Eva Ibbotson - The Beasts of Clawstone Castle

‘But how will you get home without money?’ asked Madlyn. ‘What will you do?’

The men smiled. ‘We haf plan,’ said Slavek, tapping the side of his nose, and the others nodded and said, ‘Yes, we haf plan.’

It was only now that Rollo was recovered enough to ask the question that burned him up.

‘But what about the cattle?’ said Rollo. ‘What will happen to them? Why have they brought the cattle here?’

Remembering what he had seen, he began to shiver again.

The Mundanians exchanged glances.

‘We do not know,’ said Slavek, ‘but it is big what will happen to the cows. It is very big, very important. It is big and it is soon. He waits for the boat to bring him what he needs, and now the boat has come.’

His brother nodded. ‘It is big with the cows,’ he said. ‘I think perhaps it is tonight.’

Then they shook hands one by one. ‘You can rest here,’ they said. ‘But soon you must go back and tell.’

And the children were left alone.

The Mundanians had gone. The three children huddled together in the empty hut, stunned by what they had seen. They had to get back to the mainland and tell the world about this evil place — and quickly.

Ned opened the door a crack.

‘There’s no one about. If we drop down on to the beach and go round by the shore we should make it.’

They hadn’t gone far when they heard a sound which brought them up short: the desolate yet frantic mooing of a cow who has been separated from her calf. Then men shouting orders, the stamping of hooves…

‘It is big what will happen with the cows,’ the brothers had said. ‘It is big and it is soon. Perhaps it is tonight.’

Without hesitation, the children turned and ran back towards the buildings.

They had come to a kind of forecourt, a concreted yard with drainage channels which had been swabbed down with disinfectant. A big incinerator took up one side of the courtyard. On the other side was a very large building: grey and forbidding and windowless. It looked like an aircraft hangar or an industrial workshop.

Beside the incinerator was a row of large waste bins. The children ducked down behind them and waited.

They waited for what seemed a very long time. And then slowly — very slowly — the huge steel double doors began to draw apart. The gap grew wide, and wider — and there, as on a stage, lit up by arc lamps more brilliant and dazzling than any daylight, they saw an operating table, high and clinical and white. Chrome cylinders of oxygen stood beside it, and pressure gauges and trolleys loaded with jars of liquid and coils of rubber tubing. And close by was a rack of glittering, outsize instruments: scalpels and scissors and forceps and clamps.

Rollo gasped and Madlyn put an arm round his shoulder.

There was no one in the lab at first, but then a man in a white coat came in from a door at the back and walked over to a large sink and pulled out a long curled horn that had been soaking there.

The man turned, and they saw his face.

It was the vet with the black beard who had come to Clawstone to tell them that the cattle were sick. He had shaved off his beard but they knew him at once. It was this man that Rollo had glimpsed out of the window of the hotel.

But before they could work out what this meant they heard the sound of hooves and, walking past them, his head hanging, came a calf, led by a man in overalls.

The calf was snow-white and it walked as slowly as the beasts must have walked in the olden days on the way to the temple to be sacrificed, sensing their terrible fate. When it reached the stream of light coming from the double doors, it stiffened its legs and tried to dig its hooves into the concrete, but they slipped on the wet floor and the man jerked the rope and led it forward.

Rollo had recognized it at once. It was the youngest calf, the one he had watched being born. His calf.

Ned held him back as he tried to leap out of his hiding place.

‘Wait,’ he hissed. ‘We have to know.’

The man leading the calf tugged at the rope once more and the calf was dragged into the operating theatre.

The door on the right opened again and Dr Manners came in. He was dressed in a high-necked operating gown; a surgical mask was strung round his neck.

‘Is everything ready, Fangster?’ he asked, and the vet who had called himself Dr Dale nodded and lifted up the curled horn with the pointed end which he had taken from the bag that the whalers had brought ashore.

‘This is the smallest. We’ll need to pack the wound tight, but it should close over all right. And if not…’ He shrugged.

‘Quite so,’ said Dr Manners.

The calf was dragged up on to the operating table. It was mad with fear, fighting every inch of the way.

Dr Manners was filling a great syringe. The vet picked up the narwhal horn and held it above the head of the tethered beast.

And in that instant the children understood everything.

It had begun in a faraway country, in the Kingdom of Barama, with a small, unhealthy prince who could not sleep.

Barama is in South America and it is very beautiful. It lies between Venezuela to the east and Guyana to the west and many people have not even heard of it, although the man who rules it is possibly the richest person in the world.

Barama is very beautiful; it has a palm-fringed coastline and mountains covered in green-blue trees and meadows filled with flowers. But what makes Barama special is one thing and one thing only: oil.

Oil gushes and bursts and erupts out of the sandy desert, and the more it is dug up and barrelled and sold to oil-hungry countries, the more seems to come out of the ground.

Before the oil was found, the princes of Barama led busy and active lives. They were strong men with big moustaches and they hunted and shot and fought their neighbours and each other.

But as they became richer and richer all this changed. They built themselves enormous palaces and filled them with priceless furniture. They bought themselves cars and aeroplanes and yachts and they covered their wives and daughters with fabulous jewels. They bought hundreds of suits and pairs of shoes and sumptuous ceremonial robes, and ate larger and larger meals and got more and more servants to wait on them.

The result of all this was exactly what you would expect. They became bored and miserable. Their muscles got flabby because they never walked anywhere but were always driven in cars and their stomachs boiled and bubbled with indigestion from all the rich food that they ate. So while their palaces got bigger and bigger, the rulers of Barama got smaller and sadder and feebler, and the present ruler of Barama, King Carlos, was a very little man indeed.

Carlos had not been a healthy child. His muscles were so weak that a servant used to go upstairs behind him and help to push his leg up to the next tread, and he had mostly been fed on slops — semolina pudding and lentil soups and things of that sort, because solid food gave him a stomach ache.

Prince Carlos’s mother had died when he was a baby, and after that his father had married five more times, choosing women from all over the world. Having five stepmothers had made little Carlos very worried and unhappy — there wasn’t one among them who had loved him or been kind — and when Carlos’s father had divorced them they had gone off in a huff, with their jewels and their money, and the little boy had never seen them again.

But there was one person in the child’s life who never went away, and that was his nurse, Nadia.

Nadia had come to Barama from a long way away — from the border of Russia and China. By the time she came to Barama the little prince was so unhealthy and spoilt and sad that he couldn’t get to sleep at night and lay in his canopied bed in his vast bedroom, staring at the ceiling and imagining devils and ghouls armed to the teeth who would fly down and cut his throat.