,” muttered Lieutenant Upfold in an undertone from the doorway. “Know it ain’t my place to speak, but the old lady wouldn’t last ten minutes if you put her out here. There’s a deuce of a lot of Basilisks about. You can smell ’em—like wet washing, don’t you know?”

  “I don’t need you to teach me my business, thank you, Upfold,” snapped the colonel, but Mrs. Churt fell on her knees and clasped her hands and cried, “Oh, please, please, sir, don’t put me off! I can cook—my old Churt, what was took by a Telepod, he used to say I was a real grade-one cook, the best in Kent—and I have useful Dreams, sir, often—and I can make drinks for the lads, and cakes and that, and give ’em little treats, like those Vivandeers used to in the Foreign Legiron. And I could make you a cross-stitch cover for your piano sir, to keep the dust off it.”

  “Humph! What kind of Dreams?” demanded the Colonel, who had been attracted, though he would not admit it, by the offer of the cross-stitch cover.

  “Dreams, like, that show which way to go, if there’s a question about it.”

  “Well, that’s as may be. I’ll think about it. Overnight. In the meantime,” Colonel Clipspeak told the sergeant, “you had best lock the woman in the broom cupboard. Is it true, Sergeant, that the men have been grumbling about the catering?”

  “Can’t say as to that, sir,” said the sergeant stiffly.

  “That in the officers’ mess leaves everything to be desired,” murmured Lieutenant Upfold.

  Sergeant Bellswinger hustled Mrs. Churt away, but Dakin, lingering, whispered urgently, “Sir! The food’s horrible! Soup made of melted boot polish. And the spuds are like summat that’s been dug up.”

  “Potatoes are dug up, you idiotic boy.”

  “No, sir. I knows better than that. They comes out of tins.”

  * * *

  In two days Mrs. Churt was cooking for the entire troop, both officers and men. Her vegetable stews were mouthwatering, so were her steamed puddings, rich, crumbly, and wreathed in strawberry jam. Her doughnuts were light as thistledown, her raisin cake was satisfyingly stodgy.

  Mess Orderly Widgery, who had been doing the cooking, was sent back to grease December guns in the arsenal, and Mrs. Churt presided over the galley. She had green fingers too: she started to grow little slips of parsley and chives in jam jars, she polished the colonel’s potted palm with salad oil, and she rescued the drooping geraniums in the officers’ parlour from an early death.

  And her cross-stitch cover for the colonel’s piano was immediately put in hand and grew inch by inch.

  Dakin soon became very fond of Mrs. Churt. He would sit in the galley, sometimes of an evening, practising his drum-taps on a tea-cloth stretched over a sieve, while she did her cross-stitch and made a sassafras drink for the men and talked about the happy times before the monsters came.

  “We used to go to Broadstairs for the summer. You ever been to the seaside, Dakin?” He shook his head. “Eh, poor little feller, fancy that! Deary me! Sometimes I wonder what we ever done to deserve having these monsters sent here.”

  “Your reckon they was sent, Mrs. Churt?”

  “Oh, they were sent all right. I did hear, in the old days, factories used to dump all their rubbish in a quarry or out to sea; or, later on, up in the high sky, where they reckoned it’d blow away. Maybe somebody did the same thing with this little lot; just dumped them on us like kittens in a rain barrel. Or, maybe it was done out of spite; somebody had it in for us.”

  Corporal Bigtoe and a couple of privates came in asking if there was any chance of a hot drink. While Mrs. Churt served them, Dakin pondered over what she had suggested.

  Could somebody have wanted to get rid of the monsters and just thought this was the best place to tip them?

  Maybe there was something in what Mrs. Churt had said.

  * * *

  On the eighteenth day of travel they approached the outskirts of Manchester. Progress had been extremely slow for the last forty-eight hours. Several bridges had needed a lot of repair; and two of the men engaged on this work had been lost: Private Goodwillie was carried off by a Manticore, while Private Skulk had the misfortune to look at a Basilisk and of course died instantly.

  “Didn’t keep his Snark glasses properly greased,” grumbled Sergeant Bellswinger.

  “Snark gl
asses won’t help, not against a Basilisk,” said Corporal Enticknap. “In fact, if you ask me, Snark glasses aren’t much good at all. What we need is a Snark mask, like what Driver Catchpole got issued.”

  “If you know so much, why don’t you go to the colonel and say so?”

  “I’ve a good mind to do just that.”

  “You go billocking to the colonel, I’ll put you on wind-vane duty,” growled the sergeant.

