The Griffin's Feather (Dragon Rider 2)

Taken the stars from the night,

and the sun From the day!

Gone, and a cloud in my heart.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘Gone’

They’d gone! However low Lola flew through the dense jungle – there was no sign of Barnabas, Ben or Hothbrodd. And it would be really difficult to overlook Hothbrodd.

Twigleg heard his own heart sighing and lamenting, as if the alchemist who made him had implanted a living thing in his narrow chest. He imagined his master torn apart by wildcats, or all of them snatched away by the venom of a snake. But then they’d have found them dead, wouldn’t they? Oh, his mind was useless when he was worried about Ben! And in addition Lola was flying so low again that he was in constant fear of crashing into a tree trunk! They scared a lesser mouse-deer, and almost ended up between the fangs hidden in its deceptively harmless-looking mouth. A marbled cat tried to fish them out of the air with its paw. And then there was the green pit viper that almost got its venomous teeth into the wing of Lola’s plane!

Twigleg would have put up with all that uncomplainingly, if only Lola’s hair-raising flying manoeuvres had succeeded in finding Ben and the others. He was staring out of the plane window so hard that it wouldn’t have surprised him if his eyes had popped out of his head. But all he saw was greenery! He never wanted to set eyes on anything green again!

They were gone. Gone! Swallowed up. Eaten. Digested and disappeared without trace. How he cursed the Pegasus and those eggs! Who needed flying horses? Or griffins… monkeys and apes… snakes… trees? His master was all he needed. He clutched his breast. Had his heart already broken? No, it was still beating. That meant the boy wasn’t dead! Yes. Yes, he just had to stay alive himself, and then so would Ben. Did it work that way around?

Even Lola was looking anxious by now – or at least that was how Twigleg interpreted her twitching whiskers. And then it began to rain again! If the torrents falling on the dense layers of leaves could be called rain. The water dropped and dripped, lashed the fuselage, and ran down the panes so fast that Lola, cursing, had to keep her nose pressed to the Plexiglas if she was to see anything at all. Suddenly she let out a shrill whistle (an expression of great alarm in rat language), and wrenched the plane over to the left. Twigleg saw red feathers and felt a dull impact. The aircraft dipped forward, but Lola pulled it up before it could reach the ground. Then she steered a lurching course through some dripping wet fern fronds, and crash-landed on a cushion of moss. The plane sank into it up to its windows.

Red feathers. At first Twigleg was so dazed by the near-crash that he thought they had collided with some kind of feathered jungle traffic light! Only when a parrot landed beside them, drenched through, did it dawn on Twigleg who this was. By the test tube that had borne him – it was Me-Rah! The rain gave her plumage the deceptive camouflage colouring of a half-ripe blackberry.

‘Oh, I’m so, so sorry!’ she squawked, spreading her wings in agitation. ‘I only wanted to stop you, but you were going so fast!’

Twigleg gave Lola a reproachful glance, but she had eyes only for her plane, which looked the worse for wear. Luckily the moss had saved it from major damage. While the rat cleaned leaves and bits of chopped liana off her propeller, Twigleg tried to understand Me-Rah’s excited chattering. What she was saying didn’t sound quite as terrible as the scenarios that he had been envisaging, but it was still bad enough. Me-Rah had found her flock, only to hear from the other parrots of two humans and a green giant who, apparently, had been dragged away by a gang of monkeys. Monkeys working for the lion-birds.

‘Kidnapper monkeys?’ said Lola in annoyance, when Me-R

ah had finished her story. ‘What sort of island is this? Full of traps that snap shut and rat poison? Do the monkeys around here by any chance also eat human flesh? If so, you might have mentioned it before!’

Twigleg almost swallowed his own tongue in horror. But Me-Rah energetically denied that the monkeys of Pulau Bulu showed any interest in human flesh. She added, sharply, that unfortunately the same couldn’t be said of the situation the other way around.

‘Well, at least that’s something,’ said Lola. ‘So now we can only hope that they haven’t already fed our friends to the lion-birds. I’m afraid those lion-birds would enjoy any kind of meat.’

The idea made Twigleg so weak at the knees that he had to hold on to the wings of Lola’s plane.

When he asked Me-Rah whether she could show them where their friends had been taken, the parrot looked almost as scared as she had in the temple of Garuda. Then, resigned to her fate, she rolled her eyes and nodded.

Lola’s plane spluttered and groaned as she started the engine. But it finally rose into the air and followed Me-Rah through the jungle that was still dripping wet with rain.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Captured

Hoping for the best, prepared for the worst,

and unsurprised by anything in between.

Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Wherever they were, it seemed that they had reached their destination. The monkeys untied Ben and threw him into something that swayed back and forth so menacingly that he felt around for something to hold on to. He got his fingers into twigs woven together, and when he took the blindfold off he saw that he was kneeling in a round cage like a basket. Beside him, Barnabas was polishing his glasses as if he wanted as clear a view of their unfortunate situation as possible, and Hothbrodd, cursing, bumped his head when he tried to sit up. As far as Ben could make out through the woven twigs that surrounded him, their basket prison was hanging from the roof of an enormous nest made of mud. He counted over twenty such baskets of various sizes. One of the monkeys who had brought them here pushed two lorises into a basket not much larger than a calabash, and then, like his companions, he swung himself up to the wide opening leading to the outside air on a liana. The basketwork of the cages consisted of twigs only loosely interwoven, even under his feet, and far below Ben saw three dog-sized creatures with scorpion bodies and the heads of jackals. They were passing the time by attacking one another with their pincers.

‘Damn it all, Greenbloom! Dammit dammit dammit!’ cursed Hothbrodd, looking at the twigs that imprisoned them. ‘Why did I let myself be persuaded to come to this island with you? May the frost giants carry you off!’ He flung himself against the interwoven twigs so angrily that the cage creaked dangerously, and Ben glanced in alarm at the scorpion creatures beneath them. ‘A troll doesn’t belong in a cage! Certainly not a cage hanging in the air!’

‘I’m really sorry, Hothbrodd,’ replied Barnabas, but he wasn’t looking at the troll as he spoke, he was staring, like Ben, at the scorpions down below.

‘Jackal scorpions! Fascinating! They’re even larger than I imagined them. And the armoured exoskeleton and sting really are made of gold! The griffins must have brought them from Mesopotamia with them! They served the kings there as guards and hounds for hunting. These specimens may well be over two thousand years old!’

‘Oh yes? And what’s their favourite food? Let me guess,’ growled Hothbrodd. ‘Troll and human flesh?’

‘I’m afraid you’re right about human flesh,’ said Barnabas, without taking his eyes off the scorpions. ‘But I think they’ve probably never tasted troll. And their liking for human flesh is presumably because the Mesopotamian kings fed their enemies to the scorpions. I assume that by now these creatures will have adapted their diet to this island.’