In silence, Perry and the children stared across the little park at the broken fences, the shattered buildings…
“Is it an earthquake, do you think?” asked Ellen, who’d only just woken up and was still rather muddled.
“Or a terrorist letting off bombs?” suggested Con.
But before they could decide how the zoo had got into the state it was in, there was an agitated scrabbling from the container and when Con cautiously opened the door, all five yetis stood looking out at him, beaming with pride and joy.
“We did it! It’s a surprise for you! We let out all the animals, every single one!” said Ambrose the Abominable.
There was a moment of total silence while Con took this in. “Oh no! You didn’t! Say you didn’t!” he begged.
“But we did. All the animals were sad so—”
Con’s face had turned ashen. He had begun to tremble. “Don’t you see, it’s a crime. Breaking up people’s property, smashing things… As soon as the Sultan gets to hear of it, he’ll send his soldiers with machine guns. You’ll be mown down, you’ll be—”
But Perry now came to the rescue. “We’re only a hundred miles from the border,” he said, “and the Sultan can’t touch us once we’re across. The pump’s mended; no one’s about yet — we’ve a good chance of making a getaway.”
And a few seconds later the door had shut on the bewildered yetis and the yellow lorry was roaring out of the city.
A hundred miles in a slow and overloaded lorry can seem like a desperately long way. Every motor horn, every train whistle made the children jump as they imagined the Sultan’s men come to round up the yetis or torture them or simply shoot them out of hand.
But the Sultan did not come that day, or any other day. And that was because, by evening, the city of Aslerfan no longer had a sultan.
What happened was this. On the morning that the yellow lorry left Aslerfan, the cruel and greedy little Sultan woke up in his huge gold and turquoise bed as he did each day, stretched his fat little arms as he did each day, and thought of all the nice things he was going to do, like watching a public execution, having some journalists flogged because they’d dared to criticize him in their newspapers and arranging a hunt in which a herd of exquisite fallow deer would be gunned down from his private fleet of helicopters.
Then, as he did every day, he rang for his servants. But after that, things happened differently. Because what came into the room was not his barber to shave him, or his valet to dress him, or his footman carrying the six fried eggs he always ate for breakfast.
It was a hippopotamus.
“Help!” screamed the Sultan. “Help! Help!” He reached for the bell rope and pulled it again. Only it was not the bell rope, it was the tail of an enormous boa constrictor, which now fell in a hissing and annoyed heap on to the Sultan’s embroidered counterpane.
“Aaeee!” yelled the Sultan. He leaped out of bed and rushed for the nearest door, which led into his lapis lazuli and marble bathroom.
Sitting quietly in the middle of the bath was a huge, whiskery and very wrinkled walrus.
“It’s a plague! It’s a plague of animals! The gods have decided to punish me!” yelled the Sultan, who had read about the great plagues of Egypt, when Jehovah had sent locusts and frogs and flies to punish a wicked ruler who had been cruel to his people.
As the terrified Sultan ran through the corridors of his palace, he saw more and more signs that the gods were out to get him. An orang-utan was crouching on the imperial throne, dreamily cracking fleas between his teeth; a proud ostrich had just laid an egg on the grand piano in the music room, and three armadillos were bulldozing their way across the table in the state dining hall…
Still in his pyjamas, the fat little man reached the main courtyard. There was no sign of his servants or his soldiers, who had all fled when the animals invaded the palace. But standing by the fountain, looking at him through golden, serious eyes, were two very stripy tigers.
The Sultan waited no longer. With a scream of terror he turned and ran, on and on, through his terraced gardens, and private parks and pleasure pavilions, on and on, till he came to the brown bare hills that surrounded the city. And there he fell on his knees and beat his head against the earth and asked the gods to forgive him his sins. And the next day he put on a sacking robe and went to live in a cave where he spent the rest of his life gabbling prayers and fasting so that he would get to heaven in the end.
And so the hated Sultan was seen no more, and in the city of Aslerfan there was feasting and rejoicing and dancing in the streets. People hugged each other and let off fireworks and threw open the doors of their cafés so that everyone could eat and drink their fill. The prisoners were let out of their dungeons and the sick were taken off the streets and cared for. But because it was the animals who had brought freedom to the people, the new government made it a law that all the animals that had escaped were to be guests of the city and not to be harmed. So, for many months, while they built a new, model zoo for those animals that preferred to live in town, you could see giraffes dozing in the middle of the road while cars edged carefully around them, barbers politely shaving wildebeests who had wandered into their shops, or old ladies giving lifts to porcupines in their shopping baskets.
Nor did anyone ever find out who had freed the animals. True, Mr Bullaby had gabbled something about furry giants with bedsocks round their necks and Queen Victoria on their stomachs. But when people talk like that there is only one thing to do: take them to some nice, quiet hospital and shut them up till they are better. And that is exactly what the people of Aslerfan did.
7
The St Bernards of Feldenberg
The yellow lorry had passed through the beautiful city of Istanbul and was well into Turkey before Con stopped shivering and peering into the driving mirror to see if anyone was following them. Only when Perry went into a café in a little dusty village where they had stopped for petrol, and heard on the wireless that the Sultan of Aslerfan had fled, did the children relax.
Unfortunately, the news that they had saved the people of Aslerfan from their cruel Sultan made the yetis very smug.
“We did good, didn’t we?” said Ambrose, his blue eye beaming. “We’re sort of rescuing yetis now.”
“Well, don’t be rescuing yetis again, please,” said Con, who’d really had a dreadful fright. “Not till you’re safe at Farley Towers.”
That night Perry found a beautiful deserted little bay on the Sea of Marmara with a track down which the lorry could just go. Lucy and Grandma paddled, lifting the long hair on their legs out of the water like Lady Agatha had shown them, and Ambrose tethered Hubert to a fig tree and told him that he was a big yak now and could eat grass perfectly well if he tried. Con made a bonfire and they sat round it while Perry told them just how he thought the Perrington Porker would look when he had bred it: pink and fat but very strong, with a double-jointed tail and droopy ears, because pigs with droopy ears are more peace-loving than the other kind.
“Can we play the Farley Towers game?” begged Ambrose, as they lay down under the stars to sleep. It was a game that Ellen had invented to while away the journey and the yetis loved it.
“What will we do on our first day at Farley Towers?” said Lucy, because that was the way the game began.
“On the first day you’ll have dinner by candlelight with damask napkins,” said Ellen.