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‘Heavens above, this is my first time ever on a desert island!’ cried Ben. ‘And I’m a dragon rider! I’m not going to have myself carried around by a troll!’
Hothbrodd wrinkled his bark-like brow as if he wasn’t sure whether to take that as an insult. ‘This troll will soon be nothing but a green puddle anyway!’ he grumbled, with glance of disapproval at the sun, burning down fiercely even at this early hour. ‘I’m surprised the parrots hereabouts don’t fall from the air ready-cooked, like a shower of roast chicken.’
To Me-Rah, at least, that did sound like an insult. She announced, with a shrill squawk, that the weather on Pulau Bulu was perfect, and favoured Hothbrodd with a curse in Trollish – very impressive evidence that chattering lories really are past masters at imitating other people’s voices.
‘Right, you come with us, then,’ Barnabas told Ben, ‘and I apologise for my paternal anxiety. One of these days you’ll understand. But Twigleg ought to go with Lola in her plane. It’s nice of him to worry about our safety, but I’m sure there must be over four hundred species of snake on this island that can kill people of his size.’
In any other place, the mere idea of getting into Lola’s plane would have brought Twigleg’s pale forehead out in a sweat of fear. The memory of his last flight with her still made his heart beat faster, although it had been over two years ago. But in this case, it really did seem the more tempting prospect – even though, as usual, he hated to be separated from Ben.
They had all been expecting Me-Rah to say a last goodbye as soon as it was light, but when Lola imperiously waved Twigleg over to her plane, the parrot settled on Ben’s shoulder without any comment.
‘My dear Me-Rah,’ said Barnabas as their feathered guide told them, courageously keeping her voice under control, that she wanted to help them in their search for the griffins, ‘my dear Me-Rah, we can’t possibly accept your generous offer! You’ve done more than enough for us. But it would be extremely helpful if you could tell us once more exactly where you think the griffins may be nesting.’
Me-Rah could not conceal her relief. She advised Barnabas to search the mountains rising beyond the treetops to the southwest. Then, by way of farewell, she flew three times in a circle around each of them, and disappeared into the dense growth of trees along the beach. It swallowed Me-Rah up as the sea swallows up a fish, and Ben wondered whether that was just what a forest meant to a bird while he followed Barnabas in under the trees: a sea of leaves and branches in which she moved as naturally as fish move in the salty waves of the sea.
To Ben, on the other hand, it was like entering another world when, after the bright sunlight, shadows suddenly cast chequered patterns on his clothes. The hot air was humid and moist, like the hothouses in the zoo where tropical lizards dreamed of the heat in their native lands, and when he looked up he saw not one but a dozen canopies of leaves: it was a multi-storied structure of branches, creepers, flowers and foliage, and made you doubt that anything like sky existed. Guinevere would probably have been able to name any flower that added a touch of colour to the greenery. She had inherited, from her mother, a passion for everything that grew and flowered. ‘Never eat anything if you don’t know what it is!’ she had warned Ben. ‘Don’t touch any leaf without gloves on, and don’t trust plants that shoot their seeds into your face.’
Easier said than done. How was he to avoid touching leaves when they were all over the place? Luckily Hothbrodd trudged ahead, ploughing a path through the dense thickets that allowed them to walk on with reasonable ease. But all the same, Ben had to keep freeing himself from tendrils and thorns, or picking tiny frogs and furry caterpillars off his clothes. He had never seen such large butterflies before, or such colourful beetles. And the monkeys! If he put his head right back, he saw them swinging from tree to tree high above him. Well, it was going rather too far to say he saw them… they weren’t much more than shadows in the shade, a leap from one tree to the next, gone before his eyes could tell him if it was a gibbon or a macaque moving between the sky and the ground up above him.
In view of all these marvels, it was difficult to think of the dangers that came with them: the coral snake that Ben noticed only because Barnabas reached for his arm to warn him; the mottled coat of a marbled cat among the trees… When Ben nearly trod on a sleepy white-lipped pit viper, and Barnabas could hardly take a step without wiping spiders’ web
s and mosquitoes off his glasses, Hothbrodd finally put them on his shoulders after all, and Ben had to admit it was a great relief. No insects bothered Hothbrodd, maybe because his bark-like skin was too thick for any sting to get through it – or because he looked like a walking tree. Lola would certainly have added that it was on account of the fishy smell that all trolls gave off. Whatever the reason, Ben enjoyed not having to take care where he put his feet, and being able to look up undisturbed. He particularly liked the flying squirrels, and he had never seen so many fantastic birds, not even in the temple of Garuda. They made up for the sweat that drenched his clothes and the seasickness he felt because of the way Hothbrodd swayed as he walked, even if their whistling, croaking and screeching filled the hot air with deafening noise.
