No one was up yet; it would be dark for at least another two hours. The sailors — rough-looking men — turned in to their bunks. Presently they would unload the cargo they had brought, but now they slept.
The Feet felt the slight vibration of the trawler’s engine as they lay under the tombstone, but they did not move. But Rollo heard the noise of the engine and woke… and crept out of the church and climbed up the grassy hill that gave a view over the whole island. The boat had come in, just as Dr Manners had said, to take the cattle to the promised land. He watched for a while; then, as the light grew stronger, he took out Uncle George’s binoculars.
It was a very small boat to transport a whole herd of cattle. It was really very small.
And something nagged at the back of his mind. Something about one of the men he had seen out of the window in Dr Manners’s room — a man he thought he had seen before…
The Mundanians were in their wooden hut, eating their breakfast of beans and fermented goat curd.
There were eight of them: a very old woman with a single gold tooth, a younger, buxom one, and six men, all living in a space the size of a caravan. The huts on either side of them housed chickens.
They looked tired, and the day that faced them would be as hard as all the others. Cleaning out the animal houses, incinerating the waste matter, humping heavy loads to and from the workshops… and other things that they tried not to think about.
Today there was an extra job — unloading the cargo which the whaler had brought.
The hut was bare and cold; the Mundanians could not afford proper heating and their food was what they could scrape from the soil. They were so poor that they could buy nothing, and in any case they were forbidden to go to the mainland.
Dr Manners had not been lying when he said that the Mundanians came from a very beautiful country high in the mountains of central Europe, and that they were of proud and ancient stock. But the Mundanians had not come to Blackscar because they had heard of Manners’s missionary work; they had never even heard of Blackscar. What had happened was that two years earlier a cruel dictator from a neighbouring country had conquered Mundania and started a reign of terror. He had forbidden the Mundanians to speak their language or have their own schools or practise their own religion, and when anyone protested they were imprisoned or killed.
So the two brothers, Slavek and Izaak had taken their family — their old mother, Slavek’s wife and four male cousins — and trekked across Europe to look for a place where they could live in peace. And after months of hardship they had reached Great Britain, thinking they would find a welcome there and a home and a chance to work.
They were horribly wrong. The whole family was shut up in a squalid and overcrowded camp surrounded by barbed wire and told they had no right to work and no permits and no papers and would be sent back to Mundania.
Twice they had been shifted to other camps that were even more crowded and wretched than the first. Then the third time they were moved they managed to escape, and it was as they were trudging the roads that a man had come and offered them work at Blackscar. Not paid work of course (they were not allowed to be paid) and work that was harder than any that was ever done even by the humblest peasant in Mundania, but they knew that if they complained they would be sent back to the camp. They were really prisoners at Blackscar and each day they woke up so wretched and sad and homesick that they did not know how they would bear it. But they did bear it. They had no choice.
So now they finished their goat curd and while Slavek and Izaak went out to fetch the cargo from the whaling ship, the old woman with the gold tooth piled up the dirty dishes.
But before she started on the washing up, she turned on the ancient transistor radio which one of the workmen had given them.
On the whaler they had started unloading. There were four long canvas bags — not a big load but valuable, incredibly valuable; the sailors expected to be paid an enormous amount of money, and they had earned it. The risks they had taken to get their booty had been great; if they had been caught they wouldn’t just have been fined, they could have been imprisoned.
Although the boat flew the Norwegian flag, the men were not Norwegians. They were crooks and riffraff from several countries, but they had one thing in common: they were hunters who knew the sea and cared nothing for the creatures that lived in it if they could make a profit by killing them. To get the booty they were now unloading, they had harpooned close on thirty whales — and not those whales that it was legal to hunt, but rare and protected ones.
The whales they had killed were narwhals, those shy and gentle beasts which live in the icy waters of the Arctic and are rarely seen by man.
Narwhals are not large as whales go, they are seldom more than five metres long. The Vikings called them ‘corpse whales’, not because they ate corpses — they wouldn’t dream of doing such a thing — but because of the blue-grey colour of their skins.
But though they are small, there is one thing about male narwhals that is extraordinary. Growing out of their foreheads is an enormous, single, spiral horn.
Because they are so rare and so amazing, narwhal horns have been prized throughout history. Medieval princes believed they could detect poison which had been put in someone’s food by an enemy. In Asian countries, doctors ground them up for potions and medicines. Carved narwhal horns adorned the palaces of kings.
And just as poachers will hunt elephants for their tusks and leave them to rot once the ivory has been removed, so the sailors who had come now to Blackscar had cut the horns from the narwhals they had slaughtered and thrown the carcasses back into the sea.
Dr Manners too prized narwhal horns — but not to detect poison or to use for potions. He wanted them for quite a different reason. It was a reason that nobody but him and his assistant, Dr Fangster, knew anything about.
Slavek and Izaak had begun to wheel the canvas bags up to the office beside the main laboratory. The bags were padlocked; no one was allowed to open them; what was in them was a strict secret, but the Mundanians were used to shifting loads they knew nothing about. When they were safely stored, and Dr Manners had examined the contents, he would arrange for the sailors to be paid.
They stowed the bags and went back to the hut to fetch their tools for the day’s work.
‘Good heavens — what is it, what is the matter?’ asked Izaak as he threw open the door.
The old woman was sobbing in one corner; Slavek’s wife moaned in the other. The four cousins, who should already have been mucking out the animal houses, were huddled over the radio. Their faces too were streaked with tears.
‘What is it?’ repeated Izaak. ‘For goodness’ sake, what’s wrong?’
The cousins turned from the radio, and wiped their eyes.
‘It has happened,’ they cried, throwing their arms round the brothers. ‘Oh, Slavek, Izaak — it has happened at last! That we should live to see this day!’
On the hill opposite the island, Rollo watched the boat. The sailors had finished unloading; soon now the cattle would go on board. Dr Manners had said they would be washed clean first, restored to their whiteness. Only how would they all fit in? Dr Manners knew everything there was to know about animals; he would not let them travel in cramped or unsuitable conditions; but all the same, the boat was small.
And what about the man who had walked past the windows of the hotel? Of course, he might have been somebody quite different, but if not…
From the doorway of the church, Madlyn called up to him.
‘Come on, Rollo. It’s time to go.’
They had packed up; anything they could not carry was locked in the car. It was going to be a long trek to the village.