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‘Who’s the proboscis monkey beside the throne?’ whispered Twigleg.
He wore a cloak of parrot feathers over his brown pelt, and held a staff in his long-fingered hand, making him look like a master of ceremonies at the court of a medieval prince.
‘Nakal,’ whispered TerTaWa. ‘May the jackal scorpions tear him limb from limb! May the jenglots drink his blood – I’m sure it’s even more poisonous than theirs! He is Kraa’s personal servant. And his best spy. Anyone who crosses Nakal doesn’t live long.’
Nakal gave the crowd a haughty look. His staff was made of carved bones. Twigleg looked at the platform on which the throne stood. Of course. He had been wondering if it was made of ivory, but no; it too consisted of bones, arranged in an artistic pattern by The Hands.
Nakal struck the platform with his staff.
Immediately there was silence. Even the parrots, sitting among the branches in their dozens, stopped squawking. Twigleg wondered what they thought about Nakal’s cloak of feathers. There were some lories with red plumage among the parrots, but Twigleg had to admit that they all looked to him much the same, and he couldn’t have said whether Me-Rah was among them.
TerTaWa swung himself lower until he was standing on the platform. Of course, Lola was intent on looking around at her leisure in the crowd, and in the end Twigleg too gave way to the temptation to poke his head a little way out of TerTaWa’s fur. Unfortunately, however, two of the black macaques were blocking his view of the cages. The only things that Twigleg could see – all too clearly – were the griffins perched high above them. The venomous snakes that were their tails were wound around the branches they were sitting on.
‘Do you see the contempt in their eyes when they look at us?’ whispered TerTaWa. ‘To them, all other living things are as unimportant and worthless as the beetles and butterflies that their monkeys kill to use their wings for colouring the pictures on their nests. Only Shrii is different. He was our hope! He risked his life for us, and now he’s going to lose it on our account!’
TerTaWa’s eyes were fixed, full of pain, on the large basket-work cage where Shrii was held captive. But finally he made his way on through the throng of hairy bodies, and at last Twigleg had a clear view of the other cages of prisoners. When he saw the outline of a boy in one of them, Ben’s name almost passed his lips. But it wasn’t Ben. The boy pressing his face to the bent twigs of the cage was younger, and came from this part of the world. Where was his master? Had the griffins already eaten him and the others?
No – there! The lenses of a pair of glasses glinted inside the twigs of the cage. Lola had seen them too. Twigleg heard her suppress a curse. Barnabas! Oh, what a relief. For a moment Twigleg even forgot the cage and the griffins. Beside Barnabas, the green fingers clutching the bars of the cage unmistakably belonged to Hothbrodd. And yes, there was his master!
Ben called something to the other boy, but Twigleg couldn’t understand the words. The silence that fell when the proboscis monkey struck his staff on the platform hadn’t lasted long. Kraa’s followers were squawking, chattering, and growling in the crown of the gigantic tree. It was like a vast wasps’ nest. Monkeys and apes were the great majority: macaques, gibbons, lorises, langurs, surilis and proboscis monkeys! In addition there were countless Indian flying squirrels, pine martens and snakes climbing or crawling on the platform or in the branches above it.
The proboscis monkey struck the platform with his staff again, but on this occasion three times, and with greater emphasis.
The huge canopy of the tree was full of anxious silence.
It was so still that you could hear the scraping of Kraa’s terrible claws as he stepped out of his palace entrance. It was surrounded by flight ramps that enclosed the nest like a wreath of gilded thorns. One of them cast its shadow on the throne platform. Kraa’s claws, the claws of a bird of prey, made his gait rather stiff-legged as he walked along, but his lion’s body and snake-tail more than made up for that. The snake wound its way along after Kraa, like a threat traced in the sultry jungle air.
The griffin stopped at the end of the ramp and looked down at his subjects. The great beak was slightly open, as if he were drinking in the fear that rose to him, and the cruelty in his yellow eyes made Twigleg bury his face in TerTaWa’s soft fur for a moment.
Then Kraa spread his wings. The rushing sound was like a gathering storm above them. Oh, he was gigantic! For a few moments Kraa’s shadow made day into night. The crowd drew back even before he came down on the platform, and like all the others, TerTaWa threw himself on his knees so quickly that Twigleg almost slid off his shoulder.
‘Kraaaaaa!’
Hundreds of voices murmured, growled, and squawked the name of their feathered king. Twigleg felt TerTaWa shuddering at the sound. The voices also murmured another word: Tuanka. Lord…
While Kraa strode to his throne, six creatures crawled out of his plumage. They had already troubled Twigleg when he found them beside a griffin in a book illustration. Jackal scorpions. No, oh no. He had really hoped they were just a medieval invention, like people with faces beneath their shoulders, or two-headed camels. The jackal scorpions jumped down on the platform and surrounded the throne, with the stings at the end of their tails raised to attack. With bitter satisfaction, Twigleg saw that even Lola’s whiskers quivered at the sight. Curse that Pegasus! Curse the eggs as well! Curse the day when Guinevere and Vita found them!
The leap with which Kraa settled on his throne made the platform shake, and Nakal struck the floor with his staff again.
‘Bow down before Kraa the Terrible, invincible and older than the world,’ cried the proboscis monkey in a shrill voice, ‘bow down before the Winged Tempest, the Feathered Lion of the Air, the Snake King…’
Kraa’s viper tail bared its venomous fangs, while the griffin listened with obvious pleasure to the enumeration of his titles.
All eyes were turned on Kraa. Lola took her chance to scurry around to Twigleg from TerTaWa’s other shoulder. That crazy rat!
‘I’m going to climb up to Barnabas. Humpelkluss,’ she whispered to Twigleg. ‘You stay here.’
And before Twigleg could protest, she was already jumping down to the bone tiles of the platform, and had disappeared into the milling crowd.
Nakal was still reciting the many unpleasant titles of Kraa.
Twigleg looked up at the cage where Barnabas’s glasses were glinting behind the twigs – and climbed down TerTaWa to follow Lola.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Kraa
It took the whole of Creation