Hothbrodd wasn’t interested in the birds, or the flying squirrels, or the monkeys. The troll had only a fleeting glance to spare for the gigantic, humming flowers of the Singing Plant-Wolf that had shown them the way to Pulau Bulu. Hothbrodd took an interest in only one species of living thing in this jungle: the trees. He kept stopping to whisper a few incomprehensible words in Trollish to them, or to stroke their bark affectionately, and he looked up at the enormously tall trunks with such delight that, in the end, Barnabas had to remind him gently of their quest.
Of course, the troll’s presence attracted other fabulous beings. A fist-sized spider with a frog’s head let itself down from a teak tree. A cat with fur that shone like molten gold made its way out of the thicket, and looked at the troll in amazement. Not even Barnabas knew all the fabulous creatures that Hothbrodd lured out of the jungle, and Ben could see how much his adopted father would have liked to talk to every one of them – although some were looking at their party in a far from friendly way. Once they saw a tiny figure on a branch that looked faintly reminiscent of Twigleg. But when Ben hastily asked Hothbrodd if he could take a closer look at it, the tiny being bared sharp fangs, and narrowed its red eyes with such hostility that Ben’s hope of having found a companion for the homunculus died down as quickly as it had flared up. Of course, he knew how much Twigleg longed for someone like himself, but this creature would probably have eaten him.
In spite of Hothbrodd’s long strides, it was not until noon that they reached the foothills of the mountains where Me-Rah thought the griffins had their nesting places. The slopes were soon rising so steeply that Hothbrodd had to stop, more and more often, to lean against a tree, gasping for breath.
‘By Surtr’s flaming sword!’ he cursed, raising his arms, which were dripping with sweat. ‘Trolls aren’t made for such weather, Barnabas!’ he complained. ‘This island is like an oven! Nifhel on earth! I just hope the rat has had better luck than us in finding the griffins!’
After another hour, during which a tropical rainstorm drenched their sweaty clothes yet again, they came to a clearing burned in the jungle by a flash of lightning. Creepers had covered the charred tree stumps with fresh green, and for the first time since they set out, they could see the sky above them through the branches. Hothbrodd bent down to pick up a couple of snakes. Their teeth had as much difficulty as the insect stings in getting through his skin, and the troll was just throwing a particularly venomous viper into the surrounding trees when Ben heard a rustling above him.
At first he saw only the gibbon.
Then the two macaques.
And then he felt a sharp pain, and realised that Hothbrodd was swaying under him.
And all the green around him turned black.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
A Mysterious Find
You haven’t seen a tree until you’ve
seen its shadow from the sky.
Amelia Earhart
Twigleg soon felt sorry that his fear of snakes had made him forget his fear of Lola’s skill as a pilot. That crazy rat! Lola took advantage of every upwind and strong gust to indulge her fatal passion for looping the loop, climbing steeply and diving! Twigleg had once asked her why she didn’t appear in an aerobatics show. ‘Oh, you’re such a dreamer, humpelclumpus!’ was all she said, pinching his cheek. ‘Who wants to watch a rat aviatrix? Anyway, why would I want to feature as a trained performing animal when I can be wild and free?’
Yes, Lola was nothing if not wild and free. In all his long life, Twigleg had regarded rats as his natural enemies. After all, to someone of his size they were terrifying beasts of prey. In his younger days, he had almost lost one arm to a rat bite, and he couldn’t count the number of times he had run away from them. He’d have bet his life that he would never call a rat his friend, certainly not one who liked to loop the loop and always made out that she couldn’t remember his name, because she had so much fun playing around with the word homunculus. But it was a fact that he had been friends with Lola Greytail for a long time now. Indeed, very good friends, even if she drove him demented with her taste for living dangerously.
As usual, the rat was singing out loud to herself while she steered a slalom course around the trees. Pirate songs, robber songs, drinking songs. Lola had an inexhaustible stock of them. After two minutes, Twigleg had already thrown up twice through the window, and couldn’t wait for the moment when they would finally break through the leaf canopy and see the clear sky ahead, Suppose a liana disabled Lola’s propeller, or one of the branches under which she zoomed at such breakneck speed skewered her plane along with the two of them inside it? But of course Lola was enjoying all this, and she was in no hurry to fly higher.
‘Suppose we can’t see the griffins’ nests from up there?’ she called to Twigleg when he cautiously reminded her of their mission. ‘No, no, we ought to search down here some more first.’ Whereupon they got caught in a gigantic spider’s web, and couldn’t break free until Lola roared the engine so that it sounded like a desperate bumblebee. And then they almost collided with a flying squirrel.