  Wind-vane duty was very risky. It meant crawling along the top of the train, often through driving snow, clearing out the vanes, which soon became choked with dust when the train was in motion, and wiping the stellar energy panels. The worst danger was from Flying Hammerheads, but also the train rolled from side to side as it travelled, so there was a fair chance of being flung off.

  Enticknap scowled, but remained silent. But when Dakin took in the colonel’s beautifully polished boots next morning, the latter demanded, “What’s all this about Snark masks?”

  “They’re saying as how the men ought to be issued with them, sir.”

  “Do you know how much a Snark mask costs, boy?” rapped the colonel.

  “No, sir.”

  “Lord Ealing told me I was only to use them in the last resort.”

  “Where would the last resort be, sir?”

  “Oh, go away!”

  “Sir,” said Dakin.

  “Well? Now what?”

  “Sir, I never get a chance to play my drum. Ser’nt Bellswinger won’t let me. He says it makes too much finical row, that it would rouse up all the finical monsters between here and Gretna Green. Sir, when can I play it?”

  “Don’t you worry,” said the colonel, rolling over under the velvet bedspread to help himself to another cup of tea. “You’ll get to play it soon enough.”

  At that moment both Dakin and Colonel Clipspeak were greatly astonished to hear a voice apparently coming out of the colonel’s early-morning teakettle. It said, “Hey, we gotta bloke here wants to get to Hempfields. What’s it like out that way?”

  “No go,” said another voice. “It’s a regular breeding ground for Snarks. Tell ’im, if ’e goes, it’s at ’is own risk. The corporation won’t admit liability.”

  “OK, I’ll tell him that.”

  “You got Snarks your way too?”

  “Have we got Snarks! Like starlings. Warrens full of ’em.”

  “They do say the young ones are harmless. You look at ’em, you don’t vanish.”

  “You ever tried?”

  “No, but my cousin Albert did. His kid brought one in for a pet. Cuddly little thing, it was.”

  “What happened?”

  “It grew a bit older and looked at them and they all vanished.”

  “Well, then.”

  “What I mean is, if we could go after ’em when they’re young…”

  The two voices died away in a forest of crackle.

  “Well, I’m blessed,” said the colonel. “My kettle seems to have picked up a radio frequency.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Dakin. “Hempfields is a place in Manchester, sir. My Auntie Floss used to live there. Do you think I might get to see my Auntie Floss by Christmas, sir? Aunt Floss used to have a tea-maker set like yours, sir.”

  “So did lots of people,” snapped the colonel. “You send Major Scanty to me right away.”

  “Yessir.”

  * * *

  “Come in, Scanty, come in,” said the colonel, ten minutes later. “Help yourself to a glass of ginger wine. It was you, was it not, who received the radio message two days ago from Manchester?”

  “Yes, Colonel.”

  “How did they contrive to send the message? I thought Manchester was deprived of all basic services.”

  “The mayor said—if I understood him correctly—that the vibrations set up by the wings of huge flocks of Snarks overhead created such exceptional static in the atmosphere that large portions of the city were infiltrated by electric current—even toothbrushes, carving knives, and hedge clippers became capable of transmitting electric messages—”

  “Hmn, I see; like this kettle of mine. It just caught a chat between two radio cabs.”

  “Indeed sir. That kettle will be a decided asset if it continues to pick up external transmissions. Perhaps by means of it we shall be able to discover something about the causes and origins of the problems that we face,” said Major Scanty hopefully.

  * * *

  The outskirts of Manchester were more devastated than those of London, in a different way. There were great greasy frozen swamps, with derelict factories, twisted metal girders, ruined concrete overpasses, and piles of snowy black coal-dust grown over with bindweed. But the town had not been flattened; far away in the distance highrise buildings could still be seen. The problem here had been Snarks, not the Shovel-tuskers which had knocked London flat.

  Before it reached the city, the rail track sank down out of sight into a greenish peaty bog puddled all over with ice and rainbow patches of oil. A party of ten sappers was sent out to make good the track, layering it underneath with rapid-setting filler and plastic ties. The men wore well-greased Snark glasses and carried Kelpie knives for close combat; they were protected by another party in the driver’s cab armed with flame-throwers and also December guns which fired explosive missiles of ice cooled to minus sixty degrees Celsius.

