The Cockatrice Boys

by Joan Aiken

  He took a gulp of parsnip wine, which somebody had passed him, and coughed miserably.

  “So now there’s just one of the dogs left?” said Bellswinger. “What’s his name?”

  “How would I know?” grumbled Tom Flint. “We never got introduced.”

  Dakin began to feel rather impatient with Tom Flint. Certainly it was a sad and shocking tale he had to tell. Dakin thought how much he would like to see Mr. Coaltar the Boston Harbourmaster compelled to jump off a high tower or swallowed up by a Bandersnatch. But just the same he felt that Tom Flint might have made a bit more effort to look after the hounds left in his care, and get to know them. After all, the trip on the canal boat must have taken at least a day.

  “What were the words of command on the bit of paper the handlers gave you?” Dakin asked Flint.

  “Bless me, boy, I’ve forgot what they said, after all that ruckus out there. And that scrap of paper’s halfway down some Wyvern’s gullet by now.”

  “Why don’t you have a go at the poor beast,” Bellswinger suggested to Dakin. “See if you can get in touch, perk him up a bit? He looks mighty sorry for himself.”

  “Not surprising, seeing all his friends have been killed off,” said Wintless.

  “And he’s cut about a bit himself, poor old feller,” said Dakin.

  He went and knelt in front of the enormous dog, who gazed back at him mournfully. The animal was covered in thick, rough, grey fur, and had a long, curved tail. His ears were upstanding and lined with white whiskers. His eyes, under tufted brows, were hazel-brown, and the tip of his nose was black. His front legs were about the length and thickness of Dakin’s arms. He was somewhat clawed and battered, and there was a smear of blood down his chest. But none of the wounds seemed to be too serious. It was grief and shock that had done the worst damage.

  “Would you like something to eat, you poor old boy?” Dakin asked him in German.

  The dog slowly wagged his tail. His eyes brightened just a little.

  “Anybody got a spare mushroom roll? No? Oh well, you may as well have mine. Here—”

  The mushroom roll vanished in a snap of enormous jaws and a lengthy pink tongue.

  “Stand up, aufstehen Sie, and let’s have a look at you,” Dakin suggested, still in German.

  Obediently, the great dog rose to his feet. All the men were now watching in interested silence.

  “Looks like Dakin’s got on his wavelength all right,” somebody murmured.

  “That’s all very fine—but what’s the use of one hound?” said Coldarm.

  “Better than none!” snapped Bellswinger. “Can you make him sit down again, boy?”

  “Sit,” Dakin told the dog in German. And he sat.

  “Clever old fellow!” Dakin rubbed the dog’s bushy eyebrows and bony skull. “You’re a real brainy one, aren’t you? And I’m sorry as can be about all your friends … Wie heissen Sie? Hey! There’s a bald patch in behind his eyebrow. No it isn’t, it’s been shaved. And there’s something tattooed there; marks. Can you hold the light closer this way, Fred?”

  When Fred Coldarm held the light near the dog’s head, it could be seen that the marks tattooed on his skin were letters. Dakin traced them over with a careful finger.

  “U-L-I. Uli. Is that your name, Uli?” he asked the dog.

  Gravely the great creature stood up again, lifted an enormous right paw, and laid it in Dakin’s hand.

  A spontaneous round of clapping broke out among the men.

  “I reckon you got yourself a friend, Dakin,” said Coldarm. “Hey, listen—the bellringing’s stopped upstairs. D’you think they’ve all dropped dead of heart failure up there?”

  “I wouldn’t mind taking another turn,” said Dakin, and ran up the stairs, followed by Bellswinger and several others. But when they reached the belfry they saw that the ringers had their faces pressed eagerly against the slit windows.

  “Daylight’s come at last—or almost!” said Forby joyfully. “And there ain’t near as many monsters about. Sergeant, don’t you think it’s time we made a break for it?”

  “You ain’t so daft as you look, Forby,” the sergeant told him, peering out. “And it’s snowing like blazes again, that cuts down visibility. Let’s go … Hey, see who’s followed us up!”

  The great dog Uli had climbed the stairs behind Dakin, and now came to stand with his head pressed against Dakin’s knee.

