by David Alric
‘I’ve got to write on “The woods in autumn” and “The pros and cons of zoos” – whatever that means,’ said Lucy.
‘Pros and cons means things for and things against,’ explained Clare, ‘so you have to say what’s good and bad about zoos and farms and keeping pets. Sounds quite interesting but it’ll be frustrating for you not to be able to say what the animals could tell you about being captive.’
‘I’ve got an idea,’ said Lucy suddenly. ‘Why don’t we ask Mum to take us to Richmond Park or Wimbledon Common at the weekend? The doctor said I should get some gentle exercise and they say it’s going to be sunny. I can pretend to make notes about the woods for my project and try to talk to an owl.’
‘OK,’ said Clare, ‘but it’ll have to be Sunday because I’m going shopping with Hannah in Kingston on Saturday.’ As Clare agreed she found herself, for the umpteenth time, wondering if she was in a dream. Here she was calmly discussing a plan for her sister to go and have a chat with a wild owl. Maybe they were both on some kind of trip! But in her heart she knew that Lucy had turned into something very special and that she had to support her through this amazing experience.
‘Greetings, O Moonwraith.’
Lucy was standing in a small clearing in the woods on Wimbledon Common. She was speaking to an owl and had decided that nightbane, the name Tibbles had used, sounded a bit rude. Clare had diverted her mother and Sarah to see some toadstools on a tree stump and though still in sight they were far enough away to leave her undisturbed. Lucy had wandered into the clearing and, while pretending to make notes in a small notepad, had ‘switched on’ her beacon. She had heard a bewildering array of voices – many of which were quite new to her – and then sent out a clear thought for an owl to respond. She had immediately received a new signal in reply and within a minute a tawny shape had swept effortlessly through the glade and landed in the fork of a nearby oak tree.
‘Greetings, She Who Speaks. What is your desire?’
The owl replied to Lucy’s salutation in a ‘voice’ that was surprisingly deep and masculine. Lucy wasn’t quite sure how you started up a conversation with such an impressive-looking creature but she felt intuitively that it couldn’t do any harm to start off with a bit of humility, even if they did all think she was the new mistress of creation, or whatever.
‘Er, I am sorry if I disturbed you at rest,’ she began, ‘but I find I can speak to all creatures and wish to find out more about how this can be, and why you are all being so helpful to me.’ She immediately thought that she sounded stupid and should have spent more time in advance planning what she wanted to say. The owl, however, appeared not to notice her confusion and replied gravely:
‘I am deeply honoured, O Promised One. If I had known you were to come I would not have slept for many suns. I will carry out anything within my power that you command, but fear I cannot give you the knowledge that you seek. Although I am large and my talons are feared by all the creatures of the field and forest, I am but a fledgiquill and have only the mind of a fledgiquill. If you seek enlightenment concerning The Promise, you must talk to others with greater minds than I. It is told that there are Hairy Tailless Ones imprisoned in the City of the Great Clock and they have much knowledge. The Little Great Ones are also said to possess much wisdom: they breathe the air but live like gillifins in the Great Salt. Fare thee well in thy quest.’
‘Lucy, Lucy, come on, we’re going to the pond!’ She heard Sarah calling and turned to see her mother and sisters waiting.
‘Fare thee well also, Great Moonwraith!’ she said, and went to join the others.
‘Well, what did he say?’ said Clare eagerly when she and Lucy were alone for a few moments while Joanna helped Sarah climb on a fallen tree. ‘Did you ask him if he had delivered any mail to Harry Potter?’
‘No, I jolly well didn’t,’ said Lucy. ‘I actually found him a bit scary, if you must know, even though I realize that I’m the one they all hold in awe. I couldn’t make some stupid joke he wouldn’t understand, could I?’
‘I was only teasing,’ laughed Clare. ‘How did it go?’
