Aurelius and I (26 page)

The owl flew up from its perch to avoid the missile before promptly resettling and recommencing its cries with increased vigour.

“TOOWIT-TOOWOO! TOOWIT-TOOWOO!”

“I think I made it angry,” I said. “I don’t want to hurt you, you stupid bird, but I’m not going to let you eat my friend either, so why don’t you just go away?”

“TOOWIT-TOOWOO! TOOWIT-TOOWOO!”

“I think it’s trying to tell us something,” Grahndel piped up.

“Really? How can you tell?” I asked, for each of the owl’s cries sounded identical to my untrained, human ear.

“When you have spent as many years among the animals as I have, you come to understand their customs and languages,” he answered in a boastful tone.

“Frog-droppings!” Ophelia interjected sternly from her position on my back. “The gift of speaking with the animals must be bestowed from birth, it is not something that can be learned. I mean, even Charlie can’t understand what they’re saying, and he has the watch. Animals simply don’t have a language in the way that we would understand the concept, you know that, Grahndel.”

“I know no such thing,” he responded indignantly. “I have been told such information before, certainly, but that is by no means the same thing as
knowing
it. There are many things that are taught to us as fact but that are, in truth, no more than fiction.
You
should know that, Princess!”

“Will you two please stop,” I interjected. “Grahndel, perhaps rather than merely insisting upon the falsity of Ophelia’s statement, you might actually consider
proving
her wrong by getting the owl to buzz off?”‘

“Happily,” he huffed, before turning meaningfully toward the owl and signalling for everyone else to fall silent.

“TOOWIT-TOOWOO! TOOWIT-TOOWOO! TOOWITWITWOOWOO! TOOWIT-TOOWOO!”

“Hmm, yes, I think I see,” Grahndel responded, his hand cradling his narrow, bearded chin in contemplation as he did so, somehow bestowing upon him the appearance of a university professor. “Would you mind just repeating that last bit for me?”

TOOWIT-TOOWOO!

“Oh, Toowit-
Too
woo, I see, yes that makes much more sense,” he said before spinning to face us once again and pausing dramatically, enjoying the attention as we waited to hear his translation.

“Get on with it,” I said, impatiently.

“Very well,” he said. “Our feathered friend has come to warn us about Aurelius, and the dastardly plan he is seeking to hatch which is likely to come at midnight tonight and is likely to involve the deployment of an enormous pink jelly-bean.”

“We already knew all that, doesn’t it have any...sorry, an enormous pink what?” I exclaimed as my tired brain eventually absorbed the information it had received.

“Jelly bean,” Grahndel repeated.

“
Jelly Bean?
Are you sure you’ve got that right?”

“Quite sure. I hope you’re not questioning my skills as a translator.”

“I’m afraid I might have to,” yawned Daisy, poking his head out of my breast pocket. To my eyes he looked even older than before his slumber, but his aging process was so amazing to me that I was no longer certain I could trust that my mind was not simply seeing what it expected to see. There was however, no denying the vast improvement in his vocabulary.

“Oh, and I suppose you’re an expert on owl-speak are you?”

“Well, no,” admitted the daylet, “but I do speak fluent hawk, and the two are remarkably similar.”

“Oh, you speak hawk, of course you do,” said Grahndel sarcastically. “And when exactly did you have time to learn that in the few hours you’ve been in existence, somewhere in between your forty-sixth and forty-seventh naps I suppose?”

“Actually I didn’t learn it, I was born knowing it, just as all daylets are.”

“And how do you know all daylets are born knowing how to speak hawk?”

“I was born knowing that they know.”

“Well how very convenient,” humphed the purple demon.

“So what other languages do you speak?” I asked, gripped by fascination at the idea of any kind of innate language skills, let alone bi-lingual ones.

“Well, other than Hawk and English, there’s Elf, Goblin, Yeti, and French. Oh, and Armadillo. Mustn’t forget that one.”

“Oh no, don’t forget that; Armadillo, that’s just bound to come in handy any day now,” Grahndel mocked jealously.

“This is all very nice,” Ophelia interjected, “but would anyone mind if Daisy actually told us what he thinks the enormous, feather-covered, fairy-gobbler is actually saying so that we can get on with running as far away from it as possible.”

“Happy to oblige, my dear lady,” Daisy answered politely, before turning to address the owl; “Pardon me, o’ wise one, but would you mind going over all that again?”

“TOOWIT-TOOWOO! TOOWIT-TOOWOO! TOOWITWITWOOWOO! TOOWIT-TOO-WOO!”

“How come I can understand you and Daisy when you speak owl, but not the owl’s answers?” I asked.

“Because we asked our questions in English,” answered the daylet, the hint of condescension in his voice suggesting that this should have been obvious. “Just because a creature is not able to
speak
English, doesn’t mean they can’t understand it when it is spoken to them.”

“The translation, if you’d please!” hurried Ophelia.

“Oh yes, well, the fellow with the horns was actually fairly accurate, that is for someone who is, you know,
self-taught
.” Daisy whispered these final words as if they were the rudest and most derogatory that one could use in polite company; for someone who had never met any of his own kind, he was quite snobby about his heritage.

“Like him, I am also imperfect in my translation and thus will only be able to provide a general gist of what was being said; as far as I am able to determine, our feathered friend had indeed come to warn us of the ghastly plan that has been hatched between The Professor’s evil-doers and the illustrious Mr Jones. As I suspected, however, his warning is no of the threat posed by an oversized item of confectionary, but, in fact, some sort of curved-blade of Swaronia - though, in fairness, in owl-speak the two terms do sound remarkably similar to the untrained ear.”

“The Scimitar,” I exclaimed dissapointedly.

“The what?”