  “I doubt we’re going to have trouble getting him down again, though,” said Bellswinger …

  * * *

  The trip back from Willoughby-on-the-Wolds to Nether Broughton took less time than the outward journey, since it was undertaken in daylight. But it was no pleasure. The wind was against them, and a slashing snowstorm beat in their faces all the way. Several members of the party, blinded by snow and sleet, fell into the canal and had to be rescued by the dog Uli, who proved a valuable asset.

  “Uli! Fetch that man out of the water!” was Dakin’s continual shout.

  “Worth his weight in ruby rings, that dog’s going to be,” commented Sergeant Bellswinger.

  “Who wants ruby rings? Worth his weight in mushroom rolls, more like,” said Dakin, who was hollow with hunger as he had given his rations to the dog.

  Tom Flint, from the Canine Rescue Mission, accompanied them, since all his companions were dead and he could not manage the canal boat single-handed. Nothing could be done about the inhabitants of Willoughby-on-the-Wolds, who had come to the aid of the men and dogs and had been killed by monsters. Such as had not been devoured overnight now lay under several feet of snow.

  “We can’t do owt for ’em, poor devils,” said Bellswinger. “Colonel’s going to be in a black rage over this job o’ work. Let alone we lost ten good men, and only come back with one dog out o’ thirty, we wasted valuable time turning south, when we might have been on our way to the Kingdom of Fife. And then—I dunno—the whole thing seems to me like a put-up job. Almost an insult, you might say.”

  He was talking to Ensign Quickstep, but Dakin, who was jogging beside them through the gale, with Uli close at his heels, heard what he said and asked, “Do you think it was an ambush, Sergeant?”

  “Ah, boy, I do. There ain’t been such a concentration of monsters seen since we ran in to Manchester—no one’s a-going to tell me they come there by accident. That was a planned incident.”

  “You don’t think the people who sent the dogs planned it?” Dakin said in horror.

  “No, no, lad, I ain’t saying that. But somebody got wind of where we was going, and somebody sent the monsters there to lay in wait. And what I’d like to know is, where is that somebody, and how did they hear tell of secret command post orders? That’s what I’d like to know. Those Basilisks weren’t there by chance. Basilisks ain’t so common—not in such numbers as that. There’s summat fishy about it.”

  Somebody has to be a traitor, thought Dakin. But who? What a horrible thought.

  He trotted on very soberly through the wintry weather.

  * * *

  A faint exhausted cheer rose up from the expeditionary force when they finally rounded a windswept corner of beech coppice and beheld the Cockatrice Belle ahead of them, couched snugly in a deep railway cutting. The tinsel and the red and green glass bells which adorned the train when they first set out from London had long since been smashed or stripped away in battle, but the train was still a gallant sight with its bronze armour-plating and gold stripes, and Lieutenant Upfold had kept the men who remained on board hard at work polishing the windows and cleaning out the wind-vanes in case their returning comrades should be pursued by hostile forces and a speedy departure was required.

  An answering cheer came from the garrison on the train as they saw their mates come over the hill, but this died away uncertainly when it became plain that no large pack of Gridelin hounds accompanied the returning force.

  Colonel Clipspeak was out on the observation platform with the Archbishop beside him and a guard of sharpshooters with Snark
guns.

  Bellswinger saluted smartly as soon as he came within earshot, but his tone was sad, flat, and apologetic as he reported. “Have to announce the death of ten men, sir. And the dogs was all killed by monsters before we ever arrived at the rendezvous point. Only this single hound left, what you see, sir.”

  Clipspeak turned very pale, but remained calm. He said, “You’d best come to my office, Sergeant, and give me the whole story. Let the remaining men of your party be well fed and rested. And the dog had better be taken along to their mess. Who is that civilian?”

  “He’s a chap from the Canine Rescue Mission at Boston, sir. I’ll tell you about him when I make my report. I daresay Mrs. Churt can make him comfortable in the galley till you want to interview him.”

  “Very well. I don’t approve of taking civilians on board, but in the circumstances—and as we have room—” The colonel sighed.

  Later, in the office, Bellswinger gave a full account of the disastrous expedition, and the colonel listened with knitted brows.

  “You don’t think the whole thing was a put-up job? That it was organized from Hanover?” he said.

