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He didn’t open his eyes again until the gibbon stopped. Although it felt to him as if they had been jumping from tree to tree for days on end.
‘By all the three-humped camels of Samarkand!’ whispered Lola. ‘Take a look at that, humklupus!’
Such an enormous tree spread its canopy in front of them that all the others seemed to retreat respectfully from it. Mud nests exactly like the ruined nests that Lola and Twigleg had found hung from its mighty trunk and its countless branches. But high above, in the crown of the tree, there was a structure, complete with battlements, beside which the other nests looked like hovels in the shade of a princely palace. Its walls shone in rich shades of red and green, as if they were set with rubies and emeralds.
‘Let me make the introductions,’ whispered TerTaWa. ‘The Royal Tree of Kraa the Terrible! No, wait a minute. He prefers the title of Kraa of the Murderous Beak. Kraa who kills with talons, venom and claws, Kraa of the Blood-Drenched Feathers, Eater of a Thousand Hearts…’
The entire tree was in motion. Crowds of monkeys and apes – lorises, macaques, gibbons, sirulis – were climbing up the trunk and along the branches to a platform that had been built right below the palatial nest like a great square in the crown of the tree. There was a throne in the middle of it, with a griffin’s head carved on its back, and above the throne – the sight almost made Twigleg drop Lola’s binoculars – hung a dozen woven cages. Twigleg could make out the outlines of prisoners behind the twigs from which the cages were made.
The basketwork cage hanging directly over the throne was far and away the largest, and TerTaWa uttered furious chattering when green feathers appeared, pressed against the woven side of the cage.
‘Why all the excitement?’ whispered Lola. ‘Is this some kind of assembly?’
‘No, Kraa is about to dispense justice!’ TerTaWa whispered back. ‘That crook-beaked monkey-murderer! He loves putting on a show!’ The gibbon struck the trunk of the tree where he was sitting with his fist. ‘He’ll kill them!’ he groaned. ‘Shrii, Kupo, Patah and all the others. Or sell them to the poachers to fill his treasury!’
‘How about a little more optimism?’ hissed Lola. ‘We must get closer to the cages. Can you do that without being recognised, TerTaWa?’
By way of an answer, the gibbon picked a fruit growing above them. He bit into it and rubbed the juice into his dark hair until it turned a reddish colour. Then he ruffled up the white whiskers on his cheeks, pulled the hair on his head over his eyes, made the tips of his ears look pointed – and bared his teeth.
‘What’s the plan?’ he whispered.
‘Plan? By my aircraft’s compass and elevator,’ hissed Lola, as Me-Rah stared in alarm at all the apes and monkeys still clambering up the tree, ‘what kind of a plan? We’ll improvise, that’s what! We’ll find our friends and let them know we’re working to set them free? Will that do for you?’
TerTaWa glanced doubtfully at the basketwork cages – and ducked hastily as a shadow fell on the tree where they were sitting. Rushing filled the humid, sultry air, and five griffins came gliding through the branches of the surrounding trees. They flew towards the platform, circled in the air above the throne, and finally, one by one, came down to perch on the branches above it. They dug the claws of their paws into the dark bark, they folded their wings as if clenching fingers into fists, and their eyes, the eyes of birds of prey, scanned the crowd that had assembled in the space around the throne below them.
They looked so much smaller in the pictures! That was all Twigleg could think. A ridiculous thought, for he had read often enough that griffins were the only fabulous beings that could compete with dragons in size.
As usual, of course, Lola’s reaction was rather different.
‘By all the storms of this world,’ she whispered, in a tone of admiration, ‘those creatures really are magnificent!’
‘Magnificent?’ hissed TerTaWa. ‘Plaguey rapacious felines! Brood of snake-tailed robbers! See the way they’re looking down at us? Roargh, Hiera, Chahska, Fierra, Greeeiiiir… there were more of them once, many more. But the rain and the humid heat don’t agree with the older ones. And they don’t often have young. There are only three females left, and Kraa claims them all for himself, so two of them flew away last year. Of course Kraa claims that Shrii persuaded them to go, but not
even he knows where they are.’
Another griffin came down through the canopy of leaves.
‘Tchraee!’ The gibbon bared his teeth as the griffin came down to perch on a branch above the others. ‘He’s Kraa’s adjutant, and almost as bad as Kraa himself. When Tchraee is in a bad temper he likes to eat one of the lorises that are always having to decorate Kraa’s nest with new pictures. Do you see how he’s staring down at the basket that holds Shrii? Tchraee has hated him ever since Shrii came out of his mother’s body.’
‘Out of her body?’ Lola was checking the ammunition in the signal pistol. ‘You mean griffin young don’t hatch from eggs?’
‘They’d bite your head off for that question, rat,’ whispered TerTaWa. ‘No, griffins have cubs in the same way as lions. Reee was Kraa’s sister, and Tchraee was in love with her, but Reee didn’t bother to conceal what she thought of him. Some say that Shrii’s father wasn’t a griffin but the god Garuda himself. The theory is that’s why he’s so brightly coloured! But I think his father was a Pelangi bird. They sometimes fly here from Sumatra.’
A Pelangi bird. Twigleg wished he was back in the library of MÍMAMEIÐR, with the books that told you all about the world, so that you didn’t have to board a rat’s plane to go and find out. Or ride on a griffin’s shoulder.
‘Duck down!’ whispered TerTaWa. ‘See those black macaques? They’re the guards. If they see you, they’ll feed you to the jackal scorpions without a moment’s hesitation!’
Jackal scor…? Before Twigleg had finished thinking about this alarming name, TerTaWa was taking a great leap over to the tree with the griffins in it. Twigleg really admired the silence with which he made that leap, even if it had him feeling that his stomach was in his mouth again. Didn’t the force of gravity affect gibbons? He couldn’t think of any other explanation!
And no one seemed to notice the gibbon. Twigleg nestled deep into TerTaWa’s thick coat while he looked around. It wasn’t difficult to distinguish between the nests of the griffins and the monkeys because of their different size. Two were surrounded by flocks of tiny birds working on the mud walls. They were all adorned with pictures, though none of the other nests could compete with the main nest in beauty. Kraa’s palace would have put many castles built by human beings to shame. The reliefs on the walls showed griffins hunting, griffins at war with men and monsters – and perching triumphantly on the dead body of a dragon.
‘Did lorises really create those pictures?’ whispered Twigleg incredulously.
TerTaWa swung himself up on a branch growing out of the huge tree trunk right beside the throne platform. ‘Yes. The most talented of them are sitting behind the throne. They can portray any of this world’s creatures as accurately as if it would begin breathing next moment. Some of them have been serving the griffins for several generations.’
The six lorises crouching on the skilfully carved bench behind the throne kept their eyes down.
‘We call them The Hands,’ whispered TerTaWa. ‘Don’t be deceived by their bowed heads. They pride themselves a great deal on their art. But the best of them all, Kupo, followed Shrii, because she was tired of praising Kraa’s cruelty in her pictures.’