‘Well, not very well actually,’ said Lucy a little glumly. ‘He basically said he was only a bird and didn’t know much. It’s funny really – we’ve always been told how clever owls are, but if you think about it there’s no reason why he should be any wiser than a pigeon or a duck, is there? He did help a bit, though. He said I should see the Hairy Tailless Ones – whatever they are – or the Little Great Ones. They live in the sea but breathe air, so I suppose they’re mammals of some sort.’
Clare replied after only the briefest pause:
‘I think the Hairy Tailless Ones are apes – which would make sense as they are the closest relatives to humans, and the Little Great Ones must be dolphins – the Great Ones are presumably whales.’
‘Cool!’ said Lucy. ‘You’ve completely cracked it. Thanks. Now I’ve just got to think how to get to speak to some of them.’
As they strolled back towards the car they stopped to admire a new baby in a pram. The mother was a few yards away helping a toddler to clamber on to the trunk of a fallen tree. Suddenly a horse appeared from over a slight rise ahead of them, racing along the path straight towards them. It was riderless, with its mane flying and eyes and nostrils flared. It pounded nearer and though the mother screamed and rushed towards the pram clutching her toddler, the horse was already within a few yards of the pram which lay directly in its path and there was no way in which anyone could reach the baby in time. Suddenly the horse stopped; it was as though it was running on electricity and somebody had switched the power off. It skidded to a halt and reared on its hind legs just short of the pram – the baby gurgling happily in blissful unawareness of what had happened – just as a rider ran into view, her riding coat torn and her hat askew.
‘Pegasus!’ she cried, and the horse turned to look at her. ‘Thank heavens I’ve found you!’ Then she saw the pram and the toddler and an expression of horror crossed her face. ‘Is the baby all right – did he hurt anyone?’ Once she had been reassured that no harm had been done, she explained that a car exhaust had backfired on the nearby main road and startled the inexperienced horse, who had thrown her and then galloped off in terror. She remounted, apologized once again and rode away.
On the way home their mother could talk of nothing else but the horse episode.
‘The lucky coincidences that occur in life really are quite amazing,’ she said. ‘I’m sure that it was seeing that pram that stopped the horse: he obviously thought it was an immovable object. If it hadn’t been there he would have stampeded right through us – poor Lucy could have been hurt again. Just think, that pram could even have saved our lives.’ Lucy and Clare looked at each other in the back seat and grinned. They both now realized that all animals did as the Promised One bid them and knew that Lucy’s urgent request – inaudible to the other humans present – had brought the runaway horse to an immediate stop. One day, perhaps, they would tell their mother what had really happened that day.
Later, when they were alone, Lucy asked for Clare’s advice on how she could arrange to speak to some apes or dolphins. Clare thought for a moment, then her face lit up.
‘I’ve an idea and I think it’s one you’re going to like. You know you can’t go back to school while you’re convalescing;well, why don’t you go and spend some time with Grandma and Grandpa down in Littleporkton? While you were ill Grandpa told me that they’ve just refurbished the dolphinarium down there, so you could spend all the time you want talking to some dolphins.’
‘What a great idea,’ said Lucy. ‘And it fits in perfectly with my homework project. Let’s go and ask Mum.’
Her mother told them that her parents had already suggested that Lucy should spend some time at the seaside and immediately rang them to fix it up. At Lucy’s request she also rang the school the next day to ask if Miss Anther could write a letter to the director of the dolphinarium explaining that Lucy had been il
l and asking if she could do a special biology project at the dolphinarium during her convalescence.
The following weekend Grandma and Grandpa came to stay and when they returned to the seaside they took Lucy with them. She told them about the project she wanted to do on the dolphins and Grandpa promised to go with her to the dolphinarium when it reopened the following week.
2
A Villa of Villainy
Three months to the day before Lucy’s accident a meeting took place, thousands of miles away in South America, that was to have a profound effect upon her life and the lives of many others.