  “No. No, I don’t, sir. What for would anyone send thirty Gridelin hounds just to be ate up by monsters? No, what I think was, somebody, somehow, got word of the rendezvous and sent a force of monsters to put a spoke in our wheel.”

  “Humph,” said the colonel, and sat silent for a long time pressing his knobbly fingers together.

  “Do you think it can have anything to do with the child Sauna?” he asked at length. “Could she be giving away secrets? And—if so—to whom?”

  “Well, sir, that’s a hard one.” Bellswinger frowned. His long red face was very thoughtful. “I don’t believe she’d give away our secrets on purpose, sir; that I don’t. She’s a good girl, and hardworking—Mrs. Churt thinks the world of her, and so does young Dakin and lots of the men—and, besides that, she’s as keen as mustard. Keen on our Cause, sir, as you might say. She’s learning to handle a Snark gun; she can better some of the men’s rounds, six times out of ten, and besides that she’s right handy at giving warning of assaults in advance—up to as much as half an hour ahead, sometimes, she can warn us when there’s summat nasty coming along. I’d have been glad of her on our trip to Willoughby, and that’s a fact. Now I ask you, sir, is it likely that the Other Side would plant somebody as useful as that on us? (If there is an Other Side, as such, which I sometimes take leave to doubt, sir?)”

  “You think this invasion of monsters is just a random piece of bad luck, do you, Bellswinger? But what about that memo from headquarters, saying that it’s all being directed from somewhere up by the Kingdom of Fife?”

  “Headquarters ain’t always right in their info, sir. Not but what it do seem that some of the things what happen is planned; and planned quite smartly, too,” the sergeant acknowledged, sighing.

  “Oh, I certainly think they are planned,” said the archbishop, who all this time had been sitting in the colonel’s easy-chair listening keenly and attentively to the discussion. “I think they are planned,” he repeated. “I think that every smallest thing that has befallen us has been planned—even down to the child Sauna’s aunt’s collection of holiday souvenirs—hundreds of little tiny china pots.”

  “Sir?” said Bellswinger, greatly startled.

  “I have had many talks with the child Sauna, Sergeant, while you were off on your ill-fated errand, and several things have struck me forcibly. One is the nature and character of Mrs. Florence Monsoon. She sounds to me a very strange, not to say repellent and sinister individual. Keeping the child tied up in that manner—keeping her, it seems, at the behest of somebody else; no, that situation was not simple, not natural at all. Another significant factor is that Florence Monsoon was not herself a native of Manchester. She moved there when she married. But her place of origin was in Scotland—ah, yes, you can guess where. Not far from the Kingdom of Fife. Near the Pool o’ Muckhart. (It is instructive, is it not, that many place names in Scotland relate to streams and water, or to the weather—Burnfoot, Bridge of Earn, Coldrain, Burn of Cambus, Devil’s Cauldron—those waters, streams, storms are so important to the Scots.) And Muckhart, of course, lies close to the Ochils, a most mysterious range of hills, volcanic, you know, very abrupt, seamed with unexpected caves and gorges. So your little Sauna, Colonel, is closely connected by her ancestry with the very neighbourhood in Scotland to which you have been directed by your command; is not that a very singular coincidence?”

  “Very singular indeed,” agreed the colonel gloomily. “In fact it sounds damned fishy to me.”

  “Not only so,” went on the archbishop, “but, according to the child, her aunt had told her stories concerning family forbears which suggest that she can trace her descent straight back to Michael Scott.”

  “Michael Scott?” said the colonel, perplexed. “You mean the feller that wrote a book called Tom Cringle’s Log?”

  “No, no, Colonel, not that one; a much earlier character, also an author, as it happens, who lived in the twelfth or thirteenth century, travelled to Spain, was an official astronomer (or astrologer; they were synonymous in those days) at the court of the Emperor Frederick II in Palermo and wrote numerous learned books about Nature and her secrets. Quaestio Curiosa de Natura Solie et Lunae was one of his bestsellers. And he was reputed to have traffickings with the Evil One, to possess a demon horse and a diabolical ship. When he died, his last and greatest book was said to have been buried with him at Melrose Abbey, lest its secrets fall into unprincipled or inexperienced hands.”