“
The Scimitar
, you pee-sniffer,” snapped Grahndel, clearly annoyed at having his role as translator undermined by one so young. “The super-powerful sword we already know the bad guys have and are planning to use, just as you would know if you were ever awake.”

“Don’t blame me if the messenger has arrived too late to be of use, I’m just the translator after all, I can’t be held responsible for the inefficiency of owls – why do you think people always use pigeons to send their messages?”

“TOOWIT-TOOWOO! TOOWIT-TOOWOO!”

“Are you sure you got the translation right?” I asked Daisy. “Because he still seems to be following us, like he’s trying to tell us something.”

“Perhaps he’s just waiting for a chance to eat Ophelia,” teased Grahndel.

“Not funny,” complained the fairy from the sanctity of my rucksack.

“Who’s joking?” the dragnor replied.

Apparently satisfied that we had learned all we were going to from the owl, we continued past it on our directionless trek through the forest in search of who-knew-what, but no matter which turn we took the owl followed, flapping and calling with ever increasing intensity as it did so and generally hampering our progress. I felt certain that the information we had interpreted from the bird was not all (or, quite possibly, any) of what it had intended to communicate. And so, since my companions were plainly useless as translators, and since were merely ambling toward an unknown destination and were not going to get there any time soon with our feathered friend in tow, we did the only thing we could do, we followed the owl.

***

After leading us on a twenty-minute trek into the deepest depths of the forest the owl came to rest in the branches of a tree. But this was not just any tree; it was the biggest, blackest, ugliest tree I had ever seen. In fact, it was actually quite scary. Well, for a tree anyway. It had clearly been hit by lightning many times in the centuries it had stood as guardian to the inner realm of the forest, which should have come as no surprise given that, even now, in it’s burned-out, half-destroyed state it still stood a clear ten feet taller than any other tree in the vicinity, most likely in the forest as a whole. The lightning, as well as scorching the tree’s bark and so making it appear black and evil, had split the trunk in such a way that its branches reached like tentacles into the forest around it at every imaginable angle, threatening to scoop up and crush in their timber talons anybody or anything that strayed to close to them.

Next to the tree, weaving its way through the branches, around the trunk and deep into the undergrowth, was a pathway.

“He must want us to go down there,” said Grahndel, noting, as I had, the bird’s increasingly frequent calls and its apparent nodding in that direction.

“I think you’re right,” agreed Daisy. “I believe he is saying, ‘Here it is, here it is!’ I guess that must be where he wants us to go.”

“And why should we trust him?” Ophelia questioned. “How do we know it isn’t a trap?”

It was a valid point. We didn’t know. However, after some consideration, I decided that this was not an unusual scenario for the four of us. The truth was that we didn’t know much. Certainly there was probably at least a fifty percent chance that this was a trap, designed to lure us into the deepest, densest, darkest part of the forest from which we would never in time find our way out before the tablet was destroyed. But that left a fifty per cent chance that it wasn’t a trap, that we were, for once, going the right way, and those odds seemed to me to be better than any other odds we might have had. And so, in the continuing absence of a plan B, we set off down the narrow and winding path into the darkness, the owl remaining in its position in the tree, hooting what I hoped was its approval.

With the exception of their mutual location, the forest dwelling of Aurelius-Octavius Jumbleberry-Jones and the house that stood before us could not have been more different. In stark contrast to the compact, neat, round, white stone cottage that stood so proudly conspicuous against the trees, the over-sized, ramshackle, wooden hut with which we found ourselves faced merged so well with its dark woodland surroundings that it seemed more likely that it had grown out of them rather than being built among them. In fact, the first time I came across it I almost didn’t see it at all. Somehow the moss that covered its timber walls and the ferns that sprouted from its leaking roof provided such an effective camouflage as to make the sudden presence of a lone human construction stranded in the deepest, darkest, remotest part of the forest seem distinctly unremarkable.

“What is it?” I exclaimed, dumbfounded, as I stood staring at the dilapidated timber abode which seemed to have snuck up on us from behind the trees.

“It’s a house,” Grahndel replied, stating the obvious. “Well, at least I think it is. I mean, its pretty crappy looking – it makes my cave look decidedly comfortable, but I guess it still qualifies as a house.”

“I gathered that much,” I said, “but what’s it doing here? I mean, what sort of weirdo would live somewhere like this?”

It wasn’t the cabin itself I referred to with such a question; even its shocking state of disrepair it could no doubt seem more than acceptable, desirable even, to some of the creatures I had met over the past week or so. No, what led me to question, and even fear, the shack’s occupant was its location. I could not (or, more accurately, did not want to) imagine what sort of being would
choose
to permanently reside in the scariest, lonliest part of a forest full of mythical creatures. Such a person – or, as seemed more likely, alundri – would have to be either totally crazy or totally monstrous to not have anything to fear from such a location.

“I really don’t know,” the dragnor responded, the fear in his voice mirroring my own, “And I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know.”

I have to admit that I was inclined to agree with my reptilian companion’s sentiment, but before I could voice my concurrence Ophelia made her own feelings known;

“Of course you don’t want to know, that’s you all over. You’ve no sense of adventure - you’re just a coward, plain and simple. But Charlie isn’t like you, Charlie’s a warrior, like me. He knows that if we want to save this forest then we can’t just run whenever we’re afraid, he knows that there are times when we need to stand up and be brave; times like this. Isn’t that right, Charlie?”

I nodded my uncertain agreement and must have appeared more convincing than I felt as the little fairy continued her speech with vigour.

“We need to discover who lives in that house, and what they can do to help us to save this forest.”

“And how do we know they can do anything?” Grahndel retorted.

“We don’t. And they may not. But we have to try. Nobody ever saved the world without trying.”