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With his limbs trembling, Twigleg brought out a mixture of chattering, cooing, shrill screeching, and hoarse squawking that sounded to his own ears very much like parrot language.
No reaction.
Only a blue lizard showed up by way of an answer.
But when Twigleg turned instead to the dialect of Lorius garrulus, the chattering lory, there was a rustle above them, and a red-feathered head looked out of an opening in the weathered roof.
‘There she is!’ whispered Ben.
From the size of the beaked head, Twigleg worked out that the bird looking down at them with mingled panic and dislike was at least five centimetres taller than him.
‘Ask her where she comes from!’ hissed Ben.
The parrot replied to that question with such angry squawks that Twigleg was tempted to creep into one of Ben’s pockets, but he felt too bad about his own cowardice to do so.
‘What’s she saying?’
Twigleg spared Ben the imaginative terms that chattering lories applied to human beings. Thieving vermin was the most flattering. No wonder she spoke her own language, although even the homunculus often caused ordinary animals to use human language. She had a strange name for him, too: she called Twigleg a jenglot, whatever that might be. Maybe Twigleg would have taken it as a compliment if he had known that jenglots were dwarf-like zombies who drank blood and were much feared in Indonesia.
The parrot went on squawking and screeching abuse, but Twigleg knew enough about fear to recognise it in others. The bird’s black eyes were wide with fright, and Twigleg saw in them a sadness that he knew only too well. So he cleared his throat, and departed slightly from the gist of what Ben had told him to translate.
‘It isn’t easy to be the only one of your kind,’ he said in the dialect of Parrot that she had used herself. ‘Believe me, I know what it’s like. But my master here has a kind heart, and you can be sure that he won’t do you any harm. Far from it. He may be able to help you to get home, but if he’s to do that, you must tell us where you come from!’
The parrot craned her red neck to take a closer look at Ben. Then, to the surprise of Twigleg and Ben himself, she gabbled something in English.
‘Me-Rah comes from the thousand times one thousand green islands,’ she croaked, ‘and her heart is as sore with homesickness as the back of a donkey.’ Then she let out a plaintive screech, and disappeared into her hole again.
‘The thousand times one thousand islands?’ whispered Ben. ‘That could be Indonesia!’
He lowered the torch so that Me-Rah wouldn’t feel threatened by its beam.
‘Your English is very good, Me-Rah!’ he called up to the parrot.
For a moment nothing moved, but then Me-Rah put her head out into the open. ‘So why does that surprise you? Parrots can imitate every sound in the world,’ she snapped. ‘And I’m only too familiar with the primitive language you use. The man who shut me up in a cage spoke it too.’
Ben didn’t explain that his mother tongue was German. He was sure that Me-Rah would consider that no less barbaric.
‘Maybe we can help you to get home!’ he called to her. ‘Is it true that there are griffins on your islands?’
Me-Rah had crept right out of her hiding place now. She was a sad sight. Her feathers were crumpled and dull, her beak dusty and splitting, as if she had been gnawing nothing but the stones here for days.
‘Griffins? What’s a griffin supposed to be?’ she squawked suspiciously.
‘A great big bird!’ Twigleg spread his arms wide – then let them sink when he realised that he could barely give any idea even of the wing-span of a sparrow. ‘With a lion’s body and a snake for a tail.’
Me-Rah tilted her head, looking scared. ‘Are you by any chance talking about the lion-birds?’ She let out a couple of whistling notes so shrill that the dark passages of the temple filled with the squeaking of alarmed bats. ‘Oh, they’re terrible! They can pluck a great gibbon out of the trees like a caterpillar! Even the sun bears and binturongs run for it when their shadow falls on the jungle!’
Ben exchanged a triumphant glance with Twigleg.
‘Can you lead us to them?’ he called up to Me-Rah. ‘And of course we’d show our gratitude by taking you home!’
Me-Rah fluffed up her untidy feathers and gave a yearning coo, but then she shook her red head very firmly.
‘If you fly to where the lion-birds live you’ll never come back!’ she squawked, as urgently as if she were repeating something she had been told as a chick. ‘They’ll line their nests with your feathers and adorn their treasure chambers with the horn of your beak. They’ll use your bones to skewer their prey, and they’ll feed your beating heart to their young!’
She turned around, and in a flash she had gone back into hiding.
A very sensible reaction, Twigleg thought. They’ll use your bones to skewer their prey? This whole project needed more thought! Seriously, did the world really need Pegasus foals? Why did there have to be horses with wings anyway? Surely there were more than enough of the wingless sort!