  “Fancy that, most remarkable,” said the colonel, not greatly interested.

  “Another of Sauna’s ancestors, a more recent one, was a man called John Brugh, a notorious warlock, who lived in Glen Devon around the year sixteen hundred, who was tried and burned for witchcraft.”

  “Indeed? But I still don’t quite see the relevance. What has that got to say to our present predicament?” demanded the colonel fretfully.

  “Firstly it explains the girl’s psychic powers. These things are often hereditary. They run in families—like red hair and deafness. Secondly, it appears to me that a kind of stage management is going on.”

  “What can you mean, Archbishop?”

  “Why—that matters are being put in train to get the girl up to Scotland, up to the neighbourhood of her origin. The aunt mysteriously vanishes, the girl is rescued—quite fortuitously as it seemed at the time, but I now suspect that the whole affair was pre-designed.”

  “Come to think,” the colonel recollected, “there was that funny business of her aunt’s voice coming through on the phone. You told me about that, Bellswinger.”

  “Yes, sir, I did, and a deuced queer start it was. On the internal house line, it was, and smashed the instrument all to little bits, and gave me such a shock as loosened the teeth in my gums. But Sauna didn’t like that one little bit, sir, she was even more scared than what I was. She didn’t want to answer her auntie. And she told me her auntie never loved her, nor wanted her at all, but only took her as there was nobody else as’d have her.”

  “Yes,” said Dr. Wren. “That was what she told me. But in fact, as we now know, the aunt’s position was a false one. For Sauna was not alone in the world—she had her cousin Dakin and Dakin’s mother in London.”

  “But what about the dogs?” demanded the colonel. “I must confess, I can’t make head or tail of that affair. Who—I ask you—would arrange to have a decent pack of hounds slaughtered on purpose?” The colonel had been a foxhunting man in his younger days, so naturally he felt strongly about this. “I can just about swallow your notion that there might have been some deep-laid plot to get the girl aboard this train—though it seems a mighty roundabout way to gain such an end—but why take elaborate steps to do away with all those valuable, high-bred dogs? It don’t make sense—no, by Columbus, it don’t!”

  Dr. Wren sighed.

  “There are powers of which our knowledge is
minimal,” he said. “And their values, mercifully, are not the same as ours. We shall just have to be extra watchful, extra vigilant.”

  “Keep a sharp eye on the gal, you mean?” suggested the colonel.

  “Certainly that—among other things. But without making the poor child aware that we do so—for, after all, she herself may be as innocent as the day.”

  “Well,” sighed the colonel, “at all events, we can’t put the girl off the train. Besides, she’s a deal too useful. Now, what about this other fellow—what’s his name, Linch, Finch?”

  “Tom Flint, sir, from the Canine Rescue Mission.” And Bellswinger told the story of how Flint and his colleagues had been given the charge of the dogs at the port of Boston.

  “I wonder,” mused Dr. Wren, half to himself, “if the object of the rendevous at Willoughby was to get Tom Flint on board?”

  “Just wait till I get back and write a report on that bungling harbourmaster,” growled the colonel. “All this howdedo results from his idiocy. However! That’s water under the bridge. What’ll we do with Flint? Can’t very well turn him out to walk back to Boston across country on his own?”

  “He asks, sir, if he can come with us as far as Queensferry on the Firth of Forth, and then from there he can make his way back along the coast by submarine.”

  “Seems a bit roundabout—and how did he know we were making for Queensferry?” muttered the colonel. “Still, if that’s what he wants … Maybe he can be of some use in looking after the hound.”

  Oddly enough, this reasonable suggestion proved unworkable. Uli, the great, grey, shaggy dog, soon settled down well enough and found his place among the crew of the Cockatrice Belle; the men grew very fond of him and competed to slip him bits of their rations (for he had a huge appetite); Mrs. Churt tolerated his presence in her galley, though she did grumble that it was like climbing over the Alps every time she wanted to get to her cooking stove; Dakin and Sauna loved him dearly and spent hours brushing and combing out his shaggy grey pelt and practising the language in which they conversed with him. Sauna called it Low Hundisch; very soon she was almost as expert in it as Dakin.