  But despite this the work-party suffered badly. Dakin, dashing about in the cab, feverishly cleaning the big glass windows, wiping off Snark scales, Telepod fur, powder burns, and men’s sweat, keeping the vision clear for the marksmen, was horrified to see how, man by man, the brave sappers were picked off. Six of them just vanished, when Snarks came too close, one was dragged away by a Telepod, one chopped in two by a Manticore and two were pulled into the swamp by Cocodrills. Just the same, in four days the task was finished. The track had been made usable and the Cockatrice Belle clanked slowly and cautiously over the doubtful stretch, and then very much faster up the slope beyond, Lance-Corporal Pitkin switching in half a dozen of his wind generators.

  But the colonel was cursing long and bitterly as he paced about his cabin, with Major Scanty and Captain Twilight taking turns to look through the periscope that allowed a farther view of the track ahead.

  “Some of my very best men! Those butterheads at supply just don’t know the first thing about Snarks.”

  “How many real Snark masks were we given, sir?” asked Captain Twilight.

  “Only enough for half the troop! And it’s plain we’re going to have a pitched battle on our hands before we can get into Manchester. The men will have to wear masks for that. Ensign Catchpole!” he barked over the intercom.

  “Sir!”

  “Cut your engine. We’ll stop here for the night and recharge. Sergeant Bellswinger!”

  “Yessir.”

  “We’ll have a sally at first light tomorrow. Eighty men with full battle equipment—masks, Griffin capes, the lot. Meanwhile, tell the lads to take it easy and turn in early. And—harrumph—tell Mrs. Churt to give them something extra tasty for their evening meal. And, Bellswinger, send Drummer-boy Prestwich along here, will you?”

  “Yessir.”

  Dakin was feeling depressed. He had seen ten people he knew, men who had been kind to him, cracked jokes, given him butter tokens, shown him a fast way to load his pistol, told him tales of Cockatrices, and how to deal with Bonnacons—he had seen those men vanish like drops of water on a hotplate and it had upset him badly. His expression was very dejected as he knocked and entered the colonel’s cabin.

  “Now, Prestwich,” said the colonel, taking no notice of this, “there’s a kind of monster in these parts that’s hypersensitive to loud rhythmic noise.”

  “Sir?”

  “The monsters can’t stand a regular row. All the ones in the Apocarpus family are like that.”

  “I don’t know no Apocarpuses, sir.”

  “We don’t have many round London. But here there are whole schools of them. Hydra, Cocodrill, Glypt
odont, Telepod, Kelpies, Griffins—they all belong to the Apocarpus family.”

  “Quite a big family, sir.”

  “If they hear a loud, sustained regular noise they tend to fall in half.”

  “Coo, sir.”

  “So you’ll be out there tomorrow, with those eighty men, Prestwich, and I want you playing your drum really loud, so long as the battle lasts. D’you understand? I don’t want you to stop for a single moment. Can you do that?”

  “Coo, sir, yes sir!” said Dakin joyfully.

  “Ask Mrs. Churt to give you a mug of hot milk with malt and molasses and rum flavouring in it, last thing tonight and first thing tomorrow. Tell her I said so.”

  “Yes, sir. Goodnight, sir!”

  “Goodnight, Dakin.”

  “That ain’t a bad boy,” said Captain Twilight, as the brass-handled door closed behind Dakin. “He’s got some sand in him.”

  When Dakin went along to Mrs. Churt for his bedtime drink, he found her with a melancholy, distant look in her eye. She too had been grieved by the loss of the ten men. But she was working even harder than usual at her cross-stitch canvas (it had a picture of a stylized Cockatrice on it, transfixed by a crossbow quarrel). A lot of the men had somehow acquired the notion that Mrs. Churt’s piece of handiwork was a lucky charm, and many of them came seriously to touch it with one finger before retiring to bed.

  “It’s like the bit of turf in the centre of the Manchester United football pitch,” said Private Tomkins. “Dead lucky, that is. You touch that with your finger, they say, you get all the good luck of everybody who ever stepped on it.”

  But Mrs. Churt was not paying attention. She sighed.

  “That Corporal Bigtoe, he was a real one for a laugh. Come to that, they was all nice boys. Lively. I’d like to set up some kind of memorial to them.”

  “What kind, Mrs. Churt?” asked Dakin, sipping his hot molasses and milk.

  “I’ll have to think. Now, you hop it, off to bed. You got to keep busy, tomorrow.”

  Next day at dawn Dakin, reporting to the galley for his morning toddy, was surprised not to find Mrs. Churt presiding over the big copper cooking plates that were heated by power from the engine. Instead, Orderly Widgery was back in charge, stirring the cauldrons of porridge and toasting raisin buns for the men’s breakfast.