On that day Alf Sawyer rose as dawn was breaking and went for a dip in the private pool of his villa. As he swam, the sun rose from the sea and bathed Rio de Janeiro in a brilliant rosy glow. The ‘Cidade Maravilhosa’, or Marvellous City, with its stunning backdrop of mountains and miles of golden beaches, sat like a jewel on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. But this jewel was not without its flaws. A considerable number of drug barons, thieves and assorted war criminals spent their ill-gotten gains here on villas, beautiful gardens, exotic swimming pools and servants, and made themselves feel respectable.
A self-made man, Alf – ‘Chopper’ to his friends and associates in the illegal logging business – had risen from humble beginnings in south-east London to sit at the head of a multi-million-pound company making a fortune from drugs and illegal gold mining. The organization operated under the cover of a legal timber company which was run by a network of Chopper’s henchmen, who kept the company’s activities apparently on the right side of the law while ruthlessly exterminating any person or rival company that got in Chopper’s way.
Despite the origins of his wealth, Chopper had never been caught by the police or even charged with any crime. He always put on a show of outward respectability and with financial success he had indulged himself to the full. His extensive villa and grounds looked out over its own beach, and a sophisticated security system ensured that his spoils could not be shared by others, for he strongly disapproved of any criminality directed against himself.
The decorating and furnishings of the villa had all been executed in the worst possible taste and comprised a collection of the most expensive trash that money could buy. Chopper was particularly proud of his large collection of gold-plated garden gnomes, specially made to illustrate his own career and interests, and arranged in a variety of little scenes depicting criminal activities.
Chopper was the eldest of four brothers, all criminals, and he was by far the most successful of the bunch. The next in age, Sam, was his deputy in the company and had no talent other than mindless violence. The other brothers were twins and Chopper had not seen them for over five years. He knew they had gone to jail somewhere in the Far East but since then had heard nothing until they had contacted him out of the blue a week earlier and requested a family meeting to discuss ‘business’. Chopper had immediately suspected that they had heard of his success and were anxious to tap into his fortune, but could hardly refuse to see them. They were due to arrive with a business colleague, Mr Song, that very morning, and Chopper had arranged a business meeting in the villa boardroom for 11 a.m. He now sat on a lounger on the patio overlooking the swimming pool, basking in the morning sunshine. It would be a long day for, following the arrival of the twins and the family meeting, he would be holding the annual board meeting for his timber company in the afternoon and there was to be a family reunion dinner in the evening. He wondered what exactly his brothers wanted and where they had been during the past five years, apart from jail.
Chopper had been six when Sid and Fred had been born. They had been criminals since early childhood. Starting with cruelty to animals at a young age, they had terrorized first their schoolmates, then their teachers and then their entire neighbourhood. After several convictions for car theft and mugging with extreme violence they had eventually ended up abroad as ‘minders’, protecting the boss of an organization that sold animal parts for use in Asian folk medicine. Their new career turn had happened by chance and came about because of their being arrested by customs officials in the Far East when returning from a package trip, the package in this instance being two kilograms of drugs.
The twins had been convicted and jailed for life, having only narrowly escaped death sentences. On being imprisoned they had found themselves in a small compound containing fifty or so other criminals ranging from petty thieves to murderous cut-throats. Within a few weeks these inmates were divided roughly into two groups: those who had in some way offended the twins – a group readily identified by their limps, makeshift crutches and a variety of interesting dental and facial disfigurements – and the rest, who avoided becoming members of the first group by supplying the twins with extra food, cigarettes and the best places in the shade. For a training in survival in an unfriendly world, the playgrounds of south-east London and residence in a number of Her Majesty’s correctional institutions were clearly more than a match for the backstreets and crowded bazaars of the Orient. This interesting social observation did not escape the notice of a certain Mr Song, a fellow prisoner who had made certain he remained on the right side of the twins. One day, after they had left a particularly vicious and sneaky thug called Saddhu the Sadist looking even more unattractive than he had looked before stepping accidentally on Sid’s toe, Song had approached them.
