The Griffin's Feather (Dragon Rider 2)

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

The Greatest Task for the Smallest in the Team

You know how you let yourself think that everything will be all

right if you can only get to a certain place or do a certain thing.

But when you get there you find it’s not that simple.

Richard Adams, Watership Down

The thing about plans is that they don’t always work out as expected.

The plan thought up by many heads under the Whispering Tree sounded, from the first, as if it could never, ever succeed. It contained so many maybes and what ifs, so many question marks about what awaited them in the griffins’ tree, that all of those involved thought of it with a sense of foreboding. With two exceptions: nothing and no one gave Lola a sense of foreboding, and Tattoo… well, Tattoo hadn’t forgotten how frightened he had been of his own anger on the beach, but all the same he could hardly wait to prove himself again. Above all because, for the first time in his life, he would have a dragon rider. Although the task given to him and Firedrake that night sounded far from exciting.

‘You’re only our backup! You don’t come to the rescue unless it’s a genuine emergency. Promise?’ Barnabas Greenbloom had repeated that so often that after a while even the tip of Firedrake’s tail would have shown his impatience, and not only Tattoo but also the two dragon riders were secretly hoping that in the end the two dragons would play more of a part in the operation. Even Barnabas couldn’t conceal the fact that, to his mind, that seemed more probable than he liked to admit. After all, what they were planning to do really was rather crazy.

So what exactly was the plan?

For many years now, Kraa had been hunting only by day. His great old age had made him blind at night, and Patah, Kupo and TerTaWa all swore that he was certain to be

asleep in his palace nest when they carried out their plan before the first light of dawn. That sounded like a good opportunity to steal one of Kraa’s sun-feathers. Particularly since the other griffins were usually out hunting until it was day, and that too would make it considerably easier to set Shrii free. Of course they could only hope for Kraa to sleep so soundly that he wouldn’t notice the theft of the feather. And that the other griffins didn’t come back before Shrii was free. Hope was a crucial part of the plan. Rather more crucial than Twigleg liked.

As well as the griffins, of course, there were a number of other creatures in Kraa’s royal tree who might present problems. The jackal scorpions guarding Kraa’s nest, the monkeys, snakes and birds who served him and kept watch in the branches – they all had to be distracted or rendered harmless in various ways. But after all, the expeditionary team that set off just before midnight itself consisted of very different participants with very different qualities: macaques, humans, dragons, a brownie girl, a troll, a homunculus, a rat, a parrot, a gibbon, and last but not least a loris and a maki. That was nothing, of course, compared to the number of enemies waiting for them in the griffin tree. All the same, they were so numerous that they had decided to approach their target by six different routes, so as to pass unnoticed. Luckily they would also get help from the many sounds of the jungle: the rain that, as so often on Pulau Bulu, was falling from the sky, pouring and pattering; the night calls of the birds; the chorus of toads and cicadas… all that drowned out even Hothbrodd’s footsteps.

Barnabas and the troll were the only ones going to the griffins’ tree on foot, rather than through the branches of the trees or down from the sky. Theirs was the task that began the whole operation.

None of them had ever seen the griffins’ tree from below. Even Hothbrodd seemed to shrink to Twigleg’s size when its trunk came into sight among the other trees. The snakes lying in wait as guards between its roots bared their venomous fangs, but Hothbrodd simply lifted Barnabas up to his shoulders and threw any snakes who seemed particularly keen to attack into the bushes. Then he walked calmly over the others, and unimpressed by their hissing placed his green hands on the trunk of the griffins’ tree. The troll caressed its bark as gently as if he were stroking an elephant’s furrowed flank.

‘Oh yes, you have many tales to tell!’ he murmured lovingly. ‘And you didn’t choose the winged creatures living in you, did you? What do you say – shall we give them a bit of a fright?’

The huge tree shuddered. But Hothbrodd closed his eyes, pressed his hands more firmly to the brown bark, and began whispering in a language that every tree in the world understood. And every diurnal troll.

TerTaWa, sitting high above them with Twigleg and Lola in the crown of a neighbouring tree, saw the effect at close quarters.

The thinner branches of the tree began to bend without a sound, like fingers carefully reaching for something. That Something was the nests of the monkeys hanging in their dozens from the trunk of the tree or in its lower branches. The branches wound around them until the nests looked like the basketwork cages in which the griffins kept their prisoners. But that wasn’t all. The tree began to shake. Only very slightly, so slightly that neither the monkeys nor Kraa were woken. But the snakes winding themselves sleepily around the branches over Kraa’s palace nest fell out of the tree in their dozens, like dead leaves, and landed among the roots below. One of them brushed Barnabas’s shoulder, but he seized it with a practised grip before it could sink its poison fangs into his neck.

Hothbrodd laughed softly, as if the griffins’ tree had told him an amusing secret. Then he leaned his forehead against the bark and whispered words to it that sounded as if they were carved out of wood.

Another shudder passed through the trunk, and branches grew from the bark so that Barnabas could climb them comfortably, as if climbing a ladder.

‘They’re going to be sorry they shut a troll up in a cage like a bird!’ growled Hothbrodd. ‘Dum, ha! Meget dum!’

‘Hothbrodd!’ Barnabas whispered down to him, before continuing to climb. ‘Don’t overdo it! We don’t want the tree moving so much that it wakes Kraa!’

Hothbrodd replied with the usual grunt expressing his displeasure, and Barnabas put up a silent prayer to all the gods who, like him, were on the side of animals and fabulous creatures, hoping that Hothbrodd would be able to curb his wish for revenge. That was a great deal to ask of a troll.

Hope… yes, the success of this nocturnal mission had so much to do with hope.

Barnabas was an excellent climber, after spending weeks in the crown of a redwood tree in California to study some climbing coyotes three thousand years old there. But he had to hurry, because above him TerTaWa was getting ready to put Lola and Twigleg down on Kraa’s palace nest. The griffins had the branches of the nearby trees pruned by monkeys and parrots, so that no one could get near their nests. But no one could jump further than a gibbon.

When Twigleg saw the abyss that TerTaWa must cross, he felt sure that their whole lovely plan would break to pieces in front of Hothbrodd’s green feet. The troll was thinking much the same as he looked up at TerTaWa. He was about to ask the tree to catch the gibbon if necessary. But TerTaWa was already in the air. He leaped over to the mighty crown of the tree so gracefully, without a sound, that the jackal scorpions on guard, as usual, outside Kraa’s palace didn’t even look up. High above them, however, TerTaWa was moving from branch to branch, until the gigantic nest was just below him. Then he came down to settle, as silently as a moth, on the roof with its surrounding battlements.

‘There we go. Even a falling leaf makes more noise than a gibbon!’ he whispered as he put Twigleg and Lola down on the nest.

Below them, the jackal scorpions were sitting on the gilded flight ramps that surrounded Kraa’s palace nest like a ring of long spines. It was up to Barnabas to put those guards out of action, with a few well-aimed shots from the fountain pen filled with anaesthetic that Twigleg and Lola, luckily, had found in the abandoned hollow tree along with his backpack. But Kraa’s guards still looked alarmingly wakeful.

‘TerTaWa, can you keep an eye on the jackal scorpions?’ whispered Twigleg.