‘I like your people skills,’ he said. ‘I could use you boys in my outfit if we ever get out of this place. The money, by the way, is good.’ The twins were immediately interested. They had already noticed that Song’s scam, whatever it was, was extremely lucrative, for he bribed the guards generously for various favours including an endless supply of cigarettes for Sid and Fred. Mr Song, they learnt, ran an organization which slaughtered tigers in the wild, selling their skins to the fur trade and their body parts for use in a wide range of Asian folk medicines. Tigers were a protected species and the trade in tiger parts was illegal in India and had been banned in China in 1993 and in Japan – an end-market for the products – in 1999. There was a thriving underground market, however, and the prices that could be obtained for such products were enormous. Song and his men paid villagers near the few remaining jungles in which tigers survived to trap or poison the animals. These poor villagers received what was only a pittance compared with the money Song would eventually receive for the animals, but for them the pay seemed handsome and well worth the risk of illegal hunting. From a single tiger Song could make hundreds of thousands of pounds. The skin alone was worth a fortune and there seemed to be no part of the animal that was not used in traditional medicine: the meat to treat nausea; the whiskers for toothache; the bones for rheumatism; the fat for leprosy; the nose for dog bites; the brain for spots; the eyeballs for epilepsy, malaria and cataracts; the teeth for asthma, rabies and fevers; the tail for skin disease; the claws for sedation; and the skin for mental illness. Song had bases in Madhya Pradesh, Bengal, Nepal, China and Bhutan, smuggling the tiger parts across the various international borders to his base in Hong Kong where, under the guise of a butcher’s shop, they were sold from under the counter. In a back room the bones and teeth were ground into powder, ‘diluted’ with chalk to increase the volume, and then sold around the world to a variety of dealers in folk medicine. It was ironic that Song was not in jail for conducting this dreadful trade, but had been arrested for evading tax on his cover trade, the butcher’s shop. While he was in jail his lucrative tiger business, long the envy of other animal dealers, was being run by his son but was under threat from a number of rival gangs eager to share in the rich pickings from the illegal trade, and Song felt that the twins were just what he needed to preserve his empire.
Shortly following this discussion the president of the small country in which they were imprisoned died suddenly from food poisoning (the twins were never quite sure if this news came as a complete surprise to Song’s organization), the government was overthrown and an amnesty was declared for all prisoners.
Fo
llowing their unexpected release from jail the twins took up Song’s offer of employment and for two years Song’s terrible trade had continued under the protection of the twins and wreaked havoc on the tiger populations of the countries in which they worked. With the supply of tigers running out, however, and the governments of those countries coming under increasing pressure from animal organizations and the media to put an end to the killing of rare and threatened species, Song had finally decided to hold a crisis meeting to discuss the future of the business. During that meeting the twins had happened to mention their brother in South America and Song’s fertile brain had immediately worked out a plan to rescue his organization. He had persuaded the twins to arrange a meeting with Chopper and the three of them were even now in a taxi speeding from Rio airport towards Chopper’s villa.
Chopper’s thoughts as he sat by the pool were suddenly interrupted by the maid.
‘Excuse me, Senhor,’ she said. ‘Your guests have arrived. Shall I show them to their rooms now and call you later?’
‘No,’ said Chopper. ‘They’re late and I’ve got a company board meeting this afternoon. Show them straight into the boardroom and give them coffee.’
‘Very well, Senhor.’ She turned and left to do his bidding. Chopper heaved his massive bulk out of the lounger and went in to change. A few minutes later he strode into the boardroom and greeted his brothers and Mr Song.
Mr Song bowed slightly and said:
‘I am delighted to meet you and see your beautiful home – but please call me Sing – it is the nickname your brothers seem to have given me and I am very happy with it.’ Despite his sinister appearance, his voice had a soft, musical quality.
